At first, it was paradise. There was no one there to tell her what to do, and nobody to distract her. To an introverted loner such as her, it was a utopia of emptiness.


Her name was T_ F_. A girl that had achieved nothing in life but the completion of one hundred video games.

She had a comfortable life, and that didn't change at all when she came here. She never felt thirsty or hungry. She never felt tired. There was no danger.

"Here" was MineCraft: Pocket Edition. Her parents refused to buy her the real one, so she had made the best of what she had.

At first, she only thought of building. A glass skyscraper. A Petting Zoo filled with sheep and pigs. A baker's. A butcher's.

In Pocket Edition, you are given a limited space with the basics. If you're lucky, you get lava and waterfalls, or veins of diamond.

In Creative Mode, she could do whatever she wanted, in this world, so aptly titled "Empty".

There was one thing she was scared of here. The white space that surrounded her tiny world. When she dug deep enough, she could break through the bedrock and fall through the white space. That terrified her.

Also, when she flew high enough, she could land on an invisible, hard ledge that signaled the top of the world. Again, that terrified her. Back before she was here, the game always kicked her out when she went too far into the white.

Eventually, the inevitable happened. She ran out of space.

With all of the many buildings, caves, and floating islands that she built, it was bound to happen.

At first, she raged. She screamed and cried and begged.

She made touch-ups and edits until her world was perfect, and then some. She built monstrous, parasitic structures and tore them down. She wandered around her world, finding rooms she'd forgotten existed.

Eventually, she grew bored of this. In a fit of long lasting rage, she devastated her lovely creations and rebuilt a giant, maze-like cube reminiscent of a science fiction spaceship.

Again, she wandered the halls like a ghost, adding and destroying things as the whim hit her. She built people and pets out of woolen blocks, before viciously shooting them until the arrows began to disappear.

She understood perfectly well that she was insane. Normal people don't talk to blocks and set themselves on fire to see if it hurts. Normal people don't choose a random floor block as their pet and name it Caroline. Normal people aren't alone all the time.


Again, she rebuilt her world from scratch, creating a "Holy City". She made up stories for the people, filling thousands of signboards with them. She built a shrine around Caroline, and created priests out of fenceposts.

Silence was something she came to hate. Whereas before, it had been a signal of contentment, it was now a sign if her growing loneliness. Sometimes, she would cry and scream and argue with the air; she initiated temper tantrums out of nowhere.

It was in the middle of one of these temper tantrums that she felt the pulse. It sounded through her mind once, twice, three times.


Is anyone there?


She wanted to follow the call, but it was too far away and too weak.

It repeated, over and over, until it stopped mid-call.

When it returned, the message had changed. With renewed strength, another pulse reached out.


Follow the call!


She desperately tried to pinpoint it, weaving through her maze of lava and water, but not even her desperate destruction could find it.

Suddenly, the voice multiplied; doubling, tripling, quintupling, gaining more than enough strength for her to follow it.

The call pulled her from her world, and she took several hesitant steps though square clouds. They drifted around her feet, whispering silent entreaties to go back, go no farther! She fought to ignore the unease in her stomach, treading softly through the clouds.

Her slow inching became a fast walk, before morphing into a jog and finally a full-out run. The pulses called her; screaming for her to come.

As she ran, her feet became heavy, and she gasped with breath she hadn't needed in a very long time. A thousand years of hunger gnawed at her stomach and the thirst for water called her ever more forward. Wind flittered through her clothes, and a line of hearts appeared to float in front of her.

Small 64s appeared on her once unlimited blocks, and some disappeared entirely. Chickens, cows, sheep, and pigs ran in every direction as the spotted eggs shattered at her feet.

Alive, she realized. I feel alive!

Rusty laughter filled the air, and she realized it came from her own mouth. She wondered what happened to the times where something as simple as a misplaced block could make her giggle.

After running for so long that one of the hearts disappeared, she found herself at the edge of a city.

The city stretched as far as the eye could see, made of tall, iron and silver blocks. To her left she could see suburban homes made of brick and wood, and beyond that lay farmland filled with square animals. A few dazed looking people wandered around the empty buildings, greeting each other shyly.

"Hello!"

She turned to see a handsome, blonde boy with green eyes and a pair of square glasses. He smiled kindly at her.

"Where do you want to live?" She stared mutely at him, and he added gently "Somewhere crowded, not crowded, or in the middle?"

"I don't want to be alone again!" she blurted, before covering her mouth with a blush.

He smiled benignly at her, gesturing for her to follow him. "Suburban it is! By the way, I'm Derek Woodthrush. Can you tell me your name?"

She had to think for a moment, frantically searching her mind for a phrase long forgotten while Derek waited patiently. "T... Tricia... F...Fore...Forebush?"

"Its nice to meet you, Tricia. Welcome to your new home!" The blonde placed a sign with the words Forbush Residence on a wall bordering a squat brick building. Tricia didn't even care about the misspelling; for the first time, she had something that she hadn't built herself.


The sunset cast a dying ray of light over two figures: a sobbing, old woman and a blond young man comforting her.