Presenting Mindcrack's Team Nancy Drew in:

The Case of Monumental Malfeasance

Episode 1: Banana Shenanigans

In a dark room lit only by the LCD pixels of two forty-inch monitors pressed side by side, Porky leaned over to click on the play button. The video box on his YouTube page blared the song, "You're watching Guude Boulderfist," into his headset. He shook his YooHoo bottle, twisted the lid open, and took a sip. Mmmmm! Strawberry! He dropped onto his nice high-backed executive chair, with genuine imitation suede.

Suddenly his headseat screamed, "Hello, guys!" Porky unwrapped his ham and cheese sub and watched the screen. Guude said, "Welcome back to more UHC statue building. Today we will be building Aureylian."

Porky scratched at his rotting flesh. As he lifted the sandwich to his mouth he briefly wondered if it was cannibalistic for a zombie pigman to eat ham. He quickly decided that since he was a zombie it was not.

The video began with the usual unorganized antics, and then Guude started gathering his materials while talking about how Aurey joined the server, what her background was, and so on. Fully relaxed, Porky set his heels up on the desk and leaned back for some good catching up with the Mindcrack server.

Halfway through his sandwich they were up to Aurey's chest, ender pearling all over the place to make sure her dress and cape were just so and discussing exactly what they would use for her eyes and hair. Movement on the other screen caught his eye, and he fixed that eye squarely on the bank of security monitors filling it. Diagonally up and left of the lower right monitor he saw it, barely perceptible, but he knew what it was all the same. It was the boss.

Leaning back again, Porky turned his attention to the Mindcrack video, watching Guude and Aurey try to figure out how high the statue was supposed to be. Aurey fell from the top of the statue and nearly died, and then Skype started up. Porky sighed and answered the call.

"What is it?" he asked, annoyed.

It was the boss. "I need you to get up here right away."

"Yes, sir," he replied. It was always something with that guy. Porky clicked the pause button, took one more bite of his sandwich and chugged the rest of his YooHoo. He pushed himself up out of his seat. This is why I can never keep pace with the Mindcrack videos, he sighed.

Guude hummed as he dashed through Spawn Village. There had been some changes made since he was last there, but he wasn't paying attention to them. He was intent on his destination: the UHC monument. The path was second nature to him at this point. The world was so familiar to him by now that it would take a huge difference to catch his eye.

In the sky appeared the familiar Enterprise hovering ever vigilant over an assortment of builds including that God-awful pixel art of his own face. It wasn't that he didn't like his own face, it just stuck out like a sore Guude and wrecked the background view for half of the UHC monument.

Materials in hand, he hopped over to the chest he had laid out at the base of his next UHC monument project, casually tossing his stuff into it. He suddenly realized he needed ladders and grabbed the wood he had just put into the chest and started to head over to the crafting area. It was then that he noticed something was different.

He couldn't figure it out it at first, but after a while he realized what it was: Aureylian's statue was missing. He looked around to make sure he wasn't looking in the wrong place, but sure enough it was nowhere to be found. He had just worked on it with her a week before, too.

Sprinting over to the empty lot where her statue had been he found a curious sight: a jukebox playing the song "Ward." That always creeped him out. Guude punched the jukebox to make it stop. His blow must have been very powerful because the jukebox broke. Where it had stood he saw a deep dark ladder-lined hole. It looked dangerous. His gut told him the hole led to danger, but he had to find out what had happened. Doing this alone would probably get him killed, though. This was a job for Team Nancy Drew.

Guude, Baj, PauseUnpause, and VintageBeef leaned over the hole, gazing intently into the darkness. It was 1x1, with a ladder descending into the yawning depths until it was out of sight. "What do you think guys?" Guude asked.

"It's dark all right," Beef remarked. "Wonder where it goes."

"I don't like the look of it," Pause said. "It could be a trap."

"We should probably have someone scout out the way." Guude looked around at the others.

Pause quickly replied, "I'm going on vacation in a couple of days. Last thing I need is a creeper blowing up my face."

Beef looked at Guude. "I don't have anything to fight with. My inventory disappeared again."

Guude sighed and started throwing supplies at Beef. Baj stood straight and tall, the wind causing his glorious moustache to undulate. "You're all wimps," he chastised. "Baj Grylls isn't afraid to go down some silly hole." And with that he leaped heartily into the air and dropped down the hole.

The remaining three men looked at each other and shrugged. "How is it down there?" Pause called down to Baj.

"Dark," said Baj. His voice was faint. "Nothing's trying to kill me yet, though."

One by one they followed Baj down the ladder. It was definitely dark, and the ladder seemed to go down to the very bowels of the world. When they finally found the bottom their legs and arms ached from so much descending.

"Ouch, watch it, Beef!" Pause said. The four of them found themselves in a very cramped space.

"I think there's a door here," Baj said. "Iron."

"That means there's a button or lever or pressure plate somewhere," Beef said. "Look for one of those things."

There was much jostling and pushing. Someone shoved Guude back against the wall. He felt something dig into his back and click into place. The door swung open, and they heard the sound of something sliding into place above them.

"That's it!" Baj said. The door clanged shut. "Push it again."

Guude pushed it, and Baj quickly slapped a torch on the wall in the space left vacant by his departure. They were in a two by two room with an iron door on one wall and the ladder and button on the opposite wall. The room was lined entirely in bedrock, and the way up had been cut off by a bedrock block that had slid into place when Guude pushed the button.

"How'd they dig into the bedrock?" Pause wondered aloud.

"I don't know, but this prank is starting to go too far." Guude was visibly starting to lose patience.

A few minutes of pushing the button and trying to dart through the doorway in time without getting caught on the wall brought them all into a long narrow passage through the bedrock. Baj led the way, dropping torches onto the floor here and there to light the otherwise pitch-black corridor. After a lot of walking they saw a faint light ahead of them. The four Mindcrackers quickened their pace to get to the source of that light.

They arrived in another small room, this one considerably bigger than the room at the bottom of the hole. It led off into a wider passageway that went perpendicular to the one they had just traveled through. Glowstone placed in strategic spots along the floor, ceiling, and walls provided light. Rails extended as far as they could see into the new corridor. The rails started against the wall opposite the new corridor, beside a chest and underneath a button.

Beef smashed one glowstone. "More bedrock under here," he said, disappointed.

"You think Pak's behind this?" Pause asked. "Getting back at us for spoiling his furnace dungeon."

"That was a long time ago," Guude said.

"It was the origin of Team Nancy Drew, though," Beef observed.

"Too bad my texture pack isn't broken this time," Baj lamented.

"We don't really have much choice," Guude decided. "We have to go along with whoever made this. There's no way back."

"You're not planning on going down that track, are you?" Pause looked fearfully down the way. "It could be a trap."

"This whole thing's a trap," Guude said. "I don't think were safer here…"

On cue, they heard the rattling of bones and the moaning of zombies. They could make out shapes coming down the passageway they had just traveled along. "You're not kidding," Beef said. Guude popped the chest open and, as he suspected, it was filled with minecarts. He grabbed one and plopped it onto the rail.

Guude jumped into his minecart and punched the button. He swung his diamond sword at the first zombie that came into the room flailing its arms at him. The cart rolled away slowly at first then hit a few powered rails and was flung quickly down the track. The ride maintained a fast pace along the 3x3 bedrock passageway. Pause, Baj, and Beef were all keeping up with him in their carts. The walls suddenly turned to sandstone, still lit with glowstone.

Ahead the passage narrowed to a green-walled passage just wide enough for the rail. When they got close enough, Guude's eyes flew wide open and he scrunched himself in the center of his cart. "Watch out!" he yelled.

The narrowed corridor was actually cactus on both sides of the rail. The minecart was rattling as it whipped along the tracks, and Guude was afraid it would jostle him too close to the sharp barbs of the cacti. His head was hunched down between his shoulders and his arms were crossed against his face as he cringed the whole way through the cactus tunnel.

The cacti were behind him now, and sandstone ahead of him. Then just sand, an entire corridor made of sand, wider than the one he was in now. It was getting closer. Guude heard a click, and he instantly sensed danger. The sand corridor began collapsing. Guude screamed, "Get out!" and he leaped from his minecart. He rolled along the sandstone floor and then there was nothing beneath him but a huge gaping void. He scrabbled for anything to grab onto and just caught enough of a finger hold to avoid plunging into the dark ravine below him.

Sand fell down all around him and minecarts raced by and slid off the edge of the broken rails, but he couldn't see if the others had gotten out in time. Guude was grunting and straining to maintain his fingertip hold on the ledge and hopefully pull himself up. He feared moving as it might dislodge him and send him plummeting to his death. He knew he couldn't hold on forever. He was going to have to try and get a leg up over the ledge. Guude labored to pull himself up, his face hot and undoubtedly red. His forearms were burning, and his biceps were tight.

A face appeared over the ledge, smiling down at him. "Hello Guude."

"Aureylian!" Guude said. "Help me up."

A strand of string dropped beside him. Guude unsteadily took hold of the string with one hand, bracing his feet against the wall. Aureylian stared down at him serenely, a thin sword in one hand.

Guude got both hands on the string. "I'm ready," he said. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"Banana shenanigans," she said, her voice strangely emotionless. Then she swung her sword in an arc, slicing through the string, leaving an astonished Guude to free-fall into the void while she stood watching.