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“Here we go, this is a good learning space,” Grian said, setting Grumbot on the crafting table so his legs dangled off the edge. “Your final lesson of Player Academy starts right this moment, and it is on the topic of how to mine for materials. You remember how to craft a pickaxe, right?”
Grumbot gave a tuneless hum. He’d accepted his Mumbo For Mayor T-shirt with hushed, giggly glee, hopping up and down as Mumbo handed it over like a trophy, hamming up the presentation like an actual mayor presumably would have, and he had pants and boots, so he wouldn’t be running around barefoot, but he still wasn’t inclined towards physical expression.
He liked to run his hands across interesting textures. He liked to watch the redstone circuits surge under his skin, gridded out in tight venous patterns, and when he’d learned about the election results he’d screamed for hours, until he was red in the face, hyperventilating in miserable hiccupy bursts– until his hunger bar had had to be low, and he still hadn’t been eating, and Grian had been on the verge of suggesting respawn as a hard reset–
But that hadn’t been necessary in the end, and now Grumbot was getting along all right. Mumbo had made him a tablet to type on so he wouldn’t have to talk. They’d convinced him to take bribes in the form of snack foods. That was a lot of progress, if Grian thought about it.
“It’s quite simple,” Mumbo offered when the silence stretched, immediately garnering Grumbot’s undivided attention. Grian tried not to be jealous. “You take three wood planks and two sticks, and you access the enchantments in the crafting table you’re sitting on, and generally that does the trick.”
Grumbot nodded and hopped down. He took out wooden planks and a stack of sticks, placed them carefully and precisely next to each other on the floor, and squinted at the crafting table.
Grian could see the currents firing in his little head. Grumbot rocked back and forth on his heels. He picked up the planks again, antenna twitching, and the sticks jumped back into his inventory with a pop. He startled at that, staring up at Grian wildly, and pulled out his tablet to type, “NEED MORE STICKS.”
“That’s– if you’ll just check the rest of your inventory, you’ll see them,” Grian said, a little exasperated. “You’ve got them with you, dude. Remember your hotbar?”
“Maybe we should go through it again,” Mumbo said. He abandoned his own project, an attempt to diagram an automatic dispenser so a baby player could memorize it, and wandered over to stand next to Grian. Grian batted him with the top of a wing on principle. Mumbo sputtered and stepped pointedly out of range. “Right, take a gander at this, yeah? Watch me extremely carefully.”
He crouched next to Grumbot, suit jacket crumpling a bit, and started explaining what he carried with him all over again, slowing his cadence like he was giving a redstone tutorial to a clueless builder. Grumbot inched closer and pressed against his side, peeking up at Grian like he was making sure he was still there, and Grian’s heart flipped in his chest, made a good faith effort to crawl up and block his throat.
He hadn’t thought the universe could make a player so little, as shaky and unformed as a newly spawned lamb. He himself had come into existence with most of his growing done, wings half-fledged and mind awhirl with ideas, and Mumbo had popped into his first singleplayer world in full businesswear, and that was how it was supposed to go. The universe crafted players out of available materials, and they went away when they were done existing, and they could always look after themselves, right from the beginning. Every player knew how to scale the list of achievements, starting with taking inventory and branching into obscurities.
So Grumbot should have been better at being one, since the universe had deigned to transform him. It had been a whole week. He should have reached his full growth within twenty hours, should have rankled at Grian and Mumbo’s coddling and run off into the mines instead of trotting after them like a llama following a train. Sticking around like this couldn’t be healthy for him.
They’d taught him most of the basics, though, even if they’d had to do it manually. Grumbot could build a dirt hut. He could make a redstone clock. He could use a forge to cook beef and smelt iron, and he knew he was supposed to go somewhere brightly lit when the sun dipped out of sight. He had a bed in his inventory, in case he couldn’t find wool before then, and they’d taught him how to set his spawn.
Grumbot was holding up a wooden pickaxe, both arms straining to support it. “That’s it, you’ve done it! You have it!” Mumbo cheered. “Gorgeous job, what a talented little man-bot-creature you’ve become, you are– you’re– you’re doing great, right? You’re gonna do great. Tomorrow. It’ll be cool.”
The pickaxe was nearly half Grumbot’s height. Grian swallowed hard, wings mantling without permission, and came closer to place the blocks he’d brought for the day’s lesson. It would have been simpler to just let Grumbot mine out of the ground– they were underneath Grian’s mansion, where his item sorter was actually mostly finished, without Mumbo’s help, he was succeeding at redstone all on his own– but that wouldn’t give him the full picture, and Grian believed in thoroughness. He’d gathered iron and redstone ore, mossy cobblestone and coal that’d blacked his hands. Cobwebs, too, so Grumbot could learn to break them.
“It’s going to be fantastic,” Grian declared, because it was. “We just need to make sure you can mine things, and then you can go off and have your adventures.”
Grumbot typed out, sea-lantern eyes brightening, “WHAT IS ADVENTURE?”
“It’s when you get into unfortunate situations, and sometimes you’re killed quite terribly, but other times you acquire feelings of triumph or joy, I suppose? Or you fall into mud pits, or your very good friends trick you into schemes and kill you and you have to track them down for revenge. A wide variety of things, honestly.” Mumbo paused. Wringed his hands together. “Statistically, though, it does involve a great deal of murder. Grian, do you think–”
“No,” Grian blurted, “no, nope, that can happen in its own time. Nothing but organic, free-range, gluten-free respawns here. If it hasn’t been tenderly cosseted by a farmer who also sleeps in a cage so he knows how the livestock feels, I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“Oh, well, I’ve sat in fenced-in areas before, if that works,” Mumbo said. “Dunno if I keep animals in cages, do leather farms count?”
“That’s behind glass,” Grian sniffed, “and also not the point. Farms are something you’re gonna have to figure out all on your lonesome, Grumbot, or– or we’ll track you down, in a bit, and give you a manual to read and you can come ask about stepped gables when you’ve grown more. At this moment, we’re paying attention to minerals.”
Grumbot frowned. “NEW PURPOSE: PLAYING THE GAME,” he typed cautiously.
“Correct,” Mumbo said. “And that’s fine, right, Grian? Isn’t it fine? I’m entirely happy with how the election went, we both voted for me and lost fair and square and learned some very valuable lessons, and– oh, and we got a Grumbot out of it, which is all to the good. Can’t beat a good AI, that’s what I always say.”
“And good artificial intelligences pay attention to their lessons,” Grian picked up where he left off, “so I need you to heft that pickaxe, and we can get started. This is iron ore. You’ve seen it before, it’s an old classic, maybe a little outdated for the modern age, but you can’t go wrong with good, solid metal. We’re gonna go through how to smelt it one last time, and then how to make armor and torches and all that good stuff, and in the morning, we’ll– we’ll–”
“We’ll, er, progress into the next stage of things,” Mumbo said, strained. “In daylight, when it’s safe.”
The morning, right. When a player who avoided the lightless mouths of caves and big ravines could go unmolested until he had time to build a shelter. That was— that was more manageable than the nighttime for sure.
*
In the end they had decided on a birch forest biome south of the G-Mansion and the Valley of Tattooren, where some surreptitious X-ray glitching had informed Grian there were resources waiting to be mined. He’d scoped out the area overnight, while Mumbo dealt with Grumbot waking up to ask for water and tucked him back into bed afterward, because he’d be cranky in the morning otherwise.
It was a good place to start, with plenty of early-game materials that had escaped the determined grinding of Hermits stocking shops, but Grian made some modifications just to be sure.
He’d widened some cave openings, lava pools added in for natural light, stone scraped off to expose near-surface coal seams. He’d planted some iron ore here, some redstone ore there, a good few oak trees in the grassland nearby, and other parts of the forest had been way too shady and hard to navigate, just stupidly cluttered, so Grian had thinned those out, too. It wasn’t cheating . It was terraforming practice, and no one could blame him for it.
He fixed up an empty village in the blue hours before dawn, setting up lamp posts and replacing the doors on the houses. He cut a path from the birch forest to the fishing cottage at the village edge, sand crunching under his boots, and slaughtered the Drowned that tried to spear him from the water, diving until his wings were sodden to line the riverbed with glowstone.
Cows and pigs and sheep in the stable, accompanied by an amiable gelding whose maximum speed was a respectable 12.13 blocks per second. Lush melon patches, ripe golden wheat, potatoes trailing oval leaves over the sides of their beds, a compost bin filled to the brim with bone meal–
It was an exercise in village design, that was all. He would deny everything if someone insisted otherwise, and Mumbo could provide an alibi if pressed.
Mumbo was providing a redstone handbook with a lot of simple pictures and a shulker box of materials, too, which hadn’t been in the plan, but since Grian had just spent hours stacking the odds in Grumbot’s favor, he couldn’t exactly object.
“It’s a care package,” Mumbo informed him. “Don’t look at me like that, I’ve done the math! I’ve run the numbers, and if he’s less than half our height, that’ll mean more strides per block, firstly, and– and probably quicker exhaustion, you’ve seen how he sleeps.”
“Right, but–”
“Yeah, he’s got a bed, but he needs food, and I am providing,” Mumbo said stubbornly. “As an older player and mentor, and also as a former recipient of his wisdom. He may not have any mayoral reservoirs to flood anymore, and frankly I’m still not sure what that even means, but he has a hunger bar now, and therefore I am obligated to remove that disadvantage. Equity before equanimity, I mean equality. Or I guess we could give him very tall boots, but that’d be stilts, wouldn’t it, that’d be downright odd. He’s slow enough as it is.”
“I left a horse in the village,” Grian admitted. “It had a saddle on, so if Grumbot’s clever, he’ll use it for transportation right away.”
“Okay,” Mumbo said. “Good. A horse is good.”
“We’ll know what he’s doing based on achievements. He hasn’t got the one for crafting a furnace yet.”
“I reckon that’s negligent of us,” Mumbo said weakly. “What if he doesn’t know he can craft them?”
“I mean, it’s self-evident,” Grian drew out. “You can’t not know how to build a furnace. As soon as you’ve got stone, it’s as easy as counting to eight.”
They were up high, standing on the platform for Grian’s defunct sugarcane farm. Grumbot was down below, curled on his side and bracketed by blankets, his hands balled up close to his mouth. Grian had surrounded him with gray concrete and redstone blocks for a homey digital atmosphere, a campaign poster in a frame behind him.
Nothing but chance had brought Grian back to the virtual reality cube after he and Mumbo had left it. Better routes existed over that ocean, and he’d had his upside-down mansion to work on in the Nether, and the election had been over with, the campaign headquarters relegated to a mustache-themed roadside attraction at best. He could have left the build alone for months, the grass growing thick before the lack of direct sun took its toll, the flowers wilting in the glow of a contented robot face, but he’d dropped by one last time, a few days after the election had concluded, to pick up a spare sweater he’d left in the headquarters. He’d noticed that Grumbot’s whole facade was gone, and he’d been irked by the prank, practically vandalism considering the intricate redstone that had gone into it– he’d been typing demands into the chat, he’d been furious–
But as soon as he’d alighted on the soil, a little person had crept out of the weeds, and Grian had known him. Grian had recognized him before he’d read the baby player’s username, because there’d only been one thing in that cube that the universe could have created a new person from.
He’d built those shining white eyes. He’d pored over blueprints for this baby player’s exterior, leaving gaps for Mumbo to fill in with minute redstone wiring, taking breaks to eat his lunch from the top of the structure, where the sea breeze carried salt into his lungs. He’d perched on that enormous facade, and then it had condensed into a creature that breathed and fit in the space between his arms. Someone small and compact and not heavy at all.
“X said he needed a week, didn't he?” Mumbo blurted, pacing to the end of the platform. He’d been shifting in place as Grian explained his modifications to the birch forest biome, but his movements had gotten erratic, a pendulum swinging wider with each rotation: he was practically jittering out of his socks. Grian, whose anxious picking at his own feathers was within reasonable parameters, decided to judge him for it.
“X said at least a week,” he corrected. Really Xisuma had said probably, if I had to estimate, a week should be good? and then he’d tried to walk Grian through Grumbot’s stats again, sounding bewildered that a new player could have spawned on a Hermitcraft server in the first place. He had agreed that a new player should grow up sooner rather than later, though, for practical reasons if nothing else.
He’d also claimed Joe Hills said a baby player was called a child, like how a baby cow was a calf, and said that maybe Grian should ask for their input, but—
Well, Cleo had come around from the Hermiton Herald to report on Grumbot’s sudden existence, but she hadn’t published the article yet, and it wasn’t the best idea to bring Grumbot to the shopping district while Scar was being mayor at everybody. The opportunity to introduce Grumbot to the other players on the server had never quite materialized. They hadn’t had time between lessons.
That was fine. People could see Grumbot in the whitelist if they wanted to, after all the cam accounts.
“It’s not that long,” Grian told Mumbo, whose eyes were alarmingly damp and shiny. “It’s– Mumbo, it’s a week, and he can respawn, and– listen, the next time we see him he’ll be as tall as you, and probably pleased as punch over some build or another. You know how new players get.”
“No, yeah, I know,” Mumbo said, and sniffled. “Should we both be there to drop him off, do you think?”
“No,” Grian said with finality. At this rate, Mumbo was going to lose his nerve and make Grumbot melt down again , when he couldn’t fulfill his new purpose of being a player. Someone had to take charge here, and it clearly wasn’t going to be Mumbo. “Let’s just– you say goodbye to him and give him your present, and I’ll drop him off. We’ll go together to check on him when he's done his time in the field."
*
Grumbot barely came up past Grian’s hips, and he went pliant when Grian scooped him up, lacing his arms around Grian’s neck and his legs around his waist, resting his head on his collarbone like being lifted up by his creator was the most natural thing in the world. Mumbo had let him ride on his shoulders on the third day, when they’d been showing Grumbot what a proper starter base looked like and how it differed from a megabase , but Grumbot liked to be held every which way, really. You could hold him upside down to make him giggle. You could toss him into a soft thing and he’d bounce back up to stand hopefully nearby until you did it again.
Grian had only flown with him once before. He hesitated over that, torn between promising Grumbot that he wouldn’t let him fall and walking to the birch forest instead, but Grumbot just blinked up at him when he explained they were about to be really high up, and tightened his grip, and okay, Grian maybe tied Grumbot onto him with a lead, too, but the trip itself was uneventful. He flew low to the ground, so Grumbot wouldn’t die if he was dropped. He was used to the bludgeon the air became when he hit certain speeds, how it would steal moisture from his eyes and scour his exposed skin, but since Grumbot wasn’t– and since he didn’t have wings, so until he acquired elytra he’d be groundbound anyway– Grian put a blanket over his head to blunt it.
From where they landed, the G-Mansion was visible as a distant cluster of light, patches of snow glimmering like gypsum crystals . It was too far away to travel by foot, unless you were willing to cross large swathes of terrain overnight, and difficult to see from Grumbot’s diminutive height. A landmark, but not a useful destination.
That was intentional, though. Grumbot wasn’t supposed to seek them out. He was supposed to learn how to survive on his own.
“NEW LESSON?” Grumbot asked. He glanced up at the sky with its wispy clouds, hope stark on his face, and tapped on his tablet. “GET MORE FLYING.”
“Maybe later,” Grian managed, and the tightness within his ribcage solidified into dreadful, pointless fear, a weight he couldn’t throw off. He hadn’t thinned the birch forest nearly enough. Too many dark spaces for mobs to hide, too much variation in the landscape. A skeleton could have been taking aim at that moment, and Grian wouldn’t know about it until Grumbot broke into a scream. “This is your most important lesson yet. It’s been a week, Grumbot, and you’ve learned all you can from tutorials. The time’s come for you to fly the nest.”
The blanket had mussed Grumbot’s hair. Grian crouched to straighten his bangs, wings spread to block any enemies’ lines of sight, and prompted, “The first step is wearing armor.”
Grumbot put his helmet on, but fumbled with the chestplate, struggling with the buckles until Grian did it for him. Grian had to help him put his legs into his pants, too, that was always tricky, and after that there wasn’t a reason not to make sure his boots were on tight. Tripping and falling would be a ridiculous way for Grumbot to die.
“WHERE IS OTHER DAD?” Grumbot asked when Grian finished levering his heels into his shoes, and Grian couldn’t answer him for a long, paralyzed moment. Which was ridiculous. It was just a week, and Grumbot was going to set his spawn first thing, because they’d told him and told him how important it was to have a shelter first and they’d given him the bed– “WANT OTHER DAD.”
“He’s working on a project. You’ll see him in a week or so, we’ll come visit then.”
Grumbot contemplated this, eyes flickering down a notch. He reached up for Grian’s hand and closed his fingers on nothing, because Grian had stepped out of his range. It was harder than it should have been to put distance between them, to let the morning air fill the gap. Grian would have to lunge to grab Grumbot, if something attacked now. He was distressingly vulnerable, and it shouldn’t have been allowed. He’d built Grumbot’s facade out of concrete. He’d built him weather-resistant and enormous.
“Your job is to go into the woods here and build yourself a house,” he forced out, and Grumbot nodded gravely, shifting back and forth in little steps, a miniature echo of Mumbo. “You’re a player now, okay? This is what players are supposed to do, we run off and make stuff and fight mobs. It’s important that you get this right.”
Grumbot’s sea-lantern eyes were bright and rapt. “COMING WITH ME.”
“Not coming with you,” Grian said. “I am… going to work on my mansion’s interior. To show people later, when they come into my mansion and look at all the angles they can look at it from, which are all of them except the back. I’m going to go do that, and you’re going to go into the forest.”
His voice broke like mishandled pottery. Grumbot started tapping something out on his tablet, some plaintive objection or demand or another question that showed how much he didn’t understand, and Grian couldn’t stand it. He leaped into flight , propelling himself with rockets as soon as he was sure he wouldn’t be slamming Grumbot with noise.
The air was thin at build limit. Usually Grian could angle in it like a dancer, catching thermals and inversions until he barely had to flap his wings, letting the atmosphere cradle him, but this time he just circled above the cloud cover, anxiety blustering through him like an icy wind, and finally landed on a mountain the next biome over.
His comm didn’t have any new messages. He’d see a death message in the chat if Grumbot died, and so far– had it been five minutes? Ten?-- there was no indication that he was doing badly. He hadn’t had time to do badly, and Grian and Mumbo weren’t that bad at teaching, they’d done tutorials for newbie players before and those had gone ludicrously well–
Grian mined his way into the side of the mountain, telling himself that he’d gather resources and head back in a while, after he’d gathered enough iron to replenish the Barge’s anvil stock. He’d just stay until then, and after that he’d wash his hands of this whole mess until a week had passed.
He accumulated cobblestone like a cellar accumulated dust. He ripped open every mob he saw, even the ones too far away to threaten him, and the frantic wingbeat in his chest failed to abate once they were gone: he kept pulling out his comm and scrolling through it to the world chat, waiting for it to buzz. Grumbot was killed by a skeleton. Grumbot drowned. Grumbot starved to death– no, but it wouldn’t be that one. He had his favorite snacks with him. Grian had added them to Mumbo’s care package.
And he had to die eventually. Everybody respawned. It hurt at first, but Grumbot would get used to it, and players were killed all the time, sometimes they let themselves be killed on purpose–
Grian’s comm vibrated. He fumbled it out in an explosion of terror, heart slamming into his ribcage, but it was just a whisper. Just a private message.
Grian had to take a few breaths, hand over his mouth, before he could calm down enough to interpret what it said.
<MumboJumbo> wait grian don’t take him yet!!!
<MumboJumbo> i’ve just remembered i didn’t show him smart pistons
<MumboJumbo> those are crucial honestly
<MumboJumbo> bad idea to leave them out
<MumboJumbo> my mistake sorry
<MumboJumbo> best to bring him back now so i can explain
Oh, right, they couldn’t forget smart pistons. Those were necessary–Grian definitely knew all about them, in detail, he used them in every build or he could use them, if he really wanted to– and it was downright unfair to make a new player start out without knowing about them.
How long had it been? An hour, maybe two? Grumbot would have realized Grian wasn’t coming back, by now. He could be melting down again, begging for a purpose until smoke came out his ears, or he could just be hurt, like the first time he’d scraped his knees and cried because robots never felt pain, he hadn’t been prepared–
<Grian> yknow what
<Grian> youre right
<Grian> ill go get him now
There was a stream at the edge of the forest, trickling through a drain that couldn’t be more than a block deep. Grumbot’s pants were wet up to his knees when Grian tracked him down, which meant his socks were absolutely soaked, and he had a pile of smooth rocks by the bank, stacked so the littlest balanced on top. His eyes flared bright as he caught sight of Grian. “FOUND ROCKS!!!”
“They’re very nice rocks,” Grian choked out, forcing his feathers to stop bristling. Grumbot had scrapes on his knees, mud smearing his cheek, but he wasn’t actively bleeding, and he didn’t seem like he’d cried. He did rush up to hug Grian, little arms wrapping his waist, but that wasn’t unusual: he did that all the time, clinging like glow lichen to whichever of his creators was in range. “So nice, in fact, that they have caused a change in plans. We’re gonna stay here for a little while, and then we’re gonna go back to my base and learn about smart pistons, alright? And– and other essentials. Look at you, you’ve already gotten your boots filled with water. I know I taught you better than that .”
Grumbot hummed, reminiscent of the jingle for Mumbo’s campaign commercial. He brought his smooth rocks over, flopping onto the ground, and Grian settled beside him, close enough that he could draw Grumbot into his lap if he needed to. Grass tickled his ankles.
The smooth rocks went back into rows, this time forming a gradient from dull reddish beige to dove gray, mineral and slickly glimmering. Grumbot must have spent nearly all of his time alone collecting them, not going after essential resources at all, like– like he’d thought someone would be back any minute to collect him, like Grian had in the virtual reality cube. Like he’d assumed he’d sleep in the warm little bedroom Grian had made for him that night, with the blankets Mumbo had scavenged up.
Clearly he hadn’t quite internalized that he should have been independent already, if that was how he’d reacted to being left alone. Another week of training was needed at the minimum. Maybe another month, so Mumbo could get all his redstone tutorials in, and if anyone objected, Grian would inform them firmly that it was none of their business. It was his business and Mumbo’s, and that was the end of it.
Grian’s chest felt fluttery and tight, adrenaline sparking through him in fitful frozen gasps. He couldn’t stop wanting to gather Grumbot close, to patrol the forest’s edge or perch somewhere high where he could watch for approaching threats, to make Grumbot change clothes so he wouldn’t catch a chill from his wet pants, but those impulses abated as long as Grumbot was in arm’s reach, and the baby player didn’t seem to mind sticking close. He was happy with his rocks, and with his shulker box care package, which he was systematically emptying to make room for more of them.
Grian resisted the urge to hug him just to know he was warm and alive. He sent a message to Mumbo to let him know he’d found Grumbot, one eye on the little dude in case he wandered off, and then he had to put his comm down and convince him to at least try the baked potatoes Mumbo had packed, because Grumbot was very intent on throwing them away in favor of random stones.
It was still easier than having to give him diamonds for each scrap of conversation. Grian dwelled on that– on all the ways a baby player was less convenient than a giant AI, and all the ways he was much more portable and approachable this way, really– and pushed his terror into a corner of his mind where he’d never have to think of it again. He rushed Grumbot home as soon as the sun dipped below the trees.