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The last thing Ren remembered before he woke up on that island was jumping through the swirling purple portal - that resembled a Nether portal, but it had hints of different colors and shifted between shades of purple - with his friends.
And then he was alone on an island in a small cove without any of his things aside from his clothes and his communicator; his communicator wouldn’t connect to the chats of wherever he was now - he must’ve been on another server - and he felt so stuck. Over the weeks he built a small base, did some mining and explored as well, in other words, normal early-world stuff. But he still couldn’t find a trace of a single soul. Maybe he was on an empty server, he had been separated from his friends, and he was stuck here forever!
He knew he couldn’t think like that though, he needed to have hope he could still find his friends, and he tried really hard.
“Oh, bane of arthropods?! Come on, this is supposed to be a level thirty enchantment!” he exclaimed in slight frustration as he looked down at the enchantment table and the now shimmering diamond sword laying on it, enchanted with several good enchantments, but with bane of arthropods hidden in there. “No… come on dude…” he groaned, sighing as he picked up the sword and pocketed the lapis again. This would have to do for now, he was not about to start putting himself through the pain of gathering thirty levels again so soon.
He looked out of the window, to the growing darkness and the sight of mobs gathering on the shore of the mainland, just milling around. Ren didn’t want to sleep quite yet though, and he was sick and tired of exploring after doing it almost nonstop these past few days.
So mining it was. Never can go wrong with mining.
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“Hah, now I’m back, got some things I wanna- say,” he mumbled to himself as he hit his iron pickaxe against the next block of deepslate in front of him, trying to do something, anything to fill the silence. “What’s the letter that starts the alphabet? Ay!” he continued, his voice getting louder as he sang. He could still remember his part of the rap by heart, and it was one of his go-to things to sing when the deathly quiet became too much. When he remembered recording it with his friends, it made him smile. The way it had taken hours because they decided to do it together and there would be constant disruptions from one of the other, or whoever it had been would stumble because of something someone else was doing. They had decided to go one at a time, switching every time one would try to record their verse all the way through and fail.
Wels got his done first, which nobody was really surprised by, with twenty-nine tries. False came second with thirty-four, Doc next with forty-seven, Ren with fifty-two, and X just barely last with fifty-three. If you didn’t count Mumbo, that was, who had eighty-one, thanks to absolutely everyone focused on not letting him finish. He might’ve been a mole for G-Team, but Ren didn’t really care much, it was so fun to just be there in the Team S.T.A.R. base, messing around.
A small, sad smile was tugged to his face as he remembered that, and he stopped singing. The loneliness that he had previously been pretty good at ignoring was now suffocatingly obvious, it felt like it was going to consume him, crush him under its weight.
“Ladies get in line, the Biggity B on the way,” he almost whispered to himself, not expecting the shakiness in his voice as he tried to continue. That made it worse, the fuzzy memories of his soulmate coming back again… “Cleo don’t know who she freakin’ with…” Cleo, his friend, betraying his rule, them laughing about it together afterwards…
Ren sank to the ground, resting the back of his head against the two-by-one tunnel that he had mined from his main strip mining tunnel, feeling tears brimming in the corner of his eyes. This tunnel was too cold, too empty, too small, too quiet to help as he started to cry.