My Hermitcraft One Shots

There May be Voices in my Head

He breathed in through his nose, wiping the tired from his eye and rolling out of his bed in the bare expanse that was Area 77. Well, when he went to bed it was bare. When he woke up there was a whole world outside and he knew who was guilty. He went down toward the buildings and examined the industrial, but modern, build style, wearing a smile, he hissed slightly with the excitement of the new builds. But he didn't see their builder, who could only be the brilliantly talented Scar, anywhere around and went to explore the building closest to where he had slept. It appeared to be the home for Scar's recent persona of Captain Angry Eyes.

Of course, he wasn't around so Doc couldn't dote on his talents, so he made a mental note to praise him later and walked off to go work on starting his raid farm.

After a few solid hours of working later and the massive glass flooring was perfectly finished. Swirls of stained glass, green and blue and white blending together into one massive design. Up close it appeared to be random, but when he flew over it, he couldn't help but see a portal in the image.

Things seemed to be out of place or just a bit different than he remembered and it all made things a bit hard to track. Sometimes his friends would look different as well, but Doc connected that to their use of personas for different events. Like how his best friend Ren was his second in command during the Civil War was now living as a hippie and rivaling him. The people had agreed to one more big event before going to a new world, but then people started getting tired. A knight he hardly knew named Wels ended up going to sleep and then staying that way. The other creeper-person in the world, a rare species of red one, ended up doing the same. People got tired of the world and they agreed to end it on the high note of Area 77 being an amusement park.

Fully ready to leave, Doc stood before the diamonds of the cursed portal but he hesitated. Maybe he was feeling sentimental and stopped to give a formal farewell to this place, but before he could even speak to the empty land, someone walked through the portal. And this someone wasn't just anyone. He wore a fancy suit like Python or Mumbo but instead of human or creeper skin below, he was covered in fur. Doc knew the squirrel man instantly.

"Ilmango!" Doc excitedly called out to him but was not met with the warm welcome he was expecting. Instead he pressed a button on a remote that was delicately pulled from one of the decorative looking pockets of his blazer. There was a loud thunk behind him and he instantly turned to see his friends all standing there. But they were different, stood straight upright, unmoving. None of the real people showed their faces. They were nowhere to be seen or heard. It wasn't like they were around beforehand, most had gone off to the next world already or were getting ready to leave, but it was strange that nobody around would hear the crash and investigate. "Where did these guys come from?" His lungs felt heavy as he stared at the clones.

His stomach burned and made his face warm, something he didn't recognize burning behind his eye. The squirrel creature pressed a second button which made every single clone turn from their look off into the distance to look directly at Doc. This made his face heat up and vision blur from the slight liquid in his eyes and his chest feel heavy. "Doc, you know why I am here. You can't keep this up. We're scared for you."

"I-" Doc couldn't speak. He couldn't get his eyes off of the clones. They all dropped onto one knee in one swift movement, each staring down at the ground. Not that their eyes were no longer marked onto Doc, he turned to look at Ilmango once again. "I do- don't.." He stepped to the hybrid and rested a hand onto his shoulder.

He thrusted his head toward the clones as Ilmango pressed a button. They started to disappear one at a time. The first was Grian. When the short clone vanished into thin air, Doc could hear his voice just behind him. He shot his head to stare but there was nothing there. Nothing. Grian's voice slowly turned to dust in his mind, an Avengers joke being the last thing heard before it eventually was gone. Then the same happened with every clone until Ilmango pressed the button the last time and Xisuma left with a quiet "Goodbye, Doc", leaving him alone with his old friend.

There was an uncomfortable and stiff silence between them, but it melted away when fur touched the hybrid's freezing skin. A comforting hand rested on Doc's back and with that small touch, he knew that this was different from everything he had felt from being in this world. He knew that this was real. The feeling was immeasurably perfect to him and he never ever wanted to let it go. "I'm sorry that we let you go," he said very softly. His accent was thick, but perfectly real to the creeper. "After everything we found out we just let you go." He quietly explained that this all was a side effect from a sickness that nobody knew how to fix. Everything that was going on here was all his. This world was barren aside from the things that Doc had peppered the land with. There were no other people there, only other living creatures were animals.

They separated from each other, Doc wiping the liquid from his eye, and Ilmango pulled out a screen and showed what looked like an x-ray of a partially robotic body. It was pretty clearly the body of Doc. Everything was a hallucination, Ilmango explained to him, and nothing around him was real. He had to be told many times for it to get through the thick metal plate covering his brain.

Together they stared down at the x-ray, there were strange markings all through his body. Mostly his arm, brain and heart, all places now heavily coated with thick plates of metal. "None of us are doctors, but we did what we could to save you.." He zoomed in on a place where the abrasions looked to be the most dense, directly behind his eye, not replaced with a lens. "This one caused you to see and hear people. We removed every other one, but this one would have killed you. We didn't stop trying, we offered you meds that we all worked on and tried to give you things to make it shrink. We suppressed as much as possible..

"But when you left us, you left the treatment you were getting." Ilmango tried not to get emotional but when he looked into Doc's face, the hybrid began to sob, an emotion he clearly wasn't comfortable with showing so publicly, probably reserving it for bottling up and pushing down or just sitting down in a boiling hot shower.

Doc was pretty emotional, obviously reliving the events of this world. He was the only one here, every single building was his mind's creation or his hand's creation. Every voice was fictional in the world. Every person was just himself. The war, the build battle, the entire of the Area 77 conflict.. How fucked up is it that Doc lost the war when he was fighting against people that weren't even real. How fucked up is that?

Ilmango gently pulled Doc to and then through his portal, which he doted on the ability to make, saying he was impressed at the ability to make things like that. Now through the portal and in their home world, Doc saw every one of his old friends. He knew from the quiet in his own head...

He was free.