Escape from the Overworld

by Danica Davidson

  Right away the red eyes morphed into an entire world of shining red, and then the pulses of light around me turned blue, and then finally everything flared into a giant grass green. I hurtled through the other end of the portal, and landed into a stranger world than I ever could have imagined.

  The first thing I knew was that I had landed face down. Ouch. But the ground I was on . . . was fuzzy. And white. And it felt like I was kind of—but not really—sinking into it. And it smelled funny.

  Slowly my head tilted up. Was this . . . a bedroom? It kind of looked like my bedroom because there was a bed there, but everything else was all wrong. Everything looked so squishy and there were many different kinds of shapes. Not everything was square, like it should be. And what was up with these dimensions? There was a window nearby, streaming in sunlight.

  I didn’t know what-in-Overworld I’d stumbled into. Slowly I started to get up, and that’s when something in this bedroom-not-a-bedroom let out a shriek. It stood by the door and it looked like some type of humanlike mob I’d never seen before. It wasn’t green like a zombie, and it didn’t smell bad. It had olive skin and arms and legs like me, but at the end of each of its arms were five things that looked like squid tentacles, only smaller. Its face was oval, its body more distinct than the block shape a human should have had. It had loose tendrils of black stuff coming from the top of its head, but instead of being blocky like real hair, it was wispy and was broken up into thin, silky little pieces like spiderwebs collected in the mines.

  This was the mob that had made that horrible screaming sound. It reached behind its pink too-soft-and-squishy-to-be-a-bed bed and pulled out a long, sticklike weapon.

  The spider was behind me at the other side of the portal and this mob with a weapon was in front of me. Either way, I was in trouble.

  The mob swung the weapon back over its shoulder in a threatening motion, letting me know it would hit me with it. As simple as that weapon was, it looked like it could pack a wallop. I figured it could do a lot more damage than anything in my tool pouch could.

  Ever since I was a kid I’d been drilled on the best way to fight and kill mobs. They each had little or big differences. But this mob was my height and glaring at me in direct sunlight—and it looked dangerous. My hand flew to my tool pouch to grab something, anything.

  The mob shouted, “What are you doing in my room?”

  Mobs could talk like this? I thought, bewildered.

  “What are you?” I exclaimed. I yanked out my shovel, the best thing I had left in my tool pouch. But my shovel looked so small and useless next to the mob’s weapon.

  “What do you mean, ‘What am I?!’” it yelled right back. “You came flying out of my computer!”

  I didn’t know what kind of sorcery a “computer” was, but I had a feeling it wasn’t good. And, besides, shouldn’t it have been a portal I’d come out of?

  “I’ll call the police if you even think about hurting me!” the humanlike mob said, its brown eyes flashing.

  I didn’t know what kind of sorcery “police” was, either.

  “I only attack in self-defense,” I said, eyeing its weapon. “And you give me good reason to defend myself.”

  The mob was inching toward a small silver thing on the table next to the not-a-bed. The silver thing had a little screen on it, kind of like a portal, but it was way too small to be a portal and it had little square images on it. “I’m going to do it,” she said, “I’m going to call the police.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “And I don’t know what kind of mob you are. But you’re not hurting me.”

  “Mob?” it said. Something seemed to dawn in its eyes. It lowered its weapon and I saw it shake a little, but not in the way a creeper shakes.

  That shaking made everything fall into place for me. And at the same time I could see from her eyes that everything was falling into place for her.

  This wasn’t a mob I’d found—it was a human.

  CHAPTER 6

  “YOU REALLY ARE FROM minecraft,” SHE GASPED, taking a step back. She’d stopped reaching for the little silver object, but she wasn’t getting far away from it, either, as if she wanted to keep it close just in case.

  “I come from the Overworld,” I protested. “I saw this portal and there was a spider chasing me, so I jumped through.”

  She was turning reddish. It was weird, but I guess it was better than turning green like a zombie. She sat back on the not-a-bed, shaking her strange oval head, putting her weird squid tentacles against her brow, just below the bizarre wispy, spiderweb hair.

  “Did I just create you and make you real?” she whispered.

  “Huh?” I said. “No, you didn’t create me. I’ve been alive eleven years.”

  She set the weapon down on the not-a-bed. “I was playing Minecraft on my computer and I found rocks I’ve never seen before. I Googled them but I couldn’t find anything, so I figured they were some new thing to the game. I thought it’d be fun to make a new kind of portal and see if something happened.”

  I didn’t understand half of what she was saying, but I knew she must have been the one who made the portal. And she’d made it all from her own world!

  I looked behind me. There was a wooden desk there with . . . a small silver portal? It wasn’t very big and it wasn’t made of blocks, but it was rimmed with silver and had silver in the back, and inside I could see my world. The spider wandered around as if it was looking for me.

  “Is this your portal to the Overworld?” I asked, pointing.

  “My portal?” she said in disbelief. “That’s my computer!”

  “Your portals are called computers?”

  For some reason she covered her whole oval face with her squid tentacles. “This can’t be real. I must be sleeping.”

  “This is a very unusual portal,” I said. “I’ve never seen one like it. Do your Nether portals also look like this?”

  “There are no Nether portals,” she said. “You’re a video game character. You’re not real. This is a dream. It has to be. Yeah. I never get enough sleep when school starts. So I guess I must have fallen asleep after I finished my homework. Yeah. And I’ve been playing Minecraft so much that I had a dream about it. That’s it. And I built a funny portal in my dream and this Minecraft character comes flying through my computer screen and lands face-first on my floor, and for some reason I’m not waking up even though I’m pinching myself and it hurts.”

  She was pinching herself. This was a very strange girl.

  “There are no portals?” I said, confused. “But how do you get to the Nether?”

  “There is no Nether,” she said. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying?” She grabbed a small thin object that said “Minecraft” and had a picture of a guy who looked like me on it. “I bought this at the store to play on my computer.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I don’t, either,” she said. “Okay, back up. You say you’re eleven years old and you just jumped through this portal to get away from a spider?”

  “Yes, pretty much,” I said. “And I’m still not feeling too well after getting hurt by a creeper, so I couldn’t fight that spider. I had to take my chances with the portal. I jumped through the portal and landed on this weird fuzzy stuff.”

  “A carpet,” she said.

  “And you were holding a strange weapon.”

  “A baseball bat,” she said.

  “And you have stuff like squid tentacles on your hands.”

  “They’re called fingers!” This time she sounded really insulted.

  “So what world is this?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said with a sigh. “That’s a good question. Because until two minutes ago, I thought this world was the only world in existence.”

  CHAPTER 7

  THAT GAVE ME A START. SHE COULD SEE INSIDE MY world but for some reason didn’t believe in it, even though it was right there before her eyes. She had no idea about po
rtals or anything.

  “What’s a video game?” I asked.

  “It’s a game you play,” she said. “I build things in Minecraft. I make farms and fight mobs. I started a new game today, and every time you start a new game, you get a new area of land. And I saw those rocks and I thought I’d make something different this time.”

  “You don’t have to be scared,” I said, because I could see she was trembling. “There are lots of worlds. I grew up knowing that, so it’s not scary to me. I guess if you didn’t realize it, it probably would be pretty scary when you first learned. Sometimes I go to the Nether with my dad, but this world is brand-new to me.” I tucked my shovel back into my tool pouch, aware I wouldn’t be needing it.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” I continued. “I really was just trying to get away from that spider.”

  I took another glance back at the “computer.” The spider was still wandering around, as clueless as ever. She got up and touched something on the computer and the middle of the computer went completely black. It had turned to night, no moon. I realized the round thing she pushed must have been a button, but it wasn’t square like buttons should be.

  “And you’re still here even with the computer off,” she mused. “I guess you really are real.”

  She looked me over, and I realized I probably looked about as weird to her as she did to me. Then she said, “I’m Maison.”

  “Stevie,” I said.

  That got her to smile a little. “Of course,” she said. “Stevie.”

  CHAPTER 8

  IT TURNED OUT THE NOT-A-BED REALLY WAS A BED, and we sat there telling each other about ourselves and our worlds. She was eleven, just like me, and she had a lot more to tell me about her world than I had to tell her about mine. I asked if her family also farmed and mined, and she said, “No. I live with my mom, and she’s an architect. She works in an office each day. That’s like a building where you have computers and, well, you work there.”

  “Do you live far from your village?” I asked.

  “I guess you could say I live in my village,” she said, gesturing toward the window. When I peered out of it, my heart just about dropped. It looked so much like my world and yet so different. There were houses lined up in a row, all of them had a slightly unique appearance. There were trees, too, though they didn’t look blocky, and the grass might have been strangest of all. Instead of blocks of green, it stuck out of the ground in a lot of little green strands.

  When something noisy and even bigger than a giant spider came rushing past us, I ducked down below the window, expecting the worst. It looked as if there were people inside that noisy thing! Maison said, “Um, that’s a car. It’s a way people get around. I guess it’s a little like our version of a Minecart.”

  Slowly I let my eyes peek just above the bottom of the window. Another “car” came whishing by, and I could definitely see people in it this time. It had wheels at the bottom and was a big, shiny black color.

  “Wow,” I breathed. “How do those work?”

  “You have a steering wheel and gas pedals. Only adults are allowed to drive them, though.”

  It did look as if those things would make trips to the village much faster for Dad and me.

  “I like to ride on pigs,” I said. “I put a saddle on the pig and it chases after a carrot I put on a stick.” Those cars had passed by fast, but I was pretty sure I didn’t see any carrots on sticks being used to make them go.

  Maison looked at me funny and had nothing to say. So I changed the subject.

  “What’s that?” I asked. If I angled right and looked to the side of her house, I could see a building much bigger than all the other houses. “A really good builder must have made that one.”

  “That’s my school, where I go each day to learn with the other kids,” she said.

  “You mean your mom doesn’t teach you?” I said. My whole life, it’d been Dad teaching me everything.

  “No,” she said. “I have one teacher for shop class, one teacher for English, one for math, one for history, one for science, one for P.E. . . .”

  “Oh, wow,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. Mostly because I didn’t really follow her. I guessed that “teacher” was the term used for someone who taught you stuff. It sounded like she had a lot of them. “That sounds amazing. Can I see?”

  She sucked in a breath. “Well, it’s Sunday today so school’s closed. But tomorrow is Monday and school starts in the morning.”

  “Do they teach you how to build tree houses?” I asked eagerly. Maybe I could learn useful new stuff in this world and make a really amazing tree house that would blow Dad’s mind.

  “No,” she said. “They teach you how to do math and spell and stuff like that.”

  “Do they teach you how to fight mobs?”

  “There are no mobs.”

  “No mobs!” This was the most stunning thing yet. “So you don’t have to worry about zombies at night? Or creepers?”

  “No, there’s nothing like that here. There are spiders, but they’re really small and most of them are harmless.”

  I think my mouth was hanging open. This world may have looked ugly with its strange shapes and people with squid tentacle fingers and spiderweb hair, but there were a lot of nice things about it.

  “So you can build without worrying about mobs?” I said.

  “Well, most people here don’t build,” she said. “People like my mom make designs and then construction workers put it together. I want to be an architect when I grow up, too.”

  “Why don’t people build?” How could they not? I thought.

  “They pay other people to do it.”

  “With emeralds?”

  “No, with money. Uh, here.” I watched as she reached into the side of her pants and pulled out several green and white sheets with images and writing on them. “This is money.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this while mining,” I said, taking one. It was so light, but it was green like an emerald. “Do you trade it to the blacksmith for all sorts of good stuff?”

  “There is no blacksmith,” she said. “You go to stores and buy what you want with money. You have to work a job to get the money. You don’t go mining for it. There’s a factory that makes money.”

  What an amazing world! “So you don’t have to be a good builder to be taken seriously and you don’t have to fight mobs?” I said, giving her the money back. In my mind I was thinking I might want to stay here forever. “This sounds like paradise.”

  “This place isn’t paradise,” Maison said sadly, looking out the window at the school building. “Far from it.”

  “How can this world be bad if there are no mobs?” I asked.

  Maison leaned back against the wall, blowing a stray bit of hair out of her face. “Because there are eighth graders.”

  “Eighth graders?” That didn’t sound like an especially scary kind of enemy, but I would have to trust her on this. “So they’re your version of mobs?”

  “I guess,” she said. “I finished fifth grade last year, and so now I started middle school. It’s a different building with different teachers and all my good friends from elementary school went to the other middle school in town—uh, in the ‘village.’”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t understand all the terms she was using, but I understood what she was trying to say. “So you don’t have friends anymore.”

  “They said we’d stay in touch, but they lied!” she said. “Now they act too cool for me and they just want to hang out with kids from their new middle school. I ran into them at the mall yesterday—that’s like a big market in the village—and they barely even looked at me. They were making fun of me because I had paint splatters on my clothes from something I’d been making. They were all trying on makeup and buying new clothes and . . . and . . . they told me I was stupid and ugly!”

  “That’s terrible!” I said. I knew how much words could hurt.

  “But what are these
. . . eighth graders?” I asked, hoping I said it right. She was throwing a lot of new words at me.

  “So I’m in sixth grade at middle school and I don’t have any friends,” she said. “And these two eighth grade guys really like to pick on me. I don’t even know why. It’s like they chose me on the first day of school to be their punching bag or something. They’re making me miserable.”

  “They try to turn you into a punching bag?” I said. “What kind of sorcery does that involve?”

  For some reason that got her to laugh a little. “Oh, Stevie,” she said. “I’m just saying they like to upset me. I shouldn’t let them get to me, but they do.”

  “So what you’re telling me,” I said, “is that they’re like creepers? They show up and try to ruin the good things you could have if they weren’t there?” I thought about this for a moment. “Do cats scare eighth graders away like they scare away creepers?”

  “No,” she said. “But I did hear that one of the eighth graders is scared of spiders. Too bad spiders don’t get big here, huh?”

  “Yeah, huh,” I said, even though I thought she was really lucky spiders didn’t get big here.

  CHAPTER 9

  MAISON PUSHED THE BUTTON ON HER COMPUTER portal and brought the Overworld back up in the middle of it. The spider was still there, pacing.

  “Great,” I groaned. “I was hoping it would have left by now.”

  “You can spend the night,” she said.

  I almost said, “I don’t want to worry my dad.” But then I thought through it. If I went back and told Dad all about this new world, he might forbid me from ever going back. He wasn’t big into change.

  And that comment about me disappointing him? That still stung, and I flushed thinking about it.

  Just one night, I thought. I’ll spend the night here, go to school tomorrow to get a better feel of this world, and then go home.

  “How about I give you a tour of the place before my mom gets home from work?” Maison said. “Normally she doesn’t work on Sundays, but she had to run to the office for something quick. We don’t really want her to see you because it’d be too hard to explain.”