"I thought I knew what to expect, but they fell instead of just fading away!" Evenstar rubs the back of her head. "There must be some lumberjack mod installed, I guess."

She nods thoughtfully. "Yeah, must be. Didn't trigger with hands or a stick, but let's try an axe."

She chops the next birch tree with her wooden axe, and the whole thing tumbles apart into easily collectable log blocks after several solid hits.

"Yeah, definitely a lumberjack mod. That's convenient."

Evenstar goes over to Hailey's crafting table and crafts her own wooden pick and axe. 

"Let's see about getting together full sets of stone tools, like the quest in the book said. This biome with all the calcite and basalt is going to be a pain for that, but I think there's some blackstone mixed in we could use."

Hailey nods and jogs agreeably off to a patch of blackstone, digging her way into it. "It sure is fuckin' surreal that I can clear a one meter cube of stone so fast," she comments as she mines.

"Yeah. Minecraft physics may be weird, but for making a lot out of a little they're actually pretty convenient." 

Evenstar helps out with the mining, and incidentally clears some gravel, getting a piece of flint in her inventory. 

"I have an idea. We have all these advanced crops, right? Tomatoes, rice, cabbages, onions. I bet that means that farmer's delight is 'on the server.' And if that's the case, I think I can craft this flint into a proper knife. Call it an experiment." 

Evenstar puts her materials into the crafting grid, and a moment later has a gleaming sharp flint knife. 

"There we go. It worked!" 

"Nice!"

Hailey blushes faintly at the sight of the knife, but dismisses those thoughts. Save that kind of thinking for only if they turn out to have resurrection on this server. She's not eager to let either of them take the risk of finding out.

The quest book vibrates with each new stone tool they complete, and when they've got the standard five, they get another completed quest.

"Hey, sweet. Iron ingot for getting the standard set of five."

But as she's saying that, a zombie wanders out from under some trees and shambles toward them, catching fire as it goes.

"Zombie!"

She fumbles for a moment to get her sword up in time, and gets briefly burned by a flaming punch from the creature, but slays it quickly enough.

"Ow. Fire hurts."

Evenstar manages to land a couple knife stabs as well, contributing to the zombie's quick demise. 

It is almost underwhelming how fast it dies. 

Then she catches her breath and gives Hailey a small smile. "You're okay though? Not injured?" 

"Nowhere but my health bar. I'll live."

She pats herself down just to be sure, and nods.

"I'm glad."

She smiles. "Seems pretty incontrovertible we're in Minecraft at this point, if there's zombies and they burn in daylight on top of all the other stuff we've seen." 

She opens her inventory and pulls out her quest book, and retrieves the reward for her full set of stone tools — a single iron ingot. 

"One iron ingot. Not even two so I could make a sword. Or three for a pick or a bucket. One iron ingot."

Evenstar sighs and shakes her head.

"I feel toyed with."

"Honestly, yeah. It's like they're trying not to break progression too much. I got one too, so between us we could make one iron sword. At this point, though, it's also looking like this is the kind of pack we'd make. Create, a worldgen mod, sticks on the ground, falling trees, Farmer's Delight..."

She shakes her head.

"You got a full set of stone tools?"

"Yeah." Evenstar taps her chin. "I'm thinking it's time for a furnace, and then some surface mining to try and get more iron. There's a lot of exposed stone in this hot springs biome."

"Agreed." She nods and gets to mining, first for enough blackstone to make a furnace with room to spare, then just looking for bits of exposed iron and coal.

Evenstar follows along, darting from patch of ore to patch of ore. The biome is pretty big, and close enough to the shelter that it's relatively safe to futz around in. 

Evenstar wanders to and fro, checking the boundaries of the biome. "Straw!" she announces on cutting some tall grass with her knife, followed by calls of "iron!" and "coal!" and one occurrence of "Cave! Not going in there right now." She kisses Hailey in a field of sunflowers, and spends time with her in simple, rote work. The calcite breaks satisfyingly fast even with stone tools, and there's so much iron and coal to gather...

"Okay, I got a bunch of iron together!" She smiles and looks over her shoulder at where Hailey ought to be. 

Hailey is not there. 

"Hey, where are you?" she calls. "I thought you were right behind me..." 

"Huh. I'm over here to the north of you? Could hear your voice just fine, despite the distance."

Evenstar lowers her voice. "Huh. Same. It seems like we might be... 'in a voice call', more or less. Can you still hear me?" 

"Your voice, at least. Not the little noises of your movement or mining."

"That's a little convenient, but it would be nice if this place would stop surprising me." 

Evenstar sighs and nods. "Alright, I'll finish up out here. The mining is really good."

She looks around, sees a stand of cherry trees off in the distance, and starts walking that direction.

And she comes up on the side of a giant crater full of lava, with a black stone meteorite in the center.

"WE HAVE APPLIED ENERGISTICS!", she yells at the top of her lungs.