by Cube Kid
Here’s my performance sheet.
I didn’t do too well on building, apparently. My mind was wandering during the whole examination. I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility of actually becoming a sword-wielding, mob-crushing cool guy like Steve.
At villager school they assign you to a certain level based on your test results.
Level 1 is a total noob.
Level 100
means total competence in all fields.
I tested out at level 3. That’s not too bad. Stump’s still only level 1, and Sara—a girl I’m friends with—is level 2. So I thought I was cool being a third-level student on the first day of school. Then Max showed off his performance sheet.
He was level 5.
Wow
Would he ever stop being so annoying?
As I stared at his sheet, he glanced at mine. And laughed. Of course.
“If you ever became a warrior,” he said, “I wonder what they’d call you? The Noob Lord?”
“More like the Baby Police,” I said. “I mean, someone’s got to keep your wimp levels in check.”
“Whatever.”
He handed my sheet back to me. “When I hit level 100 and you’re still at level 10, I’ll let you be my assistant. How’s that? Hurrr!”
I glared at him. “Moo.”
Max’s cheeks turned red. The Adventures of Cow the Cow is practically for babies, yet it’s Max’s favorite. I saw him reading it a couple weeks ago. He was real secretive about it. He doesn’t want anyone to know.
“Rrrrrrurrrrrg!”
Max walked away without saying anything else.
When I found my friend Stump, he looked angry. He was staring down at his performance sheet. I looked at my own sheet, also feeling a little glum.
“Level 1,” Stump said. “Level 1!! I’m not even a second-level student!! Am I really so bad?!”
“Not at all,” I said. “You’ll catch up. Your parents are bakers, so you know some stuff about crafting, right? And my parents are farmers. We can help each other out, huh?”
He nodded, then crumpled up his performance sheet and threw it onto the floor as hard as he could. “Maybe I don’t have a chance at being in the top five, but I’m not going to be humiliated like this!! I’m going to be at least level 50!!”
I totally agreed with him. From this point on, I had a clear goal. When I hit level 100, I’ll hand my performance sheet to Max. Then I’ll say . . . um . . . well, I’ll say something witty. I’m sure of it.
Maybe I should think about what I’m going to say when that day comes.
Today, in farming class, we had to learn how to take care of sheep.
My family only has pigs and chickens, so I’d never really dealt with sheep before, but they had one thing in common with the farm animals I knew—they’ll stare at you in a creepy way whenever you’re holding food. Still, I find sheep to be the creepiest, for some reason.
Then we learned how to shear sheep. I didn’t realize it until now, but sheared sheep look really, really strange.
I honestly wonder what a hungry, sheared sheep would look like. I’m not sure if I even want to imagine it.
Hurrrrrr.
Sheep scare me now. Hooray.
* * *
Later, I found out that my Tricking Zombies class was changed to Mining Basics. Max is in that class.
Hurrrgggggurgurgurgurgurgg.
Gurg.
Urgurg.
Tricking Zombies sounded like a really fun class. But then, anything is better than mining.
Let me tell you, swinging a pickaxe is the hardest thing of all time. I don’t want to be a miner. After just one hour, my arms felt like dead slime. But Stump is in that class, too, so it wasn’t all bad. We collected a ton of cobblestone. We weren’t supposed to get so much. Our teacher didn’t even know what to do with all of it. I think we’ve got enough for a new village.
Okay, so we didn’t get THAT much. But still. We mined a lot.
Of course, before we even started mining, the teachers told us about the “golden rule.”
I’d heard it many times before, but I guess the teachers thought that it was necessary to repeat during the first week of school.
Okay. Let’s test your knowledge.
The golden rule is:
A) Eat lots of cookies.
B) Always hug creepers.
C) Never dig straight down.
D) Thermonuclear corncobs.
Which one, hurr? You probably know. It’s easy. The answer is . . .
A) Eat lots of cookies
Just kidding . . . Well, that’s what the answer should be. But it’s not. It’s C) never dig straight down. I guess bad things happen when you dig straight down. Very bad things.
Like what happened to the zombie who had a craving for diamonds instead of brains.
Oh. I almost forgot. This is really embarrassing . . . maybe I shouldn’t even write about it . . .
I broke my pickaxe while mining today, and forgot to repair it quickly enough.
Hurrrrrrg.
So of course Max saw it. He laughed at me again. Naturally.
“Hey, Runt,” he said. “You should learn to be more careful.”
“Good tip,” I said. “I was just about to be super careless. I was like, ‘Hurrrggggggg, I’m SO not going be to careful right now.’”
Max shrugged. “Just trying to help out. Wouldn’t want you to end up like Spike. He wasn’t careful, either.”
“Ugh, another one of your stories,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Okay. Let’s hear it. What happened to Spike?”
And so, Max told me the story of a villager named Spike.
Apparently, when you’re mining deep down, you need to listen for the bubbling sound. That’s nearby lava. Well, when Spike mined, he never listened. He kept swinging his pick at a wall of solid stone. Chunk, chunk, chunk. He wasn’t digging down. He was digging horizontally. So he was being safe. Or so he thought.
Sadly, his little tunnel broke into the side of an underground lava lake. The lava splashed out, and all over him. I guess he barely had time to scream. When the other miners came to save him, there was nothing left of him. Just bubbling lava. Oh, and his boots.
I never wanted to be a miner, but hearing Max’s story made me not want to be a miner even more.
Backbreaking work?
Check.
Possibility of taking a lava bath?
Check.
There has to be a way out of this. What if I said mining is against my religion? Or that I’m allergic to pickaxes? No, I don’t think the teachers will believe any of that . . .
Hey, help me out here!
We had a special building class today. At first, they just went on about the super easy stuff. Stuff even I knew.
Like how it’s a really good idea to put a crafting table and a furnace next to each other. Who doesn’t know that? They’re made for one another.
Then, it was fun time. We got to work on building a house. The teachers said to be creative. So I had the idea of building a furnace house. Awesome, huh? Stump thought so, too. So we decided to work on this little project together. After all, it gave us something to do with our mountain of cobblestone.
I mean, why NOT build a furnace house?
We had so much cobblestone. Plus we could use multiple furnaces to speed up cooking. Come on, why not? You could cook chicken in one furnace, steak in another, and smelt iron ore in a third. The possibilities were just endless. Again, why not?
However, our teachers didn’t think it was such a great idea . . . They said it was ridiculous. Pointless, they said. Pointless! As if. But the teachers insisted.
“You don’t need so many furnaces,” one of them said.
“Al
so,” said another, “it looks a bit ugly.”
Blah, blah, blah.
It’s not fair
Some girls built a few mushroom houses, and the teachers praised them!
“Oh! What lovely little mushroom cottages!”
“So cute!”
“So wonderful!”
“Breathtaking, really.”
“‘Marvelous’ would be the word I’d use, personally.”
A mushroom house?
Seriously?
I was a little angry. In our furnace house, you could cook thousands of steaks at the same time. If some guy came over to your house, and that guy was like, “I need to cook one thousand steaks. Right now. Absolutely right now. These big juicy steaks cannot wait. Cannot. I must cook one thousand steaks as fast as possible.” You’d be able to say: “One thousand? Is that all?”
Now, maybe it’s the rare occasion that someone would actually come over to your house and ask to cook one thousand steaks. But hey, with a furnace house, you’ll totally be prepared for that. Can those girls say the same thing about their fancy little mushroom houses? Nope.
And if you found your furnace house to be a little too dark at night? No problem. Just pop a wood block into a furnace. Bam. You now have a cozy little glow. Would that be possible in mushroom houses? Nope.
I really wish those teachers could have seen how awesome our furnace house really was. There was no use dwelling on our loss, though.
So Stump and I decided to just build a normal house. Small, simple, wooden. What could the teachers possibly say about a house like that? A lot, apparently.
I couldn’t believe their responses:
“Boring,” they said.
“Too plain.”
“Who hasn’t seen a wooden house before?”
One of them even sighed. “Do try to be a little more imaginative next time, huh, boys?”
What, a furnace house wasn’t cool enough?!
But then I had another idea. If the teachers liked the girls’ mushroom houses so much, why not build a mushroom CASTLE?
We went to work on it immediately.
Our mushroom castle had:
Eight rooms.
A spiral staircase leading upstairs.
A back deck with a table and chairs, all made out of mushroom blocks.
It took us over an hour to build that thing.
I know what you’re probably thinking. That maybe our mushroom castle looks a little sloppy. We’re not master builders yet, okay? Do you know how hard it is to line up eight giant mushrooms into the shape of a castle? Super hard. Probably on the same level of difficulty as mining obsidian with your fists.
And do you know what a teacher said to us?
“Now boys . . . you shouldn’t be copying those girls. Come up with your own ideas, okay?”
Whatever
Even feeding sheep was better than this.
I’m done for today.
I’m still sad and angry about what the teachers said about our mushroom castle.
I don’t want to write today.
Hurrrrrr.
We had an extra class after school. Every Friday, we have to take a special class on mobs.
It’s called Mob Defense.
Today, we started with zombies.
The first thing they taught us about zombies is: A zombie in daytime can be more dangerous than at night.
When a zombie is on fire from the sun . . . it will try to hug you before it dies. That’s how much they hate living people. That’s how evil the mobs are. Honestly, it was a little scary hearing about it. I mean, normal zombies? Scary.
But a burning zombie? It knows it’s going to die. And it will do anything it can to take you with it. It wants nothing more than to wrap its little claws around you. The thought of being hugged by a burning zombie and catching on fire . . . gosh.
I was getting a little afraid.
Even scarier was what they taught us about a special type of creeper.
Apparently, when a creeper gets struck by lightning, it glows blue. That’s called a “charged creeper.”
Its blast is stronger than TNT. A charged creeper is the stuff of nightmares. I’ll admit, learning about burning zombies and charged creepers made me think twice about becoming a warrior.
The posters on the school walls didn’t help, either. Like this one:
I didn’t even know about charged creepers until today. And they’re real. Not imaginary like Max’s “poo screamer.”
So basically, I’ll never go walking around in a thunderstorm ever again.
But flaming zombies and charged creepers aren’t even the most dangerous mobs, according to the teachers. Skeletons are among the deadliest. Mostly because of their range. And when one of their arrows hits you, it knocks you back. If you’re standing near a pool of lava when that happens, well . . . bye-bye. You’ll be joining Spike.
To illustrate how dangerous skeletons are, there was this poster:
Suddenly, being a warrior didn’t seem like such a glamorous job anymore.
Maybe I should just be a blacksmith? That seems like a safe profession.
Am I afraid? Maybe I don’t have what it takes to be a true warrior . . . A real warrior would never be afraid. Especially not from a poster on a wall.
Well, it’s normal to be scared from time to time, right?
I’m only twelve, after all.
There aren’t any classes on Saturdays. So this morning, I hung out with Steve again. He helped me craft a sword. My very first. I wasn’t allowed to make one in Crafting Basics.
Holding it in my hands, the feeling was unbelievable.
I know, I know, it’s only a wooden sword. Hey, I had to start somewhere, right?
Steve crafted a practice dummy and I swung my sword at it until half of its durability was gone.
After that, I asked Steve something that’s been on my mind.
“Hey, Steve. Are you . . . afraid?”
“Afraid?” He blinked. “Afraid of what? Mobs?”
“. . .”
“. . .”
“Yeah.”
“Of course,” he said. He paused for a moment. Then he stepped closer. “Actually, you’re really going to think I’m crazy if I tell you this, but . . . I’ve died in this world before.”
Died?
What was he talking about?
I didn’t understand.
So Steve told me the whole incredible story. When he first arrived in our world, he was in a desert. He eventually left that desert and found a forest, where a creeper snuck up on him. He heard a hissing sound behind him, turned around, saw the creeper, and—Boom! That was the end of Steve.
Except it wasn’t. What happened next was really strange.
He says everything went red, then black. Then he woke up in the very same desert he had originally appeared in.
As I listened to his story, I didn’t know what to make of it. Was Steve telling the truth?
Not only is he from another world, but . . . he’s immortal as well? If what he said is true, it means he can become a really good warrior. A legendary warrior.
I’ve seen what happens when one of us dies. We just fall over and vanish in a cloud of smoke.
Villagers can actually die.
But not Steve, apparently. Hurrrmm.
Mental note: In case of danger, let Steve go first.
Wow. I’ve been writing in this diary for over a week. It doesn’t really feel like that much time has passed. Maybe it’s because we’ve been training so hard at school. By the way, I received another performance sheet.
I’m sure it’s because the teachers didn’t like our furnace house. Again, this is totally unfair. My level is still horrible,
too. Despite all of my hard training, I’m only level 7.
Even Bumbi’s score is higher than mine. Bumbi is this really weird kid. But he’s really good at both farming and building things.
My building score is holding my level back. If I want to improve it, I’ll have to do extra well in building class. Which means . . . I have to build stuff the teachers actually like.
But I still don’t see what was so bad about the furnace house.
I’m going to have to think about this. There must be a reason why the teachers liked those mushroom houses. But why?
Think.
Think.
Think.
I’d be happy with even level 20 at this point. Sigh. I am so pathetic!
Of course, Max has been bragging because he’s level 15 now. How can I catch up to him? This is a lot harder than I thought!
I’ve decided to spend Sunday nights practicing my building. I’ve got to raise my score.
Stump and I discussed why the teachers didn’t like our furnace house.
“Well, they did say the mushroom houses were beautiful,” Stump said. “Maybe that’s the reason?”
“No,” I said. “The teachers are tricky. They’d never tell us the real reason. They want us to figure that out for ourselves.”