#darkle writes

Well I hit 100 followers yesterday, but like most of hermitblr I was a bit too obsessed with Moon Big to bother.

Today, though! Today feels like a day we all need some fun, fluffy, lighthearted fanfic. So here ya go, enjoy the fluffiest thing I've ever written in my life.

Doc notices her out of the corner of his eye as he stands talking with Ren, Mumbo, and xB at the new spawn point. But he doesn’t think anything of it until he hears a faint tap on his cyborg arm, just above his bicep. He turns, but by that time Gem has already disappeared again, her giggle floating behind her.

“Huh. That was weird,” he says.

“Ya got...somethin’. Right there,” xB says, and taps his own arm, grinning.

Doc twists his head to look down at his arm. There’s a bright yellow smiley-face sticker now firmly affixed to the metal plate. He sighs.

Mumbo laughs. “You’d better be careful, Doc. You know Grian’s gonna see that and decide he needs to out-do Gem.”

It was the third knock on my door this morning.

I sighed and stared at Paisley. Her golden eyes blinked back at me, unfazed. A year ago when I’d first adopted her, this many interruptions to our daily schedule would have had her bolting under my bed, only able to be coaxed out by a crunchy treat.

Ever since Pen had moved in across the street, though, this was just another part of the daily routine.

I sighed and got up from my cross legged position on the floor, going over to the front door, and pulled it open.

A woman in carefully applied makeup, clutching a tall Starbucks cup in one hand and wearing athleisure that screamed “I have money to burn but I want to look like I shop at thrift stores”, blinked at me. She said slowly, “Are you—“

“Penrod Eckleman, professional witch?” I grinned at her. “Whyever would you think that, ma’am?”

Her eyes widened just a fraction, and I knew exactly what she was thinking. Long black dress, black lace cardigan, skull earrings, anhk necklace, studded bracelets, black lipstick...surely I must be the fabled witch.

As if on cue, the front door of the house across the road burst open, and Pen burst out onto his porch, looking very un-witch-like with his perfect angled nose and his pretty-boy pout and the bangs that fell across his face like a Korean pop singer’s—even though he was only one-quarter Korean. He waved to us, the movement making sunlight catch the gold thread woven into his waistcoat.

“Good morning again, Penny!” He shouted. “And—Mrs Ainsbury, isn’t it? I believe you’re my ten o’clock appointment?”

Mrs Ainsbury looked just about like this shock was going to knock her out of her glittery Nike wedge sneakers. She looked back and forth between us, then started drifting across the street.

Penrod met her halfway, smiling like Joel Osteen. “Terribly sorry about that, Google always mixes up our addresses, I’ve put in complaints but...big tech, you know how they are.” As he led her across the road to his house, he glanced over his shoulder at me and mouthed “Thanks, I owe you.”

I held up two fingers.

He nodded.

However, I finalized today what I’m working on next, and I thought I’d give you guys a heads up on what you have to look forward to!

1) “the MCC fic”. No title as of yet. Dream takes Scott, Ren, Pearl, Cub, and the MCC server hostage because he’s pissed off over the whole “Grian Dreamslayer” bit. Grian, False, HBomb, and Martyn team up and go through new (deadly) iterations of MCC games in order to rescue their friends.

2) Snapshots of the Apocalypse. What if, instead of abandoning the server, the hermits had built bunkers and hunkered down? Intertwined ficlets about each hermit as they await the approaching apocalypse.

3) finishing up Slow Fuse, which is a very, veryyyy outdated Empires fic about how the roseblings are twins who can feel each other’s emotions, and the spiral fWhip goes down when Gem is kidnapped. (non-canon obviously, but closer to canon than ETTG). (Like I said. Outdated. But I still love it so I wanna work on it.)

I’m also diving back into original work with a story about a village girl who knows the magic of plants and bees, and just wants to be left to her own devices tending her garden and apprenticing to the village herbalist. But an ancient fae boundary line runs through the village green, and one day, two fae factions show up to argue over it—which is never good, considering fae tend to get a bit…destructive, when they argue.