"This looks like a good one."
Steve redirected his gaze forward from where it had been locked on a map, all the hills and mountains they had encountered so far on their exploration expedition drawn carefully on a slip of parchment by his ink-smeared hands. Alex was before him with her back turned to him, her footsteps crunching against a layer of snow as she approached what looked to be the beginning of a cave. He swiftly joined her side and took a gander himself.
The cave sloped downward sharply, yet was hardly illuminated thanks to its location within the mountain they were at the foot of. It appeared to be deep, but the gray stone was just too quickly swallowed by darkness to judge accurately.
Alex pulled out an unlit torch and a flint and steel. With an expert hand, she struck the flint against the iron bit and sent a spark to the head of the torch, lighting it aflame. Then, with a bit of aim, she chucked the torch toward the mouth of the cave.
The torch made a hollow dink as it hit some diorite before it continued to tumble down, down, down, its yellow light shrinking in the abyss. Eventually, Steve couldn't make out the torch any longer, nor could they hear its descent.
"It's really deep," they pointed out, furling their map.
Alex pulled out a new torch and lit it as well, a smile raising the corners of her mouth. "That means I was right. I think I saw some iron; let's go."
"Be careful," Steve said, more out of habit than a genuine need to remind her. She set down onto the rim of the cave before slipping down onto the next layer of blocks. Steve pulled out their half-worn stone pickaxe and followed.
Although the two knew going in that the cave went down for a while, it still managed to surprise them just how far it carved through the world. The singular pathway that had yet to branch granted much to the duo in the way of ores and various stones to build with later (and some light-hearted arguments over the aesthetic of diorite). Eventually, however, the worming tunnel opened dramatically.
"Woah..." Steve let out in a surprised breath as Alex held her torch up high. The two stood on a precipice overlooking a grand, spacious underground area, spottily illuminated by sprigs of lichen and the occasional flowing of lava. The bottom of the cave even grew darker with deepslate.
A gentle touch on Steve's shoulder brought their attention back to Alex. She pointed her torch to the ground below. "Look deep enough for diamonds?"
They shifted in place, taking a glance downward again. "Maybe. It's, uh, quite the drop, though."
Her hand returned to their shoulder with a reassuring grin, guiding them toward a shallow aquifer with a waterfall spilling out from its side. A spruce boat was hastily made and with that (and a firm grip on each other), the two rode down the waterfall. The ensuing splash mostly hit Alex head on, and Steve couldn't help but laugh at her. She returned it in kind by slapping some water right back at him.
The deeper caverns helped line their inventories with more gold, iron and lapis lazuli, as well as some gunpowder and arrows from the mobs lurking in the shadows. In addition to what they had found before entering the cave (including the riches from some buried treasure), their pockets were brimming with resources. Yet there were still no bright blue gems to be found. The two set up a campsite near a large underground lake, starting up a couple furnaces for smelting and cooking.
Steve curled toward one of said furnaces. The area the duo had been in had already been a touch cold, so being so far removed from the Sun had only worsened the chill. Alex didn't seem as affected by the temperature, as they brought their hands through the water and washed their face.
Steve's eyes drifted from them to the lake. Some magma blocks and lichen shaped out the jagged and hole-ridden bottom of the lake. Some of the dim light even highlighted some ores. In particular, a blue one caught his attention.
He rose from his lean against the furnace, making Alex turn to him. He pointed toward the water. "I think that's a diamond."
Alex flicked her gaze to the lake with a scowl. "We'd run out of air before breaking it."
With a smirk of his own, he pulled out a bottle from his inventory. A shimmery, murky blue sloshed within its glass container.
Alex raised her eyebrows. "Where did you get that?"
"From that buried treasure that took us forever to find," he said, popping the bottle's cork.
She huffed, brushing some of the hair out from her face. "It'd better be worth it, then."
With a bit of a sigh, he tilted his head back and quaffed the water-breathing potion in one go. Some of the gross, salty taste still managed to find its way on his tongue, and he shivered at the slimy feeling left on his throat. He coughed and handed the empty bottle to Alex before turning to the lake and diving.
He nearly leapt out as soon as he was submerged. The cold seeped into his skin instantly, cutting his breath short for a brief moment. The next moment, however, his breath came easy, and so he continued to swim.
The already dark environment mixed with the foggy water made it difficult to see much of anything; thankfully, the glow lichen served as a beacon for him. With one final stroke, he could make out the ore more visibly... only to notice it was lapis lazuli. With a frown, he pulled out the new iron pickaxe he made and gathered it.
Alex was standing on the rocky shore when he returned, goosebumps rising on his chilled arms as she gave him a hand and helped him climb out. She appraised his expression. "Only one?"
He sighed. "None. It was lapis."
"'Course. Guess there's always strip-mining." She let go of his hand and turned to one of the then unlit furnaces. "I think I had me enough spelunking for the day. I need some Sun."
With a nod, he attended to the other furnace, pulling out its coal and iron ingots. He then unsheathed the new iron pickaxe he had made, raising it above his shoulder.
A sharp hiss punctured the air behind him. He twisted around just in time to see Alex let loose an arrow from her already prepped crossbow into the creeper behind him. The arrow lodged in its side, but it wasn't enough. The creeper exploded.
The wave of pressure hit Steve squarely in the chest and sent him flying through the air, his ears popped from the sonorous boom and his eyes blinded by the coating of leaves, spores and other creeper residue then coating his face. Cold water slapped his back harshly, and his breath left in one fell swoop as he hacked.
Then, the back of his head hit something sharply, and everything turned black.
Alex, meanwhile, was forced into a backward roll, scraping her arms and legs against the rough stone as she fell down an incline. Some tapered stone hit her in the middle of the back before she finally landed on flat ground, bumping her forehead straight onto the rocky floor. She was left in a daze.
Eventually, her senses returned to her. Her back and head throbbed with pain, and it felt hard to breathe. Regardless, she stood up, wincing as her weight settled on her right foot.
"Steve?" Alex croaked out with a small voice. No response. "Steve?" they tried again more loudly. Their voice echoed against the walls of the cave, with no other voice joining it.
Biting the inside of their cheek, they walked up the hill they fell down, expecting to see Steve passed out on the shore. Instead, they were greeted with the black halo of soot and crumbled stone left from the creeper's explosion and nothing else.
They hobbled over to the water with widened eyes, peering into the water. Dust and green, leafy viscera floated atop the lake, making it impossible to see anything in it. "Steve?" they called out again.
Steve woke up with a start, hissing and closing his eyelids as something touched them. He wiped his face off, allowing him to blink open his eyes.
Even with his eyes as wide open as possible, it barely made a difference compared to when they were closed. There was nearly a pure absence of light surrounding him on all sides, along with a thin wall of sediment that threatened to enter his eyes. The only source of light he had was a small cropping of glow lichen near his feet, which was also where his line of vision effectively ended.
It also didn't help how he wasn't on land, but rather completely underwater. He gasped, creating an assortment of small bubbles of air that drifted up and away from him. The slimy coating on his throat still felt present, so he still had the water-breathing effect. For how much longer, though, was a mystery.
Steve looked around in vain, only agitating more silt from the bottom and making it rise up. They slowly looked forward again, eyes gravitating toward the lichen.
The explosion had to have pushed them into the lake, so it only made sense that they were at the bottom of it. Then they just needed to swim up. Carefully, they leaned forward and took ahold of some of the lichen before ripping it out. Its blue-tinted glow continued on.
They stood up and, with a push of their foot, rose upward, making wide strokes. To their growing concern, the darkness didn't lighten up at all as it should have if they were getting closer to the surface. Instead, as they tried to do another stroke, their hands brushed against something hard.
Steve raised his hand of lichen. Its dim glow illuminated a stone roof, with not a hole to be seen in it.
His hand shrunk back to his body as he kept kicking his feet to stay afloat. His logic had failed him. It also occurred to him then that the pickaxe he had had in hand earlier was gone.
His breath threatened to quicken as he pushed his hands against the wall of the cave he was in. It was much closer than he had expected it to be, which only made his breath waver more. Normally, he preferred closed spaces to open ones––open spaces were much more prone to blind spots and that lingering sense of loneliness that still clung to him even though he had Alex with him––but underwater tight spaces were another thing entirely. The pressure of water on his chest, the lack of his senses to guide him, the sensation of some creature much more adapted to its environment than he was just waiting around for its time to strike and, worst of all, the threat of getting lost and eventually drowning––they all added to a horrible mixture of misery that he had endured once after foolishly getting lost in a series of caves he had found in an underwater ravine.
He shoved those thoughts away as best as he could as he focused on the wall before him, leading his hands down its rough, slimy and pocket-peppered side. Eventually, the wall caved inwards, revealing a significant hole. The dim glow of the lichen was essentially absorbed into the hole's black abyss.
It was possible that his unconscious body had drifted through the hole and then settled at the bottom of the cave––after all, the bed of the lake had been littered with craters. Then he just needed to travel through that passageway in order to return to the surface.
With a deep breath and the noticeable thumping of his heart, he slipped in.
Alex's teeth began to clatter against each other once she dropped into the cold lake, kicking over toward the verdant film. Her frantic waves made the spores disperse by the time she got to the area. She stared down into the inky blue.
Lights dotted the bottom, giving her a vague idea of the shape of the lake but not of where her friend was. She needed to get a closer look. With a great inhale, she dove below.
The frigid water against her face nearly made her splutter her breath back out but she persevered, doing wide strokes until she reached a spot of magma. She positioned her hands carefully around the magma, keeping her head in the air bubbles while avoiding the burn of the converted lava. She looked about.
It was much the same: a gloomy navy served as a filter for her vision, blurring the edges of blocks as they went further from her. No distinctive bipedal shape or teal color popped out from the monotonous scene. She continued to glide around the lake's bottom, stopping frequently at magma spots to fill up her lungs and search. Unfortunately, her partner was nowhere to be seen. All there was to be found was his lone iron pickaxe, which had to have blown out from his grasp in the explosion.
Her lungs burned from the repeated oxygen deprivation and her legs were slowing from exhaustion and a continual flare-up of pain near her right foot. She needed to recuperate. With a frown, she swam up to the top of the lake.
Alex shivered on the stony shore as they wrung their hair. They had been methodical in their search, so the only conclusion they could come to was that Steve's body had fallen into one of the many craters of the lake. There was no way they would be able to investigate any of the holes without drowning, though.
They stood up, keeping as much weight off their right foot as possible while they stared at the lake. He hadn't died, else all of his items would be strewn about the shore and surface of the lake. Had the explosion knocked him out, then? They otherwise didn't understand why he hadn't returned yet.
Another unsavory possibility then came to mind: he could have gotten lost trying to find his way back, somehow or another. It was so easy to get turned around in caves––doubly so when underwater. Even Steve with his experience in navigation had gotten lost in some underwater caverns...
The memory came vividly to them: the two had been on the open sea, once, relatively close to home. Steve had mentioned a ravine underneath the waves and Alex had gently prodded for him to go for it (he had on that leather helmet with respiration, after all). He dove into the ocean and became a dark pinprick in their vision before he slipped into the crack along the sea bed. Time passed. Eventually, Alex could only reach one conclusion for why he hadn't returned and paddled back home. The sight that awaited them was of Steve on his rose-red bed, curled up on himself.
They teased Steve a lot about his quick-to-startle nature and spooked him from time-to-time, but they didn't want him to be under such horrible distress again, not if they could help it. They had to rescue him.
Alex slid Steve's iron pickaxe out from their belt. If they couldn't get to him directly, then they would have to try an indirect route. With a grunt, they swung the pickaxe in an arc straight at the ground below them.
The hole was a tighter squeeze in comparison to the previous cave; Steve couldn't perform any wide strokes, nor could he comfortably turn around. Instead of a swimming motion, he more so crawled through the gradually rising tunnel. As he moved, the rough texture of the tunnel's walls scraped against his uncovered arms. It stung.
With a grunt, he slid half a meter higher up. When he brought his hands back above him to rise again, a faint glow tinged the tip of his hands. His heart felt lighter and rose from where it had been someplace near his gut––he was close to the surface. He rushed his movements, swim-crawling as fast as he could through the tunnel.
Eventually, Steve pulled himself up. Instead of the surface of the water, as he expected, it was yet another cave. Rather than more dinginess, though, a group of glowing squid floated and jetted about the den.
Although he was familiar with the dopey squid, he had not been aware of a glowing variant. They were painted in shades of sea green that lightened to mint green at the tips of their tentacles. Fluorescent blue light gleamed off of them and onto the walls in a pulsing pattern of brightening and dimming.
Steve's lips parted open as he pushed up from the tunnel, his eyes trained on the sea creatures. His heart that had been racing before slowed to a more relaxed cadence. Harried thoughts abated into contentless contentment as he was drawn to the shoal of squid. The brilliance was all he desired.
How long he was fixated on the squid, he did not care––at least, up to the moment that something brushed against his back. A timeless amount of survival instinct hit him all at once, crashing through his trance as he remembered where he was and his situation. He spun around and struck forward with his hand.
A splutter of aquamarine gushed out as his fist sunk into a glow squid with a squelch. There wasn't time to contemplate his mistake before the consequences of it came at him: the squid lifted its tentacles and let out a cloud of ink. Steve's vision and throat filled up with cyan. He grabbed at his throat, choking and wheezing as he rapidly blinked his burning eyes. Eventually, he spat out a glob of phlegm and his breath evened. He relaxed his eyelids.
The squid were gone. If it were not for the splatter of glowing ink left on his shirt, he would have thought they were figments. He also still thankfully had a grasp on the lichen. In addition to those mundane observations, it was terribly, terribly dark, and he had no idea what direction he had come in from.
Steve gulped. A hot chill took root in their gut and spread throughout their system as their realization caught up with their body. In a numb state, their last ditch thought was to swim backwards from where they were facing. Perhaps, in a miracle, they hadn't turned away from it much.
When they reached the wall opposite the one they had been facing, the dim light of the lichen showed solid stone. A beat passed, with Steve just staring at it, until the numbness faded away. A flash of anger (at the world, at theirself) burst to fill in the empty space and they jabbed at the wall. A small crack formed in it and was quickly mended.
That ire then drained from them in a single rush, and all that remained was the dregs: self-hatred and anxiety. Panic buzzed below their surface. They struggled to breath. They wanted to bludgeon their head against the wall. They wanted out.
They pushed off from the ground at a weird angle, causing some pain in their foot as they shot off in a different direction, eventually finding another wall. Their hands scraped fast against the rock as they kept the momentum up. Eventually, a hole revealed itself and they charged through it.
Small bubbles of air were left in their wake as they glided through the submerged corridors, the path they took lost to their panicking mind. The already limited glow of the lichen was starting to dim, to the point that the ink on their shirt was brighter. Whatever vision they had before was effectively null. They began to swim and bump into walls, only disorienting theirself further. The need to flee surpassed it all.
Then, something grabbed Steve's foot, tugging him backwards. He flailed his legs and arms and eventually whatever the creature was let go of him. The creature, however, was persistent. It continued to bump into and grab at him as he swam away, and its slimy, scaly skin would occasionally drag against the skin of his arms. He couldn't even see it anymore, his light long since dead; he wasn't sure if he even wanted to see it.
At the very least, he lost the creature, judging by the lack of appendages grabbing him. It didn't matter much, though, as the exhaustion was starting to set in. Eventually, the screaming of his muscles and the emptiness of his stomach grew to be too much: he sunk to the ground, the cool stone meeting his cheek.
The water felt more rough against his throat as he heaved in and out breaths. The potion was finally subsiding. He had no idea where he was, and there was no way he was going to be able to find his way out in time. He was going to drown.
Emotional fatigue dropped onto him like a thick sheet of snow. He relaxed his sore, tense muscles and lay limp against the rocky floor. Drowning, at least, was not as painful as falling into lava.
The ticks dragged on as the water became progressively less easy to take in. Faint, colorful shapes faded in and out of his otherwise completely black vision, produced by his sensory deprived mind. Whatever strange calm he had achieved before was also starting to deteriorate. He could only hope that Alex was there when he next opened his eyes.
"Steve!"
Steve's eyes blew open. The sound, although muffled heavily, was still discernible. It was hard to determine what direction it came from, though; so, he sat up and with as great of an inhale as he could manage, he bellowed out, "Here!"
For a moment, no sound accompanied his. His heart sank from what little it had rose. Then, sharp clinks rung out before rays of light suddenly pierced through the dark, making Steve turn his head away with a hiss. Finally, his eyes adjusted, and he looked back at the hole to see the face of Alex. Without a word, he swam through the hole, falling into the open arms of Alex.
He landed onto them with a loud gasp, the air freezing on his arms and face. Some water splashed down onto the ground from the waterlogged tube, though the rest was forced back by a crudely made spruce door. A cascade of water dripped off of him, but that didn't stop Alex from planting a kiss to his cheek and hugging him tightly. He returned the embrace quickly.
"I thought I was too late," they mumbled into his shoulder while he shivered from the cold, the overwhelming relief, everything. They eventually pulled away enough to look him in the face. Concern was etched in their features. "Are you okay?"
"N-N-No," he stuttered out, his teeth clattering against each other. His grip on Alex tightened. "Are––Are you––?"
"My foot's hurting me, but otherwise I'm good." Alex slipped one of her arms underneath one of Steve's. "Come on; I set up a base."
The two did an awkward shuffle down the skinny branch mine Alex had made, peppered with torches and the occasional spruce door that was holding back water. Alex hadn't lied: she was noticeably limping, dragging her right foot along the ground like a zombie. To ease some of her pain, Steve stopped leaning on her and supported her instead. She gave them an appreciative smile.
Soon, a clearly unnatural cubical opening showed itself, already outfitted with a glowing furnace and crafting bench. Steve dragged Alex in and set her onto one of the walls, allowing her to slide down onto the ground. Steve's stomach let out a serious growl as they turned to the furnace. Not caring much if they burned their hand, they snatched a steak from the furnace and tore a chunk out of it.
After polishing off the steak, their head already felt clearer. They grabbed another steak from the furnace and turned to Alex, intent on giving her it. Instead of reaching a hand out, though, Alex was instead preoccupied by fighting off her droopy eyelids and head. The sight served as a reminder to Steve of his own fatigue.
He put the steak in his inventory as he walked over and sat down beside her. His head found home on her shoulder, as did her head atop his own. She was warm in comparison to the chill still coating his skin, and it only helped him feel more drowsy.
Knowing that he would see her when he next opened his eyes, he fell into a deep sleep.
A/N: For those curious: there were multiple holes in the cave Steve woke up in. Steve just happened to choose the wrong one (since they couldn't really see the other choices); if they had picked the right one, they would have gone right back up to the surface.
Also, the "creature" was just kelp and maybe tropical fish.
