"No, it's a really ugly build but it was actually built like that on purpose, the problem is the, uh, bedrock. You can burn down people's houses if you want." They can approach and Bacon does some parkour around it while they talk. "It's--people just have bedrock. People have the power to place bedrock, people have the power to spawn Poopies, you have--whatever modded stuff you've got--and it's, like-- what's the point of doing things, for those of us who don't have exploits? It's just, like--some people have, like, creative mode. People see the bedrock and it's like, okay, so--everything I can do, it doesn't matter, in comparison to what other people can do. When Peepees was spawned, Zam was trying to fight Mapicc, right, and he was winning, it was going to be his first win against Mapicc after months of being hurt by him, it would've been, like, a whole dramatic climax. And then Spoke spawns Peepees and Zam dies to a stupid overpowered mob spawned by someone he wasn't even fighting with. What's he supposed to do about that? Grinding for potions or gear or whatever won't help. Practicing fighting won't help. There's nothing he can do and there's no, there's no point in doing anything. I was--I was okay with it for a couple weeks, 'cause, like, it was kinda cool? Like, Poopies was fun. I'm not going to lie and say, I didn't have fun with that. But it's not fun to be, like, okay, if Alita does anything, I can't fight back 'cause she can just turn into a warden and two-tap me. Or, I have to be nice to Ashswag, 'cause he gave Planet a shulker of totems for being nice to him but he's also got the power to spawn more of the creatures and could apparently put me in a bedrock trap, uh, pretty easily, if he wanted to.  Already there have been, like, a couple dupe glitches, and those were kinda cool, because it was still technically possible to get the stuff in survival, and also because, uh, they were a pretty good villain for the rest of the server? But even that, like, it's been months and the server is still not fully recovered, there are still so many duped items going around, and then this is--I'd say this is definitely too far. Like, last season Ashswag did his whole playing god thing, but he didn't--he didn't actually give himself god powers, just, like, illusions to scare people. Now they're just, like, actually gods. And it's not fair for the people who don't have those, who signed up for, like, a vanilla survival server, and not--whatever this is."

"That's—yeah. It's scary for other people to have abilities you can't use yourself. I can see why you would want to align yourself with an authority that prevents that.

...I will say that in my experience, when other people are already getting away with this kind of thing, disarming yourself doesn't do anything to help with that? You gotta accumulate your own asymmetric advantages. That's why I learned to morph, because I was facing people who had a monopoly on the food supply and could condemn me to a horrible death by starvation. Or—if someone got caught in a bedrock trap, I could morph enderman and teleport in to kill them, then give them back their stuff and the heart. But I couldn't do that kind of thing if I hadn't learned to morph in the first place!"

"I mean, I could go and, like, research glitches, I guess? I'm gonna be honest, I don't know how possible that is, um, anything that's public I should assume they already know about and I don't really know how to go about finding new crazy ones, I'm usually not one of the people that, uh, does that. I don't actually have any of my own asymmetric advantages, I'm not disarming myself if I don't have any arms to begin with. I could try and backdoor the server like they probably have, I guess, see if the plugin maker takes bribes or whatever. But also, that's stupid, because my whole goal is for Lifesteal to have fewer exploits. I'm not going to backdoor the server to give myself god powers because, first of all, that's dumb, but also, I don't want anyone to have god powers, and giving them to everyone doesn't really fix that. It's not really just about losing, like, even at the beginning of the server I was losing all the time, that's, like, whatever. It's about-- when people killed me at the beginning of the server, they had to try, you know? If everyone has creative mode and a bunch of mods it's just--stupid. I don't want Lifesteal to be like Spoke's practice server. It's fine for what it is but I don't want to live there."

"You do too have an asymmetric advantage! You have me.

—Well, like, me being willing to bust you out of a bedrock trap isn't asymmetric; I'd do that for anyone, cause you just shouldn't do that to people. But me being willing to try landing a touch on Spoke in my natural form, so I can see if I get his powers and what they are, is!

Sometimes you gotta use the technique you object to in order to make there be less of it in the long run. Like, in my old home I and my friends objected to slavery, and some of them stayed in the pool rather than take a host who would probably be a slave. And I took a slave, and that was wrong, but I was able to steal the Kandrona plans when they couldn't, and in the long run that's gonna free lots of slaves.

But, um, actually, speaking of the whole 'try to touch Spoke in my natural form' idea—now that I know morphing is against the rules, I should probably think about how I might do so without getting caught. Do you know if he, like, sleeps?"

"Yeah, I mean, I'm aware of the principle, that's why I did still ask you to touch Spoke. I'm not Zam, I'm not angling for total moral purity here. I mean, it'd be nice, but if we gotta exploit to get rid of the exploits, I'll do it. But that's still ultimately to make there be less of it in the long run, it's still because I think the rules are there for a reason, and that's what you wanted to hear my reasoning about. We're--just, uh, going to move past the slavery thing."

He considers explaining why he doesn't really count Alita as his advantage and decides against it for now. If it comes up again he can explain why he doesn't trust her and doesn't love this arrangement but it's not actually super relevant to the conversation they're having right now.

"Spoke... probably sleeps? He's inactive at night at about the same time as most people are. But if he has a base I don't know where it is, and I really doubt he'd make it easy to find. Team Awesome didn't have a base while he was with them, so either he didn't have a base or he kept it secret from his team. Could be either, honestly. I don't even know if he has a bed set in general or if he just makes little one-time-use holes and then breaks them in the morning. He had a base early-server with Rek, I think, but he wouldn't keep using it once the location was known unless he wanted to be found. If you just tell him about your powers I give it, like, 50-50 odds he lets you do it because he's curious, but the other half is he gets paranoid and makes sure you never get a chance to touch him. Probably worth trying in secret first before asking." Pause. "We know where Vitalasy sleeps. Or, like, we don't right now, but that we could find out easy."

"What powers do we know or suspect Vitalasy to have, and what's he been doing with them? How would we find out where he sleeps?"

"We know for sure Vitalasy has bedrock; he's claiming he got it legit through a farm but we're pretty sure he's working with Ash and Spoke, and that all three of them have the same set of powers. We're technically not sure of that, so even if you get one, it'll probably be worth trying to get the other two.

We can find out where he sleeps because I'd be willing to bet a fair amount that he sleeps in the same bed as Zam, and Planet's close enough to Zam that we can probably get that location out of him. That's, uh, also why anything you said or did in front of Zam is going to be common knowledge with the exploiters pretty soon." And if convincing Zam doesn't work they can see if Mapicc would be interested in a temporary alliance for Eclipse Federation basehunting. That'd be a betrayal of Zam, at least a little bit, which is why they didn't do it last time they needed Zam's base, but in this circumstance--Bacon's honestly not sure if that's better or worse than convincing Zam to betray Vitalasy like this, because giving them the coords to Vitalasy's bed would also be at least a little bit a betrayal. It doesn't make Bacon feel great, either way. But it would definitely be easier than finding Spoke's bed.

"...I don't feel good about using Zam to spy on his, uh, boyfriend? but I really do want to know about these guys' powers, and I guess if he's also spying on you it's fair play."

At least if Spoke already knows that she's a Yeerk she wouldn't have much to lose from trying the "show him your powers openly and see how he reacts" plan. 

(Assuming Bacon is telling the truth about Spoke and co. breaking the rules in the first place, but if he's not she doesn't know why he'd lie about them knowing she's a Yeerk. Not much point trying to trick her into revealing her powers to Spoke when he could just report her to the authorities himself. And if Vitalasy does have powers and her morphing gets her them she'll know for sure.)

“I don’t feel great about it either but if we want to sneak up on them while they’re asleep, well, there’s a really obvious way to do that one.” Bacon makes a considering noise. “Honestly he also might let you touch him if we asked right or got Zam to ask. We should probably consider Ashswag, too, but I don’t really have a plan there either. Maybe try and get Jaron to convince Ash to go back in house arrest for a couple days? I have no idea how he’d react to being asked, I can sort of guess at Spoke and Vitalasy but I don’t know Ash well enough.”

"If they already know about me, I think asking them is worth a try. Have Zam ask Vitalasy."

"Sure. Might be a couple days, they insist on doing big team meetings instead of just talking to each other normally."

"Sounds good! Gives me more time to explore and gather resources. Did you have more to show me here at spawn?"

“Uh, I can show you the barrier blocks if you want to see that it’s not just bedrock, but you’ve already met Poopies, so. Up to you.”

"I'd like to check them out."

"Sure, follow me? It's a bit of a walk. Not too bad."

Bacon gets lost at one point in a birch forest, but even with that it's barely over five minutes. When they arrive: there's a dirt staircase leading down into a stone room. It's a bit of a chaotic room: it's not very large, but there are furnaces, crafting tables, cobblestone, netherrack, obisidan, a single chest, and a single piece of ancient debris, scattered along the walls and in the air.

There's also a bedrock box, and a few barriers: entirely invisible. Bacon stands on top of one to demonstrate, and it looks like he's standing on thin air, but if Alita touches it, it's solid: smooth to the touch and unbreakable, as hard as the bedrock had been. Diamond tools can't even scratch it.

"I'm gonna try and help Parrot break these soon, so check them out while they're still here."

Alita touches them, with her hands and with tools, then jumps on one and rapid-fire crouches and rises to standing.

"I do have to admit, they're pretty cool. Freaky, but cool."

Bacon crouches back in the universal sign of friendliness, though a bit less enthusiastically. "They are that. They're just also, you know, unbreakable. It's not, like, worse than the bedrock? But, you know." Pause. "Also you can make a bedrock farm, and that's what Vitalasy's claiming he's doing, but, uh, I'm pretty sure you can't do that to get barriers. Or, like, spawn eggs."

"Spawn eggs?"

Right. He had sort of forgotten how Alita... was.

"--Lets you, uh, spawn mobs. Zam caught Spoke with one, it's how we know he's the one spawning the mobs. Well, we would've known anyway, he wasn't slick, okay, but it's how we got proof."

"Good to know!"

Alita starts walking away in the direction of spawn.

"Um, see you around?"

"Bye." Wave. "Think about what I said?"

"I will."

She makes her way to spawn, demorphing and remorphing along the way, and enters the portal to resume her mining and search for structures.

There are structures in the nether! Fortresses and bastions. The ones near spawn are all picked-over, partially-mined, netherrack blocking off hallways and scattered along walls in staircases, all the chests empty; the fortresses are useful for spawning blazes and wither skeletons, but the bastions are entirely empty. Farther away from spawn there are structures with actual loot. There are also a lot of manmade tunnels throughout the nether, mostly at Y 15, many of which are punctuated by craters.

By branching off the manmade tunnels, Alita finds her first pieces of ancient debris. She also checks out a fortress and gets her hands on a blaze rod, with which comes the knowledge of how to craft a brewing stand.

She races back to the overworld to try brewing as many potions as she can. When she has her first invis, she splashes herself with it and—

—assumes the form of a Taxxon.

She dives into the ground and glides through earth and stone. Mining faster than any pickaxe, she accumulates a hoard of ore and diamonds.

(She keeps her ill-gotten gains separate from the proceeds of her regular mining. She's not going to deploy the resulting armory unprovoked, but she wants insurance in case these Spoke or Vitalasy characters come after her.)