Chapter Text
Before he was Joe Hills, he was something else.
Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that Joe Hills came later, like a name placed gently over something older. Rebranding, he would call it.
Long before wandering, there had only been Herobrine.
Not a player.
Not an admin.
Not a developer.
Something in between, though closer to the first than the last.
Players understood that their world was made of code. Most of them did, at least. It was a simple truth of existence, like gravity or the sky. The blocks beneath their feet, the mobs in the forests, the weather overhead. It was all structured, built from lines and lines of instructions quietly running beneath everything.
But knowing the world was code and seeing it were very different things.
Admins could see it, if they wanted. They could peel back the surface of the world and manipulate its structure directly, moving blocks, altering rules, shaping the server itself with deliberate effort. It required focus, attention, and permission. Admins were powerful, but their power was bounded by the servers they governed.
Beyond them were the Developers.
The Developers were something else entirely.
Omniscient.
Limitless.
They existed beyond the worlds themselves, able to alter reality without restriction.
At least, that was how it appeared.
Herobrine knew better.
But that knowledge didn’t matter much.
Because Herobrine wasn’t one of them.
He had abilities similar to an admin’s, yes, but the way he interacted with the world was fundamentally different.
Admins edited code. Herobrine lived inside it.
He didn’t have to choose when to see it. He always did.
Every tree, every cave, every movement of every creature around him appeared not just as matter, but as flowing lines of information. The code moved constantly, shifting and responding to every action taken within the world.
To a player, the world was solid.
To Herobrine, it was current.
He moved through it the way a fish moved through water, effortlessly following its flow. Admins could fight the current. Change it. Force it to bend in ways it hadn’t originally intended.
Herobrine rarely did.
Not because he couldn’t.
But because when he tried, things had a tendency to… blur.
The lines of code were so close to him that even the smallest adjustment sometimes rippled outward further than expected. Changing one thing might alter ten others.
So he mostly left the current alone. Observation was safer and easier, plain and simple.
And there was always plenty to observe.
Because Herobrine could do something else most beings couldn’t.
He could move between servers.
For players, traveling between worlds was inconvenient. They could only join servers they had access to. Public ones, whitelisted communities, or private worlds they built themselves.
Private servers tended to become lonely. Eventually, most players sought out other places.
Herobrine never had that problem.
He slipped between servers the same way he moved through code itself.
Effortlessly.
No permissions required.
No invitations necessary.
He simply followed the currents of the code until the world around him dissolved and reformed somewhere new.
He wandered like that for a very long time.
Across countless worlds.
Some empty.
Some thriving with civilization.
Some peaceful enough that entire towns formed around quiet lakes and open plains.
Others descended into chaotic messes of half-finished builds and endless player conflict.
Herobrine watched them all. Sometimes he did small things when he grew bored.
He would remove every leaf from a forest just to see how the trees looked without them.
Or dig straight downward through layers of stone until he reached the lowest parts of the world.
Occasionally he built things, strange structures placed where players would eventually discover them.
It amused him when they reacted.
Most of the time, though, the players never saw him at all.
Mobs ignored him.
Players overlooked him.
He existed just slightly outside their perception.
Which suited him fine.
At least, it did.
For a while.
Because eventually something began to change.
At first it was small.
A strange sensation in his chest when he fell too far from a cliff. A sharp ache when a skeleton’s arrow struck him directly.
Herobrine paused the first time it happened.
Pain.
That was… new.
He tested it cautiously. Jumping from higher ledges, standing still when mobs attacked.
Eventually he confirmed it.
He could feel it now. Not just pain, either.
Hunger appeared soon after.
Then fatigue.
The world had begun treating him like a player.
Herobrine found the development fascinating.
For a while he spent most of his time experimenting.
Testing the limits of his new physical form.
Learning what changed and what stayed the same.
Eventually curiosity led him somewhere slightly more dangerous.
He tried to examine his own code.
Player code was notoriously difficult to manipulate, even for admins. The deeper parts of it were tightly structured, resistant to alteration.
Herobrine assumed he might have an easier time with it.
He was wrong.
Looking through his own code was like staring into a maze of shifting lines that resisted direct contact. Every time he tried to isolate one piece, ten others reacted unpredictably.
Still.
He learned things. Sometimes the lessons were unpleasant. One of the most significant discoveries came much later, after another ill-advised experiment.
By that point Herobrine had begun calling himself Joe Hills.
The name had appeared somewhat randomly during one of his wandering periods.
It sounded respectable. Approachable.
Joe liked it.
The problem was that Joe had also recently discovered something else.
He could bleed.
That revelation led to a series of experiments that, in retrospect, might have been poorly planned.
Joe had been careful, of course. Small cuts. Controlled observations. Watching the way the damage appeared within his code structure.
But eventually he made a mistake.
The wound became infected.
At least, that was the closest word Joe could find for it.
The physical symptoms were unpleasant. Fatigue, heat, dizziness, but the real problem appeared inside his code. A cluster of corrupted lines had formed, flickering erratically between normal instructions.
Joe stared at them thoughtfully.
Deleting them seemed unwise. He had a habit of breaking more than he intended when editing code directly.
So instead he attempted something gentler.
Cleaning.
He smoothed the corrupted lines carefully, reshaping them back into what he believed they were supposed to look like.
The process hurt.
A sharp stinging sensation every time he touched the code.
Still, he continued.
Eventually the corruption vanished. But when Joe examined the finished result, something looked wrong. Too neat. Too orderly.
Player code was usually messy, small imperfections scattered throughout the structure.
This looked… scripted.
Like an NPC.
Joe frowned.
That wouldn’t do.
So he nudged one line slightly out of place. Just enough to introduce a little natural imperfection. Unfortunately, he wasn’t paying close enough attention when he did it.
The adjustment rippled outward. Not through his physical structure, but through something else entirely.
His mind.
At first he didn’t understand what had happened.
Then the emotions hit.
All of them.
Before that moment, Joe had operated mostly on logic. He could feel things in a distant sort of way, but they had never dominated his decisions.
Now they flooded through him all at once.
Joy.
Frustration.
Curiosity.
Loneliness.
It was Overwhelming.
Joe lay down in the grass of whatever world he had been standing in and stared up at the sky for a very long time.
“…well,” he muttered eventually.
“That might have been a mistake.”
Still.
He recovered. The infection faded. The emotional noise settled into something manageable.
Eventually Joe fell asleep. And when he woke up, he was somewhere else.
At first he didn’t realize it.
But when Joe sat up and looked around, the difference became immediately obvious.
Sand stretched in every direction. Tall sandstone walls surrounded him, rising so high he couldn’t see their tops.
Joe blinked.
“…that’s unusual.”
The ground beneath him was glass. Below it, lava churned slowly. Torches lined the walls. And there were signs.
Lots of signs.
Joe stood, brushing sand off his coat, and walked over to read them.
The first sign read:
Welcome to..
Joe tilted his head slightly. Another sign below it read:
SUPER HOSTILE
Joe hummed. A warning, he thought.
LEGENDARY
“Well,” he said quietly.
“This looks interesting.”