Never the Same - Team Crafted Stories (DISCONTINUED)

Part I Chapter 6: The Derp

Ian's POV

If there's something strange in your neighborhood, who are you gonna call?

NOT FREAKING ME! (A/N: who gets that reference? 😂)

My alias is SSundee, but I go by Ian. Ian MacLeary. Or more commonly known as the derp of Team Crafted. I'm twenty-six years old, much older than the rest of Team Crafted. I'm tall, have brown hair, and blue eyes.

I've lived in metropolis of Dayton, which is in the Midway Plains, my entire life. I'm different from everyone else in Team Crafted in another way because of this - everyone else grew up in a small village, out in the wild. Nope, not me. I lived in a ten-story tall apartment building in Dayton, in the middle of a busy city.

I was always the popular kid at school, and honestly, I don't know how, or why. There were so many fakers. But I had one real friend. His name was Lance. We always did the stupidest things together. Most of them consisted of playing around with mods we shouldn't be using. We used the ShapeShifter mod the most often. I would prank Lance by Shifting into a creeper, then sitting in his room until he came in. He would do the same for me, except he would Shift into a spider. Did I mention that I'm scared to death of spiders?

The city was always safe from mobs, because as soon as the sun set, the redstone lamps would click on, and the entire city would be lit up. And when the sun rose, the lamps would turn off. If they didn't... well, let's just say there would be a lot of dead people in Dayton.

Because of that, I grew up without being required to know how to use a sword. But my dad pushed me to learn how to fight.

Maybe I should explain more about my family. Colton, my little brother, is much younger than me - he's only twelve years old. (A/N: Yes, I know Colton's his son. I decided to make him Ian's brother because I don't really want to make Ian have a family - yet.) My mom was never really around, which left Colton and me in the care of our dad. Our dad was a scientist who was interested in other mobs and their abilites. You know those evil scientist dudes, with their plans to take over the world that always get failed by some hero who comes along?

That would probably be my dad. He studied mobs and their abilites at a research lab in Dayton. One day, he wondered how humans would change if they had mob DNA injected into their system. And that's how the Mineature Labs came about. Believe it or not, he started the Labs with good intentions, but eventually, his plans became to use these stronger, improved humans to take over the Skylight Kingdom, one biome at a time.

Yeah, I know. Jason, Adam, and Quentin have all had horrible experiences in that place. But hey, it wasn't all my fault.

Dad, Colton, and I would travel out to the Labs every day. I was ten years old when the Labs were founded. Colton wasn't even born yet. Dad wanted Colton and me to someday take over his work. I remember that back then, I wanted to. I wanted to make Dad proud. But that was before I realized what Dad did to conduct experiments.

He'd kidnap poor little boys and girls from everywhere - the Canadian Taiga, the Oregon Hills, the Texxan Forest, the Arizonian Desert, the Edenton Swamp, even from other areas of the Midway Plains - and force them to cooperate in his experiments. He and his scientists would inject them with liquid that I knew to be mob DNA, putting the test subjects in a lot of pain. Most of the time, the test subjects died. Some survived, and escaped. Others, my dad let go willingly. Some killed themselves while in the Labs, because they were too embarrassed of what my dad had done. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that not very many people survived.

Looking back, I wonder how I ever thought it was right. How could it be okay to drag a helpless child out to a place they barely knew, for an experiment - and a whole lot of pain and torture - that would most likely kill them?