This story is a first for me. I've never written anything remotely resembling a fanfiction, let alone a Minecraft one. This idea was spawned when I began wondering what it would be like to actually be in Minecraft, and so I began writing this. It's very loosely based on real life. Enjoy!

Prologue: an Unexpected Power Fire

"So, have you guys all got the mod installed in your Tekkit clients?"

David glanced around the room as his friends answered with variations on "yes." They were gathered around a largish table, with their computers all set to the same LAN network in order to be able to play together. This was a weekly venture, but this time they were trying something new.

"So what does this mod actually do? You just sent me a bunch of zip files and had me install them in my client," Simon, who was short with light brown curly hair, asked, "and I was a bit nervous about it but I trusted you not to send me a virus."

David, a tallish, gangly, and dark-haired 15-year-old explained the premise of the mod. "Basically it adds a new dimension. You open a new world, build a special portal, and go through. I've never tried it, because apparently it doesn't work in singleplayer. You have to be on a server." He created a new world and opened the LAN. "You guys should be able to get on, now."

Simon was the first on, followed by Justine, who had long dirty blonde hair. Mark's client had crashed while loading, so he was dead last into the server after having to restart his PC. He was tall and athletic, with short hair that curled up in the front, in a way some of his friends had likened to the great wall of china. Bailey, with very short blond hair and glasses, was very slightly ahead of him, given his nightmarishly old and sluggish computer (which Simon had a habit of calling a trilobite. He had a set naming scheme for any computer slower than his, which was most of them: he liked to call everything else some sort of prehistoric animal. David's poor, ancient beast got the term "dinosaur", because it didn't crash a lot but was very slow to do things.)

David quickly made a portal, as he was in creative. This was mostly just to test if it worked. The portal itself was an ugly thing, constructed of different blocks of terrain from both the nether and the overworld. He lit a fire in it.

The middle sparked into being, a mess of rainbowy/vomity pixels that made the nether portal texture look like fine art.

"Oh god, it's hideous!" laughed Mark.

"Heh, yeah," said Bailey, "what were they thinking when they designed this?"

"Alright—" David began.

"Ugh! What the fuck?" exclaimed Simon in reaction to the noise the portal was making.

"Should we just play unmodded for a bit? That doesn't look like it's really working," cautioned Justine, who had backed away slightly from the aberration that was the portal. David himself was rather skeptical of the integrity of the mod, but he had seen weirder mods that had worked, so, meh.

"I think it'll probably be fine. Anyway, who wants to go first?" David asked, interrupting the burst of talking that had filled the room at the portal's ignition.

Everyone silenced and looked at each other. Simon burst out laughing after about five seconds of this, and David grinned. "Alright then, I'll go."

He stepped into the mess of pixels amid some egging on from his friends. The "loading dimension" screen popped up, backed up by more pixel messes.

The computer screen suddenly became blank white.

"Shit," said David, "I think it didn't work."

Mark leaned over. "Yeah, that's kinda broken."

"David, your computer's smoking!" Justine said loudly, pointing at David's laptop.

Indeed, a thin line of smoke was gently wafting up from the ancient laptop. With a yelp, David leapt away from it, but only remembered he was sitting in a chair when it tumbled backward, leaving him on the floor. The others leapt up, staring in stunned shock at the computer as it began to hiss and spark, a small flame curling around the screen.

"What the hell, that's my fucking computer!" yelled David, standing up and waving his hands wildly at it.

"Good observation!" snarked Simon.

"This isn't the goddamned time, dammit!" snapped David.

The room had by this point generally erupted into chaos. Justine had run out to look for any sort of fire extinguisher, Mark had backed into a corner, Bailey had run into the other room, Simon was giggling maniacally, and David was on the floor and on the verge of tearing his hair out. The computer had by now become completely engulfed in flames.

David wasn't even sure that was how computers burnt, and that was part of what was frustrating him. What was astonishing him even more was that the screen still seemed to be displaying a blank white panel, which was almost brighter now.

To everyone's astonishment, the screen began to grow.

The white panel expanded, cracking the computer's frame and leaving it a melted, smoking heap on the table. It grew into a shape about the size of a door, pushing down through the table and cracking it. It was perfectly flat and perfectly door-shaped, more perfectly than a door normally would be. It emitted an eerie hum.

Everyone stared at it, and were so engrossed in it that they didn't notice the clang of the fire extinguisher hitting the floor as it slipped out of Justine's astonished hands as she re-entered the room.

For a few moments, there was silence. The white doorway floated about an inch above the ground, and everyone felt rather like bonobos must feel when they come across chimpanzees using wooden tools: very, very confused.

"Er—hello?" David asked, standing up and facing the door.

Silence.

"Um. Hi." He tried again.

Silence.

David looked around.

Simon shrugged at him.

David looked at the door.

The door didn't shrug at him.

David looked at his shoes.

They didn't shrug at him either.

He concluded that he must still be sane.

He squared his shoulders and stepped towards the door. He felt a strange pull towards it, as though someone had condensed a rather large planet into a door shape so that it had its own gravitational pull. He reached out to touch it.

His fingers stopped, shaking, mere inches from its surface. There was no heat, just a gentle, consistent tug. He glanced around the room.

Everyone was staring at him.

He looked into the door, and had a sudden sensation of adventurous spiritedness fill him. It grabbed his prefrontal cortex and made him do something that would have probably seemed a very stupid thing to do if he had been fully under the control of his own brain.

He pressed his palm to the door.

The sensation that followed was so utterly strange that words could not describe it, and as such words will not attempt to describe it here. All you need to know about it was that it was very strange, and very very uncomfortable.

David had a very brief recollection of screaming from behind him, and a set of very strange noises greeted him from the front. These, too, were indescribably strange, which naturally warrants that no attempt be made to describe them.

After this virulent cocktail of indescribable words and sounds, David felt a very describable feeling take him over. It can be described with one word:

Nothing. In another word, oblivion.

Thankfully, this oblivion wasn't an infinite one.

It had an end, which was nice.

It ended with a forest, which coincidentally is where the meat of our story begins.

A/N: Review, it keeps me going. Constructive criticism appreciated, being an ass is not. If you're here to be a jerk without providing anything constructive, please kindly go away. Yes, David's language is a bit strong, but how would you react if your computer burst into flames?

Enjoy, updates are not necessarily guaranteed, this is purely experimental. If you guys like it, then I'll probably update.

Enjoy,

-Aurelian