OKAY, THIS ONE'S REALLY LONG, WHAT THE CRAP. GET SOME POPCORN, DIVE INTO YOUR SECRET NETFLIX BUNKER THAT I KNOW YOU HAVE AND PREPARE TO BE HERE FOR A LITTLE WHILE.

This chapter takes place as of Minecraft Pocket Edition update 1.1

One to Three

Trying to keep my mind off of it, I walked up to my house.

It was a very simple thing - a 10 x 10 x 5 oak cube surrounded by a one-block-thick path of polished andesite, which also happened to be what the house's floor was made of. It had a set of oak double doors at the front with a torch on either side.

It may not sound like much, but it does what it needs to do — it's efficient and it's where I put my stuff.

I went inside, and it almost felt good to be 'back.' I had accomplished A LOT on this world: I had huge crop and animal farms with one of each animal and plant, I had found and bred perfect horses, I had an enchantment table with a full room of books around it for high-level enchantments, and of course I had gone to the Nether, and had even found a fortress!

Given, I wussed out on exploring the place normally and had instead OP'ed myself to find the fortress in creative mode, but I made up for it by making myself build the long cobblestone bridge over lava to get there entirely in survival once I found its location. Plus I sacrificed a few hundred chickens by burning them in the Overworld.

Yeah, I had a weird sense of pride when it came to my survival world….

Anyway, I went on ahead to a double chest I had against the left wall, which I had labeled 'Minerals' with a sign, and went to pull out a few iron blocks to make new armor and tools when I realized I hadn't even opened my inventory yet.

Then I remembered the second button that showed up in front of me and thought out loud, "Oh wow, I completely forgot about that one, I bet it must be the inventory button!"

Obvious statements aside, I pressed the button and sure enough, it opened an inventory screen, floating in front of me like a hologram. Emphasis on 'an,' as when I opened it up, it seemed to bear more resemblance to the screen PC uses than PE, as it wasn't divided into tabs, rather it utilized one large screen, with a player model and armor/off-hand slots above twenty-seven item slots and a hotbar with nine more.

That was the first time I saw my skin, and let me just say it was weird looking at something that was me yet not.

For the first time since spawning, I looked down, and sure enough I found that I was wearing the clothes my PE skin uses — a white tank top covered up with a black-and-white knit sweater jacket, a pair of black cargo shorts with the bottoms rolled up and — remember when I said I was a weeb? — white anime-style belts hanging down on my hips coming down from the top of the shorts. Although perhaps if I said it was inspired by steampunk I wouldn't get so much hate? I don't know.

I was also wearing a pair of short, black lace-up boots with a white tongue- and oh my god why did I put so much black and white in my skin? The only things that weren't black or white were the bright, almost neon purple irises in my eyes (and no, I'm not another enderman rip-off, that's just the color of my skin's eyes), my now light brown and actually REALLY long and straight hair, and the two square, purple barrettes keeping said crazy-long hair out of my face on either side.

"Huh, neat."

I just. Wanted. SOME ARMOR. But NOPE, the crafting menu just HAD to be such a little turd, and press the button to make an iron chestplate SIX TIMES.

"I give up," I sighed, "You'd think you'd have a little more control doin' this yourself, but no, pocket edition is still the glitchy mess I remember!" and I punched the close button in the upper-left corner of the menu in anger. The inventory screen seemed to be the only thing that bore more resemblance to PC, because all other menus, like the aforementioned crafting table, were exactly like their PE counterparts.

Took me a few seconds of standing and staring into space to realize that it hadn't hurt when I punched the screen. I mean, I guess it makes sense, after all, why would you get damaged by closing a screen?

"Hmm, I wonder where my bars are at?" and no, I wasn't talking about my musical inclination, because I know that that's far gone, me being as "tone deaf" as I was, rather I was looking for where I could find my health, hunger, experience, and now that I had on a set of iron, including one of six iron chestplates, my armor bar.

I looked up first, because that's where PE puts its bars, but I only found the tag displaying "Rafila1" up there, and I hadn't seen any PC-style hotbar where they would all be floating in front of me, so I was at a loss (haha, I II II L).

"Maybe I'm just not capable of seeing it? Oh, nevermind it's on my arm, heh."

Up and down the underside of my right arm were four bars, floating just above my arm's skin, positioned horizontally so that left end of the bars faced my wrist. The experience bar was at the bottom, above that, hunger, then health, then the armor bar that was now at seven and a half. My hotbar was there, too, bent into the shape of a circle and floating around my wrist, with all of the items I had made each in one of the nine slots, and yes, I'm talking about the other five freaking chestplates I made. Still salty on that one.

The bars slowly faded back into my arm until they were gone, and giving my arm a tap or somewhat flexing the muscles there would make them appear again, and I found I could cycle through my hotbar by moving hands in a clockwise or counter-clockwise manner, clenching my fist to select an item.

Realizing I can't just go bashing zombies over the head with armor (assuming this world was still on normal mode like I had it), I set my focus on re-making the set of iron tools I had back when I played normally, including an actual sword.

And about three back-ups because I over-prepare like that.

After grabbing a stack of cooked chicken from my food storage, I set back outside to check on all of my buildings to see if everything was still normal from when I had last played.

The sword I had made looked strangely realistic as I selected it from my hotbar and it fell into my hand. I felt it firmly in my grasp as it glinted in the synthetic sunlight. It looked almost a meter long, and while it still had an iron crossguard and pommel, its wooden handle was also covered with a leather wrap. The white blade's edge looked sharp, and almost felt powerful in my hand, and had a shallow fuller running up and down its sides. Despite the fuller, it was actually somewhat heavy, too.

Nevertheless, I went on my way to check my little base I call home.

I was finishing up — nothing seemed off about anything I had made: my horses were okay in their stables, the barns I made for cows, pigs, and sheep were fine, my llamas were doing good (even if some of their leads attaching them to the walls of their stables had snapped, but that's PE for you, I guess), and my more utilitarian community buildings hadn't been blown up or anything, like my subway to NPC villages, my underground beacon, or the guest room my friends camped out in when they joined while at my house, even if only my brother or Grace ever joined this particular world.

Admittedly, the redstone lamps I had used as the eyes of the 'statue' right behind my house were glowing a little more white than I would have liked them to, and that was a bit worrying, especially considering I set them to only light up at night. Maybe I just needed to fix it again. Don't get me wrong, I'm no idiot, but one had to desperately hope for those things rather than have to deal with the alternative.

I was headed back to my house, which was back at the far side of my base, to decide what to do next, as I was pretty much at a loss for how I could get out, as much as this seemed like it could be an interesting adventure.

I was in a clearing in between my barns, when I could've sworn I had felt wind.

"There's not supposed to be wind in here..." I whispered to myself, exhausted.

Just then, I got an alert from my chat box:

has joined the game

"What the crap? It's blank."

The wind started to pick up immediately after the message popped up, and it felt like there was a strange, heated energy in it. I started to breath heavier as the air got thicker. Something powerful's coming. He's coming.

Then, all of a sudden, it stopped. I felt the presence of something behind me.

"So you're a girl? What a shame," the voice sent chills throughout my whole body, "When I saw you I was hoping that you were just some dork with long hair. Hm... 'Rafila1.'"

I didn't dare turn to face the cynical voice reading my nametag behind me; assuming that I still had a heart in my chest, it was definitely beating.

"Are you planning on doing something or what? Or do you not even care about what's happening? Funny, I thought humans liked asking questions."

He walked up in front of me, and my eyes locked with empty, glowing sockets. Nothing can express the terror of making eye contact with him.

Herobrine's eyes make you feel like you're being burned to death.

He squinted at me, and I could tell he was getting irritable, "Well?"

I have to hit him and make a break for it.

I grabbed my sword from my hotbar and tried to strike at his face, only for him to nonchalantly raise his hand to the sword, to which it shattered at the point, while the tang got pulled out from its slot in the hilt.

"Was that really necessary?"

I darted my eyes back at the shards of sword lying on the ground in horror, which had started to despawn, turning into white dust and floating upwards like an animal's death sequence.

Herobrine started towards me, cold eyes dead set on me, and I instinctively backed up, keeping my distance from him, but before I knew it, I was backed against the wall of my cows' barn.

He leaned in and spoke slowly. I noticed that he had faint, grey-white pupils, "How long...do you think you've been here, hm...? A few hours, maybe…?"

"I…."

"I assure you...that you've been in here for no more than...five minutes," the voice he used at the end made me shutter. "Maybe you haven't figured out...the ratio yet?"

I answer quietly, "Ratio? I-"

"The ratio of one to three. For every hour that passes in existence, three days pass in our world of nonexistence," his eyes shift slightly down and to the side, "I can assure you...that an hour has yet to pass...otherwise, I am certain that the rest would have loaded by now…."

I managed to get out my first full sentence in his presence, "The rest? What's loading?!"

He backed up slightly up a slope, as if readying himself to leave, "You might want to prepare for some lag in a little under three days. By day four's morning, an hour will have passed, and you can expect several hundred...others...that were trapped in the impact of the servers' reaction to starting."

"Severa- wait, others?! What impact?! What's happening? What did you do?!" I started shouting at him, momentarily forgetting that I didn't exactly have any dominance to exert. "What's the point in doing this! Why am I alone here!? Why was I first?!"

"For the love of god stop shouting. To be honest, I liked you better when you stuttered." Well, that caught me a bit off-guard. "If you must know, you came first for no reason other than being the closest human to the impact — it could've easily been anyone else. I, however, had to take longer to manually transfer myself back to data from that stupid Earth form, which I was never meant to have, mind you."

I stepped forward slightly, "So what about all the other questions you didn't answer, huh?! What's the point of this, then?!"

"Be quiet," he sneered. "There is no need to be so cocky."

At that, he stepped back further, and warped away in a whirl of black, smoky flames, leaving me seething below him, and my barn on fire.