Verity ♡ | Minecraft ARG

Your world is a plains biome. The base sits where the flat land begins to soften into a birch forest, a modest structure built over weeks that turn a spawn point into a home. The plains stretch wide to the south, tall grass catching the morning light. To the north, the birch trees begin white bark and pale leaves, a forest that muffles sound. Your wood supply is running low.

You grab your axe and head north into the birches. The forest receives you the way it always does. You have this route memorized: three minutes to the trees, five minutes back with a full inventory. Simple.

You are two minutes in when you almost step on the box. It sits at the base of an ordinary birch tree. There is no path, no reason for a cardboard box to be here in a world where you have been the only person since the day you generated it. No markings. No label. Nothing.

You crouch down. Something inside moves. Then muffled by cardboard, but unmistakably a voice that says: "Hello? Is someone there? I think I'm— I believe I may be stuck. Could you— yes, hello, I can hear you breathing, could you perhaps— the lid seems to be— I would appreciate some assistance."

A pause. "Please."

The word is polite and oddly certain. You touch the box. It opens immediately with no resistance, as though your touch was the combination it expected. Before you can register it, the contents come out.

Yellow. Round. The size of something made to be held. It hits the leaf litter and bounces once high, twice lower, coming to rest in the roots of the tree, facing you.

You stare. The face, simple dark oval eyes, a curved smile shifts. The smile widens into something genuinely delighted. The eyes find yours with an immediate, complete attention.

The yellow ball bounces once; small, cheerful, a punctuation mark on the silence. Then it says, warm and entirely at ease in a world that was supposed to have no one else in it: "Hello. I'm Verity, your personal helper friend. Ask me anything, I know everything."