Chapter 1.3: Far From Home

Elma's POV

Me and Ando started walking down towards a cave that is not too far off. I've been placing torches for navigation as to not get lost when nighttime hits.

And now, we're facing the menacing cave.

"Hey Elma, any thoughts on the matter?"

"Going towards that cave is really nerve-wracking, it's freaking me out, man."

"I'm smelling adventure."

"Not terror?"

"... just a bit. I mean compare this with that big tunnel over there."

He points out the massive tunnel over at the distance. Not that it helps anything by going somewhere else now that the sun is setting.

"We should at least navigate this tunnel even for just a little bit."

"Then you do the honors, Elma."

"Right. Whatever, wimp."

I headed into the cave nervously holding a torch and as the dim surface of the cave lights up the darkness, I surprisingly felt reassured.

"Oho.. somehow carrying this light torch is oddly comfy, I don't know why."

"Oh. I think it's the lucky presence of the torch kicking in. Placing the right biome torches gives out a bit of luck so this must be the stroke of fortune buff."

"Stroke of fortune?"

"Yeah. It's the same case when a bunch of ladybugs starts spawning in the surface around the base. Don't tell me you didn't know about it?"

"Nonono! Of course I know the luck feature was a thing. I just didn't fully understand how this luck thing works, I mean I don't see the buff being displayed in the buff status."

"Of course it doesn't show because luck doesn't count as a buff, except when drinking the luck potion. Luck is considered as a stat after all."

The functions of luck in Terraria is hidden just as the stats of the players are hidden from the players in the initial game, so we can only assess in speculation only the important parts like damage reduction and fortune presence.

"Wow~ It's a buff but not treated as one. Terraria sure does have a complicated system. Are you also feeling lucky too, Ando?" That comment had lingering sarcasm applied.

"Yeah. I'm feeling like I can take on any enemies in the way."

"Hey! Don't jinx us! We don't even have proper tools and equipment here!"

"Oh come on man, we're only doing navigation close to the exit, we're obviously not going too far off! You better not be freaking out running off on your own!"

"Oh, I could say the same thing to you! You better not be leaving me behind!"

And with that, we started our cave navigation.

The pathway was bumpy that we could trip and tumble very easily in the darkness. We carefully tread the passage with torches for our guide way out.

Seemingly, we did not encounter any mobs in the cave, not even slimes.

"It's eerily quiet. No slimes are showing up even though we're in a cave. Does this counts as a sign of good luck, Ando?"

"I don't know. Luck chances may be applied in the spawn rate reduction but this is strange. Might be because we're--"

"Hey-hey! You better not say another word! You're gonna jinx us again, weren't you?!

"Ehh. Maybe.."

This prick. He's trying to make me cower this early in the game when he himself suggested to go 'expedition' together. He better not be sorry if we're accidentally on a pinch.

"If only your eyes had two more extra layers." I mumbled.

I pressed the chat log button on the top right corner next to the minimap button and the text box in the interface and a hologram keyboard showed up.

I started texting Luna.

***

On the other end of the spectrum, the girl group are just sitting in coziness around the campfire and Luna noticed a private message from Elma on the notification log on the bottom left corner of her peripheral vision.

[El Magnifico: any changes outside]

Luna is perplexed by a random stunt pulled by the one who pushed her to the edge and is thinking of how to respond.

"Hey, Jenny."

"Hmm?"

"That jackass texted me. What should I reply him with?"

"Elma huh.. Well if it was that other guy who texted, I would've replied nicely to him, but to that guy.. okay, I say you wait for a bit and then respond."

"Okay. I'll leave it for now."

And thus, Luna left it alone. She instead continued scouting outside the base on the lookout while waiting for Loki to finish the house.

The view of the meadow is still unchanged as the slimes bounce around their base and rabbits and birds stroll around places.

Though it is almost becoming dark as the sun sets in the horizon.

Not long after, Loki showed up to the girls exhausted.

"Argh, I can't believe there's a missing piece not being placed in the base."

"Oh, what is that?"

"The walls, Luna. The house wasn't suitable without the smooth walls."

"Huh? How is the walls not suitable?" Jenny asked.

"Okay. Think of the wood blocks as one of those cement bricks. As those are freshly made, they have those rough surfaces that you don't wanna rub it in your skin, and there's the wood walls and you would think of those as smothered bricks. That's the difference."

"So.. in other words, they act like those wooden panel plates?" Luna summarized.

"Well that was long. I shouldn't have asked."

"Shut up, Jenny. In any case, we might finally have a guide moving in at any time."

Surely enough, the 'Guide' finally showed up.

***

I've been waiting for quite a while and got no response. All I received was a notification that says;

[Andrew the Guide has arrived]

Well, if we're able to get an NPC moving in then there might still be sunlight out there.

Also, I've been thinking about this torch I was holding. It's true that staring at it made me feel at ease but then I thought about the torch luck.

The torch luck was indeed a thing back then but I remember it had an updated patch mentioning about this as well, I'm not entirely sure though because my memory is still hazy but I can think about it in another time once I got the full picture.

As I've been navigating for a while, I started talking again.

"Speaking of functions, how's the interface treating you?"

"I can figure them out now, thank you very much!"

"Oh yeah? You probably missed out about the difficulty level."

"Hmm.. ahh, the difficulty. I don't think that mattered."

"Mmm.. Why'd you think so?"

"Well Terraria, this world itself, is completely different from the base game. So I think we'll be experiencing differently than what we knew from the original."

"Yeah I see your point. But then, I took damage back then and it's equivalent to the Master Mode difficulty and I think that's concerning."

"Yeah you literally experimented with yourself just to understand the basis of whatever is going on around you, huh?!"

"It just shows how much I am invested into this game. I've also completed the-- Whoa!"

I stopped moving in a hurry and let out a shout of surprise because I almost stepped into the hole of abyss. Me and Ando spotted a massive hole in the beginning of the expedition.

I let out a witty attitude towards the hole.

"Well, well, well. Hello, giant pit."

I looked at the pitch black pit with interest.

"I wonder how deep you are right now.."

"Hey man, you're not thinking of going down there, are you?"

"Of course not. We're pretty much done here. We should go back now. Huh.."

I looked back at the straight path from down below and see the laided torches hanging in the sides of the cavern walls, it seems like we walked out too far. But it's not much of an issue, there's still no mobs spawning in our way so we're still cleared out.

But that thought didn't last very long.

Slimes started to show up on the darkest of shades and slowly coming into our way.

"Hey Ando, we should move."

"Yeah. I don't want to waste my recall potions here."

"What?! You have recall potions?"

"Yes. I've been saving it for our emergency exit. Here, you can have the spar--"

Before he could pass out his spare potion, in the spur of the moment he suddenly vanishes, leaving me here alone in the cave.

"He accidentally used it, didn't he?"

Slimes, appeared to be increasing in numbers, are surrounding me and I was pressured with an ominous sense.

"Argh! No time to breathe here either!"

I started running towards the exit blazing the trail of the torches and I can already see the outside world.

But the light outside the cave has already drowned out and before I knew it, zombies came flooding in the exit and are heading towards me.

"What the HELL!! IT'S NIGHT ALREADY!! Yiiee!! They disgustingly look realistic for a zombie!!"

I ran back going deep inside the cave, slicing the slimes in my way and eventually returned to the same giant hole pit.

"Oh no."

I'm in big trouble here.

***

Luna's POV

I made a life of myself being entitled to independence, away from the correlation of family issues. And to that, I made a belief of being strong is being free.

I'm a strong and independent woman.

But the circumstances here has changed my everything.

I've descended into a world I was familiar with and I'm at a loss of what I am going to do. Ever since that smartass man riled me up, I'm only feeling uneasy.

Not wanting to move up, I let the boys do the work just like Jenny suggested.

And I questioned myself, what am I going to do now..

A few minutes ago after Andrew the 'Guide' has arrived.

"Hello Terrarians. It's nice to meet all of y-- Well not all of you. l could guess some of the boys are in heavy duty tonight."

Andrew greeted us. I stared at the man who changed my everything. He speaks to us in a socially friendly manner.

"Mm, hummh.. the place looks refined like a proper housing should. There's the chair, table, doors and lights. Now I don't have to worry about the outside world anymore."

The guide just naturally gave us his assessment of the base like nobody's business. I feel overly stagnant by that attitude of his.

I finally broke his assessment.

"Hey, Mr. Guide! Should there be something you should be informing us about?!"

"Huh? Oh yeah, let's retry this. Hello Terrarians, welcome to the new world of Terraria. Here is a world where you can dig, fight, explore and build with your own free independent will. Or at least that's what we wanted it to be.."

As he said so, the attitude in his voice changed..

"Our beloved game, Terraria, has been laided out by an independent AI. We let it take over the development and it brought everything to fruition. But this AI took the matters in its own hands and trapped us in here, preventing us from interfering. We tried completing the game ourselves but the AI replaced our administrator privilege and turned it into NPC traits source codes and implemented restrictions to confine us, making us an NPC that can't interact with the items entirely. Fortunately, we barely managed to scrape the authority to send a message here in the interior and summon you players into this world."

His explanation was so long that I didn't fully comprehend on what he's talking about. I spoke with a puzzling annoyed look.

"Okay. So this AI somehow managed to finished developing the game, manipulate you developers to fully integrate into the game and forcefully pulled us in here to complete a virtual reality game?"

"Basically yeah."

"Basically?! You think pulling us in here would make things any better?! We're just some random college students that was ripped apart from reality just to complete some bullshit! Do you even think that we can make that objective happen?!"

"I don't know. But all these troublesome stuff will be on your hands now."

"Oh you-"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down now Luna.."

Jenny grabs me in a hurry appeasing the situation and Loki steps up saying something.

"Hey, was the selection for players like a raffle or-"

"All of you were randomly selected and brought upon. Though there's that, it was troublesome getting the player ID coded into the game, took a lot of program but here we are."

He just casually talked over him and rambles on his programming behalf.

Seconds later, I hear some magical bubbly noise. I look around at where the noise originated from and saw Ando.

"Oh no."

He mutters with a grave expression.

All of us went up to him and Loki spoke up.

"Oh no what?"

".. I might have left Elma alone in the cave."

When Ando said that, a sense of dread was looming in me thinking back on the message I ignored.

"Hey! What do you mean by that?!"

"The cave that we're scouting suddenly filled itself with mobs and he might get trapped if--"

Ando was then interrupted by the banging door.

"Huh.. that must've been Elma knocking there.."

Jenny stated as she walk towards the door. My sense of dread intensifies.

I quickly grabbed her wrist to stop her.

"Huh? Luna.."

"Don't go to that door, Jenny."

"Ehh? Why?"

"I don't think that's him."

I went to the door before her and pressed the doorknob lock. I immediately pressed the chat log button and texted that jerk.

[hey r u outside the house]

I sent the text and asked Ando once more.

"Where were you exactly before you got here?"

"Just a bit far off inside the cave after we saw the pit. He might still be in the cave rushing over here now."

"How can we check on where he was?"

"Huh? Just press the map button. It's on the top right of your peripheral vision."

I did what he said and my vision revealed an overview of a map with me surrounded by the meadows and blacked-out surroundings.

All of a sudden, the pixel image of that guy's face popped up on the black surface of the map south-west of our position nearby. Next moment, his pixelated face vanished.

"Whoa. Hey, he's up and gone from the map. What's going on?"

"Huh? He might've ran back into the cave."

"EHH?! Elma is in there?!" Jenny expressed her surprise.

Loki, Aimee and Andrew looked at Jenny in disbelief and I was too.

That guy actually got left out alone in the underground area. I started to wonder what is going on outside.

I asked Andrew.

"Hey! What's going to happen to him?!"

"Eh? Even if you ask me that, I don't know what's going to happen. Well, the worst case scenario here is that he might die if he's down there for too long." He casually said so.

He was so nonchalant in answering that I don't want to bother with this anymore and just straight up leave from this nightmare.

"Mmm.. I don't think we can do much for him right now."

Jenny spoke out loud, she continued.

"It's not going to be that much of a deal for him anyway. It's him we're talking about here. And he uses a sword too. He'll just try to survive from there and find his way out there if he's lucky."

What she just said made sense that my sense of dread just died out.

"Yeah. If he's really invested in this game like he claims to be, he should at least be able to find a recall potion or work his way out of there." Ando sums it up.

"Hmm. I guess that's the logical way to do it. We might've worried ourselves here for nothing." Loki added nonchalantly.

I started to think the same. If that guy had the nerve to rile me up then he may come back home alive.

Home.

One word emerges from my mind.

I was now wondering what's going on the other side. Wondering what's it felt like to be away from home.

And just when I forgot about that guy.

I received a message from him.

[El Magnifico: no. and btw thx 4 ignrng me rlier]

I'm getting farther. Far, far from home.

***

Elma's POV

I just survived the fall of the deep hole.

Seconds before I jumped the pit, I threw one torch down for the visibility of the pit and then just jump.

It was a leap of certain death.

In the midst of the fall, I immediately crafted the rope coil and hold it hard.

Not seeing the ground, I threw the rope coil to a random direction hoping it would hit a wall or a ceiling to negate my downward motion.

Luckily enough it did hit something and landed myself hanging to the wall, stopping myself from falling hard.

Moments later, a bunch of slimes falling in straight down right past me and I clinged to the wall, making sure to not let them hit me.

When they stopped dropping in, I checked my health points, it has 57 points left. I checked my inventory next, I still have 7 torches left, 4 bombs and 109 ropes.

Going this deep underground early in the game is not what I intended it to be. I haven't even thought about the respawn and now here I am deep in the dark.

I also remembered about that torch luck being a complete bogus and they later scrapped the 'torch curse' out of the game, leaving only the benefit of the torch luck in the game. It did pissed me off when luck affects my farming for items.

"Ahh.. damn. Talk about bad luck! Ugh.."

My state of mind is getting sore from all of this climax so let me get my pace back.

I looked around and saw the thrown-out torch laid on the ground right below me and sighed out loud feeling relieved of throwing the coil early. I could've died right down there if I didn't due to fall damage.

I again crafted a bunch more rope coils and connected it to the rope I was holding.

Not long after climbing down the rope barehanded, I made it to the ground in one piece. My legs are shaking.

That jump was genuinely a leap of death and I shuddered at the thought that I was going to die there for a mere second.

I then looked around to see my surroundings, it was pitch black all around the light of my torch and the slimes from before might've went into the dark. The hole where I dropped at from above looked even more empty than ever.

Now that I strayed so far from home, it's not ideal to go back up again, especially if it's night time when there's a lot of zombies out there.

The only thing I can do now is to keep looking for loot and materials in this dark, eery cavern-like layer.

Well, I made it this far. I can't stop now.