A/N: I wanted to write something for MCSM, and something more lighthearted after the seriousness of You're my Hero (that one was for regular Minecraft.) So, after talking about it with a friend, I decided to do a series of stories about what happened in those worlds Jesse and his pals were exploring, like the water world and the tilted world and the ever-popular fire world.
This story uses Female Jesse (we'll call her Jessie to clear that up), and takes place after ep6 and before ep7. If you haven't watched the first six episodes and at least the opening sequence of the seventh, this is going to be loaded with spoilers. Caveat lector!
"Adventure!" Ivor's loud, ragged voice echoed in the Portal Hallway. The long, narrow corridor was built of pristine white quartz and lit only by the colored light leaking out of the dozens of portals lining the walls. Blue, green, white, purple, red, and orange swirled within frames of gold, redstone, sea lanterns, and other treasures. The rainbow of lights coming from the portals still wasn't quite enough to dispel the darkness, so giant shadows stretched across the floor and crept up the walls. It gave the room an air of mystery, and its alien geometry only further reminded Ivor of how far he and his three teenaged companions were from home.
Upon Ivor's arrival in the Portal Hallway, the three kids turned to face him. They seemed rattled and relieved at the same time, which was understandable. After all, they had just narrowly escaped a trap-ridden mansion owned by a pumpkin-wearing killer.
"I say we break that portal in case you-know-who figures out how to escape from the dungeon," Petra suggested, a bit belatedly. The feisty redhead was already attempting to pull the gold blocks out of the skull-shaped portal. Her tampering made the green goo of the killer mansion portal flicker, but it refused to go out.
"Petra, don't touch that. You shouldn't fool with forces you don't understand," Ivor reprimanded her.
"Don't play with forces I don't understand?" Petra seethed. "You're one to talk. Who was the one who made the Witherstorm?"
"That was not the intended outcome—" Ivor began, until Jessie cut him off.
"Hey, hey. Don't fight, guys," she said. The dark-skinned girl, clad in sleek Star Shield armor, interposed herself between her arguing friends. "We're never gonna find our way home if we're distracted by arguing."
"Hmph," was Ivor's response.
Jessie ignored the grumpy alchemist and pulled out a scrap of paper she had been carrying around since before they even went into the killer mansion world. "Okay. So now that that nightmare is over, we're back to square one again. Which portal should we try this time?"
The others glanced around at the colorful portals, then looked back at Jessie and shrugged. Which was the typical response when she asked all of them at once.
"You know, I hope we aren't going in circles," Ivor said, breaking the silence. "How are we keeping track of which ones are which?"
"I've been marking them down on my paper," Jessie explained, waving the paper, which was crumpled and dirty from all the wear and tear it had gone through. She sighed. Her friends were equally disheveled. Petra fingered some scratches and dents on her blue-and-gold armor with distaste, its shiny brand-new state a fargone memory. Ivor's olive-green robe was worn down in spots and needed a sewing kit to patch up the holes and ripped seams. Lukas didn't seem to mind that his armor was beaten too, but he patted his spiky, banana-blond hair and muttered something about needing to touch up on the gel. It was looking considerably less spiky than it had before they went to Sky City.
To distract the others from their disheveled states, Jessie continued, "The last world we went in was the mansion world, and I picked that one, so that means now it's...Lukas's turn."
"My turn?" Lukas's eyebrows perked. "Okay. Um...let's see." He took a look around at the nearby portals: a white one with emerald and redstone blocks for a frame, a green one with iron and quartz blocks, a pink one with quartz pillars and gold blocks. Finally, he settled on a blue one ringed about in gold and lapis, a few portals down from where he stood.
"The blue portal?" Jessie asked, pointing at it. Lukas nodded.
"All right, sounds good to me," Petra agreed.
"Ivor?" Jessie asked.
"Why not?" was the alchemist's response.
"Anyone have any guesses what kind of world it might be?" Petra inquired as they started heading over towards it, their boots and shoes clinking and slapping on the smooth quartz floor.
"Not a clue," Lukas replied with a shrug.
"There's only one way to find out." Ivor pushed past them to the front, leading the way. "Adventure!" He charged at the portal, pulling out his stone sword.
"Ivor, wait. Be careful-" Jessie warned, before he slipped through the blue goop completely, disappearing into another dimension. "-You...don't know...what's on the other side of the portal…" She had no choice but to follow him into the unknown.
"Crud," Petra grunted. "He always gets so hyped up whenever we go through a portal." She ducked through the frame and into the blue goop as well.
Lukas, unnerved by being alone in the Portal Hallway, slipped through the portal and said, "Whatever's waiting for us there, it has to be better than the White Pumpkin. Right?"
Well, that remained to be seen.
"Adven-Oof!" Ivor careened onto a wooden dock, tripped on a loose plank, and nearly fell flat on his face.
"My hero," Petra commented dryly as she passed by him while Ivor was standing up unsteadily and mumbling something about "regrettable rash action." Jessie and Lukas weren't far behind.
"A wooden dock?" Jessie asked, testing the rickety wooden boards by pressing them down with her armored foot. Green with algae and rotted in some places, they creaked and groaned under the pressure.
Overhead, a noonday sun was glowing in a nearly cloudless sky, making the sapphire-blue ocean waters surrounding the dock twinkle as they rippled in the wind. The air was thick, salty, and cold. Besides the occasional sea rock jutting out of the water, buoys floating a hundred or so feet away, and a motley armada of boats bobbing near the dock, there was nothing but ocean around them...endless, churning, glittering, salty ocean reaching to the horizon.
"Pretty," Jessie remarked, smiling at the charming nautical scene stretching out before her.
Petra wasn't impressed. "Well, this looks like a waste of time. Nothing but ocean in this world! Definitely not home. Let's go back." She whirled around crisply to face...a lighthouse. Instead of a portal, a weather-beaten lighthouse rose three stories above them.
"The portal is never there right behind us," Ivor said with a sigh. Reluctantly, Petra turned back around and crossed her arms in frustration.
"Looks like we're going to have to do a little exploring," Lukas said.
"Exploring where?" Petra questioned.
"Underwater...I guess…" he trailed off, not so sure of himself.
"Thanks, Lukas. That's very helpful," she said thinly.
Jessie wasn't listening to them. She glanced back at the buoys and boats. Someone had to have built them, of course. They didn't just poof there by themselves. She stepped up to the edge of the pier to get the closest look she could at the boats. They looked battered and fallen into disrepair, suggesting that they had been abandoned at this strange dock in the middle of the ocean. Most of them were wooden, with algae and mussels stuck to the hulls. Frayed ropes bound some of them to the dock, but most of them were free to drift with the waves. There were tiny canoes, several dinghies, quaint steamboats for fishing, and one large, half-sunk clipper (its mast leaned against the lighthouse, the sails dangling feebly from the wooden poles.) A few of the boats had cabins clad in brass and bronze plating, with gears and valves sticking out at odd angles. Jessie wandered down the length of the short boardwalk, backtraced, and then looped around the lighthouse to get a full view of the collection of boats surrounding the pier.
"It's crazy how there are all these boats just floating out in the middle of nowhere, isn't it?" Lukas asked Jessie as he walked up to her. "I wonder why they're all the way out here."
"Maybe it's a dumping ground for old boats that no-one wants anymore," Jessie suggested, turning to him.
"I can't imagine that this would be the only civilization in this world," Lukas said as he kicked a pebble off of the pier. It hit the water with a sploosh and sank into the depths.
Jessie nodded and scanned the sprawling ocean around them, to the buoys bobbing a small distance away. Covered in a fresh coat of bold red and white paint, they floated merrily in the water like giant pieces of candy cane. And as she looked, she noticed something new.
"The buoys are in a straight line. They don't wrap around the pier like the collection of boats. Maybe…"
"Maybe they're giving directions?" Lukas jumped in. "Pointing the way to civilization?"
"Yeah, yeah," Jessie agreed. "I'll bet that's it. I mean, those buoys look brand new. Someone dropped them there rather recently…"
Lukas narrowed his blue eyes-as blue as the ocean he was looking at-in determination. "It's our only shot."
Jessie turned to Petra and Ivor, a few paces away. Petra was leaning against the lighthouse wall, watching them intently; Ivor was admiring the classical construction of the clipper leaning against the lighthouse.
Petra strode towards Jessie and Lukas. "Okay, that seems reasonable," she agreed, "but how will we reach them? Do any of these ships work anymore? Most of them look...broken."
"The canoes will be fine," Ivor pointed out.
"I don't want to row a canoe all the way to wherever these buoys lead," Petra protested. "What if the place is, like, a hundred kilometers away? We'd never make it in a wimpy canoe."
"Lukas?" Jessie asked, turning to him to receive his input on the situation. But Lukas wasn't standing next to her anymore. He was tugging on the rope mooring a small fishing boat to the pier, in an attempt to stabilize it as it floated askew in the water.
"What are you doing?" Jessie inquired of Lukas as she approached him.
"Well, since we're not going to use manpower to work the boats, our best bet is one of these steam-powered ships."
Jessie looked quizzical. "How do you know that they're steam-powered?"
"I recognize the mechanisms," Lukas explained. "Do you remember that funky statue with the gears and pistons the Ocelots and I built for the Endercon competition a few years ago?"
"Yeah," Jessie replied, remembering how the Ocelots had made a "self-assembling statue" that switched between the likeness of a horse and a wolf at the flip of a lever. It had used a system of gears and pistons to move the blocks, changing the statue's shape. Unfortunately for the Ocelots, it blew a piston and some gears slipped their moorings when they were demonstrating it, and the statue was a flop. That year had been one of the few times the Ocelots lost the competition.
"Most people would have used redstone for a build like that," Lukas continued, "but I had been reading up on powering machinery using steam power, gears, pistons, and stuff like that. It's called 'steampunk tech.' If I remember what the book said, people experimented with using steampunk tech before redstone was discovered. It fell out of fashion when redstone circuitry was invented. I thought it would be cool to do a little experimentation of my own with steampunk tech. But...yeah, it didn't work out so well."
Jessie stifled a chuckle. She remembered Aiden's horrified expression when the build was falling apart, and that was hilarious.
"Anyway, like I said, the machinery on this fishing boat seems familiar in that way. I think it might be steam-powered, too."
"It's probably broken, though," Ivor said as Lukas sat on the edge of the pier, slid off, and hopped onto the deck of the now-upright boat. The blonde boy was undeterred and threw open to door to the cabin, ducking inside. A few minutes later, there was the hiss of fire, a loud popping sound as the engine backfired and threw a jet of sooty smoke out a large valve poking out of the roof, and Lukas shouting "Whoa!" from the inside of the boat, followed by a hasty "I'm okay!"
"What is he…" Petra trailed off. "What is he doing? Is he playing boat mechanic?"
"Shh," Jessie said, trying to peek through the narrow windows to see what in the world Lukas was up to.
It was quiet for several minutes, and then a rattling sound and another fiery hiss came from within the boat. The fishing boat's horn tooted once and then it roared to life: the engine rumbled, the gears spun, the pistons pumped, and steady streams of clean white steam floated out of the valves in the roof. Lukas emerged from the cabin, his face smeared with soot.
"Well, would you look at that," Petra mused. "He made it work."
"Great stuff, Lukas!" Jessie cheered.
"It wasn't that hard," Lukas explained. "The only real problem was that the main pipes had a leak and the power wasn't circulating properly. I took apart an old fishing trap and melted it down to patch up the hole with, cleaned the steam valves, and tightened the bolts on some gears. After that, I just had to shovel some coal into its furnace and it was ready to go."
"Olivia would be proud," Jessie remarked as she hopped off of the pier to join Lukas on the deck. Petra and Ivor followed shortly.
"Let's get a move on," Petra suggested as they all ducked inside the cabin. It was low-ceilinged but still had enough space to comfortably hold the four of them. A control panel faced the bow window, with the door to a coal furnace underneath. Pieces of the fishing cage that Lukas had taken apart for scrap metal were scattered over the wood-plank floor, and Petra kicked them into the corners of the cabin so they'd be out of the way.
Lukas went up to the control panel and and turned a wooden wheel that apparently steered the ship. The boat spun around halfway to face the line of buoys in the distance, and accelerated towards them when Lukas threw a lever next to the ship's wheel. It skimmed across the water, passing the buoys in a matter of minutes. Several minutes later, they passed a second line of buoys.
"That's a promising sign," Jessie said, watching them fly past the windows. "Say, how is it that you know how to work a steam-powered ship?"
Lukas shrugged, but was too focused on driving the boat to turn around and face her. "Well, when the Ocelots and I needed prismarine for a build, we'd take a boat out to a bay, not too far from our town, where there was this old ocean monument near the surface. The treasure had been cleaned out and the guardians killed a long time ago, so it was mostly just a looted ruin. There wasn't much to it, but we never needed that much prismarine anyway, so it was our source. Anyway, Aiden put me in charge of driving the boat because he has no sense of directions. And I already knew a bit about how steampunk tech works. So I just put the two together, and here we are."
"Nice," Petra said with a nod. "I've never been good at driving boats. I always crash into squids in the middle of the ocean. Swimming back to shore after that is not fun. To me, driving boats is just a lot of nautical nonsense."
"Whoa!" Jessie exclaimed suddenly, running up to the bow window and pointing at something outside the ship. "What's that?"
In the fog-bound distance, they could see the outline of a city. Tall buildings rose into the sky, which was now gray, cloudy, and sprinkling rain. The city was alight in a radiant golden glow, welcoming in the midst of the gloom.
"I believe we've reached our destination."
To be continued...