Work Text:
Mornings on Hermitcraft are usually quiet, aside from the occasional beheading. Most hermits are not morning people - they wake up late and stumble over to their kettles and coffee brewers, blinking the sleep from their eyes. It’s later in the day that things get heated, that wars start and rivalries develop.
Doc, like many others, started his morning with a pleasant cup of coffee. He’d had a late night, using science and technology to push through reality’s seams for his benefit. As one of the earliest-waking hermits, he enjoyed his peace and quiet.
Birds sang, bees buzzed, and the wind howled across the empty perimeter. Surrounded by his favourite tomato plants, warmed by the shining rays of the sun, he raised his cup to his face and promptly splashed it all over his chest.
He groaned. “Are you kidding me?”
His right arm - a gift from an old god - had gone in an instant from a finely wrought masterwork of cybernetics to a twisted tool of madness. The angles of the design, the intricate pistons and wires warped impossibly around each other, as if tangents and normals were alike. The limb had somehow twisted backwards even as he moved it forwards, spilling his precious coffee over his coat and fur.
“Dang it, man,” Doc remarked to no one in particular, as he straightened out his arm. “I haven’t had an accident like that since I was a kid.” It was really embarrassing.
He walked back inside, tossing his coffee-stained coat on a chair and heading to the shower. As he shampooed his chest, he examined the cybernetic hand closely.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The divine curse was as perfect as the day it had been granted to him. Had he really just had a noobish accident?
After the shower, Doc pulled on a new coat and took to the skies to dry off and begin his day proper.
The Perimeter Empire was looking wondrous on this fine day. Blue waters gleamed in the sunlight. Enormous marvels of engineering stood like monuments to mortal ingenuity. His pet world eater had cut a great scar through the natural terrain, leaving Doc the opportunity to turn this place into a palace of greatness.
Today’s project was something he’d wanted to work on for quite a while. He’d not finished gathering the resources yet, unfortunately - these days, netherite was hard to find, with only scraps of it that could be refined from rare, buried debris. That was to be his first step.
He rocketed towards his floating supply depot, hovering above the perimeter. Slime, honey, observers, coral, TNT… or should he give the ghast cannon another shot?
Landing on the floating platform, he began to pick through his piles of shulker boxes. “I spent a lot of work on those ghasts,” he muttered to himself, “but a tunnel bore-”
And then, in a split moment, Doc found himself somewhere else.
It was a dimension of chaos beyond the bounds of comprehension. A place where all concepts of colour and shape failed, where visions inconceivable to mortals were commonplace. To mortal eyes little more than a riot of colours could be discerned, as edges wriggled away and writhed between themselves - it was a painful but mesmerising sight, and one that could and did make people ill just looking at it.
Doc sighed and slipped back into normal space.
“You think this is funny?” he asked the air. “I’m not going to take this lying down.”
There was no reply.
“I don’t know who you are, but I will find out,” he vowed. “And I swear that you’ll be sorry you ever messed with the Goat!”
Despite his bold proclamation, the troubles continued throughout the day. Doc’s limbs shifted, his colours changed, and his position was unmoored from ordinary spacetime. Worst of all, he could barely spend any time with the other hermits!
“Howdy, Doc!” Joe was tiredly cheerful like always. “You wanted some tadpoles delivered, right?”
Doc nodded. “Yeah, thank you. I will really need them soon.”
“Glad to hear it! Be sure to stop by my Mixolotl shop if you want more!” Joe picked up their shulker box. “By the way, what’s with the pink?”
“Wha?” Doc looked down at his chest. Somehow, without him noticing, the hue of his chest had entirely inverted, leaving his fur a bright pink. His mind scrambled for an explanation. “It’s… ahm… for cancer!” he explained, “you know, breast cancer?”
“Ah,” Joe replied, “that makes sense. That’s a really nice gesture, thanks!” They shot off into the distance, leaving Doc to grumble and correct his colouration in solitude.
“What’s even the point of a mortal body if I have to do this constantly,” the goat-man mumbled to himself.
“What’s up, Doc?” Cub was the next to show up, restocking his shop just as Doc was browsing his wares.
Doc grumbled internally. “The day hasn’t been great, man,” he admitted.
“What? Dude, do you need help with something?”
Doc shook his head. “No, I can deal with it perfectly fine,” he assured. “Do you have any mangrove leaves in here?”
Cub did a finger-guns motion, pointing downstairs. “Second floor,” he explained, “It’s in the stock book.”
“Thank you,” Doc told him.
Then, without warning, the world shifted from under him. Like an error in reality’s code - actually, it was exactly an error in reality’s code - his next step took him twenty metres to the left. Outside the building.
As he plummeted down, Doc sighed and affixed his physical body to the fabric of the world even stronger than before.
The next hermit he encountered was walking along the side of his own perimeter.
“Hey, Doc!” Jevin was carrying a grey crystal in his hands that Doc gave a look of distaste. “Do you want the hot potato?”
The goat-man blinked. “Whuh? The hot potato?”
“Yeah,” the slime showed him the worn, inedible spud. “It’s an eight-diamond daily quest.”
Doc shook his head. “I’m not doing Ren’s quests,” he reminded Jevin. “The perimeter is- look over there!”
Again, more of his true form poked into reality. Jevin looked away just moments before a thousand fractal eyes covered Doc’s head, and the reflection in his gleaming cybernetics stopped following the laws of optics.
“What am I looking at?” the slime asked, his tone confused.
Without much ceremony, Doc stepped backwards off the cliff, leaving Jevin alone at the top.
“Seriously, man!” Doc continued grumbling as he flew over the server, heading over to check on his last prank. “What’s going on? I’m not a kid, why is it so hard to keep my body stable?”
His wings chose that moment to flare out, silvery elytra bristling with kilometre-long feathers for a moment before he forced them back into shape. His eyes scanned the landscape below, making sure no hermits were in sight.
When it came to matters of reality, his power was near-absolute - second only to admins and the elder gods, and he had won battles against the latter. Manifesting his powers, however, took a dreadful toll on those around him.
Well, it took a dreadful toll on villagers and other mobs, but he didn’t want to test the effect it would have on other players.
Finally sighting Dwayne in front of him, the goat-man let his altitude drop. There it was: the floating rocks, one of them now corrupted by sculk, a new bridge too, and an interesting visual effect - how did Grian make the perspectives work there, where he could see both sides of the bridge at once…
Doc looked though the world, making sure it wasn’t just some builder’s trick. Whatever was affecting him was affecting this bridge too, he was sure of it. He looked around - rock, rock, vault, rock - then looked down, into a well of brilliance that blinded his othersight.
He landed on the ground without moving his wings, and stepped down into the cave without moving through the intervening space. A brilliant magenta portal shone before him, a Rift in space appearing from a crack in the wall. It dwarfed his mortal body, dwarfed the scattered scientific instruments scattered around Itself. It was magnificent.
It… was what had caused him so much inconvenience and embarrassment.
“Rift,” he spoke, and let the hole in the world hear him loud and clear. “Why did you have to do that, man? You know I can’t just let you mess with me like this. No one touches the Goat and gets away with it!”
The Rift didn’t visibly respond, but Doc could have sworn It hummed louder, as if taunting him.
“That’s it,” he decided. “I’ve had it with you.”
He let go, allowing his full body to slide through reality. Fractals and twisted geometries writhed and tangled, impossible angles meeting and moving apart once more. On the outside, he might have still looked somewhat alike his mortal body - green feathers, or fur, or foliage, covered in white and pierced through by gleaming mechanisms - but in the material plane his shape must have looked impossible.
Free to act, Doc stared down the Rift. A thousand claws twisted through space and clamped onto Its plane-thin edges, pushing and pulling on the stubborn gap. It gave way, compressing to half Its size, then a third; but It resisted stronger with each metre lost.
Were his mortal body in realspace, he would have grunted in exertion. As the Rift shrunk the resistance grew, stronger and stronger until he couldn’t push anymore. The glowing Rift had shrunk to a brilliant, blinding star in the wall, and all his strength was still not enough to close It. “Come… on… man…” he gasped, trying to get another newton of force from his infinite muscles, his many-dimensional dad bod-
A whoosh of rockets startled him, and he let go.
His many eyes took in the situation in a moment. Grian was right above the entrance to the cave, preparing to descend. In less than a second, the pesky bird would see him!
Doc wound his body back up like measuring tape, his mortal body reappearing in a blink. The Rift in front of him resumed Its former size in the same blink, looking just as It had before he’d started. Doc panted heavily, his muscles burning from exhaustion.
“...check on the Rift,” Grian entered earshot. “It’s- Doc?! What are you doing here?”
As Doc panted, he desperately tried to think of an excuse. “Ahm,” he tried, “I was… peeling my grapes?”
Grian blinked, and gave him a deadpan stare. “Peeling your grapes.”
“Yeah,” Doc’s mind descended deeper into the fiction. “You know, I was pre-peeling all my fruits for the week, and I realised that I had forgotten my grapes. You know how it goes.”
“That makes sense,” Grian nodded, then stopped. “Wait, what? Why were you here, in front of the Rift?”
“I wanted to see if It would give me a grape peeler,” Doc replied in a straight tone.
Something hit him in the back of the head.
Grian snickered. “Well, it did now,” he pointed out, “Is there anything else you wanted? Some charged creeper heads, perhaps?”
“Well,” Doc ambled, as his tail brushed over the small implement that the Rift had chucked at him.
His tail.
He tucked the offending appendage behind his body, trying to give Grian a smile and will it back out of existence simultaneously. No such luck.
“Well, I have to go now,” He said nervously, leaning down to pick up the grape peeler while keeping his tail tucked away from Grian’s sight. “Perimeter stuff to do, you know how it is, man.” He jumped into the air and shot off, not waiting for a reply.
Grian watched the cyborg retreat into the distance, his suddenly-appearing tail streaming behind him. “Well, that was weird,” he decided, turning back to the gently humming Rift.
What was Doc doing down here? Grian had seen him descend down, then his body shift and change into… something else. Did he want something from the Rift? Did he just want to talk with It?
“Well, it’s none of my business,” he shrugged. He was too busy breaking into Mumbo’s vault, and not organising a resistance. Doc didn’t seem too bothered by it, so it was probably fine.
The next day, Doc plotted his vengeance on the Rift. This morning, while peacefully gardening among his bees and tomatoes, he’d grown corkscrewed claws that had pierced straight through one of his bushes. This wasn’t an attack he could take lying down - no one messed with his bushes and lived.
“No, how should I deal with this…” he pondered to himself. “I tried the direct approach already, and that didn’t work. I don’t want to bother the hivemind with this… oh, what if I seal up the rift, instead of trying to close it?” He grinned to himself. “Yeah… I can even ask for help! I wonder if Mumbo would be willing to ‘prank Grian’, heh heh.”
Mumbo, as it turned out, was always up for pranking Grian. “I mean,” the spoon explained, “I do get to prank him every week, really. And he even pays me diamonds for it - though of course I don’t need any more diamonds, why, my vault’s practically overflowing with them already.”
“Whuh?” Doc asked, “Grian pays you diamonds to prank him?”
Mumbo nodded. “Well, he gives me ten diamond blocks every time he dies breaking into my vault, but that’s basically the same thing.”
Doc chuckled. “Sounds fun.”
“Anyway,” the spoon asked, “what are you planning to prank him with?”
“You know the Rift?” Doc asked.
The other hermit tilted his head. “You mean that purple portal underground? Yeah, I’ve seen it. Looks a bit bonkers.”
“I want to seal it up,” Doc revealed, “and replace it with glass and sea lanterns. Grian won’t know the difference.”
“Are you sure?” Mumbo frowned. “That seems a bit mean, dunnit?”
“That hole spilled my coffee and touched my bush,” the goat-man told him. “It can’t get away with it.”
The moustached man looked befuddled. “I’m not sure how a portal can do… that,” he said, “or anything, really. Did it really spill your coffee?”
Doc looked him in the eyes. “Yes.”
Mumbo muttered something about pants, but agreed to help out.
Some poppies later, and both hermits carried replenishing stacks of sea lanterns, end rods, and magenta glass. They could have gotten away with only a few shulker boxes, admittedly, but Doc had wanted to show Mumbo his latest shadow tech.
“This thing still looks bonkers,” Mumbo said as the two of them descended into the cavern. “Is there something in it?”
Doc shook his head. “Don’t worry about it.” He surreptitiously checked the length and number of his body parts. “Now, let’s fill this in.”
They got to work. A shell of sea lanterns was placed inside of the Rift, and layers of glass and interspersed end rods filled in the gap to its entrance. It was a wonderful visual effect, and Mumbo had gotten progressively more excited, declaring himself chuffed to bits by the prank.
Doc, meanwhile, had only grown glum. “Mumbo?” he said, as they were filling in the last few blocks, “Maybe you should look away for a minute.”
“What? Why?”
“Ahm,” he dithered, “I… need to tie my shoelace?” He raised his foot to show the spoon his crocs.
“There’s just this last block left,” Mumbo protested, placing one last piece of glass and wiping his hands clean. “I don’t know about you, but I’m chuffed to bits! I think this looks great.”
Then, as Doc had expected, the Rift retaliated. He quickly backpedalled from Mumbo’s line of sight as the hole in reality consumed their entire cork in moments. Again It mocked him, “burping” another anomaly to turn his mortal body greyscale.
He carefully scraped the warped reality off his fur and coat with a spare few flagella while Mumbo was distracted gaping at the Rift. “Don’t mess with me,” he muttered.
The moustached hermit looked between him and that darned hole. “You had to tie your shoes, right?” he asked, “I have to go water, um, my vault now.”
“Go ahead,” Doc growled. “I want to have some words with this thing.”
A few rockets later, Mumbo had returned to his base.
“Well, that was weird,” he decided, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like that before.”
It certainly wasn’t the most unusual thing he’d ever witnessed, but it was certainly up there. And he wasn’t sure he wanted a portal like that right underneath his endless piles of diamonds.
His brows furrowed. “Why was Doc grey for a moment there, anyway? That was odd.”
Then he shrugged.
“Anyway, I’ve got to lie down on my piles of Grian’s diamonds now.”
As Doc carried out his usual chores, he talked himself up. “This is it,” he said. “No more Mr. Nice Goat. It’s time to pull out the big guns.”
Then he jumped up and took off, in a dramatic and cool fashion.
“Ren!” he knocked on the gates of his friend’s castle, “Come out, man! There’s something I want your help with!”
When Doc had first joined their group, only Xisuma and Etho had known who he truly was. He’d told Xisuma, to make sure there wouldn’t be any unexpected problems, while Etho had somehow found out on his own. It was only in the dust of Area 77 that Ren had found out about Doc’s background. The then-hippie had declared Doc to be “really cool” - which had surprised him at the time, he’d expected torches and tridents - and their friendship had begun in earnest.
In the time since, Ren had learned as much about Doc and his kind as Doc had learned about mortals. Though his brain couldn’t physically comprehend the many-dimensional concepts involved as anything but abstract maths, Ren’s ability to find the most dramatic and over-the-top solutions to mundane problems was incomparable.
Ren also had plenty of experience being unfairly made a mockery of.
In short, if there was anyone else in this world who understood exactly what Doc was going through, and could come up with a suitable way to get revenge, it was Ren.
“Ren! Are you there?”
The king finally poked his head from a second-story window. “Doc? My man! How’ve you been doing? Feels like I haven't seen you at all this month, dude.”
Doc craned his head. “It’s that dang Rift that Grian made! It’s driving me up the wall!”
“What?” Ren shouted. “I can’t hear you!” He leaned out further. “Let me come downstairs and open the door, so I can hear what you’re saying.”
As Doc waited for the door to open, he made sure that the dang hole wasn’t affecting him too badly. Tail - removed. Limbs - made Euclidian. Colour - restored. Chest - exposed. He shifted an apple to his off-hand as he waited.
Where was Ren?
A belated check of his Minkowsky position told him that he’d been stationary in time for the past two minutes. “That dang Rift,” he muttered as time resumed and Ren finally opened the door to his keep.
“Doc! What’s the problem, my man? You said something about a rift?”
“Grian’s Rift,” the goat-man clearly enunciated the capitalisation. “It spilled coffee on me, It made me pink, It even messed with my bush! I can’t take it anymore!”
Ren’s mouth quirked upwards. “Grian’s rift? You mean that portal thing under Mumbo’s base?” His tone seemed almost amused. “How did it do all of that?”
“It’s been messing with my mortal body, man,” Doc groaned. “I try to take a drink of coffee, and then bam, it’s all over my fur.” He tried to be as dramatic as he possibly could. “It’s the absolute worst thing.”
Ren vainly tried to conceal a smile. “Well, that doesn’t sound great, man. What do you need my help with? Do you want me to make a quest for Grian to remove that thing?”
“No, no,” Doc shook it off. He raised an apple to his mouth, intending to chew on it as he thought of what he wanted.
With a twist of reality, his hand spontaneously began resembling an Escher painting. The apple he had grasped was squeezed so hard that it exploded, showering Doc’s face and chest in apple purée.
“I can’t let It get away with this,” he vowed.
The flight from the royal crastle to the Rift was not long.
“So, what’s the plan, man?”
“That’s what I wanted your help with,” Doc admitted. “It’s too strong for me to close It on my own. Mumbo and I tried to seal It up, but that also didn’t work.” A blink of reality found him suddenly thirty metres away, careening into the ground, before he forcefully returned his body to its position in another blink. “Do you have any ideas on how to deal with It?”
“Well,” Ren reasoned, “have you asked the hivemind?”
Doc shook his head. “I can’t let them know about this. They’ll never take me seriously again.”
“I think that’s a bit dramatic,” the king pointed out.
Doc didn’t reply.
“How can we close this Rift, though?” Ren mused to himself. “I don’t know man. Maybe it’s like a Nether Portal? Could we pour water in it to close it?”
Doc thought about it for a few minutes as they approached Dwayne, then shrugged. “It’s worth a shot, I suppose.”
The two hermits descended into the cave and glided to its floor. Ren pulled a water bucket from his Ender chest, and the two exchanged a look.
“Here goes nothing!” the king exclaimed, pouring the water into the Rift, his voice thick with drama.
The water hissed and boiled away in an instant. The two of them stared blankly. Even the humming stopped for a moment, as if even the Rift itself was taken aback by the patheticness of the failed attempt.
“Back to the drawing board, I guess,” Ren decided cheerfully. “Have you tried encasing it in lava?”
The Rift didn’t react to the lava in the slightest.
Doc folded away his extra eyes and fixed Ren with a flat stare.
“Eh,” the king tried to play it off, “Obsidian, maybe? Or maybe you can use that technology of yours to get us some bedrock?”
Everything, from volcanic glass to the very solid underpinnings of this world, crumbled into dust at the edge of eternity.
Ren laughed as Doc tried to get his infinite wings under control.
“Have we tried TNT?”
Mumbo flew down to investigate the sound of explosions below his base. He took one look at the scene, then turned tail and ran.
“Stop laughing at me, you stupid hole!” Doc yelled, brushing the ashes from his fur.
The Rift remained standing, undaunted even as the walls around it fell away.
“Maybe if Gem yells at It, It’ll get scared and run away?”
It didn’t work. At least Gem got a new head for her collection.
“Look man,” Ren decided, at the end of the day. “I don’t know what else we can do. I assume Xisuma already tried his bone magic… maybe Zedaph has an idea?”
“Xisuma?” Doc asked. “I haven’t talked to him about this.”
“You-” Ren seemed at a loss for words. “You haven’t?”
The goat-man shook his head. “Why would I?”
It was the king’s turn to give him a flat stare. “Xisuma said he was going to prune the chunks tomorrow,” he reminded Doc. “You didn’t ask him if he could reset the chunks here to make the Rift go away?”
“Resetting the chunks?” Doc thought to himself. He had thought of it - he’d dismissed the thought because his time travel tech had limits and he didn’t know when Grian had opened the Rift in the first place. “It wont close the rift, though, bro. It’s too strong.”
“It’ll make it go away from here, at least,” Ren pointed out. “Will that not be enough?”
“Ahm,” Doc ruminated. “Sure. We can give it a try. To Xisuma’s place?”
Ren was already in the air.
“Why do you want me to remove those chunks, again?” Xisuma asked.
The king groaned. “Come on dude, it’s a special quest just for you.”
“I know,” the bone mage replied. “I just don’t know why you want them removed. You’ll rebuild everything there, right?”
“Yeah, we will,” Doc confirmed. “Don’t worry about it.”
The bones surrounding them seemed to hum alongside the bone mage. “But that doesn’t really tell me why you want those chunks removed.”
“Well,” Ren began, a smile on his face.
“Laundry!” Doc interjected. “I need those chunks removed to do my laundry.”
Ren looked at him in bewilderment.
Xisuma shrugged. “That makes sense, I suppose.”
The king spun his head around. “It does!?”
“As long as you rebuild everything there, sure.”
Ren wordlessly handed over the quest crystal, then sank his face in his hands.
“This is it, I guess,” the king told his friend hours later, as they replaced the missing section of Grian’s bridge. “Everything’s good now, dude?”
“It feels anticlimactic,” Doc admitted. “I was sure that Rift would find Its way back here. It’s pretty strong.”
Ren chuckled. “Cheer up, maybe it will. You’ll get to have that epic climactic fight you wanted someday.”
“Thanks, man,” the other hermit told him.
They stood back and watched the floating rocks. They had taken down a blueprint of the bridge, and followed it rock-by-rock to rebuild what had been erased along with the Rift.
“Hey, Doc?” Ren asked.
“Yeah?”
“Wanna go have a braai at mine and Keralis’s place?”
“So it has come to this…”
Doc’s footfalls were quiet, muted by the ancient carpets of the subterranean city. His voice didn’t carry to the quivering sensors surrounding him. Still, he knew, his target was aware.
“Rift. Are you ready to die?”
Finally he’d tracked It down, at the end of the world. Buried deep underground in this forgotten corner of reality, It waited.
Though It could not speak, Doc could understand It.
He shook his head.
“Maybe there was a chance for peace,” he admitted. “But then you shouldn’t have touched my bush!”
Finally, unconstrained by concern for the mortals around him, he allowed himself to revel in his true form.
The material plane quivered. Reality was torn asunder, replaced with a mad tangle of impossible shapes and indescribable colours. There were no mortal creatures around to see him, but if there were, the lucky ones would have been the ones to flee.
Doc’s true form wasn’t dangerous because it couldn’t be understood. It was dangerous because it could. Anyone looking past the assault on their senses could see the sheer might that Doc could bring to bear if he so wished - and the madness of the space between universes that had created him.
Finally, the Rift responded. Unfolding like a kaleidoscope, a riot of hues sharpening solid spacetime into infinite teeth and fangs. Not to consume, but to make Itself impossible to remove without inflicting pain upon oneself.
Doc didn’t care.
A million wings beat at the sides of the portal, shaking the cavern. In a moment every millennia-old structure in the city shattered into dust from the pressure wave. Sculk growths popped like balloons, and the few surviving clusters burrowed further into the deep to escape the catastrophe.
A million wings were pierced and shattered by a million sharp spikes, falling apart into scales and feathers as the Rift defended itself.
Doc still didn’t care.
A hundred thousand clawed limbs, organic and mechanical and everything in between, grabbed the spikes and tore them free. They grabbed the sides of the fractal Rift, pulling It shut, impaling Its inner space on Its own teeth, the twisted fragments of frozen time It had hardened into Its fangs.
The Rift slammed open once more, ichor evaporating into the dust-strewn air. Most of the cave finally shuddered and collapsed, burying Doc’s body beneath a thousand tonnes of rock, but the Rift forced the air above Itself to hold.
Yet still, Doc continued.
The hermit slipped out from the hair-think cracks between the collapsed stones, his body stretching out sinuously to encircle the portal. He tightened the coil around the bent and broken spikes of the Rift, squeezing It shut with ever greater force.
In a single moment, every bent spike turned straight, piercing great gashes through scale, fur, and skin. They split and multiplied, shredding Doc’s body into ribbons. The ribbons tangled and writhed like snakes, trying to return to his central mass - but refused by the widening maw of the Rift. What had once been a crack now gaped open like a maelstrom, stretching as wide as the remaining space allowed - then wider still, as the rocks flew back up the timestream, recreating the cave as it was.
Impaled in a million places and bleeding ichor, Doc smiled to himself.
He was a creeper, after all.
A cataclysmic blast lit up the giant cavern. The force was almost entirely directed upwards, blowing a hole straight to the surface and scarring the atmosphere. The Rift had no time to brace as every defence It had created for Itself had turned into Its own trap - as everything burned away, and the blast tore It wider than It should have ever been, shredding It.
Surrounded by dripping ichor, Doc’s body reformed from the ashes like a phoenix. It was not entirely his mortal body, but little else was still intact - though his wings gleamed still with a thousand eyes.
“I win,” he declared, approaching the last remaining fragment of the Rift. It was barely a metre across.
His claws grabbed the edges of the portal and forcefully pulled It shut, unlatching It from their reality forevermore.
It was over.
Doc took a deep breath, and took off into the air. “That took way too much time,” he decided. “I still need to water my tomatoes today!” He ascended through the hole they’d tore and into the sunlight, turning in the direction of his perimeter.
On the edge of the cavern, TFC picked up his pickaxe.
“Huh, what about that!” he laughed to himself. “I certainly wasn’t expecting to see Doc going all out like that.” He took out a torch and placed it on the wall, measuring out the distance from the previous one.
He enjoyed watching a good scrap as much as the next guy, but it was time to get back to his mine.