Great escape. Great rescue.

Chapter 2

Grian was starting to regret refusing Xisuma's offer of transport. Never before in his life had he been this nervous!

Tip toeing as quietly as he could towards Teal's portal gallery. It was the one place within the Watchers facility he would be able to leave undetected. Hopefully anyway.

A few days ago Grian had finally accepted the offer of joining the Hermits. Apparently they were finally ready to move onto a new world, and Xisuma thought it to be an opportune time for him to meet both the rest of the Hermits and himself.

Apparently they were going to travel by portal.

Xisuma told him he'd been conserving energy months prior to the move. Creating a portal that was going to span across a mass of empty space as well as transport a good 23 people across would take a lot out of him, but it had to be done nonetheless.
Xisuma wanted to keep the Hermits happy, and resources would slowly fizzle into rarity towards the end of, what they called, seasons anyway. Teleporting the group to new worlds was the best way to ensure their survival.

He'd offered to make a portal for Grian too. His suggestion was to use the remainder of his energy to transport the newest Hermit across whatever distance to make sure he made it safely to the new world. He just needed the code.

At first Grian was confused by this. What was the 'code'?

Xisuma explained that it was just how he figured out which world was which.

Each existing world has its own individual code that lets him know if they had been there before. Making note of these codes allowed him to make accurate portals between places because they allowed him to pinpoint specific locations.

'Seeds' Grian reasoned. Xisuma was talking about Seeds. The Watchers used world seeds for exactly the same purpose. World seeds labelled each world correctly and allowed for some form of simple organisation.

The second he realised this was the second he denied Xisuma's help. There was no way he could allow his friend any kind of access to the Watchers facility. At minimum it would inform his new friend of what he was and at worst it would prompt Teal and Olive into doing to the Hermits what they did to Evo.

So Grian informed Xisuma that it wouldn't be necessary. He already had means for getting to their new world, and, with a bit of prompting, was able to gain the world seed of his, soon to be, new home.

Technically Grian hadn't been lying. He really did have means of travelling by portal, it's just unfortunate that gaining access led him to this point now. Shuffling along polished bedrock floors in socks just so that the noise of his footsteps wouldn't echo around the walls.

Teal's portal gallery was terrifying!

It was a big, terrifying, hall filled to the brim with glowing purple portals. The whooshing sound of each, echoed eerily.

Like the library, this gallery seemed to be infinite. Each portal led to a new world with the seeds for each carved patiently into the obsidian frame.

Lighting was minimal and ineffective, neither Teal nor Olive seeing the need for anything extravagant given how their own aetherial bodies glowed from the pool of magic stored under their skin. Grian, however was still young, his own magic wasn't strong enough yet to be physically visible so he had to resort to squinting through the darkness and feeling up the sides of each portal for the correct seed.
He prayed that when he found the right one, it truly was correct and that it wouldn't just spit him out somewhere random he could never return from.

He hadn't taken much with him; only what he could fit inside his pockets and a compact Rucksack. It was the same one he had used back in Evo and he knew it would continue to hold up for a long time after he joined the Hermits. The only problem was that it was highly limited. He couldn't fit any of the books from the library inside it nor would be want to risk taking them anyway. The less he took with him the more time it would grant him to hide from the Watchers. So instead he settled for bare essentials.