Unfortunately, no sooner had I arrived than a super-charged creeper appeared, no doubt a remnant of a thunderstorm which occupied the first few days of my stay. The creeper packed quite a punch, and Alpha Site was more or less destroyed. This meant I had to fall back to Beta Site.
However, Beta Site was more or less the second of a chain of four fallbacks - only the first, Alpha Site, was within feasible distance of Hope to make work on it practical. This meant sites Beta, Gamma, and Delta are more or less crude huts with just enough to hopefully recover Alpha Site and from there make a stand for Hope.
Due to the nature of creepers, they have a tendency to overrun anywhere you've worked on signifigantly. This included Hope and Alpha Site, meaning my repair attempts were more or less in vain. After a near-fatal incident with a creeper in what used to be my place of residence in Hope, I fell back to Beta Site and renamed it Hope Two. (Hopefully I can revert the name once Hope is a city once more, rather than a remarkable blast crater.)
Although I would love to get some pictures for you to show the extent of the damage dealt to Hope and Alpha Site themselves, this would be nothing short of a suicide mission - there are no roads on which to walk, and the shadows of buildings make perfect breeding grounds for the nasties which have an irrevocable repulsion regarding my continued existence.
As a result, the pictures you are going to see are not nearly on the order of grandeur I had hoped to capture, but I'm afraid the impossibility of retrieving supplies from either Hope or Alpha Site makes large-scale rebuilding currently impossible. I've more or less been forced into a position from which I must start from scratch, which is an interesting truth in itself. However, at the moment I'm temporarily barred from taking daylit pictures by a storm. In the meantime, the list of notable items currently in my possession at Hope Two is as follows...
• One block of TNT • One bow and only eleven arrows to fire from it
• Enough apples to feed a man for half a year• My life
While I was typing, the rain let up - now I can show you Hope Two. Bear in mind this used to be a wooden shack with the absolute basic necessities short of punching trees down again, and that my lack of progress in the seventeen days after my arrival was mainly due to repeated attempts on my part to take back Hope.
The main house, along with an as-of-yet unfilled lava moat. | The apple tree farm a few second's walk away from the house. |
The secondary house, as well as the only viable way in or out. | A sign marking the quarry site. |
The quarry's rather shallow progression into the ground. | A birds-eye view of the compound. |
(You would not believe the lengths I had to go to in order to get the pictures organized nicely. Eventually I reverted to manipulating the HTML by hand, because it doesn't take a Ph.D. in Blogspot.)
This is Hope Two, and for Last Stand it may be the only chance to ever reclaim a fighting stand for survival against the waves and waves of ever-advancing bad guys who would gladly end your creations even if it meant their lives.
Although I hope Hope Two is not overrun, forcing me to fall back ever further, I cannot dismiss the possibility after such unfortunate tragedies in the recent past. My only retreats now are Gamma Site, Delta Site, and End of Line... and I don't intend to lose more ground before the assault. The world was named Last Stand for a reason ... here, I make the last stand. Either they die, or I do.
I appreciate your effort to make the pictures so organized and nice-looking. I'm not sure I could have figured that out!
ReplyDeleteYour Minecraft adventures are fascinating, and your writing is very entertaining as usual.
Have you done any more literature reading lately? I'm afraid I can't give you a super high or even high grade in the class unless you can show me that you read/thought about other pieces of literature than All Quiet. Did you finish All Quiet? Can you analyze it a bit as a whole? Make some guesses as to universal themes, etc.? This will all help me to grade you more accurately.