Chapter 4
I'm going to post the full story, but what happened last night was not a glitch or an Easter egg. Something has gone wrong, either with Minecraft or Clay Soldiers mod, and this is all getting way too real for me. I don't know who's doing this to me, or why, or whether this is just my game or if this is something that can affect everyone. All I know is that all of you guys were right: this is most definitely not an Easter egg or glitch. Something strange, something impossible, is going on here, and I'm scared out of my mind about it.
So I'd put the game Minecraft down for a while during the holidays because I was going out of town. But as soon as I got back yesterday I decided to try to follow the advice from one of the comments and create a new world with the same seed. I had written down the seed earlier (I won't give it to you guys in case the same thing happens to you), and I created a new world called "Medusa Test" to check to see if the chest was still there. However, as soon as this world loaded the game crashed and the Minecraft window closed automatically. There wasn't even a crash log; it just closed the game.
Frustrated, I loaded up the game to try again, but for a good ten minutes all I got was an error message which also exited immediately. Finally the game loaded...and the new world I created was gone. It must have been deleted by the crash. Thankful that it wasn't one of my other worlds that I worked so hard on, I created a new world called "EC Test" (Ender Chest). Unfortunately I got the same thing: the new world caused my game to crash, and by the time I reloaded it (it only took five minutes this time) the world was gone. I was getting scared, but I decided I must have copied down the seed wrong and went into my world to see if I could get the seed again.
What I saw scared me so much that I forgot about the seed entirely.
I wasn't in the same place as I had been before. I had quit the game more or less on the same mountaintop where I had found the cabin; now I was in the End Portal room of a Stronghold. I was in Survival mode, and I couldn't reset my gamemode to Creative. In my inventory was a painting, a bucket of water, a bucket of lava, and some snowballs to kill the Enderdragon with. I also had a single pickaxe, but I found that no matter how far I tried to dig upwards, I could never reach the surface. Seriously, I tried digging stairs all the way up past 255 blocks. Somehow the stone was higher than should have been possible.
I walked back down and jumped into the End Portal, as it seemed to be the only thing I could do and there didn't seem to be a way to get back to the rest of the world...even if it did still exist. I entered the End and began throwing the snowballs at the Ender Crystals. I found that each time I ran out of snowballs, they would mysterious appear outside my hotbar, as if someone was giving them to me, someone that I was unable to see.
Finally the dragon was dead. I grabbed the egg and the painting and put them on top of a block. Then I hollowed a space below it and filled it with a single block of lava so it didn't flow anywhere; that would make things easier. Then, with my breath held, I punched out the block. Time seemed to slow down (or maybe my game was just lagging) as both items fell through the air and disappeared in the lava. There was no bouncing, no items on fire. They just burned, falling into the lava and disappearing.
Immediately a horrendous scream emanated from my computer. The sound and music of Minecraft were both set at about 20%, but this was deafeningly loud. I immediately and instinctively muted my computer...and instantly all this crossed the line from eerie into Twilight Zone-bizarre. The computer was muted, but the scream was still playing. Out of panic I poured the water on the lava. The lava converted to obsidian, and the screaming immediately stopped. This, somehow, was just as terrifying as the screaming itself; the way it had cut off sounded as if it was an actual part of this demented audio track, not just the end of the recording. The way it sounded was as if someone who had been screaming was suddenly silenced...or worse.
I mined the block of obsidian with the diamond pick and ran for the portal back to the Overworld. I knew what I had to do with this obsidian, and from what I saw it was the last step. For some reason the idea of simply turning off the game never occurred to me; this is going to sound crazy, as if the rest of this wasn't crazy, but it was like my character was silently pleading for me to go on...as if I was the only one who could free him. I have no idea how I knew that at the time, but I'm not just writing that to be dramatic; it was my honest thoughts at the time.
I jumped into the portal, the screen went black, and the Mojang credits and that weird speech began to roll. Usually I skip it, but this time I don't know; I guess I just needed to see something that was a normal part of the game. But this only made things stranger: the text that was normally just a bit of dialogue between two entities (I consider them to be Notch and Herobrine) was now horrendously glitched. The text that wasn't glitched...let's just say I wished it was. The glitchy text was interspersed with words like "DIE", "KILL THEM", and "REVENGE", always capitalized. I'd beaten the game with Clay Soldiers before, as had countless other people; this didn't make any sense! Was it something like that Easter egg in the title that only occurred in one out of a million games?
But the most terrifying thing was the last line of text. All the other sinister text was dispersed randomly, as if the words were coded in but the placement was chosen by the computer. But after the garbled text was a single phrase, a phrase which was terrifyingly clear.
"You stole from Medusa."
It wasn't even in caps. It was as if this message in the text was intended specifically for me. I immediately opened fanfiction in another browser, found my story, and carefully reread the message. The "author" of the book, the person or entity the game called Medusa, said that someone or many someones had stolen something from her, and that reading these instructions was the only way to stay safe from her as she killed those who stole from her. But now the game said that I was one of the ones who stole from her. Was this like a backstory to Minecraft? I have to admit, at this point there was still some part of my mind that was intrigued as well as scared by the whole thing.
I finally respawned, but not back at the default spawn at the yellow town of Genesis. Instead I was standing right in front of the cabin in the mountains. I was also now back in Creative Mode. I took a quick fly around the towns and found that, sure enough, all the Light Blues were still gone. The nexus was turned off again; this time I didn't bother to turn it back on. I flew back up to the cabin and walked in to find that there was now a trapdoor in the middle of the floor leading down to what appeared to be some kind of mine. It looked like this was what it meant by "mineshaft". Nervous but still wanting to follow this through, I descended into the mineshaft.
The shaft was only one block large. I passed some ore on the way down, as well as, oddly enough, Netherrack. At this point I was beyond caring about these minor oddities. I didn't care about that. I got to the bottom and found that the shaft opened into a large stone room made out of obsidian. Redstone torches were casting an eerie red glow across the room. In the center of the room was an Ender Chest, but it had an odd symbol on it: the leering face of a woman with snakes for hair. Medusa. Cute. Real cute. Just like the weird painting, the image seemed way too realistic for Minecraft to handle. Heck, this one was so detailed I doubted whether my computer could even handle it.
This was it. The moment of truth. I opened the Ender Chest and placed the block of obsidian into the chest. I put it into the center spot because why not? Unsure of what to do next, I closed the chest. Immediately I heard yet another scream, but this time it was strangely comforting: it wasn't a new sound, it was a Ghast. I figured this meant the game was going back to normal...or so I thought.
The mineshaft and stuff were still there. Having gotten to the end of the instructions, I reopened the chest. Maybe I had to put in a specific spot? I opened the chest...and there was no obsidian inside. It was gone. In its place was a new object: a second book. It was called "Leave", and its author was again "Medusa". I didn't want to read it; all I wanted at this point was to turn off the game and go to bed. But again I got that strange feeling that my character was begging me to go on. I took a deep breath...and read.
The new message was extremely short. The leetspeak was gone; the message was clear. It was so ominous that I wish it wasn't.
You betrayed me. I am coming for you. Beware of the chicken.
...what? What chicken?! And how had I "betrayed" Medusa? I followed her instructions to the letter! I thought how disappointing this was going to be to everyone reading this on fanfiction...
...and then it hit me. Fanfiction! The first thing that the original book told me was to not show the book to anyone. Somehow I knew that the reason the book vanished when I returned to the world was that Steve destroyed it, to ensure that no one would ever see it again. But I had copied down what it said and posted it on the Internet. I had violated the rules Medusa set forth, and now it was too late and...
...and how could the game possibly know that I posted the story?!
I'm not ashamed to admit I panicked. I quickly closed the window and shut down my computer. But it didn't turn off. I repeatedly clicked "Shut down", and even held down the power button, but nothing happened. Finally, panicked and desperate to escape whatever was going on, I got down on my hands and knees and unplugged my computer. After a tense second, the power went off.
I'm writing this from my iPhone because I'm way too scared to turn my computer back on. I don't want to have to deal with this. I'm scared; all I want to do is never play this game again. I don't care about Medusa. I just want to give up and not play.
But I can't give up. That feeling I got from Steve...that was real. I can't explain it, but it's like Steve is begging me for help. I need to see where this is going. I don't know if I am making the right choice, but I have to do this. Even if I decided to quit, I don't think I'd be able to. Medusa wants me to keep playing. No, she wants me to suffer for stealing from her.
I've read your comments. You all said that something supernatural was going on. I wish I could say you're wrong and this is just an Easter egg. I'm not sure anymore.
Stay safe, guys. I'll write again soon...hopefully.
