"What!? Fucking sweet! Did you find a fuck-off huge meteor or somethin'?"

Hailey is meanwhile collecting bits of iron and heaps of coal.

"Yeah! Huge meteor in a pit of lava. I'm not going over there, there'll be safer meteors — but still! That's huge."

"It really fuckin' is. That's the absolute best high-tier storage mod."

She finishes the vein she was mining and climbs back out of the hole.

"I'm gonna head back to the house, start cooking down all this ore. Meet me there?"

"Will do!" 

Evenstar reorients, realizing that she's heading towards the wrong stand of cherry trees, and heads back towards home. 

Hailey makes it back first, and throws the ore she collected into the furnace she places in their base. By the time Evenstar makes it back, she's back on the surface, digging out a rectangle of stone to make a farm.

Evenstar comes up on Hailey by the side of the farm with a small smile on her face, and gently hugs her from behind, leaning in to kiss her shoulder. 

"Hey, love." 

She blushes and startles a bit.

"Hiya, dork. You're awful cute. I'm digging out a field."

She gestures at the rectangle of stone, slowly being filled in with dirt, a trench down the middle to irrigate it. "Wanna get some water?"

"For sure! Do you have a bucket for me?"

Hailey hands her a freshly-crafted bucket. "Yep. Thanks, babe."

And Evenstar wanders off, humming to herself as she goes over to the well to fetch water.

She returns a minute later with her bucket in hand and turns it out into the channel Hailey's been building, then watches as it spreads halfway-down the row of blocks. It's kind of cool to watch minecraft water physics in action. 

She waves to Hailey and goes back for a second bucket. 

She could get used to this, actually. Helping out her girlfriends with building things. Creating something together. She's always been a sucker for farming in minecraft.

Hazel (for it is she) continues on to spread the water all the way down the channel using the source block duplication trick, and finishes with a warm smile at Hailey. 

"— Just so you know, it's Hazel now. I was kind of blurry for a while there — being in person makes it harder to front — but I think it's solidly me now. Farming in minecraft does that." 

In the end, she's left with a long filled-in row of water, flanked by soil on both sides. It seems clear Hailey is still filling in the farmland a bit.

"Good to see ya, Hazel. I've got to collect some more dirt and fill this in the rest of the way, then we can start planting."

She keeps placing down coarse dirt and smoothing it out into normal dirt with her hoe.

"Good to see you too!" 

Hazel goes over to the closest area of dirt, pulls out her stone shovel, and starts earthmoving. It's not too long of a project. 

She comes back a few minutes later and tosses Hailey a stack of dirt from her inventory. "Here you go, and take this too; I know you've got a furnace somewhere around here." She follows up the dirt with a full stack and a half of iron ore she tore out of the hot springs biome. "I wasn't just wandering off because I'm ADD, the pickings were really surprisingly good."

"Wow! That's enough to set us up for a little while! Nicely done, cuties."

She starts placing down the extra stack of dirt Hazel gave her.

"I'll go start smelting it as soon as this is done. Crops are a bit more urgent."

"Yeah, for sure. Do we have wheat seeds yet? There was wheat in the basket but I don't think you can turn that back into seeds, because minecraft physics."

"Nope. Can't do it with beetroot, either, so we'll need to be on the lookout for those if we wanna do a complete set of crops. And if you get enough straw with that knife of yours at the same time, we can make a bunch of Farmer's Delight ropes to hang around the sides of the staircase, make it safe in case we fall off."

She places the last block of dirt, and then her hoe breaks in the process of starting to till it.

"Looks like I need new tools anyway, so I'll go down and throw the iron in, make fresh tools, and get the crops, all at once. Mind getting the wheat seeds?"

"Not at all." 

Hazel heads back to the grassier area of the sakura forest and starts whacking grass with her knife. Mostly she gets a lot of nothing, but occasionally she gets seeds or straw. 

After she's got ten or so wheat seeds she heads back to the farm, only to realize that Hailey's been busy without her and already planted most of the crops. 

She plants her wheat seeds too anyway, and feels the book buzz on her hip again. 

The farm's really starting to come along now.

She looks up at the sky. The sun is starting to get pretty low, now. It won't be long before nightfall. 

"I'm heading inside," she says to Hailey. "I need to get something to eat, and night's falling soon. We should be safely inside when the undead start spawning." 

On her way down the perilous staircase she puts in a few torches from her stock of coal, lighting the staircase so it's a little less dangerous. 

Then she stops in the safe room, and sits on her side of the bed. Pulling from the stock of wheat in the chest, she crafts some fresh bread and eats a little to fill in the gaps. It's a bland meal, but much better than starving — and she's not actually all that hungry, even after all day outside hiking around. It might be because of how her body is different here, or just because the days here are shorter... hard to tell. 

She finishes planting the rest of the crops, gives a brief satisfied smile to her field of soon-to-be-food, and heads down to join Hazel in their room.

"Got everything planted. Nice rows, to take advantage of Minecraft's row-farming bonus, with the berries off to the side."

She sits down on the bed next to her girlfriend.

Hazel flushes slightly, and then shakes her head as if pushing away a thought.

She smiles at Hailey. "I think I want to go through the book a little more before skipping the night, see what's happened over the work we've done."

Hailey hums curiously and nods. "Yeah, sounds like a good plan."

She leans closer and follows along as Hazel opens the book. "I'm curious what all is in here."

"Let me see..." 

Hazel opens her book to the first page she can. 

It falls open to an index that she's pretty sure didn't exist before. 

"Whoa, all these different chapters..." 

She flips to First Steps, and is confronted with the familiar web of quests that they've been working on today. 

"Okay, so we've been working our way through First Steps. So blue means that we've done a quest from the chapter. Let's see what all the other chapters hold..."

She flips to Entanglement, and looks at the quests in it. 

"So Entanglement is the Applied Energistics chapter," Hazel muses. "Interesting. So each of these chapters maybe represents a mod or a theme...?"

She looks over at Hailey. "What chapter do you want to look at next?"

She frowns. "Sulfur & Flame looks concerning. The name sounds like the Nether."