"Alright, first things first, you should check your inventory for anything useful." Simon explained as he led Lewis across an Icy river.
"Inventory?" Lewis found himself questioning his knowledge. 'Does he mean my pockets?'
"Oh, um… concentrate on what you're holding. An inventory might pop up. The inventory allows you to store items. There is also a thing we call a hot-bar. This allows you to have up to nine items on hand that you don't need to think as hard about to access. Go on then, give it a go."
Lewis simply nodded and tried. He quickly realized that his inventory was what one of the special abilities that the others on the ship didn't know about. He hadn't thought to call it anything and simply used it to his advantage. At the moment, the only thing in it was his advanced tools, some space tube food, his empty blaster, and a communicator that he knew didn't work, as he had been going to repair it later that day before he had been… shipped off? He still wasn't sure what had happened exactly.
"Ah, yes… I have access to it, but I don't see much in it."
"Tha's alright, we'll just… WHOA!" Simon had crashed through a hole in the ice.
"SIMON!" Though he had only known the dwarf for a short time, he knew that the dwarf was definitely… what was the word he had used? Friend? Yes, he was a friend, an ally that you could trust with your life, and one that you would assist in any way shape or form… this was a true friend's definition, yes? Lewis wasn't thinking of any of this though as he saw the dwarf fall. No, what the spaceman was thinking was more along the lines of, 'Oh shit, he'll drown or die of hypothermia!' He reached a hand towards the dwarf and proceeded to help him up and out of the frozen water. "Are you alright, friend?"
Simon coughed out some of the water, but smiled. "Yeah, I'm fine, Lewis." He chuckled. "We dwarves are pretty hardy, but I don't recommend swimming in the winter, hehe." Lewis chuckled, much to his own surprise before covering his mouth. "Heh, a laugh is alright here and there, friend. Don't be afraid to laugh once in a while if it feels right. You don't know much do ya?"
"I know quite a bit, thank you very much." Lewis then found himself confused again. He had been insulted before, but he had never felt the need to defend himself like this… what was this dwarf doing to him? "What are you doing to me?"
"What do you mean?"
"I … feel? I feel different? I'm not entirely sure…"
"Ah, so you do have emotions in there. Tha's good. It's good to have emotions. It helps you with morals."
"Morals? You mean that which decides if you are good or evil?"
"Something like that. I always thought about the idea that allowed you to be good at the same time as being evil to be interesting, but worrisome."
"Is that even possible?"
Simon thought about it and nodded. "I think so. I mean good intentions can be seen as evil by others."
"Huh… you are quite wise, Simon Honeydew."
"Pfft, that's got to be a new one. You really must be from space if you think I'm wise, Spaceman." Simon was grateful that his red majestic beard hid his blush. 'You don't know the half of it, friend.'
"Maybe so, Dwarf." Lewis looked at the sun in wonder for a few seconds before having to look away and rub his eyes. "That is bright."
Simon just laughed. "Were you seriously staring straight at the sun? Hahaha, oh wow, that's not wise, but it does give us the time." Simon gave a quick glance as well, though he had a hand over his eyes to help with the glare. "Uh-oh. We need to make a shelter, and quick."
"Why's that?"
"Well it's bloody winter, so the days are shorter, not to mention that bad things come out at night!" Simon started running about to get supplies.
"Oh…" Lewis started following.
"We need to chop down some trees to make some wood." Simon started to punch at a tree, and within a few seconds, a block of wood fell, but the rest of the tree didn't.
"What the hell!" Lewis looked at it weirdly as though Simon had suddenly grown elephant ears.
"What?"
"How come the tree didn't fall over?"
"Huh?" Simon looked at the tree. "Is that a thing?"
"YES! Gravity makes things fall! It makes trees fall, us stay on the surface of the planet, and all sorts of things fall."
Simon looked at him funny and then dug up a block of dirt with his hand. He then placed said dirt on the side of a tree, two blocks above the ground, with nothing under it. Lewis just looked at it like someone had told him it was magical. Simon smirked and left the spaceman to stare at the random dirt block while he finished cutting down the rest of the tree by punching it with his fists. "Since the sun is halfway up, we better hurry. It's going to get dark soon, and when night comes bad things also come out."
"Oh… what's that?" Lewis pointed to a cave where, hidden in the shadows, he could see something out of the ordinary. "That green bouncing thing?"
Simon had to get a little closer to the cave, as it was up a nearby hill/mountain. He only took a quick glance before rushing back quickly. "Oh Notch almighty, it's a creeper!"
"A what? And Who?"
"Notch is… the deity of this world, I guess you could say? And as for the Creeper…" Simon shuddered.
"It's gone… it's gone, Simon." Lewis took a few steps closer, wondering what it was.
"Those are very bad, they… they follow you and explode… Don't go towards it! It will see you!" With that, Simon grabbed Lewis by the wrist, mainly because he was shorter than the spaceman, and dragged him towards the woods away from the cave.
"Huh…" Lewis then noticed something else as Simon continued punching wood. "What's this over here?" Lewis got closer, and recognized it to be a sheep! He had seen images of these in a book when he was younger. "OH, it's a sheep! Awe!"
Simone had just continued his rant on Creepers though. "… they are very bad things… cuz they blow up… they destroy things…" Then he noticed his new friend's attention was on a white fuzz ball of a sheep. "Not sheep, the, uh, the creepers, the green things… they look a bit like cactuses or something…" Simone then noticed his comrade had left. "Where the hell have ye gone now?"
"I'm hitting this sheep, Simon." Lewis piped up from a little deeper in the woods.
Simon caught up to him and explained how you got wool from sheep. In his opinion the wool was useless for anything but making beds, which confused Lewis as he didn't think beds were made of wool. Simon took another glance at the sun. "Ugh, we're gonna be in trouble, start punching trees, Lewis."
"Sorry, Simon." After Lewis had successfully punched his first tree down, Simon walked him through using his crafting ability to create a planks out of the wood, and a crafting table from that. The spaceman was enjoying not knowing everything and learning from the young dwarf. Simon had explained that he was actually quite young for a dwarf, considering they live for like hundreds of years if lucky.
Lewis got distracted by a cow when Simon had started to explain how to craft a pickaxe for mining. Simon chuckled at Lewis' childish nature, as though he had never seen any of these things before, which he hadn't. "You're getting distracted very easily."
"Sorry, heh, what am I supposed to do?" He hadn't been reprimanded like he would have in the past for this kind of nature, and found himself actually okay with asking for help from the dwarf. Ordinarily he wouldn't ask for help unless he was in a do or die situation that required him to get advice from one of his assistants or superior officers.
Simon just smiled and led him through crafting a pickaxe like his father had led him through how to do when he was a runt of a dwarf. Now he was a little bigger than the average dwarf, but there were still dwarves taller than him as well, so one didn't know how high a dwarf could truly grow. A dwarf was only to be defined by his majestic beard, his helm, his love for digging, and his love for a good beer.
Simon looked at the sun once more and started to worry. "I'm telling you right now, and being honest, Spaceman, we are probably fucked." While Lewis knew the word, having heard it from his co-workers when stressed, he wasn't sure if it meant the same thing to the dwarf as it did to them. "We are so low on time." Okay, so it did mean the same thing. "I gotta find some coal…"
"Okay ,well, let's get on with it…" Simon had ran on ahead though, and now Lewis didn't know where he was. "Where have you gone, friend, I'm lost…"
"Oh Notch!" Came a high pitched call that sounded strangely like Simon. Lewis made his way over to it as fast as he could. Simon had just barely caught himself from falling into a pit was all. He managed to scramble back onto solid ground with Lewis' help.
"What's the deal with coal, why do we need it?"
"You need it to make torches." Simon explained.
'Torches are so medieval though… I'm not going to find a spaceport anytime soon, am I?' Lewis sighed as he picked at a tree with his pickaxe.
'Not likely… wait…'
The two looked at each other with wide eyes as they realized something cool that they could do. 'We're talking with our minds!'
'That is so cool!' Lewis grinned as he thought about that.
'Beyond cool, but yeah… oh, and eh, maybe I'm not fancy enough to make all your fancy guns and stuff from space, but at least I know how to survive here.'
'Fair enough, sorry friend.'
'Tha's alright, let's keep going…' Simon kept going with trying to get supplies for a hut or something for them to stay in at night. "We need some sort of light to brighten up the dark. The problem is that we might have to travel quite a bit to find some coal…"
"What's the best way to find coal?"
"We have to dig for it, which luckily enough, I'm a dwarf, one of the best diggers around. We need torches to light up the dark cuz bad things happen in the dark."
"That makes the dark sound scarier than I already think it is." Lewis grimaced as he continued to pick at the tree. He had never truly liked the dark on his ship and having rarely left the ship at all he was now worried about what would happen in the dark on this strange world.
"Right… okay, I think we're going to be in trouble." The stout dwarf admitted with a grimace. "So, there are two options." Lewis looked around for the dwarf after finishing off the tree he was working on. "One is to bury yourself in a tomb underground fer as long as it takes for the sun to come back up. Which obviously isn't ideal." He muttered as the spaceman thought about the idea. "Two is to actually build some sort of house, which is what we're trying to do, but it's going to be dark soon… but it's much better than being just incased in dirt, because that's what's supposed to happen when you die…" Lewis looked at him strangely before remembering the difference in species often meant difference in how people went about their lives as well as customs.
"Okay, well let's create like a house. Can we create like uh… one on the edge of the hill or something so that it's got it's back to the cliff, would that be a good idea?" The spaceman was surprised to find himself with yet another new emotion. 'Why am I feeling so strange…'
'It's called fear, Lewis. It's natural to be afraid of the unknown, but the best of people stand up to their fears.' Simon hummed while thinking about his friend's idea. "That's a very good idea, Lewis." Simon ran over to a tree and started to stack wooden planks around it quickly.
"Oh, it's getting dark…" Lewis exclaimed as he noticed the sunset. 'That's… very pretty…'
'Never seen a sunset before?'
'No… I haven't… I've been on a spaceship my whole life…'
'Huh… I've always wanted to go to space…'
'Maybe someday you will, friend, maybe someday…' Lewis then shook his head, snapping him out of his thoughts. "Okay, so you're going to build a house?" He ran over to the crafting bench that was still nearby and started to turn his new tree wood into wooden planks to help. "I'm getting… anxious? I'm getting anxious, friend… I think."
"Good chance, anxious is when you are worried and right now is a pretty good time to be anxious… Anxiety isn't all bad though because it sometimes helps you to prioritize things and move faster with the task at hand."
Lewis stopped what he was doing and stared at the dwarf in awe. "You are very wise sometimes, you know that?"
"Pffft, yeah, right. You try tellin that to any other dwarf and they'll say you're off your flippen rocker." Simon frowned as he continued his work. "I think we're in trouble, Lewis. Also, I don't have an awful lot of wood."
Lewis looked over and brought what he had to the shack Simon was making. He started to help with the construction. "Don't worry, I have some right here. Why are we building it under this tree? Is this a good idea?"
"Yeah, well… I was trying to make do with what we had… I didn't think we'd have a lot of time."
"This is going to be very tight for just us two." Lewis pointed out as the shack was a lot smaller than the cabins on the ship he had spent his entire life on. "I guess it's what you call… cozy? Well maybe that depends on your definition… So are the floating leaves supposed to be our roof or something?"
Simon was just panicking though and getting more wood. "We are so screwed." He gave out a nervous laugh.
"What's wrong with this?"
"We're so screwed!" Simon just kept laughing as he kept working as fast as his small dwarven body would allow him to move. Simon picked up the crafting table and moved it into the already tiny shack. "I've got the crafting table."
"Oh that's really smart…" Lewis blinked. 'Was that sarcasm?' Simon was too busy panicking to let him know. "We don't have much room… but this is our house, okay?" Simon hurriedly rushed to build one last thing as his friend listened to the sounds of the animals out at night and noticed the moon rise for the first time. "Simon… I believe I'm scared, Simon… already…"
"I just had to make a door quickly." Simon called out as he started to hang up the door. The shack was small, had no light, but also no room for monsters to suddenly appear from. It would do. Lewis was asking what would happen to the poor animals, but Simon was too worried about the spaceman to tell him they would be fine. "Come in here, quick!" The dwarf pulled the spaceman inside the shack and closed the door quickly. There was really no room to do anything but sit in the little shack.
The two stared at each other in the dark for a moment before bursting into laughter at their pitiful shack.
"So this is it, this is Minecraftia." Lewis laughed as he slumped down to the ground, exhausted from the insane day he had just had. "It's just us, sitting in the dark with leaves overhead. This is just…"
"… a really good guide for how to survive your first night in Minecraftia." The two just kept laughing as the night continued on.