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When the world first appears around him, he thinks he’s died. Personally, he thinks it's a reasonable assumption to make. He thinks it’s rather reasonable, actually, for his mind to panic like that. Automatically, his eyes clench themselves shut against the nausea that creeps against his throat.
The moment his feet touch the ground, rough and uneven, he thinks he’s died. Grian has passed on and gone to an afterlife. It’s the only logical conclusion to why his memory was messed up, and why he couldn’t remember how he got here. Entirely logical, yes. Reasonable. He’s the most reasonable Grian in the world.
Instead of grass against his heels, he feels the grainy bite of sand. Not what he was expecting of an afterlife. He doesn’t open his eyes, lest the bile rising in the back of his throat turn to vomit upon the ground.
His heart beats in his throat, the constant song of its crescendoing tempo thrumming constant against his temple. Every limb feels like it’s buzzing with static. In the absence of sight, his brain kicks his other senses into overdrive. His focus shifts towards the auditory side of the many stimuli assaulting his brain.
There are no birds singing. There is no running water nearby. The wind is eerily silent, not even rustling any tall grass with its soft yet ceaseless touch. Grian feels sickeningly underwhelmed with the lack of noise. It’s like the world died around him, a still carcass rotting. He totally was in an afterlife. That's the only logical reason why the world would have stopped taking up space: because he was dead.
With his hearing failing to provide any insight as to where he was, he places his trust in his olfactorical senses. Taking in a deep breath, both to catch the air and attempt to calm his racing heart, Grian tries to see what biome he’s in.
Every biome has its own specific smell. Spruce forests had their earthen sweetness from their seeds, birch forests had the notes of a slight tang from their birch water, oak forests with their assortment of petrichoric aromas, deserts with their windswept salt that sticks to your nose; they all had scents. Memorable scents, recognizable by most Players. Not... this.
There was nothing to smell.
It smelled like ozone, a strange, false air that set his heart racing. It felt so wrong. In a slight panic, he opened his mouth to see if that would help. The sickening scent filled his mouth, and his body reacted violently. His eyes fly open automatically.
Instantly, he’s doubled over as his stomach clenches, his last meal spilling out across the strange sand-and-stone symbol he’d been dropped on. He barely has time to look at his surroundings as his throat heaves up everything. His lungs frantically try to regain the air they lost, each inhale ragged and quick as he frantically tries to process the world around him.
Bent down and clutching his quads for support, he hangs his head and stares at his own vomit. It’s nasty stuff, and he already wants to hurl again at the sight of it, but he can’t bear to look at anything else for at least another moment. His head was already spinning something fierce with possibilities for where he was, and the fact his body disagreed
Each deep breath seems like it was a rather otiose effort, given the situation. He’d just been taken from his home while working on Wynncraft blueprints–oh void, what was he going to tell Salted?–and placed into a random place? So far from his friends? Grian might be sick again if he keeps thinking about it. Better focus on what he can see.
Taking slow inhales, he starts to register the world around him. His sight was bleary without his glasses, but soon the colors started to make sense behind his eyes.
Sand. Grass. A clear expanse. Still hunched over, clutching his own thighs in his breathlessness, he looks up at the sky. A brilliant pale starlight blue filled his sight, the streaks of dawn just now starting to paint the sky. If the circumstances were better, Grian thinks he’d kill for a photo of this view.
He straightens his back, shaking his hands out as he finally regains his composure. Right. Yeah. He’s probably not dead, maybe, but he needs to find out where he is. Patting his pant pockets absentmindedly, his palm hits his communicator box.
After a moment's pause to let his logic catch up with his brain, Grian’s hand slides into his pocket and yanks it free. Hopefully it wasn’t entirely broken. He can see cracks forming on the glass screen as he turns it on.
Instead of its usual chatbox, where members of a server could communicate through text rather than voice, his communicator device displayed a large message with an instruction. Good thing he was nearsighted, he still didn’t have a clue where his glasses were.
WELCOME. LET’S TRY AGAIN, SHALL WE?
PRESS ANY BUTTON TO CONTINUE
Instantly, his alarm was back up. Trying again? What the hell does that even mean? He turns his communicator around, trying to see if he’d accidentally gotten someone else’s somehow. Nope, he still sees his username engraved on the back. Well. This is just great.
He looked around again. Maybe there was someone else here? Maybe Jumla was just messing with him. Yeah. Surely.
“Salted? Jumla?” Grian calls out, looking around frantically. “This isn’t funny guys, come on out!”
Nothing responds. The landscape doesn’t even shift. The quiet prickles in his brain, his ears ringing dully. He was alone.
Looking back down at the ground, his eyes travel to the stone beneath his feet. Smooth and smelted, the even cuts of the lines and the strange roundness of the edges dispelled any idea that this was natural. What did it mean? What was it there for?
Grian’s hands are shaking now, and he feels his heart begin to beat faster against his ribcage. He might actually be dead. This has to be hell, or purgatory, or something. It couldn't be heaven; he’d not earned a spot among their high courts. He could be dying in the void, and this all was his synapses firing in a last attempt to make his death feel nicer.
It probably wasn’t all that. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. In the middle of his next inhale, his communicator buzzes. Grian opens his eyes and frantically pulls it up to his face.
IT’S TIME TO TRY AGAIN.
PRESS ANY BUTTON TO CONTINUE
Grian bites his tongue upon seeing the changed text. It makes him feel a little sick. What was happening to him? Why was he alone? He needs to get back home. The world around him is silent. There are no birds singing.
Looking up at the breaking dawn for guidance, the rosy hues were now smeared across the sky. Clouds started to gather in thin clumps, expanding as the horizon went onward. The only way to unwind the future is to follow the path… where had he heard that before?
The only way to unwind the future is to follow the path. It reminds him of a rabbit-eared teenager he knew.
Ah. It was a Donnie Darko tagline. That explains it. He grimaces slightly at the aptness of the quote. Maybe his brain could be less on-the-nose with its observations for a little longer? Great.
His communicator box is trembling alongside his hands. How long until someone would notice he was gone? How long could he stare at this strange reboot screen before pressing a button? What if his communicator was broken, and he was trapped because it couldn’t travel between worlds or servers? What if he was stranded?
The only way to unwind the future is to follow the path. Grian presses any button, and his communicator lights up with more instructions. Skimming them, Grian gets the jist of what he’s being told to do.
It’s instructions for how to turn a personal world’s IP into a server IP, and an invite list with a list of usernames. He’d chatted with a lot of the people on the list, but there were a few names he didn’t recognize.
He sent every user listed the same message:
Hello! I’m starting a new server and am currently searching for players interested in a never-before-seen gimmick, as a long-term affaire. I’ve linked the joining information, and we are currently holding our first session soon. Meet me on-site if you’d at all be interested.
He followed every one to the letter, and by the time players started to join, he’d already gotten his introduction prepared and ready for when everyone had arrived. Somehow, between now and the Players joining, his vomit had despawned. That was for the better.
The last join message pings on his communicator, and he clears his throat to stop the chatting. He takes another look at his instructions screen, checking for anything he might have missed; it now only has the strange symbol from the floor on it, but slides his device into his pocket nonetheless. He can worry about what that means later.
The only way to unwind the future is to follow the path. The small crowd of people face him. There's no turning back now. He has to follow the path.
“Welcome, one and all! I’ve all contacted you extremely recently, and by attending so soon you’ve shown initiative that I value in a servermate. Anyways, I'm here to pitch you on why you should humor the idea of becoming Players on my new server: Evolutions SMP.”