#minecrabt

this is 666 words

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“Sooo... what are you building now?”

Arthur startles, although not as hard as Vivi was expecting. He recovers quickly—if getting startled over nothing slowed him down every single time, they’d never get anywhere—and twists around in his computer chair to look at her, giving her a Look. “Don’t sneak up o-on me like that,” he says. It‘s cursory; Vivi hadn’t even been sneaking.

She doesn’t deign to give it a reply, instead moving closer to lean her weight against the back of his chair. “Show me what you’re building!” she demands.

With an eyeroll, Arthur turns back towards the desktop. Splayed over the first monitor is—well, it’s Minecraft, but she can’t tell what it is, exactly, that she’s looking at. The second monitor is just as incomprehensible, although this she recognizes as one of Arthur’s little schematic pages.

“You’re in luck,” he’s saying, moving the avatar back a few steps to survey the project. “I just need to finish this line of r-redstone connectors, and it’ll be done.”

“Ooh.” She crosses her arms atop the chair and pillows her chin on them. Arthur takes another moment to skim his schematic before moving onto completing the final part of the construct. “What is it?” she asks after a moment of trying and failing to glean knowledge off of what’s on screen. He seems to be in the depths of whatever it is.

“You’ll see,” he murmurs. Vivi huffs and gently shakes the chair, but she doesn’t press. Arthur’s Minecraft projects are usually a blast, anyhow, and she doesn’t mind the wait.

“And... there.” Arthur grins, self-satisfied as he places down the final block and then steps back. Vivi doesn’t understand a single thing on screen. She shakes his chair a little more, impatient to see the aesthetic side of the final product, and Arthur huffs a laugh. “Okay, okay! Just... gimme a mo’.” He navigates his way through a maze of redstone and the various mechanics it manipulates, until he’s made his way out.

Vivi gasps a little once Arthur is hovering above the project. “It’s a piano!” she says, leaning closer to the screen. It fills the field of vision, massive in size, even when half-embedded into the ground. There are two levels to it, probably to save space. “It looks so cool! Wh—does it play anything? How does it work?”

“Well—I have to manually go in and program a song if I w-want it to do something different, but it’s already set up to p-p—set up to play.” He navigates to a short stone tower beside the massive structure and, with a click, the piano begins to play.

“Oh, wow,” she says. When she glances at him, Arthur’s entire expression is lit up. “Artie, this is so cool!”

It takes a moment, but, “Thank you,” he says. “I had to—there are a few schematics online, but I made this o-one mostly from scratch. It’s, uh. It took a w-while.”

“It’s so cool,” she insists. “I love it!”

“Thanks,” he repeats, a little quieter. The smile still hasn’t left his face.

“You should build it in the server.”

The smile disappears so quickly she almost gets whiplash. “Oh, no. No.” Vivi laughs when he shakes his head, eyes wide. “Vivi, no.”

“Arthur!” she whines. “But it’s so cool!”

“And it took me so long to do!”

“You have it all figured out, though.”

“But I don’t have the materials,” he says emphatically. Vivi giggles at his expression; he wrinkles his nose at her in response. “No. It’d take s-so long.”

“Ugh. Fine. You’re no fun.”