Work Text:
Etho paged through his clipboard, humming thoughtfully. A few more, he thought, and he’d be done for the day.
He stood in the alcove under the end portal, gathering nether stars and wither roses for his shop. Above him, he could hear a few endermen running and teleporting around aimlessly on the island surface.
As he moved to pocket the latest star from the wither he’d just killed, Etho noticed that the infestation potion on the allays had run out, grey particles no longer rising from them and no more silverfish appearing. Not a problem. He flicked the lever to douse them again, but frowned when nothing happened.
All out. Oh well, he would just have to refill the dispensers the next time he came. He had a couple of extra potions in his inventory that he kept for situations just like this which he could use in the meantime.
Etho pulled an infestation potion out of his inventory to toss at the allays. As he was drawing his arm back, his shoulder spasmed, a jolt of pain radiating up his neck. He gasped, flinging the potion too early, and it broke against the wall instead of on target.
The edge of the splash radius, usually far enough to miss him, clipped his skin, and he felt the immediate cold rush of a potion effect start to influence his senses.
Etho froze. This was one potion he had never dared to use on himself before, and for good reason.
He had yet to become fully versed on the specific biological processes of the newly discovered potions that he'd been experimenting with on the allays and other mobs. He hadn’t really needed to, and thinking too hard about this one in particular had made him feel a little ill. It was enough to know that damaging a mob under the effect could create silverfish. Very useful, in certain circumstances, as this wither rose farm proved.
Now, as he was beginning to feel the effects for himself, he dearly wished he had understood it better before tossing the potion around haphazardly.
He could feel a writhing sensation start to prickle under his skin, unlike anything he had ever felt before, growing more intense as the seconds ticked by.
A distant voice in Etho’s head announced that this was an excellent research opportunity, and really he should be writing everything about the experience down. The rest of him had already dropped the clipboard, hands coming up to grip his forearms, fingernails digging into his skin.
The sting from his nails, sharp and pleasant, grounded him. He tried to focus on it, doing his best to ignore the feeling of hundreds, thousands of tiny moving bodies crawling and growing inside his entire body, moving throughout his skin.
It was sickening, horrifying, but really it just felt—weird. So, so weird. It was a sensation he had never come close to experiencing. Completely new, and incredibly uncomfortable. Violating. His throat felt thick, and he did his best to push down the nausea beginning to roil in his gut.
The helpful voice, detached and tinny in Etho’s head, continued to speculate without his permission. The silverfish eggs must be from the stone in the potion, he thought, although how they didn’t hatch before—no, the netherwort would surely work to keep them in stasis until they were able to take hold onto a living thing. The eggs must be microscopic, to enter into the body so quickly. He wished he had studied up on silverfish lifecycles and anatomy before starting this whole mess.
The silverfish in his body had grown rapidly enough he was beginning to see the shapes moving under his skin, which sent another wave of panic through him once he noticed.
Etho dug his nails harder into his arms in an effort to focus on something else, vertigo taking over his vision. He sank down against the wall as the room spun around him, placing a hand on the ground to steady his descent.
Oh, that was a mistake. Etho took a sharp breath as the rough endstone beneath him sliced into the meat of his palm. He drew his hand up off the floor quickly, cradling it to his chest.
Immediately, he felt something move near the small wound, the skin around his wrist raising slightly and tugging at the cut, making him wince.
He turned his hand up to inspect it on instinct, trying to focus on the ache of pain to ignore the rising sensations bubbling up from the rest of his body, the little bugs moving around his thighs, along his spine, circling his ankles and arms, everything too much and all at once.
He regretted it as soon as he saw the cut on his hand.
Numbly, he watched as a tiny silverfish head covered in his blood peeked out of the wound, easing itself into the stale, wither-smoke air under the end portal. In his unfortunate concentration he could feel every limb and antenna as it inched its way out of his hand, and fell soundlessly onto the endstone floor. It scurried away into a corner and burrowed into the wall.
The horror of the situation set in on him then, and he clamped down on the cut with his other hand, trying to stem the bleeding and stop anything else from crawling out.
He was shaking, Etho noted dimly. The potion only lasted three minutes, surely it had to be over soon. How long had it been already?
Oh god, what happened when it ended? The silverfish in his body—did they all have to come out? A vision flashed in his mind, and he imagined the silverfish eating their way out of his skin, leaving his corpse to rot on the ground as they crawled out of his orifices—he stopped the thought. No, the allays were fine, and undamaged. The potion couldn’t kill him, he would know if it did. But it was a mystery how it ended, if these were the effects.
A mystery you’re about to solve! The voice in his head exclaimed, cheerful. Etho shut it down. This was not the time to get excited about experimentation.
Time moved like molasses, and he stared at the allays in the far back in an attempt to take himself away from what was happening to his body. Every so often the rippling under his skin caught in the periphery of his vision, unnatural movement on his cheek or hands, and he couldn’t help but feel the accompanying slithering, crawling sensation tenfold. He did his best to focus on the cold of the stone behind his back, and more or less failed.
The silverfish didn’t seem to be growing anymore, at least. He chanced a glance down, and looked away again quickly when he saw just how many raised and moving spots he could see on his exposed skin.
Actually, were they smaller than they were before? His analytical voice perked up again even as Etho was trying to get his breathing in check and stifle the nausea still threatening to choke him.
Huh, that was odd. Now that he'd noticed it, the feeling under his skin was definitely less intense than it had just been a minute ago. Were the silverfish shrinking as the potion effect wore off?
Etho’s eyebrows creased, as he realized that most of the silverfish had stopped moving. The feeling of hundreds of little legs and bodies creeping under his skin had waned dramatically, and Etho took a breath in huge relief as the last of it ended.
When he looked back down to inspect his arms, however, he saw that all of the raised bumps from the little bugs were still there. Or, no, only some of them? Before his eyes, they were shrinking back into his skin, his body seemingly absorbing the small silverfish into himself.
Etho closed his eyes. That was—well, it was better than the alternative, he supposed. It still felt… very weird to think about.
After taking a second to collect himself, he pushed up off of the ground, taking a look at his surroundings in a new light. The allays, still drowning, elicited a little bit more sympathy from him now. He removed the water from around them, patting one on the head.
“Sorry,” he said, a bit ruefully. It wouldn’t stop him from continuing to use them, but, well. He could feel a little bad, after that.
A flash of movement caught in the corner of his eye, and he whipped around to stare at the silverfish he had spawned from the cut on his hand, bigger than it had been when he'd last seen it. It came at him from the corner with dogged speed, and he promptly stepped on it.
In a way, Etho supposed, he had kind of birthed the thing. He felt no remorse for putting it down, though. He was still thinking about how it had felt to have it crawl out of his bleeding wound. He might be thinking about it for the rest of his life. It deserved to die, for that.
He bent down to retrieve his clipboard, the attached papers slightly crumpled from where they had fallen on the ground. Smoothing them back out, Etho groaned when he realized that, of course, he was still down a few nether stars and wither roses. That whole ordeal and nothing to show for it.
There was no way Etho was going to get any more work done today, though. Nope, he was going to go back to his base and take a long, hot bath. Try to scrub out some of the lingering itching and phantom crawling from his skin. He shuddered. Next time… next time he would be much more careful with the splash radius.