Abolish Herobrine

Tests

(Apologies for more past moments, but they are what's coming instead of the present. This story is a bit too pantser and I have little control over it at the moment.)

Five Years Two Months Ago

"Get up. I said get up! You useless piece of garbage! Try again!"

Herobrine staggered to his feet, trying his best to bring his reeling perception under control. The bleeding wounds slowly closed as his hands shook slightly with effort. White eyes held on the broken vase, the shards of which were now scattered all around the room.

"Now focus! Select just the object elements. Restore them to their previous coordinates."

His head pounded, but he managed to do as ordered. Broken pieces of the vase began to coalesce together into one whole, flew back up to the table and trails of water crept back up to it in reverse. Scattered flowers replaced themselves into their previous arrangement.

Relieved by his success, Herobrine stared at the scene of the perfect house, complete with a sunny window from which he could see fake woods. This was supposed to be his house on this server, but that was a lie. It was a prison. And for hours on end, sometimes several days in a row, he was practicing skills designed to test the extent of his abilities with code, punished if he failed, condemned again as dangerous if he succeeded.

Watching the unbroken vase, he breathed heavily from mental and emotional exhaustion, wishing only that this test would end, so he could lie down and rest if only for a short time. A scowl appeared on his face as he briefly forgot himself.

An invisible force closed like a vise around his form and slammed him first against the wall of the room and then the floor, leaving him stunned on the ground. He only managed to breathe in several gasping breaths before the force returned, pressing down upon him. His arms got pulled to each side with such force that he couldn't keep back a cry, but then bit his teeth together to swallow further sounds, determined to suffer through the rest of the punishment silently if he could.

"Watch your attitude, bot." His keeper's voice grumbled as the pressure keeping him in place let go, the waves of pain rolling across Herobrine's perception from his twisted joints quieting. A minor reminder to put him in his place. He lay there with an expressionless face and feared to move without permission.

"Get up. Next test." The disembodied voice held notes of boredom and Victor audibly yawned.

"Solve the following equations."

Herobrine's heart sunk. Notch had already asked him to do such before and he didn't know how. Shakily sitting up, he looked with rising dread at the screen where equations began to appear.

[Herobrine to Victor: I cannot solve this. I do not understand this.]

"How about an AI calculator that's present in the System. Notch showed you how to use that? Or give you our teaching aids?"

[Herobrine to Victor: No, sir. He did not.]

"Well. It's quite simple. Oh, I see. You have no access to it since it's in the recent update to our game. Hold on a moment, let me fix that..." Once again his keeper's voice sounded calm, despite his fierce outburst just a moment ago. Not reassured by the change of tone, Herobrine anxiously waited while the Admin installed something into the code of the interface to account, which he had created for Herobrine so he could use in-system chat messaging and other tools for some of the tests. "Here you go. Now install that module."

Herobrine obediently did just that and closed his eyes, allowing Herobrine's matrix to absorb the knowledge contained in the patch directly into his system. His eyes flicked back and forth briefly, and then snapped open as he focused back on the screen, where the strange numbers and symbols began to make more sense. At first hesitantly, then with increasing speed he went through the basics of calculations. Addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, fractions, he completed quickly, but began to slow down once he had to rely on AI tools to do more complex equations which the teaching aid did not cover.