The screen faded back in just as Olivia spoke, "Is... this a maze?"

Jesse put her hands on her hips, staring at something the viewers couldn't see, before giving a nod. The screen switched to show her from the back. "Looks like it," she spoke mildly.

The screen zoomed out to show them standing in front of maze that looked as though it spread for miles, and miles, and miles. Crumbling stone walls with creepers and vines creeping over any available surface loomed ahead of them, with a small pond next to the entrance, various flowers, saplings, and mushrooms littering the ground around it.

"A maze?" Olivia repeated, eyes widening. "A maze? I don't think we have time to blunder our way through a maze! That thing's eating up the world as we speak!" She probably would've continued ranting, but right about then Soren started speaking onscreen, and she abruptly cut herself off.

"If Ivor used the Command Block to build this, it could hold unspeakable peril," Soren mused, touching his fingers to his mouth thoughtfully.

Jesse's eyebrow went up. It was a behavioral quirk that, now that the audience thought about it, Jesse seemed to share with Ivor. "So..."

"Maybe we shouldn't wander into the world's hardest maze without a guide?" Lukas finished the sentence, looking from the maze to Soren.

Soren sighed and rubbed his temples, looking as though he had a rather acute headache. "Yeeeaaaahhh... no. I'm not about to walk into a maze in which we have no idea what we're getting into. Let's look around for another way around or something, and if all else fails, we'll just head in. ... hopefully it won't come to that," she added, sending the maze another askew glance.

Olivia threw her arms into the air, nearly hitting Gabriel by accident. "Best decision we've made all day."

Lukas, Soren, Olivia, and Gabriel split apart from her, examining the walls and slowly venturing along the length of the wall. Jesse perched her lower arms on her hips and examined the vines creeping over the walls. She gave one of them a slight tug, and when it didn't snap upon her insistently tugging it, she released it and gave it an appraising look. "Hm. The others might be able to climb these," Jesse hummed.

Soren's voice suddenly rang out in the air. "Everyone, en garde!" he shouted.

Everyone turned to see zombies lurching towards them.

Petra groaned and let her head thump against the coffee table a bit. "Of course."

"I think I may have said this before at some point, but... oh, snapcrackers," Olivia groaned.

Jesse touched her lip thoughtfully, as the zombies slowly started splitting up and heading for each of the members of the group. She surveyed the situation in front of her, before giving her head a shake. "There's no way we can fight them all off. Climb the vines!" she yelled.

The other members of the group immediately did as she asked, scrambling to start climbing the vines. Olivia simply blinked out of sight and reappeared in a spray of sparks on the top of the wall, staggering a bit but quickly regaining her balance. Jesse slammed all six of her palms against the wall and scrambled up, legs quickly leaving the ground and helping to propel her up the wall, before she quickly scrambled to the top, peeking over the edge at the zombies bumping stupidly into the wall below.

The screen switched to show Soren looking down at the zombies as well. "Well," the ginger panted, sounding as if he was out of breath, "that worked, I suppose."

"In a way," Olivia replied, raising her long arm and pointing at something the audience couldn't see. Soren turned to see what she was pointing at, wincing upon realizing what the problem was. Lukas slapped a palm to his face and muttered something rather uncomplimentary under his breath.

On the other side of a rather large chasm, Jesse raised one of her arms and waved.

"You've got to be joking," Petra groaned. "Why is Jesse always the one who ends up by herself?"

"Jesse, you've got to have the worst luck of all time," Ellegaard muttered, shaking her head disbelievingly.

Jesse let out a sigh and shook her head as well. "I'm... starting to get that impression."

The spider hybrid looked around onscreen. "Um... let's just split up," she sighed after a moment, sounding irritated. "We'll cover more ground that way. Just head for..." Jesse paused, before rising onto her tiptoes and pointing what looked like a house in a little spotlight, "thhhat house, right over there."

Soren turned to see what she was looking at, before turning back, nodding, and then trotting along the top of the wall. The rest of the group shared a reluctant look with each other, before starting to move along their length of wall.

Jesse watched them go. "Sure hope they don't get lost." She let out a sigh and looked down at her portion of wall. "Sure hope I don't get lost."

She started walking along the wall, passing several bats, some small waterfalls, and a few torches placed strategically along the wall. At one point, she spotted her friends on the ground, although they didn't spot her.

"Oh, hey, there we are!" Olivia exclaimed. "We must've fallen off the wall or something at one point."

Jesse came to a gap. She paused, looking at the gap, measuring the distance, before slowly dropping to all eights. Tensing all of her muscles and backing up a step, she proceeded to rush forward, leap off the edge, and land right on the wall opposite her. She slipped and nearly skidded right off, but managed to catch her balance.

From that point on, she got much closer to the little house much more quickly, jumping over gaps that she was able to make it over and backtracking when coming to one she couldn't.

At one point, she slowed to a stop near a waterfall. A fond smile came over her face. "I met Reuben at a waterfall just like this," she said softly, looking at the clear, blue water. "I hope he's okay."

Reuben let out a happy squeal and butted his head into Jesse's hand insistently. Jesse smiled down at him and started fondling his ears, to the pig's delight.

"You two got close super fast," Jace teased, poking Reuben gently and making the pig give him a jokingly lofty look, if a pig could in fact look jokingly lofty.

"I've never had a pet before," Jesse said softly, continuing to fondle his ears.

Reuben gave Jesse a jokingly offended look. She let out a soft laugh and shook her head. "Sorry. Friend. I should say friend, not pet." She paused for a moment, a softer expression coming over her face, and a blanker one entering her eyes. "I never want to lose a friend," she spoke quietly.

Unbeknownst to her, Jace and Lukas automatically exchanged a bemused glance upon hearing that.

Upon returning their attention back to the screen, Jesse had just trotted past a floating island, when suddenly a spider crawled onto the wall in front of her, although it looked more curious than anything else. Jesse started back, before uttering out a hiss.

The spider hesitated, before tentatively creeping towards Jesse, a more suspicious gleam entering the spider's eye.

"Er... why does the spider look suspicious of Jesse?" Dan spoke slowly, slowly raising his eyebrow. "Please tell me that it's just my imagination telling me that that spider looks suspicious of Jesse."

"I didn't even know spiders could look suspiciously at someone," Lizzie grumbled in answer.

Onscreen, Jesse slowly wrapped her fingers around the hilt of her sword, and tentatively started to draw it.

The sword made a metallic scrape as it scraped on the sheathe, and the spider suddenly lunged. The audience all let out a yell in surprise as Onscreen-Jesse let out a shout. Whipping out the sword automatically, she brought it up and then down in a smooth, instinctive action. However, just as the spider vanished in a puff of smoke, Jesse's gold sword that she'd gotten from Petra back in Ivor's basement ages ago decided that now was the perfect time to break into pieces and vanish in a puff of smoke.

"You've got to be kidding me," Maya groaned.

"At least she still-"

"Don't jinx it," Lukas, Petra, Jesse, and Jace chorused, interrupting Axel mid-sentence.

Jesse sighed and looked at her empty hand. "Of course. Juuuust peachy," she sighed tiredly, before shaking herself out of it and trotting along the wall. "Goodness, the top of the maze is probably just as complicated as the inside of the maze," she mumbled to herself as she looked around, before glancing down at said inside.

Her eyes widened as she spotted Olivia and Reuben trotting through the maze. "Olivia?" she called down to the Enderman hybrid, but the Enderman hybrid must not have heard her, because she just kept going.

"She must've gotten separated from the rest of the group at one point," Gabriel mused thoughtfully.

Jesse watched the spot where Olivia had disappeared around a corner for a moment, before straightening back up and looking back around. She'd barely looked around before she suddenly did a double-take, head whipping back around with her eyes widening. She let out an angry hiss and slapped her hand to her forehead.

The screen switched to show a witch standing on the wall in front of her, blocking the way.

"Are you serious?" Em groaned.

Otto shook his head. "Jesse, you have the worst luck on the planet."

Onscreen, Jesse whipped out her bow and started firing arrows, but she had to waste some of them on shattering the potion bottles that came soaring right at her, and some of them missed.

Ducking under one last potion, she fired another arrow that DID make contact with the witch, and knocked her back a bit. But it wasn't enough to knock the witch off the wall. And Jesse was all out of arrows.

Lukas's arm tightened around Jesse.

Axel winced and glanced at Jesse. "Uhh, you're probably dead, dude."

"I'm fully aware of that," Jesse sighed, her voice muffled from where it was buried in her hands.

Onscreen, Jesse let out a low groan. "You've got to be kidding me," she muttered. She gave the bow in her hands a momentary glance, before ducking under another potion and charging straight at the witch. Flicking the bow into one of her lower arms, she tensed her knees before jumping straight over the witch, doing a flip in midair so she was facing the witch.

Before the witch could turn around, Jesse threw the bow around the witch and heaved back. The bowstring drew taut as it caught the witch, making the woman stumble backwards, and Jesse thrashed her backwards, knocking the witch even further back.

The limbs of the bow were hopelessly twisted, but Jesse raised the bow one last time and slammed it straight into the witch just as she hag stood up, sending the witch flying off the wall with the bow cracking and puffing into smoke in her hands right as she did so. The witch followed the spider and vanished in a puff of smoke.

"Oh. Never mind. You're good," and Axel reached over and clapped Jesse on the back, nearly knocking her into the coffee table again.

"That was awesome!" Nell exclaimed.

"That was also improvised," Jesse pointed out, but she still looked rather pleased at the compliment.

Jesse looked up from where she'd knocked the witch off the wall to see that there was a strange machine with a chest and a crafting table nearby.

"Hey, that's my flying machine!" Ellegaard exclaimed, her eyes widening. "Or, well, a recreation of it at least."

"Oh no!" Soren groaned, clapping a hand over his eyes. "I'll never forget that thing."

Magnus cackled, an evil grin spreading over his face. "Oh yes!" he replied, looking far too pleased at the upset look on Soren's face.

Crawling down the wall, she approached the machine, looking at it curiously and trying to figure out what in the name of heaven this thing did, before spotting something else.

Ivor's lab (presumably that's what the small house was) wasn't terribly far away.

I mean, save for the fact that it was over a gaping chasm.

"You're kidding," Petra groaned. "Please tell me that the 'flying machine' can get them across this gaping chasm."

Ellegaard shook her head. "If they can finish it. It's not finished. It won't fly until it's finished."

"Of course. That's great."

"I feel like you're more upset about this turn of events than I am, Petra," Jesse said, turning to look at the redhead with an amused look.

Jesse let out a loud groan and put her head in her hands again. "Can't saving the world be easier?"


A/N: (laughs) Having an extra hour of Computer Graphics gave me time to churn out another chapter, so enjoy :3

RQTC: Night or day?

Night. At least then the SUN'S NOT SHININ' RIGHT INTO MY DARN EYES.

MissyMattingly: Thanks...

SofiaTheWriter88: Thanks. (smiles a bit)

Emily The Avenger: (nods) Thanks, Emily. / But yeah, that was fun :3

x.X. A.L. X.x