Ranger's eyes snap open once more, and he looks around, his entire body shivering despite there being no temperature around him. Around him being nothing he's ever seen before - filled with computer icons, folders, and data, collapsing around him like broken waterfalls.

Standing shakily, he glances around, arms hugging himself. To his right is a solid expanse of blue, pixelated in such a way that it might suggest an image if it wasn't garbled. To his left is blackness: a single plane of blackness so deep and distressing that Ranger automatically looks back toward the blue image.

Exhaustion weighing heavily on his burning eyes, exhaustion he cannot figure out the reason to, the student blinks hard and stumbles forward. "W-where...am I-?" He glances around, uncertain, but when his eyes catch on the familiar icons, those aptly-named folders -

"What?"

- he had a feeling he knew.

"English Grammar," "Secret," "Minecraft." Of course, "English Grammar" was really his hacking resources and tools, and "Secret" was really his Shoujo manga files, renamed to look like school programs...

Ranger, with a sudden motion that momentarily warps his looming surroundings, tears off into a sprint, away from his frozen position of tiredness, away to those folder icons. No, no, no no no no no! NO!

He reaches out, grabs at one, and as soon as his biometrics touch the flat, too-smooth surface, a large window explodes from it. Ranger gasps for breath, struggling through the heavy feeling weighing him down and the sudden lightheadedness gracing his head; closing his eyes briefly to clear himself, he inhales and exhales before turning his attention to the school programs listed away inside the file folder. His hand shakes as he stares at them. No, no, it can't be, this has too much coincidence...

"...please, let it be all just a horrible nightmare!" he shrieks, double-tapping a finger onto one of the programs. The entire area around him - except for that black box - changes with a slow-motion disintegration, changing, transforming, tearing itself apart only to be rebuilt into a fluffy black-and-white still of a manga girl with large eyes locking lips with a bishounen man.

A laugh breaks out of him, an odd, strained laugh with no humor left in it at all. No joy, no lightheartedness, only a staining darkness that has bled into the college boy since he forged his high school certificate. No, even before then. When he was expelled.

Unbeknownst to him, the black panel behind him flickers to life, crackling with white static, yet the image seared on it is plain enough:

The college boys' dorm. Tony rocking silently on the bed as two paramedics carry a sheeted figure on a gurney out through the open door. He finally gets up, face greyed and as dead as Ranger, and walks up to the laptop still fried on the desk, until his the only thing visible is his torso. And then, with an odd silence, the picture narrows and falls black.

Ranger's breaths rise and fall, and his shattered laughter breaks off to quiet mutters as he moves his favorite shoujo manga out of the way and gazes over to the "Minecraft" icon, its plain white design forever marking Ranger's life as a hacker. He stares hard at it, eyes blank, and his murmurs begin to take the shape of coherent sentences as he nods to himself.

That was Herobrine - the real Herobrine - I met bac-back in that dark place. That man...that pathetic young man got to legitimately beta test Minecraft? Play right next to Notch?

I can control the icons in here, right? So I can play Minecraft while in here, right?! Herobrine got in here the same way I did, so I bet he's already figured this thing out too, before me!

Gasping, a sudden dizzy wave hitting him, Ranger leaps up and grabs at the icon with both of his hands, his knuckles white, nausea sinking deep in him; yet, despite this, he remains firmly attached to the game. The sick student reaches up one hand gingerly, curls it into a tight fist, and hits it smack in the center twice in succession. Once the second impact connects with the flat white square, he screams and disintegrates into Minecraft, leaving only a grinning boy and girl in the world of his computer.


In a stained location, full of glitched pixels and fragmented coding, Hemming sits curled up in a small ball, head down, eyes narrowed with a vague sense of emptiness. All around him plays a screen capture of Herobrine's death at the bloodied hands of DiamondShiner74, repeated over and over until Hemming has become numbed to its existence.

"Who's the wicked one here, DiamondShiner74, me or you? Of course, it all depends, but..." He chuckles dryly and manages a false smile. "I'd like to see you again..." One hand comes up to empty air, his fingers loosely trailing but coming up without his brother grabbing it, without his brother's reassurance that everything will be alright -

Markus' smile comes alive in Hemming's fractured mind, sparking to life inside his splintered memory. "- come on and beta test Minecraft with me."

Hemming stands up abruptly, throwing out his fisted hands with enough force to shatter the boringly-repetitive death sequence. As he tips his head back, his eyes flash red for just a moment before settling into a permanent white stare. "If only to get my revenge on you."

A malevolent program follows his steps as he walks through the broken pictures into a world beyond human touch.

He gazes unforgivingly at the strings of coding linking every in-game element of Minecraft, then seems to soften slightly. "This is the only home I have now, isn't it?" The young man sullenly stares upward and mutters to himself. "DiamondShiner74 doesn't belong here. But I'm sure he's already found that he can access Minecraft, and if that child destroys the only home I have left, then that would be undesirable," he hisses.

Silently, Hemming drifts along, watching out for the one tile that'll be his ticket to beat DiamondShiner74. In the far back of the field of game elements, he finally catches that one he always heard from Markus: "We, as players in the game, are called 'Entities.' Depending on the type of Entity, they can range in terms of health and solidity, but those are just one of the types of game mechanics in Minecraft. I figured that while you were beta testing this, you might as well know about some of the coding aspects of it!"

Hemming rolls his eyes. "I can't believe I even remembered that. Oh well," A smile touches his lips, "I can thank dear Markus now." A sigh escapes his lips as he stares at the floating tile, linking with countless other objects and coding strings. "Entities." With an odd hum, he brushes his hand against the coding strings for the player as he makes his way to the "Entity" aspect of Minecraft. The coding flares up and begins to break apart, crumbling and glitching into a garbled mess of data nearly unreadable.

The abandoned brother of Markus presses both palms against the tile, then closes his eyes as he pixelates away. The ride was quick, jolting, and Hemming finds himself in an even deeper mess of binary he can't even read. Before he could do so much as twitch, however, a prompt window comes up blinking with only a keyboard and one word:

Username_:

H

E

R

O

B

R

I

N

E

Hemming relaxes his shoulders, smiles, and allows his human body to disintegrate away as a new world builds up around him, encasing his old body in an unfamiliar new one consisting of geometric shapes and an uncomfortable hit box. With a snort, he accesses his own coding and casts aside the bulky rectangle. Welcome home.

Hemming is dead. Herobrine is not.

"DiamondShiner74!" I say, craning my head to look at the dark expanse of "sky" in the Minecraft data realm. "I won't let you destroy my home, or my brother's creation. You've found an enemy, Diamond~, and that enemy is me!" My scream echoes in the entire web of Minecraft, reaching out beyond computer systems to where

DiamondShiner74 stands in his own web of coding, manipulating strings, destroying links, and altering his basic "Steve" avatar into something a little more abnormal - a little thing with stark white eyes and generic features.

"I'm waiting, Markus! Don't disappoint me, 'kay?"