Chapter Text
SUBURBIA was proud of its server.
It was one of the biggest casual servers in the hub. A good place for those who did not feel the need to adventure and wanted a sanctuary.
Its admins and moderators were good at keeping people safe. They were the ones that watched for harm against the server's players.
SUBURBIA, being a simple Artificial Intelligence, was not given any parameters for interaction with players. Instead, it controls the day-to-day commands and plug ins. Hundreds of routines are running in its processing cores at any given point, problems being solved in an orderly manner with pre-determined responses and answers.
Until SUBURBIA ran into a problem.
There was a well-known hole to the Void on the server. Many players would jump in for an exciting thrill that was not a danger to their lives. After all, the AI would simply teleport them back to their designated spawn point as soon as they hit the event horizon of the Void.
Items and mob entities fared worse. The protocol for those instructed SUBURBIA to destroy them, scattering their code into the Void. Not that many mobs could be found in that area. Too much of it was lit up to spawn anything and most mods dealt with stragglers quickly.
But something new fell into the Void today.
An unidentified Thing.
At first, the AI put minimal resources on the issue, doing a quick scan and readying the commands for whichever category the thing fell into.
However, the scan returned nothing.
Or rather, it returned something that did not fit into its routine.
SUBURBIA moved its resources around, freeing up a portion of its third core processor to examine the issue in more detail.But a closer look and further scanning had it freeing the remaining memory and the entire server stuttered for a fraction of a second as it did so.
It still had 63 other core processors to run the rest of the server. It could afford losing the one.
Upon further examination, the Thing that fell into the Void was something it struggled to categorize. It was an entity, marking off the if conditions for items, but it lacked any accompanying entity description tags.
Its code was structured like a player. The Thing even had an IGN: GRIAN. The GRIAN was missing chunks of its code, however, and SUBURBIA lagged as it ran through its conditions on the Void routine. Even if it appeared to be a player, it could not categorize it as such without the entity tag. That would create too many loopholes in its protocols and open the server up to exploitation.
As it ran through its conditions and "if" statements a few more times, it realized an error: the Admins had never given it an "else" condition.
It did not know what to do with the GRIAN.
The routine looped a few times, never reaching the correct conditions for the exit, before SUBURBIA manually stopped it. It skipped past the routine loop, moving onto the next condition list it had. If it did not have a solution for the GRIAN falling into the void, it must not be what happened.
The next list in its routine was the conditions and commands for trans-server travel. If it had emotions or a body, SUBURBIA would cheer as it realized the server travel routine did not contain entity-specific conditions. Only conditions for entities or items.
Satisfied with an answer, SUBURBIA prepared to transport the GRIAN to another server. But it encountered an error: The transport had no destination. That was hardly an issue.
SUBURBIA used the GRIAN's IGN to search for whitelisted servers. But it came up with no answers. Further research into its databases found a relative, PEARLESCENTMOON. A family exception rule was on the whitelist for her home server.
It was easy enough to send the GRIAN there, along with the Metal Thing it was inside of. After all, the protocol stated that entities were transported with their items across servers.
All of this happened in a fraction of a second.
It took SUBURBIA 1 tick to realize the issue and dedicate resources to it.
5 ticks to ponder the solution.
2 ticks to transport all of the GRIAN's data to the HERMITCRAFT server.
By the time a second had passed, SUBURBIA had re-dedicated its resources to the server at large, noted the server transfer on its log, and moved on with its day.
Meanwhile, the GRIAN, due to incomplete code, was unable to spawn at the server's central spawn point. In fact, HERMITCRAFT's much simpler, younger AI did not know how to handle it any more than SUBURBIA did. It had a fraction of the routines and databases to pull information from. And half of its memory was occupied by DOCM77's actions, struggling to keep up before the new Thing came in. So it did the first thing it came up with.
The GRIAN's spawn was set to a random string of numbers HERMITCRAFT found in the entity's code, lagging as it tried to decipher the information sent to it, far from the rest of the players. The incoming entity was never logged. The admin never thought he needed the logs outside of player transfer and never set them up.
In another world, the GRIAN would be spawned far too high, crash to the earth, and lay bleeding until found by a sympathetic TANGOTEK.
In this world, it crashed on a different island, not far from the main island, with much less height. Enough to break the cage and injure a wing, but not enough to cause significant damage. Well, not as significant damage.
And it's from there we begin our story.