Minecraft: Discoveries
Titanium Blossom
(Beta 1.3 looks nice. Also
.com/watch?v=tHeZcXF0Cms
Made me lol a bit. I don't know why. But it motivated me to write the next chap. Of course, you guys do too, so leave reviews and stuff like that when you feel like it.)
Chapter 3
"I'm making a portal.", She remarked, after a very uncomfortable period of silence. "With obsidian. Look.", she said, pointing past an opened door at a rectangle that was missing a block in its top.
"I need a dark black stone. It's very hard to find. Only deep near the water and lava when it mixes. I just haven't found any.", She continued. "Very hard to find..."
Archer watched as she trailed off and continued around another side corridor, down some stairs. It went in a winding pattern, down further and further, until it met a door. She absentmindedly hit the big switch and continued on, to a small room, illuminated liberally by torches, and almost empty except for a chest and a strange object on the floor that led off down a rough hewn set of large steps, like the stairs, except with tracks instead of steps.
Archer walked over to it and looked down the steep steps. Two metal rods were set parallel to each other, with wooden planks linking them in straight horizontal lines. Further down, they curved sharply and went out of sight. He almost considered following the tracks to see where they went, but behind him, Miner was standing expectantly.
He turned around. She was holding a metal cart. He could see little wheels on its sides, and almost immediately, he understood. Something at the back of his head said that it was all familiar anyway, but the thought amazed him.
Miner tossed the cart lightly onto the tracks. Almost immediately, the cart became heavy, and settled onto the tracks with a creak. Miner got in, cautiously, being careful not to move it.
"Get in. Behind me.", She said, less of a command than a statement. "Please.", she added as an afterthought.
Archer did as he was told, stepping lightly with his right foot. Once he was balanced, he lifted his other foot into the cart and sat, legs open wide, with Miner sitting in between them.
She wiggled back and forth, bumping up against Archer in some very interesting ways.
He exclaimed loudly as she did it far harder, almost landing in his lap directly.
"What?", He asked, surprised.
"To get the cart to move- back and forth. Like this- See. Just follow my pattern.", she said, punctuating each phrase with a wiggle.
Archer followed her lead quite awkwardly, wiggling forward, then backwards, following her pattern, bumping up against her back, making the cart go back and forth, just a bit, until finally...
The floor dropped out from under him. Or so it seemed. In reality, the cart had just started on a steep slope, going down. He felt his insides dance, and his stomach felt full of butterflies. None of this was helped when Miner lay back against him, the rear of her torso pressed almost completely up to the front of his. She let her head rest right under his, and Archer thought he could smell her hair, like flowers, except the perfumed kind, like a phantom smell that didn't really exist in his world. The slope lessened, and they leveled out, but they were still going fast. Archer thought he could see glimpses of torchlight, far down below, and he could see neat flight of staircases, stretching down into cavernous holes.
Just when he thought he was getting used to the speed, the cart slammed to a halt and crashed into a solid block of cobblestone. Miraculously, they both stayed in the cart, but he was on top of her and she had managed to turn face up, so now, he was looking her in the eyes, green as gems and smoldering with something he had no name for... but liked.
He was the first to move, awkwardly slipping out of the cart and standing up. Miner followed him, pulling a diamond pickaxe out of her pack and leading the way, along a winding, unpolished path that dropped and rose like the ocean, sometimes opening into deep holes, with a light glow near the bottom, or sometimes going up countless meters. After about 30 minutes of this, Miner stopped abruptly.
Archer started to say something, but Miner turned around urgently, her finger to her lips.
She scrambled to a side corridor, sliding into a crouch position, Archer dashed behind her.
"Two. One creeper, One skeleton. They haven't seen us, but the creeper is closer. They're in the way. I'll use the rod, and hook the skeleton. Kill the creeper."
They quickly switched spots and Archer drew his bow and notched an arrow, peeking around the corner. A creeper, a 6 foot tall column of compacted slime, with small feet that moved quickly, was probably the worst thing in Archer's world. Its only method of attack was exploding, and it was nearly silent. He had more than one close encounter with the explosive fiends, but the worst part of the creeper was their faces. Cavernous eyes, sagging mouths, horrified expressions, gasping in pained, sorrowful agony. But they had no feelings. The expressions stayed frozen. Every single standing monster came from some form of dead human. Archer shuddered to think what had caused a human to morph into an animated pile of stinking slime.
The creeper in question was turned around, and was an easy target. It wouldn't take more than five arrows. He leveled the bow at the creeper and let the arrow fly.
It whizzed like a bolt of lightning and stuck deep in the creeper's back, making it stumble a bit, slime reconstituting itself to continue moving. Archer pulled another arrow out of his quiver and shot again.
The creeper kept on coming. Archer jumped out of the corridor to draw the creeper out further, and let another arrow go. This time, the creeper showed its trouble continuing. It couldn't get its slime to stay formed and move at the same time with the three arrows at various points in its body.
At that point, Miner followed him out, holding her fishing rod aloft. The skeleton, moving up behind the Creeper, immediately shot at her. She dodged the arrow easily, by moving to the side. The skeleton shot another, and this time, she rolled to the right and cast her rod at the skeletal bowman. It caught somewhere in his rib cage, and she yanked the pile of bones to the ground with a powerful jerk, then drew her pickaxe and crushed its bones into dust, with powerful strikes.
She stood triumphantly, then heard an echoing "WATCH OUT! BEHIND YOU!). Her smile disappeared when she heard a second sound. A fuse burning, and then an explosion. She had lunged forward, over the pile of dust that was the skeleton, bringing the rod with her.
A deafening boom blew hot hair from behind her, making her hair wave in the air.
She turned around, and looked down at a wide expanse of lava, stretching out for much further than she had ever seen before. And right below her, an island of obsidian. Without so much as a word, she jumped down and started hacking at a block of obsidian that was adjacent to her. It fell apart, and she picked up the block that she had been looking all this time.
Before Archer could help her up, she made a dirt pile to climb up on and pulled herself over the edge of the hole. The obsidian block went into her pack, and she brought out her pickaxe.
"Okay, I'm ready to go back. Let me show you a shortcut I have.", She said, already staring down the side corridor they had hidden in for the ambush.
"So, what is a portal?", Archer asked, following behind her as they wandered through her clean cut tunnels deep beneath the earth.
She went up a ladder that extended up countless meters and answered while climbing. A bit sheepishly, Archer looked up at her as she climbed the stairs, trying hard not to imagine what were under her pants as they flexed above him each time she went up a rung.
She looked down. "Start climbing. A portal is something that leads to another world. No doubt it will be full of danger and treasure, because otherwise, what would be the reason for all the difficult components? Right?"
Archer who had started climbing and was trying not to look up, responded with a grunt. He certainly was remembering something from his distant past, because his head was hurting, and he could feel a thought frustratingly close. Then it hit him. A concept of romance. As ashamed that he was that it came at looking at a girl's rear for a few moments, it was a very deep change in his mind. To put it succinctly, he mind was telling him to "tap that", indeed as entirely base as it sounds.
His mind, however, was suggesting that he build up a relationship first, from some long lost social etiquette imprinted across the void that was his life before he woke up alone on a sandy shore, with nothing but his clothes and his hands, and a mind that only remembered imprints from the life he had lived before.
His brief moment of introspection was broken by his reaching the top of the ladder, and seeing the familiar pool beneath the waterfall. It was night outside, but he wasn't feeling tired. He and Miner went to the portal room and she placed the block that was the whole reason for the trip into the unexplored caverns. Then, pulling out a set of steel and flint, she dropped sparks that bursted into flames on the frame created by the looming obsidian structure.
A purple portal flashed into existence, and a strange sound emerged from it.
"Shall we?", Miner asked, and held her hand out. Archer stepped forward and took her hand, and they walked into the portal.
His vision warped and faded into a purple spiral. He could feel himself traveling a very long distance...