POV: Syr
I rushed to the last place I had seen Alex, and was surprised by what I found.
I had expected a monster of some kind, but instead I found Alex with a small slime on her head. She looked like she was drowning inside it. I've known slimes for being the weakest enemy ever, so seeing Alex losing to one was... Just sad. I pulled the slime off Alex's head and held it. Alex fell over gasping for air. I squished the slime a little, playing with it like a toy. The slimes in Rhyndraxxia were corrosive, so they were at least a little threatening, but this was just a squishy, sticky blob with some pebbles inside it like a face. I tried jamming the slime into my bag and, surprisingly, it went in. When Alex finally caught her breath, I helped her to get up.
We didn't talk much after that, but I made sure to stay no more than a few feet away from her. If she could be defeated by a weak slime that easily... I didn't want to imagine what could happen if we came across something else. We slaughtered the chickens for their meat, and gathered some apples from the trees. When the chickens became scarce, the mushrooms were all gone, and we got sick of destroying leaves that only dropped apples occasionally, we sat down by the water and started fishing. The game's fishing mechanics were much more simple than in Rhyndraxxia. Cast a line, wait for it to dip under the water, then pull back. No bait or special modifications, just cast, wait, and pull. It was kind of boring. I felt a tug on my line, instead of seeing it dip, and instantly pulled back. A large squid came flying out of the water and landed on top of me, clinging to my face. The only thing I could see was a giant mouth sorta just... Breathing.
I wish I could say that this was the first time something like this has happened to me. Unfortunately, Rhyndraxxia has a "Leaping Squid" enemy that causes trouble for fishers, so it was more like the fifty-third time. I peeled the squid off my face and hurled it back into the water. I could hear Alex giggling beside me. "It's nice to know that this game has a problem with creatures clinging to people's heads." I joked. Alex didn't respond, and instead went back to fishing. I watched my reflection in the water. I remember taking months trying to design this body, I had made and remade it a thousand times over. When I was finally happy with the way it looked, I constructed it in Rhyndraxxia, a young boy with short black hair and pale blue eyes. Years later, through the many quests and adventures it had been through, it changed. It looked a little older now, with long, shiny silver hair, and unnaturally bright green eyes that would glow when in the presence of magic. I still don't recognize it as "me" though, it feels more like a puppet, bending to my will.
Alex's silence was starting to get to me. Even in Rhyndraxxia, in parties that would only stay together a couple hours, we talked more than this. Even when they didn't speak, the chatter of other groups could almost always be heard in the background. The silence now just felt... Wrong. I looked to her and asked, "Why don't you tell me about yourself? You know, to pass the time." She turned towards me and asked, "Who, me?" I rolled my eyes. "No, the millions of other people apparently with me." She smiled at that, and started to speak. "Well, as I'm sure you know, my name is Alex. You do know that, right...?" I nodded, and she continued. "I like to cook, and... Well, there's not much I have to say about that." she stopped and thought for a moment. "Oh, here, I've got a story for you."
"So, a few years back, I just sorta showed up here. Or, lots of me showed up. I'm a player avatar, or used to be. Then one day these people start showing up, they looked really weird. I was used to weird, but this was beyond weird. So, from what I'm told, people could customize their avatars, and then put it in game. But here, people started showing up as themselves, actual people. The number of me out there decreased to being almost nonexistent. Then another day, something weird happens. The mobs start acting up. They started acting strange, like, they had this weird glow in their eyes, and seemed to start working together. And then Steve and I, we wake up being in control of ourselves, it was the strangest feeling ever. My memory from that time is a little fuzzy, you'll see why in a sec. At some point this guy shows up, swearing up and down about this 'VDEU' or something like that." My eyes shot open wide with surprise. I wasn't the only one who fled Rhyndraxxia after the attack, but I thought I was the only one who could survive outside it. Clearly, I was wrong.
"He was an invader, or so Steve said, and the world tried to get rid of him. It slowly ate away at him, but he didn't die. Instead, he dug up an old myth from the game, and took form as the evil entity, 'Herobrine,' one that the world accepted. He then swore revenge on all players, and started dragging them here, tormenting and killing them. Any time he was defeated, he'd disappear and show up somewhere else, and start all over again. We didn't really care, I mean, we just lived here, it's not like he was bothering us. But then he did." She scowled and clenched her fist. "At first he was just taking players here and killing them. But then he got this idea. He wanted to go to them instead, but to do so, he said he needed to destroy the world, and he certainly tried to. He summoned this great big chain that extended beyond the sky. It started to pull this giant rock towards the world. He also unleashed wave upon wave of these abominations known as Withers. Even the monsters had turned on him at this point, seeing what he was trying to do. Steve and I worked with some players to destroy him, but I uh... Sorta died halfway through, heh... The rest I know from Steve, they beat him and sealed him in the nether, and I was put back together, somehow." The story was certainly interesting, but I was more interested in a specific part of it. The gears in my head started to turn as I thought of his name.
Herobrine
POV: 'OmegaShayn'
I knew what I was supposed to do.
The skeleton was across a watery surface, so I'm supposed pull my shield out and back away as quickly as possible. Pull out the shield, run away. Defend, retreat. I mentally told myself this over and over several times, yet I never acted on it. I simply sat there staring across the lake, like a deer in headlights. The skeleton also sat there, with an arrow ready, but never firing. Several long minutes passed, with only the wind and water changing. Eventually, the skeleton pulled the arrow off the string, and lowered its bow. It cautiously approached the water's edge, and sat down. I remembered Vic telling me that skeletons were one of the more intelligent monsters, but this was just astounding. Not only had the skeleton decided to not murder me, but it had left its weapon laying against the tree, several feet behind it and is just... Watching me.
The moment didn't last too long. The skeleton had looked up towards the sun, and seemed to decide it had better things to do. It stood up, retrieved its weapon, and left the lake, disappearing into the cluster of trees. I couldn't help but wonder why it decided to do that. Do skeletons normally do that? Judging by Vic's multiple descriptions he gave of them, they never wanted anything more than to kill a player. Was it a scripted event then, meant to be triggered at this spot? Or maybe it was one of the 'modifications' that were applied to the game. Considering I know so little about this game, I wouldn't be able to tell what's been modified and what's normal, but I didn't want to rule that possibility out.
Something brushed against my hand, and simultaneously I heard the sound of paper being moved and bent, so I quickly snatched at it out of habit, due to my papers always trying to blow away back home. I slowly opened my hand to see what it was I had grabbed. It was the map. The map I was supposed to be filling out. The map I should be working on right now, instead of sitting at the lake's edge, thinking about skeletons. It took several moments for my mind to finally process these thoughts, but when I finally made the connection, I was quickly back on my feet. A little too quickly it seemed, since I suddenly felt very dizzy and almost fell over into the lake. I slowly regained my balance, and headed off to continue filling in the map.
I only ran into a couple of other points of interest. The first was a small clearing a little south of the lake. By "clearing," I meant an area without any trees, but it was far from clear. Grass taller than I was -maybe even taller than Vic- grew all over, and wherever there wasn't grass, there were flowers. "Don't go into the tall grass," I mumbled, "it could be dangerous!" I laughed a little at my joke, and went in anyways. I remember Vic telling me that flowers could be used for dyes, and I really wanted to turn my hair back to being its blue color while in-game. I wasn't too sure what I was going to do about my eye, though. I thought about applying the dye directly to my eye, but decided against it, for obvious reasons. Feeling a little hungry, I pulled out a couple apples and started to eat them while picking flowers.
As I clumsily forced my way through the surprisingly stiff grass, I tripped over something hard. I landed flat on my face, and as soon as the pain had died down enough for me to do so, I flipped over to see what I had tripped on. I found the tip of an arrow pointed at me, directly in my face. Looking past it, I found another skeleton standing over me, holding the arrow threateningly. It held the arrow there for a few seconds, then put it away in... Honestly, I didn't see where it put the arrow, I don't even know where it could have put the arrow. It leaned down and snatched the flowers out of my hand, then walked away. It wandered around with them, occasionally attempting to replant them. Something I noticed was that it would sometimes pull out a bone, grind it up between a couple stones, and then plant a flower along with the dust. It also stayed low, and always remained inside the tall grass, like it was hiding from something. What was with the skeletons in this game anyway? I left there soon after that, I'm sure doing anything else there would have gotten me killed.
The second place I had found was the most interesting, in my opinion. It didn't show up on the map, unfortunately, since it was still under the trees. I had run into it entirely by luck. It was a small house, in the middle of the map. It was made entirely of wooden logs, and had no door. Beside it was a small hole filled with water, with flowers and what looked like wheat growing around it. The inside of the house was small, and lit by a single torch. In the back left corner of the room was a pile of leaves. In the other back corner was a short stack of three books. In the center of the room was a wooden dummy, like the ones Vic had. I decided to look through the books. Two of them were in languages I couldn't understand, but they did have pictures.
One of them seemed to be about plants and how to grow them. The reason the skeleton had ground up a bone was because the bone dust helps plants grow. Food crops need to be planted on tilled soil, which needed to be near a water source. The second was about how to build a house. Torches and light in general will prevent monsters from spawning, and doors can keep all but zombies out, because zombies can break doors down. And my friends say that in-game lore books have nothing useful in them. The third book was in french, oddly enough. I only knew a little, as I had been taking a french class at my school, but it wasn't enough to understand what was going on in the book. There wasn't much else to do there, so I got up and left. Thankfully, I didn't run into any more skeletons on my way out. I finished the map without any more distractions, but I felt something watching me the rest of the way through...
