The Tipping Of The Scales

The Tipping Of The Scales - Tension

Tom's POV

Streams were just plain awkward nowadays. Jordan and I had decided to just remain in a separate Skype call from the others as every time Jordan entered Team Speak, Tucker just barraged him with questions about Sonja and insults about his ignorance to the main story-line. Sonja streamed alone, communicating with us via the game chat briefly, sending us private messages in an attempt to hide her presence from Tucker. She had asked us to help distract Tucker whilst she grabbed the last of her stuff from their vault so she could move out properly, to which Jordan had agreed to bodyguard her whilst I tormented Tucker. The gods were online constantly, not communicating with us at all merely sitting at spawn and staring at all those who walked past. The levels of tension were through the roof and nobody knew whether their actions would cause their demise, or whether the gods were standing right behind them. Paranoia was the prominent emotion for us all, with Jordan and I covering one anothers backs at all turns and Sonja cowering in her base whenever she saw Tucker's name nearby.

Despite all of this, the rules themselves were remaining unbroken. Tucker hadn't gone on a rampage in a few days, leading us to believe that he was planning something big and that we should be on our toes. Jordan and I had created another vault the other day, with the code hidden from the stream by setting our homes in it and just using /home to enter instead of what Jordan used to do with the whole punching in the sequence with hoppers etc, which really just took too long to complete in an emergency. We had built it underneath the end portal near the farm, with the redstone impossible to reach and obsidian surrounding the walls in case someone tried to mine their way in. The booby traps Jordan had set up were INSANE, he had creeper spawners from the Dianite Bombs I had been given way back in some of the first episodes before Jordan even joined the realm of Mianite and piston traps that shoved you into a pit with lava flowing all around you - stopping Tucker's enderpearl antics and ensuring our safety. I set up the code with my face-cam on, discussing with the wizards how to do certain redstone tricks that Jordan had little knowledge of, whilst keeping an eye out for any sign of Tucker or the gods.

Since the Purge, Tucker seemed to avoiding Jerry's Tree as much as possible with the valuables the Wizards had gifted Jordan with remaining in place despite his current thieving behavior. From what I understood, most of his time on the server was spent underground on a diamond hunt and mob grinding from the grinder over at Dec's house. It seemed that Mianite had stopped providing Tucker with countless armour sets, so he had to provide for himself and replenish the stocks we had taken from him after Jerry's demise. As much as we all knew that the spawn eggs in the dispenser were all labelled with Jerry, it was an unspoken rule that you didn't kill something that was such a potent mascot to another member of the Mianite realm. I had erected another grave for Jerry on top of the tree, sticking out from the top of the watch tower for Jordan and Sonja suggested that we gave Jerry a mock Viking burial to honour his name - and of course not invite Tucker. So I built a raft out in the sea just outside of Jerry's tree and Jordan placed Jerry's remains in the centre before lighting it on fire and returning to the top of Jerry's tree to watch as the boat burnt away and the remains were lost to the grasp of the flames and the cold grave of the sea. However the sombre moment was broken by the gods.

My screen went black momentarily and then when the blindness wore off I looked around to find myself in some cage, completely unable to break blocks. Glancing around I noticed that Jordan, Sonja and Tucker were in the same predicament and that attempting to ender glitch out was not working for Jordan as his explicit language increased with each pearl thrown. There seemed to be no-one else with us, just us stuck in some cages in a completely random location. I went to check the co-ordinates and was shocked with what I saw, we were 120 blocks up! I quickly relayed this information to Jordan and Sonja,  confirming the fact that Jordan should be able to survive this if he just jumped off the edge whilst Sonja and I found another way down. The chat displayed one message from Tucker: