“Ugh, Lonnie, this looks complicated,” I said.
“No pain, no gain,” he responded. “Here, I’ll start off making the golems for us to show you. Can you just build us a shelter so that if it rains, they don’t all melt?”
“Hey, I have a better idea. Why don’t we go to the football game on Friday night?” I asked. “It’s the big homecoming one, isn’t it? And our schools are playing against each other! We’re officially rivals! You can introduce me to all your high school buddies and—”
“Bianca, are you even listening to me?”
The world went dark after that question. I stood motionless, my heart thumping with regret. That was the last conversation we would have before the ride to the homecoming game. I would forget about building what Lonnie asked. Those snow golems were probably all puddles now. I had let my best friend down. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be in the real world.
“I want to be back in the game!” I shouted. I squeezed my eyes shut. It was like a black hole had opened in my mind and I was struggling to stop myself from getting sucked in. I didn’t want to see what was on the other side of it. I didn’t want to know what would happen if I let it take ahold of me. I thought I might shatter into a thousand pieces. “Take me back!”
I opened my eyes and I was back by the nether portal I had built. It was daylight and I let out a big sigh of relief. Lonnie was standing beside me now, looking at me intently.
“Thank you for the reminder,” I whispered to him. “And…and I’m sorry for not listening before.”
I needed snowballs. I climbed up to the top of the hill and, surveying the realm around me, spotted a cold taiga biome at the limit of my vision. There would be plenty of snow for snowballs there.
I gestured to Lonnie. “Follow me.”
As we trekked across the landscape, I began to feel a lot better. For the briefest of moments, this was just a game. It was a regular day, and we were the kids we used to be when we played in our own homes. I had made the right decision not to leave the game. I was better off sticking with Lonnie, just like he had always stuck by me. I owed him that much. It was always him and me against the world. There was no reason to change that just because I met two other people one time in a game. Esme and Anton were not even that nice to me anyway, always whispering out of earshot when they thought I couldn’t hear, and blaming me for the endermen attacks.
I did not know how long we would have to travel. But I knew we had to cross the desert biome again in order to reach the colder one. Every once in a while I would reorient myself to make sure we were headed in the right direction. I saw that we were about to pass Anton’s house again. Only this time some big commotion was happening in that direction. As we got closer, I scouted ahead.
“Check it,” I said to Lonnie, pointing to the top of a sand dune. “Slime mob.”
As we moved closer, a couple of skeletons showed up. The combination of their clacking and the hopping and squelching from the slime made a terrible chorus. Anton hadn’t had time to reset all of his traps, so there was nothing stopping them from overwhelming the house, destroying what he had probably spent days to build.
I instantly felt guilty. It was my fault that his traps were all deactivated. The least I could do was vanquish these mobs for him.
Taking out my sword, I charged in, giving my best warrior yell. I bashed through the little slimes that were at my feet while keeping the skeletons away from Lonnie. A huge slime hopped toward me, one of the big size-4 ones. I kept slashing though, cutting it down by half and half again, and then collecting slime balls. But more huge ones popped up, surrounding me.
I tried to move more quickly through the slime mobs and the horde of skeletons that kept popping up from the sand, but nothing was reducing the number of attackers. One of them got Lonnie and he fell down the side of the dune. None of the other mobs seemed to notice him there, so I left him where he was and continued fighting. A slime got me from the left, and I watched my health points go down as I staggered back, away from the fighting. But there was a zombie behind me, which punched me and drained more of my health points. I slashed it a few times until it died. It left behind an iron shovel that I wished I could use to bash the skeletons’ heads in, but I put it away for later. I turned back to the slime mob, which seemed to have gotten smaller.
The last couple of attacks had moved me down the dune a bit closer to Lonnie, so I fought to get back on top and move the fighting away from him. Even I knew that having the high ground would give me the advantage. For that, I’d need to fight through this seemingly never-ending horde. As Anton had said before, these mobs were legendary.
I pulled up my supplies and took out sand, flint, and gunpowder. I ran off, around the side of one of the really big slime cubes. Just as it turned toward me, I threw the TNT I’d made on the ground between us. The blast made a crater going straight down.
The slime moved toward me and fell into the hole. A couple of smaller ones followed.
The skeletons were a little harder to corral but a couple of them fell in too. As they dropped, I delivered fatal blows with my bow and arrows. Then I gathered slime balls, bones, and a potato as they went down.
“We can’t leave you alone for one moment, can we?” said a familiar voice behind me. I twisted around and was surprised to see Anton and Esme standing there, armored up like they were about to make a run to the End.
“What are you guys doing here?” I asked. “I thought I had…”
“Blown us out of the game with TNT?” Esme chimed in. “Yeah, you definitely did that. Locked us both out of the game.”
“Luckily, the doctor on duty this morning let us back in,” Anton said.
“Did he say anything about Lonnie?” My heart beat wildly.
“Bianca,” Esme said slowly.
The pounding in my chest was unbearable. I could feel each thud of my pulse like a drumbeat, and it only hit harder when Esme said my name like that. “It’s okay,” I interrupted. “If the doctor didn’t know anything, I mean. Every doctor doesn’t know every patient, right? And besides, we should be focusing on the plan here. Next steps and all that.”
Esme stared at me for a long second before saying, “Yeah, next steps. We think we need to visit A.J.’s place. He’s created most of the complex mods in here.”
“Why his house?” I asked. “A.J.’s just a kid.”
“Just, nothing. A.J. has all the cheat codes, and knows way more about this game than we do,” Anton said.
“So, where is he now?”
“He keeps rebuilding,” Esme said. “Always someplace new. He likes to blow up the stuff he’s made and start over again when the world resets, and he spawns in a new location.”
“Which means he’s hard to find,” Anton said.
“Which way, then?” I asked.
“Last I checked, he started a big fortress in the taiga biome. That’s probably our best bet.”
“Great, I’m headed there anyway,” I said, glad that this new side quest Esme and Anton were forcing on me would take me where I already wanted to be.
We moved north, following the river until it turned. We skirted the swamp and, before it got dark, worked together to put up a house on the side of a hill, overlooking a valley. The going was slow. I did most of the work, still feeling pretty bad for when I kicked them out of the game. But when it came to the traps, Anton wanted to put them together himself. It was going to take a while, so I decided to use the time to scrounge up some more supplies.
I moved to the next hill and started mining down. There was a seam of coal inside that I followed, putting up torches as I went. I found and kept some sand, too. I mined all the way through the hill and came out the other side to a plain that was flooded on one end with a lake, on which a little island of what looked like weeping willows stood. I suddenly wished for real water, a r
eal island to lie on in the sun. I longed for soft lines, my mother’s face looking into my own, my father’s hand rubbing my back in that way that always made me feel better, the tangle of Carrie’s limbs when she climbed into my bed. My entire family was out in the real world. But I couldn’t log out. I didn’t want to, not until I finished what Lonnie and I had started.
It was starting to get dark. Time to get back.
I hurried back over this new landscape to the three-floor house we’d made in record time. “That’ll teach them I’m no noob,” I said aloud as I got close to the house, and Anton stepped out, waving me over to the side. I was going to ignore him when I remembered that he was big on traps. I followed his directions and found a small door cut into the hill itself. It led to a tunnel that opened into the house.
“Look at this,” Anton announced. “We found redstone in the hill.” He slumped against a wall. Lonnie stared out of one of the windows. The darkness had settled in, and I waited for the mobs to start attacking. I handed Esme a diamond sword we made from the haul on the hill, and took up a position near the front door while she replenished her food points.
“What if we don’t find A.J.?” she said. “He might not even be in the game today. The doctors have been in his room a lot lately.”
“He came into my room rocking his ‘gamer for life’ pajamas and Minecraft slippers,” I said. “I have a feeling that kid is always in the game.”
There were the sounds of zombies and slimes nearby, but none of them ever made it all the way to the house we’d built. It felt nice, to actually be able to pass the night in relative safety for once. As light came up again, I breathed a sigh of relief.
When all of the mobs disappeared, Esme said we should get some food. A mooshroom had appeared on some grassy terrain in the valley below, and she went after it. I stayed near the house, and chased around a couple of chickens and a rabbit for meat and eggs.
“Want to help?” I asked when I noticed Lonnie had followed me. I held my hand out to him, and he came along.
“I’d feel better if you put the rope back on him,” Anton said.
“No,” I said. “You guys were right before. If I want to get my friend back, I have to start treating him like my friend, not a pet.”
I looked at Lonnie, and he turned back to me in a way that made me wonder how much of him was in there, and how much he might have been holding back. Anton cleared his throat, ending the moment, and said, “We should probably get going.”
We found another forest biome and built the next shelter there, inside a thick copse of trees. This time we went wide instead of high. The two rooms on either end were set to explode, depending on where you stepped, thanks to some clever wiring by Anton. The inner rooms were where we would stay. In the event of an attack, we’d have plenty of time to escape via a tunnel Esme and I dug that led to another thicket of trees. Between the wired-to-explode house hidden in the trees, the tunnel, and the next set of trees as cover for an escape, we should have been fine.
Should have been.
After the tunnel was built, Esme and I made our way back through it to the house, hopping over one carefully hidden pressure plate that was our last-ditch effort if we were overwhelmed and still needed to run. I looked back at our handiwork when we got to the house again. Not going to lie, I was really impressed with what we had done.
“Pretty cool, right?” Anton commented.
“Yes, Anton, your traps are the best around,” Esme admitted.
He grinned. “Anything that comes even remotely near is going to get blown sky-high.”
Night came quickly, and we hunkered down in beds to make it pass more quickly. But as soon as we lay down, there were explosions from the front and sides of the house. I ran to the nearest window and watched as a mob of zombies got blasted to smithereens. I was just about to celebrate when another wave surged forward. More explosives went off. I held my hand up and Anton slapped me high-five. But there was a third wave, which included a creeper, and the mob had gotten dangerously close to the house.
“Time to fall back?” I suggested.
“Nope,” Anton said with confidence. “Wait for it.”
Two of the zombies went for the door while a third went around to the side of the house. I worried about the door, but I knew the traps would keep anything back.
As the first of the two zombies got near the door, there was the click of a trigger, and then the sound of a low whistle that got louder and louder, and then bam! Both of them got smashed by an anvil. Anton laughed. The third zombie off to the side kept moving until it hit a pressure plate and was immediately blown up.
Anton turned to us, clearly pleased with himself.
But the creeper had hesitated near the zombies at the door, and with both of them gone, and the two traps set off, it entered. It didn’t know it was a booby-trapped room. It took a couple of steps forward, somehow missing the triggers, and I held my breath.
“No way will it miss them all,” Anton said.
“I think it’s time to fall back like Bianca said,” Esme suggested. She started putting away supplies, and led Lonnie toward the escape hatch.
The creeper was still coming. It still hadn’t tripped any of the traps.
“How is that possible?” Anton asked. “I was sure that I’d—”
“Doesn’t matter now,” Esme said. “Let’s go!”
All four of us made our way down the escape hatch. I stayed behind a beat to close it tightly as Esme went on ahead, lighting up torches so we could see our way through, and so we wouldn’t accidentally trip our own trigger. I saw when she helped Lonnie jump over it, and Anton followed. But I felt a cold wind at my neck, and looked back in time to spot the creeper coming toward me. I wished I still had Howl. She was a real scrapper and had come in handy in every close fight I’d had so far. Instead I turned and ran, hopping over the pressure plate and running to catch up with Esme, Anton, and Lonnie. Before we made it to the exit, the trigger went off and the blast from the explosion knocked us to the ground.
We made it out to the trees. I was grateful to see the flat, squared-off clouds in the night sky.
“Do you see this?” Esme said. “There’s a path here.”
There was a thin trail that wound through the trees, but it barely qualified as a path. “I’m not so sure,” I said.
“The world doesn’t generate this way,” she said. “I’ve been playing in here long enough to know what’s a path and what isn’t.”
I looked at Anton for confirmation, but he only shrugged. Lonnie trudged behind Esme and I took up the rear again, trying to make note of exactly which way we were headed in case we needed to double back.
We walked until daylight again, moving pretty consistently upward. There were more rabbits up this way, which we saved for meat. Through a little tangle of bushes, I spotted another gray wolf, and moved in closer. “Hey,” I said. It looked at me briefly before running away.
“What?” Esme asked.
“Did you see that wolf?” I asked.
“No,” Esme and Anton said together.
“It’s just, I was thinking about Howl, and then all of a sudden, here was this wolf, and—”
“And there are plenty of wolves in the game. It’s not a coincidence or anything,” Esme said sarcastically.
I scoffed and walked ahead. We moved on to a high, rocky cliff that overlooked a frozen biome. Down below was a large building near a lake of solid ice. I got excited just looking at it.
“That’s it,” I said.
“How are you so sure?” Anton asked.
“It’s weird and complicated,” I said. “Exactly the kind of space a kid would build. It reminds me of A.J. Besides, what else do we have to do? It’s not going to kill us to look.”
“Famous last words,” Anton added.
“It’s pretty
far down, though,” I said, looking over the side of the cliff.
Anton pushed me aside. “It’s Minecraft,” he said. “You can literally cut away steps on your way down.”
“Right,” I said.
“Well?” he asked. “Those stairs aren’t going to make themselves. And you’re the one who wants to check out the house.” He gestured over the cliff.
“Oh come on, Anton,” Esme said, exasperated. “We’re all in this together.”
He groaned but walked over, pulling out his pickaxe to help me create a staircase in the side of the cliff. Esme also pitched in, and I smiled, grateful for their help. I could almost feel the relief rising through me that I wasn’t alone, that they were actually going to help me follow through with the plan.
I glanced over at A.J.’s fortress. A.J. was the one who got me into the game to begin with; surely he had the cheat codes to fix my friend.
“Not much longer now, Lonnie,” I said, as I cut another step down through the frozen rock.
“Oh come on, A.J.! What is this nonsense?!” Anton threw his arms in the air.
There was a wide river of lava separating us from what looked like a much more ambitious gauntlet of protections than Anton had on the desert house.
“What? Because he put protections around his home base?” I asked. “You did the same thing.”
He walked a little way to the left. “Look at that, it’s redstone wiring.”
“Exposed?” Esme asked.
Anton moved a little farther along, ignoring Esme’s question. “Those are pressure plates. I’m sure of it.” He lay down on the ground and crawled forward, looking toward the side of the house. “Yep. Definitely pressure plates, and they go around this way…” He trailed off and set to running. We followed him to the side of the house where it became clear that what we were looking at was a complicated array of levers, trapdoors, and pressure plates attached to who knows what, arranged in an elaborate labyrinth that surrounded the house entirely.
The Crash: An Official Minecraft Novel Page 10
