I live on a really weird server. I try to avoid the weirdness, but good lord, it's everywhere… Anyway, where should I start? How about the time I was sacrificed to a cactus?
I mined along, wondering whether Jason (The guy who runs the server) was going to get around to banning somebody soon, when I hit a wall of sand. I figured it was a desert, so I mined a staircase up to the surface to figure out where I was.
The sand was a square, twenty blocks by twenty blocks, in the middle of a plains biome. Naturally, I thought this was strange, so I dug a layer of sand away. Underneath it was a layer of sandstone, like someone was using it to hold the sand up. I dug away one block, and then someone in the open space underneath screamed "Heretic!"
The block I was standing on disappeared, and I fell six or eight blocks into the room below. There were maybe twenty people there, wearing these weird sand-coloured hooded robes, all arranged in a circle. They appeared to be worshipping a… a cactus…
When I landed there, the nearest people jumped on me. When they hit me with their hands, I felt cactus needles. A few minutes later, when they had me tied up, I saw why; each of them, every single one, had pads of cactus tied to the palms of their hands. And that stuff is not one-sided.
I was lying on my back, my hands tied behind me and my feet tied together, and I could see the robed people coming to cluster around me. One of them, a tall person with dark green around the edges of his sleeves, pulled their hood back. It was a white guy with a high forehead and red eyes, and he looked at me and said; "You have violated the temple of the Cactus. You must die."
I struggled. "Alright, Ky, you can say 'April Fools' now…" I said, hoping that this was one of Ky's weird practical jokes. He's pulled some pretty outlandish ones in the past, occasionally on me, but this was pretty bad even by his standards.
"Sacrilege!" Shouted one of the people, and the others, including the guy who said I had to die, echoed it. They lifted me upright, and the cactus needles bit into my skin. Then, all of them but the hoodless guy and one other ran off and broke all the torches. They then took up positions around the room, the only light now coming from fires they lit in holes in the wall.
The hoodless guy pulled his hood back on, and they dragged me towards the cactus in the center of the room. I struggled, because they were planning something involving me and that cactus, and really I didn't want to be a part of it.
They stopped when the cactus was right in front of us, and they turned me around. The previously-hoodless guy asked, in a low voice, "Any last words, heretic?" I was struggling even harder now. "Gyaah…." I said, because anything else was really beyond my ability at the time.
"Very well." He said, and they untied my hands from each other. There was still rope around my hands, and they pulled my arms to the sides so that I was standing in a weird t-shape. Then the people standing on the outer edge of the room began to hum, and that creepy tune was just about to make me scream when they tied the ropes attached to my hands around the cactus.
They started this loud chant thing as the cactus needles bit into my back, and they gave one final shout as I took the last heart of damage nearly half a minute later.
I respawned in Jason's library. Bookshelves lined the walls, and Jason himself was seated at a desk, doing some sort of paperwork. He looked up at me, then he looked back at his paperwork, pushing his glasses up his nose.
"The Cactus Cult, eh?" He asked. "Uh." I said. I walked across the carpet towards the door, then I paused. "Uh, Jason, do you…" Jason didn't look up. "Have anything on the Cactus Cult? Yes. Green volume. Second shelf from the top. C-D section."
I walked to the indicated shelf and pulled the book off. I flipped through it. "They believe that their Holy Cactus is at the center of the universe?" "Mm hm." I flipped through it again. "The cactus on their hands is a sign of their devotion? I thought they were blipping masochists…"
I put Jason's book back. Then I left. I was hoping that this would be the last creepy adventure that happened, but I knew that it was not over.