Work Text:
It is 2:34 AM. Grian is awake. Why is he awake? He doesn’t want to be awake. He’d been asleep a moment ago. Something is whispering in the back of his head. He’d…
An alarm sounds. Grian jumps about three feet in the air, wildly flapping his wings in his momentary panic, and then winces as he hears a lamp fall over. Dangit, he’d thought he’d finally moved all the fragile objects in his starter house so that he wouldn’t—why is an alarm going off?
He stumbles across his house to where a screen is lit up and there’s a siren blaring. Shut it off, shut it… “Wait, hold on,” he says, as his brain finally processes which siren has gone off. “The—the Rift! The Rift monitoring device! I didn’t even think that would actually work, I stole that from Doc two seasons ago,” he babbles to himself, scrambling to read the numbers telling him that, across the server, the Rift he’d started monitoring was apparently doing… number… things.
Thinking about it, he has no idea why the Entity wanted him to study the unknowable this season. He has absolutely no clue what he’s doing. However, look! It’s working! Maybe that’s why?
“Oh my gosh,” he says, finally managing to make the alarm stop alarm-ing. “Okay. Okay, to—to Scar’s nether portal? Should I just fly? Maybe I should just, yeah, I should…” He grabs the things the Entity had suggested he use for his studies off the table. One more monitoring thingy he’d swiped from Doc, a set of tools Pearl had lent him, some things he’d invented with a bit of prodding—okay. Okay! Time to go check out the rift between worlds.
He stumbles out of his house, clumsily avoiding hitting the door with his wings. He brushes his hand across the Entity to make sure the thing’s paying attention, because, once again, Grian stole most of this from Area 77 and has no idea what he’s doing, and then he opens his wings and stumbles into the air towards his megabase and the Rift.
The server at 2 AM is nearly quiet, Grian thinks. Not quite properly quiet, mind you—he can see Keralis’s lights on at the log shop and hear the faint sound of axes, for example, and xB is doing… something… on top of his starter base (he’s glowing? Grian has questions and no time to ask them), but it’s quiet-er. Never quite totally still. Hermitcraft is never totally still. But it’s quiet and still in a way it isn’t during the day, and it makes the anticipation Grian and the thing in his head are feeling even stronger.
It only takes a few minutes to get to his base. The cold night air has properly awoken Grian now. He swoops inside and stands in front of the glowing purple hole between worlds he’d been guided to, and it’s pulsating, flashing, burning in a way Grian’s never seen before. No wonder whatever the thing was he’d stolen had been going off. It’s… mesmerizing. It’s hard not to look at it. It’s…
…wrong?
Wait, what—what does that mean? Of course it’s wrong, Grian reasons with the thoughts he’s learned belong to the Entity, but it’s supposed to be! That’s the whole point! It’s a gap between worlds! But it’s also the wrong thing, something that isn’t supposed to—well yes, wasn’t that the point? Honestly! No, there’s something wrong wrong, the thing coming through wasn’t what they’d been waiting for. Oh, is that so? That’s news to Grian! Grian didn’t know they were waiting for anything specific! Grian doesn’t know what he’s do—
Every one of the devices Grian has with him briefly screams, in simultaneous human shouts, and then shuts down altogether. Grian stands, frozen.
The Rift looks at him. The Rift looks at the Entity, too, even though the Entity is only here in Grian’s head. Grian subconsciously puffs his wings out, widening them and flaring the eyespots on them right back at the Rift, instinctively trying to make himself too big and scary to look at, not prey, he isn’t prey—
Then the world flashes around Grian, and he can’t see anything at all, and the ground is shaking, and Grian can’t see to keep his balance but his wings start flapping desperately to keep him upright anyway, and if this kills him he’s going to kill the Entity right back and also will owe Mumbo so much money so this can’t be how Grian dies forever, it can’t, it can’t!
Desperately, he starts to try to use his wings to go backwards.
And then everything is still.
Grian looks up. All of the electronics are working again. The Rift looks like it did when Grian first found it. There are only two signs that something is wrong.
The first is the Entity in the back of Grian’s head, expressing what can only be described as mute, baffled terror.
The second is that there is another Grian standing right in front of Grian, wearing thin desert clothing, wide-eyed, with his own wings flared out the way Grian had only a moment earlier, standing in front of someone who could only be Scar, if only Scar had ever been that grey-colored.
The two of them stare at each other. He recovers first.
“What?”