Never the Same - Team Crafted Stories (DISCONTINUED)

Part I Chapter 5: The Troublemaker

Ty's POV

Before we get started here, I just want to clarify something: do not call me Tyler. Understood? Okay, we're good.

I'm Tyler Collins, and I'm eighteen years old. I get to brag that I'm the youngest member of Team Crafted. Call me Ty or Deadlox; I don't care. Call me Tyler, and you're getting a beating. I DON'T LIKE BEING CALLED TYLER!

My story's different from a lot of the members of Team Crafted. So, you better listen the whole way through. I lived in a village called Phoenix, in the middle of the Arizonian Desert. No other villages are near me, but the size of Phoenix makes up for it. There were a lot of kids around my age, growing up in Phoenix. For example: Seto, Ghost, Clash, and Double. Don't know who they are, right? Well, I'll tell you a bit about each of them.

Seto Matthews... he was my friend for ten years. We always hung out together. He was like a little brother to me. No one else knew his secret except me, although Ghost came close to finding out once. Seto's a sorcerer. He and I would screw around for hours in his hideaway under the sands of the desert. He showed me how to make potions, how to enchant, and how to use spells. Although, something went wrong one day when we performed spells on each other. He released a monster's soul known as the Ender dragon into me, and neither he or I can get it out. So I'm kinda stuck being part Ender dragon. Don't worry, I'm not hostile - most of the time. No one knows except for me and Seto, after all these years, and we plan to keep it that way. Soon after Sky and Jason showed up, Seto disappeared and I've barely heard from him since. I've only seen him three times in the past seven years. But those are all stories of their own. Don't worry, we're still friends. And the rest of the Team is considering adding Seto to our group!

Ghost, Clash, and Double. Oh, man. Those three are troublemakers. Ghost, Clash, and Double are their nicknames; their real names are Daniel, Cody, and Ethan. They nicknamed me Deadlox when I was five, I nicknamed them Ghost, Clash, and Double, and that's what we still call each other today. I was always closest to Ghost. We played so many pranks on Double and Clash, and on each other. I called him Ghost because his skin was as pale as... well, a ghost. Double is the loudest human being to walk the lands of Minecraft. When he talks in a "normal" voice, it sounds like he's announcing something to the world, and when he whispers, it sounds like he'd be talking to someone normally. Clash is a lion-human hybrid. I guess he was born like that. He never talked much, but I know where he came from. Quentin told me all about it. But again, that's another story.

Okay, now back to me. As I already said, I grew up in the village of Phoenix, which is in the Arizonian Desert. I have one real sister. Her name's Rose, but I call her Rosie. She's annoying sometimes. But she can be the best sister in the world.

The Arizonian Desert is south of the Keate Jungle, southwest of the Canadian Taiga, east of the Oregon Hills, west of the Midway Plains, north of the Edenton Swamps and the Texxan Forests. Remember that.

I was a troublemaker, an explorer, and always curious about everything. I had a fascination with strange objects like new metals, new armor types, new weapons. Eventually, Mom explained to me that these new materials weren't supposed to exist. They were glitches in the code, otherwise known as mods. But I loved them. I wanted to learn more about them, and maybe, someday, create mods of my own. But even now, that's still a long way off. My other fascination was parkour.

One day when I was five, I found a ladder that led to the top of the roof of my house. I climbed to the top of it - obviously, what else are you supposed to do? Then I saw Seto's house, right next door to mine. Our roofs almost touched. Suddenly, I had an idea that changed my life. I jumped. I jumped from my roof to Seto's roof, a three block gap, twelve blocks above the ground. Looking back on it, I probably would've killed myself if I'd screwed up that jump. But thankfully, I didn't. After that, I snuck out of my house to do more parkour. I loved it. The feeling that you're flying, that feeling when you start to run and your feet lift of the ground, when you slam onto the solid ground beneath your feet. It felt amazing. But I had to be careful - and quiet, which was really hard for me. I was naturally loud, and when you landed on someone's roof, it made a lot of noise. And thank goodness no one saw me jumping from roof to roof; they would've called my parents. Thank goodness no one found out what I was doing until it was too late to stop me.

I often dragged Seto and Rose along on these attemps to parkour around the whole village. Sometimes, I bought along Ghost, Clash, and Double, but they made it clear that they didn't like parkour. Sucks for them; they're the ones missing out on it. We did really good at it, too. Rose was just as good at parkour as I was. Seto and I always raced around the village, having competitions to see who could jump on the most houses, which often resulted in a lot of broken bones.

The other thing I loved to do was explore. Seto and I - and sometimes Rosie - would explore beyond Phoenix, often finding new cave systems, discovering new animals. We often left the village with hunting groups, which consisted of the best hunters, mostly the dads. Seto and I didn't do much hunting when we landed in the Keate Jungle or the Texxan Forests - mostly, we parkoured on the trees and explored our new surroundings.

On more than one occasion, when we were in the Keate Jungle, Seto and I would run across a furry, animal-looking thing leaping from tree to tree with an iron axe in its hands. We always stayed out of its sight. It didn't see us, thank goodness. Later, I found out the forest bacca's name - Jerome Aceti, another member of Team Crafted.

When Seto disappeared, I was lonely. I wouldn't come out of my house at all. I missed him and all the memories we made. I never had that sort of bond with anyone else, even Sky (or Adam) and Jason. I was surprised when Adam and Jason came wandering out of the desert, from the direction of the Midway Plains. I saw them approaching Phoenix first, and I alerted the village. Suprisingly enough, my mom volunteered to take care of the two boys. At the time, I was annoyed. I didn't want more kids. I wanted Seto back. But Adam and Jason changed me - a lot.

I got to show them all around Phoenix. I showed them Seto's and my secret hideout, and the places we explored. I showed them our parkour route, and suprisingly enough, the two of them grew to like parkour as much as I did. Sky especially. He loved it, and he was good at it. Jason, not so much. I mean, he liked it and all, but he was so bad at first, it was hysterical. Oh, man, just thinking about it...

I also showed them mods. Glitches in the code that aren't supposed to exist. Sky's favorite was the Mutant Zombie mod. As a prank, he spawned it in my bedroom, just as I was going to bed. Thank goodness you can erase mods so easily. Jason's favorite, of course, was Galacticraft. It's actually pretty cool. You can create spaceships and all this cool stuff about outer space, and you can actually fly to the moon. Sky, Jason, and I went to the moon once, but we deleted the mod immediately.

I told them everything about me. Seto, Ghost, Double, Clash, our adventures, the mods. In return, they told me about themselves. Sky's story was sad to listen to. All the abuse he had gone through... If I were him, I don't think I could've stood it. But the past made us what we are now, including Sky. In a way, that abuse motivates him to continue playing the game, just so others can be entertained, and they won't to through the same thing he did. Jason was also different. He became an orphan at a young age, and he didn't remember his real family at all, except for the star amulet around his neck. Then he was adopted and lived in Grapevine. I wonder what it's like to live in a cooler climate. Must be nice to not have boiling heat all the time.

They stayed for six months, but it felt like a week to me. If they could, they'd probably stay for the rest of their lives. But they had to go home to their own villages. I suggested that every two months, we should meet here so that we could hang out again. They agreed, and the two of them began their long journeys back to Seattle and Grapevine.

After that, our one-week visits became more and more interesting. A few years later, the three of us decided to adventure out to the biggest gaming hub out on the Midway Plains.

That was when Team Crafted truly began to form.

~Anna