I’m sorry, something very important just happened and I have to post about it otherwise I’ll forget about it.
(click readmore to see story)
His name was Candypro_.
I don’t normally reveal real people’s real Minecraft usernames like this, but man he was a nice friend, if only for a moment.
So I was playing Hypixel’s Solo UHC Champions, and I had been preparing to build houses as usual. I had all the dirt, all the glass, I had all the wooden components and I had the bed, too. I went to -300 -200, and I started pillaring up.
When I was on the top of the unfinished house and pulled out my oak stairs to start filling in the roof, however, I noticed a guy beneath my house looking up at me.
He seemed to be in leather armor, and he didn’t look like a new player, either. Most importantly, once he ran across the arid savanna towards my house, he paused beneath it. That could only mean one thing: he was going to start pillaring up.
I rushed to finish the roof of the house, my heart pounding with every block I placed. This was normal to playing UHC, even without players around me, as I would be really stressed out anyways due to the fact that I was playing Hypixel UHC in the first place.
And when I was about to look down to see where the player was, I could just barely see through the roof that someone’s username was down and in front of me.
He was already here.
I briefly looked to double check and sure enough, there he was. He was mere blocks, mere seconds away from hitting distance of me.
I broke through the roof and hid myself in the house.
Then something happened that I didn’t expect. He paused adjacent to the house, and he punched a hole in the wall.
And there he was. Half-leather, half-iron armor, with an iron sword in his hand, standing atop a winding tower of dirt and cobblestone and spruce planks. His skin was a combination of blazing fire and chilled ice against a void-black creeper form.
And he just blocked his sword.
He was crouching. He wanted to come in. He was a friend.
I talked through the chat, just to make sure. “Hello...?” I said.
“Please, bridge, over” he said.
He must have run out of blocks. I took the oak planks he broke from the side of the house and gave him a bridge with which to come into my humble abode, now half-open to the elements.
He came in. Or rather, he came over. The gaping lack of a wall made the house seem less like a container and more like a paper bag on its side. He broke some logs from the supports of the house and crafted them into planks to fix the wall.
So now we were both sitting in my house, crouching a lot, blocking too. I have to remind you that were playing Hypixel UHC. Both of us could have been killing each other at any time. And yet neither of us were; we were just vibing inside a house in the middle of the sky.
After a while, he stopped. He probably knew this couldn’t continue. He started testing out blocks in the floor, to see which ones led to an imminent drop to the floor below.
He broke out one oak plank in the floor, then the dirt block beneath it. Sure enough, there was the savanna grass far beneath us. Much more than necessary for a fatal drop. Neither of us wanted to go down there.
Then he tested another part of the floor. There was now a second hole to the ground beneath.
He continued this way until there were four holes in the floor of the house. All of them would have led to a drop of doom. I realized what he wanted to do. He wanted to kill me but didn’t want the blood on his hands. So he wanted me to succumb to fall damage somehow so the kill wouldn’t register as his.
I stepped on the cobblestone block beneath the door and the stairs next to it. I knew my fate was sealed. I was cornered. He broke the oak door and the cobblestone too.
Now all I had left to stand on were two dirt blocks that were part of the foundation of the house.
“Farewell?” I said in chat. I didn’t know if he would respond.
He didn’t. He broke the last two blocks, and I fell, plummeting to my death.
Unfortunately for both of us, the chat registered the kill as his. “PigHunterExtreme fell to their death whilst trying to escape Candypro_!” it said. I think it added to his killcount.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As a ghost, I could now see the effect of my actions on the world. I could see the house I built in the sky atop the glass pillar, its bottoms emptied out from the dude’s repeated attempts to get me to fall through the floor.
He surveyed his surroundings, he checked it twice. He broke a few blocks beneath him until he was only standing atop the sixty-third or so glass block on the tall glass pillar. Then, completely unexpectedly, he intentionally walked off. He died from the fall.
Both of us saw another player coming from behind us, running in the direction of the house. “Oh great,” both of us probably thought. “This guy is gonna come and loot our corpses.” The guy arriving couldn’t even imagine the kind of moment Candypro_ and I had moments earlier.
Now that both of us were dead and spectating the game, I decided I would just continue to talk with him through the chat for as long as I could, because I was worried that at any moment, he would just leave for the lobby and lose a lot otherwise. So I just started casually chatting with him.
“Candypro_, it was nice having you over at my house,” I said. “People don’t usually just act so friendly.”
I then went on to explain to him some of the more specific details of preparing to build a house in UHC. I don’t know, I though he might want to know. I know it might’ve seemed stupid or something. I just thought maybe it would open his eyes to the fact that you can in fact spend a lot of time and effort preparing for practically useless things—or something like that.
The entire time I was speaking, he wasn’t saying anything, In fact, he wasn’t even moving, at least not that much. But he still hadn’t left. And he wasn’t visibly AFK. So it wasn’t that he couldn’t hear me. I could tell that he was actually listening.
“So,” I was about to conclude, “thanks for coming over.” I really meant my thanks. I was really happy that he could come over.
We made our last gestures of farewell. “Ok,” he said, breaking the silence. His text was white, in contrast to my chat text being gray. He had the VIP+ rank in Hypixel.
“So I guess this will be our last time meeting?” I said.
It was too late. He had already pulled out his bed, and now he had been warped to some lobby somewhere.
It really was our last time meeting. And I didn’t even get to say a proper goodbye.
