Denzel gave a slow, deep breath and nodded, twisting his pickaxe in his hand. “Well, I wish I was as optimistic as you. I guess we’ll see.”

  He pushed himself off the wall as he lit another torch, making his way towards the hole slowly forming in the cave ceiling.

  “Hey, Pari, you finished yet?”

  “That only happens if there are monsters nearby.”

  - Aiden Smith

  Chapter 4: Mining

  Mining, it turned out, was strange. Hours of walking and talking, scouring long tunnel walls, and scraping stone block after stone block. It all seemed like it should be exhausting, but so long as their food was keeping them full their energy never seemed to dip.

  The cave system turned out to be a winding maze of branching pathways and a constant feeling of dread; a squeak of a bat or a pop of lava would cause them to freeze and wait. Their hearts thumping until they were sure that nothing was approaching.

  It was slow and somewhat mind-numbing, but the rewards were clear as their packs slowly filled with enough iron and coal to last them for weeks.

  They began to march their way down the last branching tunnel of the caves. Their inventory was getting heavier but their spirits were light. Pari suggested they carve a small campsite to offload some of their goods before they run out of inventory space.

  The three of them got to work and made a small indent in the wall.

  With the spare wood Aiden had collected they managed to furnish their small home base.

  Denzel made a furnace to slowly melt down their ore into iron ingots.

  Pari made a chest to place their overflowing supplies into.

  Aiden sat heavily on a spare brick of cobblestone, watching Pari fuel the fire and Denzel rummage around their spare crafting table.

  “We should probably make some new beds and sleep.” He said.

  Aiden reached into this inventory and he fished out their remaining wool. He started counting out the nine pieces needed as Pari cocked a brow at him.

  “What? Why? We’re not even tired yet,” Pari complained.

  “Phantoms come out at night if you don’t sleep for a few days.” Aiden passed on the wool blocks to Denzel who took them with a nod, grabbing more wood from his pile. “We don’t want to come outside to that, trust me.”

  He emptied out a small section of the wall just large enough for them to rest comfortably, and Denzel set the beds up side by side.

  Sleep in the world of Minecraft is easy. All you have to do is lie down in your beds, and moments later you’ll be fully rested, and hours have passed. Aiden was happy it wasn’t like sleeping in the real world, where he’s just tossing and turning in bed, and watching an endless stream of funny videos on his phone.

  Aiden reached for the bed’s blankets, preparing for sleep, when a strange sensation overcame him so suddenly that he nearly jolted backward. An odd anxiety began to well up in his stomach, and he yanked his hand away from the bed like it was burning.

  He glanced up at his friends who stood stocked still beside their cots as well. Then he slowly reached down again. The dull fear came back with a force, and he realized that the thought of climbing into bed made him feel as though he was about to be sick.

  “Hold on,” he said, “something isn’t right.”

  He watched Pari reach for her covers as well, and similarly, her hand shot back to her side, eyes widening in alarm.

  “It’s never done that before. Why is it doing that?” Pari asked, her voice panicked.

  “It’s like we’re not supposed to go to sleep or something. Like something in the game won’t let us,” Aiden determined.

  “This isn’t good.” Denzel folded his arms around himself and looked up at Aiden. “This really isn’t good, guys. Isn’t there usually a reason for us not being able to sleep in Minecraft?”

  Aiden thought for a moment and glanced towards the cave entrance. Their torches burned bright down each hallway, the cave branches glowing with fiery light. He slowly looked at the other two with his hand ghosting towards the hilt of his sword.

  “Yeah.” Aiden said, his voice gone hollow. “That only happens if there are monsters nearby.”

  A deep, palpable feeling of dread filled the cavern as they slowly grabbed their weapons. Their ears straining in the silent underground halls to listen for signs of mobs.

  Denzel crept out to the entrance and peeked around the corner, shaking his head to the others as he loaded his crossbow with a shot.

  “Nothing out here. Are we close enough to the surface for it to trigger above us?” Denzel asked. “Maybe the monsters are outside and not in the cave?”

  Aiden shook his head. “We’re almost near bedrock at this point. There’s no way.”

  Pari, still in their hideaway where they made their temporary base, pressed her ear to the cave wall, eyes scrunched up in intense focus. They opened after a second and she waved the others over.

  “Guys, I think I hear something.”

  Aiden and Denzel ran over to her side, the three listened, and indeed, a noise crawled into their ears from within the stonework. It was a skittering, many-legged noise, cramped inside a small space and spitting air in frantic bursts.

  The sound made their skin prickle. Aiden began to run his hand down the cave wall while the others retrieved food and armor from their chests once again.

  He stopped just at the base of the wall, behind the currently smelting furnace. The texture had shifted, no longer the rough-hewn surface of the rest of the cave. It was smooth, now, and his fingers dipped into a small crevasse where he could swear brick was placed.

  Aiden knelt down and broke the furnace and placed it aside.

  “—Guys!”

  Pari and Denzel whipped around, weapons at the ready, but Aiden shook his head. He pointed at the four bricks visibly forming a block of tile, white and slightly greenish from moss creeping through.

  “I think we’re right next to something.”

  They both joined him, and Denzel folded his arms quizzically. “We certainly didn’t put that block there.”

  “Maybe it’s a dungeon!” Pari said excitedly. “That’s probably where the monsters are. C’mon, let’s get through this wall.”

  “Be careful, there might be a monster spawner on the other side.” Denzel warned.

  “Come on, we can take on a monster spawner!” Pari said.

  “There might be some good loot too!” Aiden added.

  Denzel moved the furnace to a safer place as Aiden and Pari worked at the stone, and eventually, Pari’s pick broke the thin barrier enough for them to see to the other side.

  There was no monster spawner as Aiden had assumed there would be.

  Instead, the room that stretched out before them was nearly empty aside from a single column of stone in the center. There were four torches illuminating the rest of the stone room.

  It was the same smooth brickwork as the odd block they had found, and two iron doors rested on either side of the room. A deafening silence followed as the three peered cautiously in through their new opening.

  Denzel stepped up, crossbow raised, and walked a few feet into the room. “What…is this?”

  “It doesn’t look like a dungeon,” Aiden said. He peeked through the windows set into the iron doors and saw hallways that curved into darkness. There were hardly enough torches lit to see. “They’re usually one or two rooms. This place looks…massive.”

  Pari trotted towards the rightmost door and pressed the button. It slammed open to the opposite wall, startling all three, and she glanced behind her with a shrug.

  “C’mon. Let’s go find those monsters.”

  “Someone extinct?”

  - Denzel Brown

  Chapter 5: Halls of the Crypt

  The three walked through the quiet stone hallways in relative silence, each weapon gripped tightly in their hands. It felt like they were walking through a tomb. Their footsteps called back to them in quick, mocking whispers.

  “You hear that?” Aiden said as he stopped still.

  “Shhhh…” Denzel whispered.

  All three of them heard it—the gurgling and groaning sound of a zombie.

  From around the corner, a pair of green zombie arms came into view and immediately reached for Aiden.

  “Watch out!” Denzel said as he shot his crossbow, hitting the mob right in the head with a critical hit.

  Aiden took a deep breath, “Nice aim,” he sighed.

  The three of them continued on their path, every so often they did have to duck behind a corner to dodge a stray arrow or zombie slash. The halls were just lit enough to not stop the occasional monster spawn. They moved very carefully as they made their way through the strange maze of stone.

  They encountered another iron door ahead of them.

  “Should we go inside th—” Denzel started to say, but Pari pressed a button causing the door to slam wide open. “Well…I guess we’re going in.”

  The three of them stepped inside and the finality of the iron door shutting behind them sent a chill up their spines. They turned to find themselves in another strange room.

  This room was both larger and less spacious. There were small rooms spaced throughout the big room, each sealed by another door.

  They approached cautiously and saw the iron bars separating each room, with one or two old, dusty beds lying empty in the corners within.

  “It’s a jail,” Pari whispered. She pressed up against the bars. “It looks ancient in here. There’s dust everywhere.”

  “Probably abandoned. No one’s been in here for a long time.” Denzel replied.

  He was keeping his distance from the jail doors, watching either side of the room for monsters, but couldn’t keep a curious eye from watching the others explore.

  “It’s strange… the villagers we met, they said they were peaceful folk, didn’t they?” Denzel pointed out.

  “Pavlos said that they don’t even know how to use weapons,” Aiden said and cocked a brow. “Why are you asking?”

  “Well, there’s no one else nearby here in this world yet.” he said, “and you know that the villagers are probably the only ones around. So if that's true…who felt the need to construct this big of a building underground, including a jail?”

  “Maybe the pillagers built this?” Aiden wondered.

  “No, Pavlos said the pillagers made their tower here recently. They haven’t been around here long enough to have built all of this,” Denzel replied.

  “I…don’t know.” Aiden felt his heart jerk a little at the question, glancing towards the beds with a look of new uneasiness. Pari, however, waved her hand.

  “This place is really old. It must have been from people ages ago.” She said.

  “Like who?” Denzel countered. “What other creatures could’ve done something like this?”

  “It could be someone who’s extinct by now.” Aiden offered. Denzel gave him a look of doubt.

  “Someone extinct?” Denzel questioned Aiden.

  “Yeah, you know. They had to’ve been pretty powerful to build something like this, but maybe they got wiped out by something. It could happen. It’s just like how we learn in school about extinct species.”

  “Like…like dinosaurs.”

  “Not like dinosaurs—”

  “You’re telling me dinosaurs built a jail cell.”

  “No!”

  “They could have built it to keep their food in.” Pari cut in. “Like a human jail farm for the dinosaurs to eat from.”

  “Plus, there are parrots in this game, and as we learned in school, birds descended from dinosaurs,” Denzel added.

  “I’m going to the next room. You two are being annoying.” Aiden turned and strode to the exiting door, leaving the snickering Pari and Denzel to run and catch up.

  They continued to wander through the halls as they fought to keep their bearings. Each hallway they entered had four or five different doors to go through. More than once, they found themselves circling back to a corridor they had already trekked through.

  They discovered more empty rooms, fountains within the walls, and storage rooms filled with so many chests that they weren’t even able to search through all of them.

  The tangled mess of passageways was confusing and fatiguing, and they found themselves sluggish as they opened yet another door and found themselves shocked still.

  This was the largest room by far, it stood over a hundred bricks across, with a second half-floor hanging over their heads. The air was still and filled with the strong musk of old paper. In nearly every space in the room, there were bookshelves.

  There were shelves upon shelves upon shelves stacked up like packing crates. They formed looming corridors all throughout the space. There was hardly space for a torch to hang safely, leaving the entire room dangerously dim and striking an eerie atmosphere as dust specks flew into the lights like wisps.

  They were in a library.

  “If we don’t sleep soon, bad things can happen.”

  - Aiden Smith

  Chapter 6: The Library

  “Woah,” Aiden was the first to break the silence, breathing a sigh as he stepped in further. His footsteps kicked more grime up from the stone, marking the first footsteps the room had seen in ages.

  “I didn’t even know you could fill this many bookshelves,” Pari said.

  She approached one of the shelves carefully and ran a finger down the wood; the dust was an inch thick, and she had to cover her mouth to keep from coughing.

  “Are these actual shelves? Do the books have things written in them or…?”

  She glanced to the side and watched Aiden take a thin book between his fingers, slowly peeling it from its place in the shelf so he could flip the cover over in his hands.

  “They do!”

  Aiden turned the book in Pari’s direction and showed her the opening pages. They were less written words than odd symbols, and Pari squinted at them curiously, turning the page to see more on the other side.

  “Sort of.” She said. “It’s certainly not in English. It might just be randomly generated gibberish.”

  “It kind of looks like the font used for the enchantment tables.” Aiden took the book down and turned the pages in search of anything readable. “I think that’s an actual language, but I don’t remember how to translate it. What do you think, Den?”

  There was a beat, and Aiden glanced up, blinking as he looked towards the entrance again. “Denzel?”

  A set of footsteps in the dust lead down a different pathway, and Aiden and Pari followed to find Denzel sitting on the floor. Several shelves that lead to his spot were now almost bare.

  Stacks of books were piled beside him, and in his lap rested a thick notebook, which he was currently scribbling in as fast as his fingers could move. The two glanced at each other hesitantly before approaching with soft steps.

  “…Den?” Pari said. “Have you been possessed by the ghost of a dead librarian?”

  Denzel glanced up, eyes wide, and gave an astonished smile, waving a hand at the books scattered around.

  “What? No. This place is amazing.” His voice was breathy with awe as he flipped the page on a small book laid out in front of him. “Look at all of these. These could be filled with history, or cultural literature, or scientific works, or—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess, but we can’t read it.” Pari cut in with folded arms.

  Denzel cocked a brow at her, continuing his scribbles as he looked back to the open book. “Maybe you can’t.”

  Both Aiden and Pari started, and Aiden rushed to his side. “Wait, hang on.” He put a palm over the open-faced book to block them so Denzel would look up again. “You can read these?!”

  “Well, not really, but I can translate them, at least.”

  Denzel reached down and turned to a page from his notebook. On it he had scribbled down what looked like a cipher key. Symbols and their correlating letters laid out neatly on the page. Aiden’s jaw dropped in disbelief.

  “You wrote down the enchantment cipher? When did you learn that?”

  “Last year. Enchantment table language actually comes from another video game, and it’s called Standard Galactic Alphabet. There’s a bunch of ciphers online that you can use. You know I like language, so I decided to learn how to translate it. It was no biggie, Klingon was harder to learn.” Denzel’s smug smile wavered when he saw Aiden match it, his warm brown eyes glittering with sudden mischief.

  “You told me you thought this game was for babies.” He said.

  Denzel puffed up at once, back straightening, a scoff ready in his throat.

  “It is for babies—”

  “Then why did you go through the trouble of memorizing the enchantment table language cipher?”

  Denzel stopped short, and Aiden could see the dark flush of his skin creep into his neck the way it always did when he was angry. His mouth opened, shut, opened again, and he gave a harsh sigh that sent dust particles flying up into the air.

  “…Okay, fine. I guess it’s not that bad. It’s sometimes fun for young adults like me too.”

  “You’re barely a teenager,” Pari added.

  Denzel gave her a look and he handed the cipher to Aiden. He settled his back against the bookshelves, doing his best to ignore the bright grin on his friend’s face. “Here, you guys can use this to translate if you want. I don’t need to write it down again. I already have it completely memorized.”

  “Of course, you do.” Pari opened her bag and let Aiden slip the paper inside. She rubbed dirt off her shield with her shirt sleeve. “Why don’t you translate for a little while we go and try to find the monsters left in here? You look like you can handle it.”

  Denzel nodded and waved them off, instantly absorbed in his book again.

  Aiden and Pari lit the rest of the library to ensure no monsters could spawn within. Since there wasn’t much space to place torches on the wall, they mostly placed them on the floor below them. They left the library and shut the iron door behind them to make sure no monsters creeped inside and continued their slow-moving search.

 

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