absolution.

grand debut.

Immediately, Tommy wakes up in his room feeling that the Festival won't be right. He (ignores the fear that cuts into him like a sword and) groans, almost rolling off his bed.

...It's not as intense as the day of the USJ attack, maybe. Tommy gets up anyway, flicking his wrist and checking his inventory.

Ehh... He still has a lot of his shit he had from the first day. Blocks, weapons, medical shit... he doesn't really need to refill that much. U.A. had provided a lot for the class, anyway.

Wouldn't hurt to refill, either. And he could fill more room in his chests with materials to craft with.

Tommy checks his communicator; he has time. It's only five in the morning, after all. Three hours to go before he has to go to U.A.

Ah, shit—he hasn't made a mineshaft here yet, hasn't he? Maybe he could make one in the basement and somehow connect it to the one in the forest.

Tommy equips a pickaxe from his inventory with ease, already heading down to the basement. It'd serve as a good stretch before whatever the Sports Festival will cause, and a way to get his mind off of it.

===

Mining a few blocks of diamond ore and deep into his new mineshaft, Tommy comes to a sudden realization: he hasn't made a Nether portal yet.

He almost smacks himself in how fucking dumb he is; why hadn't he made one? That was like... one of the first fucking things he should've done when he made the mineshaft in the forest, Prime-damn-it. He could've made so many golden apples now with the gold he could find, since this server's Overworld gold is weird.*

...Then again, he had just been... dropped in this server, and everything was just so—different. Then Izuku and Toshinori came, and with that followed U.A...

Focus, Tommy.

The gold in this server didn't work here to make golden apples like most servers, but maybe the Nether here was the same as the SMP's?

With new fervor, Tommy rushes to find lava—not before crafting buckets with a nearby crafting table he'd placed, of course. Five's enough for this.

"Swear some of this shit was around," he mumbles, dashing through the long tunnels he's dug in. His eye scans each hole in the tunnels. "C'mon, c'mon..."

There!

Tommy skids to a halt, balancing himself by placing his hands on the walls. He turns towards the relatively-large lava pool—wait, he needs water.

...Water bottles could do, right?

So, Tommy mentally marks the place in a map in his head, before darting back to the entrance of this new mineshaft with long strides. He climbs up the stairs to the basement, digs through his plethora of chests, and finally finds the one with the stacks of water bottles in it. (Listen, he just likes to store shit in case of emergency, alright?)

Uncapping and pouring two at a time into two of the buckets he'd crafted, Tommy fills them to the brink, shoves the plastic in his inventory along with the buckets of water, and heads back down to the pool of lava. There, he makes a room in one of the walls, setting up a two-by-two, one block deep hole with space to walk around it. He pours the two buckets in two of the corners, prays to fucking Prime this works, and attempts to fill up three buckets.

The pool refills itself.

"Alright!" He cheers, giddily taking the three buckets back to the lava pool. He builds a platform in the middle—three-by-six, just enough to have a block of cobble surround where the portal would stand—as well as a path equally wide from the platform to the entrance of the room. The sudden temperature change by being near the lava is intense, but Tommy's long been immune to this heat, so it doesn't deter him. Instead, it only pushes him to move faster, his mind supplying him with the quickest way to build a Nether portal with ease.