"So you... You find yourself lost here too, am I correct in saying this?"
"What are you talking about? I'm dead, let's just leave it at that."
"No. Well..." He hesitates. "No." The voice firms. "You're stuck, you're not right."
"I've never been 'right.'"
"Are you the one who did this to me?"
At the sudden change in tone, Ranger snaps his head up, his eyes open, and he sees standing very still in front of him a man. A rather young man, with an unkempt appearance and deep bags underneath his eyes, absolutely drained so much in color that Ranger could swear they glowed in their dark, silent surroundings.
"I-I've never seen you before."
"And I have never seen you before." His eyes drift to the side, and sudden movement touches his lips, tugs them up in a musing, thoughtless smile.
A smile that turns Ranger's body cold.
Ranger's breath turns heavy and labored. "Where am I?!" he screams, suddenly terrified.
"Why," The man looks back up at him, "you're not anywhere I know of, that's for sure." As he speaks, his head jerks in rapid succession, and his tranquil attitude is broken by a snap of his arm instinctually toward his neck; a wince shatters his smile, a gasp breaks his words.
"What's your name?! What are you?!"
"My name is Hem - H-Hemm -" As he gets this name out, his eyes enlarge, and his head jerks again hard downward. "My name is Herobrine. I am human." His right arm comes up and fully extends out in front of him, hand splayed toward the college sophomore as if reaching out for help that he will never get. With a close of those empty eyes, the man quietly whispers something, the words lost as they rasp in his throat.
Ranger blinks and stares hard at the young man in front of him as his facial features change, "I am human, but..." melt into an anguished look of agony as he collapses into a digital heap of messy coding and pixels that silently shiver into the blackness around them - "I doubt I will be for long." His white eyes flash a solid streak of light before the remainder of his upper body destroys itself into the epitome of nothing.
At the sudden sight, Ranger screams and begins to run, run harder than he has ever run in his entire life, only to feel his knees snap beneath him and the ground torrent like an agitated whirlwind of burning, scalding energy, like the lava he found in that cave. His body numbs, and yet Ranger could still feel the tearing apart of his reality as his physical body crackles and separates into glitching piles of unrecognizable gibberish for code. The young man closes his eyes, sucking in his last breaths as a frightened hyperventilation, and then everything falls silent.
Wait-!
Hero...brine...?
