Unrecognizable

~~Prologue~~

Begin date: June 22, 2020
End date: November 3, 2021

Grian's eyes fluttered open as he woke up to a still silence. He glanced out the window of his mansion-- it was still rather dark out, nearly dawn. He didn't quite care, however, and decided to get up anyways. There was not much hope left for sleep, after all. Not now that he was awake.

Grian hadn't been getting much sleep recently, he noticed. He'd often lie in bed for hours staring at the ceiling, then wake up long before dawn in the mornings. That was no shocker for him, though. Not with the current... Situation.

He sat up in his bed, kicking his feet over the side. Standing up, he dug through one of his chests to grab a few golden carrots for breakfast. He nibbled on one, the sweetness of the carrot melding with the rather tart tang of the gold, as he made his way to the front of his mansion. Looking at it from the outside, it appeared that he had not worked on it much for a while.

And, well, there was good reason for that. He hadn't been working on it much. He had barely done more than rough detailing over a good bit of time. Three months, to be exact.

Why had he not worked on his mansion, or anything, for that matter? The answer was simple, really.

It had been three months. Three long, terrible, god-awful months. Three months since what? Three months since the hermits had last been completely at ease. Three months since tensions hadn't been high. Three months since Mumbo Jumbo disappeared.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Mumbo Jumbo had been missing for three months. The last anyone had heard of him was a simple message he left in his base. On a sign simply read the words,

"Working on a new project."

That was the last any of the Hermits had seen of the moustached man, and it certainly wasn't helpful.

Of course, no-one had worried at first; a few days without sight of a hermit was pretty normal, nothing to worry about. It wasn't uncommon to disappear for a bit while mining or such.

No, Mumbo's absence was not noted, or acknowledged even, for a good two and a half weeks. And even then, the Hermits had not truly worried, per say, but more along the lines of casual recognition. Some even joked about it, with Iskall going so far as to make a missing poster for him. That earned a number of laughs.

Soon, Mumbo had even made it into the Hermiton Herald. By the time a month had gone by, most of the light-hearted chit-chat had dwindled. A few Hermits, Grian included, had started to worry just a bit. Projects usually didn't take this long, not without any surfacing whatsoever.

Pretty soon after that, a few of the more anxious Hermits decided to search Mumbo's base. What had happened to him? The Hermits respawned when the died, so that was out of the question. If Mumbo had somehow perished, everyone would know and he would simply have just respawned in his base, lest he had brought a bed with him... wherever he had gone.

But the Hermits had found nothing but emptiness in Mumbo's bases. Nothing but neglect and thick dust. It was apparent that he hadn't been there in a long time. The only thing that was different was the increasingly large collection of minecart messages from Grian, who had been sending one everyday for about a month and a half. But, the way they sat awkwardly on one another, erractic and random, proved that Mumbo hadn't even looked at the messages.

Dejected, the Hermits abandoned the attempts at finding their friend. He'd turn up eventually, right? ...right?

At two months without any Mumbo sightings, even the more lax Hermits were starting to really worry. People didn't just... Go missing. Especially not someone like Mumbo. Had something happened to him?

Over time, the hopes about Mumbo suddenly reappearing began to fade. The usual energy of HermitCraft was slowly lost, until seeing a genuine smile on the face of a Hermit, especially Grian--who was seemingly taking this worse than the rest, was rather uncommon.

After three months, activity was mostly back to normal, but a heavy sense of unease hung over the Hermits in place of the excited sparks that used to cover HermitCraft. Hermits slowly went back to their daily lives, but many things such as pranks were highly neglected due to the negative atmosphere. Of course, some Hermits tried to lighten the mood with new minigames, but they seemed to have backfired, with some of the others getting snappy, saying 'they shouldn't be joking around in a time like this.'

Tensions were high and excitement was low in HermitCraft. Mumbo's sudden disappearance was rather dampening on the mood of the Hermits. Seeing as their friend had gone missing nearly without a trace, anyone or no-one could've been responsible, or at least knew something, so some Hermits had even begun to grow suspicious of their friends.

Needless to say, HermitCraft was not a pleasant place at the time.

-(Author's Ramblimg)-

Because logic, I decided to just compress the two parts. Why? Because having the prologue in two parts is stupid, that's why.