CHAPTER 5
When i hoisted myself back out of the hole and into the cave, I was surrounded by gawking kids who were all asking me what had happened. The mocking boy looked surprised to see me after all that. Dad was there and just getting ready to go down the tunnel after me.
“Stevie!” he said, in his Stevie-what-were-you-thinking? voice. It was a voice I knew like the back of my hand.
I started to hold up the purple crystal to show him, only to be interrupted. Dad wasn’t done.
“I told you that if you wanted to see the other kids, you still had to stay in the village!” Dad went on. “You didn’t even ask permission to be all the way out here! The blacksmith’s gone missing, and I’m trying to help the village find him, then I get kids coming to me saying you’re being attacked down below the surface!”
There was only one thing worse than falling down a hole, being attacked by an Enderman, and having kids mock you: when your dad yelled at you in front of all those kids afterward.
“But Dad—” I started to argue. Then I realized what he’d just said. “Wait, the blacksmith is missing?”
“He’s not the only one,” Dad huffed. “The mayor, the librarian, even the iron golems. Something is very wrong here, and I don’t need to be chasing you down on top of it!”
“There was an Enderman—” I began. Dad cut me off.
“I’m sure there was!” he said. “If you’d stuck close to me, you’d know that in addition to so many villagers going missing, we’ve also had a number of Endermen harassing people around here. They’re stealing blocks from people’s houses and trying to get inside.”
My head spun. Endermen were known for stealing blocks, and they’d hold the blocks at the very bottom of their long arms. However, everything else about this didn’t seem right.
“Do you think the missing people and the Endermen are connected?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Dad said. “And coming here to get you is wasting my time. Have some food, then grab your sword and let’s go.”
He pulled some food out of his toolkit, knowing I had to eat to regain my strength. It was a kind gesture, but he was looking so annoyed at me right then that it didn’t feel very kind.
I couldn’t even look at the kids, though I could feel their stares. Clutching the crystal close, I picked my diamond sword up and trotted after Dad, stuffing my face with the food he’d given me. I heard one of the kids say, “I told you that boy Stevie is strange. He’s always messing things up and he only hangs out with weird-looking people from another world. Plus there’s that crazy cousin of his, Alex. Does she ever not have her arrows?”
I wanted to turn back and say something, but I wouldn’t let myself. If Dad heard it too, he didn’t say anything.
The food was making my body feel better, though not my spirit. I really wanted to ask Dad what the crystal was and why I thought I heard a woman’s voice down below. I wanted to ask him why I could make friends from other worlds, but not from my own.
However, I also didn’t want to ask Dad anything right then. He had that concentrated look he always got when on a mission. I’d learned that when Dad was acting this way, you waited until he was done with his mission and then you asked questions. If you interrupted him, it’d just make him madder.
As we headed out of the cave, a man I didn’t know came running over to us, shouting, “Steve! Stevie! Thank goodness I found you!”
The man was dressed like a guard and he was out of breath, as if he’d been looking for us for a while. I noticed he had said both of our names, Steve and Stevie. I was used to people searching for my dad when there were problems, not me.
“What is it, soldier?” Dad asked when the man got close.
“It’s official business,” the man said. “Mayor Alexandra needs to see both of you at once.”
This caught my attention. Mayor Alexandra was Dad’s sister and my aunt, and the mom of my cousin Alex. She was the mayor of the next village over, so this must’ve been one of her guards.
“Tell Alexandra it can wait,” Dad said. “I need to help find the missing people in this village.”
He tried to walk past the guard, but the guard stepped forcefully in front of him, blocking the way.
“It’s an emergency,” the guard said. “Mayor Alexandra is on her way here. Something is very wrong in our village. People are going missing, and we have Endermen breaking into people’s homes and going through their things.”
I gripped the crystal harder, as if it were some kind of protection against all this.
“The same thing is going on here,” Dad said. “Has it reached other villages?”
“Not as far as I know,” the guard said, shaking his head. “Just these two villages. It’s as if the Endermen are … looking for something.”
I felt as if I were in a daze. I slipped the purple crystal into my toolkit.
Before the guard could say anything else, we heard a horse’s whinny. Aunt Alexandra’s chariot came charging toward us, with my aunt clutching the reins. Next to her was my redheaded cousin Alex, and of course she was holding her bow and arrows. The kid I had heard earlier might have been making fun of her, but Alex did love her arrows, and she was the best shot around.
Aunt Alexandra vaulted out of the chariot before it even came to a full stop. I could see where Alex got her spitfire personality from. Aunt Alexandra and my dad were both famous in the area, and well-respected for their talents. People thought they’d make a perfect fighting team, but the truth was they didn’t really like working together. A lot of times they’d just bicker as if they were still kids, fighting over who got the last piece of cake.
“We’ve been looking all over the village for you,” Aunt Alexandra exclaimed as Alex got down beside her.
“I had to go look for Stevie,” Dad said. “I was already trying to figure out what’s going on with all the Endermen and the missing villagers. Do you have a plan for what to do next?”
“Yes,” Aunt Alexandra said. I thought she would tell Dad what to do, so I was surprised when she turned her full attention on me.
“Stevie,” she said, looking at me closely. “Go to Earth and get your friends. We have no time to spare.”
CHAPTER 6
Earth.
Earth was a world no one in the Overworld had known about before I accidentally discovered a portal to it. When I fell through the portal, I fell through my friend Maison’s computer and into her house. Of course, she wasn’t my friend yet, then. In fact, she thought I was some sort of monster and tried to fight me off with her baseball bat. It doesn’t sound like the start of a good friendship, but it was.
On Earth, they had the Internet, cell phones, factories, fingers, and all sorts of crazy things you’d never see in the Overworld. The people look different too. Instead of being square like Overworld people, they tended to have emerald-shaped faces and proportioned bodies and hair that moves around and doesn’t stick flat against their heads.
In the Overworld, everything and everyone has a squarish shape, and we all build our own things. We harvest our food, create our buildings from scratch, and live in a realm teeming with dangerous mobs. They don’t have mobs on Earth, though they have their own dangers there. Sometimes they even turn things that are supposed to be helpful into something dangerous. Like that Internet thing they have. It lets them have all sorts of knowledge and information, but I’d seen them use their technology against one another before.
As different as our worlds are, there are lots of things we have in common too. We care about friends and family and taking good care of ourselves and eating good food. There are plenty of games we both like to play (even though I still don’t really get baseball). And most of all, I know that whenever I need my Earth friends, they’ll be there for me—even if they don’t understand that a square world is much nicer to look at!—just as I knew they’d be there for me now.
Now, my special portal to Earth was kept in a secret room in my house, which only
a very few people knew about. Because my Earth friends had helped in so many Overworld battles, some of the Overworld people learned about them, though they still didn’t really understand where they came from. After getting Aunt Alexandra’s command, Alex and I went running back to my home while the adults and the villagers all talked about what they had to do.
“Have you seen any of the Endermen?” Alex was asking me. “One came into my house while I was having my mushroom stew for lunch. It kept teleporting around the kitchen until I got it with my arrows! And look, it dropped an Ender pearl when I defeated it!”
Cheekily, Alex held up a glowing green Ender pearl. If you threw an Ender pearl, you’d teleport to where it landed. So it’d help you move fast, but it wasn’t all good. Using an Ender pearl hurt your health, which was part of why I’d never used one myself. I’d always wanted to, and Dad said they came with a high cost and should only be used in emergencies.
I didn’t want to tell Alex about my humiliating and scary fight with the Enderman earlier, so instead I pulled the purple crystal out of my toolkit. “Hey, have you ever seen something like this?” I asked. Alex liked to go exploring and she saw all kinds of stuff on her journeys.
Alex took the purple crystal and examined it. “It looks like an Ender crystal, except it’s too small,” she said. “Where did you find it?”
“In a tunnel below a cave,” I said. I decided not to tell her how I got into that tunnel.
“Ooh, a new tunnel?” Alex said. “I’ll have to check it out later. Maybe we can find some more of these.”
Great. She’d probably drag me along with her too.
We came running up to my house and let ourselves in. Ossie, my cat, was there to greet us, but we didn’t really have time to pet her. Together Alex and I opened the door to the portal room.
The portal was an amazing sight. It glowed green, blue and red, sort of reminding me of the Aurora Borealis pictures from Earth that Maison had shown me. As far as I knew, there was nothing else like it in the Overworld. The purple crystal seemed to glow brighter around it, or was that my imagination?
I was trying to figure out how I could tell Maison, Destiny, and Yancy we needed their help again. This wasn’t their world, so wouldn’t they get sick of coming here to battle all sorts of monsters they didn’t have to deal with on Earth?
Then I noticed the inside of the portal was starting to shimmer like water that’s been touched on the surface. Alex and I took steps back. Out of the portal jumped an Earth girl with black hair and brown skin, a baseball bat already in her hand.
“Maison!” I cried.
Maison came over and hugged me. A moment later two more people from Earth stepped out. There was Destiny, who was a little taller and rounder than Maison, with her brown hair and black clothes. Last of all there was Yancy, who was a teenager and a few years older than us. He was taller and paler than the rest of us, with slicked-back, black hair and a heavy jacket he wore even when it was warm out (he said it was “cool,” whatever that meant). He’d also brought along his backpack, as if he were preparing to stay for a while.
“Why are you here?” I asked, amazed. “I was just going to go look for you! There are Endermen attacking the villages and people are missing.”
“When I opened up Minecraft today, I knew something was off,” Maison said. It was her game of Minecraft on her computer that allowed the Earth portal to even work. “So I called Yancy and Destiny over.”
“Really?” I said. “I feel bad for asking you guys for help again …”
Destiny smiled shyly. She was usually pretty quiet, and she was great with computers. Yancy grinned at me and said, “Aww, Stevie, when life is nice and calm, it just doesn’t feel normal. Where are the good ole days when I was turning into a zombie or getting blasted by a Wither?”
“Then you guys are really all here to help me?” I said. I thought of the kids earlier, who didn’t even throw my diamond sword down to me when I needed aid.
“Of course,” Maison said. “Now let’s go get some Endermen!”
CHAPTER 7
We were back at the village, with Maison, Alex, Destiny, Yancy, and I all lined up in a row. Aunt Alexandra stood regally before us.
“You five have been called here for a very specific mission,” Aunt Alexandra was saying.
Dad was standing to the side in disbelief. “Alexandra, they’re kids—”
“They’re kids who have saved both of us in the past, and all the worlds,” Aunt Alexandra said. Turning back to us, she went on, “You’re all aware of our current problems with Endermen and missing villagers. The adults are working on it, but we also want you here. I’m making your little group official. And I want to call you the Overworld Heroes.”
“Overworld Heroes?” Yancy said, sounding shocked. Because of past not-so-good things he’d done, he wasn’t used to people in the Overworld liking him.
Alex, on the other hand, gave a whoop. “Overworld Heroes!”
“You have saved us multiple times before,” Aunt Alexandra said. “Each time you came together and defeated the enemy, despite the odds. I want you to be your own special task force, so that whenever we have issues in the Overworld, we are able to call on you.”
My heart pounded.
“They have defeated enemies before, but is it really safe to put so much pressure on their shoulders?” Dad demanded.
Aunt Alexandra looked at him coolly. “I’m not saying we stand back and have them take care of everything. We’ll be working against our enemies too, naturally. But whenever something is awry, I want to know we can call on you five. Are you kids all right with this? If you don’t want to be in this task force, say so now, and I will not hold it against you.”
Everyone but me cheered about being in the new task force, with Alex cheering the loudest.
“Stevie?” Aunt Alexandra said.
“Uh …” I looked at Dad, who was staring at me darkly. Probably thinking of how much I’d messed up earlier. How could I be on a special task force after how I bungled my fight against the Enderman? Maybe everything I’d done before was a fluke or luck. For someone who had managed to save the Overworld, I still messed up a lot.
My friends all looked at me. Aunt Alexandra’s eyes were silently asking me to answer. So I said, “Okay.” And I hoped I wouldn’t regret it.
“I’m ready!” Yancy said, and reached into his backpack. He pulled out a Jack o’ Lantern from the Overworld and plopped it on his head.
“Yancy!” Destiny hissed in a whisper. “It’s probably disrespectful to wear that in front of a mayor!”
I don’t know about disrespectful, though Yancy did look pretty funny with it on his head.
“This is me preparing for battle,” Yancy said, with as much dignity as you can have with a pumpkin for a face. His voice was muffled. “Endermen don’t attack you if you have a Jack o’ Lantern on your head!”
I had forgotten all about this, but Yancy was right! He was already more prepared than I was, and he wasn’t even from this world!
“Good thinking,” Aunt Alexandra said. “Get to the bottom of this mystery as quickly as possible. Dismissed!”
CHAPTER 8
“Overworld heroes,” alex said to herself, all moony-face and beaming. She kept tasting the words like really good cake. If any Endermen showed up, she’d probably be so lost in her own world she’d miss them. “Overworld Heroes.”
“What is a hero, anyway?” I asked. We were all walking along the edge of the village, looking for clues. “Can you be born a hero?” I thought of my dad, because the village looked up to him so much.
“I think someone is a hero depending on their actions,” Maison said. “Like if they singlehandedly defeat an army.”
“I defeated an Enderman with my bow earlier!” Alex said proudly.
I grumbled something.
Yancy ran into a block in the middle of the street and tripped. I had to catch him before he fell face first and smashed his Jack o’ Lantern ma
sk.
“Thanks, Stevie,” Yancy said. He straightened the Jack o’ Lantern. “These things never get easier to wear.”
“You seem down,” Destiny noted quietly, looking my way. Maison nodded, as if she’d noticed it too.
I looked at the five of us. We didn’t seem like heroes. Heroes were supposed to be big and strong and not scared of anything.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
Yancy tripped over another block in the middle of the road.
“Ouch!” he said, getting back up. “Why are all these blocks in the road here?”
We got our answer immediately. An Enderman appeared down the road from us, holding a block in its long black arms. Its purple eyes locked on us and it began to advance.
Alex whipped out an arrow. Yancy, not able to see, asked, “What is it? What’s going on?” The arrow went flying through the air—and the Enderman vanished, leaving an empty road.
“Did I get it?” Alex asked.
“Look out!” Maison cried. The Enderman had reappeared right behind Alex, leaning over her as if it wanted to whisper a secret. Or snatch her away in its clutches. Alex startled and tried to turn around in time. Maison flung her baseball bat out and the Enderman disappeared so that she couldn’t touch it. But she’d saved Alex.
“An Enderman?” Yancy cried. He was trying to see it without taking off his Jack o’ Lantern mask, but all he was doing was spinning around in confused circles and getting himself dizzy. The next moment a giant, night-black body was hovering over me like a shadow. It dropped the block it was holding. And it reached out to grab me.
CHAPTER 9
I saw maison’s baseball bat swinging before the mob could grab me, making the Enderman leave. It was scary to have something hulking over you like that, then have it be gone, then know it could show up anywhere in the next second. I was spinning around myself, trying to find it. The Enderman showed back up just next to Destiny, but instead of doing anything to her, it began moving quickly my way. Its purple eyes were on me and only me.
Adventure Against the Endermen Page 2
