Part 36: In which no progress is made

Morning in the deep woods, with a creeper at the door.  The day was not off to a great start.

I just noticed him staring in dismayed horror at the pile of ashes by the window.  Those are dropped by dead creepers, and I had unthinkingly emptied the useless item while cleaning out my inventory earlier.

Before I could do anything else today, I needed to take care of the creeper problem.  Remembering how easily I used this method to take out a wolf a few days ago in another universe, I punched out a block of glass, and stood ready with my bow?

No sign of the creeper - had it wandered off?  Quite stupidly, I edged closer to the window.

This was not well-advised.

Immediately Boxter, who must have seen this coming, leapt in front of me, and began jumping up and down.  A split second later, I realized what he must have been trying to get through my thick skull, because I heard the ominous hissing of the creeper.

"Run, you fool!"

 I backed off rather in a hurry.  By breaking the glass, I'd made the boneheaded mistake of allowing the creeper to scent me.  With glass in between us, I was safe.  But with just one block removed, I'd suddenly given the creeper sneaky ninja ranged attack capabilities - it could get me from behind the stone wall, even if I couldn't see it at all.  As far as the creeper was concerned, we were now in the same room, and I was fair game.

This is probably a safe distance from the window.

I opted out of the clearly ill-fated battle.  Instead, I decided to escape by digging a tunnel clear through to the other side of the mountain.  It would take me ages to dig this tunnel large enough for Boxter, but maybe, considering the creeper-laden forest that awaited me, I would exit on my own and scout around to see if there was a sane path out of this mess.

Freedom!

My tunnel to freedom completed, I looked back the way I had come.  Boxter was, to my astonishment, distracting the creeper by engaging it in a jumping contest.  I didn't even know creepers jumped, but here was one matching Boxter bounce for bounce.  I guess they do jump - admittedly I'd never taken the time to study their behaviors in detail.

This is an even safer distance from the window.

 The other side of the mountain held a thick and lion-infested forest.

The lion looks particularly joyful, though.

I wandered around to the north, looking for a clear path onward.  It looked grim, but away to the northeast it looked like there might be a sandy beach wide enough to ride on.  Assuming we could make it through all these trees.

I took some time to try to prepare a path, clearing a tunnel through the worst of the trees.  I had no idea how big to make the cleared way - we were massive, that's all I knew, and a single leaf in the wrong place would be enough to block our progress.  The other problem was that all trees tend to look alike, so I managed to lose track of the path even as I was trying to clear it.  I had a feeling that I was never going to find these spots again.  Forlornly I placed a torch as a waymarker, then realized just how many torches I was going to have to place.  Forget it.

And the requisite bear.

Looking back the way I came, I made the discovery that the mountain I'd built the night's shelter in was actually quite staggeringly cool.  It would have made a great base for a mountaintop castle, accessible only by pegasus.

Majesty!

In the woods I was surprised to find a creeper lurking nearby.  It was past noon - what were the creepers doing still around?  They don't burn up with daylight, but they're supposed to eventually lose interest and wander off.  This one was possessed of exceptional patience, apparently.  But not exceptional brains.  It got stuck behind a tree trunk, and I was able to pick it off with arrows.

Surprise afternoon creeper!

Moments later, I was attacked by another afternoon anomaly.  What was a spider doing out in the afternoon, and why was it still aggressive?  This was getting weird, and a bit worrying.

Ow.

 Near sunset I returned to the mountain shelter to find that Boxter had attracted company.

Company!

It was two identical horses which, until my arrival, had been bouncing near the windows.  Had they come to absorb wisdom, to check out his toned cubic physique, or to taunt him?  They wandered off when I drew near.

The pair of horses wanders off into the sunset.

Inside, Boxter was practicing his daily exercise regime, which consisted of bouncing repeatedly and neighing a lot.  I blocked up the hole I'd punched in the morning, and ran down the long hallway to take care of the door on the other side of the mountain, quickly before anything scary wandered in.

The Minecraft equivalent of a boarded-up window.

I returned to find Boxter determinedly bouncing again.  He kept it up for the entire night, a feat that would put any human athlete to shame - in addition to his mental powers and his horse magic abilities, he apparently was in top physical form.  If he was an action hero, I'd probably be forced to hate him, especially if the next thing I discovered about him was a mysterious and troubled past.

All of my screenshots of him from that night show him in midair, like some sort of horse-shaped helium balloon.

Part 35: Let's try this again

Dawn revealed the now-familiar view through the front window of the shelter, of an open desert and, faintly visible, the useless glass portal to the land of terrifying death.

My brisk morning run (panicked headlong dash for fear something would leap on my head) revealed no danger, so I returned to the shelter to collect Boxter.

Relatively harmless wildlife this morning.

He was apparently raring to go, showcasing his impressive 1-block leaping abilities.  I wonder why it is that he can jump higher with my weight on his back than without it?

And I've got my eye on that spider.

For what seemed like the umpteenth time, we turned to look back at the mountainside we had just left.  The previous day's journey freshly in my mind, I decided to go to the west of the mountain this time, for fear of ending up at the exact same place once more in a sort of endless replay of the same day's journey.

The Sargasso Sea of Sand

To this side, the landscape was indeed passable.

But unfortunately, not quite an isthmus.

We stopped to gape back at the weird floating sand landscape that we'd tried to descend yesterday.  This version of Minecraft doesn't have solid sandstone, just fragile sand, which means that this entire structure is defying gravity, even Minecraft gravity, ready to collapse in avalanche.

This is only part of the maze.

And we came at last to the same peninsula that I'd seen in the parallel universe, a short gap to another island to the north.  This seemed to be the only way across - but at least it wasn't too deep.  After checking for sharks a few dozen times, I nudged Boxter forward, and we began to wade across.  It occurred to me that I had no actual plan should a shark try to attack us.  Well, my plan was to click madly at the shark with my sword and hope Boxter didn't swim out to deep water.  It wasn't a very good plan.

I was very nervous at this point, having seen a shark in the bay to the right not very long ago.

"How are you doing, Boxter?"

"Glub glub"

I wonder if Minecraft horses need air?

We made it.

The new island consisted of pretty rotten territory for riding through, so it seemed that much was in accordance with what I'd seen in the parallel universe.  And there was a bear standing squarely in our path.

I engaged in a staring match with the bear, trying to work out if it was worth dismounting to battle the bear, and risk losing health or using up arrows.  The bear seemed to taunt me, beginning to wander off, before, "Ok, I'm leaving now.  Oh, wait, forgot this flower over here.... Now I think I'll go... Oh, hang on, did I lose my watch in the sand?  No, I had it the whole time..."

The bear

The bear is not actually leaving.

Finally I tired of waiting, and made the daring move of wading through shallow water once more, cutting across the bay away from the bear.


The territory ahead didn't look very promising at all, although that mountain was pretty cool.

Mountain!

Sure enough, the forest was maddeningly difficult to navigate, and the trees were even too tall for jumping between treetops.  In several places, there simply wasn't enough space to drive a horse between trees, and I had to dismount and whack away at the leaves to clear a path.  This procedure was complicated somewhat by the way Boxter kept bobbing and jumping around, as if trying to help, but succeeding only in getting between me and the tree.

I did try to simply ride him through some of the gaps in the trees, but ended up somehow getting my face caught in the branches when I finally was forced to dismount, and after a bit of damage, decided that probably wasn't a good idea.

Boxter in the woods

It took us the rest of the day to reach the mountain, and I resolved to stop there for the night, digging the  now-customary tall and thin cave entrance.  I still haven't completely worked out the kinks of that plan, though.  I put up a two-block glass barrier, and cleared the ceiling up to five blocks, two blocks back into the cave.  Confidently, I leapt onto Boxter's back, and we jumped for the opening.  We got stuck halfway over the glass barrier.  In frustration I dismounted, only to embed my head in the ceiling, taking damage.  I somehow managed to scramble out of the ceiling.  I landed inside the shelter.  Boxter landed outside it.  So I had break the top layers of glass out (it didn't occur to me to build a step, and to expand the notch in the ceiling to give us room to pass), and chase down Boxter.  Again I rode him inside, this time over a lowered barrier, and then tried to bodily block him from jumping back out the entrance as I blocked it up with glass.

Prevented from jumping out of the shelter, Boxter turns instead to freaking me out by sticking his nose through the wall.

For once, I'd secured our shelter before darkness had actually fallen.  I decided to build a person-sized exit so I could scout ahead our route for the following morning.

Ha.  Human-size.

I returned at sunset with the unfortunate news that things looked pretty grim.  Trees out to the horizon.  No sign of a giant impassable ocean, at least, but maybe on horseback I simply hadn't made it that far yet.

Darkness fell, and Spooky Cow was outside doing his best to fill the night with unsettling sounds.  "WoooOOOooo.... MoooooOOOOOOOoooo...."

"I've heard scarier," I told it, as I checked all the corners of my shelter for danger, then nonchalantly turned to crafting a pickaxe.

Seconds later, my heart nearly leapt out of my throat when a grey shape floated quickly past the window.

"All right, fine, maybe I'm a little scared of Spooky Cow."

I went downstairs to mine till morning, away from all the scary sounds.

I think that MIGHT be Spooky Cow at the upper left of the window.

Part 30: The Portal

In the morning I set out to build the portal that my horse Boxter had described, the one that might bring me to the alternate universe where pegasus still survived.  But first I had to deal with a creeper problem.  I dealt with it in my usual way: by running terrified from my shelter, waving my sword, and then turning around to fire madly at anything that might be still chasing me.  

At first when I looked at this screenshot, I thought it was a lion.  Green creeper + red ouch = brown.

I built the portal and looked back to find that the trouble had not ended.  There were bears and lions and creepers up on the mountain and - oh no, oh no! - a lion at the very door to the shelter where Boxter was.

Aaaaaaa!

I raced back and slew the lion, hoping that I wasn't too late.  Fortunately, Boxter had stayed well back in the shelter, and the lion was either too big, too stupid, or too slow to get to him.

Phew

That disaster averted, another loomed, in the form of a bear about to land on my head.

Augh!

A flurry of arrows put an end to that one as well.

If the bears are all already carrying fish with them, why do they feel the need to attack horses?  Are they trying to make some sort of surf and turf?

Finally I collected Boxter and we rode to the portal.  At the portal I stopped.

"Boxter... that portal design is too small for horse and rider."

"You think I'm going through there?  You're out of your mind.  I've heard there's tigers and worse."

"Wait, you mean you're not coming along?"

"You bet your sweet pixels I'm not."

The portal

I dismounted sadly.

"But before you go, if you wouldn't mind..."  Boxter motioned back behind us, where yet more predators were lurking.  This time it was two lions, menacing Boxter's pig friend.  One last volley of arrows, for old time's sake.  And then the valley was safe once more, at least temporarily.

Where are all these things COMING from?

"You really want to stay here?  With nobody to fight off the predators?"

"What makes you think traveling with you is any safer?"  He had me there.  Between my crazy mountain-climbing and my propensity to attract lions and exploding creepers, I might well be more of a hazard than a help.

We exchanged our farewells, and Boxter headed for the horizon, while I turned to face the portal.

Well, here we go.

Zwwwiiiiiiingitty

Part 29: The truth about pegasus

Dawn was tranquil, as seen from the spot where I stopped, panting for breath, after running full tilt from the night's shelter.  There were no creepers pursuing me this morning - just a rather bemused sheep.  Behind the remaining glass, the part that I hadn't busted out while making my escape this morning, I could see Boxter bouncing about in horsey enthusiasm at the brand new day.

Peaceful

Our path northward led into mountains, and we began to climb an increasingly narrow ridge.  A cow guarded the top.

cow of the Highlands

And the cow didn't want to let us past.  We could easily have continued below the ridge, but the cow was looking at us with a sort of wall-eyed belligerence that screamed challenge.  Were Boxter and I not, combined, the largest creature in all of Minecraft?  We charged over the ridge of the mountain.

Occupying the path, huh?  We'll see about this.

The cow knocked us off.

Oof.

We charged again, and were soon engaged in a perilous high-altitude shoving match.

Grrrr

The cow knocked us off again.

I think those block dots near the top of the picture are the hooves of the cow as it did a ninja-style backflip over the mountain peak.

And then the cow seemed to lose interest, sauntering down the ridge as if it had made its point.

...ok, I'll chalk this one up as a moral victory.

Carefully, and a bit sheepishly, we wound our way down to the desert floor.

Ahh, vast and open.  We'll make good time.

I am still not good at descents on horseback, so I had to dismount to gobble a health-restoring pork chop.  Fortunately, Boxter didn't stray too far - in fact, he startled me by breathing in my ear just as I was turning to find him.

Gaaah!

The desert skirted a shoreline, and we paused to watch an interesting sight - a chicken swimming happily with a shark.  Could it be that sharks actually weren't all that dangerous?

Cue Jaws theme music

In the next second, the shark answered that question.

With a single casual sideswipe of the jaw

We passed a perilous cave, from which a skeleton ambushed us.  His ambush would have been more frightening had he not been on fire at the time.  We stood back, and let the skeleton problem sort itself out.

...yeah, not much for me to do here.

The sun beat down on us from high noon.  The coastline narrowed, and I nudged Boxter up an inviting sand dune.

Sand.

It turned out to be quite a sand dune.

Bird teasing fox.  Bird won, on account of fox's inability to fly. 

And our descent posed quite a problem.  Although the southern side was smooth and regular, the northern and western faces were geometrical nightmares, with steep cliffs and sudden dropoffs.  We wandered the vertical maze, trying to find some way down that wouldn't get us killed.

Dungeon!  Not interested!

I contemplated jumping straight into water, but wasn't 100% sure that as a human-horse combo, we would survive such a move.  For example, individually we can each swim, but not when I'm on horseback.  Would the same caveat apply to avoiding falling damage by landing in water?

It occurs to me, though, that maybe I could have dismounted and given the overhanging sand a nudge.  It might have collapsed into a convenient downward slope.

During our indecision, I happened to see a lone patch of grass in the desert, for which the forces of Bear and Lion were doing mighty battle.

For the record, it looked like the Bears beat the Lions.

I decided not to risk jumping into water and, finally, after a fair amount of inevitable falling damage, we reached the desert floor again, and luckily found a tranquil valley with a bit of non-sand wall in which to dig the night's shelter.

Quiet valley, with pig.

As I began my hurried construction, Boxter's snorts and neighs grew gradually fainter.  I looked up to find that he had made friends with the local pig, and the two were wandering out toward the open desert together.

Boxter communes with a pig.  His is the simple life.

As sun began to set, they were still wandering their way onward.  Not fretting about building shelters, not on a pointless pegasus quest... just wandering.  And tomorrow I'd be racing with him off into the north again.

Friends heading toward the far horizon.

Sigh.  Well, my shelter was nearly finished.  And this time I'd tried the strategy of building a two-block barrier to the entrance.  I'd also tried digging the entrance taller to give us room to ride in, but I couldn't finish the job or the weak sand ceiling would collapse.  I was out of time.  This would have to do.

In fact, there are multiple problems with this entrance scheme, given that we are two blocks wide and three blocks high.

Sure enough, we got stuck on the threshold to the shelter.  I dismounted, leaving Boxter balanced on the glass barrier, hoping that he would jump into the shelter.  He jumped the other way, of course.

Darnit.

So, with night descending in a perilous manner, I broke away the top two blocks of glass, chased down Boxter, rode him into the cave, and then dismounted. I whirled around to face the entrance, and quickly bricked it up.  For once, I beat him to it.

Phew.

And there we stood in the narrow stone shelter.  I widened the room somewhat, but there was no real purpose to it - tonight, Boxter appeared to be in a tranquil mood.  He watched me work.

"...so you're still looking for that pegasus, huh?" he said at last.

"Yeah.  It's out there somewhere."

"I'm not so sure."

I shrugged my pixellated shoulders.  He'd tried before to convince me that pegasus didn't exist, and that the one I'd so briefly had tamed was a figment of my imagination.  "I've ridden one.  They exist."

"One, perhaps," he said.  "If I ignore the overwhelming evidence against your sanity - you are talking to a horse, after all - and allow that maybe you did see one pegasus... do you really think there are any more?  We've searched hundreds of miles by now, and all possible habitats, and haven't seen a second pegasus.  There can't possibly be a sustainable breeding population.  I think they're extinct."

I looked at him, stunned.  Could he be right?  I'd only ever seen one, and that was hundreds of miles ago, and it was dead now.  "No, I don't believe it," I told him, and stiffly shouldered my pickaxe.

To clear my mind, I began to mine.  But after digging a long and torch-lined shaft that led single-mindedly down into the depths of the world, and not finding a single lump of coal in the entire thing, the symbolism was not lost on me.

Perhaps Boxter was right.

The Mine of Nothing

I trudged back to the surface, where the sun was beginning to rise and burn off the morning layer of zombies and skeletons.

"So what do I do, if they're extinct?"  I asked Boxter.

"You build a portal to the next world," he answered simply.

"What, the Nether?  The land of screaming mud and flaming rocks and seas of lava?  Pegasus hang out there, do they?"

"No, the next parallel universe on.  You might have better luck there."

"How do I build a portal like that?"

He told me the plans.  They were simple.  I could make it out of glass.