Chapter Three

Leaving

    The next morning, Gameknight woke up with a start when Harvester ran down the hall screaming, “THEY’RE ON THE MOVE! LETS HIT THE ROAD!”
Gameknight jumped up and ran out the door. He found himself in a spruce wood corridor with white carpet on the floor. Harvester was waving her arms over her head and yelling at the top of her lungs. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” He yelled, grabbing her. “Now, tell me, who is on the move?”
   The young girl looked up at him, her eyes shining. “The army!” “What army?” He asked. “Remember how we told you our village kicked us out while those people were those people were there?” “Yes,” he said. “Well, we follow them. We ride ahead of them and set up camp for a few days, then go ahead again.”
  “They do a bunch of cool things!” Harvester said excitedly. “Like, they fight with the wither king Krale!” “Moving on to more important matters,” Fletcher says. “So, do you make small huts on the way?” Gameknight asks. The girls eye each other. “Not exactly…” Fletcher says with a mischievous grin.
  Suddenly, Gameknight yells as a hacking sound fills the air. The User-that-is-not-a-user jumps back against the far wall as an iron axe blade suddenly cuts through the wall. A moment later, there’s a small hole in the wall. “What is that about?” Gameknight yelps, cold sweat trickling down his back. “Are we under attack?”
    Fletcher rolls her eyes. “No,” she snorted. “It’s just Smithy.” Then she stuck her head out and called down, “How’s it going down there?” Suddenly, Smithy’s head appeared in the opening. “Great!” He said. “Easy. Remember when we we had to make a hut in the desert made of cobblestone three blocks thick?” Fletcher laughed. Gameknight realized with a shock it was the first time he had heard her do it. “Well, don’t fall,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind, but it’s to annoying to drag Harvester away bawling.” “Hey!” Harvester snapped.
  Smithy grinned. “You know me,” he said. “I have the balance of a cat.” “But…” Gameknight says. “But were not even that far from the ground!” He expected Fletcher to roll her eyes again, but instead she gave him a evil looking smile. “Look out,” she told him. Gameknight stuck his head out. “Woah!” He yelled, gripping the sides as he instantly became dizzy. They were, in fact, VERY high off the ground. There must be three stories below them, and looking up he saw there was one more. Right above that was a lot of leafy foliage. With a shock, he realized they had completely turned a humongous spruce tree into a cozy tower. Smithy was nimbly perched on a single fence post. He was was holding his axe in one hand and a torch in his other. Looking around him, Gameknight saw there were other fence posts positioned neatly around, torches burning bright on every one. He couldn’t exactly tell, but he estimated there were fence posts every ten blocks and always ten blocks above the one below them. The NPCs had been very precise. “Now come on,” Fletcher said. “Smithy, you got two stacks yet?” The big villager nods. “I just came up here to see how you guys are doing.” He broke the other block and stepped through.
  Smithy grinned at Gameknight. “Are you finally up, sleepyhead?” “What are you talking about?” Gameknight sputtered. “The sun just rose!” Indeed, the sun had just cautiously poked its square face out, as if it was checking to make sure the case was clear. Gameknight couldn’t help staring at the beautiful sunrise- he had never seen it from this high up before. Harvester laughed. “We always get up before the sun rises.” She told him. “We always take two stacks of wood with us and leave the rest behind,” Smithy explained. “I’m all good. I don’t need these last two blocks. And with that, he threw the blocks down. Gameknight couldn’t help but gulp when they smashed into a thousand pieces, scattering splinters everywhere.
 Smithy grinned at them again. “Well, gotta go,” he said. He mock saluted them, and then suddenly fell backwards out the hole. Gameknight screamed and stuck his head out the gap.
  Smithy was still smiling up at them, but grabbed a bucket out of his inventory and dumped its contents below him. Blue liquid splashed and over the ground, and suddenly Smithy was knee deep in water. He was still smiling and waved up at them. He scooped up the water again and ran off. Gameknight climes back inside, his face still pale. He looked at the girls, still shaken.
  “Loves to scare people, huh?” Fletcher asked him. Then, with a toss of her long hair, she strode down a stair case he hadn’t noticed before. “I got to go get some carpet,” she called out without looking back. “Harvester, you need to go collect all the flowers.”
 “Aw, no fair!” Harvester complained. “I always have to! I hate getting thorns when I get the roses!” “And then,” Fletcher went on without giving any sign she had heard the younger girl. “Go get the eggs and milk Bess.” “Bess?” Gameknight asked. “Our cow,” Harvester whispered. “Sheer the sheep, we’ll need wool, and do your job, Harvester, and go get all the food at the farms. Anything that isn’t ready to be harvested stomp on for seeds.”
  “And what are you doing all this time?” Harvester snapped. “Getting the carpet, feeding the animals, getting the horses ready, baking the bread and meat we’ll need, going through the mine for any ores we missed, go find some pigs and sheep for meat, getting the beds, going through all the chests-“
  “Alright, alright, I get it!” Harvester snapped. She rolled her eyes. “Bye, Gameknight.” The rest of the day was a blur. The rest of the house was as nice as his room. He looked at the marble kitchen, and the many living rooms with cozy fireplaces, and walked around the garden which he was pretty sure was full with every flower in Minecraft. Tall flowers, like roses and lilacs, made a patterned wall around the garden, and the only entrance was a gravel pathway. The plants were in neat and tidy rows, the farther in you go farther you find your self in the rainbow. At the very center there was a small clearing where it looked like they had sprinkled bonemeal. Grass, ferns, and poppies litter the ground, all stretching up as if to catch the sun. There was a small pool that started out a block deep but then deepened to two blocks. The bottom was sand, and sea grass grew at the bottom with waving fronds that seemed to sway on nonexistent breezes. There was even three tropical fish, a blue, a black and green, and a magenta. The blue and black were swimming around a clump of sea grass, while the magenta circled lazily around a piece of bubble coral.
 The gravel path widened into a circle around a bench made of oak wood stairs and fence. Gameknight sat down, listening to the soft trickle of water from a small fountain flowing into the pool. Bees buzzed overhead, going sleepily from flower to flower as if in search of the perfect one. Occasionally they would go back in their hive with a pop, their home on an oak tree planted at the edge of the circle. A bunny munched some full grown carrots someone had planted their for it, if it did notice Gameknight it didn’t care.
  The whole place was quiet, calm, and somehow just felt lazy, and Gameknight was starting to get sleepy. At the same time, it also was a little bit sad, and Gameknight started to miss his friends back in the Overworld, and Jenny and Shawny in the physical one. He was just starting to doze off when he heard someone coming up the path behind him.  It was Harvester.
   “Hey,” he said, yawning. “Hi,” she said. “I’ve got to get the flowers. Hey, can you help? We need to break this grass, in case there’s some seeds.” “Alright,” he shrugged. Harvester worked on collecting all the flowers while Gameknight broke all the grass for seeds. By the time he had finished a hour later, Harvester was done. “That was fast,” he marveled. “Thanks,” she said sheepishly. “I do it a lot. I was the one who built this whole garden,” she said proudly.
   “Wow,” he said. “That’s impressive.” She beamed at him. “What are you doing?” He asked. Harvester was sitting on one of the lily pads that floated on top of the pool. She scowled at the sandy bottom, where the fish were swimming in the constantly waving ribbons of sunlight. “I’m trying to get the fish,” she explained. “But Velvet is putting up a fight, as always. And this time she’s roped Aquamarine and Spiral into it.” “Huh?” Gameknight said, confused. “The fish,” she said. “Velvet is the red, Aquamarine is the blue, and Swirl is the black one with green patterns.” This time when Gameknight looked into the rippling pond, he saw what he had thought was magenta really was a deep, dark red. So dark, he could actually see a hint of violet. The blue was a mixture of ocean blue, sky blue, and cyan. The different shades melted into each other so you could never tell where one color ended and the other began. Spiral was black, with swirls, and, of course, spirals of dark and light green.
   It took a while, and quite a bit of swimming, but eventually all three fish were swimming around in water filled buckets. Then they took the lily pads, and scooped up the water, and took apart the bench. “What about the gravel?” Gameknight asked. “We take it,” Harvester said as she tossed him a shovel. “All flint goes to Fletcher for arrows. All the gravel we get we break over and over until it’s all flint.”
  Then came the bees. They caught the bugs with a net Harvester had made, and she used a silk touch pick to get the hive. They cut down the tree for wood, and broke the leaves for saplings, sticks, and apples. After a long afternoon, all that was left of the garden was a hole and a indent in the ground that was covered in pebbles. Then they hit the farms.
  Gameknight was blown away. The NPCs were growing what looked like every plant in Minecraft. There was sweet berries, sugar cane, carrots, potatoes, wheat, pumpkins, melons, beetroot, and oak trees for apples. The only thing he didn’t get was a jungle tree in the middle of it all. At first he thought it was for cookies, it was covered with cocoa pods, but he wasn’t sure why a whole tree was needed. He asked Harvester, and she answered by reaching up and plucking a very yellow- and very familiar- object out of the leaves.
 “Is that-“ he gawked. “A banana?” “Yep,” she said. “What, do you have them in the Overworld?” “No!” He yelled. “That’s the whole point!” She shrugged. “We figured it out from the phantoms. This is what they eat, you know- that and leaves and apples.” All the User-that-is-not-a-user could do was shake his head. After a while, Harvester stopped harvesting a pumpkin she was standing in front of. Gameknight paused too, the axe he was using to cut down an oak tree with still in the air.
 “I’m going to miss this place,” she said softly. “Of all the places we’ve been, this has been my favorite. I love this house, and the garden, and this is where I got my bunny Carrots.” As if on cue, the same rabbit he had seen earlier hopped into view. Harvester scooped him up and buried her face in his warm fur.
  Gameknight was quiet for a minute. “I see why you’d love it,” he said finally. She smiled, but was anything but happy. “For once, I’d like to actually live somewhere where I didn’t have to move from place to place all the time.”
 “Why do you follow those guys?” Gameknight asked. “Villagers have to know they have something to do,” Harvester said. “Have a real purpose. And… this is all we got.” A few hours later, everything had been harvested and all the seeds had been taken back. The trees had been cut and so had their leaves. The cocoa pods were broken and the jungle tree had been taken down. The water hydrating the plants had been scooped up.
               All that was left was a bunch of bare dirt. “Now what?” Gameknight asked. “What next?” “Nothing,” Harvester replied. “I already did everything else. Let’s go back to the house.” Gameknight couldn’t believe it. Half of the glass was gone, and a huge chunk of wood was gone, exposing the now empty insides. Four horses, a donkey, and a llama were standing at the front. They shook their heads and pawed at the ground. “Finally!” Harvester groaned as she dumped an armful of seeds into a chest that the donkey was carrying. “Sorry, Chocolate,” she said as the the donkey snorted. Gameknight put his supplies he had taken in Chocolates chest. “There you are,” Smithy said, sitting cross-legged on a piece of polished ditorite he had placed. “I was getting worried.”
  Harvester snorted. “Yeah, right. As if.  You could see us the whole time!” “True,” Smithy said. “Where Fielder?” Gameknight asked. “Down in the mines,” Smithy told him. “She takes her jobs very seriously.” About a hour later, Fielder turned up. All the sudden, Gameknight found himself on a white and black horse named Pat. And then they were leaving, and he was looking over his shoulder at the slowly fading house in the distance.
   And all he could think was this-

Was he going closer to the Overworld, or farther away?

  Thanks for reading!