Saturday, September 15, 2012

Part 20: Things that go quack in the night

When morning dawned, things picked up approximately where they had left off: surrounded by an unknown number of enemies, plus one spider.


Scenic country, though.  Cautiously I broke the shelter's glass.

Looks all right...


... Yeah, it wasn't all right.


Fortunately, I had been moving at a fairly fast panicked dash, so the creeper merely winged me.

As the second inevitable creeper made its charge, I filled it full of entirely too many arrows, since I was too nervous to take the time to pull the bow back properly, and the amount of damage per arrow was approximately the same as if I had lobbed them overhand.


Our descent from our hillside shelter was something less than elegant.

Ouch.  Red means ouch.

And we began our journey, through scenic though lion-infested desert.


...And more lions.  And this one had spotted us.  Over a period of a few seconds, I careened madly off the hillsides in an effort to get away from a series of two lions, and in the process inflicted so much damage on myself that I actually had to stop, with one heart of health left.  For whatever reason, I can't do anything on horseback, including eating (health regulations don't allow a meal service?  horsebacksickness?), so I actually had to get off, while Boxter did his level best to wander towards peril.


Fortunately, there was nothing too much more perilous than an unconcerned chicken.

Guess what's just over the crest of that hill!  Could it be a lion?

Next on the list was bears.


And another bear.


And a shadowy lump that was either a bear or a relatively-harmless boar, but which I'm going to go ahead and assume was a bear.


And a lion.  And, unfortunately, thicker trees, impeding our skittish and vaguely-northward flight.

In fact, the country was becoming distinctly and disappointingly forested once more.



As the sun was getting low in the sky, we reached the land's end once again.  We would be nuts - well, more nuts than usual - to go any farther today.


For the second day in a row, there was no ready shelter-cave, so instead I set about digging another hillside hollow.  Rather than staying in the hollow I was digging, Boxter immediately took off.  But it seemed he only wanted to go swimming, and he watched me work while he bobbed serenely in (happily shark-free) waters.

A duck checked my work.


But unfortunately, it seemed that was all Boxter wanted to do that night: go swimming.  And no amount of my firmly returning him to the nice shelter I'd built would convince him to stay in it long enough for me to build the last wall to enclose us.  He hankered, evidently, for the sea.

It's getting dark... this is not funny anymore...

He's out there somewhere again.

....annnd he's left for a fourth time.
It was time to bring out the haystack offering.



By that time, it was full night, and our shelter had one wall and a roof completely open to the night and the creepers.  And I could hear something coming, as it scraped loudly, shuffling footsteps coming closer.   I could barely move my fingers on the keyboard and mouse, as they stiffened with dread.  It was coming closer... closer... and suddenly it was THERE!


...it appeared to be a duck.  Which wandered around not doing much of anything, but all the while making a loud, heavy, shuffling, scraping sound.  Apparently there's only one "footstep" sound in Minecraft, so the footsteps of a duck make the same noise as those of a zombie.


I had nearly finished putting in the windows when I began to hear a new noise, the WwwwwooooOOOOooo creepy mooing sound of the Spooky Cow.

I'll spare you the many screenshots of an empty window, which I took each time convinced that THIS time I finally had a shot of the Spooky Cow.

But this screenshot was interesting - a shot of the duck launching itself from the roof above my head, only to die in a puff of asterisks in midair.


Eventually I saw the likely culprit: a fox that somehow must be possessed of a ninja ranged attack.



And then another shape darted in front of the now-very-scary window!


It appears to have been a boar.  Such was my distraction that I took the time to build a furnace to smelt more sand into glass, only to finally remember that I didn't actually have any sand with me, or anything worth smelting, really, unless I wanted to make more rock to add to the mountain of solid rock that already surrounded me.  Or to replace some of that unsightly cobblestone with elegant grey rock, thus making my habitat into an elegant.... yeah, right.


Here's yet another screenshot of a blank window, during which I must have been convinced that something else was out there.


Morning dawned, and our entrance hallway did have a certain elegance to it.


And yet another creature lurked at the door.  Someone must have been projecting movies on the other side of the glass or something.

I appear to have drawn my bow against the terrifying sheep.

Oh, well, at least we'd, most improbably, survived another day and another night.  Next: more trees!

2 comments:

  1. Hi again, I was just wondering when you would post again. I miss it.
    Thanks and hope you post another entry soon
    StormWolf

    ReplyDelete
  2. By popular demand! And by "popular demand" I mean one person asked me :-)

    ReplyDelete