Demise (Old Edit)

No Control

Word count: 1000

Comparator, repeater, dispenser, dust, hopper, piston... Impulse thought as he rummaged through his redstone box. He wouldn't put it past the dead to steal his redstone supplies. However, nearly half the people on the world were redstoners. The Watchers had probably arranged that on purpose.

The hermits were lucky to even be on a world. As heart-breaking as it was to be torn away from friends or family, at least they had each other. Some people got taken to the Watchers realm and never came back. Impulse wondered how much of it was folklore and how much was truth. He recalled Xisuma's rare sharing time about how he had a sister that disappeared one day and a book was left behind. The book simply said, "Her command block skills are required." Who knew what sinister plans they had for the poor girl?

Impulse involuntarily shuddered as he rummaged through his concrete box. Command blocks could kill, transform, or warp anything. From people to worlds, they were hated. And the Watchers had control of them.

Every redstoner knew how to use them, but some could operate them better than others. Impulse thought back to when he was a little kid. He was just going through the find, the time when you discover your talent. When his parents saw him making storage systems with some spare dust, they knew instantly.

He and his family lived in more fear than the builder families, afraid their child would be taken to work for the Watchers. As Impulse grew older, his talent grew. He devised mechanisms to protect his family from the other worlds.

One day he had a spark of idea, at random. The contraption he built had never been done before. A world merger. It almost worked, and it also almost brought the Watchers to them. Impulse's friends said he acted on impulse. The name stuck. Impulse added SV to his name to remember his old name, Steven Vike.

Now he was here, in a new world trying to survive. Why the Watchers had put this on them he didn't know. He suspected a command block. This was probably some sort of entertainment for them. He wondered what would happen when all of them had become the undead. Would they finally come alive again? Would they need some redstone, or find the command block and destroy it?

Impulse shut the chest, done with his sorting. He walked through the waterfall, which parted for him. Another handy redstone trick. What wasn't a trick were the levers that were scattered around his base.

The dead had trapped his base. That was it. Impulse grabbed his modified elytra. The regular ones didn't do much. They broke and didn't even launch themselves. So Impulse made special ones that were like the ones the admins had. Xisuma had ones that were a part of him, though he never used them.

Impulse decided to travel through the nether, as it was faster. When he stepped out on the other side, something hit him. Instant damage.

"OW!" Impulse panicked. He was fine it just really hurt. He looked around and saw more traps. Traps and traps and traps. Remembering the bad accident years ago, Impulse became paranoid. He wandered the Nether hub for a good hour trying to escape without using a portal. A text brought his senses back. Tango had texted the group.

Tango> "Anyone have any redstone? I need to finish my sorting system."

Mumbo> "I can. I was just AFK at my witch farm."

Grian> "Oh so you aren't going to give the resources to SAHARA Mumbo?"

Mumbo> "Grian I just stocked Sahara."

Grian> "What about the hole?"

Mumbo> "Yeah, still haven't fixed that."

Impulse was cracking up. The architects were still bickering. He finally decided to go through False's portal and fly over to Tango's base. Impulse thought it odd that Tango was still working on his storage system. Then he remembered that Tango was taken by the Watchers for a long time. Xisuma had talked to them and finally Tango was allowed back into their world. It was something about him having something caged inside him.

Impulse uncertainly hovered above Tango's entrance. That was another feature of his modified elytra. The drop was a long way down, and the tower was very slim. Well, no use just staying here, Impulse thought as he plummeted down the shaft.

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Impulse and Tango were at the Deny your Demise shop some time later. Impulse was looking through the potions when Tango said there was a lectern. Impulse regretted that he didn't say anything. He should have remembered that lecterns emitted a redstone signal! It was too late for regrets, as soon enough, Impulse was falling to his death, the very thing he had been trying to avoid.

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Impulse wandered the murky swamp. He couldn't really remember how he got here or why he was here. He just knew he had an untapped skill that could be used for... what? That was hard to figure out as well. He just knew that his skin was now grey. Had it always been grey? Was he human?

Impulse couldn't even remember his name. What was going on? Was this his home? He spotted someone else. That meant answers. He rushed over to the colorful person who took one look and flew off.

Something inside him clicked. He was supposed to turn the whole world grey. If he didn't, the virus inside him would make him. Logically, Impulse chose the route that kept him in some control. The control he had was none at all.

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Scar massaged his temples, trying to shut out the horrible migraine. No pain killer could stop the torment Scar was going through. Spots danced across his broken vision. Carefully avoiding clenching his fist, Scar wrote down more data. The data that could possibly save the world from imminent doom.