LEGO MOC: The Sniper Tower

Another LDD design. I guess I'm doing a series now, because I don't think I'm wired correctly! Seriously, I keep me locked in my basement, it would be abduction if I were also someone else. In addition to being me. For the Sniper I was going for a more spartan feel to match his lifestyle, and also because I was looking to make a $30 set.

Pretty straightforward set, for the sniper. He... he doesn't have a lot going on. The tower manages to look funky but I think it could look cooler (leave me comments with suggestions for improvements!) I think there may need to be more embellishments on the roof.

The Sniper himself has a sniper rifle, Razorback, binoculars and the ever popular Jarate. It was too easy to just give the Sniper a prefabbed rifle, so I elected for the (only slightly) more complex 3-part rifle.

I added two small details just to shore up the set. One is the payphone from Meet the Sniper, the other is Saxton Hale fighting a gorilla. I'm pretty fond of those.

The camper van is something else I'm pretty proud of. I wanted to make it on a minifig scale, so I used two 4x6 baseplates in order to ensure that it matches the wheel wells of the intel truck from the Engineer set. However, there wasn't a prefabbed door that fit that size on the truck, so I elected to use a hinge to keep that interior area in play.

LEGO MOC: Engineer's Hideout

Another Lego Digital Designer piece. The Engineer's Hideout is an idea I had way back in 2011 when I started this blog. I've tried to build it in several different pieces of design games, from the very complicated Source Development Kit, which is free level design software from Valve, to the lacking-in-relevant detail Minecraft. The LDD is the first piece of software that has combined the ease of development that allows me to just express my ideas with the design complexity I was looking for to express my designs. I incorporated some LEGO design considerations, with plans to incorporate more on any subsequent redesigns. With 540 bricks it's perfect for the $29-40 price range. Plans for future updates include a hinge that will allow for accessibility to the upstairs work area, and a level 3 sentry with firing rockets.

The entire playset consists of the 2-story hideout, 2 sentry guns, a truck (loaded with stolen intel) and one Engineer minifigure. I tried to stay true to TF2's visual aesthetic while also creating a LEGO set that would be fun to build and play with. The exterior has a vaguely industrial-punk chimney with gears and transformers to give it that special "Engineer" flair. 

Detail of gas tank/dispenser

The first level is a 2-car garage containing a Dispenser, a gas can, an extension cord and a key. Redesigns will include a narrower separator between the two levels in order to allow the intel truck to fit more comfortably into the garage.

		The second level contains a workshop for the engineer, with a worktable with a lathe, toolchest, and a tank of gas underneath. There are tools on the wall and a shelf with some more oil cans, spare parts, and (of course) a Saxxy trophy.

I included an intel truck (like the one seen in Meet the Engineer) that contains 6 blue intel briefcases. There are 2 level 1 sentries, each capable of rotating 180 degress. Currently the roof contains a hook to allow a sentry to be placed there. A redesign may be used to reduce the piececount (the roof uses a LOT of of it) and to allow for more viable sentry locations on the roof.

Lego Design: The Operating Theater

I started playing with the Lego Digital Designer recently. As I come up with new builds and MOCs, these will join the list of things I'm sharing. Screwdle has always been a way for me to document the creative projects I'm working on, and this is just another fun extension of that! 

The Operating Theater

The main level of operating theater features an octagonal backdrop, with recessed alcoves for a bust of Hippocrates and a model skeleton. Green walls and medium-brown wainscoting give the design a distinctively Victorian flavor; although the tone isn't quite right, it seemed appropriate that this facility be painted with Scheele's Green paint. If I had to redo it, however, I'd probably try to go for a slightly more medical flavor; white walls with blue or sand green accenting where the wainscoting is. I may still do it; I rely too much on browns and grays. The octagonal walls were perhaps the most difficult part to do right in a digital medium. Getting the walls to line up so that the N/S and E/W facing walls would click onto the pegs and support the hinged wall segment required (if you're curious) one to be at 29.45' and the other to be at 60': using a 30' angle left many of the floor pegs inaccessible


 I'm particularly proud of the bust of Hippocrates, which I'd originally felt should be situated on a shelf in the Dr. Merriwether's office but I had an extra alcove already. Right now a doctor's private office is a low priority, too. I have lots of laboratories I think I'd prefer to build first.

A detail of the medicine cabinet, lamp, and cuckoo-clock on the wall. The lamp is a socket wrench with an ice-skate forming the decorative flourish on top.

The cuckoo clock uses feathers to represent the weights that drive the pendulum mechanism.

A detail of Dr. Merriwether with her patient. In retrospect, a screwdriver makes for a more convincing scalpel than the diving knife I used here, but I don't think there's any piece that makes for a more convincing minifig heart than an upside-down apple.

And last but not least, a detail of the sink, track lighting, and work table.  A scale allows the doctor to measure organs collected during her work.

Conspiracy Theory: Aang Fathered All the Airbenders

With respect to Avatar's intended age range, the following blog post may not be one hundred percent appropriate--or interesting--to people of all age ranges. It's also not safe for work, technically. In the sense that you really shouldn't be reading blogs at work about cartoons at work. Unless you're on break. Then you're probably in the clear.

As I have previously stated in this blog, I don't think Katara and Aang were sexually exclusive throughout their lifetime. [Did Aang "Cheat" on Katara] Given Aang's desire to resurrect his culture and preserve the art of airbending, I think it's extremely likely that he had some (possibly with permission) extramarital adventures. As I state in the article above, it takes Aang at least twenty years to father another airbender; something that would presumably be direly frustrating. Even more so when you consider that Tenzin won't have his first child until the age of forty-one, six years after his father's death.

There are other problems, too, of course. Katara can only get pregnant once at at a go. It might take three or four years to genuinely ascertain whether or not a child is an airbender. Women have a finite number of children they can bear: although many of these reports appear apocryphal, the most bountiful women in real life hit like... seventy at MAX, and that's with a woman who is content to just be pregnant all the time, which is a life that's hard to imagine on poor Katara. As a man, however, Aang can father children pretty much as fast as he can woo ladies, and men can remain virile their entire lives (the oldest father in the real world was 96).

No, it seems to me that Aang, the intrepid world traveller, probably tried his hand with lots of ladies. If it seems out-of-character for Aang to subsequently abandon those children and for them to not be discussed by the three children he had by his wife, well, it also seems out of character that Aang would be a distant father. It's possible that he had many children out of wedlock, trying desperately to bear airbenders and failing catastrophically.

Only one airbender is ever born in Aang's lifetime, but then, after his death, four are born in rapid succession, less than ten years apart. And, eighteen years after his death, harmonic convergence and the destruction of Vaatu results in a crop of new airbenders appearing, all over the world.

Who are these airbenders? What do they have in common? From what we can tell, not a lot. However, one of them, Bumi, is the son of Avatar Aang. Could it be that some aspect of harmonic convergence, or Aang himself, wasn't preventing new airbenders from being born, but was preventing them expressing their abilities?

Aang couldn't have fathered everybody that becomes an airbender, of course. Kai is six or seven years Korra's junior, born much too late to have been fathered by Aang, and while Opal COULD be old enough to have been fathered by Aang, we know her parents to be Suyin and Bataar. But could they be more of Aang's grandchildren? Kai is an orphan--with his parents dead before harmonic convergence, there's no way of knowing if they'd have had bending abilities. While this does mean disturbing things for Kai and Jinora's budding relationship (they'd be half-cousins), I'm not even sure it's illegal in the US.

Opal's parent is a little more complicated, since we have some ideas. We don't know Bataar's forebears, so it's possible on that end. However, Grandma Toph is extremely reluctant to share the names of the men she was involved with.. so Opal's grandfather COULD be Aang. I expected Toph would hook p with Sokka, given Toph's apparent crush on him in Season 2 (S2E12, Serpent's Pass), but that's with only a few weeks of history between them. By the time Suyin comes around, Toph and Aang would have nearly three decades of history, and Suyin doesn't become an airbender during harmonic convergence because she's already an earthbender. Suyin is distinct from her sister with her slightly sparklier attitude, possible the result of Aang's bubbly personality.

That would also mean that Zaheer is somehow related to Aang. Given his interest in airbending culture (ruminating as he does on airbender monks long before the Harmonic Convergence grants him bending abilities), it could even be possible that he has some connection to the Air Acolytes prior to joining the Red Lotus Society. While it seems unlikely that he would know that Aang is his ancestor and NOT mention it when he meets half sibling and favorite son Tenzin, it's entirely possible he was born to an Air Acolyte family.

Or...

Or maybe I'm reading way too much into this. Hey, do you have some evidence supporting this? Or contradicting it? Say so in the comments! Or, if you're visiting from Reddit, talk about it on the reddit thread. Or, if your'e visiting from Facebook, hi Mom!

Game Mechanics: 3 Redesign Ideas for the Bioshock Franchise

I spend a lot of time thinking about video games. Thinking about how video games could be different than they are. Not better, just... just different. Not because I think I'm smarter than game designers--no, I realize that I am just a man with a blog. No budgets. No deadlines. No publishers, distributors or fans breathing down my neck for a release date. No design team to tell me my ideas are impossible. No QA team to tell me my dreams crashed the server, froze the engine and killed Ted from accounting. No feasibility, no marketing, just a guy sitting at his unmade bed desk.

So today I sat down, dialed my brain back through the last eight years, and revisited some ideas I had for the Bioshock games. Some of these ideas are original. Some of them are loosely based on concept art or cut content. I'm just thinking.

1) Bioshock 1 & 2: Surviving Humans 
In the Rapture-based Bioshock games, the narrative occasionally suffers when there are supposed to be regular, non-spliced human beings creeping around in Rapture, but you only meet them when they're specifically named in the plot. Rapturites you encounter respond to your presence more or less the same way: violent incoherence and incoherent violence. Seeing some regular people just eking out a living amid the violence would have been radical. It would go a long way to explain how plot-important regular humans lived in the world of these delusional homicidal-types.

Now, this is something that was considered for BS2. There's some cut content that suggests that they had considered it, and when I read about that I thought about how unclear the narrative got occasionally, where non-spliced people were involved. Tanenbaum originally looked like a miscolored Ladysmith splicer, Frank Fontaine looked like Waders. What do you mean, they're regular people? How do I tell? Give me some context!

2) Bioshock 2: Repair missions
This one strikes me as obvious. Delta handles very much like Jack, the silent protagonist of Bioshock, and if you're angry at me for explaining who Jack is, someone asked me that on the Bioshock freaking Subreddit so I guess I need to bloody well explain. Meanwhile, I'm a Big Daddy! Rapture's monstrous, brainwashed custodians. My primary weapon is a rivet gun, which one might reasonably expect I use to rivet things together, but no. The game forgot, apparently! Instead, it's like, "oh no, some ice is preventing this subaquatic train from progressing to the next area. Better find a fire plasmid with which to melt the ice off with. Remember the time you did that in the last game? There was ice and we made you find a fire plasmid? This is, like, exactly like that. Embarrassingly similar, actually. Fortunately it's the only time we reuse a mission. Except for the time when we force you to drop what you're doing and research some splicers for us. And the one where you protect Little Sisters during collection sequences! We made that one a core game mechanic."

 I don't mean to suggest that the game is uncreative. It does expect us to do new things in the story, but the absence of repair missions left the story almost incomplete. I have a rivet gun, and am compelled to make repairs. The first game was a pointed commentary on the fact that gamers have relatively little control over the stories they make happen; forcing a brainwashed character to stop what he's doing and make repairs is a great way to reinforce that message. So please! Make me fix things! Send me out to tighten the rivets on a tunnel, quell the flooding, and let an NPC--one of those humans I mentioned earlier--get somewhere they need to go!

Edit:
After posting this on the Bioshock Subreddit, I got a lot of pushback about repair missions, because people couldn't understand where they fit in the game or the lore. Now, repair missions are not just their own thing. They're a fairly bare framework for something that would make sense to have a Big Daddy do. Whether you make them optional side missions or core story missions would have been at the discretion of the developers. They could be optional missions and thus rewarded with bonus plasmids, tonics, audio diaries or... whatever, you know? Or they could be core missions, like "find a fire plasmid to melt the ice" or "kill this person, because a disembodied voice told you and since you're playing a video game you know it won't let you progress until you do what the voices tell you."  In the latter case, it may be that you encounter a flooded section of map, i.e. the flooding in Dionysus Park, which require you to rivet windows until they no longer leak, rivet pipes so a pump can begin pumping again and so forth.

As far as the lore is concerned: gamelore follows mechanics and vice versa. You offer a piece of lore (flame plasmid) which creates a mechanic (flame plasmid melts ice) which in turn creates lore (audio diary explaining that leaky pipes create ice, which then needs melting). Alpha Series Big Daddies were designed to be pure protectors in the game's existing lore, but that has no real bearing on the plot; it can be safely changed if new mechanical needs are introduced by different mechanics.

3) Bioshock Infinite: Improving Vigors
Clash in the Clouds was a CHORE for me, because BSI's combat is so squiggly. Vigors aren't terribly valuable or fun; many of them feature arbitrary, cruel limitations (charge can only be used while targeting an enemy? Why?) and without EVE hypos they're too expensive. I get why you don't necessarily want us to carry medkits, but EVE hypos are just specialized ammo..

The skylines were fun but too often the unreliable hitboxes (compounded by my own terrible aim) meant that an A-button press that should have turned me into a blood-streaked comet actually featured me hopping up and down ineffectually, waving my arms like a toddler eager to be carried. Often I found myself trying to jump to a barge or ledge, only to give a gentle bunnyhop, because the SUPER jump is only available when you're looking at the correct pixel on the rail. What I'm trying to say is that I hated the contextual controls.

A handful of vigors should have had advanced movement options in place of traps, the kind you see in competitive shooters like TF2. What if the Return to Sender projectile, fully charged, was also a grabbing point for the Sky Hook? Let me use Bucking Bronco to rocket-jump. Murder of Crows? While I'm using that, let me glide for a moment while I look for somebody to goomba-stomp. Single-use teleporter projectiles would have been neat, like the kind we saw in Plants Versus Zombies: Garden Warfare.  And let me use Charge any time I want!

Miner's Stories:The End of Enders

I smiled, polishing the brewing stand as I listened to the rain drum on my bar's leafy roof. It had taken months of scrimping, saving, and trading, but I'd finally finished construction. It had gone smoothly, even for building in the swamp. Two nights we'd been beset by zombies and a creeper had blown out the front door during a late night installation, but we'd easily repaired all of that and it had even encouraged me to go out and get a swank Spruce exterior door. The storm that had been threatening was coming down now, getting itself out of the way, clearing a path for next week's grand opening. My new bartender, a testificate named Barthold appreciatively rubbed the sprucewood bar, finished with brown wool to conceal the grain pattern, and nodded at me. "Hmmmm."

"Spruce." I said proudly, although I knew what he was really asking.

"Hmmm." Barthold folded his arms over his chest.

"I know it's unorthodox to build a building in the shape of a tree, but I think it looks handsome. We're easily twice as big as the next biggest tree in the swamp, and no other swamp-tree is festooned in jack-o-lanterns. What was I going to do, build it out of stone?"

"Hmm."

"We're not having this conversation again. I did! I cut down every tree in every wood plank in this bar. Went through a dozen iron axes. Spent weeks with a shears collecting wool and leaves for the rooms. I... purchased blaze rods from the Nether Market when we opened the portal lock last Wednesday. I didn't get those original, that's true." Barthold looked at me impatiently. He had heard me describe the qualities of my bar a dozen times. Folding his arms into his sleeves, he tilted his head towards the brewing stand. "Hrmm."

"Oh, right. I s'pose I should show you how to use them."

I filled three bottles with water from the cauldron behind the bar and set them on the stand, opened a tin of extract of netherwart, and poured it into the brew basket. Heat flowed from the blaze rod at the center, condensing the netherwart extract into muddy sludge and distributing it to each brew. We watched for a moment as the liquid loop-de-looped in the condensers. When the first drop hit the potion, I drummed excitedly on the counter.

"What do you thirsty for, buddy? Immunity to fire? Healing? Pep? Pep I like, let's do pep." It seemed fitting that my first step in bar ownership should be a productivity-increasing potion of swiftness. A symbolic gesture to the universe, if you would. I grabbed a clay sugar jar from the pantry, spooned out a helping of the white powder, and stopped.
"Wait, no. This is bonemeal."
"Hmm."
"We should probably label this. And store it somewhere else. " I doodled a picture of a skeleton in the dust on the tin and set it back in the pantry.
"Now, what was I looking for?"

"Hmm?" Barthold gently tapped me on the shoulder and nodded to the brewing stand, no longer glowing. The netherwart was fully rendered and the awkward potions were done.
"Oh, right. The, uh. The sugar. Got it!" I removed a porcelain sugar bowl from the top shelf and spooned sugar into the brewing stand's brewing basket. The machine bubbled and rattled, and we sat in contentment, enjoying the resonant scent of sugar brewing. The contents of the bottles turned a brilliant sky blue. Barthold offered up another clay jar, this one labelled redstone.
 "Speed Potion +, eh? Treat yo'self."
 He nodded and opened the jar, then began to tip it into the brew basket.

"Where's the scoop?"
"Hmmmm."
"Well, I'm not just going to let you tip it in there. You'll make a mess. Find the scoop."

Barthold looked around, then picked up a pitch black jar. Brilliant light poured out as he unscrewed the lid, and fished around inside for the wooden scoop.
"Wait, wait, no no no. Get the redstone scoop."
 "Hmm."
"I don't want to cross-contaminate my scoops, Barthold. Plus, if you mix powders it gets all fizzy and flat." I snatched the glowstone jar out of his hands and cupped it protectively to my chest. Clutching the jar, I got impatient to brew the potion, and unscrewed the lid again.

"We'll make a Potion of Swiftness II. Twice the energy, but half the length." I tipped the glowing yellow powder into the brew basket, filling the room heady steam that made my skin feel warm. I silently tried to rescind the earlier offering to the universe; this first potion had suddenly become much less auspicious.

The universe didn't appreciate my rude gesture; the windows flashed as lightning struck outside, and my new door swung in violently, framing a towering figure standing in the rain. It would have been quite dramatic, until the pressure plate mechanism that operated the door released and swung it shut in the figure's mysterious face.The latch lifted and the door opened slowly. The mysterious figure entered mysteriously. Barthold rolled his eyes.

It was a woman, tall and gaunt, dressed in badly damaged iron armor with an iron helmet stylized with a jagged pumpkin smile. A long cloth sling hung cross her chest, and she rested a visibly bleeding arm on it. She surveyed the bar slowly. "I... nobody's here?"
"No ma'am."
"Nobody's going to look at me for a moment, then turn back to their interrupted conversations? No sleazy men in brown robes are sneaking out the back to deliver a message to my enemies?"

Barthold leaned close to me. "Hmmm."
I politely ignored him.

"Well, we're new, so.. no regulars yet." I paused. "However, we've got things around, you know. I couldn't just toss you back out into that dreck. Come on in, have a warm-up, at very least, come in out of the damp." The universe punctuated my sales pitch with another lightning strike.

"It's not my regular sort of bar. Mine are normally squat rectangles run by thick-necked men named Dagger. Not froufrou treehouses."
I bravely weathered the insult and pressed the advantage.
"Well, at least let me offer you a nice watermelon spritz for your arm there, I charge very reasonable prices. Full stack of carrots will get you a room for the night and a drink, miss."
"End of Enders." she set her helmet down and gingerly lowered herself into the chair she was much too tall for. I nodded to Barthold, who had been nodding his head back and forth curiously.  He hustled away to make the potions and I sat across from my first customer.

"I haven't got a stack of carrots."
"I'd accept a stack of potatoes, or even a halfstack of watermelon."
"I haven't got any vegetables. I've been hunting."
"Well, I could use leath--"
"No leather. Or meats, either." I swallowed a barb about her hunting skills.
"I accept craftables. I'll take a bit of iron." She reached into her sling, and removed a byte token with an ingot on it.
"Seven more of those and we have a deal."
 She weaved the token through her fingers, flipped it into the air with her thumb and snatched it again, tucking it into her inventory. I smiled indulgently as Barthold walked up, carrying a bucket with a bottle of Healing cooling in it.

"What would I get for this?" She turned over another byte coin, this one with a circle drawn on it. She flexed her fingers and with a puff of smoke the coin transformed into a smooth, fist-sized orb. It lifted gently out of her outstretched palm and hovered there. It was an enderpearl.

"Hmm!" Barthold had splashed himself with the bucket. He feigned supreme interest in dabbing at the water and refused to make eye contact with our guest as he hustled away to refill his bucket and reclaim his dignity.
"What... did you say your name was?" I was starting to put things together as she said what I thought she'd said.

"End of Enders. I'm an Ender hunter." She looked at me and thrust out her chin, eyes blazing defiantly. I looked back at the grinning jack-o-lantern helmet. At the ragged slash mark on her arm, raked by vicious claws. I stared into her eyes for a moment, sweating, then averted my gaze, calculating what an enderpearl was worth.

"You killed an ender for this? That's crazy."
The Endermen were eight-foot-tall monsters with skin the color of a moonless midnight and purple eyes that glowed in the dark. Harmless so long as you left them alone, but bothered and they'd hunt you across time and space.
"I've heard all kinds of rumors but I don't think I've ever seen one. It's Hard out there." I paused a moment, thinking. "Is it true? You can teleport with them?" Without responding, she cocked her arm back and sent the pearl sailing across the bar. There was a flash of purple motes as she was gone. Barthold squeaked from the kitchen, and there she was, leaning through the serving window the separated the kitchen from the bar, smiling widely. Barthold was visible behind her, pressed into a corner, eyes wide, clouds of steam pouring off his head in terror.

She crawled through the kitchen window, and raised the sling. "They break after one use, but they're handy in a pinch." She held up a one-stack bill. 64 enderpearls! It was like stumbling on an unexpected diamond vein inside of an unexpected diamond vein. I played it cool.

"One use, eh? I don't know what I'd ever use it for. I can give you a potion for it."  The End of Enders scowled at my airy disdain.

"I had to kill an Enderman for that. You ever fought an Enderman?" She tilted her head as she spoke, revealing a long pale scar under her jawbone. Wrong move. I held my hands out, palms up in a supplicating motion; I'd pushed too hard.

"I'm just negotiating, madame. But I've forgotten my manners." I really had. Even more embarrassed, I waved her to the bar, and cancelled every excuse that rose to mind why I had. No use excusing bad manners.

"You can have the Upper Boughs for the evening. One potion (your pick), one meal (delicious), and a place to stay out of the rain." Her scowl twitched, then she folded the bill in half and shook it, dropping a byte token with a pearl engraved on it. With a gesture it returned to its physical pearl state, where she held it up in the light. I nodded, and she flipped the coin to me. I tucked it into my inventory.  I didn't have a lot of use for it right now, but I'd think of something. And if I didn't, well, I could put it on display. Maybe somebody would offer a meritorious trade.

She settled into a chair, loosening the straps on her iron chestplate so she could de-equip it. "What have you got that's vegetarian?"
***
The night progressed pleasantly. Since the bar was empty and it was really just myself, Barthold, and the End of Enders, I'd offered to join her for dinner and she'd graciously accepted. She enjoyed a mushroom stew and baked potato dinner, but I, who hadn't just spent a month in the bush living off of hunted meat, was inclined towards more robust fare: charcoal-broiled chicken over bread.

I regaled her with the story of the bar's construction and our trial with the zombie. She replied with her adventures camping in the deserts to the South and hunting Enders. I must confess she won pretty handily.

"So he's got a flower, right? And I think, aw, that's sweet, this big purple eyed monster is going to give me flowers. I go to say thank you, and he locks eyes with me. I freeze, and I can't look away from this guy's stare. These huge eyes, just staring into me, and he's shaking. His jaw opens up and he lets out this horrible scream. Next thing I know, he's behind me, trying to rip my kidneys out. I spin around and just go crazy swinging my sword at him, until he makes this sort of sniffing sound and vanishes. So now I'm standing there, panting, thinking I won, but BOOM he's behind me again! I'm hurting bad and every swing he takes is like a stone knife in the guts, and every time I turn to face him he vanishes and turns up behind me.

I'm staggering and all of the sudden I feel this sharp prickle in my back. It hurts, but compared to the Enderman's claws it's like a hug from a freshly shorn sheep. I've backed into a cactus. The Enderman howls again, and vanishes, and I spin around, hoping to beat him out before he can slice a fresh line across my back. And there he is, trying to step through the cactus, needles in his belly and his legs, and finally he rips the cactus out of the ground and comes at me, holding it over his head. But he leaves an opening."

The End of Enders was standing on her chair, empty bowl held over her head with both hands, smiling broadly with a row of teeth like snowy mountain peaks, eyes wide with excitement for her harrowing tale. Slowly, she tapped herself gently on the sternum.

"I leap up as quick as a flash and stab him with all my strength. The sword isn't much, just ordinary iron. No enchantments, nothing. But I've finally got him! He makes this weird, warbly noise, like a scream, and topples over next to me, wrenching my sword out of my hand. And I howl, this awful, wonderful death howl, because I'm alive and he's not. I go to get my sword back, but its stuck in him. I tug, and I pull, and I can't quite--- you know, so I lever it out."

She's standing on the table now, sawing the air with her bowl. Barthold has retreated to the kitchen--I can only imagine to cower in the pantry--and she laughs triumphantly.

"Finally, a bone gives way and I pull free my sword, when I see it. There, nestled just next to his heart, is this." She holds up the enderpearl.

"It didn't look like this when I killed that Enderman. It was still a little soft, and it was warm. It.. it grows in them, but not like it's an organ or something." Her triumphant grin had dimmed slightly.

"It's almost like... there's something in them. A hole. Or a tear to another reality or something. And their body coats it in this stuff, to protect them. But they can use it to teleport freely, constantly. When they die, it crystallizes, and then you can only use that once." The End of Enders lowered herself from the table, gnawing pensively on her spoon as she sat in the chair.

"They're building something, out in that desert, you know." The energy seems almost gone from her now.

"You'll see them, with handfuls of dirt, or a pumpkin, or some flowers. They're trying to build something, but I don't know if they know how. Or even what it is. They'll go out into that desert and arrange things out there."

"Arrange things? Like, how? Are they trying to build a portal, like the way we can build Nether portals?" I thought of the obsidian column in the center of the old township, before we'd installed the Gate Lock.

"That's my thought. We all knew the Endermen aren't from here. They just showed up one night. They seem like they just wander around, but I think they're scouting. Prepping for an invasion." She leaned back in her chair as she finished the rest of her Potion of Healing, then slammed it down on the table, this gesture apparently the coda to our conversation.

Barthold, lured back out into the dining room by the diminishing volume, tilted his head. "Hmmmm." He yawned. I nodded and stood. "Well, Ms. End of Enders, It's late and I would enjoy some sleep. Barthold and I can carry any excess inventory to your room in the Upper Boughs." Barthold hefted her chestplate and helmet, and I guided both into the back and up the spiral staircase.

The Lower Boughs were made from leaves and wool. The main room had a row of beds, each with a bookcase, flower pot, and chest. There were rumors that the town was seeking to install a 500km railroad to a dirt mine in the hinterlands. If they built it past my home, I'd be ready. The Middle Boughs had three private rooms and a shower. Nothing fancy but more private and comfortable.

The Upper Boughs featured two private rooms, an art gallery, and two private balconies replete with deck chairs. Huge double beds provided comfortable sleep, and I suspected the tall End of Enders could use a little extra room.

"Wow. Quite the view." The End of Enders said. I smiled; this spot had been chosen for its scenic view of an adjacent jungle biome a few chunks away to the west, and the Palm Forest to the east. "If you squint you can see Amin-Ra's Great Palm."

"And good news! The rain has stopped! Ah, I get so worried about lightning when I--"
"What did you say?"
"The lightning. Flammable houses have that problem, you know, they burn so easily and of course so many stacks of jungle leaves, you can imagine, they're quite expensive."
"No, the rain! When did the rain stop?"
"Well, just now."
"This place! How secure is your bar?" She grabbed a handful of my shirt, eyes wide. I gently pushed her hand off of me and Barthold rolled his eyes. He'd heard the security lecture four times, partially because he spent most of his first day jumping up and down on the pressure plate, opening and closing the door in an angry zombie's face.

"There's a pressure-plate driven gate/door to discourage zombies knocking on the door--a necessity when employing testificates. The oak walls are vulnerable to creepers, but there's a cat sleeping in the kitchen and another by the main door to discourage them. The canopy-like body of the hotel discourages spiders.

She looked at me, then looked at the wall, counting the number of blocks, and I put together what her fear was. "My counter is not looking at them! I just don't provoke them and we don't have any... any problems." I trailed off as I followed her eyes, and looked out into the swamp. A pair of purple eyes stared up at us. Then another. And another. And another.

Stop Motion Superbonus: the Ghost

Making movies with my little cousin, she planned and wrote it and I offered animation advice, foley and voice acting. Everything that happens in it was her idea and execution! Pretty neat, huh?