An Explanation

Delaney led me to her base while no one was looking. It was in this moment as she pulled my arm to have me follow her across a bridge that I looked above her head and saw her nametag. Her's, 'Rafila1,' was slowly turning gray.

"Hey, have you noticed the nametags are fading?"

"Uh? Oh, yeah," she responded slowly, like usual. "My guess would be that it's to help with the lag, 'cause it was a bit crazy when all you guys first loaded on. Yours is fading too, but it brightens when you look at it, see? Seeing all those tags would be an eyesore, anyway. Here, my house is right up here."

"It's right in front of us, I think I can see it," I cracked, "and it doesn't exactly look like much a house to me."

"Well, it's what I've got and I don't feel like changing it."

The 'house' looked to me like more of a big, cubic shed placed in the middle of a spruce forest. It was one that I certainly recognized, after all the times over the summer that she had had me join her world when she stayed over at my house.

She openly admitted to me often that she wasn't the most creative when it came to bases, making them only for 'objective use' most of the time, and this one was no exception. She opened up the door to the little wood cube and led me in.

"Quaint place," I observed.

The walls had piles (well, as much of a pile as you can have in a cube-based game, anyway) of chests stacked against the walls in an orderly fashion. They looked at least a little organized into stacks, most of them clearly labeled. Delaney rummaged around in the one in the far right corner next to her bed and pulled out an iron sword, which she then shoved into the floorboards.

"Alrighty," she began, "let's get started. The chests to the right of the door have food we can put out, and I've got some materials I can give you for armor and the lot."

"Aren't you gonna tell me what's going on?"

"... Right, that." She sat on the edge of a crafting bench and leaned back with a deep breath. "From what I can gather, we are stuck in Minecraft, on my world, with probably no way out."

"Well I assumed that, but why are we here?"

"Herobrine."

"Oh for the love- you're pulling my leg; I knew you had an obsession with that kinda stuff, but just on out with it already."

"I'm serious! Herobrine has somehow warped our whole school body into Minecraft, and since me and my phone were the closest to that bright light that went off, it's on my world... Okay, yeah, wow, that sounds really weird out loud, but I swear he's the guy who caused all this!"

"What makes you think the infamous urban legend himself is here? Besides us ending up here being a reason in of itself, I mean."

Delaney stared me deeply in the eyes as she got an axe out of her chest and proceeded to unflinchingly knock a hole straight into the wall behind her.

"Hey, what are you doi-" I started, but before I could finish, she went up to me and dragged me over by my cloak to the hole.

She said bluntly, "Grace, I want you to take a good, long look at that statue and try to ask me that again."

I looked up and saw a massive statue of the default skin with eyes that I could assume were using redstone lighting. "Woah, that's big. Nice eye effects."

"I didn't do that, that's the thing! I made the statue, yes, and I had it set up with a daylight sensor to light up two pairs of two redstone lamps whenever night came, yes. When I first came online and saw that they were lit during the day, I had thought I just messed up the redstone again and I had to screw with the sensors a little bit more, but the thing is... redstone lamps are yellow."

"So?"

"So, they shouldn't be white," she began to shout manically, "and lit up with the power of nine-thousand and one freaking suns in the middle of the day!"

"Alright, I believe you. It's pretty hard to refute the evidence. So you said you've been here... a few days… somehow? Have you seen the guy yet?"

"YES. Several times. He's basically a stalker by now; for all we know he could be watching us right now. He's told me a few things, though: one, there is a ratio of time in here to time in the real world, meaning that a full twenty-four hours here, while feeling like a normal-length day, is actually only twenty minutes in the real world, like playing an actual game of Minecraft for a full day cycle. This means that three days have passed for me in here while an hour has passed in the real world and that it took an hour for you all to load in."

I leaned into sitting on one of the chests and put my chin on my hand. "So, you actually met Herobrine? What's he like?"

"He's an ass."

"Le gasp! Language, my child," I said sarcastically, dramatically putting my fingers to my mouth.

"Sorry," she said, holding her arms and looking down, "I've been under some stress lately." She looked back up and smiled at me as if with embarrassment. "Do you think you'll be fine with him?"

"Nothing like being watched by your friendly neighborhood stalker!"

She laughed a tittering laugh, turning red from smiling. "Yeah, nothing," she finished. "Well anyway," she said, suddenly serious, "the other thing I learned is: two, if you die, it's game over. I don't know whether this is the truth or if he's screwing with me, but this could be a matter of life or death for all the people in here."

"So, this is basically a Sword Art Online type of thing?"

"Yeeeah, but this'll probably have a better plot and slightly less Mary-Sue-ing."

"Good point."

"I don't know how long it will be until we get help. I've done the math, and at the ratio of one hour to three days, a day in real life is seventy-two in here and a week is five-hundred and four. Grace, we might be in here for years before someone finds us and is capable of getting us out." She paused, looked awkwardly out the hole she made in her house, and then turned back to me. "The only way I can think of getting around the sheer amount of time is if someone freezes the servers while we're in here. My theory is that that would put us in a sort of stasis, creating the illusion of a kind of time skip."

"Sounds about right," I responded, standing back up.

"I know this is a lot to take in, but-"

"Dude, this sounds awesome."

"But people could die!" she shouted. "Do you really want the blame on your shoulders?"

"Well, we'll teach them how to do things, and it's not like we're the only ones out of hundreds who play Minecraft, and it's not really a hard game, especially now that we aren't limited to controllers and can physically do things ourselves. Word'll get around on how things work, and we'll be fine."

"But-"

I gripped her shoulder and tried to make a face to reassure her. "Trust me on this. We got this, no need to worry so much."

"We got this..." she echoed.