A jagged gash opens in the air, silent and sinuous, first slashing a rough curve through reality and then spreading open farther as though grasped and pulled by some vast alien force. It twists through space, shuddering and pulsing like a creature in pain, wider and wider until—at last—a person tumbles through and it snaps shut all at once with a thunderous crack.
After a bit she'll reach Technoblade's house; past that is her concert hall and mostly-finished house; past that is civilization. All of civilization is pretty small, now that she has Expanse Of Tundra to compare it to.
Ooh, and now that the only thing she has to lose is her architecture notes, you know what she can do?
Take notes on ALL the architecture!!!!!
There are lots of random cobblestone paths in the sky. There's a floating cobblestone-and-concrete "YOU <3 LITTLE PENIS". There are various ugly square buildings. There are a few blocky statues made with colored concrete. There are occasional craters or floating blocks. There's a group of buildings built on stilts. There are a couple upside-down T structures, which she may or may not recognize as extremely crude penises. Some architecture samples:
She jots down teenage boys under the Influences heading and stares in amazement at the blushing duckling. The Influences heading is otherwise pretty sparsely populated, because a lot of the aesthetic here seems genuinely alien. Hedgerows are a recognizable phenomenon, but what on earth is with those glass walls with the vertical black bars - well, they're not on earth, are they? Maybe that's the answer, maybe this is just how architecture develops given the materials and constraints at hand.
Halfway through scribbling down an excited bit of speculation about the flying cross with eyes, she pauses, thinks about how closely her notes have skirted revealing who she is and where she came from, and switches midsentence to writing in Greek. Hopefully that will confound anyone who steals her notebook and reads it to gain insight into her mysteries.
She can keep looking at architecture, if she wants! Have some more architecture:
As she's looking at the last house, a mixed-race person with a mask covering most of their face and hair comes along, takes a fish out of the pond, and attempts to burn down the house; a teenage boy with a beanie and a slightly older person with white goggles stop them. The three of them run off to a different location pretty quickly.
That castle is magnificent and she must explore it as soon as she is done getting outside views of all these places. (The hill house is so charming! She's glad it wasn't burned down.)
There can continue to be places, then.
(When she’s looking at the third image, she sees the group of three again; this time, goggles man and beanie man are trying to take down the walls around the red tree while the third person tries to get them to stop.)
Note to self, if you ever want to build something really good, build it at the end of a month-long jaunt into the wilderness. And tell no one.
It’s… pretty empty, honestly. There are a lot of chests and flamingos made of wool and wood. It’s mostly lit by torches, although there’s a bridge lit primarily by lanterns. There’s a throne of gold blocks.
Interesting use of space. But it makes sense that with so few people in such a large world with such ease of building and such relatively minimal survival needs, you'd have plenty of places built mostly to be looked at. Still, it makes her want to build a castle that's properly full of things, as full of things as a real lived-in castle would be. Lived in by something other than pink woolen birds.
Okay, she has investigated local architecture, it's time to traipse off into the wilderness again—in a completely new direction—and experiment. Today's experiment: build the minimum viable tower, basically just a ring of stairs around a central pillar, and just kind of keep going until it gets dark or she gets bored. It will probably get dark before she gets bored.
It does in fact get dark before she gets bored! It’s definitely more annoying to do things without good tools, though— without a fire aspect sword, she has to cook the animals she kills for food, and getting materials to build with is much slower without efficiency-enchanted netherite tools.
Irksome, but in a sense valuable; it's always better to know the true worth of your materials. She'll have a much greater appreciation, later, for how easy it is to build with advanced equipment.
In the meantime, she puts a bed on a little outcropping at the top of her stairway to heaven and sleeps in it. As soon as she's up, she resumes working.
Nobody bothers her.
If she goes up high enough, she eventually won’t be able to build any higher.
Wow, there's all kinds of thematic implications to that.
She immediately finds the tallest hill within sight of her initial tower, and builds another one starting from there. Is the height limit absolute, or does it vary with the height of the terrain?
"Once again, I have found Heaven," she tells the air. "Surprisingly dull place, really."
Okay, you know what she needs? She needs a bedroom that is as obnoxious as possible to enter while she's sleeping in it. She doesn't care that much about having her bedroom ransacked or destroyed while she's not in it, but being woken up with an axe was irritating.
Treehouse at the top of a heavenstair? Treehouse at the top of a heavenstair. Except then someone looking for her could just climb the huge obvious tower. She needs some kind of collapsible heavenstair, and there aren't... really... collapsible entities... in this universe.
(Are there not? What has she seen that might work?)
She looks around for an ocean to build a heavenstair from. And, while she's at it, looks around for any natural phenomena that might be slightly more collapsible than the average solid object. Hmm, she should experiment with actual ladders, see how easy they are to collect behind her on her way up...
Here's an ocean! Also, it's not a natural phenomena, but there were definitely some more hollow and spindly-looking setups around the still-in-construction parts of the stilt city? She can also experiment with ladders. She may or may not have noticed that columns of water are often used in architecture rather than stairs, but that still raises the problem of how to set it up so that nobody else can use it.
Oh, columns of water have possibilities. She detours into an exploration of how water works—buckets are a thing, right, let's start bucketing and see what happens—and determines, eventually, that she can in fact set up a platform atop a pillar with a waterfall for a ladder, swim up the waterfall, scoop up the source of the waterfall, and be all alone atop her pillar.
Some of those cobblestone paths were just kind of floating in midair.
She removes the pillar from this equation.
Okay, now she's getting somewhere.
Off she trots to find the deepest part of that ocean—if it's too close to civilization for her comfort, she'll look for a deeper ocean later—build a dirt path out into the middle of it, build a heavenstair at the end of the path, and... honestly probably have to go to sleep before she's halfway done. Maybe this time she'll work through the night.
The chat mostly isn't particularly interesting or even sensical without context, but there is something that might catch her eye significantly before night falls:
Ranboo joined the game
<Punz> HUH
<Punz> HUH
<Punz> HUH
<Punz> HUH
<Punz> HUH
<Punz> HUH
<Punz> HUH
<Punz> HUH
<Punz> HUH
<Dream> wtf
<Ranboo> UHH
<Thunder1408> this is probably not good
<Ranboo> eh
<Ranboo> its fine
<Ranboo> time to take over
<Dream> wtf
Ranboo was shot by Dream using [Nightmare]
<Ranboo> is it because of the weapon
<Dream> just had to give you your first death