Feeling a little bit stupid for his ignorance, Stan set into the mine, pickaxe in hand, tailed closely by Kat.
His first stop was the coal ore he’d seen. He took his pickaxe and mined a good-sized lump of coal in a matter of minutes. He saw that the coal ran in a vein, and before long he had collected about ten lumps of it. He brought them over to Kat, who was hacking away at a stone wall.
“Good,” she said. “Let me see those.” He handed her the lumps. She pulled some sticks from her inventory and fastened them to the coal to make torches. Each lump of coal yielded four torches, so they had forty in all.
“Now we can go deeper into the mine, where there isn’t any natural light,” she explained. They ventured further, placing torches along the wall as they went. Stan noticed that the torches ignited the second that Kat attached them to the wall, with no matches or lighter or anything. Strange …
“Hey, look over here!” Stan ran over to a spot on the ground flecked with black. “More coal! I’m going to dig this out,” he said. “Could you get me some stone for a new sword? And get some for Charlie, too.”
“Whatever,” she said. She started hacking into the wall at a new location, gathering up tremendous amounts of stone chunks. Stan dug into the coal vein. He was about to dig into the eighth piece of coal when Kat said, “Hey, Stan! Come check this out!”
Stan walked over to her. She had made quite a dent in the wall, and she was staring at a block that was different from the stone all around her. This block was flecked with little spots that looked similar to the coal ore, but were light brown instead of black. Kat stepped back.
“I’ve never seen that before. Do you think it could be gold?”
“It might be. Hang on, put a torch up,” Stan said. Kat obliged. Stan pulled out his book and turned to the section on blocks. He found a page describing gold ore and showed it to Kat.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t match the colour. Gold ore has yellow flecks; these flecks are tan. Check out the other pages.”
Stan turned to the previous page. He held that illustration up for Kat.
“That’s it!” she exclaimed. “What is it?”
Stan read from the book.
IRON ORE
Iron ore is an ore block typically found in mines or mountainous regions. When smelted, it produces one iron ingot.
Stan looked up.
“Do you know what an Iron Ingot is?” he asked.
Kat shrugged her shoulders. “Look it up,” she said.
He did.
IRON INGOT
An iron ingot is a crafting item. It is most commonly obtained by smelting iron ore, but can also be found in the chests of Dungeons, Strongholds, Abandoned Mine Shafts, Temples and NPC villages, or by killing Iron Golems and (rarely) Zombies. The iron ingot is an essential crafting item for a wide variety of things, including iron swords, iron armour, iron tools, buckets, shears, iron bars, tripwire hooks and many other things. Tools and armour made from iron are of a higher quality than stone or leather, respectively, but of a lower quality than diamond.
Of this entire passage, one small section caught Kat’s attention.
“Iron sword?” she exclaimed. “So if I smelt this stuff, whatever that means, I can get an iron sword?”
“Apparently,” said Stan.
“Sweet!” shouted Kat gleefully, and she began hacking away at the wall of ore. The two players hacked at the wall and managed to get out four blocks of iron ore before they hit stone again.
“Let’s look around here. Maybe there’ll be some more!” She was about to take her pickaxe to the adjacent section of the wall when she heard a bloodcurdling cry echoing from the top of the cave.
“Aaaaauuuuughhhh! Stan! Heeelllllpppp!”
“Come on!” Stan shouted to Kat, and the two raced up the mine and into the light.
After Kat and Stan had vanished into the mine, Charlie stood up and walked around, a scowl on his face.
Stupid girl, he thought, looking around and spying a patch of wheat next to a sign that said “Take what you need, but replant.” Why should she get to be in our group? She nearly killed us! What does Stan see in her? It was true, he thought as he harvested the wheat, that the girl did seem to know her way with a sword. Ah, what am I talking about? I don’t know that. I didn’t see her actually fight! For all I know, she’s never killed anything in her life. I’m ditching her first chance I get, the arrogant brat.
And now look what she’s done, he thought as he began to break the leaf blocks on the trees. He had read in Stan’s book that every now and then an apple would drop from a leaf block if you broke it. She’s gone with him into a mine, delaying us from getting to the Adorian Vill— Wait a second, he thought, not noticing the apple dropping from the block he had just broken.
What if it’s a trap? What if she’s just lured Stan down there to kill him, and she’s going to come back and finish me off? I have to go find them! He quickly picked up his sword and was about to dash into the mine to save his friend when something stopped him.
A little way into the darkness of the mine, he saw a figure. It looked like a monster of some sort. He was about to run, but his curiosity got the better of him because it was the most bizarre thing he had ever seen. He edged slightly forwards to get a better look. It was as tall as he was, two blocks high, but it didn’t have any arms, and it stood upright on four stubby legs. He couldn’t see well, but he could have sworn that its body was flecked with different shades of green, with some white in there, too. He edged a little closer. This turned out to be a huge mistake.
The creature suddenly turned towards him. He had gotten too close. It stared at him, and he had never seen such a terrifying face in his life. It looked like a morbid, green-speckled jack-o-lantern. It had empty black eye sockets and a gaping hole of a mouth that was open in a horrible upside-down grin.
He swung with his sword, and the monster was knocked back, but his wooden weapon had reached the end of its life. The spent blade splintered into a thousand pieces, and Charlie threw the useless handle aside as he screamed into the mine for his friends to help him.
This creature was fast but silent as well. The Zombies made moaning sounds, the Spiders made a clicking sound, and you could hear the rattling of a Skeleton’s bones as it moved. But this thing was absolutely silent. As it chased after Charlie, he could barely hear the sound of its footsteps. Also, the Zombies and Skeletons burned up in the sunlight, and the Spiders hadn’t paid him or Stan any attention. But Charlie was running around in the path in direct sunlight and the thing kept following him, not slowing down or taking any damage. Charlie did not want to know what would happen when the thing finally caught up to him.
Kat and Stan burst out of the mine just as Charlie was running back towards it, still being followed by the monster.
“Guys, thank God! I’m so glad that you’re—”
“Get down!” Kat cried.
The monster was upon them, and it was starting to hiss and swell like an overinflated balloon. Kat pushed Stan, who fell backwards into the mine, and she tackled Charlie out of the way just in the nick of time. There was an earsplitting explosion, and a cloud of dust rose over the road. Then, all was quiet.
As the dust cleared, Stan got up and came out of the mine. The monster was gone, and in its place was a huge crater, blown right into the middle of the dirt path. Stan stared at it, and Charlie and Kat got up. Kat turned on Charlie.