"Well. Something went wrong."
Arcum looked around. He wasn't dead, and he certainly wasn't home. He was out in the middle of nowhere.
A large plane of grass, trees scattered sporadically around. Flowers and grass grew in small patches, and the sun in the sky was a square. Everything was a square.
Arcum could have sworn he died. Watching the event unfold on his computer, he saw the Cosmic Alliance get defeated by Irontomb, the rest of the world following suit.
Now Arcum was in Minecraft.
Looking down at himself, he wasn't blocky like Minecraft players in the game. His hands were still normal, not blocky like the world around him.
"Well, might as well try to survive."
Arcum enjoyed playing Minecraft before... the world supposedly ended. He wasn't the best builder, but he knew how to survive.
This could very well be a dream. But dream or not, Arcum was proud to be a Minecraft player—and he sure as hell wouldn't die, dream or not.
He ran over towards a tree.
Slamming a fist into the tree, small cracks formed in the middle of the block.
"Hup!"
Arcum started to barrage the tree with his fists, before the block broke. He continued this process, breaking the rest of the tree with his bare hands.
He sure would've thought that it would hurt. Punching a tree out of Minecraft should have hurt, that is, if you weren't superhuman.
Pop!
As he picked up the blocks that fell to the floor, guides and information suddenly flooded his mind.
Just as quickly as the information came, it had immediately left, leaving Arcum out of breath.
"What..."
But the information was not without its merits. Arcum suddenly felt, as if he had known his entire life, how to open his inventory. How to chat, how to use the menu.
But strangely, it didn't have any information about the recipes on how to craft. It didn't matter to Arcum, he knew recipes by heart.
"Now I don't have to worry about making things myself. It seems that I have the regular system! Jackpot."
He opened his inventory. A screen appeared in front of his face, the usual 27 slots in the center of the screen. 9 slots for a hotbar, while the top of the menu had the 2x2 crafting menu and his avatar.
He was just... himself. He still felt his short black hair with a rattail. He wore his favorite gray turtleneck, black pants, a black coat and a knit brown scarf.
He stuck his hand out, dragging the oak logs from his hotbar into the crafting grid. Placing it inside, he created oak planks.
Using those oak planks, he created a crafting table.
Arcum closed out of his inventory, placing down the crafting table.
"Now then, time to-"
Arcum paused before he interacted with the table. A chat message had appeared in his vision.
"Somebody is nearby..?"
Strange. If people knew how to use the chat function, why wasn't the chat filled with random messages?
The only logical reason that Arcum could think of was that chat messages were only able to be seen by those close to your general location.
"Oh," Arcum thought. "There's more people."
<9Tailed_Foxian> where are you all?
Arcum had to ignore the chat for now. He didn't know any of these people, to be quite honest.
"Two planks into sticks, two sticks and three planks into a pickaxe..."
Strangely, Arcum had to manually place the sticks and the wood in the correct places in the grid to create it. There wasn't a usual system popup.
Arcum made a pickaxe, before digging straight down to stone level to mine cobblestone.
"Stone tools will be useful. Then, I can go for iron. Or a village, that would be useful."
Digging until his wooden pickaxe broke, Arcum used the dirt blocks he mined prior to stack back up to the surface.
Using the crafting table, he took a few moments to make himself the usual stone tools—a sword, pickaxe, axe, and shovel. He didn't need a hoe right now.
Arcum looked up and behind him.
His tree was still floating.
"Oh."
He looked around himself, trying to find who was talking. Whoever Trash_Racoon31 was had to be nearby, if they could see his tree.
Arcum saw nobody, but he sure wasn't going to stick around to find out who they were.
He wanted at least iron armor before he went ahead and started interacting with others—some people could try to kill him!
Taking out his stone axe, he broke the crafting table, leaning over to pick it up off the floor. Before he could stand back up, someone spoke up from behind him.
"What'cha doing?"
Arcum yelped, falling forward into the floor. Turning around, Arcum saw a girl with silver hair and yellow eyes.
"Who are you?" Arcum asked, standing up slowly.
"Me? I'm Stelle. Or Trash Racoon 31."
Arcum nodded slowly.
"Did you choose that name?"
"Ha! No. I would've chosen Galactic Baseballer."
Stelle looked down at Arcum's hand, noticing the stone axe in his hand.
"Why do you have an axe?"
Arcum looked back down to his axe, his gaze wandering back up to meet her yellow eyes.
"To break specific blocks and to break them faster."
Stelle nodded, before tilting her head. "I don't understand."
Arcum blinked once. Then he blinked again.
"... do you know what this is? Where we are?"
Stelle shook her head. She looked around, pointing at the floating leaves that were breaking, along with the blocky surroundings.
"Nope. But it looks like everything is square here now."
Arcum narrowed his eyes. Stelle didn't know anything about Minecraft, nor where they were.
"I... see."
Arcum spent the next few minutes interrogating Stelle, although it was just asking questions.
To his surprise, Arcum learned that Stelle was one of the participants in the war against Irontomb.
Someone who fought from the inside, not on the outside, which explained why he didn't see her on his computer.
"Wait, so if you're in here..."
Stelle nodded. "Probably. If I was brought here, and you were brought here, then I think the entire world is in here."
Arcum nodded slowly. Minecraft worlds were extremely large, so the chances of finding people were going to be rough.
"Do you have a lot of connections?"
Stelle nodded her head. "Plenty. I'm apart of the Astral Express, after all. Didn't I tell you that?"
This would be a good way to form connection then. If everyone is actually in here, then he would need to join a group to ensure survival.
"Okay, then here's the plan," Arcum explained slowly. "This world can be dangerous if people don't know about what goes on in it."
Stelle nodded and sat down on the grass, using her finger to try to write words in the grass to no avail.
"So we're going to be building a large hub. Then, if people see it, they'll go over to it. Civilization built."
Arcum pointed towards the center of the plains they were in. "We're going to build it here."
"Build?" Stelle asked. "You know how to build? I don't. There should be a lot of things to factor in, no?"
Arcum blanked. "You literally saw floating tree leaves, and you're wondering on... factors?"
Stelle had to shrug at that.
Leading Stelle over to the area, Arcum pulled out his stone pickaxe from his inventory. "Here. Dig down at get stone. It's the gray looking block."
"Alright. Do I get paid for this?"
"No."
As Stelle dug down to grab cobblestone, Arcum started to setup above ground.
Placing down the crafting table, Arcum used the cobblestone he had leftover to make furnaces.
Running to the nearby forest, he used his axe to break more oak logs, before dashing back to the furnace.
Using some planks, and some of the oak logs, he started to make charcoal for fuel.
"HELP!!!!"
Arcum looked down the hole at Stelle as she screamed for help.
"What do you want."
"I'm stuck down here."
Arcum scratched his head. "Pillar up with the cobblestone."
"How do I do that?"
Scratch that. The information that flooded into Arcum's head should have included how to play Minecraft. He never would have expected to have gotten involved with other people, let alone teach them how to play.
"Jump," Arcum said. "Select the cobblestone in your inventory and stack up. Jump, place a block down, a repeat until you get to the top."
At least the world taught people how to use the menu. Arcum couldn't teach Stelle how to open the inventory even if he wanted to.
"Here you are good sir!"
Stelle, when she got back up to the surface, gave Arcum the rest of the cobblestone.
Arcum created more stone pickaxes, throwing them all to Stelle.
"Go back down and get more. We need a lot if you want to make a civilization."
"This is child labor," Stelle sighed out.
"You're not a child," Arcum responded kindly.
"Mentally I am."
"Well too bad," Arcum finished. "Go back down there are get cobblestone, unless you can find other people to join you in the mines."
"There's no way to give direct locations to others! My phone won't even work, so I can't message my friends! I can't even do my dailies..."
Location, why didn't Arcum think of that? The menu had coordinates.
"Do you think those other people in chat know who you are?"
"Probably," Stelle responded in the middle of digging straight down. "Why?"
"Open up your chat," Arcum instructed. If they knew who Stelle was, then Arcum could give coordinates, and they would come to where she was—effectively giving Arcum more manpower. "Type this."
Arcum went back to the furnace, smelting the cobblestone into stone so that he could make stone bricks.
If this was going to be a civilization, then it would have to look like one. Otherwise, he would have just made a dirt castle and called it a day.
A long while passed. Stelle had come back up from the hole, tossing Arcum all the cobblestone she had gotten.
"Why did you stack the cookers on top of each other?"
Stelle was looking at Arcum's workbenches. He had his setup in a 3x1x3, like tic-tac-toe. His crafting table was on the bottom middle, the furnaces everywhere else except above the dead center.
Arcum needed to access the top of the crafting table to craft, afterall.
"It's space efficient," Arcum replied. "Even though we have an entire plains to use, I can access them all from one area and not have to move."
Arcum reached into the furnaces and grabbed the stone out, placing them into the crafting table and creating stone bricks.
"Do you know how to build?" Arcum asked again. Stelle, now knowing that there were no physics here, could perhaps whip something up.
Stelle nodded this time.
"I've designed my own room before," Stelle bragged. "I'm quite the expert."
"Good," Arcum replied, throwing stacks upon stacks of stone bricks at Stelle. "Get to work."
"Aha! My friend, is that you?"
Arcum and Stelle turned towards the voice. Approaching the pair was a knight, clad in armor. He had long red hair, and for some reason, had rose petals spawning behind him.
"Oh," Stelle said. "It's Argenti."
"Who?" Arcum asked.
"Knight of Beauty," Argenti replied, taking a bow when he stood in front of Arcum. "I've come to these coordinates, as asked."
"Oh good," Arcum replied. "You can go ahead and help Stelle then."
"And," Argenti added. "I've also brought along two weary travelers!"
Argenti gestured behind him. Stelle must have known the two, because she gave a small gasp and waved.
"Hi Asta! Hi Fugue!"
Behind Argenti, were two people. There was Foxian lady with brown hair and green eyes, in brown robes with a burning tail behind her. The other was a lady in a researcher outfit, with short pink hair.
"Perfect," Arcum said, smiling devilishly. "Now I don't have to do much. Stelle, could you explain to your friends our plan?"