Archive of Our Own

But it all comes back when the moon gets low, dancing in the afterglow, and when the room starts spinnin’ and my eyes are closed, feeling like I’m not alone ‘cause there’s a ghost in the machine… 

It’s two days into the new season when Scar catches Impulse outside of his starter base—not a village, this time, but a simple house, with wood and stone and that new copper block, though he may have to replace it because it’s long since turned blue and Impulse had kind of liked the orange look. Scar’s roof, across the way, has evidently had the same problem, though that may be intentional—Impulse can’t quite tell. He’ll offer his neighbour some honeycomb when he gets the farm up and running anyway, and try not to feel apprehensive about building next to Scar, who always goes above and beyond with his builds in a way Impulse could never master.

He’s trying, anyway, and surely it’s the trying that counts.

“I think we have a neighbour,” Scar tells him, tiny hat perched on his head, and Impulse frowns.

“You mean Cub?” he says, because Cub’s the only other person he can think of in the immediate vicinity. 

“Oh, no, no,” Scar says. “I meant of the ghostly variety.”

And Impulse says, “ah,” because he’s not sure what else to say.

“I’m starting to get the sense she likes me,” Scar says, when Impulse doesn’t say anything else. “I mean, she wasn’t too far from my starter base in Season Six, and then we were neighbours again in Season Seven… She just can’t resist the good times, huh?” 

“Well, I mean,” Impulse says, “I imagine good times are hard to come by, in her line of work and all.”

“Hm, true,” Scar concedes. “Being Hermitcraft’s resident poltergeist can’t be an easy gig.” And the words are light but there’s a heaviness behind them, a heaviness echoed in Impulse’s own heart. 

“Where abouts is she set up?” he asks, peering past Scar at the plain stretching between their bases.

“Over there,” Scar says, gesturing. “But also kind of over there?” He then gestures in the exact opposite direction. 

“Huh, someone’s got big base plans this season.”

Scar snorts. “Right? If we’re not careful, we’ll be outmatched!” 

Impulse, smile fading, asks, “Should we set up a perimeter?”

“Probably,” Scar says. “Wouldn’t want anyone stumbling in! That would not be a good time, let me tell you.”

And Impulse winces sympathetically, because out of all of them, Scar has probably had the most experience stumbling into the ghost’s builds, and it is never a pleasant experience. “Yeah,” he agrees. “You take the one over there, I’ll take the spots over here?”

“Sounds good,” Scar replies. “Well, I’ll get on that, then—I’ll see you later, Impulse!”

“Bye, Scar!” Impulse calls, and waves as his neighbour heads back over towards his base.

Ten minutes of scrounging up spare blocks later, Impulse heads out towards the spot Scar had indicated, directly opposite his house. Before he can get there, though, he feels a distinct chill somewhere off to his left, really just outside of his front door, and turns to look. “Um, hello?” he calls, and though he hears no answer, a shudder runs down his spine. “Huh.” He walks slowly, counting the blocks until the chill fades, and places a block down there. Then he turns left and keeps walking until once again the chill fades away, and places down another marker. By the time he’s made a full loop, he’s sectioned off a relatively small plot of land, too close to his base to be either of the haunted areas Scar had mentioned.

“Huh,” he says again, and keeps walking over to the next spot. When he gets there, he finds it’s really more two spots than just one, both straight ahead from Impulse’s base. He marks them out and stands back, then turns to look at where Scar is marking out a relatively large space not far from his own starter base. “Looks like this place is super haunted this season, huh?” he says to nobody, and then turns back to look at the area he’s just marked off. “Welcome to the neighbourhood, friend,” he says to the cool air. “It’s good to have you around!”

The ghost says nothing, but that’s probably for the best, anyway.

It’s a week later when Impulse is passing by the marked-off area by Scar’s base and feels someone walk over his grave.

He freezes, breath caught in his throat, and becomes aware that he must be standing in the midst of one of the ghost’s builds, his skin crawling and every hair on his skin standing on edge. He needs to move, needs to get out, but his knees have turned to jelly and he’s not entirely sure he can take another step without collapsing—

He hears, faintly, the sound of someone crying.

“Hello?” he calls, and turns, squinting, because he’s heard that sometimes you can see where the ghost is, some kind of heat shimmer in the air. There’s nothing, though, just empty air and grass swaying in the breeze, and the faint, staticky sound of sobs. “Hey, it’s alright,” he tries, even as his heart feels like it’s about to beat out of his chest. “You’re okay.” 

The wind tugs at him, and he’s suddenly hit with the overwhelming sensation that no it’s not okay nothing is okay nothing will ever be okay—

“Hey,” Impulse chokes, and he’s crying, too, now, tears streaming down his cheeks, “hey, c’mon, I’m sure it’s not that bad. What’s bothering you? I noticed that, uh, you—you moved your base. Um. Was there something wrong with it?”

There’s a feeling of surprise, and a low not okay never okay gone gone everything’s gone everything’s wrong—

And a louder, it was rotated the wrong way.

Impulse can’t help but bark out a laugh. “What, did you tear it down and build it again? This seems like a big build!” The ghost does not reply, but the sobbing is quieter, Impulse thinks, a little less desperate. The pressure on his chest is lighter, and he can almost breathe again, shuddering gasps between his own sobs. “You’re crazy,” Impulse tells the ghost, and there’s something fond in it beneath the shakiness. “I guess I should move the markers, huh? So people don’t walk into your base.” He sniffs, reaching up to wipe at his eyes, and stumbles forward until he finds the edge of the cold air, placing down a random block from his inventory to mark it. 

“It, um, was nice to meet you,” he tells the ghost, though his eyes are puffy and red and his body is trembling and his voice sounds like he’s been gargling rocks. 

The ghost does not reply, but the coldness feels maybe a little less unfriendly than it did before.

…Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Impulse really isn’t sure.

(It’s not until later that Impulse realises that the ghost, who for two seasons has sobbed and screamed and been completely unresponsive to any attempt to communicate, had replied to him. He lies awake that night, too troubled to sleep, and when the sun finally rises he finds that he’s still not sure what to make of it.)

 The season stretches on, and Impulse learns to watch where he steps, because haunted spots keep popping up left, right, and centre. Scar builds his waggons, and Impulse builds his shop, and they put up proper fences around the ghost’s builds with signs warning the other hermits to keep out, and Impulse begins to worry that by the end of the season most of this area will be untouchable spots of cold and misery. It’s bad for business, really, and also bad for Impulse, who feels like he’s on guard every time he steps out of his front door.

“Why don’t you just move?” Tango asks him one day, when the two of them are up on a pillar trying to figure out how to make horses fly. “You know, there’s plenty of room at Big Eyes. We’d love to have you.”

“Well, sure,” Impulse says. “But I don’t really…” He trails off, trying to figure out the right words. He’s not sure Tango will understand even if he finds them. “I don’t want to leave Scar on his own with a ghost,” he decides eventually. “And I had plans! I still have plans. I don’t really want to change them.”

“And?” Tango presses, sensing that there’s more to be said, and Impulse sighs.

“I don’t want to offend the ghost,” he admits.

“Offend the ghost,” Tango echoes, incredulous.

“I mean, it’s not like she has any choice in the matter, right? She’s stuck here, and I’m sure it must suck way more to be her than to live with her. I don’t want to leave and make her feel worse than she already is.”

“Impy, she doesn’t even know who you are,” Tango says. “We ran all those experiments already, Doc looked at the code, she’s not really… cognizant. She wouldn’t notice if you left.”

And Impulse knows, logically, that Tango is right, but the memory of it was rotated the wrong way echoes in his mind. That had been a response . She’d heard him, had answered his question, and that’s… 

“I’m not moving,” he says, finally. “I appreciate the offer, and all, but I’m not… I just don’t want to move.”

And Tango sighs and gives him a look but doesn’t push it, instead pulling a slow-falling potion from his inventory and asking, “You ready to try this?”

“I was born ready,” Impulse replies, and lets the ghost slip out of his mind in favour of horses and flying and patented hermit chaos. 

“Impulse!” Scar calls as Impulse swoops past, sitting on the roof of his Swaggon. 

“Hi, Scar,” Impulse says, turning to slow his flight and land on the copper roof. 

“Here to see the moon?” Scar asks, budging up slightly and patting the spot next to him.

“Yeah,” Impulse says, taking the seat. Jellie, sitting on Scar’s lap, raises her head and gives him her familiar stink eye before stretching out her neck and poking his hand with her nose. Impulse reaches up and gives her a scritch behind the ears. 

“I’m quite excited,” Scar says. “She’s a good builder, our ghost, and she’s been busy this season.” He gestures down below at all the fenced-off areas. 

Impulse hums. “Honestly, I don’t know how she does it. I swear she’s productive enough for two people. Maybe even three.”

“Well, she probably never has to worry about phantoms, being a ghost. Or mining.” Scar pauses, head tilted to the side. “Wait, does she mine ghost blocks? Are there ghost mobs?” 

“I hope not,” Impulse says, shuddering. “Can you imagine ghost mobs? They’d be everywhere.”

“And you can’t even kill a ghost mob,” Scar says, horror in his face. “They’re already dead!”

Above the horizon, the full moon begins to rise. The two of them sit in silence for a moment, watching it slowly track up. Finally, Impulse asks, “Do you know if anyone else is coming by to see?”

Scar shrugs. “I haven’t heard anything.”

Impulse nods. He’s sure at least one of the hermits will fly by later, curiosity getting the better of them—and if they don’t, he’s sure they’ll be by next month. They’re still in starter base territory, after all, and it’s the ghost’s megabases that usually shine. (Megabases, plural, because she never builds just one . That the ghost is an overachiever shouldn’t really be a surprise to any of them, really—this is Hermitcraft, after all. She fits right in.)

(Never mind that the bases always seem to be built in slightly different styles, different personal flairs added to each in a way you could recognise across the seasons. The first time Impulse had seen one of her bases, his heart had about pounded out of his chest, because for a moment the style had been almost familiar , and he could almost believe it had been built by—

But that was just wishful thinking, he knows. Because they’d tested that theory, and they’d gone through the code, and they’d concluded, without a doubt, that the ghost wasn’t—

But she could have been, maybe, in a world that was a shade kinder, or perhaps a shade crueller. And in the light of the full moon, Impulse looks at the ghostly images of her builds, and his heart aches, because if he pretends enough, it’s a glimpse of what could have been, if Mumbo had come home.)

The moon clears the horizon, and the sunlight is finally beginning to fade, and below them Impulse can begin to make out the edges of the ghost’s builds, fuzzy and indistinct. The moon rises higher, and the images become clearer, and Impulse sees— 

A tiny house, and a tiny van held above it in the hand of some kind of tree monster. A house standing opposite his own, large and beautiful with a crescent moon affixed to the roof. A train, one side open for people to access the store inside. An upturned boat-turned-base, white flags glistening in the silver light. A steamship-turned-shop. What looks like a large replica of a dragon’s egg. An unfinished framework of a structure, up near the hills at the back of their area. The start of a megabase, maybe, if Impulse had to guess. 

Scar whistles. “Well, she has been busy,” he says. “Look at that!”

“How is it fair that a ghost’s a better builder than me?” Impulse complains, but his heart isn’t in it, not really. Then, his eyes landing on a strange structure in the centre of all the buildings, he says, “Is that a stack of boats?”

“I think so,” Scar says. “And… Amethyst?”

“I think that’s a grindstone,” Impulse says, pulling out his spyglass to get a better look. “Why is there a stack of boats? What is she doing?” 

“Better yet, why is it on top of a hole?” Scar asks. “That’s a big hole!” 

Impulse tucks his spyglass away and gets to his feet, readying a rocket in his hand. “Wanna go take a closer look?” he asks, and Scar nods, picking a less-than-enthused Jellie out of his lap and preparing to take off himself. They fly down, and Impulse lands just beyond the fences, turning to look at what is definitely a stack of boats and beds and a grindstone and a single block of amethyst. It’s held up by a crafting table, a single sign affixed to it with glowing ink: Boatem Hole & Boatem Pole.

“What’s a Boatem?” Scar asks.

“This, I think,” Impulse says. He leans forward, careful not to cross the boundary of the fence, and peers down into the shadowy echo of a hole that isn’t really there. “That’s bedrock, down there. And… broken bedrock?”

“What?” Scar sounds appropriately baffled. “Why is there a void hole in the middle of our village?” 

“I have no idea,” Impulse replies. 

“Impulse, this is not Scar safe!” Scar says, disbelief and laughter in his voice.

“Well, it’s not a real hole,” Impulse says, able to see through the illusion if he crosses his eyes just right. “You couldn’t fall down it even if you tried.”

“Still!” Scar huffs. “The ghost knows me well enough to know that it’s not safe! What if she’s trying to kill me?” 

“Scar, she doesn’t need to try and kill you, you do that well enough by yourself,” Impulse points out, and Scar slumps, pouting.

“You’re right,” he agrees miserably. 

Impulse snorts, but addresses the air in front of him anyway. “Miss Ghost, please don’t kill Scar, he dies enough already as it is!” 

“Please!” Scar adds. “Think of my poor levels!”

And Impulse thinks he hears, just for a second, a tinny, staticky giggle, the garbled kind of sound that he associates with calls between Hermitcraft and city-servers where the signal just won’t hold. And then there’s a voice, so quiet he can barely hear it, but audible enough to just make out the words— Scar, I promise nothing bad will ever happen to you while you’re in my company.

Impulse blinks, eyes wide, and turns to look at Scar, who doesn’t seem to react at all. “Did you hear that?” he asks. 

“Hear what?” Scar asks. 

“Nothing,” Impulse replies. Then, “Thought I heard phantoms.”

“Well, I’d hope not!” Scar says. “I slept last night just to make sure we wouldn’t see any!” 

“Yeah, no, me too,” Impulse says. “Must be my ears playing tricks on me. Phantom phantoms.”

Scar shudders. “Oh, the worst. We better not start having to deal with ghost mobs around here, I tell you.”

Impulse laughs, and turns away from the strange pile of boats, and tries not to let his thoughts linger on the voice, or the strange sinking feeling in his gut.

A couple of days after the first full moon of the season, Impulse decides that if the ghost has started on at least one of her megabases, he should probably get started on his.

There is, however, one small problem, and that problem is that, well…

Well, the problem is, is that the ghost has seemingly gotten started on more than one megabase, and now the majority of the land on his and Scar’s peninsula is fenced off and inaccessible, unless you wanted to have a very haunting experience. And not that Impulse minds their ghostly neighbour, really, but there’s so little room left, and unless Impulse wants to start creating land and building out into the ocean…

Well. He’s going to have to start building on top of her. And Impulse really isn’t too sure what the etiquette is for asking a ghost if they want to be roommates. 

So, lacking in ideas, he goes to get help.

“Stress?” he calls, wandering through birch trees. “Are you around here?”

“Who is that?” he hears a muffled voice say. “Is that Impulse?”

“It’s me!” he calls back. “Where are you?” 

He hears the sound of a door opening, though he can’t see where, and Stress appears through the trees moments later. “Impulse, hi!” she calls. “What’re you doing here?”

“Oh, you know,” Impulse says. “I just wanted to see how you were doing! And I maybe wanted some advice, if that’s okay?”

She squints at him, then nods. “Oh, of course! Here, just come back to me base, it’s right around here.” She leads him through the trees towards a house built into a hill on the edge of a ravine, shrouded by foliage, and opens the door to usher him inside. The interior is sparse and plain, and as he looks around, she says, “Oh, don’t mind the mess, I haven’t been around much, so I haven’t had much time to decorate.” She gestures to a table in the corner, where he sits, and then turns to prepare a pot of tea. 

“Oh, that’s fine,” Impulse says. “What’ve you been up to, then, Stress?”

“Oh, you know.” She waves her hand dismissively. “Building, wrangling geezers, visiting Iskall… The usual.”

“Right,” Impulse says. “How is Iskall doing, by the way? I haven’t heard from him much recently.”

“Oh, he’s fine! Well, as fine as he can be, you know. He's doing this whole Indiana Jones thing these days, raiding vaults and whatnot.” She sighs, her shoulders slumping, preparing cups as the water begins to boil. “What about you, Impulse, how’s your season going?”

“Fine,” Impulse replies automatically. “That’s… actually kind of what I wanted to speak to you about.”

“What, do you want building tips? Because I’ve gotta say, Impulse, if you’re looking for redstone help, you’ve come to entirely the wrong place.”

“No, no, not that,” Impulse says. “It’s actually about my neighbour.”

“Scar?”

“The ghost.”

The kettle begins to whistle. Stress grabs it from the stove and pours it into the cups, putting the kettle down and beginning to stir the drinks. “The ghost,” she echoes. “Right, she’s over with you guys, ain’t she?” She brings the mugs back to the table and pushes one towards Impulse. He takes it and stares down into the golden liquid, cupping his hands around warm ceramic. “I gotta say, Impulse, I’m no ghost whisperer.”

“I know,” Impulse says, and takes a sip of his tea as he mulls over his words. “The thing is, she’s taken over a huge chunk of the land in my and Scar’s area, and unless I wanna start building out into the sea…”

“You’re gonna have to build on top of her,” Stress realises. 

“Exactly. And I don’t know how to ask her if that’s okay?”

Stress stares at him. “Impulse. Luv. You know she can’t hear us, right?”

“I know,” Impulse says, though he’s really starting to doubt that, “but I’d feel bad if I didn’t! It’s common courtesy, you know? Like, do I just… walk in and ask? Do I give her a gift? What do ghosts even like?”

“You could take her some flowers,” Stress suggests, sipping at her tea. “Everyone loves flowers. And people usually leave flowers at graves, I figure that’s gotta be for a reason, right?”

“Ooh, maybe,” Impulse says. “You know a lot about flowers, right, Stress?”

“Well, not to brag or anything…”

“Do you have any suggestions on what flowers? There’s a lot of them, and I’m not gonna lie, I don’t know my poppies from my roses.”

She sighs. “You’re hopeless,” she tells him. Then, “Of course I can help! I’ll get you a bouquet whipped up in no time.” She stands up. “Wait right here, I’ll be right back!”

She disappears down a ladder at the back of the base and Impulse sits and waits and sips at his tea until she returns with a bundle of flowers that she presses into his hands. 

“Here ya go!” she says brightly. “Tulips, hydrangeas, white and yellow roses, and amaryllis. If she knows the meanings at all, that should get your point across—but even if it doesn’t, they’re pretty flowers, and who doesn’t like pretty flowers?”

“Hey, thanks, Stress,” Impulse says. “That’s the roses, right?” he says, pointing to a flower that he’s pretty sure isn’t the roses, and her grin turns into a glare. “I’m messing!” he says, laughing. 

“That’s the hydrangeas,” she tells him. “They mean thanks for understanding.”  

“Oh,” Impulse says. “Wait, they mean things?”

“Yes, they— Impulse!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about flowers other than how to make dye out of them!”

She huffs. “These are tulips,” she says, gesturing. “They mean friendship , or gratitude . There are two different roses there—yellow and white—they mean, like, friendship or enthusiasm , and new starts . And the amaryllis, that’s creative achievement. So altogether, they mean something like, hello friend, let’s start a new creative achievement together, thanks for understanding!”  

“That’s perfect,” Impulse says. “Seriously, thank you, Stress.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, just make sure to stop by my shop sometime in return, alright?”

“Oh, I see how it is,” Impulse says. “You just want my diamonds!”

She grins, and winks, and Impulse grins back, laughing as he leaves.

It’s twilight when Impulse makes it back home, and he should probably be getting to bed before the mobs can get him, but first he walks into the patch of cool air next to his starter base and promptly bursts into tears.

“Hi,” he chokes out through the overwhelming misery, every hair on his skin standing on edge. “It’s me again! Sorry to come barging in again, but there wasn’t really anywhere to knock, and, well, I got you something!” He holds out the flowers. “I—I just realised you can’t really take these, so I’ll, um, I’ll just put them down here…” He sets them down on the ground and straightens up, vision blurring. He reaches up to wipe his eyes. “So, um, I had something to ask you. A, a proposition , if you will. See, we’re neighbours! And that’s cool and all, but you’re, uh, you’re taking up an awful lot of land here, and between you and Scar, there’s not… really anywhere left for me to build?” A shuddering breath in. His chest aches. “So I was wondering if, if you wanted to be roommates! I’ll build my base around here, and you can keep building yours, and because yours don’t really exist on the same plane of reality as mine, it should be fine, right? So, um, what do you say? Roomies?”

There’s no response. Impulse can’t even hear that same echo of sobbing as he had last time. The petals of the flowers ripple in the evening breeze, and the sun dips low on the horizon. There’ll be mobs soon if he stays here. Impulse swallows hard, and says, “I’ll let you sleep on it, okay? Goodnight friend!”

And then he’s ducking out of the cold spot and gasping like he’s never breathed before as the overwhelming grief fades. He spares one last glance at the bouquet left on the ground, and then ducks into his house to wait out the night.

He doesn’t sleep well, tossing and turning and waking with a start every time he begins to drift off, and when the sun rises he barely has the energy to force himself to get up. He does, though, and wanders downstairs, opening his front door—

And there’s a stem covered in small yellow flowers sitting on his doorstep. His heart lurches and before he can think about it he’s snatching it from the ground and taking a photo to send to Stress.

<ImpulseSV> what’s this??

<StressMonster101>  goldenrod

<ImpulseSV> what does it mean?

<StressMonster101> encouragement 

<StressMonster101> or good luck

<StressMonster101> wait why

<ImpulseSV> no reason thx stress!

<StressMonster101> ok…?

Impulse stares at the yellow flowers and grins, turning to look at the nearest ghost build. “Thanks, roomie!” he calls. There’s no reply, but, well.

Impulse sticks the flower in a glass bottle of water and leaves it on the windowsill of his starter base before grabbing his pick and heading down to the mines.

Beginning the base is a bit of a learning experience.

Not just because it’s big, and not just because he’s experimenting, but because working around the ghost is a little harder than he thought it’d be. He has to rearrange his plans several times to make sure the worst cold spots are in the middle of rooms, because he’s going to be spending a lot of time building the walls, and it’s really hard to pay attention to what you’re doing with blocks when your vision is blurry with tears and your hands are shaking too hard to have any real dexterity. Even then, the ghost’s megabase plans are so large that he can’t avoid building walls along the edges of them, and he quickly becomes accustomed to bringing tissues with him—and then, when he goes through an entire pack in the space of a couple hours, Scar stops by and gifts him a silk handkerchief that Impulse finds himself more than grateful for. After a couple of weeks he becomes used to the sore nose and aching eyes and permanently clogged throat, and spends far more time focusing on the base (and how much he’s enjoying it) than worrying about the fact that he spends several hours of his day sobbing his eyes out on someone else’s sadness.

Still, the melancholy weighs on him. He doesn’t sleep well anymore—he spends most of his nights tossing and turning, his dreams distorted glimpses of blood and light and flame accompanied by wailing and screams. People avoid his base, and they go out of their way to assure him that it’s not him—it’s his roommate that’s the problem. Impulse can’t exactly tell the ghost that she’s bringing down the vibe, but she is, and it’s becoming a real issue, and soon he finds himself with only one option.

He needs to find a way to cheer her up.

The first thing he does is craft as many jukeboxes as he can, and scrounge up the discs to go with them. He places them in every room of the base, and every time he’s in a room, he hits the jukebox to start the song—and every time it ends, he drops what he’s doing to go back and restart it. He’s not sure if it’s working, honestly—the music provides something for his brain to focus on other than the suffocating sadness, and he certainly leaves the base at the end of the day with a lighter step, but the ghost doesn’t seem to react all that much. After a few days, he even starts to get sick of it—trekking all the way back to the jukebox when he’s up on a wall, breaking his focus on the build, is getting annoying, and there’s only so many times someone can listen to Cat before it becomes the worst song in the world. 

So, about a week after he set up the jukeboxes, he hears the song run out and doesn’t move to restart it, just keeps placing down one block after another. The silence stretches on, and Impulse breathes, and his eyes sting, and—

The song starts up again. 

Impulse blinks, and looks down towards the jukebox—he thinks, for a moment, he can see a vague heat shimmer in the air, but then it’s gone, and he’s not sure if it was real or just the glimmer of a tear stuck in his eye. But the song is playing again, and he didn’t put it on, so that must mean—

He smiles. “Glad you like it!” he calls down. “Feel free to put on whatever, okay?”

And the ghost takes him up on the offer, because from then on, whenever he approaches the factory in the morning he can already hear the distant sound of music from one of the jukeboxes, and when he lies awake at night in his starter base, if he strains his ears just enough, he can hear the faint echoes of a melody carried by the breeze. 

“Impulse!” calls Scar from somewhere out front. “Impulse, you around?”

Impulse places down the block he’s holding and turns from his work to fly out to the courtyard. Scar is standing by the gate, still refusing to set foot inside the factory ever since he’d tried to set up one of his swaggons in the garage and had ended up a sobbing mess on the floor. 

“Scar!” he greets. “What brings you here? You can come inside, you know, no need to hover on the doorstep.”

Scar pulls a face. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

“Yeah, the entrance is fine, come in. I’ll let you know if you’re about to step anywhere spooky.”

Scar hesitates, but comes inside, looking around. “I wanted to say, Impulse, this place looks absolutely amazing.”

“Aw, thank you!” 

“Seriously, well done. But, uh, well, I’m kind of here with a complaint.”

“Oh?”

“From the noise department.”

“Ah.” 

“Never let it be said that I would get between a man and his grooves—never, Impulse, I would never—but every hour of the day is maybe a little much.”

“Well, see, the thing is…” Impulse glances away, sheepish. “The ghost likes the music.”

“...The ghost?”

“Yeah! And, well, you know, I’m building on top of her, and if she’s vibing to music, she’s not really… It’s less bad? And she figured out how to restart the song by herself, so it’s not even me doing it anymore, she’s in charge of the soundtrack.”

“Well then!” Scar says, and he actually sounds a little surprised. “Can you try and… speak to her, maybe? See if she’ll keep it down? Because if I have to listen to Cat one more time, Impulse, I’m gonna—”

“Oh, I started wearing earplugs days ago,” Impulse says, grinning brightly. “It’s maddening!” 

Scar stares at him for a moment, then, weakly, asks, “Do you have a spare pair?”

“Yeah, of course,” Impulse says. “And I’ll try and talk to her. I can’t guarantee it’ll work, but…”

“That’s all I ask. Thanks, Impulse.” Scar takes off, and calls back, “And great work on the base!”

Impulse watches him go, and then, when he’s sure Scar is out of earshot, he turns to the spot behind him, which has grown steadily colder. “You heard that, right?” There’s no response. “What do you think? Can we cut it out with the music?” Still no audible response, but Impulse feels a wave of distress crash over him, and that’s reply enough. He sighs. “I know it helps you, but—could I do something else? Could I find something else you like, and you cool it with the music a bit?” 

The ghost feels hesitant, and the distress lingers, and then slowly fades as the air turns from deathly chill to more of a cold fall afternoon . He sighs, and somewhere in the factory, a jukebox begins to play— 13 , this time, and Impulse is sure it’s out of pure spite.

He turns back around and looks out to the horizon, to Scar’s Swaggons across the way and the hills beyond that separate Swagtory from Cub’s biome, and wonders what, exactly, he can do to entertain a ghost that spends most of her day sobbing. 

Impulse finds Joe out near spawn, at the little community hut he’d built on the first day. As he swoops down, he realises that the air has a familiar chill to it, and can’t help but blink in surprise as he lands at the doorstep and turns to the cold patch beside it.

“Howdy, Impulse!” Joe calls, jerking him out of his thoughts and reminding him why he’s here in the first place, and Impulse turns with a wave.

“Hi, Joe! You’re just the man I wanted to see.”

“Oh, yeah? How can I help?”

“Well. You know how I’m roommates with a ghost this season.”

“I’ve heard something like that, yeah. She’s livin’ with you?”

“That she is! And I found out that she really likes music.”

“Oh, well that’s nice!”

“It is! And, well, I was wondering—do you know anything else she might like? Because the music is kind of getting on Scar’s nerves—and mine too—and I don’t wanna take it away from her without giving her something else in return, except I don’t really know what she’s into. And I figured, hey, Joe checks in on her sometimes, maybe he’d know!”

“Well I’ll be honest, Impulse, I’ve never really managed to hold a conversation with her, she’s not the most talkative of people. I do a lot of talking at her. And she’s never given any kind of indication that she can actually hear what I say.”

“Oh,” Impulse says. “But you talk with her anyway?”

“Well, yeah. I figured, y’know, if I were a ghost, and I were trapped on a strange server in an eternal state of suspended misery, I would probably appreciate someone stoppin’ by to check on me every so often.” Joe pauses in his restocking of the chests, and says, “She’s been talking to you, though?”

“Well, it’s more like… feelings,” Impulse says. “Sometimes things make her more sad, and some things make her less sad, and I can feel them when I’m close to her. Though… I think she may have spoken to me once or twice. I dunno.”

Joe gives him a long look, then says, “If you’re starting to get through to her, I can’t imagine that’s not a good thing. Just… be careful, won’t you? Ghosts can be tricky.”

“You’d know,” Impulse says. “Yeah, I’ll be careful, don’t worry. So—any ideas?”

Joe shrugs. “Honestly, maybe just, talk to her more? She always felt kind of lonely to me. Nobody really wants to be around her.”

Impulse hums. “Talk to her more? I can do that.” 

The next morning, Impulse goes to the factory, and begins work on the build. As he works, he talks, and after the first few loops of Cat the music stops, and he can feel a vague chill as he speaks and the ghost, apparently, listens.

He’s rambling, more than anything, telling stories from his childhood with Tango in the Nether, or tales of Hermitcraft’s glory days, or the things that he and Skizz got up to on Naked and Scared. That, or he’s just narrating his thoughts as he deals with tricky parts of the build, explaining to her his vision for the future of this base, or telling her about the redstone contraptions he’s been working on at his industrial district.

And it works. She hovers not too far away from him, and he’s so used to the tears by now that they don’t even register, and he works and talks until his voice goes hoarse and the sun begins to set, and she doesn’t touch the jukebox once. 

Then he leaves for the night, and as he’s walking towards his starter base, he hears the sound of a jukebox start up behind him. 

…Maybe Joe had been right, about the whole loneliness thing. 

 The next day, Impulse packs up his stuff and moves into the factory. He’s not fully ready to move all of his stuff over—his storage system especially is still very much a work in progress—but he figures that if he sticks around, maybe the ghost won’t have to try and fill the emptiness with music. 

It works, he thinks—the ghost follows him as he moves over his stuff and sets up a mini chest monster beside a bed, and hangs out in the corner of the room as he makes dinner that evening, and finally disappears as he gets ready for bed. No music starts as he curls up beneath the sheets, and he slips into sleep easier than he has in months.

Impulse is in a place he doesn’t recognise, but some part of his brain tells him it’s home and he doesn’t think to question it as his attention is drawn by the two beings stood before him—tall and imposing with long purple cloaks and white masks and Impulse feels a hatred bloom in his chest the likes of which he’s never felt before in his life. He’s angry, angrier than he’s ever been, shaking with fury as he screams at them, “What did you do to him?” in a voice that is not his own.

He screams, and his voice cracks, and his friends are here—no one he recognises, but his friends nonetheless—blinking sleep out of their eyes and armourless and weaponless and oh, he’s armourless and weaponless too. He can hardly find the energy to care, though, caught up in his fury as one of the beings cracks down her staff against the ground, silvery wings snapping out to block out the sky behind her, and calls flames into existence with a snarled, “No.”

It’s chaos and heat and Impulse chokes on smoke, eyes streaming as he tries to peer past the flames. He catches glimpses of his friends, but they’re snatched away, their screams echoing above the crackling fire before cutting off abruptly and without mercy. His eyes are steaming with tears, and he can feel the flames hot against his skin, embers burning flesh and lungs. It’s hell on earth. It’s the end of the world. He looks up at the Watchers (how does he know what they are?), gods standing above the carnage they have wrought, and screams with the fury and passion of a dying woman. 

He screams and screams until there is nothing left inside of him, and then with the last dying embers he spits out, “Fuck you. Just. Fuck you. Both of you. Straight to hell.”

And the Watchers glance at each other, their words burning somehow even more than the flames around him, and one of them raises a wicked obsidian blade—

And then there is agony and breathlessness and the full moon shining high above in the sky—

And then there is nothing else at all—

And then Impulse is gasping awake in bed mere hours after he fell asleep, dizzy and disoriented and nauseous, and even though it’s nighttime and the room is large and draughty he is far, far colder than he should be. 

He chokes back tears, his voice too hoarse to scream, and pulls the quilt tight around him, shivering so hard his teeth chatter. “Was that you?” he calls out to the darkness, and hates how scared he sounds. “Is that how you died?”

The ghost doesn’t reply. There’s sadness, but there’s always sadness, she’s always so so sad, and Impulse is sad, and the sensation of dying is all too vivid in his mind, and—

Maybe he’s starting to understand why. 

The nightmares start in earnest after that, and they don’t let up. Often, it’s dying, playing in a horrible loop behind Impulse’s eyes every time he drifts off, but sometimes—

Fluorescent lights and uncomfortable chairs and the comfort of his dad’s arm around him as he sobs into his shoulder because she’s gone, she’s gone, it was so sudden and she’s gone—

Standing hand-in-hand at a funeral, watching a coffin lower into the ground, and he’s trying so hard not to cry again, gripping far too tightly to the bouquet in his off-hand—

Falling, falling, falling, and he’s going to die, and he’s never died before, and SNAP-CRACK—

Impulse has never fought a dragon before, and this is terrifying, and his heart is pounding and they were all meant to be here, where did they go, why is he alone—

He’s gone he’s gone they took him where is he he misses him—

A flash, a burst, magic and explosions and water rushes in beyond the cracked wall as his best friend screams and Impulse wants to scream but he can’t he can’t he can only watch him break—

Sometimes it's different. Impulse doesn’t like those dreams any better. 

“Knock knock!” 

“Knock knock!” Impulse parrots unthinkingly, before his sluggish brain reminds him that that’s not what you’re meant to say when you’re already inside, and he follows it up with, “hi?”

Bdubs cuts off another, uncertain, “knock knock?” and enters the room. 

Impulse grins tiredly at him. “What’s up buddy?”

“I asked Scar—” he cuts himself off with a yawn, glances at his watch, and says, “oh, it’s nighttime. I should be sleeping. Anyway—I am in the business of making a basalt generator.” 

“Really?” Impulse asks.

“Yes.”

“That’s… really… weird.” It takes Impulse a second to parse why Bdubs is staring at him like that, and then he realises that that was definitely not a socially appropriate response to his friend’s statement. Bdubs breaks, and begins to laugh, and Impulse laughs with him, though he’s really not sure why.

“Stop it!” Bdubs barks

“No, no, I’m saying that because about five seconds ago I finished my basalt generator in the nether.”

“Stop it! No!”

“I swear!”

“Get out of here!”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Well this isn’t gonna work out! Are ya gonna sell it?”

“What? No, I just needed some to make a, floor for my new storage room.” Impulse blinks hard, several times. It had taken him far too long to remember the word floor . 

“Oh, okay, okay. So would I be right in assuming you may have some soul soil on you?”

It also takes him a moment to figure out that he definitely has more than the five he’d just used, and by the time he’s led Bdubs to his store room and got him set up, Bdubs is looking at him with more than a little concern.

“Are you alright?” he asks, and Impulse stares at him for a second too long before replying.

“Oh, I’m fine. Just haven’t been sleeping well, is all.”

“Well I could tell that,” Bdubs says, crossing his arms, tone more than a little offended. “You have bags under your eyes! That shouldn’t be happening!” 

“I know, I know.” Impulse yawns. “I’m just… I’ve been having these nightmares, is all. It’s fine.”

Bdubs gives him a look that Impulse is far, far too tired to figure out the meaning of. “You know, I’ve got this amazing sleepytime tea, I’ve been drinking it for years and in all that time—I haven’t had a nightmare! Not a single one! It’s miracle stuff—how about I get you some, in return for the soul soil?”

“I… yeah.” Impulse offers an exhausted smile. “Sounds great. Thanks, Bdubs.”

“Thank me by getting some sleep,” Bdubs says, wincing at what Impulse can only assume is his face. “Yeesh!” 

It’s the full moon, and Impulse would be spending it poking around Boatem with Scar, but Bdubs’ sleepytime tea had not helped as much as he’d hoped, and he doesn’t really want to be dealing with phantoms all night. Instead, he wanders the halls of his factory, trying to get a glimpse of what the ghost’s been building, and it looks like… a mountain? Maybe even two mountains, jutting up through his base. It’s impressive, he’s got to admit. 

And then, out of the corner of his eye, he sees someone.

People have seen the ghost before—they’ve described her as a shimmer in the air, like the heat mirages you see on a hot day, but vaguely-human shaped. Not solid enough to make out any distinctive features, but enough to know that she’s there .

This isn’t like that. This is like the ghostly bases that appear under the full moon’s light—this is a woman made of silver light, grinning as she walks through his base, a shulker box in arms and elytra strapped to her back. She has long hair, and is wearing netherite over a hoodie and shorts, and Impulse’s heart freezes in his chest as he stares .

“H-Hello?” he calls. “Can you hear me? Hello!” 

She doesn’t reply. He hears the vague distant echo of a laugh as she disappears around a corner out of sight. It takes him a moment to remember how to use his legs, and then he takes off after her, hesitating for just a second before following her out of the door and into the courtyard. He hears the distant screech of phantoms, but he pays it no mind, racing forward to see—

There’s the strange stack of boats over the hole, and there’s the ghost, grinning as she reaches out a hand to pull someone else out of the hole. He’s wearing the same netherite and elytra get up as her, short messy hair and a warm-looking jumper beneath, and he laughs at something she says as she helps him up, and the two turn to Impulse to wave at him.

Impulse, hesitantly, waves back, mind racing, and before he can begin to think any of this through more than the what the HECK looping through his brain, he feels a cold chill somewhere behind him. He turns, and he’s not sure what he’s expecting to see, but it’s not—

It’s not Mumbo.

What the heck gets upgraded to what the FUCK and Impulse can’t breathe as the ghostly moonlight vision of Mumbo waves and laughs and heads over to the two ghosts by the hole and—

A phantom shriek splits the silence, diving down towards him, and Impulse runs for the safety of his factory before it can reach him.

By the time he gets back inside, heart pounding and breath coming in snatched gasps, he turns to find that the three ghosts have vanished, as if they were never even there in the first place.

The next morning, Impulse heads back to spawn—not to meet anyone, or to catch Joe doing his weekly restock of the spawn shack, but to visit the memorial behind it.

It’s simple, this season, a stone obelisk surrounded by flowers and candles and photos, a beacon beam shooting up behind it and up into the sky. Grief stirs in his chest, and he knows it’s all his own as he sits in the grass and looks at one of the photos. The frame is simple, the glass warped and weathered and the photo beneath old—it’s from when Mumbo had first joined the server, before Impulse had ever even heard of Hermitcraft, and his heart aches to realise how young his old friend looks. How young he'd been when he'd disappeared, twenty-one and still the baby of the server despite everything.

“Hey, buddy,” he says to the air. “Been missing you this season. Well, I miss you every season, but—you know. Missing you a lot.” He sighs. Tears a chunk of grass out of the earth and lets the blades fall between his fingers back to the ground. “I, uh, I saw you last night. I don’t think you saw me. And, you know, I thought—back when the ghost first showed up, I think we all thought she was you, but then we did all those tests and she wasn’t , but… Y’know what, now I’m not too sure!” He laughs. There’s no mirth in it. “Because I saw you last night! And I want to, I really want to believe you’re still out there somewhere, that maybe you’ll come home one day…” The breeze makes the grass sway. Seventeen-year-old Mumbo grins back at him from the photo. “But maybe you’ve been here the entire time.”

Mumbo doesn’t reply. He can’t reply. He’s gone, and he’s been gone for a long time now, but he’s still gone, and Impulse… 

Impulse stands, and turns his back to the memorial, and takes off into the sky, and then he’s gone as well. 

It’s dark and cold and empty and Impulse feels so, so weak, to the point that he thinks he might just fade away into nothingness from the sheer lack of everything he has right now. But he clings to his existence, meagre as it is, and watches as his best friend pulls out a black knife from somewhere in his robes, pulls down his sleeve, and presses the blade to his wrist.

Impulse screams before he can stop himself, and his friend can’t hear him, and he knows there’s nothing he can do, but he screams nonetheless. He screams, and screams, and cries nonexistent tears with eyes he doesn’t have, and his best friend, his brother, stares at his suicide with hunger in his eyes and Impulse begs him not to, begs every god that exists and every god that doesn’t not to let him, not to make him watch his brother  kill—

The knife goes flying and shatters against the far wall, and his best friend yells out in defiance before collapsing into a sobbing heap, and Impulse wraps his ghostly arms around him and pretends that either of them can feel the hug.

Impulse wakes weeping in the early hours of the morning, and weeps until his sobs lull him back to sleep.

Impulse wakes early, still shaking from the nightmare, and heads to the Nether, and meets an unfortunate end at the hands of an enderman. When he respawns, he spends an hour just staring blankly at the ceiling, unable to find a single shred of energy to move or care about his despawning stuff. Just as he’s contemplating giving up on today and just trying to sleep, he hears the distant sound of a jukebox starting, and finds it in himself to leave if only so he won’t have to listen.

He heads back out to finish the job, and by the time he’s done, the hey there sign by the Boatem Nether portal has given him an idea. He spends the rest of his morning going around the server and leaving the other hermits encouraging signs by their portals— keep up the great work! and you can make something awesome today! and you are appreciated! Then that idea gives him another idea, and he puts up similar signs all across his base, keep on going! and turn that frown upside down! and you’re my reason to smile! And, sure enough, every time he comes across one it ekes a small smile out of him, something to cut through the misery that permeates every corner of his factory.

He can only hope that it makes the ghost—ghosts?—smile too.

“Impulse!” calls a voice, and Impulse blinks, glancing down through the broken window of his starter house to Scar standing below and, oh, hm, that’s not where his house was this morning, he’s pretty sure.

“Scar?” he calls down, and his voice sounds strange in his ears but he can’t quite put his finger on why.

“Impulse!” Scar says again. “You moved your house!”

Impulse blinks. “Did I?”

“Well, I’d assume so, since you’re in it, and it’s moved.”

Impulse stares at the broken glass and removed support, forming a wide window that looks out toward the ocean. He blinks, slowly, like that’ll make anything about this situation make any more sense, and it doesn’t. 

“Huh,” he says. “Guess I did!” 

Scar frowns. “Are you feeling okay?” 

“Yeah, I, uh, I’m fine,” Impulse reassures. He quickly places a couple glass blocks down to fill the empty gap—it looks a little weird, but not necessarily bad—before heading down the stairs and meeting Scar out front. “Sorry about that,” he says, “couldn’t hear you too well up there!”

Scar squints at him, and Impulse tries his best for an innocent smile. They lock eyes for a moment, two, and then Scar smiles and claps him on the shoulder. “Well, that’s good!” he says. “Now, Impulse, I had something I wanted to talk to you about…”

And Impulse gets so caught up in Scar’s shenanigans that it’s not until later, when the sun is setting over the horizon and Impulse is heading back to his factory, that he catches sight of his starter base, standing in a place he hadn’t built it, and he realises in a cold rush of dread that he doesn’t remember anything from this morning before Scar had come along.

“He doesn’t need to know that I’m here.”

Mumbo stares at Impulse incredulously. “What do you mean?” he asks. “You think you might never see him again and you’re—you’re not even going to give him the chance to say goodbye? You’re mad, that’s beyond cruel—”

“No!” Impulse yells, and moves to block his path, knowing that if Mumbo really wanted to get past the effort would be futile. “Don’t tell him, don’t you dare!”

“Why not?” 

“He doesn’t know!” Impulse cries, and then the explanations are falling from his nonexistent lips in a tide he can’t stop and Mumbo—

“Okay!” he cries, holding up his hands. “Okay, okay, I understand! I might not agree with it, but I understand!”

If Impulse could sigh in relief, he would. If Impulse could cry, he would. Instead, he manages out a quiet, “Please don’t tell him.”

And then, out of the silence comes an even quieter, “Pearl?” and Impulse turns to see—

His best friend, his brother, blinking sleep out of his eyes, clothes and hair rumpled. And Pearl freezes, unable to do anything but stare, and he stares back, and Mumbo’s eyes flicker between the two of them as they stand caught in an endless moment.

And then the impossible happens, and the moment ends, and his best friend crumples and says, “Pearl,” and Pearl—

Pearl wakes up, and Impulse blinks, staring at his hands, because he’s not—

“Pearl?” he calls out into the dark. “Is that your name?”

And the air ripples, and there’s a shimmer in the air, and he hears the ghost of a voice whisper, “Yes.”

Impulse smiles, and says, “It’s nice to finally meet you, Pearl.”

Pearl does not reply, but the normally frigid air of Impulse’s bedroom feels warm for just a second, and Impulse’s heart warms with it.

“Hel-lo? Earth to Impulse? Come in, Impulse.”

Impulse blinks to find Tango’s hand waving in front of his face. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Must have zoned out.”

“Yeah,” Tango says, and the laughter in his voice quickly dies as he peers at Impulse. “You still not sleeping well?” Impulse shrugs. Tango sighs. “You gotta move out of that factory, man, it’s no good for you.”

“But it’s coming along so well,” Impulse insists. “Have you seen how cool it looks?”

“I have seen how cool it looks, you’ve done a great job,” Tango says. “But look at yourself! You’re a wreck.”

“I’m fine.” Impulse sniffs.

“Every time I see you you’re crying. You’re crying right now!” 

Impulse, surprised, reaches up to his face, and sure enough finds that his cheeks are wet. “Oh.” He wipes them away. “I didn’t realise.”

Tango makes a frustrated noise and gestures silently at him before getting out, “This is exactly what I mean! And you’re always there—”

“Not always—”

“And I never see you anymore! Even Scar says he rarely sees you around! When was the last time you talked to someone who wasn’t one of us? When was the last time you talked to Zed?” Impulse opens his mouth to reply, and then closes it when he realises that he doesn’t have an answer that won’t back Tango’s point. That in itself backs Tango’s point, however, and he says, “exactly!” 

“I… Okay, so I’ll go visit Zed,” Impulse says. “Will that make you feel better?”

Tango sighs. “If it’ll get you out of that dang factory, anything will make me happy.”

So Impulse goes to visit Zedaph, in his ultra-modern lab up high in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, and Impulse only has a minute to wonder why Zed can get away with being a homebody and he can’t before Zedaph is telling him all about his experiments this season and ah, of course, that’s why.

“Are you getting some interesting data from it?” Impulse asks, gaze fixed on the wall of brightly-coloured sheep over Zedaph’s shoulder. 

Zed doesn’t seem to notice. “Oh, it’s all fascinating —or, it would be, if I knew what any of it meant.” That last part is a mutter Impulse isn’t entirely sure he was meant to hear, so he lets it slide. 

“The sheep should be upside down,” he blurts, and his voice doesn’t quite sound right to his ears.

“Excuse me?”

“The sheep. You should dinnerbone them. It’d be funny.”

Zed turns to survey the wall, and hums, and says, “It would be pretty funny. And that’s what science is all about—being funny.” He grabs a bunch of nametags from a chest and hands half to Impulse, and together the two of them spend ten minutes renaming all the sheep on the wall until they’re all hanging upside-down by some strange defiance of gravity. 

“Perfect,” Impulse says as they stand back and survey their work.

Zed says, “Why does your voice sound like that?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. Weird?”

Impulse shrugs. “I dunno. I’ve…” he sighs, and his vision unfocuses against his will again, and he really wishes it’d stop doing that. “I’ve been feeling kinda weird lately, I guess.”

“Hm.” Zed squints at him. “Maybe we should put you in the Chamber. Figure out what’s going on in that brain of yours.”

“Do you really think it’ll help?” Impulse asks.

“Oh, I’m sure of it.”

“Then… I don’t see why not!”

Zedaph has Impulse sign some waivers that it’s definitely not wise to sign, but it’s Zedaph, so Impulse writes his name with a flourish, only to blink and realise it’s not his name he’s written at all. He quickly scribbles it out and signs his own name in the cramped space that remains, and Zed doesn’t call him out on it when he takes back the form and tucks it away in his inventory. 

“Just this way, please, follow me—and then keep going, up at the top, you can’t miss it.” Zed vanishes through a door marked scientists only , and Impulse keeps going up until he falls through a hole into a white room filled with assorted random blocks and structures and chests. There’s a wall of dark glass separating him from Zedaph, and when he hears his friend’s voice again, it’s over the tinny channel of a loudspeaker. “Hello, Impulse.”

“Hello.” He glances around. “This is quite the set-up you’ve got here.”

“Welcome to the chamber,” Zedaph says, a hint of pride in his voice. “Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with the room.”

So Impulse opens and rifles through the chests, climbs up the scaffolding and parkours over to the floating slabs against one wall, examines the random scattering of redstone dust and pokes the minecart until it moves along one of its pointless windy rails.

“Okay, I think you’re familiar enough! Now, Impulse—”

“Yup!”

“Can you explain to me, in as many words as you can, the lifecycle of a frog, using only adj—ajectives—I can’t say that word.” 

Impulse laughs. “Those are descriptive words, right? I remember third grade English. Okay, umm… Jumpy? Wait, no, you said life cycle… How do you describe eggs? Eggy? Okay, eggy, and, um… Hatching… Wait, no, shoot, that’s a verb.” He can’t help but giggle, and when he glances up he can see Zedaph scribbling away on his clipboard. “Oh, no… Um, eggy, no-longer-eggy, swimmy… Grow-y? And then jumpy.” He nods definitively, like he’s just said anything of worth, and then bursts into laughter. “Oh, gods, they’re not even called eggs, are they?”

Zedaph doesn’t answer his question, but he smirks, and that’s answer enough for Impulse, who groans and regrets every decision that’s led him to this point. “Next, can you lie down in an usual place?”

Impulse turns and surveys the room. “An unusual place…” His eyes land on the minecart, and he spares a second to wonder what he’s doing with his life before he walks over, picks it up, lies down on the tracks, and places the cart back on top of him. He’s far too large for the minecart’s wheels to reach the tracks, and it balances precariously on his stomach as he cranes his head back and looks up at Zedaph. “Is this unusual?”

“I don’t know, is it?” Zedaph asks.

“Well, I think so,” Impulse says. 

“Then I guess it is! Now, if you want to come out from under the minecart, and stand up…” Impulse’s vision does that thing where it blurs again, and there’s a weird rushing in his ears, and the next thing he knows he’s standing upright in the centre of the chamber. “...please can you find out exactly how many red items there are?”

Impulse blinks, and looks around the chamber, and says, “Well, there’s like six redstone dust.”

“In the chest?”

“Oh, in the chest?” Impulse echoes, turning toward it. “Did you say that? I’m sorry, I zoned out.” He opens the chest and rifles through it before giving his answer of, “twenty-two?” There’s no response, and Impulse turns to see that Zedaph is gone, replaced by a mannequin wearing his head. “Zed? You look a little, uh, inanimate there.” A trapdoor flips open, and Zed sticks his head out, and Impulse laughs. “There you are!”

Once Zedaph is out of the trapdoor box—something easier said than done—he explains, “I wanted to see you react to my dummy friend here.”

“Ohh,” Impulse says. “Well, y’know, he’s pretty inanimate, but he’s got more of a body than I used to have, so good for him!” 

Zedaph frowns. “What?”

Impulse blinks. “What?”

Zed stares at him for a long moment, then glances at his clipboard, jots something down, and moves to continue the experiment. “Next challenge! Prove this pig is a superpig.”

“Pig?” Zedaph hits a lever, and a pig comes tumbling down into the room. “Oh! That pig!”

“Yes, this pig,” Zed says.

“Hmm…” Impulse squints at it. “This pig,” he tells Zed, “is a pig of wonder. This pig brings joy and happiness everywhere he goes.”

“And that’s a superpower?”

“Of course! Look at his face. Don’t you feel overjoyed right now?” Zedaph looks dubious, and Impulse insists, “When I look at this pig, I don’t even want to cry! He’s so full of joy.”

“...Do you often want to cry, Impulse?”

“Oh, all the time,” Impulse says cheerily. “I wake up crying, and every night I cry myself to sleep! I'm crying now, look!” He wipes his face, and holds out his hand to show Zedaph the tears streaked across his palm. His face hurts from smiling.

Zed looks slightly unnerved as he continues with the experiment. “Impulse, you have ten seconds to hide from me. Three two one—ten, nine…” Impulse glances around, and then tries his level best to hide behind the wooden structure on the right, hanging into the ladder. “One!” Zed turns, and there’s a beat before he lets out a long sigh. “Every time, every time!”

“What?” Impulse asks.

“Everyone always hides there! I can see you, Impulse.”

“Aw, man.” Impulse sighs and climbs back down. 

“There are things in the chamber—I’m gonna give you ten more seconds.”

“Oh, yeah,” Impulse says, smacking himself in the face. “Duh.”

Zed begins to count again as Impulse scrambles to build a wall to hide behind. When the count is over, there’s another second-too-long silence, and a very disappointed, “Impulse?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you behind the wall?”

“...Yeah.” 

He emerges from behind it, despondent, as Zed sighs and jots more stuff down on his clipboard. He then clicks a button and a book shoots out of a dispenser. “Take a look at that and tell me, what do you see?”

“What do I see?” Impulse echoes, picking up the book and flipping it open. “Let’s see…” There’s an inkblot on the page, and Impulse stares at it for a moment, eyes blurring, before replying in a voice that doesn’t quite sound like his own. “Oh, that’s Squiddy.”

“Who?”

“Squiddy, y’know, the big squid that Zee pranked Grian with? Though I never saw the original Squiddy, I just saw the one Grian made to get back at him after I arrived. But it looks like that!”

Zedaph is quiet for a long moment before asking. “Impulse, who are those people?”

And Impulse opens his mouth, and thinks of crackling flames and an obsidian blade and a best friend who can’t hear him scream, and says, “I… don’t know.”

Zedaph stares at him for what feels like too long, not even making any moves to write any notes down. “Impulse, are you—”

“I’m fine,” Impulse interrupts him before he can ask. “Let’s keep going, shall we?”

Zedaph looks hesitant, but nods, and says, “You have sixty seconds to fill the chamber with as much water as possible. Go.”

Impulse is in the middle of grabbing a bucket when the light goes out, and he’s shrouded in darkness. He yelps in surprise, almost dropping the bucket, then feels a wave of relief at being out of the light. Now he’ll be solid enough to actually use the bucket and grab the water to fill the room.

He hears a lever snap outside, and Zedaph say, “Wait, why aren’t the lights turning on?” A couple more lever switches, and Zed calls, with growing alarm in his voice, “Impulse, stop placing water, I think there’s a problem with the redstone.”

Impulse keeps placing water, Zed’s voice but a distant ringing in his ears, and there’s really a lot of water left now, and not a lot of air, and, oh, he’s drowning. He should probably do something about that. The lights begin to flicker, and he hears Zed call his name, and just… lets himself float, somewhere beyond his body. He breathes in water, and it feels strange, and it’s been so long without a body that he’s forgotten what it feels like to drown…  

The glass shatters and the water level suddenly drops as it goes spilling through into Zed’s area of the chamber, and his friend is wading through it to grab him. Impulse sucks in a breath of air and chokes , lungs burning with water, spluttering and coughing as Zedaph pulls him out through the door and into the hallway outside of the chamber. 

“Never do that again,” Zedaph says, breathless. “You scared the life out of me!”

“Oh.” Impulse blinks. He’s soaked to the bone. “Sorry.”

“I’m calling Tango,” Zedaph says, pulling out his communicator, and Impulse grabs his hand before he can.

“Please don’t.”

“You’re clearly not well, I can’t in good conscience let you go off alone after that—that stunt you just pulled, Impulse!”

“I won’t be alone! I’ll stay the night with Scar, I promise, I just… Don’t call Tango. Please.”

Zedaph stares at him. Impulse pulls out his best puppy dog eyes, and hopes that his sopping wet cat act is pathetic enough that Zedaph will take pity on him. It seems to work, because Zed sighs, and puts his communicator away. “Fine. But you better call Scar to come and pick you up, I’m making sure you stick with that.”

Impulse sighs, but takes out his own communicator and shoots Scar a message. Scar replies with a thumbs up, and an hour later, he’s landing on Zed’s front doorstep. “Sorry about that!” he apologises. “Took me a while to find this place. You’re pretty far out in the middle of nowhere!” he tells Zed. “You ready to head home?” he asks Impulse, and Impulse nods.

“See you, Zed,” he calls, and there’s that strange tone to his voice again, but he doesn’t have the energy to question it, following Scar off into the sunset.

And, if when they arrive back at Swagtory, he waves off Scar’s questions about the whole ordeal, and heads back to the factory instead of sleeping over like he’d promised Zed…

Well, what Zedaph didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

“Nervous?” Pearl looks over at Mumbo who has sat down beside her on the grassy bank outside of the cave. His head is cocked to the side, expression open and warm and questioning, and the strange mixture of feelings in her nonexistent stomach that appear whenever she sees him raise their heads again.

“A little,” she admits, intangible knees pressed against intangible chest, nonexistent arms wrapped around them. She lays her—you guessed it, not real!—chin atop them, and looks out to where Grian is pacing around the strange bundle of materials he’s laid out in the vague shape of a human body. 

“It’s going to be fine,” Mumbo reassures her.

“I mean—is it?”

Mumbo blinks. “Well, it has to be, doesn’t it?”

“Not really.”

“Listen,” Mumbo says, “I may be a bit of a spoon, but I reckon—well, the really important stuff, that’s gotta turn out alright. Doesn’t it? Because otherwise nothing good would ever happen.”

And Pearl thinks of Evo burning, thinks of Grian breaking down in the shattered remains of his base, thinks of a shattered obsidian knife—

And says, “I guess you’re right,” because if he can find it in himself to be hopeful after all he’s learned in the past few days, she can find it in herself to humour him. And who knows. Maybe he’s right. Maybe out of the two of them, the one who lived long enough to stand at Grian’s side has a better chance—and maybe some of that luck will rub off on Pearl by virtue of him being here. 

“Okay,” Grian calls, and she can tell how nervous he is from the way his hands twitch, “I think I’m ready.” The two of them head over, and Grian glances at Mumbo. “You’re sure I can’t convince you to go home before we try this?” he asks. 

“No way, mate,” Mumbo says. “I’m staying right here. You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

Grian sighs. “Don’t I know it,” he says, voice fond, and Pearl feels the familiar sickening surge of jealousy shoot through her. 

“What do you want me to do?” she asks, because she can’t bear to watch them stare at each other any longer.

“Just lie down here,” Grian says, waving at the makeshift body he’s constructed out of logs and sticks and plant debris. 

“Alright.” Pearl doesn’t have a body to lie with, but she lowers herself down nonetheless, until her consciousness is within the rock he’s used as a head. “I swear to the gods, Griba, if you bring me back as some kind of wooden mannequin nightmare—”

“No, it’ll be a body,” Grian says. “Trust me, okay?”

“I trust you,” she replies, without even thinking, because it’s the most natural thing in the world. Her life, her soul—maybe not her builds, he’d fill them with chickens she’s sure, or maybe blow them up—but everything important? Yeah, in an instant.

“Okay,” Grian says. “Mumbo, stand back.” And then he closes his eyes, and screws up his face in concentration, and there’s a shimmer in the air as wings materialise, and he starts to go fuzzy around the edges—

And Pearl can’t watch him any more as her vision goes dark and she attempts to gasp in a breath with lungs she doesn’t have yet, and she feels more real than she has in years but this body is still wood and stone and dirt, slowly transmuting to flesh, too slow—

And then the sky splits open with a thunderous boom, and they are not alone, and Grian whispers, “No,” in a voice that’s small and broken and terrified. Pearl needs to move, to get out of this half-formed body and do something, but she’s stuck—too tangible to drift, but not alive enough to stand. She wails soundlessly, and then becomes aware, on the periphery of her everything, that there’s another body, already made and alive, and she reaches out with hands she does not have to grab—

And Mumbo gasps and reels as someone that is not him yanks a hold of his soul and tries to turn with his body, stumbling over his own feet as the Watchers surround Grian, grabbing him by the arms and holding him down as he screams and struggles—

And in unison they both yell, “Grian!” with a fear they’ve never felt in their lives and the Watcher that had slain Pearl once before, oh so long ago, turns and sighs and pulls from her inventory an obsidian blade—

And Pearl bleeds out, again, on the ground of a strange server, gasping in agony, the full moon floating in the sky above her, and as Mumbo’s vision blur she begs her mother please—

And her soul shatters into irreparable pieces, a ghost of a ghost, tangled code tethered to a home that is not her own—

And Pearl wakes crying in Impulse’s bed, and it takes her a moment to realise that she has a body, one that is, for the moment, just as good as hers.

Then Impulse starts awake, attempting to sit, but she’s already sitting and all he manages to accomplish is hitting his head against his knees as he tries to figure out what on earth just happened. She sits up, and he realises that he’s not alone in his body, and panic washes over the two of them. “No, no,” he gasps, and she clamps their lips shut before he can say something that makes her feel the slightest bit guilty over what she’s about to do.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and her words sound strange in his voice, even with the familiar lilt of her own accent. “I need to go, I need to go and find him, you have to understand.”

And Impulse doesn’t understand, but he should understand, because he’s been feeling it, because their emotions have been one for months now, he can feel all of her grief and pain and loss and he’s gone and Pearl wants her brother—

And Impulse wants his brother—

He’s grabbing at his communicator before she can stop him, frantically typing through blurry vision, sending the messages in the server chat because it would take too long to pull up his private chats.

<ImpulseSV> tnago

<ImpulseSV> hlep

Pearl jerks and throws the communicator at the wall. It clatters down against the floor and she stumbles to his feet, unstable on legs that are not hers get out get out before making a beeline for the door. She needs to get out of here, needs to get to the End before they can find her and stop her. It’s not until they stumble outside that they both realise, with a jolt, that the moon is full, and not only that—it’s huge, taking up far more of the sky than it should, and they freeze, staring at it. All around them are the ghostly echoes of builds, and Pearl can’t understand why they’re there, and Impulse thinks didn’t you build those? and Pearl thinks back no! and Impulse would probably take a moment to process that if he weren’t too busy trying and failing to process everything else that is happening right now.

“Impulse!” calls a voice, and Pearl snarls a quiet curse under her breath, turning and pulling Impulse’s sword from their inventory and levelling it at Scar, still dressed in his silken pyjamas and silly nightcap. “Well, now.” Scar raises his hands in surrender. “You’re alright, it’s just me, your good friend Scar. Are you okay?”

They shake their head with far too much ferocity. “Get away from me,” Pearl chokes. 

“You know I can’t do that.” There’s a steely look behind Scar’s eyes, one Impulse rarely sees but knows means business. “Do you wanna put the sword down, Impulse.”

“No,” Pearl says. “Leave. Or I will hurt you. Don’t think I won’t!” 

They’re crying again, sobbing so hard that their chest aches, and Impulse begs her to put the sword down, but she holds it level, pointed straight at Scar’s heart. Scar opens his mouth to reply, but then Tango comes crashing down in a storm of elytra wings and flames, a comet spat out of the sky. Impulse would have fallen to his knees in relief if Pearl hadn’t been keeping him upright.

“What’s going on?” Tango demands, eyes flickering between the unarmed, pyjama-clad Scar and Impulse with his sword. “Impulse?”

“No,” Pearl cries, “no, no, get out of here! Both of you! You need to go away, I need to leave—you can’t stop me!”

Tango looks confused for a moment, but then realisation dawns, and he says, “You’re not Impulse, are you?”

Scar looks at him in confusion, but Pearl steels her jaw and says, “No. I’m not.”

“Right.” Tango sighs. “So, what do I have to do to convince you to give me my brother back?”

“He’s not coming back!” Pearl snaps, and Impulse recoils from the force of it, the grief of it. “I’m here now, and there’s not much of him left, and he’s going to fade away, and I’m sorry, but I really, really need to go.”

Wait, Impulse thinks, because he doesn’t have enough control to say it, what? Pearl? And he’s scared, and she’s sorry, and Impulse remembers what it had felt like in those memory-dreams of the void, what it had felt like to die, and it feels oddly, awfully familiar to the strange nonexistence creeping up on him. Or, not nonexistence, but not his existence, like so much of him has been replaced by someone else.

“I’m sorry,” Pearl sobs again. “But I needed a body.”

“You’re the ghost,” Scar says in realisation, staring at her with wide eyes. 

“I have to go,” Pearl says again. “Thank you for everything, but I need to—I need to find my brother, he’s in trouble, I need to save him—”

“So, what, you’re just gonna kill my brother to do so?” Tango cries. “I don’t think so! Let him go or I swear to the gods I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Pearl laughs. “You’ll kill us both?”

Tango goes quiet, glaring, a helpless desperation in his gaze. Impulse wants to reach out to him, to tell him it’s okay, he’s here, but he can’t. He can’t, he can’t, please stop this please—

“If there was another way, I’d take it,” Pearl says quietly. “I liked Impulse. He was nice to me, and he told me stories, and he kept me company, and he cried when I couldn’t. He was good. I’m sorry I had to kill him.” She takes a shuddering breath. “But this is more important.”

Impulse sees Scar move out of the corner of his eye, and Pearl snaps towards him, but it’s too late—

The sword goes flying across the ground, and a hand claps around their wrist and twists, and Scar says with a tone in his voice Impulse has never heard before, something beyond charming and well into the realm of forceful: “I think it’s about time you left my friend alone.” And Pearl gasps, and Impulse gasps, and somewhere in the gut-punch of Scar’s words he finds he can twitch his fingers. “In fact,” Scar adds, “I think you should leave all of my friends alone! I think you should go back to that factory over there, and lock yourself inside, and never come out again!” 

And Pearl wails with agony as her soul once again splits from its body, and Impulse collapses to the ground, a puppet with its strings cut.

“Impulse!” Tango cries, falling to his knees beside him, trying to roll him over. “Impulse, can you hear me?”

“Hi,” Impulse whispers, shaking, face streaked with tears that show no sign of stopping anytime soon. 

“Oh my gods,” Tango gasps. “Don’t ever scare me like that again, you hear me?”

And Impulse musters a smile, and says, “I’ll try not to,” before his eyes roll back in his head and blackness descends. 

Impulse awakes in Tango’s bed to find his brother sitting at his bedside, morning sun shining through the window behind him. Tango’s head lulls as he barely avoids drifting off into sleep, and Impulse mumbles, “How long was I out?”

Tango starts, eyes snapping open. “Impy!” He reaches over and grabs a glass of water from the bedside table, handing it over to him. Impulse takes it and, with his brother’s help, sits up enough against the pillows to take a sip. His body feels heavy and weak, which he figures makes sense, all things considered. “You’ve been out for a full day,” Tango answers his question. “Everything went down in the early hours of yesterday morning.” He takes the empty glass back from Impulse and replaces it. “You scared the shit out of me, man.”

Impulse smiles sheepishly. “Sorry.”

“No, don’t— ugh.” Tango groans. “I’m just glad you’re okay, alright? We had Doc in here yesterday to stabilise your code, because you kept just—glitching out, and it was terrifying . I really thought…”

Impulse reaches out and places a hand on his brother’s knee. “I’m fine,” he promises. “I’m right here.” And Tango still looks so sad, so Impulse opens his arms up and offers, “hug?”

Tango accepts it wordlessly, falling into Impulse’s embrace, and if Impulse squeezes him a little tighter than usual, neither of them mention it. Finally, Tango pulls back, and Impulse lets him go. 

“We need to talk, though,” Tango says. “Not all of it right now, but at some point we need to talk about all this.”

Impulse sighs. “I figured.”

“The ghost is trapped in your factory. You’re not allowed to go back there.”

“But it’s not finished—”

“Nobody is allowed back there,” Tango cuts him off. “It’s been declared off-limits to all hermits. Everyone’s to avoid the ghost as much as possible.”

“What about my stuff?” Impulse asks quietly.

“We’ll get you new stuff,” Tango says, and Impulse sighs. Tango sighs too. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you liked that build, but—”

“No, I get it,” Impulse says. “It’s too dangerous.” He stares past Tango, out of the window and at the steadily rising sun. “I feel so stupid,” he admits. “I thought… I knew she was getting more real. But I just thought I was getting through to her.” He sniffs, and reaches up to wipe his face, but there are no tears. His cheeks are dry and sore. “I thought I was helping.”

“You did all you could, buddy,” Tango says softly, wrapping an arm around Impulse’s shoulders. “But sometimes there are things that are wrong that you just can’t fix.”

And Impulse nods, and stares out of the window, and for the first time in months, his eyes are fully dry.

It’s nearly a full month later when Impulse, who has been living out of a much smaller base he’s built at Big Eyes Bay, is passing by the factory for the first time since that night, on his way to drop off some stuff with Scar. He looks up at the tall, imposing figure of his megabase on the horizon, and for the first time sees beyond his pride in the build, sees beyond the notion of it as  home, and sees a cold, empty building filled with unspeakable misery. And for the first time all month, he feels no desire to go near it. In fact, he thinks, he wants to drop off his stuff with Scar and go back home as soon as possible.

And it’s not until he gets home that he realises that he can’t remember the ghost’s name, anymore, or her brother’s, or any of the nightmares that had haunted his sleep for weeks upon weeks. The memories are gone, and all that Impulse can find in the space in his mind where they should be is a soft, aching sadness, and the image of a full moon.