The light of a laptop screen illuminates a dark bedroom. The office chair creaks as Loren pulls it closer to his desk and straightens his posture. He hovers the cursor of his mouse over the webpage of a new Minecraft mod he found. He reads through the description, slowly absorbing the words as he snacks on the bag of chips on his lap.
He was recreating an old self-made mod pack from scratch. It broke down after one too many incompatibilities—something like that anyway. Loren doesn't claim to be an expert in anything mod-related. He's trying to be careful now, trying not to download every single mod he sees.
He's already downloaded all the mods he's sure he needs, the mod pack being a combination of utility, convenience, adventure, and magical additions tailored to his play style. He's double-checked everything, making sure nothing will go wrong.
Still, he did want something new. This mod should be the last one. It's new, posted only just an hour ago, and will likely be full of bugs. There are no reviews or screenshots, just the promise of "an immersive world the likes you've never seen!" but Loren supposes a little test for the thing wouldn't hurt.
He's tested his modpack beforehand. If this one goes wrong, he'll just remove it afterwards.
Harsh knocks on the door cause Loren to yelp, violently flinching and throwing crumbs from his pajamas to scatter on the floor. "Give me a minute!" Loren yells, first clicking on the web page to download before scrambling over to unlock the door and flick the lights on.
He pulls the door ajar, leaving only enough space to let his head peek through. Outside was his sister crossing her arms with an impatient expression, holding a small piece of paper in one of her hands. "I heard you got fired again?"
Loren frowns, avoiding her gaze as he furrows his brows. "Yeah, well, they were being assholes."
"It's customer service. They're full of assholes." Ryley sighs. "We're going to be behind rent. I can squeeze a bit more money from art commissions but you'll have to be the one to buy groceries tomorrow." She hands Loren the piece of paper.
Loren skims through what's written on the note. It's a grocery list. He messily folds it, crumpling most of it, into his pajama's pocket. "Yeah, I can do that. It's just groceries. Not that hard. Babies could do it." He jokingly smirks.
Ryley raises a brow as she shoots an accusing look at Loren. "Dude, you literally forget to eat sometimes." She takes a glance at Loren's room, at least the bit she can see through the gap of his door. "Since when have you cleaned your room?" Her nose wrinkles.
"None of your business," Loren huffs. "I'm a damn paragon of responsibility."
Ryley chuckles, but it falters as she fidgets with the fabric of her shirt and her gaze falls. "I mean, I get it. I do it too, but we're finally out of that hellhole. We should learn how to be adults."
A moment of silence overtakes their conversation. "... Yeah, I know," Loren weakly replies.
Ryley leaves after that, but Loren doesn't wait to look. He closes the door shut with a sigh. He doesn't like thinking about their family. He knows his sister wants them to have some conversation about it, but it's a finished chapter in his life. What good would it do to revisit those memories?
Loren huffs through his nose as he returns to his seat. He lets his chair twirl before stopping in front of his laptop. It wears its age proudly, being something he and his sister saved up to buy before moving into their current apartment.
They used to take turns sharing it until Ryley got one of those phones with a functioning stylus. Since then, she's transferred from using the drawing tablet to solely using her phone to draw. Loren owns the former now as a hand-me-down, though he rarely uses it.
He stares at the screen. The download's finished, but he doesn't have it in himself to play tonight.
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"Ugh, I'll just play tomorrow," Loren groans. He shuts down the laptop and plops down on his unkempt bed on the other side of the room. He slides his foot under the blanket desperately clinging on to the corner of the bed frame and pulls it close.
The blanket has a few tears in it, so Loren couldn't get as warm or comfortable as he wished he could be, but it isn't too bad. It's not his first time sleeping like this.
So he lets his eyes and mind wander, ending up staring into the ceiling as his thoughts race. His eyes flutter close as time passes.
But he's still awake, the silence too loud and welcoming for his thoughts to fester. Loren cracks an eye open, dragging his weight to open the bedside drawer and grab his phone and earphones. He plugs the earphones into his phone, the buds into his ears, and starts playing music.
Only then he sleeps.
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Loren wakes up shivering, but keeps his eyes closed. It's bright right now, the light slipping past his closed eyelids. He knows the blinds were shut when he went to sleep, nor should it be this cold at all. His room didn't need air conditioning nor a heater. It was the perfect room temperature he's used to.
But it didn't matter to Loren. He only needs to grab his blanket to go back to sleep.
He lets a hand feel its way around the bed, passing by his earphones and phone now squished under his body, but instead of feeling the wrinkled fabric of an unkempt bed, his skin brushes through what Loren believes are blades of grass.
Dew slipped and fell on his skin. His hand even bumps into something as hard as a rock—or maybe, just a rock.
"What the fuck," Loren slurs in a mumble, the kind typically observed in newly awakened people. He rubs his eyes, trying to get rid of the drowsiness in his heavy eyelids and finally blinks them open.
Instead of his bedroom, he finds himself laying on plain grasslands. It's short green grass as far as the eye can see, littered with red flowers and yellow dandelions. Hills and mountain ranges line the horizons. Trees were sparse from where Loren was, but progressively increased into a blanket of dark forests the further the distance.
Loren blinks once. A sudden pain stings through his head and eyes, but it disappears as instantaneously it came.
The landscape, once normal and ordinary, morphs into blocks.
Loren squints, scrutinizing the details of his abrupt hallucination until he blinks again. Everything turns back to normal. But he blinks again—it's a requirement of a functioning human body, obviously—and the blocks are back.
He blinks, normal landscape, he blinks again, block-y landscape, and he just keeps blinking and blinking until the two images overlay each other enough that they're one and the same—but he still sees the fucking blocks and—"Oh my god, did someone kidnap and drug me? Fucking left me in the middle of nowhere?" He heaves.
He shakily pushes himself up, taking one last view of his surroundings. He couldn't have been kidnapped. He's a nobody with no money. He doesn't know anyone who hates him enough to do this to him either. He's never known people for long enough to hate him to this extent.
Loren takes a shaky breath, gaping over the nearest rectangular tree trunk a few feet from him.
"That's so stupid. That can't—I've got to be hallucinating, aren't I? That's literally a fucking Minecraft tree," he sputters to himself, dumbfounded. He blinks a few more times for good measure just in case the hallucination was just a symptom of shock.
He bitterly chuckles, grasping at what little humour he can find out of his very unlucky situation. "I mean, I could probably," he snorts, "punch that thing if my brain so badly wants me to think everything's Minecraft?" His grin falters as his stomach audibly grumbles.
Loren weakly and sluggishly slaps the Oak tree, barely any energy as the depression of the five stages of grief quickly settles in his body. I'm only 18 and I'm already going to die—he violently flinches, taking a step back as deep cracks form in the area of the wood his hand touched.
"I don't remember being that strong," he mumbles, raising his hand for inspection. It doesn't even have any marks or scratches from touching the bark of the tree.
Curiously, partly reluctantly, he hits the tree again with a little more strength. More cracks form the more he strikes it. It wasn't even that hard. He put in the same amount of strength he would when hitting a TV remote to work again.
With enough weak slapping, the crack grows large enough that a section of the tree disappears, causing the rest to disappear in quick succession, dropping as miniature 3D items of their corresponding block in Minecraft. Blocks of Oak logs, sticks, and apples fall to the ground, laying still in the grass as they ignore physics.
"This has to be some kind of elaborate prank," Loren shakily breathes out. He approaches the items, kneeling to reach out and grab them, but they disappear upon contact. Instead, a hologram of a hotbar materializes out of nowhere above his left arm. Inside were the items lined up.
Laron doesn't remember ever owning a VR headset, nor does he remember installing Minecraft and putting it on before he woke up. He pinched himself, but the pain was real, and this wasn't a dream. So, that's great.
This is probably fine.