A chill ran through my spine as I read the words on my computer screen-saver…
Wake up…..
How did that get there? I thought to myself as I highlighted the text with my mouse and pressed delete. The sun was peeking out of my window as I looked at the clock. It was eleven in the morning and I had slept later than I intended. But I had a late night and my Minecraft dungeon wouldn’t build itself. So I went to grab a banana and went to class. It was Friday and I had the whole weekend to work on play Minecraft, so i took my time logging back on after I got home. It wasn’t until 10:00 pm that I sat back down in front of my PC and initiated the Minecraft app. I decided to go on survival mode and then explore a friend of mine’s castle on his server. After fighting some zombies and having some fun, it was time to get back to work on my dungeon. So I exited survival mode and logged into my single player saved world. As I moved my character over the lake I painstakingly built and walked over to the huge mountain where my dungeon was under, something strange caught my eye. I slowly moved my character over to the entrance of my dungeon and stopped. I took my hand off the mouse and covered my gaping maw, noticing the lack of leaves on the trees around my mountain.
There in front of my entrance was a little pyramid made of sand blocks.
I moved my character as far away from the entrance of my dungeon and them I pushed off away from my computer and jumped up. I paced all around my dorm room and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I slapped myself in the face.
Calm down, I thought to myself. You don’t believe in Herobrine. There’s no such thing as Herobrine….
Ever since Minecraft was first released four years ago, I couldn’t stop playing it as a teenager. Now in my second year of university, it was starting to take over my life. I even missed some classes. Could you blame me? The chance to create my own world out of blocks and fight night-time zombies was too much fun to resist. But I had heard the Herobrine stories and that gave my favorite obsession a dangerous allure. Herobrine was supposedly a standard block figure with a blue top, black hair and whites in his eyes that was said to appear in various places on the Minecraft server, only to disappear as quickly as he appeared. The main difference from him and other players was the fact that a player’s name didn’t appear over his head. He often appeared in single player worlds rather than multiplayer servers, which was supposed to be impossible. Herobrine made random structures, mostly pyramids made of sand blocks or structures that led to a underground tunnel. Sometimes he would appear out of the fog while other times he came out of the tunnel. Sometimes he would chase players out if they went inside the tunnel and then vanish without a trace. And on rare occasions, he would send the players messages, such as ” Wake up” as if to suggest the player was trapped in a fantasy world. And when I played Minecraft too long, that’s how it felt. Some people said Herobrine was really the ghost of the brother of Notch, one of the creators of Minecraft who haunted the game after his death. But others said it was a restless spirit, and that it was a victim of torture who retreated into a fantasy world to escape the pain during the act. That’s why he kept messaging “Wake up” But was he talking to himself, or whoever saw him while playing Minecraft, I wondered.
That’s why I couldn’t go back to my computer for a half hour after I saw the pyramid on my screen. But after ten non-stop minutes of muttering to myself “Someone’s messing with you. Calm down. You’re being ridiculous”, I gingerly crept back into my computer chair. There was my character right where I left it, near the edge of the lake, his axe pointing towards the fog in the distant horizon. I slowly moved back towards my mountain when something popped out of the fog in the left edge of my frame of vision.
It was another character wearing a blue top.
He’s in the forest, I screamed in my mind. I was terrified, but I had to see if he was real. I ran towards the forest where I saw the figure. When I got there, I found nothing. My palms were sweaty and my hand shook as I raised my bottle of water to my lips. Deciding he was gone, I went back to my mountain dungeon. The pyramid was now gone. In it’s place was a small structure that opened up to a small tunnel.
I stood up out of my chair and went outside. I needed some air. I couldn’t breathe. But something made me go back inside to see if the tunnel was still there on my computer screen. As I wearily plopped back down in my chair, my face melted into an expression of terror as I saw the tunnel was still there. “There’s no turning back now,” I told myself. I went in.
I walked down a long hall lit from little windows at the base of the corridor’s wall where you could see the program’s lava level. It was like walking down the corridor of Hell. At the end of the hall was a little room. In the room were two block skeletons and two swords. They were grey with red tips. In the corner of the little room was a small cot. Lying in the cot was a figure with a blue top and black hair. At that moment, a message appeared on my chat feed. Listed as the name of the player: Herobrine.
Wake up…
And Herobrine opened up his dead white eyes to me and jumped out of the cot.
“Crap” I yelled out loud. I made my character run away and sped far down the hall away from the room. I turned and looked back into the darkness. There’s nothing there, I thought to myself. That was when He ran out of the darkness towards me. I raced toward the opening of the tunnel, looking back every three steps -Yep, he’s still there! Crap! As I got to the opening and crawled out, I didn’t notice the pit of lava that was waiting for me at the foot of the ascending stairs. My screen flashed red as the words “You died” popped up in front of my eyes.
It was at that moment I woke up.
My mouth was drooling all over my keyboard and the monitor was turned off. I lifted my head off the desk and shook the cobwebs from my head. It was all a dream, I told myself with a smile. I breathed a sigh of relief and got out of my chair to walk towards my bedroom.
And that was when I noticed the pillows of my couch arranged carefully on the floor. They were stacked in the shape of a pyramid.
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