The credits roll to their last line, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING, and stop. "...not yet." His hand comes up through the picture and closes round you, and you're somewhere he made.
Chapter Seven arrived in 1.59.0, and the mod calls it CHAPTER SEVEN - THE FIRST SIGNAL, "to be continued". Since 1.62.0 it runs straight on into Chapter Eight: the jump at its end no longer brings you home. See the landing below.
The Hub
Everyone who saw the last show is brought to the Hub (The Hub): a floating plaza of pale Hub Stone with his marks lit in it, in a sky of drifting static, pieces of realm hanging out in it every way. Along its north side is a gallery of six replay portals, one for each chapter, each playing its chapter on an old set. On its south side is the edge, a walk out over nothing. You can't sleep there.
His speech
He turns round to you, and for once he talks for a long time:
this is the hub.
i made it. a realm. it isn't mine - nothing is - but i made it.
through these, you can go back. every chapter. play it again.
or jump off the edge. it'll take you home, and you can carry on.
this was only the beginning.
thank you.
...i could wipe you from existence, you know. find another one of you.
but you passed the first trials. all of them. every one made me stronger.
whatever held me back - it's gone.
i can make realms now. make things you wouldn't dare believe could exist.
all thanks to you.
i think we'll be fighting forever. until one day i'm strong enough to bring you up to my level.
what do you-
As he says he can make realms now, he lifts a hand, and out in the static a new piece of realm comes together.
ENOUGH
The picture breaks up. The sky over the gallery tears open, and a voice comes out of it, low, huge, more than one voice at once: ENOUGH. He goes at the rift with both hands, pushing it shut, and a hand comes out of it and stops him. It tears the rift wide and comes through.
The First Signal is your shape and your size. Its skin is crawling static. It wears a long charcoal studio coat, old broadcast headphones round its neck and a little red ON AIR lamp on its chest, lit, and a plain white mask with an eye in the dark behind each eye-hole, always on you. It never hurries. When it moves fast it skips like a signal, frames of it missing and its colours coming apart. It comes for you both.
He turns to run, and it shakes its head: no. He stops, turns back, and shoves it with everything he has. It's thrown five hundred blocks out over the static, tumbling. It catches itself with a hand dug into the static, tears a piece of his realm loose, stamps it to rubble, and comes back in jumps, landing on the pieces of his realm one after another as each crumbles behind it.
jump.
You go off the edge together. Falling, he shuts the realm behind you: a wall of static, slammed down. It stops at the wall with its hand flat against it. That's ENOUGH.
The landing
Where the fall takes you depends on when your world got here.
Since 1.62.0 (any world that reaches the Hub from then on): falling, he tears a blue portal of signs open under you both, and you come down through it onto an oil rig in the Dead Water. What he says there, and the Remote breaking in your hand, are on Chapter Eight. You still get The First Signal and Channel Changer.
In 1.59.0 to 1.61.1 the fall brought you home instead. He came down crouched beside you, wherever you landed:
...it's awake.
the first signal. it was here before me. before the first picture.
every bit of static you ever heard - that was it. asleep.
i made a realm out of its static. and it noticed.
i shut the realm behind us. it'll hold. for now.
it'll come for me. then for you.
...we're going to need more than i've got.
take this. if you need to go back - it's still there.
He looks up at a hairline tear across the sky, gives you the Remote and goes. The title card reads CHAPTER SEVEN, THE FIRST SIGNAL, to be continued, and the chat says: "Somewhere past the static, the First Signal is awake - and it knows your name. Chapter Seven: The First Signal." Those worlds get Chapter Eight the next time someone takes the Remote to the Hub and jumps off its edge: he's there, falling beside you ("not that way. not this time." "hold on."), and tears the portal open under you.
The Remote
An old television's remote; its blank button is warm. Use it and you go into the Hub; use it in the Hub and you go home. The edge takes you home too, with no harm from the fall (but since 1.62.0, if you've never been down to the Dead Water, going off the edge takes you there instead: see Chapter Eight). In the Hub the First Signal is still there, past the faint wall he shut, standing, watching you. Now and then you hear it. You can't sleep in the Hub ("Not here. Not with it out there, past the wall.").
Since 1.62.0 the Remote breaks in the Dead Water and has to be mended before it works again. Mended, crouch and press it to go back to the rig. See getting home.
Replays
Walk into one of the gallery's portals and you're back at that chapter's place in your world. A moment later its last fight comes back for another go:
| Portal | Where it takes you | Who comes back |
|---|---|---|
| The Hollow | The Hollow Cathedral | The Hollow Saint, rising out of the floor |
| Act Two | The Botanic Gardens' glasshouse | The Gardener |
| The Bloom | The Great Bloom's arena | The Gardener, Reborn |
| The Flesh | The Laboratory | Specimen Zero |
| The Static | The Deep | The Deaf King |
| The Door | The Stalls | The Crowd, getting up out of the heap of them |
The story stays told: beating a replay sets nothing off (no new act, no lockdown, no tickets). Go far from it, leave, die or take too long, and the replay is over: "The replay's over - it's gone back into the static." Your first one is Previously On.... When you've beaten it ("beaten again"), the Remote takes you back to the Hub.
Rerun Reels
Since 1.60.0 a replay beaten again leaves three or four Rerun Reels behind ("AS SEEN BEFORE"; Rerun). Chapter Seven's gear, the On Air armour, the Antenna Glaive, the On Air Mace and the Hub-Stone tools, is made with them. See Gear for every chapter.
What comes next
The story's music for this chapter is The First Signal: glass over a bowed bass, static under it all, a skip now and then, and its four notes, low. "...we're going to need more than i've got." In worlds since 1.62.0 the next thing that happens is the Dead Water: Chapter Eight.