"What? What is it?"
All I could do was point... By now, the odd creature was almost fully exposed; it's horrid translucent body was mostly visible, exposing an orifice shaped vaguely like a mouth, that would occasionally change shape. Two small, horizontal slits came into view, and it took me quite a while to realise that they were actually eyes; the slits were composed of the same translucent flesh that made up the rest of the body, and just visible behind them were two spherical objects which I could only assume were its eyes! I was frozen to the spot, but from what I could tell, that might be a good thing. I don't think it had seen us yet, and I wanted to keep it that way.
"Is that the same thing from the report? The squid thing?"
I nodded, not daring to make a sound. There had been very little data about this creature, but the part that stuck in my mind was the "volatile projectiles" that it could supposedly fire from its mouth! I didn't want to see that first hand!
"If it goes to turn around, take a photo of it. We'll remain here until it either passes us or goes away. We can't risk trying to return to the base with it close by."
I slowly took the camera from my pocket, and held it in my hand, trying to reduce my movement as much as possible. I waited and waited, hoping it would not see us, let alone begin attacking us! Eventually, after some time, it turned around, facing the opposite direction. I took my chance and quickly brought up the camera, but by the time the photo was taken, it was facing us again! It had somehow managed to turn around quickly in the blink of an eye!
We all stood perfectly still, assuming it had seen us already. It began to approach us; slowly but silently hovering through the air. The slits in front of its eyes remained closed, and the sounds it made only occurred as the shape of the mouth moved... It stopped a few metres above us, totally silent, and almost perfectly still, aside from the slight bobbing. I held my breath, hoping it would either go away, or appear friendly and not attack us. After an agonising wait, the creature turned to face the way it had come, and bobbed off into the distance, shrieking once more... Once it rose out of sight, I let out a long draw of breath!
"That was close... Did you get a photo?"
I nodded, still trying to reduce the amount of sound I made, for fear of drawing it back to us.
"Good. Come on, let's get back to base. We can finish this off later when we've told the others."
We began following the torches all the way back to the base, partially running to avoid being caught by it. The pig-men seemed intrigued by our elevated movement, and began to follow us, but quickly lost interest after we moved a few metres away from them. Looks like we were the centre of attention!
----
The others have been informed. They were initially rather confused to see us back so quick, but when they saw our faces, OROTHO guessed right first time. We showed them the image of it I had managed to take, and they sat in silence for some time. We couldn't be sure where it was now, nor whether it was even aware of us. UOPETA had an idea that it may only appear during specific times, but without having any way to determine the time in this dimension, we were unlikely to master the routine patterns of a strange, alien creature.
"What was it doing when you saw it?"
"Nothing... It hovered down from above, turned away from us, turned back and approached us. It stayed floating directly above us for a few moments and then went back the way it came. It made a few shrieking sounds, but it never acknowledge our presence, nor did it ever seem to open its eyes. It was weird... Very weird..."
COLUS has insisted that no-one goes back out for some time until we can ensure that the strange creature has gone. Whilst we were gone though, OROTHO has managed to confirm that there is a delay in the time frames here in the Nether in comparison to that of Minecraftia. He's still working on a formula, but the time experienced in Minecraftia is indeed equivalent to two times the time plus the values of one lot of the time, not including the units. So the tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. For example, 125 seconds experienced in Minecraftia is equal to:
(2 x 125) + 120 = 370 seconds, or the equivalent of 6 minutes, 10 seconds.
It seems to be an almost exponential effect, where the more time spent in Minecraftia, the longer it seems for someone else in the Nether. So far, OROTHO has worked out the time differences up to an hour. In the Nether, it would be three! We're hoping to use this to our advantage, maybe consider moving a large supply of our equipment down here to enable us to work from a faster time frame. An hour in the Nether would mean 20 minutes in Minecraftia. We could conceivably work on a faster time frame than HoN Co. themselves! We could plan out attacks and scouting missions on a faster time frame, and achieve more, without wasting an equivalent time planning everything! I think I'll put this idea to COLUS later. He did after all say he was looking for a secondary base. Where better than in plain sight!
Syeonyx signing off
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