Hermitcraft Nonsense

I Never Thought I Would Learn to Love

Sorry for double post, realized that it cut part of it off and wanted to fix it. ><

Part two to "I Like to Be Alone, But I Hate Being Lonely"

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A hand on his shoulder snapped Xisuma out of his mind.

"Hey, you alright there? How'd you get here?"

A rough-looking man, very built and looking that he could use a good clean up and bed was in front of him. X blinked, wondering if he was still imagining things.

A woman kneeled down beside the man- when had X fallen to the ground? She also looked like she had seen better days, graying hair and pale grey dust smudged across her face.

"Easy now. You were having a vision now, weren't you?"

"Vision?" X repeated, shaking his head slightly and grabbing for a tree to pull himself to his feet. "I'm- I'm just imagining things, this isn't real," he said more to himself than the couple in front of him.

The man crossed his arms. "Kid, don't you know what a vision is? Pretty typical for a void walker. Who are you? How'd you get out? And here, specifically?" He asked, slightly hostile.

The woman turned around and hushed him. "Stop you. Leave him alone. Can't you see he's disoriented? Come, let's go back to our place, it should be right around here if I remember correctly and our maps are correct..." she guided X back down the barely-visible path he had created.

X dug his heels into the End dirt and stopped. "There's nothing left of that house. It's just ruins now," he stated.

The woman's composure faltered at that. Her shoulders fell and eyes went wide with shock. The man pulled Xisuma out of his partner's loose hold and grabbed his shoulders.

"What do you MEAN, it's nothing but ruins? We had our son there, we fought tooth and nail to get back to him! You can't tell us he's-"

X pulled away from the man as the woman grabbed at him herself. She led him away for a moment and they started furiously whispering and left X to his own thoughts.

They left their home and left their child? What kind of parents do that?! The man's phrasing echoed in his mind, and his offended thoughts softened as he may have misunderstood.

"Fought tooth and nail to get back." They may have been kept against their will...

That made Xisuma sad. He thought of their child, left without his parents for who knows how long, and to meet what he could only image was an unjust fate.

The woman stepped forward again.

"Kind sir... how long have we been gone?" She asked.

X looked to his armored feet. "I wish I could tell you, ma'am, but I don't know. I don't know who you are or what all this is. I just found this world at the bottom of my server list and didn't recognize it so I came to investigate, and appeared in that burnt-down house over there. I wish I could help, but I don't know."

Something familiar echoed in X's mind. "I wish, I wish," "I don't know..." But why was it familiar?

The couple (at least X presumed them to be a couple) looked to each other. The man dipped his head.

"My apologies for lashing out then. I... I just thought... we were so close..."

X saw that the couple was mourning and drummed his fingers against his thigh armor. He needed to do something. He had no idea what happened to them but their home was gone and son was missing. He couldn't simply leave them here with no resources and no hope.

He took off his helmet, breathing in a breath of thin, cool End air, and tucked it under his arm while putting on his professional admin smile.

"My name is Xisuma, I'm an admin of a server that if you life, you can come live in since your home is gone," he offered calmly. While Hermitcraft wasn't exactly that type of server, it was what he could do.

But the stares that he got weren't what he was expecting. The man's breath hitched and the woman's hands shot to her mouth as tears filled her eyes. X faltered in his formality with a confused look.

"Did I say something wrong?"

"Xisuma... that, that was our son's name," the man breathed.

X's reared back at that statement. "What did you say?"

"Oh, sweet Suma," the woman choked through tears, "you're all grown up."

X stared and backed up. "No, I- I don't have any parents, you have to be mistaken. I didn't come here to find all this, I don't... I don't..."

That crushing loneliness festered along with the sudden crying wish that this was real, that this was not a dream and maybe he wasn't alone in the universe. That maybe these two strangers didn't abandon him, that he was loved when he only ever thought he was coworker, acquaintance to all those around him.

The woman embraced him, somehow taller than him despite Xisuma already being fairly tall and running his fingers through his outgrown hair he never felt like cutting. She was whispering things X didn't understand but echoed in the back of his mind and the man brought them both closer, humming a tune that X recognized from his dreams as a child and had since forgotten.

He remembered the letter he had written, only a few days ago yet nearly forgotten. He quickly pulled out the crisp pale envelope and stepped back from the couple, nervously offering it to them.

"I didn't think I had parents, but I wrote this thinking about them... you," Xisuma mumbled to the couple, suddenly very self-aware like some child even though he was a full-grown adult.

His mother and father both reached for the letter, looking at it and then each other before smiling and pulling each other and X into another long-awaited embrace.
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Word Count: 1000
Total Word count: 3100

Alright so my thoughts on this after writing it:

X is a void walker, so are his parents. Basically, simply normal human players who have chosen and adapted to live in the End. Hence his last name Void, although X didn't know if that was actually part of his name or not. Void walkers have lived in the End long enough to become attuned to it to an extent, hence why his parents were able to grow a forest to raise their son in, as well as gain some minor powers such as seeing visions.
Xisuma's parents didn't want X to grow up only in the End, they wanted him to know of the outside world as well. They had to go to the Overworld to collect the resources, which was not impossible but difficult without killing the Ender Dragon. The true End dwellers didn't like that his parents brought the Overworld to the End, so they took Xisuma's parents and destroyed their home, but left their child as a further punishment.
Xisuma was supposed to die, but other void walkers felt pity for the baby that had been victim to his parents' good wishes that were not forbidden, but clearly not acceptable either, so they sent him to a different world (since they WERE all players) and X grew up as he did there.
His parents were held captive by the End for a long time (clearly, as X is a full-grown adult now) but evidently didn't realize exactly how much time had passed. Maybe time acted differently across the worlds as well, making X age at a faster rate than his parents were expecting.

Thank you to Fade for suggesting the song, I think I based this off of that a little more than I intended to but it really fit so? ^^"

I should probably add this to his character thing in that one chapter, huh?