Astronomical
Xephos' POV
Lights. Flashing red lights. The ship rocks… fire everywhere. Suddenly, falling, my body slowly begins to float upwards and out of the hole in the hull. The atmosphere of the planet just saves me from a quick death in space. The Goroloth soars in space above me. My ship is gone. My red uniform is peppered with holes from flying shrapnel. It flaps in the wind. The ground rushes towards me, the glassy surface of water is just below me. A mountain glows in the sun as I peer down at the ground below me that will be my final resting place. Goodbye, cruel world.
Honeydew's POV
I walk away from my ancestral home, knowing that I would perish like the others if I remained there. I always was a tad odd for a Dwarf. Tall, nearly as much so as the Humans of the Northern Realms. A love for the orange filled, cocoa and biscuit based confectionary named Jaffa Cakes that the bakeries have sometimes when the Elven traders of the West come visiting. Khas Modan wasn't really a trade centre, so that certainly wasn't often.
A volcano is what has dislodged me from my ancestral home. A live volcano, about to erupt above the subterranean city. The rest of the Elder Council refuse to leave, believing that if they should all die somewhere, it should be their homeland. Codswallop, in my opinion. If I should die, I hope it's for something I believe in.
Suddenly, BOOM! An explosion rings out above me. At first, I thought it was the volcano, but above me is a strange creature, lit aflame by a gigantic ball of muscle. The creature looks kind of like a bird. A metal bird. It falls, and a little red blob drops off of it. It looks to be about to fall into a lake nearby, and I run after it. My curiosity, as always, got the best of me and I charged ahead, even if there was peril, maybe this red blob could be my ticket to an adventure, just like the children's stories I always heard of as a dwarfling.
The blob was actually a person, in a deep red shirt riddled with holes. He had a small golden device clipped to the left of his chest, and it looked almost like a badge of some kind. I dragged him out of the lake, Gods only know what beasties could be in there, and checked his pulse. He was still alive.
Xephos' POV
I awoke from what I had assumed to be the darkness of death to the bright sun streaming through the canopy. There was a strange, armour-clad person to my left, gripping my arm as if it was checking my pulse. I quickly jumped up, knocking the person over in the process, and grabbed my communicator. "SS Rim-Hopper, come in. SS Rim-Hopper!" I spoke into the device, and I was met with nothing but static. I tried not to panic, despite the dire situation, and looked at the person. It was staring at me in awe, and almost fear. It spoke, in my own language luckily. "Who the bloody hell are you?" it said, loud enough to startle a few birds from their spots in the trees above.
"I'm Xephos." I replied, and the person closed it's eyes and nodded, as if committing my name and face to his memory.
"I'm Honeydew, son of the proud city of Khas Modan." He replied. I recognised the city's name, a dwarven settlement on Minecraftia. "Aren't you a little tall to be a dwarf?" I asked, wondering what the Dwarf's reply would be. He raised his hand up to me, and I pulled him up. He set off into a small wooden boat moored at the side of the river I had fallen in. "That's what everybody asks." he laughed, and I jumped aboard with him. He knew this world far better than I did, and I was certain I could find a fair travelling companion in him.
Time Skip: 1 week
The boat sank in the end. Honeydew had been so vigorous in his attempts to land on the shore that he punctured the bottom of the hull on a large rocky outcrop, and we had to swim to shore. We had very little supplies now. All the rations were gone, and the only items we had were the clothes on our backs, and Honeydew's Axe. Upon the shore, we found an area of snow. Miles of the stuff.
The first thing Honeydew did was make a beeline for an area of ice on the shore. He broke part of the ice, and then proceeded to fall in like the pillock he was. "Don't do that at home kids, you might die!" He said, mocking the telecommunications that my receiver sporadically broadcasted.
We made it slightly further inland, and Honeydew began to cut down some trees. He then refined them with the strange system called crafting. The crafting process seemed to be similar to alchemy, put some stuff in and get different stuff out. He made a crafting table, which helped amplify the alchemical capabilities, while I sheared a sheep with the sharp edge of my receiver to use as a bed in the shack we planned to make.
We both constructed picks, and realised the urgency of the situation. The undead would spawn at night, and night would soon be upon us. We began to build the shack, which we dubbed 'Simon's Shack', at the foot of a small hill, facing a peninsula near where we crashed. We would have collected some stone, but the rock was a strange dark colour, and we were hesitant to possibly break our shabby wooden pickaxes on such a tough looking material.
"I'm telling you now, Xeph, I think we're done for, because we're just gonna run out of time." came Simon's voice from across the valley-like area. It was full of trees that I was dragging down with my bare hands to help with the building process. I also grabbed a nice looking rose, hoping to brighten up our soon-to-be-built shack. We searched for some coal to make torches, but found none. This meant we had to be very careful of the monstrous beings that plauged our nights.
By the time we started to build the house under a tree, it began to get dark. After building the walls and door, we realised a fatal error. We were out of wood, it was now dark, and the actual shack was only 4 blocks wide. The crafting table being added meant we had 3 blocks of space and I could hardly move. Honeydew knocked out the base of the tree, meaning the leafs and top part of the tree were now our roof, and the floor was earth itself.
I placed down the rose I had collected, and laid the wool around the floor to aid our comfort. Whilst laying down, both I and Honeydew heard an odd noise. Firstly, a cow's moo got cut off, then Honeydew had me peek outside. There was a shambling thing with one arm on the peninsula, which I presumed was a zombie. Whilst looking, Honeydew jokingly shut the door on me, and I heard an arrow whistle past me. A skeleton!
Honeydew went and took a look next, and ran back in after hearing the jangling of loose bones. Honeydew instructed me on how to make a wooden sword. Honeydew then made a rousing speech about how we would defend our property from the cold dead hands of the skeletal twits, and charged. The door was nearly knocked off it's hinges as the slightly chubby dwarf and I charged out at the same time. I ran back inside after a second, and Honeydew backed off a bit. I came out a second time, and the skeleton ran around to the back of the house. I went round one side, whilst Honeydew went around the other. I saw the skeleton Honeydew lock eyes.
A bloodcurdling shriek of pain rang through the night as the skeleton released the arrow it had had nocked in it's bow, and it sank into the dwarf's left forearm. I leapt forward with my makeshift weapon, and sank it deep into the skeleton's skull, it's only weak spot. It died instantly. I gathered a bone from it's corpse, before another arrow grazed my cheek. A pair of skeletal reinforcements had arrived, and me and Honeydew retreated back into the safety of the shack.
Inside the shack, I heard the groans of a zombie, and huddled closer into the wooly carpet, curling up in the corner formed between the crafting table and the wall. "Hopefully day'll come soon, they'll disintegrate to dust." Honeydew said, surmising both of our thoughts. We laid in silence for a while, Honeydew peeking out of the door now and then. Suddenly, "Look out the door!" Simon exclaimed, humming the ancient Dwarven Morning song. The purple bruise on the skyline elongated, and the sun rose again.
"Where do the undead come from?" I asked my dwarf companion.
"The Dark, Xephos" he replied. "They come from the Dark". We went outside, just to catch the monsters disintegrating. We collected the spoils. An arrow, two feathers, and a bone. I went after a chicken nearby the shack, and slit it's throat. I always hate killing the innocent creatures of this planet, but our needs are greater than theirs.
We collected a little bit more wood, stowing the chicken in our pack, and went for the mountain. A large cave lay in the rather low area at the base, and embedded in the ceiling lay a small vein of coal. Honeydew and I scraped some dirt together to form a dome, and Honeydew stood atop it and knocked the coal onto the cave floor. I created a few torches, remembering Honeydew's basic lessons, and lit up the whole cave. The cave had three entrances, one from the north, one from the south, and one in the ceiling. Honeydew began work on the floor, collecting stone and dirt to seal the ceiling and holes.
I focused on the front entrance we had arrived from, and blocked almost the entire thing up with a dirt wall, with a few gravel pillars for stability. Honeydew left for a short while to reclaim the resources from 'Simon's Shack'. I crafted a stone headed shovel and pick, and began clearing a layer of the floor. I came to the South end of the cave, and stopped for a second to relax and watch the beautiful waterfall outside our door.
Simon soon came back, and worked on stabilising and reinforcing the sealed front end of the cave, while I worked on the back end, careful not to accidentally stem the flow of the picturesque waterfall. After listening to Simon's lecture on architecture shouted across the cave, we finally finished the sealed walls, and only the large ceiling hole was left. I ran up the mountain, and harvested a small amount of coal from the peak, when it began to get dark. The ceiling still needed work.
Simon began a long winded joke about the elven race and efficiency, and I hastily threw up a layer of dirt supported by horizontal wooden struts. We finished just as the first monsters began to spawn. I began to make a to-do list, whilst Honeydew expanded the cave and checked the time. The to-do list was rather basic but, as there were no shops as nobody should be anywhere near our snowy lands, meant a lot of hard work. I wrote up the first quest with my quill on my notepad. Pork and Glass. The glass would mean it would be far easier to check the time in the outside world, and the Pork would be a nice food source seeing as the chicken had only lasted for a short time.
We started to clear the floor of the snow buildup, and I told Honeydew of our list of things to do. He agreed that Glass and Pork were necessary, and we made our plan. Firstly, we would go down to the beach we had first arrived on, and collect as much sand as possible. (The world seemed to be having an effect on me as I, like Honeydew, no longer found sleep necessary.)Then, we would go in search of pigs for a nice christmas ham. Like the monsters, death is not an end for animals or, indeed, us. We all just search for an area near where we died that fulfilled the requirements to respawn. For us and animals, it was a light area, such as the now dubbed 'YogCave', which Honeydew had named, reasoning it was like the BatCave, but terrible. For the Undead of the night, it was Darkness.
Day broke again, and we both ventured out into the wild to search for our legendary loot. Sand and Pigs! I headed for the beach, while Honeydew went up the mountain. He soon came rolling down again, the snow clinging to his body making a giant snowball. It cracked after hitting a tree, and Simon simply gave the explanation of "Spider". He decided we should stick together, and we both went to the beach to collect sand.
In the end, we collected a full backpack of sand, and hauled it up the mountain to the YogCave. I threw open the door to the YogCave, threw the backpack in, and closed the door. Honeydew appeared from around the corner, carrying a few square shaped pumpkins, which he planned to make Jack O' Lanterns out of. We ventured out to the West, and found a small plateau, populated by pigs. Honeydew said a prayer to Hircine, the Dwarven God of the Wild, and whipped out his axe. I pulled out my wooden sword, and we began. It was a massacre.
We slowly began to trek back, our packs laden with meaty goodness. We got a bit lost, and talked about our future plans. I wanted to explore the surface for signs of another civilisation, whereas Honeydew wanted to explore the underground cave systems, in the hopes of finding Iron or Diamond for tools, weaponry and armour.
Eventually, we found a lit spot on a mountain, and found our precious YogCave. Just as it was getting dark, we jumped through the door, threw some coal into the fuel compartments of the furnace, and laid the sand into the top of one furnace, and most of the meat into the other. I cut off a small section of one piece, threw the majority of it into the furnace, and tasted it. The scent of roasting pork filled our little cave, and I'll be honest… I've never felt more at home.
Honeydew made several Jack O' Lanterns, and plonked them around the cave in place of torches. I cleared the floor of snow, and Honeydew began to remove dirt and create a wooden floor around the front door. The glass finished soon after night fall, and we replaced parts of the barricaded walls with glass windows. We sat on the wooden floor, and ate the delicious meal of pork, gammon, bacon and sausage.
We both fell asleep, oblivious to the pitter patter of four green feet on the roof. Even that soon ebbed away, and the night swallowed the light, leaving the world at the mercy of the undead, other than the YogCave.
When we both awoke, a leathery intruder began to lick Simon's face. The cow had managed to spawn inside our Yogcave, and outside the back door were several monsters, including the giant spiders that had thrown Honeydew off of a mountain. Deciding to go out the front door instead, we were met with a gigantic tree.
It appeared to have grown overnight, and Honeydew immediately took advantage of the leafy appearance, and cut a staircase into the tree, before demolishing it from the top downwards. I caught the logs Honeydew threw down, and stored them in the nicknamed the cow Betsy, and promoted her to 'Cave Keeper', and Simon began grilling some bacon for breakfast. We both ate some eggs as well, which Simon had found whilst we had been searching for pigs. After our lovely breakfast, we set out to find some ores to mine, in the hopes of making nicer tools and armour. Honeydew accidentally set Betsy free, and she ran over the plains, freedom tasting sweet on her tastebuds.
We first went to search a cave we had noticed when we had first run aground, and darkness again led us into the refuge of the 'Cave of Doom', as Honeydew had named it. Dwarves had a thing for making names for things, and enjoyed the practice immensely. It turned out the cave was nothing but a hollow, and we began to dash back to our home in the consuming darkness, when Honeydew noticed a light on the horizon other than the sun.
He charged off, and I struggled to keep up with him. His dwarf legs going at a rapid pace. There was a pyramid. A pyramid out on the ice. Where the hell did that come from!? As Honeydew neared it, I saw a lava jumping puzzle inside the temple, with chests at the end. In shock, I fled from the pyramid, leaving the puzzle for another day. Honeydew, however, threw me his backpack and attempted the jumping puzzle.
After several failed attempts involving Honeydew burning to death and respawning outside the pyramid, we both gave up, and headed further away from the YogCave, and made more strange discoveries. An igloo with a fire still raging inside it, for example, and a strange construct resembling Stonehenge, a Dwarven Heritage Site in the Western Regions.
I felt rather unnerved by these constructs. There shouldn't be anybody for several miles around us… but who could have made these things. It leaves a lot for me to think about. Honeydew continued to insist we go spelunking after we collect some leather for armour, but I'm still unsure about the prospect of being even further under the astral dimension I once called my home.
We ended up swimming into a waterlogged cave, and spotted a small cluster of Iron ore. Whilst we collected the iron, Honeydew heard a spider ahead. After trying to push forwards and realising it was me who had the torches, he raced back and followed me down a very thin passageway down into the bowels of the earth.
After reaching the bottom, I saw the glowing red eyes of a spider dancing further within the cave. Our spelunking trip had already took a turn for the worst. I began to clamber back up the passageway, until Honeydew shoved me back down, and insisted I stop being a wimp and fight the wee beastie.
We both leapt down the passageway into the wider portion of the cave, and Honeydew began making the most high-pitched squeal ever when he saw the spider's eyes. The pitch of the squeal enraged the spider, and it charged towards me. It jumped at my face, but I ducked and stabbed my stone blade up into it's abdomen, and it twitched once before dieting on the end of my blade.
Suddenly, a surprise stealth creeper jumped from the ceiling, and just missed us, blowing a small crater into the floor ahead of me. Honeydew screamed in both fear and rage, and proceeded to charge forward. He then rapidly back-pedalled, realising that he had just dashed into a dungeon. In a fit of rage from being caught off guard, he charged forward into a mob of zombies, beating two of them to death with his bare hands, before whipping out his axe and decapitating a third.
We both made a tactical retreat, before beginning a second assault. This time there was a skeletal archer providing support, but It quickly fell to my blade, as did the zombie behind it when I rammed by blade through both of their chests. Simon charged forward again, sheathing his axe and grabbing a skeleton's rib-bone and beating a pair of zombies and the rib-bone's owner to death with it.
Another skeleton spawned in the darkness with a zombie partner, but both were decapitated in one fell swoop with Honeydew's new Rib-Bone, which he used as a battle boomerang. I destroyed the spawner, and we sifted through the rubbish in the chest for the hidden goodies. Within the first chest was a pair of iron bars, a bucket, some gunpowder and some rotted food. In the second was a record and a pig saddle, along with some other rubbish.