Day 145: The hunt begins...

     The sky quickly darkened; storm clouds gathering with immense speed, lightning illuminating them, with the occasional fork licking the ground off in the distance. A few seconds later, it began to rain, incredibly hard, and a ferocious gale began to blow from nowhere. We stood before the conducting tower watching a strange vortex begin to swirl around the antennae, slowing spiralling down. There was nothing we could do but stand and watch in a mixture of awe and horror... The majority of the upper tower was now engulfed in thick, grey clouds, that flickered with light, occasionally parting to reveal the tower beneath. A humongous roar sounded from way above us, causing us to cower in fear, quickly followed by a series of smaller cracks, the clouds around the tower lighting up in time with the thunder. The clouds then began to ascend away from the tower, spiralling upward towards the dark sky. Then it started; at first it was almost imperceptible, but then the ground began to shake. It grew in intensity, until it reached the point where we were struggling to stand unaided! A massive crack was heard from the top of the tower base, and the huge antennae began to lean dangerously to one side. All that we could hear was the sound of metal under immense amounts of stress, watching the tower slowly warp to one side, before losing the battle. The entire tower section crashed to the ground, splitting us off from the others on the far side. Massive gouges in the sand where the tower had fallen began to cause a landslide, and we were forced to move back onto more stable ground.

Then we saw it. It was hard to tell at first what was happening, with the loss of the main tower, the base now instead had a massive gaping hole exposed to the sky. Through this hole rose a massive construction, so dark in colour, it was practically sucking in light! Only one material I knew did that... It was the master portal! Staring up into the sky, I watched as the entire master portal levitated free from the ground through the newly rent hole, the rift now active; a swirling mass of vicious purple. After ascending to near the tops of the trees, it stopped, and nothing happened for some time. It remained static in the air, the thunderclouds still roiling and bubbling around in the sky way up above. Then I saw something. Within the iridescent purple of the rift, two massive, glowing red objects emerged, followed slowly by a giant maw. Looking up at the creature, I struggled to comprehend what I was seeing; it tilted its head back and forth, looking left to right, before settling on me. The intensity of it's eyes grew until they were painful to look into...

"Syeonyx? Syeonyx, wake up..."

... Thank goodness for that!

----

     THEROS had returned from Minecraftia into the Nether, with a completed map; apart from the strange shapes, and the anomalous blobs of orange we had previously assumed was lava, the map was now decorated with a series of markers. The bottom of the map was now labelled; a handy legend had been scrawled onto the end to allow us to interpret what THEROS had added. I doubt it would be necessary, as THEROS was definitely the only one who was going to be able to read that map...

"That's excellent news! Have you marked all of the coordinates onto the map?"

"Yes I have; I had a little issue at first as the moron who drew this up also made the error of not utilising a scale. I eventually figured it out though when I compared the surrounding topography to the HoN CO. base."

"Excellent! Any news from UOPETA about SERVERE?"

"UOPETA hasn't seen him at all, and has been down in the wooden shack now since you ordered him to. Either we've missed him, somehow, or he hasn't returned yet..."

"Well it doesn't matter that much now as we now have a map to work from."

"What about the expedition to find more useful information back at the HoN Co. base?"

"That will have to wait. We can only assume that the guards we managed to knock out were aware of what happened, so a return visit might not go ahead as smoothly as before..."

COLUS then outlined the plan that would go into action within the next hour or so. After some advisement from THEROS, he's agreed that it would be better to keep the group searching for the Eyes of Ender to be as small as possible. Me, THEROS and THEXIS will head out with the map in search of the Eyes. The rest will remain in the camp. We're to take a series of camping gear as we're likely to travel quite some distance; the maps we've used before have been about half the scale that this one is, according to THEROS, so we're going to be covering a lot of ground. Hardly something we can do if we return to the base camp each time.

"After a suitable period of time, the rest of us will return to the base and look for more information that could help us in the long run. I can't guarantee we'll find anything useful, but with the wealth of information stored there, it's unlikely we'll come back empty-handed. Is everyone clear on what they're doing? Good. You three get going as soon as possible."

THEROS passed the map to me as he prepared his bag of supplies for the journey ahead of us; taking the central point as the HoN Co. base, and then comparing it to the scale that THEROS had implemented beside the legend, it was quite some distance from there to our base camp. The closest one was way off to the right of the base... To the East I suppose, if you considered it as a compass direction.

"Do we know what exactly we're looking for? I know we're looking for Eyes of Ender, but that's pretty vague..."

"Search the entire area for anything that could fit that description. Don't take any chances though; like you said, there could be another reason why there are no creatures around here... Let's just hope you don't run into it..."

So we were about to set out into an unknown world, equipped only with a bow and quiver full of arrows, a pickaxe, blowpipe and darts, basic sleeping gear and food, to look for a miscellaneous object with no known appearance whilst competing with HoN Co. to prevent them activating the master portal... Not my idea of fun, but at least it was keeping us busy. Since that nightmare I had last night, idle was the last thing I wanted to be. ANYTHING to keep my mind active and off that horrid vision... Anything! I reassured Amie that I'd be back in one piece before she knew it, and joked that back in Minecraftia that statement would pretty much be true! Hugging her tight, and kissing her gently, she smiled and waved as I set off with THEROS and THEXIS. I'd be back with her soon, come hell or high water! Although with the Nether, I doubt they'd be any of the latter...

Syeonyx signing off