Chapter Text
The portal closed. Dandelion only turned her back for a few moments when the click and shatter of the portal alerted Dandelion to an empty frame. The sulfur from the soul sand valley ghosts through the area where the purple swirls of the overworld stood.
She didn't panic, after all, one of her teammates could surely come and re-light it for her. She would venture a bit in the nether looking for bastons or fortresses, grab some of their stuff, and come back home. No problem with that.
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Arms and pockets full of nether rack, quatrz, and some odd treasures Dandelion starts to retrace her steps to the portal.
She stops to trade some gold with piglins remembering the portal, and opens her (very badly made) com.
As the technology blinks to life and she navigates over to their teams group chat she doesn't notice the brute eyeing her down.
A sharp pain explodes from her back as something rips through her clothes, skin, and muscles. The creature barrels on and Dandelion falls to her knees on a ledge over looking a pool of lava.
Feeling the blood trickle down her back sticking to her clothing and pulling it with it she braces her hands against the surprisingly cold nether rack floor. Her eyes cloud with tears as her brain registers the wound. Dandelion can only imagine what it looks like.
She closes her eyes and she's back in the no where with Mother standing over her whilst she burns in the cold air of nothing.
"For practice" mother will say "a puppet must not break until its strings are cut" she would lecture "replacements must be strong" Mother would replay. The same speech she's heard since forever.
Dandelion blinks slowly, painfully and the lava comes back into view, she can feel themself getting weaker, arms starting to shake, dipping forward. With her last bits of strength she tries to pull herself backwards, or Atleast away from the edge...
Their arms give out right then and flailing she falls. Her eyes are closed, but that never mattered when she can feel themself getting heat of it getting closer, burning her already. She waits for a splash, the sound never comes only an eruption of pain everywhere.
Head above the lava she feels her skin and clothing being singed, worse than mother's claws ripping her skin, remaking her, worse than the cold nothing of the nothing.
Then she wakes up. She wakes up on the edge of a different nether bank, the lava seems to reach for their burnt and aching body more. Dandelion lays on the nether rack for so long that she truly loses how long. There's no sun nor moon in the nether to tell time only crackling fire, reaching lava, and violent creatures.
How pissed off did Midas have to be to make this realm...WHO pissed off Midas into making this realm...
After an eternity and deciding that their burns are, in-fact, very much not going to cool down or heal in the nether Dandelion peels herself ofc the nether rack leaving a steaming pile of blood in her wake.
"Gross" she mumbles standing up on limp legs. She stumbles many times and falls many more but by luck or cruel fate, she makes it bake to the nether portal with little trouble.
Expect, because she's an idiot, the portal is still closed and now she has no communicator. Which results in waiting. So much fucking waiting! Dandelion resorts to sounds grains of soul sand to pass time and try to not pass out from blood loss.
Mother is reassuring in the lanterns. Dandelion tunes back into what mother is saying as she counts the sand. It's mostly how she can patch it up, because "puppets are durable, always able to be fixed" always able to be fixed...
230,485 grains of sand later and the click of a relit portal alerts Dandelion. Noah and someone from the base she hasn't learned the name of yet (why would she went she'll be gone next cycle) appear out of the purple swirls and grab her. They help them up to the portal and down back to base.
Dandelion lays in the single bed they have in the base and falls into a restless sleep. No position is comfortable and her burns still throb, the wound on her back screams but yet she still sleeps.