Читать книгу Quest for Justice - Sean Wolfe Fay - Страница 10

This player had the same body as Stan and Charlie, but Stan could tell by the appearance of this player that she was a girl. She had blonde hair that extended beyond her blocky head to create a ponytail behind her. She was wearing a leather tunic, neon-pink shorts and blue shoes.

Stan then thought, Why am I thinking this? She’s pointing a sword at my chest!

“Give me all your materials,” said the girl in a monotone, “or your friend gets a blade through his chest.”

Charlie, who had been paralyzed with fear up until now, quickly scrambled to get out all their materials. He laid them on the ground: his own damaged wooden sword, a piece of bread, a pile of dirt, a piece of rotten flesh, a bone, five arrows, some wood and a whole mess of Spider string. The girl looked at them with a distasteful eye.

“I should have known. You two don’t have anything good, do you.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I don’t know. I have … this!” And Stan, who had remained perfectly still up until this time, suddenly whipped out his wooden sword. Taking advantage of the girl’s diverted focus, he cut her across the chest, knocking her backwards. She fell to the ground and cringed; the cut had not actually hurt, but the leather armour on her chest had fallen off, revealing an orange T-shirt with a heart in the middle that was the same neon-pink as her shorts.

Stan stood over her, his wooden sword now pointed at her, and Charlie quickly joined him, his quivering hand pointing his sword at her also. Stan, sounding much braver than he felt, said, “I wouldn’t try anything if I were you. There’s two of us and only one of you.”

She pulled herself up and, to Stan’s surprise, looked almost bored as she said, “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna try. There’s no point. Killing you two, which I could easily do, would accomplish nothing. You’re just a couple of noobs. Let me know if you decide to attack me or let me go or whatever. I’ll just sit here.” And with that, she sat on a nearby tree stump, put her hands behind her head, crossed her legs, and closed her eyes as if she were lounging on a beach chair by the sea rather than being held at sword point. Stan felt himself flush.

“How do you know that we’re new at this?” asked Charlie defiantly, his hand still shaking as he pointed his sword towards her heart.

“Yeah, what if we’re, like, complete masters at this game who are just carrying around bad stuff to fool people like you?” spat Stan bitterly.

She opened her eyes and looked at Stan.

“Well, one, you’re on the road to the Adorian Village, which is for players under level five. And two, any smart player would carry around any weapons he had for self-defence, now that the King passed that new law.” She closed her eyes again.

“What new law?” wondered Charlie.

She opened her eyes again. “And three, only noobs don’t know about the law that bans you from this server after you die once, instead of just losing all your stuff and going back to the spawn point like you usually do in Minecraft.” She closed her eyes again.

“Hang on a second,” said Stan. “If you aren’t new, then why are you carrying around a stone sword? If I had to guess, I’d say stone is pretty common around here.”

She opened her eyes and a bitter look came over her face. “Oh, that. It’s, like, the stupidest thing ever. I was on this server called Johnstantinople once – run by a guy named John, go figure – and I was doing really well. I found an abandoned NPC village with an iron sword and a bunch of apples in the forge chest, and I was going around killing monsters, when this Griefer came up from behind me and killed me! I went back to the spawn point, I killed a bunch of Creepers, and I got sand and crafted a ton of TNT, and I traded a golden apple for some fire charges that this guy got from the Nether, and I griefed the house of the guy who killed me by blowing up his house! Unfortunately, turns out that that guy was John, who ran the server, and he banned me.

“It is so unfair! So now I had to join this stupid server, and there’s no NPC villages anywhere, so I had to kill this sleeping guy, take this lame stone sword, and … you’re not following anything I’m saying, are you.”

Again, it was a statement, not a question, and again it was true. The boys stood there with a look of bewilderment on their faces; they had not followed any of her rant from the mention of PCD towns or whatever she said. They were utterly confused, so the girl just got up and walked away.

“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?” yelled Charlie.

“I’m going to find some people with stuff that I actually want,” she replied, heading for the woods.

“Wait up!” Stan yelled, walking after her. “Why don’t you come with us?”

She whipped back around to face him. “WHAT?” she and Charlie yelled at the same time.

“You can’t be serious, Stan. She just tried to kill us!”

“You expect me to come with you noobs?”

“She’ll turn on us as soon as we fall asleep!”

“If you think I’ll protect you, then you’ve got another think coming!”

“SHUT UP!” yelled Stan, so loudly that both Charlie and the girl did.

Turning to the girl, Stan said, “Look, if you attack people who have better weapons than you, then you’re going to get slaughtered. Come with us to the Adorian Village. They’ll help you get a new iron sword, and then we can go our separate ways.”

The girl thought about it while Charlie stammered weak protests, which Stan ignored.

“Fine,” said the girl. “I’ll come with you, but just until we get to the Adorian Village. After that, I’m going to leave you two to fend for yourselves.”

“Good,” said Stan. Charlie looked at him incredulously, but he could see that Stan had made up his mind, and he doubted that he could change it.

“Come on,” said Stan. “The path leads this way.” He started walking down the path and the others followed.

“By the way, my name’s KitKat783,” said the girl. “But you can call me Kat.”

“My name’s Stan, and this is Charlie,” said Stan, gesturing to Charlie, who feebly raised a blocky hand. With no further words, Stan walked off, followed by the smirking Kat and the scowling Charlie.

They walked along the path in silence. Stan was followed by Kat, with Charlie taking up the rear. “I don’t trust her behind my back,” he’d whispered to Stan. They kept walking until about noon, when Stan spotted something on the side of the road. He pointed it out to the others. It appeared to be a large hole in the ground, lined by stone, with darkness inside that extended deep underground. He noticed black specs on a few of the stones that he could see.

“That’s a mine!” cried Kat excitedly. “There are minerals inside it if you mine them out! Let’s go in there!”

“Are you crazy?” snapped Charlie, still upset that Kat had come with them. “It’s all dark in there. There’s bound to be monsters.”

“Eh, don’t be a baby,” smirked Kat. “See that black stuff?” She gestured to one of the stones flecked with black. “That’s coal ore. We can make torches out of the coal to see in the dark and ward off the monsters at night. Besides, even if there are monsters in there, we can fight them off. We’ve all got swords. We’re all big boys here, except for me, and ironically, I’m probably the least scared to go in there.”

Nobody argued with her. Stan was a little unnerved at the prospect of heading into a dark mine after the episode with the Spiders. He did need to make a new weapon soon, though, and it would be nice to have a sword made out of stone rather than wood, though he had no idea how to make one. He also wondered what other kinds of minerals were in there. His desires and curiosity overpowered his fear, and he said, “All right, Kat. I’ll go into the mine.”

“I don’t care what either of you say, I’m not going in there,” Charlie retorted. “I remember the Spiders. I’m going to stay right here, thank you very much.” And with that he walked to the middle of the path, plopped down a piece of wood from his inventory, crossed his arms over his chest, and stared at Stan and Kat defiantly.

“Fine,” said Stan. “You stay out here. See if you can find any more food; we’re almost out. Kat and I will grab some coal and stone and stuff.” And with that, Stan turned and walked towards the mine.

“Hold on,” Kat said, and she threw him something that he caught and examined: a pickaxe made of stone. She held up an identical one.

“It hurts your hand and takes forever to punch through rock, and you don’t get anything from it. You’d be best to mine stuff with a pickaxe.”

Feeling a little bit stupid for his ignorance, Stan set into the mine, pickaxe in hand, tailed closely by Kat.

His first stop was the coal ore he’d seen. He took his pickaxe and mined a good-sized lump of coal in a matter of minutes. He saw that the coal ran in a vein, and before long he had collected about ten lumps of it. He brought them over to Kat, who was hacking away at a stone wall.

“Good,” she said. “Let me see those.” He handed her the lumps. She pulled some sticks from her inventory and fastened them to the coal to make torches. Each lump of coal yielded four torches, so they had forty in all.

“Now we can go deeper into the mine, where there isn’t any natural light,” she explained. They ventured further, placing torches along the wall as they went. Stan noticed that the torches ignited the second that Kat attached them to the wall, with no matches or lighter or anything. Strange …

“Hey, look over here!” Stan ran over to a spot on the ground flecked with black. “More coal! I’m going to dig this out,” he said. “Could you get me some stone for a new sword? And get some for Charlie, too.”

“Whatever,” she said. She started hacking into the wall at a new location, gathering up tremendous amounts of stone chunks. Stan dug into the coal vein. He was about to dig into the eighth piece of coal when Kat said, “Hey, Stan! Come check this out!”

Stan walked over to her. She had made quite a dent in the wall, and she was staring at a block that was different from the stone all around her. This block was flecked with little spots that looked similar to the coal ore, but were light brown instead of black. Kat stepped back.

“I’ve never seen that before. Do you think it could be gold?”

“It might be. Hang on, put a torch up,” Stan said. Kat obliged. Stan pulled out his book and turned to the section on blocks. He found a page describing gold ore and showed it to Kat.

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t match the colour. Gold ore has yellow flecks; these flecks are tan. Check out the other pages.”

Stan turned to the previous page. He held that illustration up for Kat.

“That’s it!” she exclaimed. “What is it?”

Stan read from the book.

IRON ORE

Iron ore is an ore block typically found in mines or mountainous regions. When smelted, it produces one iron ingot.

Stan looked up.

“Do you know what an Iron Ingot is?” he asked.

Kat shrugged her shoulders. “Look it up,” she said.

He did.

IRON INGOT

An iron ingot is a crafting item. It is most commonly obtained by smelting iron ore, but can also be found in the chests of Dungeons, Strongholds, Abandoned Mine Shafts, Temples and NPC villages, or by killing Iron Golems and (rarely) Zombies. The iron ingot is an essential crafting item for a wide variety of things, including iron swords, iron armour, iron tools, buckets, shears, iron bars, tripwire hooks and many other things. Tools and armour made from iron are of a higher quality than stone or leather, respectively, but of a lower quality than diamond.

Of this entire passage, one small section caught Kat’s attention.

“Iron sword?” she exclaimed. “So if I smelt this stuff, whatever that means, I can get an iron sword?”

“Apparently,” said Stan.

“Sweet!” shouted Kat gleefully, and she began hacking away at the wall of ore. The two players hacked at the wall and managed to get out four blocks of iron ore before they hit stone again.

“Let’s look around here. Maybe there’ll be some more!” She was about to take her pickaxe to the adjacent section of the wall when she heard a bloodcurdling cry echoing from the top of the cave.

“Aaaaauuuuughhhh! Stan! Heeelllllpppp!”

“Come on!” Stan shouted to Kat, and the two raced up the mine and into the light.

After Kat and Stan had vanished into the mine, Charlie stood up and walked around, a scowl on his face.

Stupid girl, he thought, looking around and spying a patch of wheat next to a sign that said “Take what you need, but replant.” Why should she get to be in our group? She nearly killed us! What does Stan see in her? It was true, he thought as he harvested the wheat, that the girl did seem to know her way with a sword. Ah, what am I talking about? I don’t know that. I didn’t see her actually fight! For all I know, she’s never killed anything in her life. I’m ditching her first chance I get, the arrogant brat.

And now look what she’s done, he thought as he began to break the leaf blocks on the trees. He had read in Stan’s book that every now and then an apple would drop from a leaf block if you broke it. She’s gone with him into a mine, delaying us from getting to the Adorian Vill— Wait a second, he thought, not noticing the apple dropping from the block he had just broken.

What if it’s a trap? What if she’s just lured Stan down there to kill him, and she’s going to come back and finish me off? I have to go find them! He quickly picked up his sword and was about to dash into the mine to save his friend when something stopped him.

A little way into the darkness of the mine, he saw a figure. It looked like a monster of some sort. He was about to run, but his curiosity got the better of him because it was the most bizarre thing he had ever seen. He edged slightly forwards to get a better look. It was as tall as he was, two blocks high, but it didn’t have any arms, and it stood upright on four stubby legs. He couldn’t see well, but he could have sworn that its body was flecked with different shades of green, with some white in there, too. He edged a little closer. This turned out to be a huge mistake.

The creature suddenly turned towards him. He had gotten too close. It stared at him, and he had never seen such a terrifying face in his life. It looked like a morbid, green-speckled jack-o-lantern. It had empty black eye sockets and a gaping hole of a mouth that was open in a horrible upside-down grin.

He swung with his sword, and the monster was knocked back, but his wooden weapon had reached the end of its life. The spent blade splintered into a thousand pieces, and Charlie threw the useless handle aside as he screamed into the mine for his friends to help him.

This creature was fast but silent as well. The Zombies made moaning sounds, the Spiders made a clicking sound, and you could hear the rattling of a Skeleton’s bones as it moved. But this thing was absolutely silent. As it chased after Charlie, he could barely hear the sound of its footsteps. Also, the Zombies and Skeletons burned up in the sunlight, and the Spiders hadn’t paid him or Stan any attention. But Charlie was running around in the path in direct sunlight and the thing kept following him, not slowing down or taking any damage. Charlie did not want to know what would happen when the thing finally caught up to him.

Kat and Stan burst out of the mine just as Charlie was running back towards it, still being followed by the monster.

“Guys, thank God! I’m so glad that you’re—”

“Get down!” Kat cried.

The monster was upon them, and it was starting to hiss and swell like an overinflated balloon. Kat pushed Stan, who fell backwards into the mine, and she tackled Charlie out of the way just in the nick of time. There was an earsplitting explosion, and a cloud of dust rose over the road. Then, all was quiet.

As the dust cleared, Stan got up and came out of the mine. The monster was gone, and in its place was a huge crater, blown right into the middle of the dirt path. Stan stared at it, and Charlie and Kat got up. Kat turned on Charlie.

“How did you get a Creeper on your tail? I thought you were staying out of the mine!” she yelled at him.

“Wait … that was a Creeper?” asked Stan.

“Yes, that was a Creeper! Why did it start following you?”

“So that’s the thing that everyone talks about?” asked Charlie, wide-eyed with shock and horror. “I’ve seen the posters online … but I always assumed that they, like, broke into your house and stole your stuff or something! They blow up?”

“Yes – now for the last time, Charlie, how did it get on your tail?”

“I went down into the mine.”

“Why?” Kat demanded.

“I … uh …” Charlie thought that it would be a little bit rude to tell Kat that he’d gone in the mine to stop her from betraying him and Stan after she had just saved both of their lives from the Creeper.

“I, uh, wanted to help you guys. I wasn’t finding any food, and I didn’t want to be useless, so I, uh, went in after you guys. Followed the line of torches … Yeah! And, uh, then I saw that thing and tried to fight it off but my sword broke, so I called you guys for help because I knew you had swords that were … uh … un-broken?” he finished lamely. Kat was staring at him with a look of half exasperation and half amusement.

“Uh-huh,” she said in a teasing voice. “Well, we’d better get going. We should really get you an ‘unbroken’ sword, and I don’t know how to make one. So you didn’t find any food at all?

“Well,” replied Charlie, “I found some wheat and a few apples. I don’t know if we can do anything with the wheat, but the apples are edible.”

“Well, that’ll have to do,” replied Kat. “Let’s go.”

As the three players continued on the road to the Adorian Village, Charlie sighed, resigning himself to the fact that now he could never abandon this girl who had saved his life.

They still had plenty of daylight left. The path was going in a straight line, and they were beginning to see hovering chunks of leaves with no trunks on the side of the road. This meant that they were definitely close to civilization.

“Excellent,” commented Stan as they passed a watermelon farm with a sign that was identical to the one at the wheat field. “We can get some food from this field. Just don’t destroy any of the vines.”

Each player picked a watermelon and destroyed it. There were multiple watermelon slices yielded from every destroyed watermelon, and the players ate all the juicy fruit to completely assuage their mounting hunger. Kat, who was particularly hungry, even ate the two raw pork chops that she had in her inventory.

“Hey,” she said through a mouth full of watermelon and uncooked pork chop to the two disgusted-looking boys, “ih mayna be preddy, butet getsa zhob bun.” When their faces changed to confusion, she swallowed and said, “Hey, it may not be pretty, but it gets the job done.”

Charlie rolled his eyes at her. Stan was about to crack a joke when, for the second time that day, a player burst from the woods with a sword in his hands.

This time there was no hesitation. Within seconds all three players were on their feet. Kat held her stone sword in front of her in a guard stance, and standing behind her were Stan, clutching his heavily damaged wooden sword in shaking hands, and Charlie, who had balled up his fists and was getting ready to fight, bouncing back and forth on the balls of his feet.

This player was dressed like a Secret Service agent. He had on a black tuxedo and black shades covering the eyes on his olive face. He was holding a golden sword in an attack stance, ready to kill the first one to make a move.

Kat spoke first. “What do you want?” she asked.

The player’s eyebrows creased as he pointed his sword at her. “What do I want? Well, there are a lot of things that I want. I want my old life back, for one. Everything was perfect—”

“Yeah, yeah, we couldn’t care less about your ‘oh, woe is me’ story. Get away from us before you do something that you’ll regret. There’s three of us and only one of you, and two of us have swords. I suggest that you just crawl back into those woods you came from.”

The player looked mortally offended. He pointed his sword at Kat.

“I will not have you telling me what to do! You are all noobs, armed with primitive weapons of wood and stone, while I, I am the most honourable Mr A, the most powerful warrior this server has ever known! If you knew only half the reasons that I want new players like yourselves dead—”

“Oh, just shut up!” Stan interjected. “There is no way you’re going to win against us, honourable Mr A! Besides, if you really were honourable, you wouldn’t attack players armed with ‘primitive weapons’ through ambush. That’s just a low thing to do. I don’t care what you were – it’s obvious that you’re nothing special now. Just leave us alone! We haven’t done anything wrong. You’re just being a … a … a Griefer, that’s what you are!” He didn’t know exactly what the term meant, but it had the effect that he’d intended.

Mr A charged the trio. Stan was glad for an excuse to fight. He was getting heated. As Mr A’s sword was about to come down on Stan’s head, Stan raised his own sword in a parry. Both swords broke at once; the wooden blade shattered just as Charlie’s had, and the golden blade bent back in on itself and fell off the hilt. Furious that his sword had broken, Mr A flew at Stan with his fist. Stan raised his arms to guard against the blow when, at the same time, Kat sliced Mr A’s leg on one side and Charlie punched his head on the other. The Griefer went tumbling head over heels and slammed hard onto the ground. He immediately got back up, but he held his torso with his hand, his face in a grimace.

“Fine! You win. But don’t think for a minute that this is over. I will find you again, and when I do, you are worse than dead! Now, good luck getting out of this!” Mr A whipped out a bow and fired an arrow. He wasn’t aiming for the players, but at something in the woods. Stan, Charlie and Kat watched the arrow fly as Mr A sprinted into the woods on the other side of the path.

They heard a pained yelping noise as the arrow connected with its target, and a moment later, a white beast with glowing red eyes jumped out of the woods. It was a wolf, provoked by Mr A’s arrow, that set its sights on the nearest target: Stan.

Stan was unarmed. It was all he could do to try to outrun the wolf, but it was swift as it ran, faster than the Creeper, faster than Stan could sprint. The wolf pounced on him, pinning him to the ground. The beast growled, its evil red eyes glowing, and was about to tear into Stan’s throat when there was a whistling noise from behind it. The animal’s head whipped around.

Kat was standing near Stan and the wolf, holding out the bone that she had just snatched from Charlie’s inventory. The boys watched in awe as the wolf’s eyes stopped glowing red, becoming a sad, black colour. The wolf cocked its head slightly to the left, paused, and walked slowly towards Kat. It came to a stop in front of her, and she gave the wolf the bone.

The wolf wasn’t on the attack any more. It sat down in front of Kat with its tongue out and its tail wagging. Kat grabbed a red collar from her inventory and fastened it around the wolf’s neck. The wolf had been tamed by the bone.

“That’s twice I’ve saved your life now,” Kat said smugly to Stan as she petted her new dog on the head. “I think I’m going to call him Rex.”

“Oh, imagine that, a dog named Rex. How creative,” mumbled Charlie under his breath, but Kat didn’t hear.

“Stan, could you look up dogs in that book of yours? I want to know how to take care of this little guy.”

Stan obliged, mouth still hanging open at the way she had tamed the wolf. He opened his book and flipped through the pages of animals and monsters, but he didn’t find anything about dogs.

“Try wolf,” she suggested.

He looked up wolves, and there was a page on them.

WOLF

A wolf is a neutral mob found in forest regions. It usually travels in packs. A wolf is usually not harmful towards a player, but if attacked a wolf will become hostile and attack with similar speed and jumping ability to that of a Spider. When a wolf is attacked, all other wolves in its pack will also join in attacking the wolf’s attacker. A wolf can be tamed by feeding it bones dropped by Skeletons. A tamed wolf can be made to sit still or to follow the player around. When a player attacks or is attacked by a mob, the player’s wolves will join the player’s attack. A wolf’s health is indicated by the angle of its tail. The lower the tail droops, the lower the animal’s health is. The wolf can be healed by feeding it any kind of meat. It will not contract food poisoning from rotten flesh or raw chicken as a player might.

Kat glanced at Rex’s tail. Though it was still wagging, it was drooping almost to the ground.

“Looks like he took a lot of damage from that arrow, and he must’ve been separated from his pack. Poor little guy,” said Kat with a look of pity on her face. Stan looked at her, baffled, as he rubbed at the scratches Rex’s paws had left on his neck.

“Charlie, let me see that rotten flesh you have.”

Charlie extracted the meat from his inventory. He handed it to Kat, and Rex started eating it out of her hand. Instantly, his tail shot up.

“Well, looks like we’ve got a dog!” she said to Stan and Charlie.

“Wait,” said Stan. “What do you mean, we? I thought you were ditching us as soon as you got that sword of yours.”

“Are you kidding?” she said with a grin. “If it weren’t for me, you would be torn to pieces by Rex here,” she said, gesturing to Stan, “and both of you would be lying in pieces around that mine thanks to that Creeper. Without me, you two would both die, and let’s face it, that would just be a lot of tedious paperwork for the ops of this server. Now come on,” she chirped, blind and deaf to Stan’s and Charlie’s indignant faces and stammers of protest. “Let’s get to that village. I need a sword!”

And they continued down the path, munching on Charlie’s apples, the boys still fuming, the girl still laughing. By the time the sun had started to sink in the sky, two towers came into sight, and the three players heard someone yell.

“New players! New players incoming! Welcome to the Adorian Village, new players!”