what happened in the hole. [minadough]

“I hate your stanky, emo ass.”

“You love my stanky emo ass. You want it so bad it makes you look stupid.”

“You don’t even know what I look like.”

“I don’t,” the girl’s fingers flew across the phone screen, “but I know.”

All around the girl, the passengers on the subway wondered who she was texting. You see, this girl—red-dyed hair, dressed in an emo black shirt and emo baggy trousers—had boarded the train with phone in hand. This was of course extremely common for youngsters her age. However, this Emo Girl had gotten so absorbed in her texting that she was grinning ear to ear. Her foot tapped frenetically on the carriage floor. And the more keen of people-watchers would have guessed that she was texting a friend, perhaps one who was sending her memes. Or perhaps texting a lover.

Well, they were all wrong. The truth was that this Emo Girl—known by the name of Sourdoughed, aka Sour, aka Dough—was texting her archnemesis.

I know, I know, nemesis implies ‘archenemy’, you can’t just say archnemesis, that’s like saying arch-archenemy, but that is exactly what best described the relationship between Sour and the other girl she was texting, Mina.

…Or, at least, that’s what they would tell you.

At last, the train bell blanged. Sour, engrossed in virtually clobbering her archnemesis, scarcely remembered that she had reached her destination. But somehow, she did remember. Lifting herself on her gangly legs, she dragged her stanky, emo (but, like, in the hot way—as the girl would’ve argued) ass out of the carriage, and the passengers on the subway with her were left with their curiosity unsated.

Lucky for you, though, dear reader, we get to follow her. No, shh, don’t complain. I know you wanted to follow the old lady who’s most certainly smuggling a cat in her purse, or the bunch of kids across the seats playing the world’s most riveting DnD game, all of which very interesting options, but I am the damn author, and you don’t get to choose. Fuck you.

We follow Sour out the doors. The girl is still texting their friend. Sorry, archnemesis. Tap tap tap tap. Their fingers are flying fast on her keyboard. They’re probably telling Mina to jump off a cliff or something equally crass. They’re so focused on their task that they don’t even notice the way that their emo boots are no longer rapping against concrete but rather sinking into soft, bright grass. The wind rustles through their red-dyed hair, smelling faintly of cedarwood and rain-soaked earth.

Something darts across Sour’s lowered field of vision. It’s small, blush-pink, drifting onto their screen. Finally Sour blinks, thumbing it with her fingers. It’s a cherry blossom petal.

“-You really missed me that much?” a rough voice croons.

Sour raises her head, and her heart knocks traitorously in her throat.

Another girl grins in her face. Straw-blonde braids frame a sweet, freckled face, shadowed by the brim of a cowboy’s hat. The wind is blossom-torn, the sky up above bright and blinding, and yet even it isn’t half as blinding as the girl before her, who glows like the sun.

“Aww, babe,” Mina flashes a smile at her. “I hate you too.”

~~~

It was not difficult for Sour to understand what had happened to her. This trope in fiction has been done tirelessly to death. Most modern audiences are familiar with the concept of transmigration or isekai, I have no doubt that if I placed any youngster in a similar situation they would’ve immediately got it too.

Sour had, somehow, while exiting the subway, walked themselves into the world of Minecraft. More specifically, the Minecraft server that they played on with Mina. Sour understood this as they hopped across the sprawling, natural landscape of Minecraft: rolling grass hills, the wide river that meanders far in the valley down below, rich and sparkling blue in the midday sunlight. On their end of the valley, the mountain is covered in blooming cherry blossom trees, which release their petals over the little civilisation they had constructed together upon the terrain.

What Sour had trouble understanding was why.

It was an odd feeling to be following after Mina. Sour, herself, had been the one who introduced Minecraft to Mina. They were the one who taught her the ins and outs of the roleplaying-game, scaling wicked cliffs, traversing hell’s fires, weathering waves of groaning, undead mobs. Sour would spring across the landscape uninhibited, while Mina stumbled after them. Well, Sour says ‘taught’, but it was more like laughing whenever Mina blew herself up. Or shooting her in her stupid pretty face for fun. Wait, they meant to say stupid—don’t know where that second word came from, haha.

Sour has no idea what the mechanics of this transmigration entailed, though. If they died in this game, would they actually die, à la Sword Art Online? Was Sour going to eventually return to the real world? Or had Sour already died, and was in some kind of fucked-up purgatory where she would be trapped with her archnemesis for all eternity? What did Sour do, what grave sin had they committed, to deserve such terrible punishment?

Maybe for being too emo?

For being too devastatingly hot?

Probably for being gay. It always was for being too gay.

Sour side-eyes the gigantic lesbian and bisexual flags flying from across the valley.

“Mina,” Sour calls out after the girl’s blonde avatar. “Am I dead?”

Mina stops her footsteps. She turns back to look at Sour.

Next, an arrow whistles past Sour’s ear. She jumps. It felt startlingly real, the way it blazed past her, nicking the edges of her red hair. She isn’t wearing any armour. Her breathing is fast, her pulse throbbing in her neck, blood rushing to her head.

“You’re not dead. You are, however, a dramatic hoe,” Mina rolls her eyes, stowing her crossbow. “Now, keep up!”

“I’m going to get you!” Sour hollers back, running after her. Her heart’s racing in her chest, adrenaline pumping through her veins as they both trample across the wilderness. And she’s never felt more alive.

~~~

Life feels surprisingly ordinary once Sour gets used to it. She isn’t really sure if this Mina is the real Mina that she knows in real life (or her previous life?), but she certainly acts like her. The world of Minecraft is an incredibly vast place, one that felt even vaster now that Sour was physically, corporeally within it, experiencing it like it was a very advanced, very expensive VR.

It should’ve felt quite empty, because of the fact that the only player characters here seem to be Sour and Mina, but Sour never feels lonely. It’s rather the idyllic life here, really. Here there are no responsibilities, other than tending to the farm animals and crops, going out to find new decorative elements for their homebase, and the like. Here, there’s no future to worry about, no past to dwell on. Sour has also figured out, after an accidental run-in with a skeleton (annoying bastards), that she can’t die in this game—she respawns just like in a Minecraft game. So, she isn’t scared anymore.

Okay, well, most of the time she isn’t scared.

There’s one time when she’s deep in the dirt, intending to dig her way into the core of the earth to mine valuables. Only that it’s dark, very dark, and while Sour had done this many times without issue while playing Minecraft, doing it in while being in Minecraft is an entirely different story altogether. For one thing it’s freezing cold, and Sour hasn’t figured out how to change her ‘skin’ to warmer damn clothes—the armour that she has crafted for herself is metallic and does nothing to alleviate her shivers. Sour fumbles around in her inventory for a torch, shafting together wooden sticks and lumps of black coal. But her fear is a glacial, paralysing thing, and it stymies even this simple action.

It's cold… so very cold.

Until, suddenly, a shadow drops down from above.

Sour screams—because honestly, what else is there to do when you’re six feet deep in a hole and someone drops on top of you—but cuts herself off quickly when she sees who it is. It’s Mina, the annoying asshole. She’s carrying a burning torch, smouldering flecks floating off its flame. Her blonde hair looks fiery gold in its light, her eyes sparkling.

“You scream like a girl,” Mina throws back her braided head and laughs, before Sour punches her in the gut and she hacks like a strangled goose, doubling back. “Ow, you motherfuckin’ bitch!”

They exchange a number more pummelling blows. When they’re both heaving, panting, with maybe a heart’s worth of health left on each of them (Sour’s sure that Mina has less than her, though), they stop.

“What are you doing down here in the middle of the night, huh?” Mina wheezes. “Instead of being in our bed?”

Ah, yes, the opulent, valentinously red and pink four-poster bed that Sour and Mina shared back in their house on the homebase. As archnemeses do.

“Because your face is ugly, and you can’t tell me what to do,” Sour snarks back. “What are you doing here, then?”

“Because I couldn’t sleep without you, idiot,” Mina says, and Sour knows that it’s just the Minecraft server mechanic where all players have to be in bed to pass the night, but out of context it really sounds like something different. “Hurry up and go to bed already. I’m sick of warding creepers away from trashing my chests.”

“Nah,” Sour replies.

“Fuck you mean, nah?”

“I mean that you can go fuck yourself,” Sour clarifies. “If you want me in bed, then you’ll have to try harder than that.”

A mirthful expression twists itself across Mina’s face. This kind of hate-filled, flirtatious banter—they’ve both gotten so used to it. It’s just the way that they are. But being this far down below the surface, standing toe-to-toe in the bottom of a one-block-narrow, dusty hole, a single warm torch between them… makes something come alight in both of them, filling the air with an electric charge.

“Oh,” Mina says, dark as a viper, “I can certainly try.”

The sound of a block being placed, and the sky is shut out above them. Clods of earth fall down across their shoulders, the heat of the flame intensified for a second—before the torch falls away from the blonde girl’s hand, thumping muffledly to the dirt below them.

The girl trods on its dying embers. Then, as the light goes out, Sour’s face is clasped in two hands, and she feels soft lips on her chapped ones.

Sour can’t see a thing in this pitch-blackness, but she can feel. They can feel the way they’re being pressed back into the wall of earth, Mina’s hands on their waist as she kisses her with a passion so fervid that the numbing cold of just a few minutes ago feels like a faraway memory, some alternate dimension that Sour has never been to.

Sour’s hands fist in Mina’s gayass flannel—she can’t see but she just knows it’s a fucking flannel. The air smells like smoked apples.

“Why would I go fuck myself,” Mina’s definitely smirking, now, “when I have you to do that for me?”

“That’s the cringiest thing I have ever heard,” Sour responds, airy.

“Ever listen to yourself? You named yourself after a fucking bread. You’re cringe.”

“Yeah, well, you’re making out with her right now.”

“You should fall off a bridge,” Mina says. “The cobblestone one.”

“That’s something you’re more wont to do.”

“Wont? Who the fuck says wont? I hate writers so much. Y’all need to shut up.”

Sour winds her hands through Mina’s hair—soft like silk. “I can think of a few ways to make that happen.”

“You think that you’re so funny,” Mina grumbles, but then they’re leaning towards each other again, inhaling whatever space there was left between them.

And Sour doesn’t know if this is purgatory, heaven or hell—

But if this is to be her grave, maybe it isn’t so bad.