Chapter Text
Brian’s voice came through the mic, “Is everyone in?”
There were resounding confirmations from everyone, excluding Aisha.
“Yo Aisha,” Alec said in his shitty mic. “Where are you? And everyone else I guess.”
“Dunno what you guys are talking about. I’m the only one here,” Aisha replied. “I can see the join messages though.”
“What the fuck,” Lisa’s voice came in crystal clear. “Brian, Aisha, aren’t you two playing on split screen? Out of everyone it should be working for you two.”
“Sorry Lise. We’re facing each other and still nothing.”
She sighed, “Hold on. I’m booting everyone.”
Alec and Aisha gave mocking cries about the world ending as Lisa shut off the server. I was faced with the multiplayer screen again.
“Can I do anything?” I said, offering my help to Lisa.
“Just give me a moment.”
Rolling my eyes, I let her have a go at it while I checked my email. There was an alert in the corner of my screen, followed by Alec’s giggling. Aisha must have sent another ‘funny’ picture over the group chat.
All of us winced when there were sudden barks that sounded like they were right next to the mic. They quieted and I could hear Rachel sitting back down on her couch.
“Everything alright?” I asked.
“Yup. Yellow wanted outside.” I added the name to the sticky note I kept on Rachel’s dogs. She was up to seven and I had various facts about them next to each name so I could talk to her about them. “How long are we waiting for?”
“Not anymore!” Lisa said triumphantly. “Log back in.”
I moved my mouse and double clicked on the server she made. There was some loading time, but when I got in I was able to see everyone else.
“Fucking finally,” Brian muttered.
“Hey!” Lisa said, offended. “If you guys weren’t insistent on doing this across multiple platforms I wouldn’t have to finagle this stupid connection.”
I kept an ear out listening to the conversation as I dug in a two-by-one hole underground. It saved me from falling into the cave I found. I tunneled until I got to the side and made a staircase down, grabbing some coal along the way for torches.
“First one to find a village wins,” Aisha declared.
Slightly muffled, Alec said, “Deal.”
“Dude, you can’t go the same direction as me.”
“Yes I can. I’ll just sprint ahead before you get there.”
“I’ll punt your ass into lava before then.”
“Try it.”
“Guys,” Brian said. “Can’t we stick together?”
“Yeah, what’s the point of me making this annoying server if everyone goes off on their own. Rachel, come back here.”
“There aren’t any wolves in this place.”
“We can go find them together. We just– God dammit!”
A second later I saw a message pop up: Tattletale hit the ground too hard
Her items rained on me while I waited for my iron to cook. Whoops.
“Taylor,” Lisa’s patient voice spoke.
“Sorry Lisa.”
“I see you on the death screen. How are you already in full iron armor?”
I spoke while crafting my pickaxe, “Got lucky. Two ender pearls too.”
“Seriously?” Alec asked. “How aren’t you dead?”
“They can’t go in two high ceilings,” Taylor reminded him while she stared at another ender man. “That’s basic Alec.”
“Pssh. Cheatery more like.”
“Not my fault they trivialized one of the stronger monsters. Three now, plus enough gunpowder to make a TNT duper. Just need the redstone.”
“Jesus Christ this is going to last an hour.”
“Relax,” I told Brian. “Remember when it took us a whole day to get enough pearls to get to the end? And we didn’t even go.”
“I don’t like that tone Taylor,” Lisa said.
“You made the guy running the server cry.”
“He lowered the drop rate and didn’t tell anyone!”
“We still got banned. The whole reason we’ve had to make our own server is because we keep getting banned for one reason or another.”
“You see guys,” Aisha said in a calm, mocking tone. “Taylor says one reason or another to avoid us bringing up all the times she’s camped and trapped people’s homes until they ragequit or banned us.”
“Yes, very skillfully.” Alec said in the same tone, like they were doing a nature documentary. “Like we’ll forget the time she got opped by mistake and kept summoning dragons to make the game harder.”
“I un-opped myself eventually,” Taylor defended.
“After the entire world got destroyed.”
“You’re the one that wanted to screw with the guy for spam-killing you with the lightning command.”
“Didn’t say it wasn’t cool to watch. Just that you don’t get to dodge your share of blame.”
Another death message popped up: Regent tried to swim in lava
“That didn’t count,” Regent claimed. “I was distracted.”
“You snooze, you lose bozo. If I can kill you with your crazy lag then I deserve the win.”
I was in the middle of fighting a group of skeletons when Brian followed Alec with: Grue walked into a cactus trying to escape Zombie
The heavy sigh was palpable in his mic.
I was caught off guard by: Grue fell from a high place
Another second later: Grue fell from a high place
“What–”
“Taylor,” he interrupted me with another sigh. “Did you by chance make your mine over spawn?”
“Ah…”
“Can you cover it up so I don’t die on re-entry?”
“I’m kind of at diamond level? It’ll take a bit for me to climb back up.”
“I got it,” Lisa said.
A message popped up in the corner of my screen. Rachel keyboard smashed out a message. I clicked on the chat and looked at her name, finding what was wrong.
“You’re mic is off Rachel,” I told her.
It took about thirty seconds for her to turn it back on and complain, “I hate this setup.”
“Better than when I was muted for a whole hour and no one told me,” Alec said.
“What were you trying to say,” I asked Rachel.
She grunted her answer, “Found a wolf forest. Anyone have name tags yet?”
“Nope,” Aisha said. “But I did find four saplings and a saddle at the blacksmith. Who wants to ride a pig off a cliff?”
No one answered.
“Lisa, make one of those challenge arenas,” Rachel ordered.
“Already? Those are supposed to be used in case we get really unlucky with the world gen.”
“I’ll be logging off until we go fight the dragon.”
“Don’t! I didn’t spend all this time just for everyone to not play together. Give me a sec.”
The Set Tattletale game mode to Creative Mode message showed up in chat.
The challenge areas were something we all agreed on together before setting up the new world. They were pretty much cheating, but with an added effort to not make the game completely pointless.
If we ever needed a resource that just wasn’t showing up or was really annoying to farm, we’d ask Lisa to build a dungeon. She’d make it as hard as possible and put a chest with the material we wanted somewhere inside. Monsters with armor, traps, lava, holes to the void. Anything to make it more difficult.
I was eager to see what she’d build, so I started to mine my way back up with a couple of diamonds in my inventory.
Lisa was still building the arena out on some plains biome when I got back up. I made my way to the taiga forest Rachel found. It took me a bit to find her name. She was underground in a cave, looking for more bones to get more dogs.
“Hey Rachel,” I greeted as I dug my way to her.
“Hey. There’s a drop,” she warned.
“Thanks.”
I broke through the ceiling and saw her character. She had two pieces of iron armor on and overall looked like a pincushion with the amount of arrows sticking out of her. Her getting shot so many times wasn’t really surprising. Her setup was pretty much a crappy laptop without a mouse and earbuds with a mic built in.
Still sounded better than Alec, who’s connection dropped randomly. He also whispered half the time like he was playing past his bedtime.
“Got you some stuff.” I opened my inventory and took off the armor pieces she was lacking. I threw those, some food, and the newly crafted diamond sword down to her. It would put a delay on enchants, but if we were going to fight a dungeon together some sacrifices would have to be made.
I went back up and tracked down where Lisa was building. She set up a large box of bedrock to hide what she was building, probably for a big reveal. Her, Alec and Aisha were the only ones who could actually build something that didn’t look like shit.
Not for a lack of effort on Brian’s part. Next to the giant box Brian was setting up a house. It was nice, better than anything I could build. I imagine he would have had some opinions on Lisa choosing to set up the dungeon next to his place, but he was so focused on building he hadn’t noticed yet.
I smiled, imagining him staring intently at the screen in pure concentration, and asked, “Need any help?”
It took him a second to register that my words were directed towards him. “Oh, yeah. Could you get me some more stone? Cobble for the road and smooth for the walls. I’m trying to make a modern design, but we don’t have quartz yet.”
“Sure.”
On the opposite side of the dungeon, I started to dig out a hole. First I got rid of the dirt, then I started on the stone. It was a nice, mindless task I could go on autopilot to do and still get something out of it. My inventory filled up and I set up chests on the perimeter of my hole.
If the monsters in the dungeon got too much to handle, we’d be able to kite them over to this and hit them off the cliff I was making. Not the most efficient method, but it’d get the job done.
After I got enough coal, I started a few furnaces to cook the cobblestone into the regular variant.
By the time Lisa was finished building, Brian had come along and helped me dig the hole further down. We filled up enough chests that we weren’t going to be wanting for any typical building material.
The iron we found finished cooking to give us both full sets of armor as well. We were as ready for the dungeon as we could be with the time at hand.
“Okay!” Lisa said. “Dungeon's finished. I'll do my normal thing of giving hints if it's too hard. Everyone ready?”
“We're not there,” Aisha pointed out.
“One sec.”
Lisa flew over us and teleported Aisha and Alec to our location. They fell long enough to lose a couple hearts.
“Seriously?”
Lisa laughed, “Annnd go!”
She used a command to delete the bedrock box and we ran into the dungeon, ready to take it on as a team.