The Chained Watcher

Pondering

~~~

Deep in the Secret Seekers' HSB (Hypixel Storage Base), several Hermits relaxed while sorting through their most recent loot.

Tango stretched, setting aside the half-stack of purple lapis he'd gathered from the haphazard pile of shulker boxes in front of him. The faction they had raided had possessed quite a collection of puzzle-room rewards, but they were scattered around through quite a few shulker boxes instead of being neatly sorted.

He sighed. For most normal items, the item sorter would work just fine, but the things Grian left in the puzzle rooms not only didn't stack with their normal counterparts, they also sometimes didn't stack with others of the same type either. This meant that, even after running all the boxes through their auto-sorter redstone, some of the stuff needed to be manually gone through anyway.

Frustrated clacking noises came from the other side of the shulker pile. Flopping over onto his side, Tango saw False holding a furnace in each hand, trying in vain to stack them together. She was glaring at them, hitting them together with increasing force in an attempt to force them to stack. He chuckled, drawing her glare to him before the two furnaces found their way rapidly through the air towards his head.

Rolling a foot to the side, Tango watched the offending objects bounce across the floor, one of them moving noticeably differently than the other. Looking away from the bouncy furnace, he saw False stand up with a groan. He called out, "You done for now too?"

She stretched her arms up towards the ceiling, arching her back as she did. "Yep. One too many things refusing to stack." Her eyes tracked the bouncy furnace as the item continued along its path. "Who decided a furnace needed to be bouncy anyways?"

Impulse's voice came out from inside the item sorter, "You know who. I wouldn't be surprised if the only reason he made it like that was so it wouldn't stack." A slight hum rose for a couple seconds, then settled down as the sorter started working on several shulker boxes. "Well, that should do the trick for now."

They had previously made a mistake when using the sorter, and ended up shorting the entire thing out as it dumped everything into the miscellaneous chests instead of their actual destination. Impulse had been in charge of finding the problem, while Tango and False were stuck manually sorting through the offending materials. 

Let's just leave it as: the gods of Rock-Paper-Scissors did not favor them today.

Dragging himself over to the kitchen, Tango pulled out an apple while letting his mind wander. It's been almost a week since their last meeting, but nothing too ground-breaking has come to light. Sure, everyone's chewing over their own theories, but none of them have more than one or two members subscribing to that particular rendition.

Meandering his way down to the lounge area, he thought about the few facts they all agreed on. At least two of the three riddles were talking about Grian himself, specifically the 'One of Many' and 'Chained and Drained' riddles. They had also agreed that the third riddle, the 'Flying High' one, wasn't talking about Grian, but... What sense did it make to have it be about something completely different? They had to be missing something with that.

And what about those strange parting words from the avian who had the feather? Truth can be stranger than fiction? What was that supposed to mean? Besides, why would Grian have left a feather in an empty box deep underground? From what little he knew, that was before the scavenger hunt began as well, so it wouldn't have been on purpose.

Maybe... maybe the avian knows more than they had first thought? If he does then his parting words start to make a lot more sense. Pulling out a notebook, Tango started charting down his thoughts.