Chapter Text
"Heeey, Joel!" Tango exclaimed. "Welcome to Season 10!"
"Thank you, Tango, thank you," said Joel. He was trying not to show it, since that would be Not Cool, but he was really excited to be on Hermitcraft.
Tango plopped himself down on the grass next to Joel. "So," he said, "what are you on the run from? Do we need to add another entry to the Handbook?"
What handbook? Joel hadn't heard anything about a handbook.
"What handbook?" he asked Tango.
"Oh, have you not received yours yet?" Tango asked. He reached into his inventory and pulled out a thick, fraying book. "Here, you can borrow mine for now. I have it almost memorized anyway."
"I have to read?" Joel whined. Hermitcraft had just lost about fifty Coolness Points.
"It's not that long -"
"This is like a hundred pages! What the heck?"
"Yeah, well, y'know there's a lot of Hermits, and everyone's threatened by someone. This isn't even all the evil things out there, just the ones that have a link to one of us."
Joel, reluctantly, took the book. It was almost falling apart. Tango must've read it a lot, which was lame. Its cover was square black leather that read: The Hermit Handbook of Potential Threats and Incursions.
Joel flipped through it, skimming the chapter titles. "Black Sun," "Blue Stars," "Business Suits." There seemed to be twenty or so entries in all. Then he reached the final page and stared.
"Why the heck do you have an entry on Herobrine?"
"In case he shows up again," Tango replied. "Although I'm not sure why he's still in there, our friendly little be-eyeballed guy could take him down without breaking a sweat. Even Doc or Xisuma could take him down, and they're just players. Well, X is just a player..."
"But Herobrine's a myth!" Joel protested.
"Yeah, that's what I thought too, before Grian came here."
Of course it was Grian. Joel was willing to bet that half the entries in this blemming book were here because of Grian.
"The entries are arranged in order of importance, by the way," said Tango. "All the dangerous, hostile, powerful little boogers are listed at the front, so that you read them first and remember them better."
Joel, feeling contrary, started to flip through the entries backwards. He was trying not to think about the fact that Herobrine was real and was the last entry. What he saw in the book didn't help him feel any better.
"So why are you joining this server?" Tango asked again.
"Uh, 'cause my friends invited me?" Grian, Scar, Gem, Impulse, Tango, Pearl... Joel had a lot of reasons to move to Hermitcraft.
"Wait, you haven't ticked off an elite group of hackers or an eldritch entity?"
"Um, no?" said Joel. "Why would I do that? That sounds - uncool."
"Huh," Tango said thoughtfully. "I think that's a first for this server."
He flapped a hand at the book. "Read it," he said seriously. "Front to back. You need to know what you're getting into."
Joel sighed and flipped to the front of the book.