Trapped in the Overworld Read online

  Simon wiped a tear from his eyes. He wanted to keep looking for a way out, but when his friends hopped into the minecarts, he reluctantly joined them to ride the coaster. Simon had to admit, this was like a dream come true. Despite the nightmare of being trapped in the Overworld, he was excited to ride in a minecart without having to sit at his computer and navigate into it.

  But as they made their first big drop, Lily called out, “Oh no!”

  “What? It’s not that scary,” said Michael.

  “No! I see the griefer in the green jumpsuit.” Her voice shook. “What will happen to us if he destroys the coaster, and we’re on it?”

  They soared down the second drop. Simon could feel his stomach clenching in fear, and he wanted to stop the coaster, but it was slowly creeping up toward the final drop. Simon knew he had to wait for the ride to be over. If they jumped out of the minecart, they’d be destroyed, and he wasn’t sure where they would respawn.

  Simon had an idea. “Guys, if we get destroyed, do you think we’ll respawn in our beds at home?”

  “I’m not sure, but we’re probably going to find out,” Lily answered.

  As the coaster dropped, Simon could see the griefer placing the brick of TNT at the bottom of the incline. “We have to be ready to jump off the ride,” he said.

  Simon waited for just the right moment, when the coaster had dropped low enough for them to jump off without getting hurt, and yelled, “Jump off!”

  Lily, Michael, and Simon leapt from the coaster and landed next to the griefer in the green jumpsuit.

  Simon took out his diamond sword. “You’re not blowing up our ride.”

  The griefer fled. Simon raced after him as Michael grabbed the TNT the griefer left behind and placed it in his inventory.

  “We have to stop him!” Simon said breathlessly as he chased the griefer away from the village. The sword felt heavier than he had imagined when he was playing the game. He was tired as he sprinted through the biome, and his enchanted diamond sword slowed him down.

  Simon felt odd running in the Overworld. His feet didn’t feel like his feet did in the real world. The blocky ground seemed harder, even though he was running through the grassy biome. Everything felt different.

  Simon didn’t like this new feeling, and he didn’t want to get used to it; he wanted to go home. But for the moment, he had no choice. He had to battle this griefer before he could figure out a plan of escape.

  As Simon began to catch up, the griefer stopped and splashed a potion of weakness at Simon. He couldn’t move.

  “Help!” Simon called out.

  His friends raced to his side. Michael gave him some milk, and Lily aimed her bow and arrow at the griefer. She struck him with her arrow, destroying the man in the green jumpsuit.

  “Now that the griefer is gone, we have to figure out how to get out of here.”

  “Ow!” Lily grabbed her arm. “I was just struck by an arrow.”

  A horde of people in green jumpsuits ran toward them. As arrows shot at Simon, he tried to drink enough milk to keep up his strength, but he was losing hearts.

  Michael called out, “We need a potion of invisibility.”

  Lily replied, “I don’t have one.”

  “Me, neither,” added Michael.

  Lily rushed toward the griefers, but she was no match for the army that was attacking them.

  The army flung a sea of arrows at Simon. He couldn’t fight back.

  “Simon!” Michael yelled. “Dodge the arrows!”

  “I can’t! I’m about to be destroyed,” Simon said—and then he faded away.

  4

  FAMILIAR LANDSCAPE

  Simon respawned. Before he opened his eyes, he knew where he was, and it made him very upset. He was hoping he would wake up in his bed, with his cool blue sheets covered in stars and constellations, but that wasn’t the case. Simon was covered in a red wool blanket—a blanket from his house in the Overworld.

  He remembered the months he had spent constructing this house. He had used up his entire screen-time limit placing emeralds on the walls and building furniture. The large picture window he had made looked out at his friends’ homes. And though Simon wanted his friends to respawn in their beds in the real world, he knew they’d probably land in their Minecraft homes, too.

  Grimly, Simon opened his eyes and walked out of his house to look for Lily and Michael.

  He sighed and said, to nobody in particular, “I used to dream about actually walking around my Minecraft house, and now I just want to leave Lisimi Village.”

  Simon walked toward his friends’ homes, but paused when he felt an arrow pierce his arm. “Ouch!” He rubbed the place where the arrow had struck him.

  “Watch out!” Lily hollered as she scampered out of her home. “The griefers are back.”

  Michael opened the door of his epic wooden home and joined his friends. He grabbed his diamond sword and said, “We have to destroy them.”

  “We have to get back to the real world,” Simon said as he raced alongside Michael and Lily.

  “That’s true,” Lily ran toward the griefers. “But first we have to battle these guys.”

  “Who knows? Maybe they are responsible for us being here,” Michael called out as he held his diamond sword and raced toward their enemy.

  “Do you really think so?” Simon asked. The thought infuriated him. He wanted to punish these griefers for trapping them in the Overworld.

  Simon struck one of the griefers with his enchanted diamond sword. It hit the arm of the griefer, who shouted, “You can’t just show up and expect to overthrow us! We’ve been here for a very long time.”

  “Are you stuck here, too?” asked Simon.

  At that, the green griefer looked surprised, and put his sword down. He called to the others to stop fighting. “Everyone, these aren’t our enemies. We must stop battling them.”

  Lily and Michael were confused that the skirmish was over, when it hadn’t even really begun.

  The griefer who had put his sword down said, “These are other people trapped in the game.”

  The group of green-suited people let out a collective sound of shock. Some of them gasped; others insisted that Simon wasn’t telling the truth.

  Simon said, “We are trapped in the Overworld. Normally, this would have been a dream for us. All three of us are obsessed with playing Minecraft, but now we are really sad. We miss our families and we know they are probably very worried about us. Even worse, we have no idea if the people we left behind are even safe, because when we were transported to the Overworld, there was a horrible storm in our neighborhood.”

  “It was a tornado,” Lily added. “And there was a lot of lightning.”

  Michael said, “We kept playing on our server when we should have been in our basements, sheltering ourselves from the storm.”

  Simon realized that, in a way, these green griefers actually were responsible for them being trapped in the Overworld. If they hadn’t been trying to blow up the roller coaster, Simon and his friends wouldn’t have stayed on the server. Simon explained this to the griefers.

  One of the griefers replied, “We didn’t know you were in the middle of a storm. You could have stopped playing.”

  Simon was annoyed. He wanted the griefers to take responsibility for his friends being trapped in the Minecraft game, but he had to admit that it was also their own fault. It was just a game, and they could have walked away. Although it took them ages to construct the roller coaster, they probably shouldn’t have built something so valuable on a public server in Survival mode. It was pointless to spend the day placing blame, when both the griefers and Simon’s friends were at fault.

  Lily seemed to have reached the same conclusion. She raised her voice. “Stop it! It doesn’t matter who is responsible for us being here. We just have to focus on getting back home.”

  “You know a way for us to get back home?” one of the griefers asked hopefully.

  Michael asked, “Do you mean
that you don’t?”

  A griefer replied, “No, we are all trapped. It’s awful. We have been here for a very long time. In fact, we’ve lost track of time.”

  “That’s awful,” Lily said.

  “We gave up trying to get back home a long time ago,” said another griefer.

  “How were you trapped to begin with?” Lily couldn’t believe all of these players had been sucked into the Overworld like she and her friends had.

  Everyone had the same story. They had been zapped into the game during a storm.

  Michael asked, “How did you meet?”

  “We were all imprisoned by a very mean person who controls this server. We don’t even know who he is, because he never told us his name. He found us all when we were first trapped here. He’s the most evil griefer I’ve ever encountered.” The griefer shuddered when he spoke about the man who had locked them up.

  Another griefer said, “When we were trapped, we began to plot our escape. We decided to change our skins to match each other.”

  A female griefer from the group called out, “Once we did that, we named ourselves the Prismarines.”

  “Do you each have names?” asked Michael

  “Yes, I’m Brett,” said the first griefer they had talked to. He continued, “When we changed our skins to match each other, we were also planning to escape from the evil griefer’s prison.”

  “Where was the prison?” questioned Simon.

  “It was in the middle of the jungle. The mean griefer has an enormous jungle temple. You’ve never seen anything as large as this temple. He added on to one that had been built. He placed us in a cell in the basement.” Brett spoke quickly, explaining how they had been locked up and given very little food.

  “It was the worst,” another Prismarine confirmed. “But we realized that if we all looked alike, we could attack the mean griefer and he’d never know which of us did it.”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” Simon said. “But what are you doing to destroy him, and how do you plan on getting back to the real world?”

  They all started to talk at once.

  Lily yelled, “Stop. We have no idea what you’re saying.”

  They were too busy talking to notice Lily’s comment. Only when they heard a loud explosion did the Prismarines fall silent.

  Kaboom!

  The sound pierced their ears, and they looked around to see what had been blown up.

  Simon cried out, “My house!”

  5

  BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

  Simon dashed toward his house. He inspected the rubble and shouted to the Prismarines who crowded around him, “You were distracting us. You wanted this to happen. You just love blowing things up!”

  “No, we don’t,” said Brett.

  “That’s a lie. You tried blowing up our roller coaster.” Simon stood next to the remnants of his house. Not only was he trapped in the Overworld, now he didn’t even have the comfort of staying in the house he had spent months constructing. And he had lost all of the emeralds that adorned his walls. He had planned to remove the emeralds and trade them for valuable resources in the village, but now he couldn’t. He was devastated.

  The Prismarines tried to defend themselves. “It wasn’t us. It’s true that we tried to blow up your coaster, but that was because we were jealous that you weren’t trapped in the Overworld, like we are. Now that we know you’re one of us, we don’t want to attack you. We want to work with you to get out of the Overworld and get back home,” said Brett.

  “We also need your help in battling the mastermind griefer. He’s probably the one who is responsible for destroying your house,” another Prismarine, who introduced herself as Greta, explained.

  Simon’s head was spinning. He didn’t know whom to believe, or whom to trust. He only knew the facts. His house was destroyed, and the people in green jumpsuits that stood around him had attacked him once before. He didn’t know what to do.

  Then Greta suggested, “We can help you rebuild.”

  Simon hesitated, looking at the rubble that was once his beloved home. Then he sighed and replied, “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Can you lead us to the jungle temple where the master griefer kept you?” asked Lily.

  One of the Prismarines started to shake when he replied, “Why? I don’t want to go back there.”

  “But we have to stop him before he destroys any more of our property,” said Lily.

  “And I wonder if he’s responsible for us being trapped on this server in the Overworld,” Michael added. “If he was able to spot all of us when we were first sucked into the game, he might have a lot more control over the Minecraft world than we could imagine.”

  This comment stunned everyone. Michael stood before a sea of gaping mouths. Simon asked, “Do you think if we find him, we can actually make our way back to the real world?’

  Michael replied, “I don’t know, but we have to find out.”

  Before the group could come up with a plan to find the master griefer and force him to get them back to the real world, they heard a loud noise in the distance.

  “Is that another explosion?” Lily looked up in shock.

  “No,” a Prismarine replied. “It sounds like thunder.”

  The sky grew dark and rain began to pound down on the group. They sprinted to Lily’s house to get to shelter.

  Everyone crowded into Lily’s tiny living room. Lily had crafted a small cottage instead of a large house like Michael and Simon had each built. Lily’s cottage had only two bedrooms, and was designed to look like the homes she rented with her parents and her sister by the beach every summer.

  As the rain fell on the roof of the cottage, Lily remembered all of the summers she had spent at the beach with her family. They were the best times of her life, and she waited all school year to swim in the ocean and eat fresh fish. She had been looking forward to another vacation to the cottage this summer, but with escape from the Overworld looking unlikely, the beach now seemed like a distant part of her past.

  Lily had to adjust to her new life in the Overworld or she wouldn’t survive. If she kept thinking about the cottage at the beach, she’d be too sad to fight. And she had to fight, because she had to win. She couldn’t let this master griefer get away with destroying everything they had in the Overworld, or keep her from getting home.

  “Lily, I wish you’d built a bigger house,” Simon complained. Something—maybe the wind—made the walls creak as he spoke.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not like you and Michael. I don’t need massive, epic homes that people talk about all over the Overworld. I like to live a modest life,” Lily defended herself. She thought she saw movement in the darkness outside her window, and turned to look.

  At that moment, a zombie ripped the front door from its hinges. Lily and her friends cried out in shock.

  Simon leapt toward the zombie with his diamond sword. He struck the vacant-eyed undead mob and destroyed it. He looked outside and saw that Lisimi Village was teeming with skeletons and zombies. “We have to go out and battle. This rain has spawned a bunch of hostile mobs, and they are terrorizing the village.”

  Simon wondered if the master griefer was behind this attack. Could he have spawned these creatures? But Simon couldn’t sit around and wonder why the monsters were in their village; he had to battle them.

  The gang put on their armor and ran into the thick of the invasion. Lily struck a skeleton with her sword, but though it lost hearts, it wasn’t destroyed. Another skeleton shot an arrow at her, and Lily’s energy was fading. Simon joined her and helped defeat the bony beasts.

  Michael called to his friends, “Help me. We have to save the town. The zombies are attacking the villagers and transforming them into zombies. Does everyone have golden apples?”

  “I do,” exclaimed Lily.

  “Me too,” said Simon.

  Simon wanted to help the townspeople stay safe. He was friends with some of the villagers in Lisimi Village and didn’t want to see
them hurt. As the population of the town he, Lily, and Michael had built had grown, the group had become good friends with villagers like Fred the Farmer, who Simon spotted trying to escape from a zombie. He could see the brown-robed farmer fighting for his life.

  “Fred!” Simon called out. “We’re here to help!”

  The trio raced toward the zombie that was attacking Fred and struck the large undead mob with their diamond swords, destroying it.

  “Thank you,” Fred said.

  “Don’t thank us,” Simon responded. “Just get to shelter, quickly. We don’t want you getting hurt.”

  Next door to Fred there lived a fisherwoman named Emily. Prepared for the worst, the group raced to Emily’s house to see if she was okay.

  As the group reached Emily’s doorstep, the rain stopped and the hostile mobs disappeared. Emily’s door was ajar, her house unusually dark inside.

  “Emily?” Simon called to his friend as he pushed her door open, but there was no response. He walked inside, and the friends could hear him moving through the house’s different rooms.

  “Is she okay?” Fred called to Simon.

  “She’s not here,” Simon said, emerging from Emily’s house.

  6

  IT GETS REAL

  “Where is Emily?” Fred was worried.

  The Prismarines joined them, and Greta suggested, “It looks like the rain has stopped. We should head to the jungle to find the master griefer.”

  “We can’t leave,” Simon told them. “Our friend Emily is missing.”

  Michael said, “She was the best fisherwoman. She would catch so many fish and we’d cook these incredibly large dinners to share with all the townspeople and villagers. Those feasts are some of my favorite memories from the world of Minecraft—not at all like today.”

  Brett said, “We can’t wait around to find your friend. We have to stop the master griefer. Now that you guys are here, he seems to be increasing his attacks.”

  “Really?” asked Lily.

  “Yes. He trapped us and would stage battles, but he never blew up our homes or spawned hostile mobs,” Greta explained.