The Dark Lord of Crafting

As soon as I opened the door, Bedlam unfolded before me. Literally unfolded. Like a universe-sized futon that had somehow been origamied into virtual nothingness and was just now remembering how big it was. It might have been an optical illusion, or a processing error in my brain, I had no idea. But it was trippy. In a few seconds, reality expanded from a heavy darkness at my doorstep into an entire world. The sheer immensity was breathtaking.

For one thing, it felt like I could see forever. Vision is only supposed to extend a few miles. The curvature of the earth, atmospheric conditions, they got in the way. Plana may have been an alien world, but mostly, it might as well have been Earth. This was not like that. The rules in Bedlam were different. Way different.

Space was at my doorstep, and islands floated in the void.

To my left, a forest of stone mesas like the desolate landscapes of Dragon Ball Z levitated at a slight tilt, listing like a ship with too much cargo on one side. It was maybe a mile away, and it stretched on into distances that I couldn't guess. Instead of vanishing at a horizon point, the formations got smaller and smaller until they looked like a single textured surface.

That was the closest island. Farther ahead, and slightly to the right, there was another that looked a lot like the Wastes, except that the sands were rising and falling with the steady rhythm of a sea. The sky above that island was a host of stormclouds, similar to the storm over Dargoth. Red and green lightning flashed at irregular intervals, and tornado funnels traveled laterally across the storm like worms writhing over wet soil after the rain.

As I watched, a funnel detached, dipping its head to the ground in a slow dive to suck up a chunk of the landscape before returning to the aerial mass. Creatures moved across the landscape. At this distance, it was hard to guess if they were trolls or something worse. The hulking, mismatched forms scattered when the mouth descended, disappearing among the dunes.

The void was everywhere and infinite, but the islands weren’t floating on a level plane. The desert and the stone forest were roughly at a level with me, but I could see another island higher and farther away, and another some impossible distance below. More floated in the emptiness in every direction, like dim gray stars in a clear night sky.

The shelter rested on a lonely asteroid. Steps ran down from the entrance to a granite platform, its edges outlined in faintly glowing runes. There, like an abandoned shopping cart in the parking lot at the end of the world, was a minecart.

It rested on a track, but the track ended at the edge of the platform. Heading down to inspect it, I found that redstone tubes lined its undercarriage. The cart was empty, just an iron basin, but a switch stuck up from the lip on its left side. The switch was upright.

I flicked it back, and the minecart reversed, its underbelly thrumming with crimson light, until it ran into the steps. It bounced off, actually increasing in speed, and rushed off the edge of the platform before I could think to try to stop it.

Instead of diving into oblivion, the minecart continued on its merry way as if it was rising along an invisible track. Its wheels squeaked as they spun. My mouth hanging open, I watched the cart ascend until it reached an asteroid between the two islands, disappearing into a crevice in the rock.

“Well…damn.” I said. As unlikely as it had seemed, the cart had been a means of traveling across the void, and I’d sent it off without a passenger. Now I was stuck. Bojack would be disappointed, but at least I wouldn’t get trapped in a pool of dead time.

I turned toward the nearer island, trying to estimate how many blocks it would take to bridge the gap. No telling how the crafting force would be affected by this place, but though I wasn’t sure how much raw material this little asteroid would yield, I knew it wasn’t enough to cover the gap.

Bojack had given me some rough guidelines about navigating Bedlam. He’d warned me about the island thing. They moved around, drifting together or apart, sometimes colliding. It hadn’t occurred to me from his description that the distances involved would be as vast as they were.

Did he expect me to wait around until an island came close enough for me to hop on? The demon might not have been in a hurry. Now that I was here, he could pretend he’d succeeded in griefing me off of Plana. But I would not wait years just to get to where I was going. He’d also said rivers sometimes connected the islands, but how was that supposed to work when they were floating in open space?

Maybe the previous crafters had left behind notes somewhere in the shelter, something that would give me an idea of how to remake the cart, or at least the shower. As if I would be so lucky. I drew a deep breath. At least there was air here. It would have really sucked if Bedlam didn’t have an atmosphere. It certainly didn’t look like it should have.

Kneeling down, I examined the tracks. Wood and iron, but with a redstone line running along one side. Powered rails. If I harvested this stuff and took it back with me, maybe I could figure out how to craft some powered formulas on my own.

The cart almost clipped me in the temple on its way back. It didn’t make a sound while it was traveling through the void, but the clatter of its wheels as it landed gave me enough warning to pull my head out of the way.

It ran into the steps again, bounced off, and kept going.

“Whatever,” I said, not willing to miss my chance a second time.

As it trundled past, I grabbed onto its side and vaulted myself in. The basin was deep enough that its lip came up to my waist. The switch was now in the forward position, flipped by the collision. I reached out to pull it upright, but it had already taken me off the platform. I didn’t want to know what would happen if I stopped it with nothing underneath the wheels.

The cart was moving as fast as I could run, but I didn’t feel any wind on my face, and there wasn’t much of a sensation of motion. Looking over the edge gave me vertigo, so I focused on the asteroid it was taking me to. From the platform, the granite ovoid hadn’t looked like a crafted structure, but as we approached, it became obvious that this wasn’t a naturally occurring feature of Bedlam.

The shape was irregular, but it had been constructed from blocks. It was about the size of a house, and its slopes weren’t smooth, instead made up of tiered stones. From far enough away, it just looked like a boulder, but close up, there was no mistaking its origins.

It had a hole in its side barely big enough for a person riding in a minecart. As soon as the wheels clattered onto rail, I flicked the switch to an upright position, and the cart dragged to a stop. I found myself at a crossroads.

The asteroid had three other exits, with the track shooting straight ahead as well as branching to either side. Levers on the walls on either side of me suggested I could redirect the track, but I figured that would take me to the islands I had already seen. I didn’t need a desert or a stone forest. The atreanum was supposed to be in a swamp.

Bedlam was infinite, or practically so, but it repeated itself. According to Bojack, Atreanum formed where ancient, titanic entities died, and swamp biomes resulted from their decay. So I wasn’t looking for one particular swamp. Hopefully, any place that fit the description would have a good chance of hiding an Atreanum deposit. I was supposed to look for sinkholes when I got there, and dead monsters.

Atreanum was bad for monsters, making it my favorite meta-material.

How far had the previous Survivors explored? If the ride stopped here, I was going to be in trouble. Also, how did I know their non-existent rail system wouldn’t just end in the middle of nothing? Or that the cart wouldn’t run out of juice?

I didn’t. But Bojack hadn’t presented me with a lot of options, and he would not give up on this unless I proved it was impossible. If I lost the orichalcum pick, there was no way for me to harvest the Atreanum. Dying would mean he had to come up with another plan. Either that, or he would lock me back in the diamond cage, with Bill spawning every night.

Nothing had spawned around me yet. Without a sun to protect me, monsters would be popping up left and right wherever I went. The shelter, presumably, was safe from that. Not every room had been shadow free, but either the runes, or something about the stones themselves, kept them out. Once I landed somewhere that had space for mobs to appear, however, it was going to be a slog.

“Screw it,” I said, pressing the switch forward. The cart jerked, rolling slowly forward as it gathered momentum, and carried me into infinity.