[Sabre's POV]

It's been a while since we left the village, the Leader taking us wherever the Crystal is.

I got tired a while ago, and Orange had picked me up and is now carrying me. It's easier for him to push away all the sharp, metal plants that get too close, so it's working better in more ways than one. However, since it was early morning when we left, it's getting hotter as the sun rises further in the sky. Being surrounded by metal doesn't help...

"Are we gonna be there soon?" I ask, taking off my hoodie so I won't overheat.

"Yes, it shouldn't be much longer." The Orange Leader says. "We're almost there."

I notice that the Leader and Orange Steve are still looking around as they go through the forest. What are they keeping watch for? Is there something out there? Does this world have monsters, like my old world? I hope not... I don't want to deal with those things again.

I try not to think about them. All the different monsters of my world, that caused so much harm... that killed so many people... including the really nice people in that shelter I started out in. I'm pretty sure that the people there were the only ones that kept their heads and humanity once the apocalypse happened.

Everyone else... they were either crazy, supplies hoarders, adrenaline junkies that only cared about themselves and their group, or just flat-out mean. Y'know, now that I think about it, all the people I left behind back there would be so jealous of me if they saw how I'm living now.

All of a sudden, Orange Steve and the Leader freeze in place. I'm about to ask what's wrong, but then Orange quickly yet gently puts his hand over my mouth. The two robots hurriedly back up and hide behind a large bush, staring at something in the way of the path ahead.

"Sabre." Orange whispers. "Don't make any sudden movements. And don't raise your voice higher than a whisper."

"Why? What's happening?" I ask, keeping my voice down like Orange told me.

"There's a Mutilator in the way of the path." The Leader whispers. "Those things are dangerous to us, so they're likely extremely dangerous to you. They're a strange combination of mechanical parts and some kind of mutated animal."

The Leader points to something ahead, and I look. In the middle of the forest road is an animal that very slightly resembles a giant wolf, although it only has one eye in the center of its face. Its ears are long, kind of like a rabbit's actually. Its claws are each the size of a large knife, and seemingly just as sharp too. While it's front half seems mostly normal-ish, it's back half is entirely robotic. Instead of a tail, it has something that looks like a scorpion's stinger, but shaped more like a diamond.

I see that it's hunched over a Darkness creature. Looking closer I see... oh my gosh, it's eating the Darkness skeleton-robot thing. How in the heck is it eating it?! It's a robot!

Orange, the Leader, and I watch in silence as the Mutilator rips apart the Darkness. Eventually, all that's left is a few scraps of bent pipe-looking parts, and it walks off. Orange and the Leader wait for a bit before coming out from behind the bush. They silently walk past the remains of the Darkness, continuing on the path through the forest. A while after we passed... that, I start asking about what the heck that thing was.

"So, how exactly is that thing able to eat robots?" I ask. "I'm pretty sure that normally when animals eat something metal, it just cuts up their insides and kills them..."

"We don't really know, and we don't really want to find out." Orange says. "I mean, do you want to go near one of those things?"

"Nope." I answer, remembering the sharp claws the Mutilator had. "Did... Did one ever attack the village?"

"No, but we've seen them kill and eat other robots, and we don't want to take any chances." The Leader says.

We reach a hole in the ground, covered in vines. I look down into the hole a little and see that it leads inside a cave, with a light coming from somewhere inside.

"We're here." The Leader says, smiling.

"Uhm... D-Do we have to... jump down?" Orange asks, stuttering.

I climb down from Orange's arms and stop in front of the hole. Huh, it's not too bad. It only looks about as deep as the height of that office building I would climb over to get home all the time.

"It's not that deep, it's fine." I say. The two robots behind me look at me with confusion and concern.

"Uh, Sabre? That fall would actually damage one of us pretty badly, not to mention what it would do to you." The Leader says. "We have to climb down using the vines. Since they're made of metal and will cut you, you'll just have to hang onto Orange Steve while he climbs down."

The Leader hands me to Orange, who still looks terrified. I climb over to hang onto Orange's back as he walks towards the cave entrance.

They start climbing down into the cave. The Leader, of course, makes it down before Orange does. He's still trying to convince Orange to climb faster by the time he's been down there for ten minutes, and Orange is only halfway down.

"Come on, Orange Steve. It's alright." The Leader says from the bottom of the cave.

"I-I'm coming, just- Hang on!" Orange says, slowly climbing down vine by vine.

I'm getting really bored, and know that we'll be here all day if this keeps going. Or at least, a few hours. I then realize a way I can get Orange to just climb down.

"Orange, if you're not gonna climb down, I'm just gonna jump down myself." I say, dead serious.

"NO!" Both the Leader and Orange yell, and Orange finally climbs down at a normal pace.

We get down to the cave, and I hop to the cave floor as soon as Orange reaches it. I look around, seeing that the source of the light I saw earlier was a lava pool in front of us, with different pipes stuck inside the walls above it. The pipes make a winding path to the other side.

"Oh, great..." Orange mumbles. "Is this what you meant by 'adjustments', Leader?"

"Yes, we needed to protect the Crystal from thieves and other people that would not use the Crystal for good." The Leader says, walking towards the start of the pipes. "It'll take a bit, but these pipes are sturdy and make a clear path to the next part of the cave."

"It looks cool!" I say, momentarily ignoring the boiling heat from the lava and staring out at the awesome parkour path. It's just like in stories!

I notice the Leader trying to get Orange to be a little braver again. I guess he's scared of the lava too, which is fair. They're robots, if they fall in, they won't die quickly like humans do. I then turn my attention back to the parkour course, and excitedly remember the mangle of pipes I would jump around on to avoid a raider faction that would patrol around where I lived back in my old world. It looks almost exactly like it, so I could probably take the same route...

"Sabre, get away from there. You could slip." The Leader says, momentarily turning his attention to me instead of Orange, who also looks worried at the sight of me so close to the edge of the pit.

"I'm fine, I can take care of myself." I say. "This is actually similar to something I would use back in my old world, to get away from raiders. I can get by this no problem!"

"Sabre, wait-" Orange starts, but... too late.

I'm already past a fourth of the pipes. Like I guessed, it's no problem for me. However, my two robot friends worriedly and quickly follow behind me. I notice Orange keeps getting scared and slowing down...

"It's alright Orange, you're doing great! It's not that much further." I smile, and he looks up at me. He soon starts going just a little bit faster.

We eventually reach the other side, the Leader and I helping Orange across. We then start walking deeper into the cavern.

It gets colder as we go further down, which is kind of a good thing because it was really hot up there. I'm able to put my hoodie back on just as we reach some kind of... glass tunnel.

"What's in there?" I ask, trying to see what's causing the tunnel to have a weird, moving pattern.

"You'll see." The Leader says, smiling.

"Despite the rust and other stuff, the view is really pretty!" Orange says.

We walk into the tunnel, and I flinch at first when I see that the glass is surrounded by deep water. I think we're under a lake?

"Cool, right?" Orange says, looking out into the slightly rust-filled underwater view. He's watching a few robotic fish go by as they swim between metallic coral formations. Wait- Why is there coral in a lake?

"It took a long time to build this part, but we needed to so we could solve the problem of the path to the crystal being partially underwater." The Leader says. "It's very beautiful when it's nighttime; all of the stars reflect on top of the water, making it look like the surface of the lake has its own collection of constellations."

"Uh, yeah..." I say, still a little nervous. "It's- It's pretty cool."

I quickly make my way through the tunnel, the robots following behind me and getting back on track. We walk for a while, occasionally talking about random things, and sometimes I ask stuff about the Crystal. Apparently, all of the different Crystals were gifts to the kingdoms to defend themselves from the Darkness, given by a hero before the first Rainbow Steve.

Eventually, we reach a large, open room. In the middle of the back wall is a pedestal with three strange rods circled around the pedestal's top, where a glimmering citrine-colored crystal stands.

"There it is." The Leader says. "This here, is the Orange Crystal."

"It looks awesome..." I say, staring at the Crystal. It's prettier than any of the gems I saw in abandoned jewelry stores from my old world.

Orange and I walk up to the pedestal, and the strange field around the Crystal disappears when Orange reaches out. Orange then picks up the Crystal, holding it in his hands.

"Alright, we've got it." Orange says. "Now we can teleport outta here."

"Wait, we could've teleported here?!" I say.

"Not exactly, Sabre." The Leader chuckles. "We're not able to teleport to a place underground; we'd just end up on the surface above the place we're trying to teleport to. However, we can teleport out of a place underground no problem. It's strange, yes, but we can't really fix it."

"Oh... I guess that makes a little sense." I say.

The Leader brings me and Orange closer to him, as his hand starts glowing an amber color. We're soon surrounded by lightning as I feel my surroundings changing.

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I open my eyes, and I see that we're back at the village.

I see a familiar group smile at us once they notice we're here, and they wave. Orange and I wave back, glad to see our friends. The Leader turns to us as he's about to go back into his house.

"Make sure you use that responsibly, alright?" He says, looking at Orange.

"I will, I will. Chill out." Orange says, laughing a little.

"Good. Now, you might want to go ahead and put that in a very safe place at the Hub you made." The Leader says. "Don't want it getting stolen."

"We will!" I smile, and the Leader smiles back and walks inside his house.

Orange picks me up as he starts to teleport, and I once again feel everything around me shifting.

—————————————————————————————————————

We've been back at the Hub for a while, and Orange is working on something for the Crystals.

He's been putting together a few posts labeled with different colors and has just started putting them up. Since I can't really help with building stuff, I've been sitting to the side watching him while eating an apple and reading my storybook. I kinda feel bad, but Orange says that he doesn't mind.

"Hey Sabre?" Orange asks, walking up to me. He's probably taking a little break from setting everything up.

"Yeah, what is it Orange?" I answer, closing my storybook for a minute.

"I've been meaning to ask, why do you have a blindfold over one of your eyes?" Orange says. He sits next to me on the fence I've been on for the past hour. Man, this must be one sturdy fence if it can hold a robot.

"Oh, that eye has problems I've just gotten used to." I say.

"Problems?" Orange says, looking confused. "How so?"

"It literally doesn't work; It doesn't move, in fact, it doesn't even look forward. It just rolls a little bit when I turn my head and that's it." I say. "See?"

I lift the black fabric from over my eye, showing the off-color iris of my non-functioning eyeball. It's constantly looking down rather than moving with my other eye. I turn my head side to side a little bit, and I feel that eye roll a little with the direction I shake my head.

"Can you see out of it?" Orange asks, staring at my strange eye. I'd call it eye contact, but uh...

"Nope, not at all." I reply. "It's completely blind. I figured that I'd rather not creep people out with it, and decided there was no point in not covering this eye if I couldn't see out of it. So, I just grabbed the blindfold one day and kept it on while I was in a shelter when I was little."

"How did you adjust to losing it? I mean, technically losing an eye is a big deal." Orange says.

"I didn't have to, it's been like that as long as I can remember." I say, putting the blindfold back. "Apparently, I was found in the wrecked city streets outside of that shelter when I was really little. I was told that when they took me in, it was already like that and bleeding from a gash on the side of my head. They were able to take care of the injury, but couldn't take my eye out because that would've risked me bleeding out or something. They thought that my eye got detached from something in my head because of the gash, which was next to my eye socket, making it not work."

"Well, that sucks." Orange says. "At least you still have one, right?"

"Heh, yep!" I smile. "Besides, I've been able to use it to make raiders think I was dead by switching the eye the blindfold was over. You have no idea how many sticky situations that got me out of."

"Ooh, that's pretty cool!" Orange exclaims. "It's like- like- a trap, kinda! Except instead of capturing people, you just trick them!"

"Yeah, it was honestly kinda fun sometimes." I say.

"Oh, I gotta go back to finishing up this project." Orange says. "I promise, as soon as I'm done I'll come right back over, and then we can play some games or something!"

"Alright!" I say. "I'll wait right here."

Orange walks back over to his project thing, and I open my storybook again, going back to where I left off. It's a story about this guy who climbs a giant plant that grew overnight into the clouds, and there's a giant there. I, personally, find it hard to believe... but hey, I'm living in a world full of robots and the planet is turning mechanical because of some sort of weird virus-like thing, and there's another virus that turns the robots into basically zombies that I'm apparently prophesied to stop.

So... it's not really that far-fetched when I think about it.