Nightmare Fuel / Empires SMP

As a Moments sub-page, all spoilers are unmarked.

The Empires SMP has its fair share of Nightmare Fuel, especially as the series gets darker as it goes on.

Season 1

General

• Xornoth, just, in general. He's incredibly powerful, with total command over the Corruption, and uses those powers to make the lives of everyone around him hell. His appearance doesn't help matters either, his skin is black and scaly with bright purple or red marks, he's got a permanent Slasher Smile, a pair of massive spiked horns, and his voice is incredibly deep and distorted.
  • He's specifically ruthless in his torment of Shrub, from killing her, to siccing mobs on her, to killing one of her wolves and leaving its head in her house for her to find, to filling the Undergrove with Corruption, to taunting her with the fact that her people are all dead and gone. Shrub is absolutely terrified of him, and he's shown to relish in that fact.
  • There's a more subtle horror in the fact that Xornoth was not always like this. In fact, as Scott's Season 1 finale showed, before he got corrupted he was a completely normal elf who liked to tease his younger brother and was working to prove he was a worthy heir to the throne. It's unclear what exactly happened to him to transform him, both physically and mentally, into a sadistic Omnicidal Maniac who looks more draconic than elven, but it cannot have been pretty.
• Scott's ice powers. Everything he touches freezes over permanently, and he has zero control over them. His attitude towards them slowly goes from nonchalantly ignoring the slowly building snow and ice, to a slow Oh, Crap! as even the embassies he was building start to freeze over, to locking himself up in his own home as every body of water in Rivendell has turned to ice and he realizes he could seriously hurt someone without meaning to, to desperately begging Gem for help once ice spikes start growing out of control all over his kingdom.
  • Special mention to the scene with Gem. Scott approaches her at the end of his rope, asking her to help him control his powers. Gem tries to help him, but because she doesn't understand Scott's magic or his mental state, she just takes him to a pool of water, gets him to freeze it, and then demands over and over that he try to thaw it, even after he tells her he can't thaw it and wants to stop. Eventually Scott snaps and yells at Gem... which triggers a massive blast of ice, freezing the entire hall and seriously hurting Gem in the process. Scott is horrified and runs away, and Gem tries to give chase... but she can barely walk, and resorts to weakly calling after Scott as he flies off.
  • Becomes worse when you remember the prophecy of Aeor and Exor... specifically the part about Xornoth bringing eternal winter if he and Exor weren't defeated. Either the prophecy has some serious errors in it, or Xornoth isn't as defeated as he seemed...
• The Rune Blade. A magical sword that, when used to kill someone, has the power to tear their soul out of their body, and send them to an afterlife of the wielder's choosing. It could be used to guarantee a dying loved one a peaceful end... or to send an enemy to the worst pits of hell you can imagine. Scott is understandably horrified at the fact that he now has this sword, and hides it behind his bed in the hopes nobody will find it.

Season 2

Pre-Festival Episodes

• From the start of the series, the fact that the Deep Dark biome is located under about half of the empires' territory, with it even being directly visible from fWhip's underground empire. The Deep Dark and the mob its presence entails is already one of the scariest (if not the scariest) aspects of the 1.19 Wild Update, but the fact that it's practically right under half the server's homes makes it even more disturbing.
  • Adding onto this, an Ancient City is located almost directly under Gem's empire near a patch of the Deep Dark, and when Gem goes adventuring there with Jimmy in their respective second episodes during a mining trip, they accidentally spawn in the Warden itself... while neither of them are even remotely prepared to fight it, only having basic iron tools. Gem calling this "the worst mining trip ever" doesn't even begin to cover it, and it's only by pure luck that they manage to get away without dying.
  • A similar story occurs when Joey stumbles across a patch of the Deep Dark while on his own mining trip and accidentally spawns in the Warden too... while not just remotely unprepared, but also completely oblivious to how Warden-spawning works.^note Clarification: He thought they only spawned in Ancient Cities, probably in the way how the Ender Dragon only spawns in the End. At one point while he's hiding, the Warden looks right at the small mining tunnel he dug and walks right past him. Even after he digs the tunnel further away from the Warden, he still hears the Warden from most likely beneath him, apparently "stalking" him.
    Joey: Oh... my gosh. I feel like I'm in a frickin' horror movie.
  • fWhip's mission to retrieve a Swift Sneak III enchanted book from the Ancient City is a disaster to be beheld.^note Perspective-wise, refer to the latter halves of Sausage's Episode 7 and Katherine's Episode 4, and the third quarter of fWhip's Episode 5, and watch Sausage's POV for the full horror experience.
    • While Sausage is recruited (read: dragged along) for the "adventure" with fWhip and Katherine (the latter as a bodyguard, even though most of her tools are still iron), he seems to have very little clue to what he's even doing. Even though it's understandable that he doesn't have wool on him due to visiting fWhip's Skeleton spawner before being dragged along, Sausage somehow manages to spawn in not one, but two Wardens out for his blood in quick succession. The result is Sausage floundering around in Darkness while flying on his Elytra wings... underground, in an enclosed cavern.
    • Later on, after landing on part of the ruins of the City, Sausage comments that it was "fun"... before one of the Wardens he summoned lumbers toward the platform he's standing on, and launches a sonically-charged shriek that takes him down to 3 hearts of health. Cue screaming. And a Warden obliterating him with another shriek attack mid-flight very literally 15 seconds later.^note For Double Life enjoyers, do note that Sausage's episode is released hardly a day after the Double Life finale... Oh, and just after the jumpscare, Katherine gets launched into the air from behind with a shriek and ends up falling off her safety pillar.
    • After that fiasco, while exploring the hidden rooms under the giant portal frame, Katherine accidentally summons in a third Warden. This causes even more screaming and the three cowering in the hidden room, unable to go up or be killed by Warden #3 which spawned right above them... then the Warden's shriek kills fWhip in two hits. Katherine and Sausage both die again in quick succession.
    • The rest of the journey goes just as well as one might expect. It involves Katherine getting punted by a Warden after trying to confront it to its face without armour on, Sausage punching said Warden in the face for this and dying to it afterward, and Sausage and fWhip accidentally summoning Warden #4. Though fWhip indeed retrieves the enchanted book he went down to the Ancient City for, the fourth Warden's debut results in the boys fleeing from the Ancient City, having lost almost all their gear and crying that they want to go home. With all of this in mind, Gem, Jimmy, and Joey were all very lucky to have escaped with their lives and items intact.
• The backstory behind Scott's Supernatural Gold Eye is, quite frankly speaking, disturbing as hell.
  • During the flashback sequence, he explains that he once raided an ancient temple for a famed jeweled skull that had two gemstones for eyes, but when he actually found the thing, it only had one, contrary to his sources. Were the sources wrong? Did something happen to the skull or the temple over time? Knowing many adventurers have tried to seek it, it might have.
  • While Scott succeeded in retrieving it, the skull ends up stealing his eye in his sleep, with nothing but a gaping black hole left in his emptied eye socket... complete with ominous Evil Laughter in the background.
    • He spends the next several years trying to reverse this, and is more than happy to have the skull taken off his hands by some random old wizard in the woods on the condition that it can be reversed at all. With this in mind, it's very likely that the only reason Scott is able to recount the story so seemingly nonchalantly is that he's had years to cope with it.
    • And on the Swamp wizard: what did he want with an eye-robbing magic skull in the first place? How was he able to vanish from the cabin in the woods in a night as though he never lived there? Just plain magic, or are there other supernatural forces at work here?
• Sausage's Dark and Troubled Past is dark and troubled for good reason.
  • His old kingdom was revealed to be ruled by a king who resented his people for being born with Magical gifts and craved that power for himself, and became so Drunk with Power that he drained most of the Magic of the nation. And his inner circle's solution to this? To drain the Magic of the people.
  • This results in a Purge that not only drains citizens of the kingdom of their Magic, but can go as far as to kill them... for being born differently from the king. For reference's sake, Sausage discovered his Speaks Fluent Animal ability before he turned ten, implying that young children could be targeted for the Purge too.
  • And then there's Sausage's own personal circumstances. Having his Parental Substitute run into the chaos of the fantastical equivalent of a genocide, telling him to flee for his life? And him running for days until reaching the campsite that was the Empires-world spawn, not knowing if Eddie (and Bubbles, who befriended him when he was a child) survived? Adding on the Paranoia Fuel that he might be hunted down by Professional Killers for the "crime" of escaping from a tyrant that wants him dead... yeah, cross this over into Tear Jerker.
  • As the series goes on, Sausage experiences events, such as waking up in weird places, and Shelby also finds him standing stock-still in her house, wearing a skeleton skull and a few hits away from death, whereupon he drops a golden apple telling her to help Sausage. When she gets inspired to try curing him like a Villager with the golden apple and a weakness potion, he feels a burning sensation... and then quickly rots into a walking corpse. Shelby is frightened by him mentioning his Horror Hunger as he walks towards her and flees, and Sausage angrily asks what she's done to him after she's left.
    • Considering how there was no point in the series where Sausage could have died and how he was wearing a skeleton mask when Shelby found him in her home, it seems that either Shelby's status as Inept Mage has caused her largest mistake yet... or she's uncovered the truth about what Sausage possibly really is.

Hermitcraft Crossover

• False's situation starts off fairly disconcerting with her amnesia and alleged sleepwalking, but after the Hermits crossed over, many more disturbing details are brought to light, especially when switching over to the Hermits' viewpoints.
  • According to False's 31st Hermitcraft episode, Hermit-False erased Empires-False's memories (with the intention for the memory loss to be permanent) and sent her to another realm (the Empires world) for unknown reasons, with various implications that she might have had an unsavory past. Considering one of the first main things Empires-False does is to rob a corpse of its clothing, one might argue that her dark Mysterious Past has always affected her in subtle ways.
  • In the meantime, Hermit-False constructs a tower in Cogsmeade, accessible only by a specific key card, to keep an eye on Empires-False, in the hopes that she would just pay little attention to it once she finds it inaccessible to her; later, it's revealed that the fenced/barred windows are electrified in spite of apparently being made from wood. On Empires-False's perspective (in her 13th episode), she just walks out her front door and BAM, big and mysterious tower just randomly pops up, which she eventually concludes that either she built it while sleepwalking or that it's a gift from another empire. Altogether, this vaguely reeks of gaslighting...
    • Just after this, when Empires-False returns to her base and muses that she thought her memory was improving, under the impression that she built the observation tower, the screen flickers with an echo of someone speaking and False's voice saying, "Quick, before she comes back." While Empires-False immediately dismisses the "glitch" in the storage room, considering what Hermit-False has said about her Empires counterpart before her memory loss, one might suspect that Hermit-False's amnesia potion did not work as well as she hoped it would.
  • Jevin's 31st Hermitcraft episode ends with him visiting Cogsmeade, chatting with Empires-False, and checking in to her Stupor Saloon and Motel. Meanwhile, as Jevin sleeps, Empires-False enters the room and splashes a potion on him, and next thing we know, Jevin wakes up at Hermitopia, unsure of what just happened. On the other side of the story, when Empires-False visits the saloon from her perspective, most likely after the incident, the room Jevin stayed in has a sign on the door saying, "Cleaning in Progress. NO ENTRY."; as she opens the door, the floor of the room is stained with what is presumably blood, and later in the episode, there's a clip of Jevin checking in and staying at the saloon just after False posts advertising for the place and him apparently disappearing overnight, implying her episode is not taking place in chronological order of incidences.
  • After visiting the saloon and while making more construction plans, Empires-False muses once again about her memory... and cue another "glitch" (apparently in False's mind) as the scene flickers to show a visual of Hermit-False, close to the camera in what appears to be Hermitopia, followed by a third glitch briefly flashing red, with False's voice distinctly saying "Promise me" and someone else saying "Get her". Whatever that is happening, things are definitely not what they appear to be...
  • Immediately after Jevin's visit, Empires-False mentions in her episode that she visited Pixlriffs in his museum. On the contrary, the screen shows a clip of her walking into the museum and splashing him with a Splash Potion of Amnesia nonchalantly, while Pix was staring at his empty Deepslate Emerald Ore display case. And on Pix's perspective, this is immediately followed by him getting murdered by False, and the amnesia potion is seen to have erased the past couple of minutes (in video, it might be as long as hours in-universe) of his memory.
• While Shelby has always known that the Fog surrounding the Evermoore is cursed, everything known about it, most notably claiming the souls of lost travellers, has always only been informed... up until Cubfan's investigation of it on Shelby's request in his 46th episode of Hermitcraft Season 9.
  • While conducting a thorough search for spirits in the mangrove swamp, Cub eventually claims to have "an unmistakable feeling of dread", as though someone were not just watching his movements, but waiting for him and expecting his arrival.
  • Other than the Fog being a distinctly abnormal fog, being pungent and turquoise in colour, Cub describes growing more and more disoriented as the Fog grows denser.
    Cub: The last thing I remember was being paralyzed by fear, as I was consumed by the Fog itself.
  • Throughout all this, the Fog initially sounds like wind at late night, ultimately a relatively innocent and unassuming sound, but when the screen entirely fades to cyan, there are some almost-bestial hissing and scraping noises, and by the time the sounds reduce back to hollow wind-like noises, the Fog has cleared... and Cub is covered in Sculk tendrils, with eyes the colour of Echo Shards (or of the Fog at its thickest), acting like everything was fine and dandy. That's not even going into the deep reverb of his voice after this:
    Unknown: As we claimed our newest soul, the soul was given two tasks, spread the Souls, and spread the Sculk. With these two tasks anchored in the mind, the Fog was lifted, and the path forward became clear. Unleash Darkness upon the empires, and let the Sun shine upon the Deep Dark once more. (Evil Laugh)
  • The fact that the entire segment is told from a third-person, narrated perspective is already disturbing enough as it is, as it provides a degree of distance from the events that Cub has gone through. Now, imagine going through all that up close and personal.
• Shelby's 15th episode ends with her waking up in her bed... not in her bedroom, but deep in the Evermoore, which she discovers in her following episode that it's near the heart of the place. There, she finds a lifeless patch of mushroom-ground, an old Nether portal in dismal condition tucked away in a corner, with a sign attached, "We're in here, Shrub. Come find us."
  • Immediately after this, Shelby has a brief vision of a scream-filled land, engulfed with flames, as what appears to be Xornoth terrorizing the place. Not only are the screams of fear loud and sudden, but it establishes how truly horrifying the eradication of the Gnomes were.
  • From her vision, Shelby proposes a theory that the heart of the Evermoore used to be the Gnomes' homeland, and the Fog arose from the souls of those who perished in the disaster that struck it, or as we'd know, Xornoth's "reign" of terror. She suggests that the angrier souls were what possessed Cubfan into spreading Darkness... implying that such anger has persisted for literally over a thousand years, and is willing to corrupt innocent souls into spreading the despondency of losing their light, home, and hope.
  • In the post-Crossover era, while Shelby is possessed by the Sculk herself, she threatens fWhip that she has "the souls of thousands living under [her] skin". This suggests that the number of Gnome casualties in Xornoth's reign of terror was at least in the quadruple-digits, which is... extremely disturbing in retrospect.

Post-Crossover Episodes

• Cubfan getting infected with Sculk is horrifying enough as is, leading to the question of whether Shelby is infected given how much longer she's been in the Evermoore. Sure enough, at the end of her 18th episode…
  Shelby: Wait a minute… what is that?
• After constructing a joint Creeper farm, fWhip and Lizzie attempt to expand its storage, only to dig into… a hole in the wall that had been there for God knows how long. Whatever is on the other side of the hole causes the two to immediately block it up and turn the other way to expand their storage system. The question remains: what exactly is behind the wall?
  • From fWhip's perspective, we get a small, brief glimpse into what's beyond the hole — Villager noises and Sculk-covered blocks. And as we've known from the season thus far, Sculk is never a good thing to find.
  • However, Lizzie's 19th episode reveals them to be a species of Bat People living underground, which retracts much of the horror element of the previous episode's ending... in hindsight.
• At the end of Episode 41, Dark Sausage intercepts the connection between Bdubs' Sun Church and Hermitcraft; in the following episode, with help from the dark world's iteration of Bubbles (for some reason) and while regular-Sausage is away, he manages to teleport to Sanctuary and invade the Empires-world again.
  • The first place he plans to terrorize is the Evermoore, but quickly takes a liking to Shelby for her Sinister Scythe and Sculk corruption, and decides to join her on a revenge prank against Pirate Joe for the fun of it. However, the fact that he giggles gleefully like a little boy while eating away at a Phantom soul and flying to the Forgotten Cove is... surprisingly disturbing to hear.
  • Throughout the entire episode, all the other rulers whom Dark Sausage meets, Shelby and fWhip, are under the assumption that he's just regular-Sausage having a bad day and in need of a throat lozenge and a nap. While it's funny to see their interactions and absolutely no one taking Dark Sausage seriously, there's some underlying horror that they have no idea they're not even speaking to the real Sausage they know and love, but instead his past incarnation's Omnicidal Maniac Literal Split Personality who just keeps making casual death threats at them.
  • After helping to set up the Ravager revenge prank on Pirate Joe, Dark Sausage takes flight to Eversea and proceeds to detonate the lighthouse/Creeper farm. While thankfully, Eversea is geographically next door to Sanctuary and regular-Sausage quickly fixes the mess with the Magic, it shows that there are far greater threats to come with Dark Sausage around...
• In Sausage's 43rd episode, Dark Sausage casually remarks that whenever the copy of disc 5 in the Colorful Cauldron tavern is played, a demon is freed in an alternate reality. While the contents of the disc in normal Minecraft is scary enough, the fact that merely playing it can unleash disasters like Xornoth Corruption 2.0 on an unknown world is outright disturbing.
  • And then there's Dark Sausage's power over demonic figures. When Shelby asks if she can have demons sent to the Great Witches Academy for wronging her, Dark Sausage cheerfully obliges and orders demons to invade the Witching World, resulting in at least two confirmed fatalities. While the Great Witches in charge are notably condescending and prideful, we don't know enough about the rest of the school to cast judgement on whether all of them deserve to die, and innocents, however one may define them, can easily be caught in the crossfire.

• At the end of Sausage's 44th episode, Dark Sausage takes over Sanctuary, while regular-Sausage has been sent into an alternate Sanctuary six months in the past, before Eddie and Bubbles have even been found. The effects of Dark Sausage's reign of terror are horrifying to watch.
  • By the next episode, Dark Sausage has sealed off Eddie and Maria with magical iron bars that only he can break, and let Dolores out to roam and wage terror on the server. He then threatens Maria into recreating regular-Sausage's outfit to lower suspicion, and stole a voice box from one of Sanctuary's Villagers in an attempt to pass for his good counterpart's reincarnation. At the latter part, he casually remarks that Abigail, the name of the Villager, would never speak again, and threatens her housemate that he saw nothing.
    • From the perspective of Eddie and Maria, their respective adopted son and nephew mysteriously vanishes and is replaced by a Evil Doppelgänger, who demands to look alike with their beloved family member.
    • Bearing in mind that Sanctuary's population primarily consists of refugees from a tyrant-enforced genocide, and the fact that they likely don't know Sausage even has an evil past-life half, they may simply presume that Sausage himself has suddenly turned evil and cruel like the tyrant they escaped from so many months ago.
  • After this, Dark Sausage attends the meeting at spawn in place of regular-Sausage. None of the other rulers are aware that this isn't even the real Sausage they know and love, and other than Dark Sausage occasionally pulling out the Staff or sword in his possession, considering to assassinate the King, there is little to no indication that this isn't even the real Sausage.
• The ending of Sausage's 49th episode reveals that the blast of magic produced from Sausage's Split-Personality Merge is strong enough to alert Sausage's old kingdom of his location. While that plotline has been thrown by the wayside for most of the series, it's perhaps a timely reminder that the ruler is a genocidal madman who intends to take all of the Magic of what is now Sanctuary for himself... and the fact that Dark Sausage was also a powerful sorcerer in his time. In short, if Sausage gets caught by the king, it's not going to be pretty...

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