Under The Helmet || Hermitcraft AU

Chapter 5

POV: Iskall
Word Count: 600
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Iskall saw Grian's dark silhouette retreat beyond the horizon. He turned towards Mumbo, who was being comforted by Stress and still staring at the setting sun. He bade them a "goodbye for now!", fished out a few rockets, and blasted himself into the distance.

He touched down at his Base-In-Between-Bases and sat down on his bed thinking hard. How do you respawn the Ender Dragon? End crystals. Eyes of ender and ghast tears. Not too hard. Neither is the boss fight. It just takes such a long time, he thought bitterly. 

Opening and closing chests rapidly, he found a few singular ender pearls, but not even a sign of some blaze powder or a ghast tear. Resigned to the fact that he may just need to make a trip to the Nether, he gathered a bow, more rockets, and some more 'just in case' ender pearls.

Building up a new Nether portal, so as not to connect it to the Nether roof, he flew the cavern-like generation, in search of a fortress.

45 minutes later

Taking his smelted glass out of his super-smelter, he sprinted to his crafting table and created the 4 End Crystals required to re-summon the Ender Dragon. Then he prepared all of the necessary equipment for the fight; Ender pearls, spare rockets, a max enchanted bow and sword. He considered swapping out his elytra for a tanky chest plate, but dismissed the thought; Elytra are useful for getting yourself out of sticky situations, like falling off the islands. He had a brief flashback of Mumbo falling out of the sky during this season's first End Busting trip out of nowhere and chuckled.

He unbuckled his green belt from over his diamond eye, as to not obscure his vision during the combat.

Iskall arrived in the cold, dark, never-ending stronghold. Having located the portal, he quickly set his spawn in the portal room, in case there was an emergency. He took a deep breath and stepped into the endless void of the End portal.

Appearing on the main island, feeling giddy with excitement and fear, he placed the four explosive crystals on the slightly splintered bedrock and waited with bated breath. The four crystals rose into the air, radiating a pinkish glow over the return portal. Then one by one, the Crystals shot a beam of ...something... onto the ten obsidian towers scattered around the perimeter of the island. In the distance, Iskall heard the ear-splitting roar of the mighty dragon. He stood, sword at the ready, prepared to face her.

You all know what the Ender Dragon fights are like. After taking out the End Crystals there is lots of roaring, thwacking of swords, shooting of bows, chewing of Golden Apples, etc. This one was no different, and within no time, it exploded into a shower of EXP.

Iskall didn't have much trouble defeating the dragon, but he soon realised he hadn't brought anything to take the egg back to base with. He hastily searched through his shulker boxes, for any kind of piston or torch. He was lucky, finding a Redstone torch buried inside one of his extremely messy shulkers.

He hit the egg, forcing it to teleport a few paces to the left. He mined a single-block hole two blocks below it, then placed the torch. He broke the piece of Endstone that was supporting the egg, and it fell onto the torch, popping into a pick-uppable item.

Extremely happy with himself, he thought of places where he could display his fabulous prize, before realising he was obliged to return it to Grian for Hermit Challenges.

POV: Mumbo
Word Count: 449
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Stress and Grian had a point. What was I thinking, giving him a task like that? Mumbo thought bitterly. Saying goodbye to the Hermit Challenges area, he flew back to his base and prepared for the next day.

Might as well get this song over and done with, thought Mumbo, still mad at Stress for her use of imagination to come up with a good challenge. Just like his button game, he decided to make it on the roof of the Nether, so others could enjoy (or not enjoy) listening to this song while flying through the portals. He brainstormed some ideas, maybe just improvise, or start a poll with the other Hermits to discover what kind of music they liked, but... no, nonononono, he had such a better idea.

He looked through and listened to the possible note types, and narrowed it down to 3, Bone block for xylophone, Glowstone for electric piano, or Emerald block for a bit. Eventually, he chose the Glowstone, as it is easier to obtain, and the piano sounds fit the atmosphere of the song better.

Mumbo propelled himself through the portal and located a spot to start work on this project. Opening his Redstone box, he extracted some Redstone dust, repeaters, some wood to craft the Noteblocks, and the Glowstone required for this circuit to work.

Just for the irony, he decided to recreate Elybeatmaker's NONONO remix. Instead of making the whole song run once, he decided, for simplicity's sake to just loop the main melody of the chorus, forever.

Because he had no experience with Noteblocks, he had to play it by ear. Quite literally. He would listen to a note, place some Glowstone, replicate the note with a Noteblock, set the delay with some repeaters, and repeat. But geez it took a long time.

After a long time of slowly going crazy listening to himself say no repeatedly, Mumbo decided to try out his circuit, in case he had messed up badly and did all of this work for nothing. Placing and then quickly removing a Redstone torch, he started to listen to the song. It's ok... thought Mumbo, but some of these delays are still a bit off. He twiddled with the repeaters and listened to it again.

He was surprisingly proud of this mildly annoying looping song, but he turned it off; it was starting to drive him insane. He built a kind of Noteblock-shaped cube around it, made of spruce wood and with a long, thin, red stained-glass window to observe the Redstone inside. He activated it and quickly flew back to his base, his purple rank belt swinging on his chest. He couldn't bear to listen to that song for another second.

POV: StressmonsterWord Count: 301_____

Leaving Mumbo to sulk, Stress opened her statistics menu on her Communicator, she scrolled down to Distance flown using elytra. She sighed upon finding that, in her whole time on Hermitcraft this season, she had only flown a total of 32,453m.

Stress decided, to bump her numbers up, to fly without using the nether, to all of her locations. That would multiply her distance she normally flies by eight, right? She also decided to do some exploring, because that would add to her total, wouldn't it?

Anyway, she headed off to the shopping district to buy more rockets, she was low, and to see if her Glass Shop had made any sales. To her surprise, someone has bought 4 stacks of red stained glass.

She pocketed the diamonds and headed to her willow tree, to see if anyone had returned the books for her potion shop. To her even greater surprise, she opened the barrel to find that it was almost full! The title on one of the books caught her eye. Pesky Bird! I wonder who that is? She thought, smiling to herself.

After around 5 hours of ordinary day-to-day work, she had only added an extra 5km to her total flight distance. Finally, Stress resigned to the fact that this challenge wasn't one she could dust off in one day. Doing my everyday tasks would surely add an additional five-thousand to my numbers, at least shouldn't it? thought Stress anxiously, placing her communicator back in her coat pocket.

Trying to ignore the fact that she had another 5 kilometres to fly using her already damaged elytra, she decided to take a break and AFK for her nether wart and mushroom farms, to get some more progress done for her uncompleted potion shop.

(I know that you can only get one egg per world in Java, I'm not very smart okay?)