...And then she's somewhere else.

sunbather has joined the game

Bacon goes to greet the new player, or at least figure out who they are--

--And then he is towering up, he has learned his lesson about non-vanilla....whatever this is. A player, apparently? He's not touching it and is really hoping it can't climb. He switches between double-handing totems, for staying alive longer, and holding pearls in one hand, for faster running.

"What the fuck. Can you, like--can you hear me? Are you a person or are you just--I don't know, another--whatever the fuck the exploiters are doing--"

Ash isn't online but Spoke and Vitalasy both are. Could also be something they can do without being online--this looks modded, who knows how deep the rabbit hole goes. 

baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: come to spawn
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: are you with vitalasy right now
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: come to spawn
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: come to spawn
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: come to spawn

AAAAAAAAH SHE'S NOT IN WATER—

A Yeerk can actually survive for a few minutes, out of water. It's not quite as quick as a human drowning in water. However, Alita isn't familiar with the sensation. Shocked by the relief from the pain of Kandrona starvation and the instant imposition of a new kind of pain, she loses her resolve not to morph. She takes the form she's most used to morphing: her old host, a young human woman, in tight clothing and with pink hair. She's a fast morpher; she catches the words "whatever the fuck the exploiters are doing".

Two thoughts cross her mind in rapid succession: how on Earth am I alive? and oh gosh I really shouldn't have done that.

"Hi!"

Baconwaffles does not jump back, because he is on a pillar. He stays safely shifted, not that that will help against a player. He settles on holding pearls instead of a second totem, since she's not holding a weapon and doesn't seem to have any particle effects right now.

baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: COME TO SPAWN
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: COME TO SPAWN
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: COME TO SPAWN
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: COME TO SPAWN
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: COME TO SPAWN

"Um. .....H...i." She doesn't sound like anyone he knows, and she doesn't sound like she's using a voicechanger either. Unless they've gotten better when he wasn't looking, which is always possible. There's, like, AI stuff now. Not the most likely option, but something to keep an eye out for. He tries to remember if he knows a sunbather from events or twitter or anything. He doesn't think so?

He's got a lot of questions, like does Parrot know you're here and do you happen to know Spoke, by any chance, and how did you just do that, and why are you here. But he can do introductions first. No need to start needlessly antagonizing right away. He can say at least one sentence without needlessly antagonizing his conversational partners. (Shut up, Planetlord, he totally can.) "I'm, um, I'm Baconwaffles, it's nice to meet you."

PrinceZam whispers to baconnwaffles0: no
PlanetLord whispers to baconnwaffles0: fiiiiiiiine im coming
PrinceZam whispers to baconnwaffles0: we've got a meeting soon though
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: COME TO SPAWN
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: trust me
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: you need to see this

That pillar looks, um, physically improbable. Is she in an alternate universe? Or maybe she was wrong about Heaven, and it is a real place after all. She's pretty sure she did die.

He's speaking English. If you'd asked her what an alternate universe might include she wouldn't have guessed people who speak English.

"I'm Alita! It's nice to meet you also. Where...are we?"

"Spawn? Uh, Lifesteal SMP. You seem... lost."

That's... an understatement. Hopefully Planet and Zam will be here soon and he can start interrogating, he's recording and he wouldn't send either of them faked footage but even with that it's better to have someone else actually there.

"I'm very lost. What are the rules of this place? How does one acquire resources?"

"Um."

Lifesteal is a whitelist-only server, he's, like, 99% confident of that. Well. He was 99% confident of that. If the whitelist got turned off and they got a random kid or something--

--No, that doesn't make sense. There was some modded bullshit going on, and it's been pretty obvious for a while now that at least one person has some sort of backdoor, the obvious explanation here is that Spoke thought this would be funny. For some reason. Or Ashswag, or Vitalasy. 

"Try punching a tree to get wood?" He looks around and realizes that there are not actually trees around spawn other than Subz's custom trees. This... Makes sense, given everything. "Actually, I'll just give you some stuff as long as you agree you owe me one, alright?"

He mines down the pillar, places an ender chest. She doesn't seem like an immediate threat, at least. Still holding those ender pearls though. And the totem. And he's keeping an eye out for Spoke or Vitalasy or any of the creatures. "Here, have some pork chops. Free sample from IHOB." Wow, he's kind of broke. He can... craft a diamond pickaxe. He really needs to beg Planet and Zam more often. Or just organize his ender chest, there's definitely lots of shitty diamond armor back at the base. He's got the one backup set but ideally he'd have more, especially if he's going to be around spawn. (He doesn't glance at the maze when he has that thought, but he does definitely suddenly remember the presence of the maze.) Oh, here's a set. Not great enchants but it's better than nothing. She can have that too. She doesn't try to steal his shulkers, which is nice.

baconnwaffles0 whispers to PlanetLord: WHERE ARE YOU
PlanetLord whispers to baconnwaffles0: almost there
PlanetLord whispers to baconnwaffles0: chill

Oh heck that is not the lead up to anything good, but she doesn't really have much of an other option. Hopefully she can pay off her debt quickly.

"Thank you! Do you have a favor in mind that I could get started on now?"

She dons the armor.

"Is, um, armor something that people are in need of a lot around here?"

Hm. There are two obvious favors. Number one, ask her not to kill him. Number two, ask her for information.

...Planetlord has, what, 20 hearts in his ender chest? It's not really a question. Especially since she hasn't actually shown any interest in killing him.

"My teammate Planet is on his way right now. When he gets here, my favor is that you answer my questions honestly. Armor is, yeah, it's pretty necessary. Well. Less so these days, honestly, it's not like it saves you if Poopies or any of the other creatures get on you, and I'm not giving you any totems. But even then, like, there are mobs, and plus without it you kinda look broke. Which doesn't have to be a bad thing, people are more likely to pity you or make fun of each other for killing you if you're not wearing any armor, but it's nice to not be a one-tap. Um, I'm not getting you a fight kit, if you want that you can get it yourself. Maybe if you pay me or something, I guess. Or Zam was giving those out for a while, he's on his way too, you can ask him."

"I would be happy to answer honestly!"

A little too happy, really. She knows it's not smart, that it will probably bite her in the butt, but she's tired of lying and hiding things.

"What sort of things do people pay each other in around here? My priority—before an, uh, 'fight kit'—would be a place to stay, with some water. And, um, electric lighting, do you guys have electric lighting around here?"

If she can get her hands on some lightbulbs she can rig up a primitive Kandrona lamp. Hopefully. Otherwise her stay in Heaven-or-whatever will be pretty short. She's never heard any American talk about where they think people go when they've died twice.

"It's more unofficial barter system, honestly. You could pay people in diamonds or hearts and sometimes people do but not super often. Uh. Easiest way to get a place to stay is to make one. Ideally decently hidden if you don't want people stealing your stuff, but Mapicc's not basehunting anymore, you don't have to be too paranoid, don't listen to Zam when he gets here. The entire server knows my base and it's been, like, basically fine. For electric lighting there's redstone lamps--I don't actually know if we've got any at spawn?--" He looks around, only to immediately break off when he sees Planetlord and wave him over. 

Planetlord appraoches! He's not weirder-looking than Baconwaffles, who is basically a sentient walking piece of bacon with a face, but he's certainly not human or anything that resembles any species on earth either. They're both sort of surprisingly humanoid despite this but they are definitely not normal earth species of human. 

"I'd be willing to do an additional favor for some lamps, or being shown where to get the materials to make one." She thinks she's getting a sense of how things work around here. He talks like they're not so constrained by the resource limitations she's used to, stuff happens faster, you can just pick some land and build your own house.

"Hi!" She turns in the direction of the new person and jumps up and down.

"Deal," Bacon says, and "O-M-G hi!" Planetlord says, at the same time.

"Planet, do you have any redstone lamps."

"Ummmm. I don't know. I can definitely make one." Ender chest down; glowstone from potion-making shulker, redstone from redstone shulker, crafting table. Redstone lamp!

Bacon grabs it for now. They need to get back on track. They can talk more about redstone lamps later. "Alita, this is Planetlord, Planetlord this is Alita, introductions over, you can all talk more later. I said I had questions for you, right?" Okay, what does he want to ask first. Whether she's with Spoke is probably more important but it's the most obvious thing to play dumb about and also less likely to immediately catch Planetlord's attention. "When you first showed up, you didn't show up as a player model, you showed up as--I don't even know. It looked modded. Don't try to deny it, I've got the footage and also your redstone lamp. How did you do that, can you do it again, can you change into anything else, was there anyone in particular who gave you that power, is there anything else I would want to know about it?"

She can't get back home, that's her best guess, which means they can't go where she came from either. She isn't putting the movement in danger by explaining morphing.

"There was a device that gave me that capability. I found it in an abandoned construction site. I can't take it here with me, and I don't know enough about how the device works to reconstruct it. I can turn into any animal I've touched. Other things I would guess you'd want to know about it...I have a time limit of two hours—after that I would get stuck in whatever form I'm transformed into—and I can't turn directly from one form to another, I have to go through my natural form. That's a Yeerk, the thing I was when I got here."

"Word of advice, you probably shouldn't tell people about the time limit. I mean, um, I don't plan on using that against you, Planetlord won't either, but a lot of people here would try." Small noise of consideration. "Planet, do you think 'any animal I've touched' includes--"

Planet has started doing the parkour at spawn but he keeps falling at the double neo. "Ummmm. I don't know. We should test that."

Hey, he extended enough trust to her to give her gear on the strength of her "sure I'll answer honestly" statement. She's not gonna betray that trust by lying anyway. It probably will kill her, but—she's already died once. She's having a hard time remembering to be as afraid as she should be.

"Test what?" Is this about to be a chance to earn her lamp?

"Uh, you're probably gonna die, so we'll come back to that one. There's, like, some really dangerous animals around here to touch, I'm curious what would happen if you tried. Planet can cover the heart." (Planet makes a noise of protest in the background.) "Fine, I'll pay you back later. I'm really low on totems right now though and if we want to do things with Poopies I kind of need those."

"The...heart?"

"Oh, yeah, uh, this is the Lifesteal SMP, if you die you lose a heart, if you kill someone you gain a heart, it's, like, the whole gimmick."

"You forgot to call it Minecraft's Deadliest SMP."

"No, I chose not to do that, because this is stupid."

Snort. "Okay. Whatever."

"And just to be absolutely clear—if you die here, you...come...back? There is still a 'you' to lose something?"

"Wooooooow you don't know anything. Sorry! Sorry! That was probably insensitive."

"I mean, it was true. Yeah, you come back unless you lose all your hearts."

"Wait, you forgot that too when you were giving the speech. If you lose all your hearts, you are BANNED."

He makes the double neo this time and bounces happily about it even though absolutely no one else is paying attention to this.

"I will begrudgingly admit that using the script makes you less likely to leave things out."

"What's begrudgingly mean?"

"Like, I'll admit it, but I'm not happy about it."

Well then.

She's not seeing a lot to contradict the "this is Heaven" idea. Except the obsession with violence. Maybe it's, what was the Viking thing, Valhalla.

"All right. Bring on the dangerous animals, then."

"I've got another question first, then I'll give you your lamp and we can talk about getting you more. The dangerous animals are extra, I'm not going to make you do that. The device, your powers, your coming here--do you know if or how Spoke, Ashswag, Vitalasy, or Parrot were involved in any of that?"

"The device was—an Andalite warrior had crash-landed and died at the construction site. We think he hid the device there. Me coming here—I don't have a clue. I died in the place I came from—which operates by way different rules, if you die once you're supposed to be gone forever—and then I woke up here, that's all I remember.

I don't know any of those people. Vitalasy sounds like it could be a Yeerk name? I think there might have been a Vitalasy something in the peace movement, it was getting big enough by the time I died that I couldn't keep track of everyone personally. But we don't know how to make the morphing cubes, if we could there'd be no war, probably no Empire."

So she's used to hardcore, modded, probably a bunch of other things. Fair enough as a backstory, if Bacon overlooks everything else about the impossibility of how she got here. She seems genuine, but the most likely possibility is still definitely that this is part of an elaborate plan by Spoke-or-someone. He can theorize more later in private. 

"And you don't have any other powers?"

"You sounded like you'd never seen a Yeerk before. In my natural form, if someone puts me in their head, I share their sensory input, and can read their mind or move their muscles.

But I won't do that to someone against their will, ever again, for any price. The reason I died was that I was fighting people who believed in doing that.

We also—though if you can die and come back I imagine this is probably already a solved problem around here—don't suffer from old age."

"Huh."

On the one hand, he's incredibly curious about the thing where she can go in people's heads? But on the other hand they really don't need more exploits being used, they need the exact opposite of that, Alita is already bringing way too much to the server.

...If Spoke and Ash and Vitalasy can do all that--which they probably can, if they added the mods she's using--this could be very bad. It might be worth asking Alita for ways to counter it. Later, though, after he's talked with Planetlord in private and made at least a token attempt at figuring things out himself.

He tosses over the redstone lamp (and a lever to turn it on) anyway; she did in fact answer his questions, and a redstone lamp is not actually that hard to get. "Well, thank you. I'll get back to you on what I want the second favor to be, or if I have more questions. I can get you more of these later, or show you how to get the materials."

"Thank you! I'd like to see how to get the materials."

What's the recipe again? He puts down a crafting table and checks the recipe book.

...This is fucking stupid. 

"Okay, I don't feel like going mining right now, but if you find a cave, go down it, or just dig down and strip mine, whichever, you can probably find redstone. More likely the farther away from spawn, most of the caves here have already been picked over, plus there are, like, withers. Glowstone's in the nether and it's pretty out in the open so I'll show you that."

Planet stops trying the parkour in order to follow Bacon to a glowing-purple portal.

"You're, like, a tutorial right now!"

Deep sigh. Baconwaffles does not love being a tutorial.

Alita follows. She's not sure what the "nether" is but she figures if she just does whatever Bacon does she'll figure it out.

The portal leads to a hot expanse of red rocks with a low ceiling of the same rocks. There are other things, mostly at random--bits of cobblestone and wood and dirt, sometimes as staircases or pillars, sometimes just single blocks scattered through the landscape--as well as a couple things that look like they could be larger structures (the outside of a poorly-maintained stone ?tunnel?, a ladder leading up, other glowing purple portals of the same type they just went through). Baconwaffles ignores all of these things to head out until the terrain opens up to the air; there's lava, but above them, there's also glowstone, which is why they're here. Bacon staircases up with dirt and then breaks a piece with his pickaxe (made of the same glowing-purple material as his armor) to demonstrate. 

"This is glowstone, you combine it with redstone to make redstone lamps. I've got silk touch, you don't so you'll have to either get silk touch or mine more glowstone to get enough. Here, you can take it." This is mostly because he doesn't have any free inventory slots and not solely because of altruism, but it looking like kindness works out.

The open Nether is...beautiful. Could be more so, with less clutter, but it's one of the loveliest landscapes she's seen in person. She allows herself a minute of gaping, then turns her focus to the piece of glowstone she's picked up.

It comes with an instinctive awareness of how to build the lamp. She'll need a crafting table, which she can make with wood; she remembers hearing that around here you can just...punch...trees.

"Thank you very much for all your help," she says as she pulls out her pick and moves to ascend the dirt staircase towards the glowstone, "do you have a way to get back in touch with me for your second favor, if I go off to look for some trees, caves, and empty land for a house?"

baconnwaffles0 whispers to sunbather: yes

Oh right, he had other messages to send.

baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: you dont have to come to spawn anymore
PrinceZam whispers to baconnwaffles0: :(
PrinceZam whispers to baconnwaffles0: im almost there :(
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: you took too long
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: should still vc me or planet before the meeting

sunbather whispers to baconwaffles0: wow this is cool!

Alita emerges back at spawn, glowstone in hand. She heads out in search of resources and empty land. She'd like to move directly along the east-west axis, but she can't tell which way it is yet with where the sun is in the sky. She'll start walking in the direction the portal is facing, then pick a landmark to head west from once she figures out which way that is.

There's plenty of empty land! When she gets away from the immediate spawn area, she'll notice that there's a lot of blown up area around spawn; when she gets further out than that, the area starts looking like normal wilderness.

Alita gathers resources! Recipes reveal themselves to her as she does. She builds herself a little house by a river out of stone brick, with oak planks and stairs for a roof. At the house she leaves the lamp and glowstone in a chest; into the world she takes her armor, the porkchops, a set of tools (all stone except the diamond pick), and a book and quill to take notes.

She jumps in the river, and demorphs. She notices that it's quick—about as fast as eating a porkchop—and that her armor returns itself to her inventory while she's in Yeerk form and has no slots for it, re-equipping when she resumes human form.

She delves into the nearest cave, in search of redstone.

The cave has redstone! It also has a lot of strange aggressive creatures: zombies, walking skeletons with bows, strange green creatures that explode if she gets too close, large aggressive spiders, and very tall black humanoids with glowing purple eyes that attack her if she looks in their eyes.

She mines her first redstone! She can make so many exciting things now: a clock, a compass, some light source called a "redstone torch" that might be useful for Kandrona lamp development.

She acquires some instances of the spiders and the black humanoids; she can't acquire the zombies or skeletons because they're dead, and she can't acquire the green creatures because she can't touch them in her natural form without them exploding. She can't get a good amount of mining done with the creatures hounding her, and her stone tools can't kill them quickly enough. She decides to try something else.

When she was executed, Visser Three had touched her with his own hand. With Alloran's hand. By sheer instinct she had made the mental motion to acquire him, and while she thought she would never get a chance to test if it worked, she—

—can—

—now.

Her armor equips—only the helmet, chestplate, and pants, because the boots don't fit on hooves. She feels that there's an additional slot for armor on the rear half of her body, but she has nothing that would fit into it now. She hacks her way through monsters with the Andalite tail-blade; it does vastly more damage than a stone sword.

(About as much as Sharpness IV Netherite, actually, but she doesn't know that yet.)

With a good haul of treasure and mob drops from the cave. Alita returns to her house to start testing the light sources. She puts down the redstone lamp, redstone torch, and glowstone in a line, noting that the lamp activates when adjacent to the redstone torch. She turns her arm into Yeerk flesh and runs it over the light sources, to see if any of them produce even a little flicker of Kandrona...

...and what she finds is overwhelming. The glowstone and the redstone lamp produce Kandrona—a steadier and stronger stream of it than from even the best lamps made by the Empire or the peace movement. This, she thinks with tears in her eyes, must be what the homeworld's sun feels like.

She builds a little pool in her house, and basks in the light.

(At the world border, Vitalasy shows up to the meeting with Zam. Writes a book. Receives a book, and then an apple.

Not quite at the world border, Bacon and Planet discuss possibilities. On the one hand, Alita being here sucks so bad in terms of what it means for the server. On the other hand, Parrot's basically useless, and they might be able to use her; they've still got a second favor, and having an exploiter in debt to them has the potential to be incredibly useful.)

After some time taking in the light, Alita gets up and enters human morph to test out her lesser goodies, the clock and compass.

...the compass doesn't point north. She doesn't know why she expected a compass on another planet to point north. She's curious about where it does point, and out of the two people she's met, Planet seemed to be more amused by her ignorance, while she felt that Bacon was getting a little annoyed.

sunbather whispers to PlanetLord: where does the compass point?

PlanetLord whispers to sunbather: spawn

sunbather whispers to PlanetLord: thanks! that's good to know.
sunbather whispers to PlanetLord: i'm also wondering about, like, the social landscape. what do people do for fun around here? is there some sort of social area i could meet people, like a bar?
sunbather whispers to PlanetLord: and, um, is there someone in charge? your name kinda sounds like someone who'd be in charge. lord of the whole planet, and all.

("Why are you laughing?" Bacon asks. Planet waves him away.)

PlanetLord whispers to sunbather: ummmmmm people kill each other mostly
PlanetLord whispers to sunbather: best social area is spawn probably
PlanetLord whispers to sunbather: i am definitely in charge. dont listen to anyone else
PlanetLord whispers to sunbather: jk! 

sunbather whispers to PlanetLord: of course haha!
sunbather whispers to PlanetLord: and thanks, that's good to know.

She doesn't get what's so fun about killing each other, even if you do come back. Still, if violence is the norm, she had better be prepared for it, and that means making full use of her unique advantages.

sunbather whispers to baconwaffles0: hey, you said you knew of some animals i could try to acquire?

baconnwaffles0 whispers to sunbather: yes
baconnwaffles0 whispers to sunbather: come to spawn

Plan "get Alita to turn into Poopies" is back on. Bacon lets Planet know and then they're also on their way back to spawn.

baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: are you still in the meeting
PrinceZam whispers to baconnwaffles0: no
PrinceZam whispers to baconnwaffles0: why are you so annoying
PrinceZam whispers to baconnwaffles0: leave me alone
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: no
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: come to spawn
baconnwaffles0 whispers to PrinceZam: trust me
PrinceZam whispers to baconnwaffles0: fine

sunbather whispers to baconwaffles0: on my way

She runs to spawn.

Bacon and Planet are already there, but Bacon refuses to do anything until someone else, "Zam" shows up--

A yellow being with a crown and a nervous smile comes out of the portal at spawn. 

"Hi! I'm PrinceZam."

"Alita, Zam, Zam, Alita. We can do more introductions in a bit. Right now, Alita, I want you to show Zam the thing you can do."

"Hi nice to meet you!" Alita says, jumping once and swinging her fist in the air.

Then her armor unequips itself as her arms retract into her torso, her facial features overwritten with a featureless green from which two brown palps emerge—

—and she shrinks down to the size of her natural form, dashing around in a few quick circles before—

—changing color once more and growing, new extremities emerging, as she takes the form of Alloran.

She's hungry. She consumes the grass beneath her hooves. It disappears as if it's been eaten by a sheep.

Zam screams and jumps back. "WHAT THE FUCK--WHAT THE FUCK--WHAT THE FUCK--"

"So I take it Vitalasy didn't bring this up in your meeting."

"I--

...No.

I'm--I'm sure he has a good reason."

"Sure he does. Just like he did for destroying the End, right?"

"....That's--he--"

He did have a good reason for it. Right? In his book, he had a good reason. He had wanted to trap Team Awesome in prison, right? That was the reason, it was for the prison. ...It had felt like a good reason at the time. It doesn't feel like as good of a reason now, in front of Planetlord.

"Yes," he says, anyway. Zam's pretty sure it's obvious he doesn't really believe it; Planetlord snorts.

"That's not the point. The point is, Alita can transform into any animal she can touch. How she got modded--whatever the fuck that is--I don't know, alright, but we have--Planet, is Poopies still in the maze? Do we know where Poopies is?"

"Ummmmmm. I think so?"

"Last time I saw it was when it killed me and Mapicc during our fight, I think that was after the maze?" Zam looks back at Alita and does a double-take again. "Wow. I--what the fuck. Goodness gracious."

Everyone here is useless. Bacon spams F3+A and looks around for endermites with ridiculous quantities of particle effect. 

"Found it. It's a bit under spawn, over that direction--" He points. "--we probably don't want to let it up, we can just dig a hole and Alita can go down. Alita, you're probably going to die, sorry. I'll give you a totem and some pearls, you can try to get out, but, um. Good luck, you'll need it."

He drops Alita a totem and a stack of pearls.

Oh no, she scared the new guy. :c

<Hey, it's cool. I'm not gonna hurt you. Sorry for startling you,> she says to Zam.

(She does her best to use the Andalite thought-speech to give her words a warm, affectionate tone. It's an inferior mental communication method, she thinks, to her native form—which, wrapped around someone's brain, can convey warmth and affection themselves.)

She turns to Bacon, holding the totem in one hand and the pearls in the other.

<How do I use these?>

(Andalite thought-speech, just like regular speech, is handled under translation convention; the native lifestealers still experience it approximately the same. They're already always doing "communication method that doesn't require your body to have ears or a mouth", and often doing "communication method where you can talk exclusively to some but not all people who are physically present".)

Just to Alita, since they're now in a private call, apparently: "It's not about whether you'll hurt me!!! It's about--you shouldn't be able to do that. No one should be able to do that."

And, a couple moments later:

"Hold the totem, it'll explode if you take enough damage to die, which will happen as soon as you touch Poopies. Also, as soon as you touch Poopies, start running and throw the pearl, it'll teleport you to where the pearl lands."

<That is...a take on morphing I have never heard before,> she says to Zam, thinking though maybe the fundamentalists will think of it when it's revealed publicly to humanity. <I'd be interested to hear more, sometime, about why you think so.>

She walks over to the place Bacon had indicated to her. <Thanks. I'm ready.>

"You're looking for an endermite--uh, little purple creature, about yea big--it's going to have a ton of potion effects, it'll be incredibly fast and aggressive enough that you probably won't have to do much looking, it's going to hit you and pop your totem and then if you're lucky you can pearl away and not die but realistically you're probably going to die. Good luck."

And then Bacon spleefs Alita into spawn--what seemed like solid ground was, in fact, a very thin layer of dirt over a massive crater. The fall hurts a little, not enough to kill.

And then there is Poopies: as promised, an endermite with various magical-looking particles coming off of it. It's very fast. It hits like a truck, or maybe something stronger than that, because at least trucks are sometimes damaged or slowed down by accidents. It hits like Alita's body is a piece of wet tissue paper. As promised, the totem in Alita's hand explodes, and she doesn't die immediately. She's got an instant to react; if she misses the pearl and stays down with Poopies, she dies, or if the pearl takes a moment too long to land and it gets her again before then.

The pearl does, indeed, take a moment too long to land. She respawns, one heart worse for wear, and assumes the form of...

...an endermite. She lacks the varied assortment of particles.

"Huh," Planetlord says. "Hit me?"

It's not super necessary; they can all see just by looking at Alita that she doesn't have any particles, and she's not moving faster than a normal endermite would. But Planet's holding a totem, just in case.

She hits him. It does the usual damage of an unaugmented endermite.

"Huh," Bacon echoes. "So, no effects. --Can you turn into people?"

Could be an insane heart dupe, if she gets people's heart counts when she does. Or it could just put her at ten, like how the endermite just gave her a normal endermite. If she turned into Spoke, or Ashswag, or Vitalasy, maybe she'd get their powers, maybe she wouldn't, it's worth testing. Or if she turned into LifestealAdmin--

--He's getting ahead of himself. See if she can turn into people, first.

(He wouldn't use it, even if it did turn out to be a dupe glitch. He'd report it to Parrot to be patched. And if he didn't, Zam definitely would. But there are a lot of people on the server who would really love to use it, and he needs to know if this is going to be a problem.)

She thought-speaks to everyone around. <I can! Humans and Andalites are people. Uh, that is, my pink bipedal form and my purplish quadrupedal form. Do you want me to try acquiring one of you?>

"Right, yeah, you've got a human form. You probably want to acquire Zam, if you get people's heart counts when you turn into them, because, uh, Planet and I do not have a ton of hearts and if you're not used to that you might die on accident."

Zam looks very hesitant about this but doesn't object.

Ok, silence and an uncomfortable look isn't a "no", but it's not exactly a "yes" either.

(Why is he uncomfortable? Maybe he's afraid she'll impersonate him, or maybe since he seems to have some kind of moral objection to morphing he doesn't want to ~contribute~ to it. Or maybe he just thinks Yeerks are gross. His loss if so, and not her business.)

She thought-speaks directly to Zam.

<Zam, are you sure you're cool with this? It's just a little tap, it doesn't hurt, but if you really don't wanna be acquired I won't judge you about that, and I'd back you up if anyone else took issue with it. Or if you don't wanna say it I could try to make up some reason it shouldn't be you.>

"It's--it's fine."

Zam doesn't feel great about the impersonation potential. Or the helping-with-exploits. Mostly the helping-with-exploits. Also the "getting swept up into someone else's plan that he doesn't know the details of or motivation behind" in general. He's been doing a lot of that recently. But Bacon's not wrong that he and Planet both have three hearts and Zam has seventeen. Zam holds out his hand to Alita.

He doesn't sound fine. At some point you have to take people at their word. She reverts to her natural form and jumps up to touch his hand.

Alita assumes Zam's form. She feels sturdier, stronger, more alive.

"Wow. I feel great. It's gotta rule to be you, Zam."

Zam sounds even more miserable now!!! "It doesn't, actually, but thanks."

"Okay, Alita, I want you to type /withdraw 1, drop the heart, and turn back."

Zam's eyes go wide. "What the fuck! No! We are not doing this again--" He hits Bacon once, for emphasis, not to hurt.

"Dude! Chill chill chill! I'm not going to use it. If it puts Alita down a heart, I give it back, no big deal. If it doesn't, I'll get rid of it, okay? But if there is a dupe, which is a big if, do we want to have video evidence we can report to Parrot, or do we want to not do anything and let Spoke figure it out? Because I'm gonna be real, it did not take me that long to figure it out, and I am not usually the first one on the server to find glitches."

"Good point. ...Spoke's got, like, infinite hearts, I don't think he'd need it."

"Okay, Mapicc then. You see the issue."

"I guess, yeah."

Alita drops the heart, reverts to natural form, and then assumes human form.

"I don't feel any different?"

Bacon picks up the heart. Doesn't apply it, just holds it. He doesn't have a flint and steel on him but he bets Zam does.

"How many hearts did you start with, in this form and in your other form? How many do you have now?"

"When I first arrived here I had ten in my natural form and human and Andalite forms. After Poopies killed me I lost one in my natural form. After dropping the heart as Zam and turning back, I still have nine in my natural form and ten in my human form."

Okay. So it's a dupe glitch.

Bacon turns to Zam. "Do you have a flint and steel?"

"Yep." Zam sets a bit of ground on fire. He is clearly pretty freaked out by the whole thing.

Bacon drops the heart in and Zam puts the fire back out.

To Alita: "Please, uh, don't use that."

It's a useless sentence, honestly. Even if she didn't use it on purpose she's still got, what, forty hearts at least, just as a baseline, and if people kill her then those hearts will start getting spread around the server. They really should just tell Parrot now. They've got video evidence of Alita doing multiple things that shouldn't be possible, the dupe glitch is kind of the least of their worries.

But if they tell Parrot and Alita gets banned, they can't undo that. So he's going to think about it a bit more first. Unless Zam has already messaged Parrot, which is entirely possible and honestly fair enough.

"Why not?"

Everyone stares at her.

Bacon's the first one to try and answer. "Because...it's a dupe glitch? I realize that, uh, 'no exploiting' is kind of a lost cause, but the rules are there for a reason. If nothing else, you're gonna get banned. You could hide it better, I guess, but if you try pulling anything too major, I've already got enough evidence to get Parrot to ban you. Unless whatever you've got worked out with Spoke or whoever can also unban you, which, honestly, seems pretty plausible at this point, but if that's the case then I can't really stop you. So I guess I'm just, like, asking politely, if you could not do that, out of the kindness of your heart."

"I see! I didn't know it was against the rules. Or, um, that there were rules of the sort enforced by people rather than the world itself, here. I won't do it, and I'm sorry to have worried you. Is there a list of the rules anywhere that I can read?

And if I may ask, who is Parrot? How did they come to have the power to ban people?"

"I mean--the rules you're breaking are the ones usually enforced by the world itself, that's, um, why it's exploiting. But--whatever. Rules. No riptide tridents, no elytra, no crossbow rockets. No end crystals or respawn anchors for combat. No crafted hearts past ten. No combat logging. No restocking during fights. No raid farms. No hack clients, no x-ray, no duping, no exploiting. I think that's all of them? Uh, it's pretty common to bend these rules a little bit sometimes, especially because right now there's a pretty major group of people that's exploiting a lot, but most people aren't doing the sort of thing you're doing, and I'm not actually happy about the other exploiters either. And if you do it right in front of people there's a chance you'll get a 2-week ban.

Parrot's the server owner." He seems to expect "sever owner" to have full explanatory power.

"You can craft hearts?"

"Up to ten, yeah. I dunno if we should count you as having nine or as having, like, infinity, since you can just, like, turn into something with more hearts? Even without the dupe it's kind of broken."

Bacon considers the possibility of Alita touching a warden and deliberately doesn't suggest it.

"How do you craft a heart?"

Bacon considers lying to Alita about the recipe but can't think of anything funny fast enough. "32 redstone blocks, four totems, four diamond blocks, four diamonds, one netherite ingot."

She writes this down, along with the rules. She assumes "netherite" is probably from the nether, and she can figure out where to get totems later.

"Thank you! Do you have any more ideas for tests of my morphing power?"

"If you meet Spoke, Vitalasy, or Ashswag, I want you to touch them. --That sounds bad. I want you to just, like, touch them normally--that's worse actually, you know what I mean--and then see if turning into them gives you any extra powers, and, like, let me know. Maybe do the second half when they're not around, I don't know how secret you want to keep this. Uh, just warning you upfront, it's definitely not going to stay secret from Vitalasy, and he'll probably tell the other two, but who knows."

"I'll, um, do my best to land a touch on them in my natural form. I guess if it's against the rules I should try to not make my morphing common knowledge."

"Yeah, I mean--like I said, word will spread. But it's still, like, probably worth not showing off too much."

"Yeah.

Planet, Bacon had said you could pay me back the heart from the Poopies test?"

“Oh! Yeah.” He puts down his ender chest and takes a heart out: a little glowing star, the same thing Alita had when she withdrew one. He hands it to Alita. 

"Thank you!"

Alita jumps up and down a few times.

"Do you guys have more business to take care of while I'm here, or do you mind if I head home?"

Planet glances at Bacon before nodding to Alita. "I think you can head home."

"See you later!"

She bounds off home, then looks over her journal and plans her next moves. Regardless of how much or little she plans to follow the laws, she needs to be able to appear to be a normal citizen, and it seems that normal citizens around here, who don't have the ability to morph off all injuries, use totems.

She tries to figure out if any of the new senses she's developed since arriving in this world can help her. Her intuition about how to craft things with materials she's obtained isn't showing her a recipe for them. 

She has a sense of certain milestones she's completed since arriving in the world, and—aha! It also suggests to her more milestones she can reach.

She can infer some interesting things from this—it seems like the nether can be used to travel long distances, like Zero-space—but she still doesn't know how to get a totem.

<sunbather> hey how do you get totems?

<SpokeIsHere> Play My Maze Tomorrow...

So he's running... some kind of game giving them out as prizes? She should go, it's a chance to meet this Spoke guy she's heard so much about and maybe get his side of the story.

<sunbather> sure! where's the maze at?
<sunbather> but i'm also wondering, like, how do people normally get them? how did you get the totems you're giving out as prizes for the maze?

<SpokeIsHere> The Maze Is At Spawn... If You Dare...
<baconnwaffles0> do raids
<baconnwaffles0> or cheat them in if you're Spoke
<SpokeIsHere> HEY!
<SpokeIsHere> all of my prizes are entirely legitamate
<SpokeIsHere> no cheating allowed
<SpokeIsHere> i grinded for these
<PlanetLord> sure you did

<sunbather> raids on what?

<SpokeIsHere> your mom
<Vitalasy> stop being rude
<Vitalasy> >:(
<SpokeIsHere> no

Oh, this is what we're doing now, is it.

<sunbather> my mom's dead
<sunbather> you monster
<sunbather> :Þ

(Vitalasy feels quietly vindicated in his stance.)

<SpokeIsHere> I Have Made A Severe And Continuous Lapse In My Judgement And Don’t Expect To Be Forgiven

<sunbather> You won't be. My retribution will be severe and instant.
<sunbather> =^-^=
<sunbather> ...ok seriously though anyone who can explain to me the normal way to get totems, such that i can actually get one, gets my first totem

The chat's quiet for a bit. No one seems super inclined to take her up on it.

(Vitalasy's busy moving wardens; Zam normally uses the three heart trio base for totems, and before that he used Subz's area, but he doesn't want to give either of those coords to Alita without permission; Planet and Bacon have an efficient raid platform that can generate several totems in the time it would take to show Alita how to get one; Spoke has more than enough totems in his ender chest.)

<ItzSubz_> you are all terrible people
ItzSubz_ whispers to sunbather: meet at -2k -2.5k on the nether roof

Alita enters the nether using the portal at spawn, and starts looking around for some means to ascend.

There's a ladder! It leads to... a ceiling of unbreakable bedrock. And unfortunately for Alita, she doesn't know that you can use the ladder and an ender pearl to glitch through to the roof.

(There are other miscellaneous nether portals at spawn that aren't the main central one with a building around it, if she wants to try any of those.)

Dang.

(She does try the other portals, starting with the closest one to the main one and working her way outwards.)

And eventually one of them takes her to a somewhat different location: a perfectly flat plane, stretching on in every direction, of that same impossibly hard rock. There are a lot of portals and random blocks scattered around--a short rail line, a few blocks of dirt and grass, a scattering of cobblestone, some netherrack around a portal, a single crafting table, a couple planks made of a strange purplish wood, a single piece of pink wool--but they all look placed, unnatural, not like they're just part of the landscape.

(If she goes further out, these signs of habitation decrease: the portals become few and far between, and the random blocks disappear entirely.)

Given that there's nothing above her, she assumes this is the roof. She starts walking in the direction of the given destination.

sunbather whispers to ItzSubz_: on my way

Dang, this place is kinda freaky. Once she gets far enough out that there are no more blocks or portals, she starts placing the occasional lamp for comfort, flicking them on with levers.

There's a portal at the given coordinates, or close enough. 

sunbather has reached the achievement [Subspace Bubble]

There's also a man hanging out at the other side of the portal. He's the closest thing to human she's seen here thus far, although he does very much have horns and a glowing purple eye and some sort of black markings on his skin on his right side. He looks young; late teens or early twenties. He's got a horse with him that's tied to a nearby post. 

"Hey," he says. "You're Sunbather?"

"Yeah. Or you can call me Alita."

"Alita," he says, testing it out. "Pillager outpost is over this way, and I've got beacons set up and an area cleared out for the actual raids." He starts walking; sure enough, after a bit, a wood-and-stone tower appears in the distance, and next to it, five lines of light up to the sky. They have to cross a river and then they're at the tower; gray-skinned angry-looking humanoids point crossbows and axes at them. They're close enough to the beacon now to get effects. (Speed II, Strength II, Resistance II, Regeneration, Haste.) Subz has his sword out; he kills most of the gray-skinned humanoids with one shot each, his bored expression unchanging. One of them is carrying a banner; Subz leaves that one alive.

"Wow."

Being at 17 hearts had felt good. Being beacon'd feels great.

"I'm guessing the last guy is for me?"

She pulls out a diamond sword. It's not even enchanted.

"Yep."

Beacon effects help out a lot with the not-even-enchanted thing, although it will probably take more than one hit, especially since she presumably doesn't know how to crit.

She does not, although she makes a habit of jumping while running and she runs at the pillager, so she might get lucky.

Well, she gets there eventually.

sunbather has reached the achievement [Voluntary Exile]

"I'll show you where you actually do the raids now, it's pretty close by." 

They have to cross another river after she gets Bad Omen and then, where the beacons are, there is a huge unnatural-looking mined-out rectangle of ground with a bed and a long wall of double chests. The raid will start spawning once Alita crosses about halfway over it; she has time to set her bed or look in the chests first if she wants.

Alita sets her bed! She doesn't look in the chests though; that's other people's stuff.

The raid starts. She's only got Bad Omen I, which is probably for the best for her first raid.

Alita starts killing the raiders. They look uncomfortably human, and she's not as skilled at fighting with a sword as she is with the Andalite tail-blade. She's sweating and gritting her teeth to resist the temptation to morph, but she makes it through the first two waves.

And then a giant bull-like thing shows up and sends her flying through the air.

"Subz what the fu—heck is that?"

"That is a ravager. I'm not PG, by the way, you can swear." He thinks about saying "you should be fine, you've got resistance and strength", and then considers her general skill at fighting and doesn't say that. He shoots at it, half to help kill it but also half just to draw its aggro away from her. But her inability to recognize ravagers does remind him of another question: "I've been meaning to ask, actually, how'd you, like... get here?" Because whatever people are assuming, Vitalasy has no idea who Alita is or why she's here. Subz would be willing to bet his life on that. He doesn't think it's Spoke or Ash either; the wormhole group chat has been just as confused and panicked about the random new person as everyone else, as far as he can tell. Maybe even more so, because they know their own capabilities and know that this is beyond them. (Subz is somewhat underestimating how panicked everyone else is, because he doesn't know yet about Alita's morph abilities. He'll find out soon, though, and then wormhole group chat will definitely be more panicked than everyone else.)

"I know I can, it just doesn't fit my personal aesthetic."

Alita is a fast learner; she gets better at timing her attacks as the fight goes on, and while she isn't consistently critting yet she seems to have at least noticed that jumping strikes hit harder. With Subz's help, she's able to take out the ravager.

"I died, in the place I came from—it has way higher population density than here and totally different technology and when you die, you're supposed to be gone forever—and the next thing I'm aware of is waking up here, at spawn."

That's cap. But if she isn't going to share Subz won't try to make her. "Gonna be honest, Lifesteal is kind of a shitty afterlife."

"So far I'm enjoying it more than the place I came from. Resources are easier to extract, we come back when we die, Visser Three isn't here..."

"Uh-huh." Okay, scratch the thing he just thought, he's asking again. "The roleplay's cool and all but, like, actually how did you get here. Like, who whitelisted you."

"I really don't know! Is there any proof I could show that would convince you I'm telling the truth here?"

Subz considers. "Probably not. Uh, maybe if Parrot did some stuff on console and a couple people confirmed that everything checks out, but it'd still be more likely they were just also lying. I can, like, stop asking, it's not that big a deal." It is to a lot of people but Subz doesn't actually care that much. Whatever it is, it'll probably get figured out or there'll be a video in a few months explaining everything, for now he can play along. In the last wave, he focuses on killing the ravager, but it's up to Alita to kill the evoker, since that's where she'll actually get the totem.

Alita successfully kills the evoker! She deeply wants to try acquiring the vexes; she can't tell if they're really alive. Maybe she can sneak back here later when no one is around.

"Yeah, probably best if you stop asking. I wouldn't believe me either, if it didn't happen to me."

sunbather has reached the achievement [Hero of the Village]

"Well, now you know how to do raids. You can use this area if you want, I think no one else really uses it anymore."

Alita bounces.

"Thank you! That's very kind of you. I will remember that you helped me."

She turns to go.

"Sure, anytime." Weird schizo girl can go. He doesn't actually need to grind raids but he should wait a while and keep an eye out for particles before heading back to his base, Subz is getting tired of leading people back to their base and then having to move.

There are no particles from Alita, at least!

She'll be back later, for more totems and to try acquiring those things, but for now she goes to explore the nether—the regular nether, not the creepy above-roof nether—in search of netherite. She also notes that her milestone-sense suggests that there might be some structures to find; she keeps an eye out for those. While she explores, she figures it might be a good time to have some of the conversations she'd been wanting to.

sunbather whispers to baconnwaffles0: you said the rules are there for a reason. i'm interested in hearing your thoughts on why the rules are justified, if it's a good time to chat?

(He’s mostly looking for invis particles; people on this server have a habit of going invisible and following people to their bases. Since she’s not in fact doing this, he doesn’t see any and heads home.)

baconnwaffles0 whispers to sunbather: sure

baconnwaffles0 whispers to sunbather: vc?

Alita initiates the chat.

“Hey. Want to meet at spawn again or just do it over call, I feel like there’s some stuff there that illustrates my point but it’s not that big a deal.”

"I can meet at spawn."

She hasn't gone that deeply into the nether yet. She can get back to mining once she's seen what Bacon has to show.

Bacon and Planet are still at spawn. Planet's still doing the parkour, even. Bacon waves to Alita when she shows up.

"Hey, so, like--normally I'd give it as an example but you've already seen Poopies. There's also, uh, there's also Peepees, Spoke spawned that in a fight between Zam and Mapicc. And just around spawn there's--walk with me?"

Alita follows.

"How did Poopies come into existence?"

"Spoke," Bacon says. "If you're asking how Spoke was able to do that, I don't know either, that's part of what I'm trying to find out."

They round a corner to see a strange house;  there's wood floating in the air, and more of the strange rock that was the floor of the nether roof exploding out from it.

"This is, um, one of the things I wanted to show you. Well, there's also, like, I'm pretty sure there's still barrier blocks somewhere, but I don't remember the coordinates, and you've already seen Poopies. Do you--do you see the problem here."

"Well, I wouldn't want it to happen to my house.

...buuuuuuuut I didn't hear 'no burning down houses' in the rules so I'm going to guess you're talking about something different."

"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.)

No one says anything, or stops her; they have no way of knowing what she's doing. You only get caught x-raying if you're stupid about it, and this isn't exactly x-raying but it's close enough. The invisibility lasts for three minutes if it's normal invisibility and eight if it's extended.

(Diamond armor and gear won't be useful if Spoke or Vitalasy or Ashswag wants her dead; she could have maxed out netherite and they could kill her in a single touch while impossible to hurt back in any meaningful way. It's good for regearing, recovering in case other people want to fight her after they kill her, but regearing wouldn't help against them. But she has no way of knowing that.)