MCSM: A World Unwound [OLD]

~Chapter Thirteen~

"In a way, Jacky served as the tipping point for this whole disaster. Nothing can be directly blamed on her, but she played a hand nonetheless. Even as a young girl, she was ferocious and arrogant, always looking for trouble. She was a griefer in every way, but was just smart enough to avoid blame being put on her. Jacky was, and still is, only out to cause problems. I'll...explain that more later on.

"Though we each had our individual skills, we were also gifted architects. Otto and Flavian began calling us the 'Great Builders', and it stuck. I was never very partial to it, but it doesn't matter now. While our group spent a seemingly endless amount of time exploring and creating, the rest of our world was changing as well. People were obsessed with advancing and bettering the world, but all they did was make things worse. Most of our adventures were purely to distract us from our world being torn out from under our feet."

"What exactly was happening?" Olivia asked, bringing Soren out of his fog of memories. The orange-haired man paused for a moment, then continued speaking.

"People are destructive by nature. They can destroy amazing things without realizing what they're doing. There was little to no order to my world, and everyone who was caught in the middle would pay a steep price. People would make creations that seemed like they could help, but would only make things a thousand times worse."

"Like PAMA." Jesse interjected. Soren nodded at her. "Yes, precisely. We were all so fed up with what was going on. We wanted a real escape, not just one of our routine expeditions. And that's when we found the Command Block."

"Wait wait wait. You just found it? How on earth does that work?" Cindy asked suspiciously. Soren frowned, but he looked more thoughtful than annoyed. "My world was very, very strange. The civilization that I grew up in was new and young, with only a few generations before my own. However if you searched in the right places, you could find older things. Items that had to be from the past, and yet they looked like they were from the future. They were concealed in temples and monuments that were hidden naturally, in mountains and underground. But it looked as though they had been obscured by time, not by human hands. It was all very mysterious. Few others cared about these wonders, other than my past friends and I. Therefore, the hidden structures were ours to rule. We found many a strange relic in those unseen sanctuaries, but the Command Block was the most life-changing. We knew it was powerful right from the beginning, but we had no idea it's possibilities or limits.

"I don't remember who originally had the idea to create a portal. It might've been Jacky, but it just as easily could've been Mevia. Or both of them, who knows. Whoever it was, they meant it as a joke. An innocent, childish gag to make the rest of us laugh. But it worked. We accidently created a portal to another world, and on the other side was endless possibilities. We explored, learned new things. It was incredible. That one little 'joke' created an infinite array of adventures, right at the tips of our fingers.

"We made more portals, more worlds. We learned more than anyone else on the Overworld, but never told a soul. The Network was our secret, and we intended to keep it that way. It was Hadrian's idea to create the Atlas, to store the information of our travels. Because of that, I'm afraid he became rather possessive of it, as Jesse found out."

"Hhm. No kidding." Jesse huffed under her breath. Soren paid her no attention, focusing on his journey into the past. "There were several debates over the origins of the worlds. Had they been created by the Command Block, or had they already existed, and we just created the bridges between them? If so, where had they come from? I always thought that there may be a 'higher force' at work, that may have influenced us."

"A higher force." Maya echoed doubtfully. Soren sent an annoyed look in her direction. "Yes. It all depends on your beliefs."

"Okay, so what happened? Yay, adventures and learning. When did things start to go wrong?" Myst prodded.