Zed watched as False boated up to his mountain, mind still reeling from everything. He vaguely remembered being more excited the first time this had happened, bouncing up and down and waving to her. He figured he should probably be doing that now, but the one attempt he made felt weak and artificial, so he opted to just wait as False parked her boat and clambered up the mountain. Zed realised numbly that he didn’t even remember what he’d wanted the slime for.
As False came into earshot, he heard her talking about being scared that human experimentation would happen. Little did she know that she’d pretty much hit the nail on the head. Once the two made eye contact, however, she trailed off. Zed didn’t remember that part. Did the fact that he was still recovering from a painful death really show that much?
“Cool place you got here!” False greeted, breaking the momentary silence.
“Thanks—uh, thanks!” Zed replied, caught off-guard by being suddenly yanked out of his train of thought.
False handed him the four slime balls with a smile.
“Also thanks!” Zed said again, at a loss for anything else. As False began the trek down the mountain, he called after her: “For science!”
“Sure!” she called back, before muttering something about not wanting to be the one being scienced on.
Zed waved goodbye, his hand hanging awkwardly in the air for much longer than it really ought to have. The whole situation still didn’t really make any sense, but Zed’s thoughts were coming back to him, and slowly but surely, the first seeds of a plan to save everyone—not just himself—were taking root in the back of his mind.
He needed a notebook.
A few minutes later, Zed found himself rummaging through the stuff he brought with him into every world. Surely he had a spare notebook somewhere? He couldn’t have used the whole set that Tango had gotten him last Christmas, not yet. Maybe it was in that other shulker box of his? He clambered up and reached for the top shelf, grabbing at the box, and—
Zed let out a yelp of pain as the box fell on top of him, spilling its contents everywhere. The good news, however, was that all of the notebooks he’d ever owned, both empty and filled with various doodles of contraption and base ideas, had been stored in said shulker box. Now he just had to get up and find an empty one.
He tried to sit up, but that was easier said than done. Moving his arm even the tiniest amount sent a dull ache echoing through the limb and up into his chest. He could just stay here for a while, couldn’t he? Noting down the original events of the season so that he could operate more efficiently within the timeline could wait. For now, he let himself slide into the disaster that his storage had turned into in order to stop his back from cramping too much, and settled in to wait out the bruises.
———
Zed watched fondly as Tango zipped around the test chamber, trying to recall the recipe for an armour stand. He was tempted to give Tango the answer, but he didn’t want to falsify his results. These experiments were important for figuring out the psychological motivations for the way the season’s end would play out, so Zed needed to keep the results as pure and unaffected by his situation as possible.
“Zed. Zedaph.” Tango banged on the glass. “Help me.”
In lieu of helping, Zed opted to switch off the lights, trying (and somewhat failing) to keep a straight face.
“GAAAAHHH!” Bdubs yelled, startled by the lights turning off. He flailed around, running his hands along the walls, trying to find some purchase, some stability. After a few seconds, Zed turned the lights back on.
“Thank you,” he told the man in question, who shot him a mildly-annoyed look in response. “Now, I’m gonna do that again, and you have to find somewhere to hide, okay?”
“Okay!” Bdubs nodded, although he didn’t look the happiest at the prospect of being in the dark. Zed supposed his fear of the dark probably did have ties to his denial of the moon’s growth—in a way, the light it brought would help ease that fear at night, so he may have conditioned himself to see it as a good thing and therefore deny the more dangerous aspects of the situation. It was food for thought, Zed supposed, and he noted it down in his notebook before reaching for the lightswitch.
“Three… two… one… go!” Zed hit the start button on the timer, watching Impulse scurry around the tiny maze. Every dead end led to a startled complaint, every wrong turn made the maze even more confusing. Zed honestly felt kinda bad for Impulse, since he was technically putting the man through this twice. Still, he had to keep things as close to normal as he could—
“Hey… there’s no exit, is there?” Impulse asked, face squished against the glass ceiling of his entrapment. The question startled Zed out of his thoughts, and he clumsily stopped the timer at… one minute? A fifth of what it was supposed to be? What?
“Uh! Yeah!” Zed admitted, rather confused. “Um… I was expecting you to take longer, If I’m being honest.”
“What, you don’t have faith in me?” Impulse asked, mock-offended.
“No! It’s just, uh, this test was specifically designed to play at your weak points.” Zed explained, gesturing in the air as if that explained everything.
“...Uh huh, sure, buddy.”
The two looked at each other, before a dumb grin cracked across Impulse’s face, and Zed broke a hole in the glass, helping him out. No harm, no foul.
Speaking of foul, Zed was certain this time around that there was something going on with Beef. He wasn’t sure what it was, what with Beef’s armour and weird mask hiding most of the changes, but Zed could see the scales creeping along Beef's neck, and smell the faint reek of copper (at least, Zed hoped it was copper) that followed the man everywhere he went. It was… unpleasant, to say the least. He might have to worry about that in future loops.
“Alright!” he told Beef, trying to keep his concern from showing. “You can drop in now!”
Mumbo yelled as the trapdoor opened from under him and he splatted into the chamber. Carefully, he picked himself up, dusting off his suit. He gave Zed a weak grin, although Zed couldn’t help but notice a certain weariness in his posture. Maybe eating a diet of potatoes, potatoes, and nothing but potatoes wasn’t, in fact, good for the guy. Who knew.
“State your name,” Zed told him, smiling. This was the last experiment, as far as his memory served him, and soon he’d have a good enough profile on a good enough range of Hermits that he’d be able to do something about this whole apocalypse business.
———
As the moon grew ever closer, Zed gradually became aware of the pressing need to start finding solutions to the problem. It was all well and good that he had some idea of how the season was supposed to play out, but if Zed couldn’t find a way to fix things, then all of this would just be an exercise in futility.
He remembered Tango saying something about having a plan, so he figured his best shot would be heading over to the Big Eyes Crew’s place. He landed in their shopping area, looking around. Where was Tango’s base again? Zed hadn’t noticed how much he’d sort of let people come to him instead of vice versa until he was trying to find his best friend’s home, and coming up short.
Thankfully, he bumped into Bdubs.
“Hey, Bdubs!”
“Zedaph!” the man in question yelped, startled. “Hey! Can I help?”
“Yeah, uh, do you know where Tango’s base is?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s over that way-ish. You probably won’t find him there, though.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, he’s been really worried about this whole ‘moon big’ hoax, so he started up a space agency. It’s a couple hundred blocks over there.” Bdubs pointed in the exact opposite direction.
With that, the two parted ways. Zed figured his best course of action would probably be to head over to that space agency place, since that would most likely, at the very least, be where whatever Tango was planning was. Rockets in hand, he took off, flying into the distance until he very nearly smacked into a massive monolith of white concrete.
Veering sharply to the left, then gliding gently to the ground, Zed landed in front of the building. The large blue logo on the front proclaimed it to be his destination—HASA Headquarters. Satisfied, he went in through the front doors.
Inside, he was met with a choice of two open doors and one boarded-up one. He tried the open door on his right first, but unfortunately did not find a Tango inside. Instead, he found a computer running a very snarky AI who insulted his lab coat, so he left that room in a huff. After that, he decided to try the door ahead of him—a boarded-up door would most likely have no Tangoes behind it either.
Beyond that door, he entered a massive hangar, full of the strangest of horse-sized zero-gravity equipment. Honestly, some of the nonsense in here looked more like it belonged in his lab (or maybe even the Cave of Contraptions) than it did in what was ostensibly a government-owned facility.
However, the sight outside the open hangar doors was what caught Zed’s attention. There was a massive rocket, and, most importantly, there was a figure in an astronaut suit trying to shove a horse through the open door. Furthermore—and this was the kicker—said figure had Tango’s voice. Zed had found who (and probably what, although why a horse would need to enter a rocket to save the world mystified him) he’d been looking for.
“Tango!” Zed yelled, running out of the hangar bay, waving his arms in the air. Tango didn’t seem to notice. “Tango!”
Adequate kicked at Tango, and the man went flying off the scaffolding, grunting at the minor fall damage. He picked himself up, dusting himself off, and then—
“Oh, hey Zed. What—what’re you doing here?”
“I heard—” Zed paused for breath, his sudden sprint leaving him winded. “I heard you had a plan to save us?”
“Oh! Yeah!” Tango grinned. “I’m gonna blow up the moon!”
“You’re gonna blow up the moon?”
“I’m gonna blow up the moon!”
“That’s great! We’ll all be okay!” Zed smiled, relieved. A small part of him pointed out that Tango’s plan clearly hadn’t worked last time, since Zed was here right now, but Zed shut that part up.
“Well, uh,” Tango scratched his head. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“HOLSTEN put my survival rate at, uh,” Tango paused to count on his fingers, “Very low.”
“That’s—Tango!” Zed yelled. Tango wasn’t seriously considering sacrificing himself, was he?
“Look! Look. It’s not zero. I might survive,” Tango explained, putting his hands up defensively. “And if I don’t, better that everyone else lives, right?”
“Tango…”
“Someone has to make the sacrificification, right? And—and if that has to be me, then so be it.” Tango looked at the ground, to the side, anywhere but making eye contact with Zedaph.
“Tango.” Zed put his hands on Tango’s shoulders.
“It’s 25 lives for the price of one. I can live with that.”
“Tango,” Zed repeated. “Please."
“I need to go.”
With that, Tango turned and left Zedaph, heading back into the scaffold up to the rocket. Zed tried to follow, but Tango shut the gate in his face, refusing to look back. Zed was left to watch helplessly as Tango continued trying to push Adequate into the rocket.
As Zed left, thoroughly disappointed and a little sad for the way that his friend was feeling, the one thing that really still stuck with him was the question of why in the name of the Void did Tango need a horse?
———
Zed sat down on his bed, and thumbed through his notebook, a slight frown on his face. How did he know that this plan was going to work? Just because a small tear in his lab coat had persisted across the time travel didn’t mean that a whole notebook would. For End’s sake, Zed didn’t even know if he’d get another shot at this! Still, he tucked the notebook in his lab coat pocket, and tried his best to brace for the end.
This time, when the moon’s gravity scooped him off his feet, he tried to hold on to something heavier, something more anchored. His hands found purchase on the post of his bed, and he briefly felt a little more secure, before the bed itself began drifting upwards. Zed realised that he was going to end up sandwiched between it and the ceiling. Well, at least being smothered would be something new.
Sure enough, as his back pressed against the ceiling, the mattress began to separate from the bed, until his front was smushed as well, despite his horns digging into the mattress. He couldn’t get any air in. He gasped and heaved and tried to clear his airways, all to no avail, his struggling becoming weaker and weaker as black spots danced in his vision, until he was overwhelmed and the world faded out.
Then, all of a sudden, he was awake again. He heaved air into his lungs, a sense of relief washing over him as he realised he was alive, he was okay, he had another chance. He had another chance to save Tango, to save himself, to save the Hermits.
His communicator pinged. He was right back at the start. He could do this.