MindCrack Adventures

Random - Friendship Forged in Fire (And Lava. And TNT. And...)

A/N: I've recently watched some of Vechs' Inferno Mines dev com. (Yeah, the chipmunk style one. Evil laughs are always more fun in chipmunk voice.) and I decided to revisit some of the early days Vechs and Zisteau's friendship. Those were good days. If you didn't mind a TON of swearing.

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 Vechs had never been what you would call a 'nice' man. Sure, he liked people, enjoyed giving presents and surprising his friends. But there was something to be said for killing them, too. And laughing at their misery. Over. And over. And over.

 Later, he would never quite be able to explain why he had picked Zisteau. Of all the Minecrafters, why pick the pigman to test his map? He couldn't say. What he could say beyond a shadow of a doubt was that he never for a moment regetted inviting the 'lava expert' to the Sea of Flame. The crazy pigman would be the one to get lost, going from Sea of Flame to Kaizo Caverns, to Infernal Sky, to Legendary, never seeming to be able to escape.

 It was then that Vechs decided to show himself.

 Again, why? He couldn't say. Certainly Zisteau's hours of cursing and swearing, mostly directed at the mapper, weren't the reason. But when Zisteau returned to the monument with the final wool, black, Vechs was there waiting for him.

 Oddly, Zisteau seemed to have been expecting him.

 "Welcome," he said with a grimly satisfied smile, "to Kill the Runner."

 But Vechs didn't do what Zisteau had expected. As the pair plunged, seemingly, into the abyss, he only laughed. It was a mad, cackling laugh. The one Zisteau had come to expect from the apparently derranged mapper who taunted people with sticks and TNT.

 "Silly Zisteau. You can't escape," he told him and the voice was smug, self-satisfied, confident.

 It seemed he would be right.

 Inferno Mines was yet to come.

~~~

 Zisteau stared around the bedrock platform, thinking about how far things had come. Far enough for him to be chosen as one of Vechs' map beta testers. Lava flowed down around the the edges of the cavern. Typical. Zisteau's finger's twitched unconsciously. He wished he had a bucket. He was a lava expert after all.

 "It's been a long time since I've done a - Snowman - a CTM map," Zisteau muttered to himself. "Guess we'd better get started."

~~~

 Zisteau felt the hot molten rock close over his head. Some things never changed, did they, he thought. He'd not even gone halfway and already he'd been blown up by TNT, shot by skeletons, nawed on by zombies, burned by fire, and this was not the first time he'd fallen into lava. And while he still swore at Vechs as he had always done, he was laughing this time. Theirs was a friendship forged in the fire of Vechs' evil desire to kill other Minecrafters.

 And it would likely be blown up, burned, and killed more than once more on Zisteau's trip through the Inferno Mines.

 This was going to be a long trip.