I spent the majority of the next week mining and gathering a vast amount off materials. It was a quiet week for us. When I went above ground to drop off my load of resources, mostly cobblestone and coal, with some iron mixed in, I saw Com building a farm outside the hut. I wasn’t really sure how he did that in a desert but I had the feeling he just put some dirt down and planted the seeds as he gathered them. Skeleton spent most of his time inside talking with the witch, Agetha, about what we could do about our situation. Every time I came up I would ask if they had heard anything from Creeper but every time the answer was no and I’d go back to digging.

Spending my time in the ground brought up memories of my life in the hive, the life I’d return to when I got back. When we weren’t training for stealth missions in the name of love, or training for combat should we have been discovered, we often took shifts working to expand the hive’s internal network of tunnels to accommodate the newborns, and the ponies we brought back to suck the love out of. The sheer terror of the ones brought back before being put in a stupor where they’d only see us as someling to love and cherish, forced of course, was the biggest source of an entertaining day for those stuck working in the tunnels, but not me. I knew that going against Chrysalis was stupid so I never did, but I’ve always questioned some of her methods for gathering love, such as forcing ponies to love us and then putting them in a stasis where we could harvest their love until their bodies turned to empty husks.

Even with my doubts, I continued working for the hive as it was the only home I knew and it was my life and I wanted it to be the best I could help it be. That’s why I became an architect, to help our hive prosper and not collapse under its own weight, literally.

As I continued to mine, I kept digging deeper and deeper, using torches to light my path and allow me to see what resources were available. On one rare occasion I came across a red substance that, when hit, gave off a small amount of light. That seemed interesting so I noted it in my head and planned on seeing what the others knew about it later. Most of my digging ended up being me digging down and making a staircase of blocks as I went, but every now and then I’d discover a pocket of emptiness and I’d sit down and rest, partially because digging was tiring work and partially because I needed to eat and get something to drink. Going down into the ground I already knew it’d be hard to come across food and water so I always brought some down with me to let me keep going without having to return to the surface.

After over six days of digging, I had created a system of stairs and ladders, made from the wood of trees growing in the nearby jungle, that I could get anywhere I wanted underneath us for likely over a mile in any direction. I thought about it and chuckled at something I remembered Garnet Fury saying about me once, she said that if I put as much effort into our espionage and pony mimicry that I do into expanding our hive and trying to ‘make the place fancy’, as she put it, then I would’ve been able to trick the princesses into my bed by now. I’d always say that if I didn’t keep at it then there’d be no bed to bring them to and we’d share a smile. Then we’d be back to work, that was all before we went on assignment into the cities, when she still had her smile.

I shook my head to clear it and brought myself back to the present. I stood in a room I had created and looked at the absolutely absurd amount of chests I had filled with just cobblestone; they filled a space more than three times the size of Agetha’s hut, in every dimension.

“Ok, I might’ve gone a little bit overboard,” I said to no one in particular.

A zombie wandered around the area, and for a moment my brain waited for him to say hello in the slow fashion I was used to hearing, but it never came. I sighed, my heart still heavy with loss, and went to the room next door, where I had more chests filled with sandstone I made from the sand I had to excavate near the surface to keep the whole desert from falling apart. The room was much smaller than the cobblestone room, as I decided to call it, and housed only enough chests currently to rival the hut in size, though honestly it was still impressive as to make the stone from sand you had to compress four pieces into a single stone so the amount of sand actually converted was rather overwhelming when I thought about it.

I heard footsteps coming from behind me and turned to see Com following Agetha.

“I see you’ve been quite busy, young shape-shifter,” Agetha said, small segments of hair dangling over her eyes.

“She’s not kidding, we got lost a couple times getting here,” Com said, chuckling at his journey most likely. “Maybe you should put up some signs to help us all figure out where everything is.”

“Hmm,” I pondered the idea. It should be easy enough to do; I only needed wood for signs if I remembered right, “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself. I guess working with tunnels most of my life just kinda gave me a sixth sense of how to navigate them so easily.” I looked at them and remembered I needed to ask them something, a broken record of a question really, “Any luck with Creeper yet?”

Com sighed, “Not yet. Skeleton has the nightlings looking for him but none of them seem to have any idea of where he went. They are all over the world and still there’s no sign of him.”

I frowned, mostly due to the building frustration that even with a network of eyes and ears as large as the one we had and yet we still found ourselves coming up short on anything to work with.

“Is there any place that they haven’t been able to check up on?” I asked, hoping we might’ve missed something we could look for.

“Other than a few villages taken by other Players and the entire underground, not really. The world is pretty big though, even with everyone looking there is just too much area to search effectively, especially when our eyes and ears are mostly wild and aren’t looking for him all the time, only when we manage to remind them for however long we can.”

“Any word from Ender and his group?” I asked, grasping for straws. I knew they could teleport and they seemed to be a rather reliable group for getting to where they wanted, and the best part was they weren’t affected by the sun so they could actually get around all the time.

“Nothing from them either, I haven’t even heard from Ender for the last few days. I’m starting to get worried to be honest,” he said with a sincere tone.

I looked at him and felt glad that in this world where his people took over, he knew that everything they did was not just and decided to help the ones native to this world, even when that meant he had to be a traitor to his people.

“There are the rebels you’ve mentioned before,” Agetha spoke up from the other side of the room where she was looking around in the chests, probably for lapis lazuli.

“What about them?” I asked. It wasn’t that I hadn’t considered them so much as I didn’t think they’d be doing much other than trying to live without Kaile’s rule.

“Not long after their kind came here, some of them found my hut, after I moved away from everyone, and asked for help. I provided help for them, at a price,” she said with a smile that for a moment seemed sinister, though I may have imagined that. “They have been living in the shadows of the world ever since and even I haven’t seen them more than a handful times since.”

“Do they have a leader?” Com asked.

“Everyone has a leader, even other leaders. But to answer your question in particular, yes. He said his name was Artemis the hunter.”

Com gasped, whoever that was apparently had some significance from his world.

“What? Who is that?” I inquired, looking at Com, who looked as though he were remembering something important that could be of use.

“He’s the best magician from our world that communed with the animals of our world. I never met him but I heard that he could even talk with the monstrous beasts that plagued us,” he said, a distant look on his face, “His skill was legendary amongst even the king’s magicians. I thought all our mages were stuck defending the portal here; how could he have gotten here?”

His question was directed toward Agetha, who was still looking in the chests. When she realized this, she turned around and spoke, “I have no idea. I didn’t question who he was, I only knew he wanted to escape the man who gave him a hell worth escaping from so I helped him escape and I haven’t heard from him since.”

For a moment Com was stuck looking around the room with a pensive look on his face. His eyes darted around every direction, as though looking around helped him think about what he wanted to say.

When he spoke, his voice was full of determination, “We need to find him.”

Agetha laughed, “Good luck with that, both of you. I helped him hide, but even I don’t know where he ended up. I just made enough potions for them all to escape even the prince’s sight long enough to get him away from his people. I assume his want to escape had something to do with how insane your prince seems to be.”

“I don’t think you’re wrong about that, but we need to find him. What direction did he leave from here?” Com pressed her for answers. Whoever this Artemis person was, I could only guess that he’d be a great advantage to have against the prince.

“He went into the jungle, I told him that it was easy to get lost in there if you lost sense of which direction you came from for even a few moments but he just laughed at me with a smile on his face, and a bow in his hand, and then he left. Kinda handsome fellow, if I do say so myself.”

“Com, do you think this Artemis person will be able to really help us?” I asked, hesitant to think another Player would be so willing to join us so easily.

“If you knew half the things the prince did while he was in charge of the kingdom, you’d know for sure as I do that he’ll team up with us. He’ll probably even want to meet you. I heard he kept a log of any creature he met and reported it to the king so we could better prepare ourselves against the beasts if they ever managed to get past our barriers, or if we ventured outside one without a barrier stone.”

Tired of standing around, I sat on the hard stone floor. Com did the same.

“To be honest, I want to know how he managed to escape the prince’s notice when everyone came here. Maybe he even has more magicians with him.” I saw a smile on his face, a real smile. It had been so long since I saw one I couldn’t help but smile myself.

A short time after chatting about the farm Com had been working on, along with the other mundane things that happened while I was mining, I went with them back to the surface and we all slept, the moon high in the sky and Skeleton standing watch from inside the hut, looking wary of anything that moved. We had a plan and now all we had to do was get ourselves prepared for the journey.

Author's Note

Oh look, a mage escaped the prince's notice. I wonder who, or what, "escaped" his notice. This should be fun to work with. In other news, I have been keeping very little track of everything I've written. I need to do that so I can be sure of my consistancy. Maybe when I stop being lazy for five seconds and take a real break from playing Destiny on my 360. So that may take a while.