by Cube Kid
“Hurrrrrr.”
“. . .”
“. . .”
We talked the whole morning. Eventually I had an idea.
“Maybe it’s about efficiency,” I said.
“Efficiency?”
“Here’s the thing. What does it take to make a mushroom house?”
“A mushroom.”
“Exactly.”
* * *
Here’s my idea on why the teachers graded the girls’ mushroom houses so highly:
A mushroom house is made out of a giant red mushroom. All it takes to create a giant red mushroom is:
One red mushroom
One bone meal
What that means is, you don’t need a lot of materials to make a mushroom house. If you’re stranded out in the wilderness and it’s starting to rain, a mushroom house can provide instant shelter. All you need to do is sprinkle some bone meal onto a red mushroom, and BAM, you have the basic shell of a house. Or a roof at the very least.
On the other hand, it takes eight cobblestones to make a single furnace. In other words, making a house out of furnaces is very, very inefficient. You can’t make such a house unless you have a ton of cobblestone on hand.
I shared this idea with my pal Stump.
“Hurggggg.”
Hurggggg? That’s the sound a villager makes when he’s thinking real hard. But then Stump agreed with me.
“That has to be it,” he said, nodding. “What’s funny is, the girls weren’t even aware of how great their house was. They just made it because they thought it was cute.”
“Right.”
“Don’t worry,” said Stump. “Now that we know this, our building scores are going to take off.”
“I hope so.”
“I’m sure of it,” he said. “Still . . . ” He paused.
I guessed what he was going to say, so I finished his sentence for him. “We have to figure out something even better than a mushroom house.”
Break’s over.
Back to school.
In building class, I listened intently to what the teachers said. I observed everything.
In two days, there will be another building project.
Stump and I must prepare for that day.
We’re going to think of something good to build. Something that amazes the teachers. Something that wipes the smirk off Max’s face. In three days, when I get another performance sheet, it’s going to have a good building score.
I glanced at Stump during building class and saw a gleam in his eye. He was thinking the same thing.
Yeah.
We’re going to build something absolutely crazy.
Hejjo!!!
My name is Runt!
I am a noobmuffin
The end.
Hurrrrrrg.
That was Max trolling me. He took my diary. I didn’t even notice. I was at school, it was lunchtime, and I was about to write in here. Then Max’s buddy Razberry started asking me a ton of totally ridiculous questions about fishing.
“Hey, Runt. Do you like fishing more than you like cows?”
“Have you ever caught a squid?”
“Is it possible to swim and fish at the same time?”
Well, I was so confused, I set my diary down and turned to face him. At that point, Razberry paused—he was probably running out of things to ask. I guess three questions is a lot for him. Then, he just started asking random stuff, like:
“Have you ever milked a mooshroom?”
I just sighed, and turned back to my diary. Little did I know, in the short time that I was listening to Razberry, Max had taken my diary and written that stuff in it.
So Razberry was just distracting me.
I know what you’re thinking. I know.
I’m a total noob to fall for such a trick.
But my mind has been elsewhere lately. I’ve been thinking about the upcoming test. Anyway, I shouldn’t be wasting time talking about Razberry and Max.
Moving on.
* * *
The mobs tried something new last night. A few spiders carried zombies up and over the wall. Then the zombies waited outside until morning, until they caught on fire from the sun. Then, while they were burning, the zombies walked up next to the wooden houses and tried to set them on fire. Our house was one of them. Mom, Dad, and I were so scared! We could hear the zombies laughing as they burned. It was horrible! All we could do was pray for a warrior like Steve to show up.
He didn’t show up.
But it started raining, which put an end to the burning zombies’ devious plan. The mobs retreated after that. Even so, their attack wasn’t a total failure: When I walked to school, the stench of wet zombie hung in the air. It was a horrible smell, kind of like rotten apples mixed with sweaty feet.
I guess I can add apples to the list of things I won’t be able to stomach for a while. If the mobs ever figure out a way to make cookies and cake seem disgusting, I’m going to be in a lot of trouble.
* * *
Before class, assistants handed out a new type of performance sheet. I guess the teachers thought it was a waste to keep crafting sheets for all 150 students. So one of the elders came up with a special type of book that displays a student’s grades automatically. Kind of like how a map updates your position and changes the landscape. Well, this is the report card version of that. They’re called “record books.”
They’re pretty tough to make, so, if a student loses his or her record book, the teachers will charge three emeralds for a new one.
I’ll have to guard mine, since I’m sure Max will tear it up if he gets ahold of it. Or write something like “noobmuffin” in it.
Here’s my record book. It’s got that purple shimmer that most enchanted items have.
Pretty cool, hurrn?
(Besides the bad grades, I mean. A combat score of 2% . . . I really am a noobmuffin. It’d be zero if I hadn’t crafted a wooden sword, though. Thanks, Steve.)
As you can see, a record book includes additional skills that the old performance sheets did not: mining, combat, and trading. Things are getting more complicated at school already.
It’s because of the mobs. The mobs keep attacking almost every night, in greater and greater numbers. Even the village elders, wimpy as they are, well . . . even they know we have to start fighting back.
Some day, those mobs are going to pay.
And I plan to be there when that happens.
* * *
I daydreamed through the first class this morning, Crafting Basics. I couldn’t stop thinking about the upcoming building test. The best way for me to raise my student level is by improving my building score since apparently building is my weakness.
I mean, I was so sure a furnace house was awesome and amazing, but according to the teachers, my building ideas are about as good as a zombie pigman’s. No. Not even that good. More like a slime’s . . .
That was why I paid a lot more attention in today’s second class: Essential Wall Building. The teacher showed us a short comic about obsidian. Mining a single block of obsidian takes forever, and if you stop mining a block before you are done, the block will revert back to its un-mined state, and you’ll have to start all over again.
The comic illustrated the problems miners face digging for obsidian.
Mining obsidian doesn’t take that long. It’s just an exaggeration. But from what I’ve heard, it can feel like forever.
The head teacher burst into the classroom and told us:
“School’s out early today. Class is over”
Well, after hearing such good news, I leapt up from my desk so high, it was as if I’d chugged down a Potion of Leaping II.
No class! That meant Stump and I could practice the rest of
the day for our building test. We could go over all of our building ideas again. We could sit in the grass at the edge of the village, chat, and watch the rectangular clouds drift by, like we used to do when we were little. I was really excited!
Then the head teacher told us why school was being let out early.
It was for our own safety.
Something had happened in the village while we were in class.
Something involving an outsider. The head teacher called it the “outsider incident.” One thing I know for certain is when an adult uses that word—incident—you know something bad has happened.
Once, there was a “pumpkin incident,” when Stump and I ran around the village with pumpkins on our heads. We also stuck our arms out like zombies and made weird noises. We were trying to sound like endermen, but we didn’t know what an enderman sounded like back
then. Looking back, the sounds we made were more like the clucks of a chicken crossed with a cow’s mooing.
Some old man thought we were a kind of new monster. When he saw us, he screamed and ran off to tell the elders. The whole village was in a panic. As you can imagine, Stump and I got into a LOT of trouble.
It’s great to know that today’s incident had nothing to do with me. My dad told me the whole story when I got home. He witnessed most of it, I guess. You see, this morning, an outsider came into the village. Someone we’d never met before. He looked a little bit like Steve, but he said his name was Mike.
* * *
Apparently, Mike wasn’t a happy kind of person.
Not like Steve.
Or that wolf guy who sometimes visits us—I forget his name. Anyway, even though Mike seemed so angry, it didn’t stop villagers from trying to trade with him. After all, he had a few emeralds. Hey, we villagers don’t discriminate, as long as there’s a glint of the green stuff.
Here’s where the problems started. Every time Mike tried trading with a villager, he got even angrier. Didn’t like all the sounds the villagers were making. Kept complaining about it—said the villagers around him sounded like a bunch of giraffes that drank way too much coffee.
Honestly, I don’t know what a giraffe is, or coffee. But I’d really like to know. Many of the villagers near Mike were just as curious. Their “hurrrrrs” and “rhurrrrgs” and “hurrrrns” grew louder.
This, in turn, annoyed Mike even more. To make fun of them, he started mimicking the sounds the villagers made. And he kept calling them “giraffes.” This caused the villagers to make even more noise. They were so curious about these new words. A few villagers even wanted to trade for these things without even knowing what they were.
“Giraffe?” said a villager. “Is that like a mooshroom? How many you got? And how much for one?”
Then a girl walked up to him and said, “What is coffee? Hurrrrrrn? I want to try some!”
“Me too!” shouted another.
A man pushed through the crowd. “I’ll trade five emeralds for some coffee!”
“Six emeralds!” bellowed an old man.
Another old man: “Ten! Ten emeralds!”
Even an iron golem approached, and in a deep, awkward voice said: “Me-also-want-coffee.”
Finally, Mike just shouted at them all. Said something about how he didn’t want to trade anyway, because no one had enchanted stuff. He ran off as the villagers chased him: the words “giraffe” and “coffee” were spoken at least a thousand times. Somehow, Mike lost them in the streets.
Then he ran into Bub.
Bub’s a farmer. A really nice one. Quiet. Helpful. What’s more, Bub never tries to cheat anyone in a trade. He’ll give you a good deal every time. Also, he had a really nice enchanted iron pickaxe he’d been wanting to sell. In other words, Bub was just the kind of villager Mike was looking for. Mike and Bub started talking outside of Bub’s farm. Just as the crowd of villagers spotted him again, Mike and Bub stepped into Bub’s house. That was the last time anyone saw either of them. Several villagers waited outside for Mike to return, so they could pester him about giraffes again. Yet, Mike never came back out. At some point, the villagers got tired of waiting around and opened the door to Bub’s house. No one was there.
Both of them
were gone
Obviously, Mike had done something. But what? Where had they gone?
Of course, we’ve had problems with outsiders before.
Noobs stealing our vegetables (such as that guy from last week).
Noobs stealing from blacksmith chests.
Actually, noobs stealing anything that can possibly be stolen. Even wool blocks from our street lamps.
Griefers setting fire to our crops.
Weird guys trying to pass off big green seeds as emeralds in trades. (Seriously. How stupid do outsiders think we are?)
Warriors using our furnaces.
Once, my family couldn’t even cook dinner because this warrior charged into our house and began using our furnace to smelt a stack of iron ore. He didn’t even ask or say hello—just boom, walked in, and started smelting in front of us . . . without saying a single word.
My dad, being the real nice guy that he is, didn’t yell at the intruder. He simply crafted another furnace for us to cook food with.
Maybe you can guess what the warrior did.
Yeah, he just said, “Thanks,” then used that second furnace to smelt another stack of ore.
Hurrrrrg.
But then, all of that isn’t so bad, compared to this. An abduction? In our village? What’s going on?
It’s the first time a villager has ever been kidnapped before. Why would someone want to kidnap Bub, anyway? What’s the point?
It’s really kind of strange. Thankfully, we’re pretty sure Bub wasn’t hurt. If he had been, at least one of our iron golems would have gone crazy. Yet, not one of them did anything this morning. Well, except hand out flowers as usual. While I was gazing out of my bedroom window, I saw an iron golem trying to give away a flower. I guess it didn’t know what to do, because there weren’t any kids outside, due to the “Mike incident.”
I just hope they can find Bub. We kids can’t go outside until they do. Until the elders say it’s safe again.
Oi.
How boring.
That means there’s no school tomorrow as well. So the building test is postponed. Maybe we’ll have it Friday, who knows.
Oi, oi, oi.
Whatever. It gives me more time to prepare. Even if I can’t see Stump today or tomorrow, I can think of some stuff to build. I’m sure Stump’s doing the same right now. Also, I’ll get some building practice in.
Okay, I’m off . . .
See ya, diary!
First, some good news.
I built some walls in my bedroom last night. Every time I built one, I destroyed it, then built another out of a different material. My mom wasn’t too happy about that. I was making a lot of noise, and because of the walls, she couldn’t even open the door to find out what was going on.
The things we students do to get better, hurrrr?
After all that grueling work, though, my building score went up.
It didn’t go up by much—from 3 to 5%—but it’s better than nothing, right?
Strangely, this means:
1) the record book can somehow judge my progress and
2) update on its own. It’s a pretty cool item the elders came up with.
How did they craft it, I wonder? The elders might be wimpy old men, but they’re pretty clever. They can create things that even warriors can’t. Secret things. Our knowledge goes way back.
Now, don’t go thinking I can just sit in my room all day, build some walls, and raise my building score to 100%.
I think the only reason I was able to do that was because of my horribly low score. I’ll try
again tonight and see what happens.
As for the bad news?
No, there’s no bad news today.
The mobs didn’t attack at all last night. Maybe Tuesday night is their night off? I wonder what the mobs do to relax.
* * *
A little update. Somehow, it’s only good news today. Some woman found Bub. She’s a friend of his. She was walking by his house and heard faint shouting. It was coming from the ground under Bub’s house.
It didn’t take very long for the miners to find him. They tore apart the whole floor of Bub’s house.
It turned out he had been sealed underground, in cobblestone.
Don’t worry, he’s alive. His house, though . . . it’s seen better days. To look at it, you’d think a family of creepers went off underneath it.
Now, one might be wondering why Bub was trapped in cobblestone under his house. Why would Mike do something like that? What did he have to gain?
We have a general idea. Mike trapped Bub there because he didn’t have enough emeralds for Bub’s pickaxe. Whenever Mike found enough, he could come back to trade. He was “saving” Bub, then. He was smart enough to not attack the farmer, since our iron golems would clobber him in response.
It’s kind of sad. Sometimes, the outsiders treat us worse than the mobs do. Some only think of us villagers as walking trading machines. “Hey, this guy’s trading some good stuff. Better seal him up in stone.”
It’s not right, you know? We’re people, too.
Honestly, there’s only one reason the elders still let us talk to outsiders. Steve.
Actually, in some strange way, the “incident” actually helped. It made us feel better about ourselves . . . because we took care of it without the help of Steve. Steve’s great and all, but we can’t always rely on him to save the day, now can we?