//------------------------------// // Chapter 1: Backstory // Story: A Tale of Crafters and Ponies // by Dolphy Blue Drake //------------------------------// Chapter 1: Backstory Twilight sighed as she waited for her friends to show up at the library. She needed to talk to them about Princess Celestia’s latest task for them. There were dimensional distortions happening all around Ponyville, but nopony could actually prove they were happening. This was going to be a strange day indeed… ------Meanwhile, in another world…------ Year 8, Day 1 I guess I should start off this journal the same way I started my other seven before this one: with my name, just in case someone reads these out of order—if anyone else reads them at all. I am Dolphy Blue Drake, one of the sixteen original Crafters to suddenly appear in this world exactly eight years ago. A lot has happened since that day, and now, I’m all alone. Well, not entirely alone. The other fifteen Crafters left on a journey to collect more magic essence for our ore garden, but most of them never came back. I have my hands full with the fourteen children I promised to look after for them, though. We hadn’t managed to create diamond seeds yet, and we’d exhausted most of our mine trying to get enough essence just to make two seeds. Luckily, the local villagers know a lot about crafting, so we knew exactly how much we needed. We were still about one hundred weak essence pieces short of being able to complete the seeds, and we also needed a sapphire (which can only be found by either mining under the ocean, or by finding one in a chest in a dungeon or mineshaft) to craft the staff for the portal to the Promised Land, which had been our goal ever since we’d found out about it from the villagers. Before I continue my tale, I guess I should start at the beginning, since summarizing the events might help a reader who started with this volume. On Day 1 of Year 1, sixteen souls were thrust into this world from parts unknown. I have almost no recollection of any life I may have had before entering this world, so I’m not going to touch on that. The sixteen souls were two humans (Steve and Samantha), two elves (Timothy and Danielle), two dwarves (Ivor and Edna), a reaper (Grim), a succubus (Midnight), two orcs (Gorrin and Bethelda), two humanoid rabbits (Powder and Cotton), two humanoid foxes (Yip and Yipe), a humanoid dragoness (Wyvern), and a humanoid dragon-dolphin hybrid (yours truly). We became fast friends and banded together to survive. We collected supplies and built a makeshift shelter about a hundred blocks from where we entered this world, and spent the night there. We had eight beds, so we let the women have them, and us men slept on the floor for the night (my back hurt for three days after that, but it was worth seeing the smile on Wyvern’s face when I gave her the bed I’d crafted myself). After we woke up, we left the location due to it not suiting our needs very well. We traveled for half the day before we found a biome I now know is called a “Mystic Grove”. The grass had a bluish tint to it, and blue “Magic Trees” grew there as well as the usual oaks and the occasional jacaranda. We looked for a flat place to settle in, but we couldn’t find a place flat enough for our liking. We didn’t want to leave the enchantingly beautiful place, so we came up with a plan (actually, the plan was mainly Bethelda’s idea, but she never took credit for it). The plan was to terraform the large one-block deep body of water in the grove into a flat place for us to settle in. We got to work, and we’d converted about half of the offending pool of water into a suitable landscape before night fell. We set up a quick shelter again (this time, we had a bed for everyone) and waited out the night. The next morning, I volunteered to check to make sure there were no monsters waiting for us. I grasped my stone sword tightly; put on my leather tunic I’d crafted the day before, and stepped outside. At first, I saw nothing. No monsters at all! I was about to tell my friends the coast was clear, when I heard the sound of a bottle shattering behind me. I turned around and saw a horrible creature: it wore purple robes and a pointed hat, and had an ugly wart on its nose. I was face-to-face with a witch. I screamed and ran back inside the small shelter, slamming the door behind me. The others asked me what was wrong, and I simply pointed at the creature staring at us through the small window in the door. Yipe came up with a strategy to beat the creature that worked flawlessly. We broke down part of the wall on the side of the structure, and then swarmed the monster. It stood no chance with us outnumbering it sixteen-to-one, and we made short work of it (I got poisoned by the Notch-forsaken beast, but Wyvern handed me a bucket of milk to fix that). With the hag taken care of, we got back to work converting the watery landscape into a suitable place for our settlement. By the afternoon, we’d done it, so we got to work building our little town. We were originally going to have a house for every Crafter, but that plan was scrapped very quickly, and we made eight houses instead of sixteen. Every one of us had bonded to one of the opposite gender quite quickly, myself and Wyvern included, so we held a little marriage ceremony for each couple, then returned to work on the houses. Not a single one got finished that day, so we had to spend the night fending off more witches (as it turns out, the only monsters native to Mystic Groves are witches). We swarmed each one just like before, so we were mainly unharmed by sunrise. The next day, we finished our little town (the houses, anyway), which we named Shimmering Hope, and got to work obtaining resources for our survival. In time, we had an extensive mine, a combustion engine power plant, a farm for every kind of livestock we’d discovered (that took a while, since it also turns out that the only other creatures native to Mystic Groves besides witches are bats), automated farms for every kind of plant (except for ore plants, berries and cotton. Ore plants strangely don’t work with the self-planting and self-harvesting multifarms, and though they can grow the cotton, they can’t harvest it, so the multifarm was useless for cotton. The same applies to the berry bushes) and several bee farms. We’d even conquered seven Nether fortresses, and we were searching for a stronghold (the villagers in the nearby Chaparral biome told us about the strongholds, and we were quite interested). Halfway though Year 2, Shimmering Hope’s population grew from 16 to 17. Cotton had given birth to the first child in our little town. I still remember the look of pride on Powder’s face when he announced that he’d just become a father. Gorrin had discovered how to brew mead in a distiller about a month before, and he offered to give everyone a drink to celebrate. Wyvern and I politely declined (and with good reason. Ever since Gorrin had discovered how to make liquor from honey, he and Bethelda got drunk at least twice a week, which caused quite a racket every time. Gorrin’s singing voice was far from the best when he was drunk). Cotton and Powder named their newborn son Hip, and our population just exploded after that. Soon, every family had a child. Gorrin and Bethelda were the next to become parents. They named their daughter Miragg, and the two stopped getting drunk as often after that (thank Notch for that), since we were pretty sure that alcohol was even worse for children than for adults (the villagers confirmed that one for us. Apparently, they’d learned that the hard way. They never expounded on the subject). The Foxes were next. Yip and Yipe named their son Matthew, and the rest of us soon followed suit. The last two families to have children were the humans and my family. Steve and Samantha had a son they named Huey, and near the very end of the year, Wyvern and I were blessed with our very own little girl: Kryanna. She was pink like her mother, but had my dolphin fin and tail (instead of Wyvern’s draconic wings and tail). Pretty soon, everyone had a second child. Well, almost everyone. Steve and Samantha struggled to have a second child, and Wyvern and I had the same problem. Every family had both a little boy and a little girl except two. The humans only had a son, and my family only had a daughter. We didn’t mind that much, though. We felt we’d add more to the population eventually. It was pretty uneventful until Year 6. We felt it was time to educate the older children on how to survive in this world, so we built a school, increasing the number of buildings in our town from 10 to 11 (we already had a power plant and a Town Hall for important business). Steve and Samantha took the role of teachers, and soon the children of our small town were learning the basics of crafting. It seems that the children knew how to store items on themselves well before we started educating them. Something we adults envied a bit. It had taken us nearly until noon of the first day to figure out how to carry more items than our hands can hold, while the children seemed to know how almost instantly after being born. Near the end of Year 6, Wyvern and I set out to see if we could find another village to trade with (the village nearby was running out of things we didn’t already have). We asked Steve and Samantha to take care of Kryanna for us while we were away (Huey was thrilled to have another child live in his house with him for a while), and then set off. It took us about 30,000 blocks and nearly a month of travel, but we finally found another village. What we found took us by surprise. The villagers had something they called a “station” near the edge of the village. It was a building made out of brick instead of materials that matched the Tropical Rainforest it was in, and there were two strange vehicles out front. We entered and spoke with the Testificate inside. He told us about marvelous vehicles called “trains”, which could pull “cars” along the tracks we’d always used for minecarts before. I offered him 10 emeralds for his incredibly detailed book on the subject, and he agreed. That was probably the only time I thought 10 emeralds was a good deal. That would revolutionize our town forever! Wyvern and I thanked the man, and then we quickly constructed a Nether Portal and dashed back to Shimmering Hope using the Nether as a shortcut. Once we arrived at Shimmering Hope, I showed the other adults the book I’d obtained. They’d built a library in my absence, so we stored the precious book in the new library (they’d also returned to where we’d entered the world and built a safe house for anyone who ended up dying to the monsters and willed themselves back to life, since every single one of us adults had died at least once by that point, and we were sick of getting slain by the monsters on the way back to town). As Year 7 began, we were searching for materials to build these “trains” with, as well as a sapphire and more magic essence to create the diamond seeds I mentioned above. Our mine wasn’t turning up much more of the stuff anymore, so we assembled in the Town Hall to discuss our situation. We wanted to visit this “Promised Land” the Testificates were constantly talking about. We were told we’d need endstone, so we were also preparing to go to The End using the stronghold we’d found. Of course, we’d have to slay the legendary Enderdragon to get back out, but we were ready for that. I volunteered to stay and watch over the children, and the others (my wife included) set out to find what we needed. After a month of waiting, they hadn’t returned. I waited a few more days, and then Wyvern, Steve and Samantha entered town from the direction of the safe house. They informed me that all fifteen of them had been slain by an incredibly powerful creature. I inquired about the other twelve, but they informed me that they somehow didn’t come back to life like they had. I knew it took willpower to come back, but I just couldn’t believe the others had lost enough of the will to live to prevent them from coming back. We broke the news to the children as gently as we could, but I was still heartbroken at the sight of all those grieving children. There were now twelve orphans in Shimmering Hope, and only four adults to take care of them. It was horrible. We held a memorial service for our fallen friends, and life was never the same after that. But things just got even worse from there. Wyvern and I managed to defeat the Enderdragon, as well as find the necessary sapphire and start working on our railway (our first goal was to connect it to the nearby village, then connect it to the one that was much farther away). We opened the portal to the Promised Land with our new “Ancient Staff” (seriously, how can something brand new be ancient?), and discovered that the portal had appeared on a small landmass that popped into existence nearly one hundred blocks above us. We quickly built a railway up to it, and then took one of our new diesel trains to the portal. When we got to the top, we were greeted by something out of nightmares: a man who looked a lot like Steve was blocking our path, his eyes were glowing pure white, and he smirked at us before punching the real Steve in the gut, sending him flying into Samantha, knocking both of them off the edge of the platform. Wyvern leaped down from the platform and flew down to catch them and prevent the impact, which she did, but now I was left alone with the horrible man-who-was-not. I quickly equipped my suit of heavily-enchanted diamond armor, pulled out my also heavily-enchanted diamond sword, and expected the creature to just turn tail and flee at the sight of my equipment. Instead, it smirked, shook its head, equipped itself with a suit of armor made out of some kind of pink gem (which I now know to be Amethyst), and pulled out a sword of the same material. I tried to slash at my foe, but he blocked my attack and countered with a slash of his own, cutting through my heavy protection like melted candle wax. Before he could strike again, I dashed into the waiting train, turned it around, and started back down the spiraling ramp to the surface as fast as I could make it go without derailing it. By the time I reached the bottom, Wyvern and the human couple were taking the children to the obsidian-reinforced schoolhouse to protect them. They got the children inside, but the not-Steve jumped all the way down from the platform in the sky, incredibly taking no damage at all from the fall (I later learned of the enchantment that does that, but I was incredibly surprised at the time. Even Feather Falling isn’t that efficient!), then turned to run us adults through. He quickly cut down the humans, and then made short work of my wife as well. I glared at him, but then I smirked and set off a chain-reaction of TNT, intending to at least send him flying, but he vanished without a trace. Puzzled, I ordered the children to stay in the school until I returned, and then rode the railway to the safe house, but I was too late. The horrible man-that-was-not was on horseback, dragging my wife and two remaining friends (who were tied up) along the ground after him. I tried to give chase, but I’d never tamed a horse, and he was galloping away from the rails, so I couldn’t chase him by train. As he vanished over the horizon, I dropped to my knees, dumbfounded. The love of my life was gone. She had been taken to Notch-only-knows-where, and my two remaining friends had been taken along as well. I ended up saddled with the task of caring for fourteen children all by myself, and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I made my way back to Shimmering Hope and informed the children about what happened. Once again, the children cried for hours, especially Huey and my poor little Kryanna. I took my daughter in my arms and told her this: “Krya, Daddy will never stop trying to find Mommy. We’ll be a family again, that’s a promise.” My little girl cried for a bit longer after that, but eventually she calmed down, as well as Huey, once I gave him a similar promise about his parents. It’s been ten months since that day, and Year 8 has just begun. I still intend to make good on the promise, but unless I can get some help from anyone competent (the Testificates aren’t even close to that), I’ll probably have to wait until these children are old enough to fend for themselves. Please Notch… Please send someone to help me.