The player was lagging behind him again, not due to server lag, but due to the fact that Maffis was on horseback and the newspawn was not. Every now and again Maffis would have to stop and wait for him to catch up, or he would ride circles around him whenever he was feeling bored. Sometimes the player would slow down to look at some hill or ruin in the distance and Maffis would need to shout at him to get moving again.
Maffis had found the newly spawned player, who had been named Durgey by the server's random name generator, just north of the South Tip. From what he could tell the new player knew little to nothing about the server other than its harder than hardcore nature. When he had first come across him, Maffis had wanted little to do with him; his duty did not entail watching after newspawns. But when the player spoke to him in his childish voice Maffis felt bad about leaving such a young player alone in such a harsh world. It was true that he was likely too young to be playing on such a server in the first place, but he was already in it and Maffis could not let him die.
The South Tip was a sanctuary for Maffis, it was his home and his place in the world, but it was no place for a newspawn like Durgey. Neither were the plains of the south, a terrible place for an inexperienced player. Even a player well seasoned at the regular game of Minecraft would be no match for this place, this empty land of long stretches of flat with nothing but shallow hills and a few old ruins scattered about.
The lands south of the counties of Breezelyn and Dvigland had no local rulers, it was considered part of the king's kingdom but had none of the king's protection. As such it had become a haven for bandits, especially in the last ten years. The bandits, glorified griefers, had destroyed the remaining towns in the area, all except for the fortress of South Tip. From then on the inhabitants of South Tip took it upon themselves to scour their lands of the bandits. Maffis was one of these bandit hunters.
Yet now, even though he was tasked with tracking and eliminating the griefing scum, Maffis was leading a young boy to a town out of his jurisdiction. It had been many years since he'd been north of the area known as the Bandit Lands, but now he was and he was slightly nervous about it. He wasn't sure if people would remember him or not, and if they did he was not sure what he would do about it.
Durgey was humming the same tune that he had been humming for days. The random skin generator had given him the appearance of a miner with dirty white clothes and a dirty pale face with dark hair. Maffis had offered to give him some armor he had taken from bandits, but the little boy refused them because they had been dyed a shade of pink; though Maffis would have called it tea rose.
When Maffis decided to take Durgey to safety he had used the boy's appearance as inspiration. In this world he would need to find a job, and what better job was there for an inexperienced Minecraft player than simply digging and looking for ores and that sort of thing. Shorebreeze was, along with being a fishing town, a major mining town on the eastern shore of Breezelyn. He had promised to take Durgey there and, despite the boy's initial whining about needing to have a career in Minecraft, agreed to go after Maffis had explained the workings of the server's economy.
"So I'll get paid in gold nuggets then?" asked Durgey whilst Maffis encircled him on his pure black horse.
"Likely not. Any gold that is made from your mining will be used to pay the king's taxes, which he collects at the beginning of each year. You'll be paid in housing and food. They are likely the same things you would buy with the gold anyway, so it's a fair trade."
"What?! But what if I want to buy something cool like a diamond sword or a really pretty horse?" asked the boy and Maffis could not help but chuckle. "What's so funny?"
"The only way you'll see anything diamond is if the king himself was to come to town. Durgey, this server is old. Very old. All the diamonds have been mined and used or lost. The world is big, yes, but we can only take so much from it before it goes dry. We've even started to find iron scarce. Leather and stone are the only reliable materials to make armor and weapons and tools now," said Maffis. "But you may get a horse some day. If you work hard enough, the mine foreman might take notice of you, give you a promotion, and then who knows where you'll go in this world."
"Oh man, that doesn't sound like fun," whined Durgey.
"To most it isn't, I suppose. But you must remember that there are thousands of players on this server, on this continent alone there were eight thousand at the last census. If they were allowed to run around and do whatever they wanted, the world would be filled with crude dirt huts and nerdpoles and pyramids of flowing lava. Laws needed to be made to stop those things, and with those laws came responsibilities that players must uphold. They must find their place in society, and to do that you must start out small."
"Did you start out small Maffis?" the boy asked and Maffis grunted. He had started out just as small as Durgey, that was true, but that was a lifetime ago and he wanted to forget about all of that. For now he was Maffis of South Tip, bandit hunter and newspawn escort to safer lands. "Oh, the path is changing! What does that mean, Maffis?"
Ever since leaving the safety of South Tip their road had been cobblestone. Cobblestone was cheap and was incredibly easy to make with a generator. For days they had seen nothing but the long grey stretch of the stoney road down the center of boring green plains with a few burnt out houses and farms here and there. But now below them the cobblestone was turning to gravel and sand. "We are in the county of Breezelyn now, Durgey. Soon we will be at Shorebreeze and your new life on this server will begin."
The sun dipped below the horizon and returned twice before Maffis spotted the crude cobblestone walls of Shorebreeze. He had given Durgey a spare stone sword, but the young player was not very skilled against creepers, so Maffis had needed to rescue him a few times; there were now several holes in the road south of them. But now that would soon be over. He would leave the boy in Shorebreeze and he would return to the south and continue on with his bandit hunting business.
"Ew, that place looks ugly," Durgey said as they neared the walls. "I thought there were really big and cool cities on this server. Like pretty ones. My brother said that some were so cool that they looked like they were made in creative mode, but the people who built them were just really talented."
"Well, yes, there are some cities like that. But Shorebreeze is not one of them. It is a community that pays its taxes with fish and, when they are able to find any, ores like iron and lapis. It is quite the poor town due to this, and they can't afford the special blocks to beautify their walls and buildings," Maffis said, thinking back to the last time he had seen the splendor that was Lazuline City. Shorebreeze was like the oak sapling that drops from decaying leaves when you were expecting the apple that was Lazuline.
"Then why can't I go there! I don't want to be a miner in some stinky ol' fishing town!" he protested and stopped walking.
"You can go ahead and go then," said Maffis and he continued on his horse to Shorebreeze. "Now you are close enough to the town that you can get there without my guidance. If you don't make it, it's not my fault. I did my best to guide you here. But as for me, I think I will visit the inn and get some sleep. It has been a few days."
An annoying thing added to the server was the need to sleep. Due to the massive amount of players always on the server it was impossible to skip the night. In order to keep beds useful, players were given an energy meter that would deplete after some time. If a player did not sleep for a certain number of days they would suffer several negative potion effects, such as slowness and nausea. It had been five days for Maffis and the slowness was setting in, the same must have been true for Durgey as he was slower than he had ever been.
He left Durgey on the gravel and sand road and had his horse sprint onwards towards the town. Due to supporting Durgey as well, his rations had depleted twice as fast, and he was eager to restock. Fish would be the most likely food he would find in Shorebreeze, but that was fine as long as they had enough salmon for him. Regular fish did not have the saturation he wanted, and it would be a long time before he could get the steaks he wanted back at the Tip.
But his hopes of fish were dashed as he arrived at the main gate of Shorebreeze. Instead of it being a single block gate that was lowered by piston as had been the case last time he had been to the town, the entrance to the town was a gaping hole in the side of the wall. The redstone circuitry was visible below as well, and there was no guard to man the lever that was meant to activate it. A creeper? No, this is much too large, he thought to himself. There were no blocks floating about in the hole, so either someone had already collected them or they had despawned.
He tied his horse to a fence post; he always carried a fence with him whilst travelling, and jumped over the hole in the ground to enter the town. Inside he found it to be much different than the last time he had been there. Large holes dotted the main road through the town. The crude, box-like wooden houses had been burned away and the cobblestone ones had been exploded. No creeper did this.
"Whoa! I really don't like this place, Maffis! It's terrible here!" a voice called from behind him and Maffis saw that Durgey had finally followed him in.
There was no one else around. No players walked the broken roads. The lapis blue banners with three stone-grey indents on their tops and bottoms hung lonely from abandoned buildings. Aside from the two of them, the town was silent and empty. "Durgey, I want you to be quiet for awhile, please," said Maffis as he began to look inside of ruined houses. When he found chests he would check them, but they were still full of useful items and food. The town had not been robbed. The bandit griefers of the south would have taken Shorebreeze for all its worth if they had attacked it.
"Where is everyone?" the boy whispered.
"I'm not sure, Durgey," he said, and then found a head on the ground as he walked into a box-shaped cobblestone house with a hole where a door used to be. When a player died on the server they were dead for good, they could never respawn. With communities playing a big part in the server, it was made so that heads would drop to the ground at the spot players died. This would allow friends of the fallen to make proper memorials. Though this was no memorial.
"There must be twenty of them!" squeaked Durgey and Maffis looked to where the boy was looking. The entrance to the town had been clean but for the rubble of destruction, but further into the town was a cemetery, a cemetery where the headstones were literal heads.
"More than twenty," he said and started towards them. Durgey was making a whimpering sound into his microphone and would not stop, even when Maffis shushed him. He was a child after all, and much too young to understand all of this. There was death in Minecraft, and most of the time it did not matter, one could simply respawn. But on this server, this server where players worked hard for everything, death was a terribly awful thing. And a lot of death had happened here.
He pulled out his sword, an enchanted piece of iron that had not seen use in ages. "Maffis? Why'd you get your sword out? I thought you said there was no iron."
"There is little iron coming out of the mines, but there is still some. And there are relics left from the days of plenty," said the bandit hunter.
They continued through the remains of the town until they came to the docks. Shorebreeze's walls covered its northern, southern, and western sides, but its eastern side was open to the sea. Its great oak dock was still intact, apart from a few missing blocks of wood. Several boats still floated, empty and hopeless of ever finding their owners.
"I think my brother would have liked this place," said Durgey. "He liked to sneak up on people that lived on the shores. He did it all the time!"
"Sneak up? What do you mean by that?"
"Oh, you know, he'd row his little boat up to the wooden dock things at night when everyone was inside their houses. Then he'd run int'a town and he and his friends would blow all the stuff up!" the little player laughed.
"Your brother is a bandit then?" Even if this was the case, Maffis tried to negate any negative feelings towards Durgey. So far Durgey had shown no signs of wanting to grief, he had only wanted to play on the server and possibly see the beautiful cities. He still had a chance at an honest life.
"No, he was an army guy. The people he blew up were bad guys, he said. But he's dead now. Well, not really, just in the game."
Maffis wondered how long ago it had been since his brother was a soldier. The last war in Sedweest had been nearly one hundred years ago, and in the other lands nearly fifty. He also did not like the idea of soldiers ruining the towns of players they considered enemies. In his experience the good guys were always the ones defending their lands from the dark players, instead of being the ones doing the invading. What side had Durgey's brother been on?
"I used to watch him, before he died. Sometimes when they got to the town it was still daytime and they would just walk in, no one thought they were army guys. But then when they were all inside they'd put on their iron armor and just start slashing at people with their swords, clicking their flint-and-steel all over the ground, and blowing up buildings with TNT. It was always funny to watch,... but now when I see this it makes me sad." Good, thought Maffis.
"Well, if they were all in iron armor it must have been a really long time ago then. One hundred years or more," said Maffis. He remembered the early days where every other player was in full iron gear, most of them enchanted. Now players were either in leather or naked, only the richest were able to wear metals.
"Umm, he's only thirteen," Durgey laughed. "How could people be on here one hundred years ago, Minecraft isn't even that old."
"I already explained this, Durgey," Maffis sighed. "There are days and nights in Minecraft. We've seen that several times on our way here. So, in order to differentiate between Minecraft days and real world days, we call Minecraft days days and real days years. You'll get used to it soon." Hopefully.
"I guess it makes sense, it's just a little confusing," said Durgey, and then the two of them were quiet for a moment. Maffis looked out to the ocean, imagining the land across it. It had been many years since he left Sedweest, since he last left its southern tip. He wondered what had changed there, or if anything had changed at all. Shorebreeze had certainly changed, but by what?
"I hope my brother's friends didn't do this," Durgey said, breaking the silent moment.
"I doubt they did, Durgey. You said they were soldiers, army guys. The world is at peace, they would have no reason to attack a town of Breezelyn. Besides, the chances of them still being around on the server are very slim. Most people get tired of it after thirty or so years and are never seen from again. Of course, they are forever considered dead by the server after ten years without logging in, so they can never return."
"Umm, I saw them yester- last year when my brother died. I'm pretty sure they're still around," he laughed again. Some people found a child's laugh charming, almost magical. It was wearing very thin on Maffis' mind.
"Remember Durgey, a year here refers to a day in the real world," he said and turned to leave the docks. "We'll have to take you somewhere else. Breezetown is near here, though I'm not too sure what roles they'd have for you. Dvelg and Dverg would be suitable, both strong mining towns, though it'll take quite a bit longer to get there."
"What about one of the big cities? Deaf-fork, or whatever it was called. My brother said that was the best city of them all!" the boy said. Maffis had never heard of a city called Deaf-fork, though there were bound to be new cities that had not existed when he was a part of the world and not tucked down in the southern reaches of the westernmost continent. "Or Lazuli-thingy! He told me about that too!"
"Lazuline City is kilometers and kilometers from here. It will take many, many days to get there. Probably not the best option," he said. He was trying to picture the map of Sedweest in his mind. Several players had made maps of the land and posted them on the server's forums. They were fairly accurate, based off of the in-game maps, but sometimes large chunks were missing simply due to the size of the world. "Dvelg is the closest of the two, so that's where we'll g-" He stopped at the undeniable sound of a block breaking.
Two blocks from where he was standing a cobblestone in the road broke open, revealing a hidden hole. "I can't stand hiding anymore. If you're going to kill me, kill me!" a voice said as a player climbed out of the hole. His skin had the basic head of Steve, but instead of brown hair it was black, and his body looked like a typical adventurer's with a brown shirt and backpack strapped all around him.
Maffis held out his sword and stood in front of Durgey. "Are you what's leftover from this town's people? Or are you what caused them to disappear?"
"I was the innkeeper! Was. Then those grey walkers appeared and destroyed everything!" the player shouted, his voice was not as deep as Maffis', but it was clear he was not a child.
"Grey… walkers?" Maffis' heart sank.