Well, nobody's at spawn, so they don't see that happening.

What they do see (and what Kite becomes aware of as well) is:

Kite joined the game

<Dream> wtf

<Nihachu> hello Kite!

<Dream> who are you

...what.

"What."

The trees, unfortunately, do not answer her question.

<Tubbo_> o/

<Kite> what

A man in full armor appears and kills her with a sword! She reappears immediately. It hurts a bit, but not much; definitely not as much as you would expect dying to hurt.

Kite was slain by Dream using [Nightmare]

<Technoblade> L

<Thunder1408> welcome to the dream smp

For a moment she's too stunned to react.

Then she starts laughing.

Then, still giggling, she whips a knife out of her sleeve and jabs it into the stranger's throat, this being the most vulnerable-looking spot she could identify.

Dream was slain by Kite

<Technoblade> LMAOOOOOOOOOO

<Technoblade> CANON

<Technoblade> CANON

<Technoblade> CANON

(The man--presumably Dream--'s body has disappeared, but a lot of items are scattered on the ground, far more than he could reasonably be carrying if the world worked how she's used to it working.)

A good moment to grab all his stuff and bolt? She thinks so.

He's got a lot of really nice stuff, as well as some food and a lot of random blocks of wood and stone. A lot of the combat-useful things--his armor, his sword, his axe--glow purple and are named "Nightmare".

Kite has completed the challenge [Cover Me in Debris]

<Dream> WTF!!!!!

<Dream> she didn't drop anything and one hit from an iron sword should NOT have been enough to kill me

<Technoblade> sure, dream

She reaches a portal that glows the same purple as Dream's former weapons; there's also a path leading away from it.

<Kite> That wasn't a sword.

<Kite> Swords are bigger.

There's a bridge over the water and then a rectangular building with paths leading in all four directions away from it! (This is the building pictured in the icon.)

<Dream> what WAS it then, it wasn't an axe

<Kite> I think that's for me to know and you to wonder about in the dark hours of the night.

Well, if her goal is "away from civilization", she might want to consider going off the path. The path just keeps going with various buildings until it reaches water, at least in the direction she's picked. She can't run the whole way either, at least not without eating something.

<Technoblade> KEKW

<Technoblade> hey new person what do you think of anarchy

That's weird, she should be in better shape than this—she slows down, panting—why is she hungry, if she ran herself into the ground she should be about to throw up—she scans the skyline again and heads for the greenest place she can see, or, failing that, off the path and parallel to the shore. Away from where she started. Away from where she started is really the most important part.

There's a forest right past the water; it looks like a river, not an ocean, and thin enough that it shouldn't be too hard to swim through. 

<Kite> The rule, not of kings or queens or money or power, not of people or laws, but of nothing.

<Kite> But what is the rule of nothing if not the rule of power by another name? Who rules without a ruler? The man with the biggest stick.

The forest: is a forest.

If she encounters animals, she can get cooked meat (as well as leather/feathers/wool, as applicable) by hitting them with the sword she got from Dream.

<Tubbo_> that's what she said

<TommyInnit> GOTTEM

Thankfully, swimming works better than running does at the moment. She notes for the future that if she needs to bolt again she should try water.

The first time she encounters an animal she just flees from it; the second time, she is reminded of her inexplicable hunger and stops to check if any of the stuff she Mysteriously Possesses is food. Objects appear and disappear in her hands. With some trial and error she manages to put on the armor and hold the sword. She does not manage to get all the way through cataloguing her Mysterious Possessions before she spots a third animal approaching.

She hits it with her stolen sword, just to see what happens.

Cooked meat! Wool! It floats just off the ground in the same way that Dream's items did when she killed him.

<Technoblade> i'd say the man with the biggest stick is retired at the moment but you just killed dream without gear, pretty sure the biggest stick on the server is yours

<Kite> I confess I've no interest in being hailed as a queen. Particularly not based on the size of my stick.

She can do that for as long as she wants, or at least until she gets tired of it.

<Technoblade> that's good, i'm not a fan of queens

<Technoblade> kinda comes with the whole anarchy thing

<TommyInnit> YORUE A WOMAN?????

<Kite> Then it seems you and I have no quarrel.

<Kite> For now.

She can't sleep in a treetop. She does get tired at an approximately normal rate; it's uncorrelated with how much she eats or runs. Day seems to pass at a normal rate as well.

(Also, she's got lots of food in her Mysterious Possessions, once she finishes cataloguing them.)

<Technoblade> nice talking to you, let me know if you ever get interested in anarchy

<TommyInnit> ALL WOMENA RE QUEENS!!!!!!!!!!!

When her attempt at a treetop nap fails conclusively, she climbs down and keeps jogging, sustaining her pace with stolen snacks.

After not too much more of that she gets bored enough to sit down and try to stack blocks of random materials like children's toys.

She can only juggle a few things at a time without putting them down and making them large and non-floaty. If she stacks the wood planks she has, she can get:

- sticks

- a crafting table!

If she puts things on the crafting table, they stay small and floaty; she can fit nine of them, compared to the four she can hold at once. It also comes with an attached recipe book.

There are such treatises on the laws of nature in her future.

She constructs a crafting table, and puts it down so she can try using it, and...

...regards it suspiciously...

...and tries to put down some random materials next to it.

Now her crafting table is tucked up into the corner of a big blocky stone wall.

Hmm. Yes. That would tend to yield structures of the kind she saw in her mad flight.

All right, time to sit down and read this recipe book cover to cover.

Crafting recipes!

There is so much.

There is... so much.

There is, perhaps, too much.

Nope, she sat down to read this whole book and that is what she will do.

—oh! A bed! Beds exist! This bodes well. Does she have the materials for one?

She does!

She pauses in her reading to make a bed and tuck it away among her Mysterious Possessions, and then goes back to plodding through the list of all the things that can be made at a crafting table. She's going to forget half of this but she wants to have at least glanced over it once before she proceeds.

And eventually it will be nighttime.

When the sun goes down she leaves her crafting table where it is, climbs the tallest tree she can find on short notice, awkwardly plops a bed on top of its canopy, and attempts to sleep there.

That works fine!

And what terrors does the morning bring?

...Well, there are some zombies and skeletons wandering around on the ground, but they seem to be on fire now?

Pretty! She watches them burn for a bit, then exits her tree.

All right. Enough fucking around. It is time...

...to do architecture.

First it is time to figure out how picking up blocks works. Does she need to use tools on them or can she just wrench them loose with her bare hands?

She can wrench them loose with her bare hands. (Or, well, most of them, but she's not near any obsidian, debris, diamonds, gold, etc., so she doesn't really have a way of telling the difference.) It's definitely faster to use tools, though, and if she uses Dream's glowing tools then she can get More Blocks Per Block.

<Kite> Esteemed colleagues, today I will show you wonders the likes of which you could never have imagined.

<Dream> oh?

<Technoblade> so like are you gonna elaborate on that or

<WilburSoot> oh i can't wait to see them!!! :D

<Kite> Well, that depends.

<Kite> Can anyone here sing?

<WilburSoot> yeah!!

<Kite> Then perhaps my wonders won't be as unimaginable as I thought.

<Kite> At least not yet. Give me time.

<WilburSoot> that's alright! imaginable wonders are good too!!

<Kite> I'll prepare a concert. And a concert hall.

While she builds, people continue talking in the Mysterious Text Thing, mostly to each other. Occasionally people die or are killed. A sample:

<WilburSoot> hi!

<WilburSoot> i stole this bell

<WilburSoot> from the prime church

<WilburSoot> hi

<Tubbo_> hi

<WilburSoot> i exploded

<WilburSoot> but im okay

<Tubbo_> glad

<WilburSoot> hey phil

<WilburSoot> the creeper blew a hole in the wall

<WilburSoot> what is this

<Ph1LzA> vc son

<WilburSoot> wait this is a seriosu thing

<WilburSoot> i am okay

<WilburSoot> dont worry

<WilburSoot> i saw nothing

<WilburSoot> i dont want serious talks thank :)

<Kite> Gentlemen, scholars, and those who are neither,

<Kite> The Hall is complete.

<Kite> Not my best work, but it's functional.

<ItsFundy> cool cool cool

<ItsFundy> so like

<ItsFundy> where… is it

<DropsByPonk> ^^^

<Kite> I don't know the names of any of your landmarks.

<Kite> There's a mansion on a bay with a road leading straight to its door. If you take that road to the mansion, then continue past it across the river and into the forest, then turn right, you should get here in short order.

<Kite> I must ask the audience to hold all friendly greetings until after the show.

The first person to arrive is an anthropomorphic pig! Now that she’s not being murdered, she might notice that there are floating letters above him, declaring his name to be Technoblade. “So like, do we gotta sing, or are you going to be doing that for us?” He turns slightly and addresses the air. “Yeah I know, but eh, whatever, I’ve got all three lives left and she seems cool, stop freaking out.”

Kite is standing on the stage, looking slightly down on the rows of seating. She tried some tricks with lighting to properly highlight herself, but she isn't satisfied with how they came out; she only looks a little bit dramatically ethereal. Also, she should really have a costume, but she has no idea how to make new clothes.

"I will be singing," she assures him. Her accent is unfamiliar, with aspects that sound British or maybe Australian and aspects that sound American Southern.

“Works for me.” (His accent is American; his voice is notably though not entirely monotone.)

The second person in is the masked man who she has a mutual-killing relationship with! “I still have no idea how you killed me,” he complains. 

“I dunno, Dream, seemed kinda straightforward to me. She stabbed you with weapons and you died.”

“Shut up.”

(He also has an American accent. Floating over his head is “Dream”.)

<Kite> Is anyone else on the way?

<Tubbo_> yes

And indeed, not long after, a group arrives together! There’s an anthropomorphic fox, four teenage boys, an adult man with fancy clothes and ruined-looking black wings, a girl with dark hair and bleached bangs, and a semi-transparent grayscale ghost wearing a yellow sweater. They’re very loud and have varyingly European accents. 

<Kite> Last call. If you don't tell me you're coming, I can't hold the show for you.

<BadBoyHalo> I’m coming!

<The_Eret> me as well

<CaptainPuffy> omw 

More people trickle in: a woman with sheep ears and exceedingly fluffy hair, four men who look to be in their early twenties, and a group consisting of:

- a strange fluffy green being

- a 9-foot-tall demon

- a man who looks to be made entirely of diamonds

- an anthropomorphic cat

<Dream> george u coming?

“He’s probably asleep,” someone says. There are general murmurs of agreement. 

“I think that’s everyone, then.”

"Welcome, welcome. My first song is an old favourite from the college where I grew up."

And she steps forward into the best-lit spot on the stage and takes a deep breath and sings.

Her voice is, if not professionally trained, definitely competing on a level playing field with ones that are. The song itself seems to be... some kind of operatic treatment of a drinking song? There's a catchy tune that's easy to pick up, with all sorts of unnecessarily pretty embellishments around it; and clever lyrics doing wordplay and double entendres that are about half straightforward and half totally incomprehensible but still manage to be pretty hilarious even when it is deeply unclear what exactly is dirty about a mouse taking tea with a mongoose. Her tone of voice does wonders to bridge the gap.

The teenage boys are so entertained by the double entendres. (So are some of the adults and nonhumans, but it's less universal.) The seating is fairly sparsely used; some people are trying to do parkour to get to various places in the room, some are pacing around, and some are using the provided boats to chase each other around very slowly.

Everyone claps and whoops at the end, though.

She grins and bows for their applause.

"Thank you, thank you—and the next one is—"

Her repertoire is pretty varied, ranging all over the place from the operatic drinking song to a sappy love ballad, a song about growing old that's full of bittersweet nostalgia, a really raunchy love ballad, and a peppy little tune about going for a walk on a spring morning. Her voice is great and her stage presence is fantastic but where she really shines is in mood and expressiveness; from the humour of that drinking song to the sweetness of the sappy love song, she pours her heart into everything she sings and makes the feeling of the music come alive.

(She's paying close attention to how her audience reacts, keeping tabs on their patience and which songs they enjoy. And which idioms they find baffling, although it's harder to edit a tracklist on the fly for that.)

Anything funny is a major hit, and the high-energy songs do better at keeping the audience's attention; their patience is extremely low, honestly, although it's clear that they're trying. They do have clear individual preferences: the nine-foot-tall demon (labeled BadBoyHalo) covers his ears when anything gets too raunchy, the grayscale ghost (labeled WilburSoot) seems to have unlimited patience but prefers happy songs to sad ones, and the man with the ruined wings (labeled Ph1LzA) tears up a little at the bittersweet song about growing old. (Dream, with his mask, is the hardest to read.)

Her final song lures them in with a happy, high-energy first verse about a boy leaving home to seek his fortune and a catchy chorus about marching down the road ("with not a thought in the world of where to go from here!"), then takes the boy on a vividly described journey to manhood where all his innocent optimism is worn away by loss and betrayal and the disillusionment of realizing that the army he joined fights for nothing but its lordly general's personal gain; each rendition of the chorus gets a little slower and sadder until at last she draws it out like a funeral march as the wounded soldier limps off the bloody battlefield "with not a thought in the world of where to go from here..."

She holds the note as she bows and leaves the stage; it echoes mournfully all around the room.

After the first verse, Dream stops doing parkour around the room in order to listen. The ghost keeps putting his hands on his ears, taking them off, and then putting them back on. The demon is openly crying on the shoulder of Diamond Man (who is labeled Skeppy); the teenage girl with the dark hair and bleached bangs (labeled Nihachu) is also openly crying. A tall blond teenage boy (labeled TommyInnit) wipes aggressively and repeatedly at his eyes like he's trying to hide his tears from view. A few other people--Thunder1408, The_Eret, and awesamdude--have to brush away a tear at the finale.

There's a moment of silence after it ends. They clap, but there isn't really any whooping for this one. 

The ghost takes his hands off his ears. "That was really fun! You know, she's a really good singer."

"Fuck you too, man."

"What did I do?"

"Nothing, it's fine. You alright, big man?"

"Definitely. I am ALWAYS alright. Nobody's ever heard of TommyInnit crying, and it's because he simply doesn't. Crying? Nah. That doesn't sound like something I would do." He wipes fiercely at his eyes again. 

Elsewhere in the room:

"Pretty good concert."

"I enjoyed it. I--"

"Mm?"

"--Miss Wilbur, I guess. Even though he's still kind of here." He glances over at the ghost and sighs. 

There are a couple of other conversations happening as well-- the fluffy green man says "I wish they didn't-- I wish they didn't understand. I know that it's not how anything works, but I just... wish I could make pumpkin pie for everyone and... make it better." ; the tall demon is slowly calming down but still hiccuping a little with crying-- but it's hard to follow them all at once.

Eventually, people start trickling out.

<Kite> I'm glad the concert was a success!

<Kite> I'll have to think about planning my next event.

Dream is keeping an eye out for her nameplate; if she uncrouches while in the area, he’ll see her. He’s not actively searching, though. 

<WilburSoot> it was fun!

<WilburSoot> let me know if you ever need a duet partner or an accompanist and I can learn something 

<Kite> I would love that! Collaboration is one of the best things about art.

<WilburSoot> make a stone button and ill be able to call you

<WilburSoot> or you can just visit l’manberg, thats where i live

Stone button, stone button... she retreats to her house and looks up the recipe for a stone button.

She just needs 1 stone for that. 

Perfect.

...as for how this enables communication, she's a little lost. And very reluctant to say so.

It rings! Kind of like a phone, if she’s familiar with phones. 

Well that's a sound. Perhaps more useful sounds will ensue if she interacts with it in some sort of way?

“Hello! I’m Ghostbur!”

"Hello, Ghostbur! Which of my songs did you like best?"

“I liked the one about going for a walk! It was really good. A few of us sing but we don’t actually have a concert hall, that was a good idea!”

"Oh, in that case I'm glad I didn't succumb to the impulse to burn it down on my way out. I should build a better one for next time, though, the acoustics were only barely adequate."

“Well, if it’s built out of flammable material, it’s sure to be burnt down sooner or later!” He sounds perfectly cheerful about this. “I can make some note blocks or jukeboxes for future iterations if you want?”

Probably it is safe to let this specific person know that she is not an all-knowing fae creature of some sort.

"How do those work?"

“So, note blocks make a sound when you hit them a certain way, and they change what sound they make by half-steps if you hit them a different way. And they can sound really different depending on what sort of block you put them on, a note block on stone and a note block on wood sound different even if they’re both tuned to the same pitch. I think you can also do something with them and redstone? I don’t know, I’m not a redstoner. I’d ask Tubbo but Tubbo’s pretty busy recently. Maybe Sam would help? I don’t know. …Jukeboxes are pretty simple, you just put discs in them.”

"And how do discs work?" She is not going to ask if it's like a gramophone. Dream didn't know what a knife was.

“They have little bumps on them, I think, that make the diamond in the jukebox vibrate to play songs? I don’t really know how they work in detail.”

That sounds more like a music box than a gramophone. Interesting possibilities there. Except— "How do you make discs; how do you decide what song they'll play?" All the things in this world so far have had such specific and exact recipes for such specific and exact results, she's concerned that there are five jukebox songs in existence and she won't be able to compose her own.

“I don’t know anyone who knows how to make them! You get them if a skeleton kills a creeper, or you can steal someone else’s. Don’t steal Tommy’s, though, he cares a lot about his discs and it’ll make him really sad.”

So five jukebox songs in existence, got it. "Thank you, I'll remember that." And make it her life's work to learn how to compose custom jukebox disks.

“Mhm! Do you have any other questions? Or if you want a tour of the server I could give you a tour of the server?”

"How likely is it that a tour of the server will involve me getting murdered and all of Dream's stuff stolen back from me? I worked so hard on stealing all this stuff and running away with it. Well, no I didn't, but it's still nice to have."

“…Depends how much stuff he has as backup and how good you are at fighting? But, like, he’s probably going to want it back at some point, even if you just hide in the woods forever you’re probably going to have to either fight him for it or keep it in your enderchest.”

"I did manage to kill him the once, but I don't actually like fighting, I prefer art to violence. I guess I'll just see how far hiding in the woods forever can get me."

What's an enderchest? She's not going to ask him what an enderchest is. She's going to ask her recipe book.

Her recipe book informs her that an enderchest looks like so and is made with obsidian and an eye of ender!

“Killing him once is still pretty impressive. I don’t think I’ve ever killed Dream? If I did I forgot. I forget things a lot, though.”

"I noticed that. Does it have to do with being a ghost or is that separate?"

“I think it’s because I’m a ghost. Wilbur had a better memory than I do. I don’t mind, though! I don’t want to remember upsetting things.”

"Aww, I like remembering upsetting things. It gives me more to make art about. Fair enough, though. Want me to sing you the spring song a few more times so you can learn it?"

“Yeah!!!!!!!”

She sings him the spring song. It's charmingly catchy.

He starts joining in for parts of it, and soon he’s singing along. He has a nice voice! If they sing more he starts making up harmonies; if they don’t, he asks “What’s spring?”

Do they not have seasons here? "It's a time when there's good weather and it's nice to be outside." She hopes they have weather.

“Oh! Okay. That’s nice. I like spring.”

Possibly the lack of seasons will have to be confirmed with someone who has a better memory. Then again, does he only forget upsetting things? How upsetting is winter? How upsetting is the passage of days into months into years into the slow decay that consumes all things? That's a good idea for a song, actually, except she has no idea if the slow decay that consumes all things even operates in this orthogonal universe.

...she sings the song again, because it's fun to sing with him.

Harmonies!!!

She likes his harmonies.

Meanwhile, despite the inherent difficulty of fleeing into the wilderness while singing, she has totally been doing that. Presumably one day she will run out of forest. If there's a sizeable body of water out there she thinks she'd like to cross it; otherwise, she'll see what comes her way.

If she continues running away from civilization in the same direction she has been, she will in fact encounter a large body of water! Once the body of water is crossed: tundra. 

She did not come dressed for tundra but c'est la vie. She'll stomp and shiver her way through the snow like a proper adventuress, assuming the local snow even admits of stomping and shivering.

It’s definitely notably cooler but it doesn’t particularly feel like she’ll, say, get hypothermia out here. 

There’s smoke up ahead. If she climbs a tree to see where it’s coming from, the answer is that it’s coming from the chimney of a small house. 

Human habitation! Terrible.

...she wants to at least get a good enough look to understand this world's architecture a little better, though.

Sure, she can do that! The house looks like this:

Oh no it's so charming!! She has to take notes. She has to consult her recipe book to find out if she can make a notebook in which to take notes. It's so cute and small and square... everything in this world is square but this thing is charmingly square.

She can make a book to take notes in!

She may end up spending an inadvisable length of time making sketches of this house from nearby hilltops and jotting down her thoughts on its many charming details.

(After a while of this, Technoblade leaves the house. He doesn’t notice her.)

So that's who lives here. Could be a lot worse! Imagine if it was Dream!

That hypothetical is enough to get her up and walking again, trying to cross the tundra. If this place obeys any normal laws of geography, she'll have to get across a whole polar region of the planet before things get warm again, but since this place is made of cubes, there almost certainly aren't poles. It can't be a sphere, geometrically speaking, unless it's a mind-bogglingly enormous one.

Not a bad prediction! There is in fact an obscene amount of cold area to get through: tundra, mountains, tundra, mountains. 

Night’s going to fall before she reaches somewhere that isn’t snowy. 

Then she will make her very own charmingly square little house, and put a bed in it, and sleep.

Dream, on the other hand, has decided to skip a night of sleep. 

Kite wakes up to being hit with an axe. 

Ow!

She gropes for her sleeve knife and stabs him, but in her half-asleep condition the best target she can identify is a wrist. Hardly conclusive.

Yeah, no. 

Kite was slain by Dream

And she wakes up in the same bed, but this time she doesn’t have any stuff. 

“…Will you tell me how you killed me now?”

"Absolutely not!" she says brightly.

“You shouldn’t have had any stuff, even if you did you didn’t make a crafting table, I was watching. …Are you a god?”

"Could be. Probably not. Who knows?"

“Well, you do, presumably.”

"Yes, but you just took all my shiny stolen goods, leaving me with very little incentive to tell you."

“You would have even less incentive to tell me if you could just leave with all my stuff instead of answering!”

"Is that so? And yet, here we stand."

She gets out of bed and starts for the door.

"I'll make you full netherite armor as a replacement if you tell me how you did it."

"If you make me a full set of netherite armor and tools, and let me traipse off into the wilderness with them unbothered for a week, I will tell you how I did it."

"...I am not making you a netherite hoe, that's ridiculous. I'll make you full armor plus a pickaxe, shovel, axe, and sword and then you can run around in the wilderness unbothered by me, no promises about the rest of the server. What enchantments do you want."

"I liked the set you had. Mending, Unbreaking, Efficiency where appropriate, et cetera."

"Do we even have a villager right now who sells-- whatever. Fine. Done. Might take a while. I'll let you know when they're finished. Deal?"

"And I will give you your answer once I have had a week in the wilderness with them unbothered by anyone, but I won't count interruptions against you except insofar as they cause delay. Deal?"

"Deal."

She skips merrily out into the snow.

She will be left alone to do this for as long as she wants!

Her jaunt through the wilderness is much more difficult without all of Dream's stuff to help her, but she's still determined to find the other end of this tundra if she possibly can. Running in an approximately straight line doesn't take much in the way of equipment, anyway, except as necessary to acquire food with which to continue running.

Mountains, snowy taiga, tundra, taiga, mountains, tundra, taiga hills... Here's a forest!

Oh good!

There's such a thing as a map, isn't there? She should figure out how to make those.

Her recipe book will inform her that this requires paper and a compass. 

And paper and compasses require...?

She needs sugarcane for paper, but she probably has some paper left over from making a notebook earlier; she needs four iron ingots and one redstone dust for a compass.

Well she has no idea where to get redstone dust but most of the rest of that is pretty reasonable. Time to... actually, probably time to start trekking back toward civilization, she doesn't have anything to lose from being killed at the moment and it would be embarrassing if she lost her way out here.

—oh, did he take her notes about the adorable house? He better not have.

Nah, all of her non-stolen items are in a chest right outside.

That's very fair of him. She picks it all up and continues toward civilization.

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.

Seems like a good plan. 

Okay now time to explore the rainbow castle.

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?

It’s absolute. 

"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

<Kite> Dare I ask what just happened?

<Ranboo> hi

<Ranboo> im new here

<Kite> That much I gathered.

<Ranboo> uh

<Ranboo> dream killed me but thats ok

<Thunder1408> oh my good friend Thomas

<Kite> It seems to be how Dream says hello.

Ranboo was shot by Dream using [Nightmare]

<Dream> had to give you your second death

<TommyInnit> VC2

<TommyInnit> VC2

<TommyInnit> VC2

<TommyInnit> VC2

<TommyInnit> VC2

<TommyInnit> VC2

<Punz> follow me big mean

<Punz> follow me big man

Ranboo has made the advancement [Acquire Hardware]

<Nihachu> hello technoo

<Thunder1408> bacon

Ranboo was shot by Punz using [N U T]

Chat: pretty much back to normal. The killing Ranboo dies down after the first ten minutes or so.

As fun as it is to no longer be the greenest shoot in the garden, she's mostly occupied with construction anyway. Gotta build this heavenstair. Gotta build it so tall.

Does she end up building through the night?

Absolutely.

Heavenstair: exists!

Time to build an itty bitty bedroom, add a waterfall, and erase a lot of stairs.

That's so many stairs.

Why did she build so many stairs.

Eventually she is up in her flying bedroom with no stairs beneath her and her water-ladder safely bucketed, at which point she rather desperately wants a nap. Do naps exist in this universe? Let's find out.

No naps (unless there's a thunderstorm, but she doesn't really have a way of knowing that). Sorry.

Terrible. She is going to invent a BETTER BED that she can NAP in.

And chairs. This place really needs chairs. She didn't know how much she'd miss chairs until she was here and there were no chairs and she had to sing a whole concert watching her audience paddle themselves across the floor in boats.

But first, proof of concept having been established, she sticks the water-ladder to her doorstep and descends. It is time... to fuck around aimlessly in the wilderness. Hey, what happens if she just flattens an entire swathe of the landscape starting from the shore? Digs everything out down to sea level? Probably this would be easier with better tools but she can stick with the tools she's got for now.

What happens if she does that is that now the entire landscape will be flat.

That is flatter than any landscape she has ever seen. That is flatter than a landscape has any right to be.

She loves it.

Okay she needs to stop doing this now before her new horizontal empire reaches close enough to civilization that someone comes looking and finds her skybed. She'll just... put everything back, how about. Re-sculpt the landscape into an approximation of its prior form. Except all the stone, which she's keeping because she hasn't figured out if there's a way to turn it back into landscape stone instead of ugly chunky stone. Is there? There's got to be, right? Any ideas, recipe book?

Has she tried building a furnace? She might want to try building a furnace. She's probably got some iron ore at this point which she might want to turn into iron ingots, too, so really this will be helpful in multiple ways.

She does, in fact, notice that she could probably use a furnace for smelting iron and the iron will help her make better tools than the stone picks she's run through a few dozen of so far, so after she's filled in a quick sketch layer of dirt over the formerly flattened area and planted some trees in appropriate-looking places, she tries it.

Furnace: also comes with a recipe book!

Oh, she can make proper stone!

She doesn't try it immediately, though; first she traipses all the way to her house in the tundra, at which point it is maybe hopefully actually a bedtime the universe will accept, and sets up some stone smelting there before she attempts sleep.

Yeah, sure, it's dark enough out now, she can sleep.

She would thank the whims of the cubelands except that instead she wishes to overthrow the whims of the cubelands and install her own regime that permits naps.

Anyway. Morning! Sunshine! A vast expanse of tundra to flatten! Courteously, she leaves the skyline from Technoblade's house intact, but should he crest any of the nearby hills, he may be able to detect a mysterious flatness in the distance.

Does she do anything else with her day or just spend it flattening tundra?

This tundra is going to be so smooth.

Then eventually Technoblade will come visiting. “Hey Kite, what’re you doing?”

"Is that a rhetorical question?" she asks, without pausing in her demolishment of the latest hill. (The pick in her hand is stone again; she's run out of iron.)

“Well, obviously you’re flattening it, but are you planning on building or terraforming something on top, or d’you just like flat things?”

"I just sort of started and then found that I didn't want to stop. It's oddly soothing. If you needed these hills for something I can put them back, I did sketches."

“Just navigation, but if you put up any sort of landmark I’ll be fine. I don’t own this land, anyway, do what you want. I got curious about the sudden flatness is all.” Shrug. “Still looks nicer than most of the server.”

"Oh, I don't know, I thought some of the architecture around here was charming! Admittedly mostly your house. And the rainbow castle. The rainbow castle is lovely."

“Eret’s alright,” Technoblade concedes. “Philza was doing a decent job of L’Manberg, too, but that’s already been ruined. I’m not much of a builder myself, honestly, so what did I do? I got Phil to give me an instruction book and then I followed it exactly, and before that, I lived out of basically just a hole in the ground. I swear, Phil and I are the only people who care about whether this server looks good.”

"Well now there's another one. If I can ever tear myself away from flattening the tundra."

“I’m sure there’ll be other places that need flattening.”

"Before I discovered the joys of bulldozing the countryside I had all kinds of grand architectural plans, although admittedly I was planning to build them deep in the wilderness and tell no one of their existence."

“Seems probably for the best.”

"That's not to say I don't plan to build anything closer to civilization, just that it seems wise to assume that if someone else knows where to find my buildings they will at some point be burned down or otherwise defaced." Dig dig dig dig dig dig clank. "Ah, bugger, I'm out of picks again."

"...I'm gonna be honest, that's... kind of sad. Do you want a diamond pick."

"That would be very kind of you!"

He mumbles something about it not being a big deal and then tosses her a diamond pick and diamond shovel. 

She bounces happily and immediately commences flattening the landscape much faster than before. "Thanks, you're a dear."

"Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far. Watching you flatten with stone tools is, it’s just embarrassing." Wave. “I’m gonna head back now. Have fun, uh, making things flat.”

"I will! Farewell! Your generosity will be rewarded with, to be honest, the same nonsense I was going to get up to anyway but slightly faster."

“Wasn’t expecting anything else.”

And she is left alone to flatten to her heart’s content. 

This tundra is going to be SO FLAT.

She sings while she works, first in English but then cycling through all the operas she didn't include in her concert because she didn't know if anyone present would speak the language. She should probably go through her whole repertoire every once in a while to keep the memories fresh. Maybe she should be writing them down? Ooh, and she should write down all the poetry she's memorized... that can be a project for another time. Right now, she is Flattening.

Nobody else visits her that day. Tundra: flat. 

The flattest tundra there ever was. Especially after she disassembles her house, flattens the small hill it was standing on, and reassembles it at sea level.

Okay. Now she can take a break and write down every poem, play, and song she's ever heard.

...this is, she discovers after a few hours, much more than a day's worth of material even writing as fast as she can. Hmm. She might have to put it aside and come back to it. On the other hand, does she really have anything better to do while she's waiting for her gear to arrive? She maybe does not. It is maybe actually the most important thing she can possibly be doing, because her memory of the world she started in is a resource she will run out of eventually, whereas the supply of landscape to flatten seems inexhaustible.

Right then, it's decided. She's just going to park in her cute little house on her expanse of flattened tundra, with all the books she can craft, and keep writing until Dream shows up to give her things. Sleeping and eating as necessary to ensure that her body continues to function. Or, well, her best guess at what is necessary; she still doesn't really understand how food or sleep work in this bizarre place.

As far as she can tell, if she's just in her house writing books, she... doesn't actually need to eat.

She does need to sleep at night.

And the next day Dream will knock on the door.

She puts down her latest book—there's getting to be quite a pile—and answers it.

"Hello!"

"Hi! I brought you the armor and tools you wanted. ...I forgot to ask if you wanted it named. Sorry. You promise that you'll tell me how you killed me after I make sure you're left alone in the wilderness for a week?"

"I promise," she affirms. "A week alone in the wilderness with my goodies and I'll tell you how I killed you."

Then she can have goodies! Lots of glowy purple goodies.

"Thanks ever so!" She puts on her armor and does a happy little twirl and then dashes off across the flattened tundra.

He watches her for a minute and then turns and heads back to civilization. 

And for a week, nobody bothers her. What does she do with her week?

Well the first thing she does is get to the far edge of her flattened tundra and then start digging an enormous pit. She's found the ceiling of the world; she intends to locate the floor, if there is one, and then count up the heights and see if sea level is consistently midway between.

There is, indeed, a floor. It's not perfectly even; it's somewhere between 58 and 62 blocks below sea level. She can build up by 193 blocks from sea level, so, not even close to halfway.

That's a weird enough set of numbers that, especially with the variation, she is suddenly having Doubts about things she previously took for granted. Like, is sea level the same everywhere, really truly? Is the ceiling height the same everywhere, really truly?

Is she going to mark two places where she believes there are separate bodies of water she's been referencing sea levels off of at various times and then build a horizontal bridge between them to check whether they're the same height? Is she going to then repeat this experiment for a separate set of distinct sea levels? And additionally build heavenstairs in all those places to check that the ceiling is the same distance away? Yes. Yes she is absolutely going to do all those things.

The sea level is the same everywhere! So is the ceiling! The numbers between sea level and the uneven floor are the same, as well.

Okay. Her curiosity about heights is satisfied. For now.

...there was a whole lot of stuff in those pits that she ignored at the time because it stood between her and her goal. She goes back and looks at the chestsful of random objects scattered by the rims of her Floor Holes. And conscientiously puts up CAUTION signs all around them, in case anyone wanders close enough to risk falling in.

Random objects: Cobblestone, mostly. Loooooots of cobblestone. Kind of ridiculous amounts of cobblestone. Quite a bit of dirt and coal. Some iron ore. Some... redstone dust, whatever that is? There's a cave with lava that she passed through in one of the holes; if she looks around in it she'll see something blueish-white and reflective on one of the walls as well as a dark black glass-looking thing on the floor next to the lava.

She does, in fact, investigate the cave, once she remembers its existence. The shiny objects are intriguing. Reveal your secrets, shiny objects!

Shiny object on the wall is diamonds! Shiny black floor is obsidian; some of it she can mine safely but some of it ends up being lava once mined.

Peculiar. Definitely worth a chapter in her forthcoming book on the wonders of Cubeland. She sets a slightly absurd quantity of cobblestone to cooking in a slightly absurd edifice of stacked furnaces, because it's just so much more aesthetically pleasing in its original form, and further investigates the mystery of obsidian. What is it doing when it ends up being lava, and why does it do that? There's some relationship between obsidian and lava in her former world, she's vaguely aware, but she bets their relationship here is very different.

Looks like sometimes there is lava behind the obsidian, and breaking the obsidian lets it flow out.

If she experiments some more, she’ll find out that if still lava touches still water, or if flowing water touches still lava, it becomes obsidian. If flowing lava touches still water, it becomes stone. If flowing lava and still water meet, they form cobblestone. 

The laws of this universe are so fascinatingly the way that they are.

Obsidian is pretty. She decides she's going to make a bunch of it, for architectural purposes. First she should do her best to safely extract all the obsidian she found here, and then she should put some water on top of some lava and see how far that gets her. Pity that the supply of lava is limited. There isn't some sort of secret law that if you sing a half-remembered opera about Pygmalion to a bucketful of lava it'll start laying little lava eggs like a weird chicken, is there? No? Too bad, but it seemed worth checking.

Is she going to be able to extract enough obsidian for a nice cathedral out of this one cave, or will she have to go foraging for more?

She can probably get enough obsidian for a cathedral out of this cave. She'll also get a really good grasp on how long obsidian takes to mine, even with shiny purple goodies.

It's for ART. She is DETERMINED.

Okay. Now, the design... better work it out in stone first, since with obsidian it would be such a pain to correct her mistakes. Tall, more square than she'd usually picture a cathedral, because it's hard to do anything with curves in Cubeland and obsidian can't even be formed into stairs to gentle the jaggedness of an arch slightly. (Why does she do this to herself? No matter. It's a challenge and she's rising to it.) Almost ziggurat-like in some respects, actually, and isn't that an interesting marriage of disparate aesthetics. She decides not to use glass for windows, but she does put in windows, tall thin ones that are really no more than gaps in the outer wall.

The stone prototype, when she's done with it, looks positively haunting. The real one is going to be even better.

She takes off into the wilderness and spends two straight days just hiking in a straight line Away, carrying all her obsidian, going over the plans in her head and in the notebooks where she wrote them. At the end of two days, she plops down a bed, builds a stone closet around it, and sleeps; then she wakes up and examines her surroundings for a good spot to put a terrifying black cathedral-ziggurat thing.

The surroundings: are wilderness. Two days’ trek away from civilization means she pretty much has her choice of biome. 

Eventually she decides on a hilly section of tundra, where she spends a while carefully considering sightlines and arranging the hills and ridges so that the cathedral is very difficult to see from far away in most directions and there's a convenient path leading in to where you'll round a corner and suddenly see an imposing monolith looming ahead. Then she builds the thing, and double-checks all the sightlines, and re-sculpts the terrain a little, and immediately starts heading back toward civilization.

Maps, right, maps are a thing, pity she left the mysterious "redstone dust" in a chest by the pit she dug it out of. She'll just have to navigate the old-fashioned way, using the sky and her memory. And singing to herself as she goes.

When she gets back, she should strike off in a different randomly chosen direction and find a different spot in the deep wilderness to hide all her written records.

Civilization: looks a bit different than she remembers it! For one thing, there are now very tall obsidian walls around the buildings-on-stilts. Dream and Punz can be seen building them. Various people--Tubbo, Ranboo, Sapnap, Fundy, Technoblade, Philza, Tommy, Connor, Ghostbur, George, Quackity, and Captain Puffy--are around, doing one thing or another. (Tubbo, Ranboo, and Fundy are working on a project; Technoblade and Philza are laboriously moving a skeleton and a zombie piglin; Tommy, Connor, Ghostbur, and Sapnap are hanging out; George and Quackity are making a house within the obsidian walls; Captain Puffy is working on a house, replacing all the smooth stone with granite.)

That's a lot of activity. She observes it all at a distance, waves cheerfully to Ghostbur on her way past, and heads to her Pit of Height Measurement to see if the redstone dust is still there. If it is, she'll see about making a map and figuring out what insane way maps work in Cubeland. If it isn't, she'll... dig another pit...??? Probably she'll dig another pit.

Redstone dust: still there!

Something something compass something something map? Yes? Oh, right, she also needs sugarcane, there's bound to be some of that around here somewhere... yes, okay, cool. Something something compass something something map. How bad are maps. Does she have to draw on it herself or is it magic.

It’s magic! Well, sort of. If she holds it while walking around, it’ll fill itself out, but it doesn’t appear pre-filled-out.

Magic enough for her purposes! Time to pick a direction and go flee into the wilderness for a couple days and then bury some treasure. Where by treasure, she means books with all the literature she can remember how to write.

She ends up writing more books on the way, walking quickly with notebook in hand.

Books: written. Treasure: buried.

What does she do next?

She's rather lost track of time at this point but suspects her free week in the wilderness has run out. Probably she should have planned this a little better. She should, hmm... actually, she should go demolish her prototype cathedral-ziggurat, because she doesn't want whoever eventually finds the real one to have been spoiled for the full effect by seeing the badly positioned one made of worse materials. She sets off to do that, writing more books along the way. Hopefully when she passes by civilization again in the other direction, no one will feel moved to murder her and steal all of her stuff.

Nobody does!

(Civilization update: The obsidian walls are now mostly gone. There are some new dirt islands in the sky. On the way to her prototype, she'll notice an island being flattened to sea level by a green creature labeled Awesamdude, and a small campsite of logs that's sprung up.)

Ooh, flattening. She bestows an approving smile on the green creature, which the green creature probably can't see from this far away, and then heads out to her prototype and. Well. Flattens it.

She now possesses a truly staggering amount of her least favourite block, namely cobblestone. Perhaps she should prototype something else with it? Or should she first try to find Dream to fulfill her bargain? No, Dream has proven fully capable of finding her whenever he feels like it. She heads back in the vague direction of civilization, trusting to her map to let her wander around in circles without getting lost, and finds a reasonably flat stretch of shoreline and flattens it a little further and starts building a fiendishly complex stone pyramid.

Nobody bothers her. As busy as civilization might be, people seem mostly uninterested in venturing beyond it.

She can probably stay lost in the tension between too much and too little symmetry for days if nobody interrupts her.

She gets two days before Dream pays a visit. 

“Sorry I’m, uh— Sorry I’m late. I got kind of busy and figured you were, y’know, you were in the wilderness somewhere, and you probably wouldn’t mind a bit of extra time alone before I came along to bother you, so I guess I just, uh. Yeah. …You’re still going to explain how you killed me, right?”

"Yes," she says, continuing to lay out the next level of her latest pyramid. (There are two other smaller pyramids in a sort of trail leading to this one. She has been having a very architectural couple of days.) "I keep my promises."

Another few cobblestone blocks finish off the current section, and then she turns to him and draws her knife from her sleeve with a rapid motion. "This," she says, spinning it in her hand, "is a knife. In the local parlance, it's not a weapon or tool but rather a part of me. Used effectively, it can kill in a single strike; with less skill, it usually only wounds. I'm not the most effective knife-wielder I've ever met, but I managed to get lucky the first time. Does that answer your question?"

“Huh.” He sounds genuinely fascinated. “I—you know, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who had a weapon as part of their—them. That’s so cool. What can you do with it, how well do you fight, I can spar with you if you want? That’s so cool, what.”

"There was a lot less murder where I came from so I don't have a lot of practice! Maybe I'll spar with you sometime when I'm less busy." She resumes laying stone on her half-finished pyramid.

“Sure. Just, y’know, let me know when you’re available. 

What are you building?”

"Pyramids!" She gestures sweepingly at the trail of them. "I haven't found a design I'm satisfied with yet."

“Well. They’re pretty cool. I’m, um, I’m not really a builder, but your pyramids are neat.”

"Thank you! I try. When I've got something I'm willing to put my name to maybe I'll build it a little closer to civilization."

“I’m looking forward to seeing it! I guess I’ll… go, now…? I don’t mean to interrupt your, uh, wilderness building time.”

"All my time is wilderness building time these days. See you around!"

“Bye. Let me know when you’re less busy?”

"Perhaps I will!" she says, waving farewell with a sunny smile. She doesn't want to make commitments. Instead, she wants to make pyramids.

It turns out when she finishes this one that she's dissatisfied with some aspects of the design; she starts an even bigger one farther along the beach, then has to sleep partway through laying the foundations.

No one interrupts her. She can build as much as she wants.

(Back in civilization: large red vines have started to spring up in a few places. The skeleton of a blackstone-and-obsidian box appears where Sam had been flattening the beach.)