A Virtual World Turned Real (An Unofficial Minecraft Adventure)

Chapter seven: Getting Good

Dom, Lily and I all walked down the cave tunnel I was exploring earlier. Eventually we came to the place where the creeper blew up.

"So this is where that goon of a monster nearly got ya." Lily said after a minute of silence, from all of us, looking at the crater.

"Yep. This is it." I said while blankly staring at the crater in the stone.

Dom breathed an expletive and said, "man, you SERIOUSLY got lucky there. Like, I've had a lot of bad stuff happen to me in my life but, man you got close to death."

"Yeah, you'd have to be there to see how close, cuz I don't think I can emphasize how close I got, in words." I replied, breaking myself out of my trance-like state and looked at my friends. I smiled. "I'm glad I have friends that care so much about me."

"That's what friends are for." Lily responded.

"Yeah, what kinda friends would we be if we didn't care?" Dom added.

"Probably not very good ones." I said jokingly and with a smile, and we all laughed at this. It had been a while since I'd been able to heartily laugh with some of my friends. It felt good.

After we finally stopped laughing Dom said, "Alright, enough joking. It's time to get some goods. Let's go."
We moved past the crater and I placed down a torch after a dozen or so steps. I would've continued on but I heard Dom say, "Hey look! This block is odd." I stopped and wondered what he meant.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Just look. It has like, brownish tan spots on it." He replied.

As soon as he said that I instantly knew what he was talking about. "Oh, I know that that is. You found some iron! Good eye." I said. I hadn't even seen it. Guess it IS better to have some company on mining trips. "Iron is very useful, we should definitely take it."

"Already on it." Dom said as he began to hit his pickaxe against it, but it had basically no effect. "What the hell?"

"You need at least a stone pickaxe to collect iron ore." I said, giving more knowledge on Minecraft, then added, "Sorry. I should've told you guys that. I have a stone pickaxe though, I'll get it."

I sheathed my sword and pulled out my pick. I then moved next to Dom, who was frowning at his pick, and I started banging my tool against the iron ore. Iron ore is a lot harder to break than coal ore, but I didn't really notice. This ore seam was a bigger one, and I had already collected ten blocks when Lily asked, "How's it going Jace?"

I broke one block as she asked that and was working on the last one. "Just about..." Then the last block broke and I scooped it up. "...There. All done."

"Nice job. Now c'mon you two, we got the rest of this cave to explore and pilfer." Lily said.

"Right behind you." I replied, slightly weary from the work I just did, but I still had a lot of fight left in me for today.

                          . . .
After exploring all of the cave, we three had quite a haul. We had two stacks of coal, nearly a full stack of iron and two and a bit stacks of cobblestone. After gaining all of that, we decided to head back to the surface. When I finally saw sky again, it looked so much more vibrant seeing as I had just been looking at nothing but gray for... what? An hour?
Judging by the position of the sun I'd say at least a good hour to hour and a half had gone by while we were underground, but there was still a lot of sunlight left before sundown. Us three all went and gathered the other miners to see what we all gathered collectively.

All together we had three and a half stacks of coal, one and a bit stacks of iron and nearly five stacks of cobblestone. Quite a haul for just our second day. After all of the loot was consolidated, I gave all the miners a brief lesson on how to build furnaces and how to use them.
Four more furnaces were then constructed and soon ablaze, smelting the iron ore and slowly turning it into iron ingots.