Spitting Lies 'Till Your Demise - Hermitcraft + MCYT AU - Collab

Chapter 2 - Odd Code

"Wait, where did Grian go?" Mumbo was the first to notice the message in chat. It was still only midway through the event, and Grian suddenly left the server.

"Why did he leave?" Impulse said, as confused as everyone else.

"Grian said he needed to do something on a different server." Stress answered. "It's probably something urgent, seeing the way he acted."

"Wonder what server it is," Mumbo murmured to himself, more thoughtful than anything. "I'll ask him when he gets back."

Impulse nodded, the hermits all generally seeming toAa accept that. None of them thought any more of that, it seemed like a pretty good reason. Mumbo would occasionally visit a singleplayer world, and Iskall would sometimes visit Vault Hunters SMP. Grian just seemed to disappear whenever he felt like it, because Grian did whatever Grian wanted.

"Anyway, we have 2 new members joining us next Season. They both have gained quite a reputation outside of hermitcraft, and I thought they'd fit this dysfunctional family rather well. Anyone any guesses?"

"Please say it's not GenerikB," Bdubs murmured, knowing Xisuma had offered an invite once before. GenerikB just never accepted. Thankfully. Joe had agreed with him before that he could be manipulative at times, even Xisuma admitted that at one point, but he didn't like being negative about people. Bdubs was one of the few people who'd actually known him personally, and found that he used to be nice, but he was a lot different now.

Long story short, Bdubs didn't want Generik to come back.

"Why did I think any of you had a life outside of Hermitcraft?" Xisuma sighed jokingly, rolling his eyes. "I invited PearlescentMoon and GeminiTay. They'll be waiting in the new world when we get there. On technical news, we'll be moving to 1.17, however I've run a bunch of tests to make sure the whitelist and border stay intact, so there won't be any uninvited guests that come in."

"Were there any attempts to get through the border this Season?" Cleo asked, looking at Joe and Xisuma.

"We had a couple from Hels and EX, but none from anyone else. At least none that got past the first border, none others would've been recorded.

"No hackers or... Anything else?"

"None that are competent."

"You would've thought they'd have tried to get in at least once."

"I'm not sure, maybe the server improvements worked? I only added them at the start of Season 6, and there's not been anyone getting past the first layer since then." Joe said.

"Probably. It's not something you need to worry about though, me and Joe will take care of it." Xisuma ended the discussion, before turning to the other hermits. "Well, I guess that's the end of the announcements. Well, let's all meet here again tomorrow, same time, for the events. Thank you for coming, everyone."

-- Timeskip --

Joe knocked on the walls of the towers as he walked in. "X? Are you there?" He heard paper ruffling from inside, a sign that Xisuma was indeed inside. Doing what, Joe didn't know.

"Come in!" X called, his voice sounding tired and exhausted. Joe walked into the room, instantly noticing that it seemed messy and uncared for. That made sense - it was the admin room, where Xisuma did adminy stuff. It was rarely cleaned up and all the paperwork was scattered everywhere. "Hello, Joe."

"X, when was the last time you slept?" Joe sighed, being already pretty used to seeing the messy room.

"Let me think..." Xisuma trailed off. "Maybe last week? Or two weeks ago-? I mean-" He quickly regretted saying that as Joe groaned and facepalmed. "A couple days ago, I swear-"

"X, how many times do I have to tell you to take care of yourself?"

"About 1000 before I actually start to listen." Xisuma responded in a joking manner, but immediately wanted to retract his previous statement seeing how serious Joe's expression seemed.

"If that's what it takes, so be it." Joe looked around the room again, the disappointment in his voice very obvious, before staring directly at Xisuma, who gulped. "Would it be pointless if I told you to sleep?"

"Joe- I still have to configure stuff for preparations to move to the new server, and there are still a lot of bu-"

"No buts." Joe cut him off quickly. "I can do all of that, you go to sleep."

"But-"

"No. Buts."

Xisuma finally sighed in defeat, standing up from his chair. "Fine, I'll go to sleep. Are you sure you can handle all the work? I can just do it all in the morning-"

"I can, X, you don't need to worry. Just sleep."

Xisuma nodded silently as he walked to the door and exited out of the room, closing the door behind him. Joe waited a few seconds until he heard another door creak open and close, a sign that Xisuma was going to sleep. "Thank god." he sighed, before turning to Xisuma's work desk and looking at all the paperwork and to-do lists. This was going to be a long night.

***

Joe looked at all of the admin panels he had up. All of them showed statistics and code, plus stuff he needed to fix and bugs that needed to be removed. He sighed once again, typing in some sort of code to fix the current bugs that he found. There were a lot, but that was to be expected with the upcoming update and the adjustments they were still working with with the proximity mod.

He also checked a lot of the files and logs, reading through them to see if there were any weird codes or if some things seemed wrong and needed to be fixed, although he often just scans over them.

He opened one of the logs files, reading through it like he did with the others, he barely noticed anything wrong, but then he did. It was a small thing, nothing that many people would notice, especially Xisuma in his sleep deprived state.

It was only 2 lines of code, but when read carefully, seemed very suspicious.

[If [code: allow entrance [player] (*****)]=True]]
        add [player] (*****) [Set Firewall Access=True]

"What's this...?" Joe mumbled to himself, noticing it. "A firewall access to an unknown person...? It's not public either, so they're only on the Whitelist while they're logged in. That explains why Xisuma wouldn't have picked it up." He examined the code for more time before sighing. "I guess it's best not to touch it for now... I should inform X about this when he wakes up. Looking into the player isn't a bad idea though. I would like to know why their name is censored."

After that, while keeping that file open, he just continued to fix the things needed fixing and continuing on.

***

The admin room door creaked open, and Xisuma walked in. "Why are you up?" Joe sighed, not even turning. "It's still 3AM, you got 5 hours at most. Probably less."

Xisuma chose to ignore the question. "Have you found anything concerning or anything bad?"

"I-" Joe sighed, deciding to let Xisuma stay up for a bit. "Yes. Small line of code, it's only 2 lines long, but it looks pretty suspicious. See here." He pointed to the already opened file, gesturing for Xisuma to look at it.

Xisuma walked over, and read the code for a bit. "...Firewall access for an unknown player? That's concerning. Especially as the person who wrote it seems smart enough to keep them unnoticed. Heck they managed to hack in to even add the line of code, that's smart enough." He said, mostly to himself. "I can't tell if it was added internally or externally, most likely externally."

"Can we find out who added it?"

"We could try tracing down whoever wrote it, it'll be difficult, but I could try."

"You could." Joe suddenly said. "But you can't since you need to go back to sleep."

"I- Joe this might be important-"

"Sleep."