The Chained Watcher

Secret Seekers Meeting

~~~

It's been a while, but with everything settling back down after the portal out of Minecraft closed, the curious Hermits have finally gotten around to organizing another meeting of the Secret Seekers.

Now while he could just sneak in like usual, Grian is starting to run low on useful party tricks that would keep him out of sight but still in the room. The more complex stuff would be, well, complex, and it just feels like overkill to rig up something like that for a little game between friends. No, this time he has something different planned.

Five minutes before the time he overheard they were planning to meet at, he appeared inside the little secret base/bunker where they have their meetings, and... sat down at the card table.

That's right. He's not being sneaky this time.

Oh, he should probably add two chairs over here. One for himself, and one for Tango, when he decides to reveal that he's in on the secret now. Just a normal chair to match the others at the table, without any of the flourishes on the main table's chairs.

Voices can be heard getting closer, so he stretches out lazily in the chair, taking a position that should make it clear that he's not a valid target at the moment. Now, they should realize that he's not going to give them a hint for tackling him right now, but you can never be sure with the Hermits. One of them might even 'misunderstand' and 'accidentally' tackle him anyway.

The door opened, and he cracked open an eye to watch Impulse freeze in the doorway, caught off guard by the unexpected presence. Or, well, not unexpected, but more unexpectedly obvious.

This unintended blockade doesn't last for long when the Hermits who had been right behind Impulse fail to realize that he'd stopped moving forward and run into him. The ones at the back manage to pull back before the domino effect hits them too, but Grian can't help a slight smirk at the chaos he managed to cause just by sitting here.

Half disentangling himself from the pile, Impulse asks confusedly, "Grian? What are you doing here? Er, in the chair, I mean."

He waves a hand in acknowledgement, but doesn't remove his seat from the seat. "Sitting, obviously." Oh, looks like he'll have to specify no free hints after all. "And since I'm not hiding, catching me isn't going to get you a hint, so don't think I don't notice you two trying to sneak up on me." The two Hermits in question grin sheepishly, straightening up out of the cartoonish tip-toeing crouch they'd been doing.

Propping his cheek up on his fist, his eyes roam over the assorted Hermits filing into the room, lingering on Tango for a brief moment. "I just wanted to see how this would play out, and I honestly can't be bothered to find a hiding spot with a good vantage point that you haven't boobytrapped yet. Seriously, all the good spots are trapped to the Aether and back."

"But there are still spots?"

Cheeky. "I'm not so gullible as to give away where the few spots I can hide are." His grin gained a sly undertone, and he added, "Unless you want to use your question, of course."

Multiple people try to speak over each other to tell him no, but none of them seem to realize that he just listed them all as able to use the question. It was Tango's question, after all, and he'd already used it, though they don't seem to know that yet.

Well, he's a little embarrassed to admit it, but he couldn't think of a riddle for Tango.

He's not going to shortchange them though, at least not too much, so he's refunding the question Tango used instead. If they ask the exact same thing, which they hopefully won't, he's going to be very annoyed.