“The whole thing is made out of purpur blocks,” Morgan said. “It’s a real End City, all right. I wonder if he built it block by block or if he just pulled the whole thing over from the End dimension.”
Ash took a closer look at the walls as they stepped farther into the room. “The thing to remember about purpur blocks,” she said, “is that they can hide a hostile mob called—”
“Shulker!” Morgan called. “Look out!”
Ash saw it then. One of the purpur blocks popped open. It was hollow, and inside it was a small, pale creature, cube-shaped, with big eyes.
“It’s sort of cute,” said Jodi.
“It’s dangerous!” said Ash. She started dropping blocks. “We need to build a barrier!”
Within seconds, Ash had constructed a short wall between them and the shulker. But she had forgotten something important.
A shulker’s energy blasts could find them wherever they hid.
A glowing trail of energy flew right over the wall, striking Jodi in the back. She flashed red, taking damage…and then, right before Ash’s eyes, Jodi started to float into the air.
“Um?” said Jodi. “Good thing, or bad thing?”
“Bad thing!” Morgan cried, and he grabbed for Jodi’s foot to keep her from floating away.
But the shulker had fired five energy blasts.
They all found their targets.
Ash found herself floating into the air beside her friends.
“This doesn’t seem so bad,” said Po.
“You know the old saying,” Morgan said, flailing around. “What comes up must come down.”
Ash knew Morgan was right. The levitation effect would only last about ten seconds. But in that time, they would rise higher and higher. And after that…
Well. It would be a long way to fall.
Po dragged his blocky hands against the walls. He couldn’t find anything to grab hold of. He kept floating up, up….
And the ground kept getting farther away.
“This is going to be some major fall damage,” he said.
“Can’t we do anything to soften the landing?” Ash said.
“I still have a few potions of slow falling,” Harper said. “But we can’t drink potions anymore.”
“Wait, look down there!” cried Jodi. “What is that?”
Po squinted. Down below, he could see a strange pixelation effect. The air itself seemed to shimmer.
Then there was a loud pop, and a familiar figure stood on the ground.
It was the Librarian!
“I’m here?” she said. She looked at her blocky hands. “I’m here! He did it!”
Who did what? Po wondered. But he was certainly glad to see her. The Librarian looked like an average villager, but she was smart and very good at gathering resources. She’d been aiding them since the very beginning of their adventures.
And they could sure use some aid now.
“Help!” Po cried. “We’re up here!”
The Librarian looked up. Her eyes went wide when she saw them floating there. “Stay put!” she said. “I need to take care of this shulker first.”
“You can’t damage it,” Ash warned her.
“I don’t need to,” said the Librarian. She produced a water bucket from her inventory. “You know what happens when you get a shulker wet, don’t you?”
“Oh,” Morgan said. “Of course. That’s brilliant!”
“What?” Po said. “What happens when you get a shulker wet?”
He watched as the Librarian doused the mob with her bucket of water. As soon as the water touched it, the shulker teleported away.
“That happens,” said the Librarian.
She didn’t pause to celebrate her victory, though. She immediately set to work building a column, leaping into the air and placing bricks beneath her feet, one after the other. She had almost reached them when Po felt a lurching sensation in his stomach.
They weren’t levitating anymore. They were falling!
The Librarian stopped building her column. She now focused on building out instead of up, creating a flat block structure high above the ground.
Po fell onto the platform, and his friends all landed nearby. It didn’t hurt, because they hadn’t fallen very far.
He peered over the edge of the platform. The ground was far below them. That would have hurt.
“Thanks for the help,” he said.
“I’m just glad I got here in time,” she said. “The Evoker King found a way to lock me out. But I’ve got a hacker on my side—and he was able to find a weakness in the King’s firewall.”
“So you’re not another artificial consciousness,” Harper said. “You’re a person. You’ve got the missing sixth headset!”
“That’s right,” said the Librarian. “I knew something was wonky about Doc’s invention, and I wanted to make sure you were all safe. You’ve probably guessed my identity by now.”
“Are you the lunch lady?” Po guessed. “The principal? Oh my gosh. Are you Amelia Earhart? So that’s what happened to you!”
“You’re Ms. Minerva,” said Morgan. “Aren’t you?”
The Librarian smiled. “You’re right.”
Po’s mouth hung open. Their teacher had been helping them all along? She’d been the one filling chests with valuable resources and top-tier enchanted weapons?
“Ms. Minerva,” he said. “You…are really good at Minecraft.”
“Why, thank you,” she said. “But don’t sound so surprised. I’ve been playing video games since 1995 or so.” Her smile dropped away. “But I’ve never encountered anything like the Evoker King. I’m deeply curious about what he’s up to, and why. So far, you five have handled everything he’s thrown at you.” She sighed. “But he’s never had so much power. Are you sure you want to confront him? We could put aside our headsets and walk away.”
The group exchanged silent glances. They hadn’t said it out loud, but they all knew that was an option. They could walk away and let the Evoker King have this virtual world.
But this place felt like their own secret playhouse. A sandbox of infinite possibility, where they’d had the most memorable adventures of their lives.
And now it was their best chance of getting to see Ash, even if she moved halfway around the world.
“We can’t give up now,” Po said, and he knew from their nods that his friends agreed. “We love this place, and we can’t let the Evoker King ruin it or scare us away.”
Ms. Minerva’s librarian avatar smiled once more. “I hoped you’d say that. I never could turn away from a mystery. And this place is quite a mystery. You deserve a chance to explore it without the Evoker King running the show.”
“And now that you’re here, you can help us!” said Ash.
“I wouldn’t be much help,” said the teacher. “While the Evoker King has the Foundation Stone, I can’t do any more than you can. You don’t need me…you need my secret weapon.”
“The hacker,” Harper said. She sounded suspicious.
“Exactly,” said Ms. Minerva. “And there are only six headsets. So I’m going to give him mine now. But I’ll be watching over you from the computer lab, just like always.”
“Thank you,” said Ash. “Thank you for helping us. But also…thank you for trusting us to fix this.”
She nodded. “You’re a very capable group of students. Particularly when you work together as a team. I only hope there’s room on your team for one more….”
With that, the Librarian disappeared in a burst of pixels. They all waited for the hacker to appear. Po could hardly contain his nervous energy.
Finally, the air rippled once more with pixels, and Po and his friends saw their new teammate. They all gasped. The avatar was instantly recognizable.
The hacker was…
Theo!!!
Theo was here, with them. Theo was the hacker!
Harper couldn’t believe her eyes. But then again, why should she believe them? Just because the avatar looked like Theo, that didn’t mean Theo was the player behind the avatar.
“Don’t worry, guys,” he said. “I’m here to solve all your problems!”
Okay, thought Harper. That is definitely the real Theo.
“Hey, man!” said Po. “Welcome to the party.”
“Hold up,” said Harper. “We need to talk about some things first. You mean to tell me you’ve been working with Ms. Minerva this whole time?”
“I wish I had been,” said Theo. “That would have helped you avoid some trouble. But I’ve been on my own until recently.”
“Start at the beginning,” said Ash. “Tell us everything.”
Theo nodded. “For me, it started when the Evoker King infiltrated the school’s systems. I noticed right away that something was up with the computers, and I did some digging in the code. From what I saw, it was pretty obvious that we’d been hacked.”
“What did you do?” asked Morgan.
“I went straight to Ms. Minerva,” he answered. “And that’s when things got really interesting.”
Theo paused for dramatic effect. Harper huffed. “Just tell us what happened, Theo!” she said.
“All right, all right! Ms. Minerva knew more than she was willing to tell me. But she was impressed with my hacking skills, and she asked me to take a look at a VR headset…and the server that was running your Minecraft game. I could see where Doc’s tinkering had caused some strange things to happen. The source of all the strangeness was a key bit of code in Doc’s modifications. A programmer would call it a bug. You call it…the Foundation Stone.”
“So the Foundation Stone is the source of all the weirdness?” Morgan asked. “Even before the Evoker King started messing with us, we noticed that this world wasn’t exactly like a standard game of Minecraft.”
“For instance,” said Jodi, “I can do handstands.” She did one, to illustrate her point. Po clapped his square hands and said, “You can’t do that in vanilla Minecraft.”
Theo began to pace on the platform. “That’s right. The bug is like this…little seed of possibility. It makes this place a little more weird and a little more wonderful.”
“I still think it might be magic,” Po said. “I’m like ninety-five percent sure.” Harper knocked him lightly on the head while Theo continued.
“In other words, the bug—the Foundation Stone—is actually having a positive effect. That seed was flowering and evolving the game to have new possibilities. You’re having more fun because of it, not less. But you had to be inside to know that. From the outside looking in—just looking at how the code was working—it just looked like a mistake. A flaw in the system. And Doc’s goal as an inventor is to correct her mistakes—and to eliminate flaws.”
“How would she do that?” asked Ash.
“With a tool she’s used before: artificial intelligence.” Theo smirked. “She introduced the Evoker King into the game’s code. She gave it a simple command: find what was wrong and fix it. Get rid of the chaos. Impose order!”
“So why hasn’t he done that?” asked Morgan. “What went wrong?”
“You did,” said Theo. “The AI’s mission got a lot more complicated when a bunch of kids showed up and started moving things around at random. Building. Exploring. Causing change. My theory is that your appearance forced the AI to evolve. It became the Evoker King. But he still had the same mission. He had wanted to find and neutralize the Foundation Stone…but at some point, he decided to use it instead. He must have realized that he could weaponize it against the greater threat. You.”
“That is…a lot to process,” said Ash.
“So Ms. Minerva brought you in, and you built the dungeon?” Harper asked Theo. “And you reskinned the mobs we fought there?”
“Yeah, but you were never supposed to fight them. I was trying to keep the Evoker King away from the Foundation Stone. He’s actually not very creative. So my dungeon worked…until you guys cracked it wide open, defeated the guardians, and left the way open for the Evoker King.”
“Oops,” said Jodi.
“Yeah,” said Po. “Our bad!”
Theo shrugged. “Live and learn. If I’d told Ms. Minerva about my dungeon plan, she wouldn’t have sent you there. I guess this is what being secretive gets you.”
He didn’t say it, but Harper knew what he was thinking: If she hadn’t insisted on keeping their game a secret from Theo, they could have been working together all along.
Harper was glad avatars couldn’t blush.
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around the Foundation Stone being a bug,” said Po. “I thought it was, like…a stone.”
“It’s really a piece of code,” said Theo. “A string of ones and zeroes.”
“That hunk of rock?” said Jodi. “It’s made of, like…math?”
“Remember,” said Theo, getting really excited as he talked, “you’re inside a virtual world made by machines. The Foundation Stone and this platform we’re standing on and that wall over there—they look like physical objects. But it’s all made out of computer code. And the code that makes up the Foundation Stone is like a key that unlocks the programming of this entire world. It’s the ultimate super-hack! It’s…it’s…the slash command of the gods!”
“Okay. Okay. We get it,” said Morgan. “The Evoker King’s always been able to bend the rules,” Morgan said. “But now, with the Stone, he’s not limited to just bending the rules. He can break them.”
“Right,” said Theo. “Fortunately, I’m able to bend a rule or two myself.” He turned to Harper. “You said you’ve got slow-fall potions? Try drinking one now.”
Harper did as Theo suggested. As soon as she took a sip, she felt instantly lighter. “It’s working. We can apply status effects again.”
Theo nodded. “Yeah. I’m running a mod that lets me ignore the Evoker King’s tampering. As long as you’re within a few blocks of me, you’re not locked out anymore.”
“Then we can eat,” Ash said.
“We can heal!” Morgan added, and he devoured a bowl of soup.
“And more important—I don’t have to be a wizard anymore!” Po said happily. He winked out of existence, then immediately reappeared in the form of a boxer. “Let’s take this fight to the Evoker King!”
Harper heard a high-pitched horn sound from above. She looked up and saw movement against the shadowed ceiling. “Careful what you wish for, Po,” she said, quickly passing out potions to the others. “It looks like our enemy’s sent a welcome party!”
A vex swooped down from the shadows, flapping its tattered wings and raising its sword.
“It has the advantage up here,” said Ash. “Everybody get to the ground before our potions wear off!”
“Don’t worry, guys,” said Theo. “I’ve got this.”
Everybody leaped off the platform. But while Harper and the others floated slowly downward, Theo jumped straight up. He rose higher than Harper had ever seen anyone jump before!
“I’ve got a double-jump mod on my avatar,” said Theo. “And check this out.”
In midair, Theo held up a sword. It was made of wood—the most basic weapon you could get. Harper knew it would take a lot of hits with that thing to hurt a vex.
But Theo’s sword shimmered for a moment. When the shimmering stopped, the wooden sword had become diamond. It sliced through the air, doing massive damage to the vex.
“Ha!” Theo laughed as he landed back on the platform. He raised his sword above his head and whooped. “I am the hack master!”
“Ugh,” said Morgan as he touched down on the ground beside Harper. “Are we sure thi
s guy isn’t the Evoker King?”
“Be nice, Morgan,” Jodi said, scolding him.
“Very impressive, Theo!” Harper called up at him. “But you might want to watch your back!”
Harper’s warning was too late. The vex swooped down, slashing Theo in the back.
“Ouch!” he said. “I felt that!”
So he’s not invincible, thought Harper. He’s just got a few tricks. Probably all stuff he had to program in advance.
Theo focused on defeating the vex. With his diamond sword at the ready, it was no contest. Afterward, he made his way down from the platform, using a pickaxe to mine straight down through the column that Ms. Minerva had built.
“Okay, it wasn’t a flawless victory,” Theo said once he was on the ground with them. “But you can see how I’ll be helpful, right?”
Harper and Morgan shared a look.
“Yeah, okay,” said Morgan.
“Welcome to the team, Theo,” said Harper.
“All right!” said Theo. Even though their avatar voices tended to be kind of plain and flat, they could hear the genuine enthusiasm in Theo’s voice. He had been waiting for this. “I am so ready to fight our way through this tower.”
“Not so fast,” said Ash. “Now that you’re here, we may have other options….”
“And we’ve learned that the best path isn’t always the one that goes right through danger,” added Morgan. “Especially considering that the Evoker King has a weakness.”
“He does?” Po said.
“He does,” Harper confirmed. “Remember? As an artificial intelligence, he’s very smart…but not very creative.”
“Which is why he couldn’t get through my dungeon,” Theo said. “It took you guys to figure out a way past the guardians.”
Last Block Standing! (Minecraft Woodsword Chronicles #6) Page 4
