The Hermitcraft Story Book 2: Deeper Down

Chapter 4: The Rise of Boatem

Grian

Grian awoke to screaming. Not the screaming of a terrified hermit struggling against a zombie, or the terrified screams of Scar when encountering literally anything, but the screaming of a goat.

Grian stormed out of bed in a huff. His half-finished starter house disappeared into the morning fog. He stomped his way onto the shoreline to see a monstrosity. There on the neighboring shoreline was without a doubt a Goatem Pole. Goats in boats stacked on top of each other. This was plagiarism! Grian would have none of it.

He dove into the water and stealthily swam through the still ocean over to the shore containing the Goatem Pole. To add insult to injury, it was even taller than the Boatem Pole. Grian made quick work of it. While he had always wanted to know what goat meat tasted like, he decided to try another approach. He instead began to dig, under the pole, a massive hole. He let the boats drop into the hole until the pole couldn't be more than two goats tall.

This got Grian fully awake and fueled his fire and his need to prank back those who had pranked first. Tango Tek had infiltrated their Wither fight and stolen their nether star. Now was the time for Grian to get them back with a well planned prank.

He began to ring a bell just on the edge of the Boatem Pole.

"BOATEM MEETING!" he yelled, the sounds of his shouts and the bell carried through the mountain range. "BOATEM MEETING!"

One-by-one they arrived; Scar, Impulse, Mumbo, Pearl. No sign of Gem though. And Pearl looked like she had something on her mind. Grian decided not to press her on it in front of everyone.

"Today we're going to get back at The Big Eye Crew!" Grian proclaimed.

Everyone became excited. Grian knew how to exploit a weakness or two for the sake of a prank.

The plan was simple. They would just need a metric ton of wood and a piston. First, they all flew over to the rapidly emerging Big Eye coastline where a series of shops were beginning to emerge. Next, they would build a small stone pillar up directly off the coast for the entire crew to see. Then, they would place down a boat on top of the pillar and a piston facing down toward the boat. Finally, they would place another boat on top of the first boat and trigger the piston to compress the two boats into the same space. This process would repeat until there were over 100 boats compressed into the same space. This should not have been humanly possible, but it was. The plan was for one of the Big Eye crew members to see what looked to be a single boat, bump into it and then disperse the 100 boats across their entire shopping district.

The trap was laid. Grian and Boatem flew over to a nearby mountain range to watch and wait from the shadows. Right on cue, Tango Tek arrived from his own house and saw the stone pillar in the sky leading up to the boat and immediately donned his elytra to fly over to it.

Boatem waited with bated breath as Tango sniffed out this peculiar sight. He eventually kicked the side of what appeared to only be one boat, causing the 100 boats to burst apart and knock Tango into the water as they covered the streets and the carefully constructed harbor.

Tango crawled his way through the gaps in the boats and pulled himself back onto the street as Grain and company flew over his head and shouted, "BUY AT BOATEM!"

"YOU!" Tango shouted. "YOU GET BACK HERE!"

The members of Boatem laughed and laughed as they returned back to their bases. They agreed to count their first meeting as an unqualified success. They parted ways, anxious to continue work on their own bases.

Grian had much work to do himself. He had a house to build. It would be a simple house with gray walls and a black roof. However when he was done, there were several extra jut-outs and towers with windows on them, except it looked like the windows were singing. Based on his placement of wooden decoration and the curvature of the windows, it looked like every window in his house was screaming a symphony of enlightenment. This amused Grian to no end.