Presenting Mindcrack's Team Nancy Drew in:

The Case of Monumental Malfeasance

Episode 2: Relly Jelly

In his dream, Guude was swimming. The water flowed endlessly around his body as his arms spun in circles. No matter how hard he tried to move forward he only went down. Beyond him there was darkness. Is this what it's like to die? he thought. I always heard there was a light somewhere.

Hands grabbed him. With one good tug they brought him out of the water. Coughing and gasping for breath, he looked around him. It was the guys: Beef, Baj, and Pause.

"What happened?" he asked.

"I don't know," Baj replied. "When you hit part of the track everything just collapsed. We couldn't stop in time."

"It was all sand everywhere," Beef said. "Must have been another trap."

The sand was piled high throughout the room. The others had apparently put torches all around. Pause had sat himself down and was pouring the sand out of his moccasins. Guude stood up and started to walk around while he stared at the enormous chamber they were in. "How'd y'all survive the drop?" he asked.

Pause pointed up at the column of water falling from the ceiling. "We all managed to hit that waterfall."

Beef was placing more torches. He got to the wall and looked up. "This place is huge. And it's all bedrock. Who made this?"

"Hell if I know," said Guude. He pointed into the darkness above them. "But when I was up there, hanging off the edge, I saw Aureylian."

The others all looked at him. "Really?" asked Baj. "What was she doing there?"

"I don't know," Guude admitted. "She seemed a little weird. She tossed me a line and then cut it and let me fall."

Pause was examining the wall. "Yep, all bedrock. Maybe we can derp pillar back up to the opening."

"Go ahead," Beef said.

"Me? Why should I go?" Pause was looking at each of the others.

"Because you had the idea," Baj said.

Pause sighed. "Okay." All four of them collected sand for him, and when he was sufficiently stocked he began the long process of jumping and placing sand over and over.

"Remember to crouch," Guude yelled up after him.

"Fuck you, Guude," Pause shouted back.

Pause wisely placed torches as he moved upward. The column grew and grew until Pause was out of earshot, and still it grew after that. They could barely see him, he had gone so high. Then something fell.

Beef, Guude and Baj jumped out of the way. It was a creeper, and it died with a hiss. Baj swiped the gunpowder it left behind, but there wasn't enough to be useful. Sand was trickling down, and soon they could see Pause again, frantically digging his pillar out from under him. When he was all the way down he was gasping for breath. At least five arrows were sticking out of him. "Place is full of mobs," he said. "Have any food?"

Guude rummaged in his inventory and found some cooked steak. Pause grabbed it anxiously and chomped it down in a hurry. He leaned back against the wall and sucked in a deep breath as he closed his eyes.

Beef had been sitting against the wall and suddenly sprang up. "I see sunlight," he said, pointing up at the top of the waterfall with his meat cleaver. Everyone else looked where he pointed – except Guude. Guude was staring at the cleaver in Beef's hand.

"How did you get that?" he asked.

"Get what?" Beef asked in turn.

Guude slapped his hand. "That cleaver. That's not vanilla."

Beef looked at it as if seeing it for the first time. "I don't really know, now that you mention it." He searched his inventory. "Looks like it replaced my sword."

"We can swim up and be out of this freaky place," Pause said.

"It'll be a tough swim. Really test a man's mettle, it will." Baj cocked his head to the side to see the top of the waterfall from a different angle. "And once we're up we still have ocean to swim through. Risky, but I can do it. Don't know about you flabby sods."

"We're not going up there," Guude said.

"What're you talking about?" said Pause. "It's probably our only way out of here. Whoever did this was thorough but didn't think about the sea floor collapsing. We need to get out of here before he finds out and closes it off."

"We're not going up there," Guude repeated. "Some crazy shit's happening down here and I'm gonna find out what it is. Nobody dicks around with my server."

"Oh, come on!" Pause looked at Guude and then back at the sunlight shining through the water.

"I can't make you come along," Guude said. "Swim up to the surface if you want. I'm gonna stay down here and figure this shit out."

None of them opted to swim up the waterfall. They couldn't exactly leave Guude to brave the dark depths of this strange place alone. Spreading out, they all started searching for doors or other openings that might lead somewhere. Baj found a narrow passageway and they all headed down it.

The passageway quickly opened into a larger room made from sandstone with a big gaping hole in the middle. Across the hole were unevenly spaced columns of sandstone. "I hate parkour," Guude said.

"It's even worse with a lava floor," Beef added, leaning over the edge. The others leaned with him and saw nothing but lava on the bottom of the hole.

"Now can we swim to the surface?" asked Pause.

"Not if we want to figure this thing out," Guude responded. Steeling himself, he stepped back a bit and then sprinted to the edge of the hole. His arms and legs flailed as he shouted, "Whoooooah!" and landed unsteadily on the single square column.

"God I'm gonna hate this," Pause said.

Unsteadily and slowly they each leaped from column to column, coming precariously close to teetering over the edge many times. But they were getting across. However, once they found themselves in the middle of the parkour maze gaps they heard the sound of many pistons sliding into place and a number of gaps opened up in the walls.

"Skellies," yelled Pause. The room was filled with the twangs of multiple bowstrings as skeletons stepped into the gaps.

"Shit!" shouted Guude as he ducked under an arrow. "Step it up, boys!"

The four of them quickened their pace across the path of pillars. Pause stopped now and again to fire at the skeletons, but when one fell another would simply take its place. "There are spawners in the walls," yelled Beef.

One by one they made it across to the other side and quickly shuffled far enough down the passageway to be out of the skeletons' line of sight. All of them had multiple arrows sticking in them. Pause had the most. "I'm really low on health here," he said. "That shit was worse than Super Hostile."

Guude rummaged through his inventory. "Looks like we're out of food," he said.

"Fuck my life!" said Pause.

Beef was laying down torches. "Found something," he said. He came back to the others holding a jar filled with something pink. "Looks like it's food of some kind."

Pause leaped up and grabbed for the jar. "Give me that," he said. Beef pulled it out of reach.

"Hey, calm down," said Guude. Baj took the jar from Beef and read a label on the front.

"Relly Jelly," he said. "Looks like some kind of sex lube or something."

Guude took the jar and looked it over. "Never seen anything like this before. This definitely ain't vanilla."

"Probably cherry," Beef said. "Maybe we should taste it and find out."

"Yeah, no," said Guude. "Nobody eats this until we find out what it is."

They continued down the corridor. "I'm running out of torches," Beef said.

"Nothing we can do about it," said Guude. "Just make them last as long as you can."

The corridor came to an end in a large room. It was already well lit. Strange machines huffed and clanked and spewed steam into the air. Long tables and counters filled most of the space in the room, and on those tables and counters were a whole bunch of jars filled with the same pink jelly they found in the hallway. A couple of machines had jars in holders and nozzles were slowly pouring jelly into them as well. "What the Hell is this place?" asked Pause, looking all around the room.

An iron door on the far side of the room flew open and out came a zombie pigman finishing off a sandwich, followed by more. When the first pigman spotted Guude and the others it stopped cold in its tracks, looking just as surprised as they were. "What's the hold up?" someone in the other room asked. A few of the pigmen were jostled out of the way as Aureylian emerged from the door. She also stopped when she spotted Team Nancy Drew. Her green eyes narrowed, and she fingered the thin sword at her side as she slowly approached them.

In front of the pigmen now, she halted, carefully scrutinizing the four men. She looked at the jar in Guude's hand. "Oh no," she said, shaking her head. She slid her sword out of its sheath. "You can't have my jelly."