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Without warning, Mumbo finds himself in an empty clearing he doesn't recognise. It's in the depths of a spruce forest, the thick, dense canopy of dark green leaves meeting dark green underbrush like water soaking into fabric. It's late morning—he leans out from under the tree he found himself in and squints up to the dim sky—and he could have sworn the sun was beginning to sink below the horizon last he checked.
Which was approximately ten seconds ago.
The absence of anything he was carrying before (his tools, his end crystals, all the stone he was using for his mountain, even his food) sits loud in his mind, but the significant lack of memory he has regarding where his belongings are is far louder. He's standing in the middle of a spruce forest, perhaps the one just south of Boatem, and the leaves are rustling, and the nipping breeze is wrapping itself in-between the fabric of his clothes, and his heart is thump-thump-ing in his ears, and he's alone. He’s alone.
There are no boats with charged creepers inside, and no marked path running through the forest, and no beacon beams in the sky. Wherever he is, he's far from home.
Just what he needs.
He crawls out from underneath the tree, and glances about himself; he doesn't recognise any direction in particular. But there aren't any landmarks, and his sense of direction isn’t great anyways. And without his end crystals, even his armour… this isn't filling him with confidence.
Wandering for a while seems like the only achievable option, and so that is what he does. Squeezing through whichever gap in the foliage might give him the least scratches, tripping over roots that are much stronger than they look. Definitely not feeling like he’s losing his grip on reality, no, not at all.
Promises of familiar voices, of friends, draw him further south. He breaks through the thick branches of a large, tall tree, and finally manages to breathe without it hitching in panic somewhere in his throat.
There are many of his friends—and as he stumbles closer, wordlessly joining the wobbly circle they've all made, he also notices some people he doesn’t recognise. Not all the Hermits are here, either. Maybe they just haven’t found everyone yet.
"Um," he starts, and a chain of faces—the majority of whom are Hermits, which both stokes and settles his weary worry—look over at him in surprise. Most of those who did immediately turn away again, continuing with hushed, stilted remarks to each other that Mumbo can’t catch. Only a few still look at him. Mumbo makes eye contact with Impulse—who’s so pale he looks like he’ll faint right where he’s standing—and cuts himself off before he can finish whatever stupid thing was going to come out of his mouth this time. Impulse says nothing; but the fear hidden behind his blankly glazed-over eyes is enough to turn Mumbo’s stomach.
Grian, with wilted wings, is staring up into the sky glass-eyed like it's holding answers. Scar keeps stealing awkward, cautious (guilty?) glances around the circle, never seemingly able to focus on any one person. Pearl's here, and she looks as confused as Mumbo feels. Ren and a blonde man to Mumbo's left are doing a terrible job of pretending they aren’t staring at one another; Ren’s eyes flicker away for a second, only to be immediately drawn back, like he’s testing the waters to see if the man will disappear when he blinks. Bdubs is sitting with his back against a small hill, head cradled between trembling hands. A man in some kind of blue costume is opposite him in the huddle, and Mumbo doesn’t need to recognise him to instantly see grief written across his face as he stares at someone else the group shades from Mumbo. Others are all scattered about, most acting as if there’s an invisible gap forcing an oddly intimate and yet much-too-separate distance between them and any one other person. It’s a very weird collection of people who are all grieving for something.
"Grian..." someone asks, searchingly honest—Mumbo's so distracted and overwhelmed he can't figure out who it was, because looking around, most of those horrible ghoulish expressions are mirrored across features that Mumbo thinks should never look this distressed.
"I don't know," Grian quickly replies, the words strangled as if he's had to drag them from his throat. His darkened glance grazes across everyone—the frown clouding his face thickens, making it nearly impossible for Mumbo to believe this is the same best friend he lives next to on Hermitcraft—before returning to the wide open sky.
There's a pause afterwards in which the silence abruptly builds into something even more stifling than it had been when he was alone, because no one is speaking and no one is even moving, and they clearly all know something Mumbo doesn't—
"I don't know," Grian repeats, quieter. Every syllable is the same tone, and Mumbo likes to think he knows Grian very well, but he's never heard whatever this emotion is before. Not once.
Mumbo doesn't think it'll ever leave him now he's heard it; the utter despair it evoked has burned the trembling way those words reached his ears into his lungs and spurs Mumbo’s brain into panicking he’s going to choke on it. Oh, Void.
But with a controlled exhale through his nose, then back in again, then back out again—he swallows the lump blocking his throat, and there’s that joyous feeling of having oxygen again.
There’s some kind of silent conversation happening now—Mumbo can't understand it, but it's evident they do. His solace is the two others, staggered at isolated out-of-place stations in the gathering, who are peering at everyone in the same way Mumbo must be. Confusion, dread, and concern all swirled into one rather despairing expression; they stick out like sore thumbs amongst everyone’s knowingly afraid grimaces. It’s the knowing that’s the kicker—but everyone’s already so distracted that Mumbo’s almost sure he’s been forgotten.
All at once, Tango spins on his heel, grabs the sleeve of another person Mumbo doesn't recognise, and disappears the both of them into the brush. Impulse quickly follows suit—in the opposite direction, stumbling backwards as if he’s running from something.
In his escape, Impulse breaks whatever is going on with Ren. Like he's been slapped out of a daydream, his spine flinches straight and his shoulders jerk backwards. He sends a passing glance to a few others before quickly turning and descending the hill behind him. The man he was entranced by takes a step forward, as if to follow on instinct—and then stops, his entire body jolting. His limbs stay, frozen by an unspeakable emotion, and from what Mumbo can see of his face he's conflicted. Either his second thoughts or his body itself refuses to let him follow, stuck in place like a rusted toy. Mumbo forces his eyes away before he notices any more he shouldn’t.
Mumbo meets Pearl's gaze, and she tilts her head at him in silent question. He makes the motion of a shrug with one shoulder; her face falls, almost imperceptibly. She looks away, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth.
It's then Mumbo takes a second to actually take in the world around him (he's been so focused on everyone else and the incredible weight of pain he doesn't understand flung across his shoulders en masse, it’s suffocating), but it doesn’t help in the way he’d hoped it might.
There's simply an enchanting table sat in the middle of a bedrock circle.
If the idea that they were still on Hermitcraft was still a viable thought in Mumbo's mind, that observation certainly would have settled it. Wherever this is—the rules are not how they should be.
From then, everyone else seems to disperse, too. Pearl pairs up with one of the mystery non-Hermits, Etho manages to coerce Bdubs up and away, the blonde man slinks away by himself, and the others all seem to form a larger bubble and head towards the mountains. Quiet conversations fill the empty, stagnant air, and though their words are tinged with some kind of guttural fear, the sound of normality brings some kind of peace. Even if it is slight and fleeting, as their voices drift into nothingness just seconds later.
The only three left at the strange enchanting-altar are Mumbo, Grian, and Scar.
Mumbo's been standing to the side, entirely wordless, since he arrived. There's a distinct sense of othering he feels, because even most of the people he didn't recognise seemed to have a place with everyone else. A predetermined companionship with at least some of the Hermits; all these clues Mumbo has been unknowingly collecting are slotting into a puzzle that he doesn't think he wants to complete.
Grian has drawn his eyes away from the sky, and Scar, with no-one else to let his attention flitter to, has stepped closer to him. They're a delicate distance apart; like both ends of a magnet at the same time, equally drawn to and repelled from each other. Mumbo has never been great at reading people, but even he can tell there’s some history strung taut between Grian and Scar, something with jagged edges and a vast shadow.
"It's different," Scar says, as if it was an itch he couldn't ignore any longer, and Grian simply nods.
Then Grian says something Mumbo can't make out, and the awfully too-present feeling that spikes in his chest makes him look away. In every direction he looks, there is more of the same spruce forest. He’s never had anything against trees before, he’d actually go as far as to say he likes them, but he thinks he could never see spruce again in his life and it’d be too soon. The only landmarks visible from here are some very tall, snowy peaks, looming over the already-tall canopy as omniscient spectators.
From the corner of his eye (while he is fanatically studying the blades of the grass at his feet, what a wonder nature is) he registers the two glance to him, and then glance back, their conversation briefly interrupted to check on him. He glances back up a long second later, only to catch Scar nod—his eyebrows are knitted together in the middle, and he looks so very small without that hat he never takes off.
Grian turns to him then, and forces a smile that doesn't even begin to achieve the goal it clearly had; in fact, it makes Mumbo feel exponentially worse. It fails to even reach the middle of his cheeks, just the edges of his mouth turning upwards. It comes across clearly contemptuous—and it falls from his face a second later, leaving his expression both somber and furious.
He slips his fingers around Mumbo’s sleeve and gently tugs him back the way Mumbo had come; Mumbo’s in no position to fight him (not that he ever would with any real intent, not that he ever could, this is Grian, and he doesn't know why he feels the inclination to), and allows himself to be pulled away from whatever the bedrock circle is supposed to foreshadow. He throws a glance back to Scar; he’s watching Grian leave with an absent glaze over his eyes that means he doesn’t stir when Mumbo looks at him.
They escape back into the forest, enveloped on all sides by those stupid trees that reach up into the early darkening sky, getting greyer and greyer by the second. There’s something about an entirely untouched world that buries itself deep into Mumbo’s bones and makes its needle-pointed presence known. Mumbo has never been claustrophobic, but as they get further away from the enchanting table and he sees the flickering, shimmering haze of a world border—well, if he’d eaten lunch, he’s not sure it would still be in his stomach.
The silence that settles across him and Grian is an odd one; he doesn’t dare to speak and break the fragile peace it seems to have brought Grian, who is still gripping his jacket sleeve like Mumbo will fade away if he lets go. It’s like that for a long while, just the two of them walking side-by-side. Occasionally, Grian will push a blocking branch out of the way and hold it until Mumbo makes it through, and Mumbo returns the favour by shredding his own fingers picking berries he finds on the way. The brightness of the blood that beads up feels wrong, smearing stark and simple against his pale skin, like there is a vitality within him that shouldn’t be there. One that Grian’s pallid, yellow-tinged skin and shallow breaths attempt to convince Mumbo he’s lacking. It’s all backwards—like Mumbo is in possession of something Grian isn’t, like Grian knows.
“I hope your peace, love, and plants thing is exclusive to Hermitcraft,” Grian mumbles, with an awkward huff of a laugh that serves only to highlight all of the things he didn’t say. “Let’s get some tools here.”
Right—that very obvious attempt at distraction is not going to work on Mumbo, thank you very much. Even if he is getting itchy at the idea of an unequipped night on this very unsettling world.
“What?”
Grian sighs from where he’s faced away from Mumbo, gathering sticks. Eventually, he manages, “It’s… a long story,” while handing Mumbo a wooden pickaxe, refusing to look up.
Whatever Mumbo may have that Grian doesn’t, it definitely isn’t knowledge.
“Dude,” Mumbo says, not ashamed of how high-pitched his voice is in the slightest because he’s been withholding his panic for this long, and what in the Overworld is happening, “I don’t think I’m—I’m not lacking for time, here.”