your eyes still haunt me to this day

Overheard on City of Heroes:

[Help] MidnightStrike: how do you get to first ward?
[Help] MyndSwap: Practice, practice, practice... oh wait.


And, from Minecraft...Three weeks in--though before I began work on the village/generator corridor, mentioned earlier--word passed down in chat that another XP generator had been built (again, skeleton flavor). This one was off to the southeast from the village, behind the patch of land Storm had claimed for his own. It was a small, strictured space when we found it, compactly laid out, and our only problem was that night fell while we were still underground.

So--considering there were other folks on the server that night--we pretty much had to wait for dawn in a small glass corridor, one block wide. Which is where we saw this little guy:

(from the Minecrafting album)

Fawkes finally told me it just wasn't done for a fierce fae explorer to be cooing at a skeleton who really just wanted to shoot us dead.

But I couldn't help it! He was so cute!

(from the Minecrafting album)

Eventually, the chaos sun rose, and we went back to the mountain base by way of the spawn. On our way we discovered something untoward in the desert.

(from the Minecrafting album)

It seems that while we were wandering, Dr. Mason was in town crafting fiendish and terrible forms of artificial life in his underground laboratory...Well, perhaps "fiendish" and "terrible" is going a bit far. Let's substitute "dim" and "absent-minded" instead.

Why? Because--just like the villagers had, earlier--the golem simply wandered off into the desert. We're not sure why, exactly; one would assume that golems, designed to guard villagers, would guard them--but then, they'd all wandered off into the desert a few days before this, so maybe the golem was just trying to find them.

At any rate, this was someone's attempt to corral said golem, and keep him from wandering around. I suppose it works--until golems gain the ability to phase through solid matter, at least.

(Keep in mind the undeveloped area to the upper left of this picture--that's where I began building the corridor from the village to the first XP generation station. All of that, at this point, is structural stone brick, hieroglyphic sandstone, wood plank and glass pane corridors, now.)

(from the Minecrafting album)

Note placement of arrow. Though I usually try to remove visible HUDs from my screen for photographic purposes, this was literally a spontaneous chance snap of a moment in time (likely never to happen again). Namely--Fawkes swimming under all that fierce orange stuph.

And I quote:

[Fawkes_Allen] You can breathe underlava
[Fawkes_Allen] Hee
[Fawkes_Allen] Don't try this at home


And now the explanation. We'd begun investigations of the substantially large cave system underneath the mountain base. A chance mishap--while mining redstone, I believe--opened up a section of lava nearly at Fawkes' feet. Thinking quickly, he drained a potion of fire resistance, and then...well...went for a swim.

In lava.

Downsides to this? Well, apparently--with fire resistance--one can actually breath liquid magma, so that's on the plus side. Unfortunately, on the minus side--pretty much all of the minus side--is that once having been engulfed in lava, one continues to burn until the amount of time one was wading in lava has expired.

See, potions only go so far. Fire resistance will save you in a pinch, but if you do more than run quickly through it, you'll burn for the number of seconds you were exposed. And--say, if your potion wears off while you're still swimming underlava--well, you'll burn for quite some time.

Fawkes did not die from inhaling molten rock. No, Fawkes died because, on the other side of the pool of molten rock, his Minecrafted body still burned merrily for several seconds afterwards. The fire resistance potion expired, having protected him from the laval effects, but still, his body burned.

Finding where he'd died and quickly throwing everything I could rescue into a chest--well, that was the hard part.

And now, one of the most disturbing things I've seen in Minecraft:

(from the Minecrafting album)

Again, we'd discovered another ravine. (The damned things just keep turning up in this world!) Navigating our way (carefully, yet still not without mishap--I believe we both died at least once each) across a treacherous mix of water rapids and lava falls, I noticed some coal underneath the water. I busily mined it out, because we needed the coal for torches, and I drowned as Fawkes overbalanced and slipped into magma.

Again.

Only without fire resistance potions this time.

When we reconstituted, I found myself treading water in an air pocket that seemed...tenanted. Before I thought it through, I affixed a torch to the wall and screamed aloud, because I was face to face with a creeper.
Which then proceeded not to blow up, thereby shattering my conceptions of just what it is creepers do.

After some minutes of investigation, Fawkes told me that according to him, I was standing waist-deep in the air pocket alone. Only I could see the Ghost of Explosions Past.

So, air kraken, adventurous golems, pens of rainbow-colored sheep, and creeper ghosts. This is shaping up to be a very odd world.

More when I get time!

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