The Secret Lives of Endermen 32

Year XXXX July 1

  Finally, we have caught up to Effar and the others and I am overjoyed to see all the familiar faces I've come to know and respect.  Knell is a lot bigger than I remember but she still can't teleport on her own.  The extended absence of her uncle and his return made her squeal as loudly as a pig before she attached herself firmly to his leg and began babbling to him about what she had seen while Sven was away.

  Adone scolded her son soundly and I was happy when I was put down so I could get away from the scene to see that Tiny was greeted with far less drama and he looked at his mother curiously.  Enzi ran up to me and chattered at me faster than I could understand about things that have happened to the clan during my absence and I did my best to respond on get her to calm down when something strange happened.

  It started with a sound, a loud buzzing that became a loud droning like I have never heard before followed swiftly with something tan fell from the sky trailing smoke like a meteor.  It came so close that the Endermen felt compelled to duck and those not scared motionless teleported away.  Knell clung to Sven and whimpered while Sasha looked torn between running away and saving her baby.

  Half of the clan hurried to where the thing had crashed, the rest stared around, and looked ready for a fight.  I went with the group that swarmed the large meteor and I stared at it in awe.  I have never seen anything like it before and I don't think it has been seen anywhere else or at least I haven't heard about it.

  Fabric was pulled across the object and it was cylindrical for the most part, two long flat oblongs stuck out for the sides and the tube narrowed as it want back where it exterminated into a strange cross.  At the other was a plate glass bubble with a spinning double blade like two swords merged just before the guard only much larger and twisted opposite each other.  Inside this bubble was a man and he pushed the glass up with his hands and it swung up and away.  All the while, the blades spun slower and the mechanical noise died.

  Endermen crawled over the plane and tested it with tooth and claw and the man climbed out of the odd craft, waved his hands at the Endermen, and hollering to get them to crawl off it.  There was something about him that commanded respect, I felt like a young man being grilled by my father.  We looked at each other for a while; he wore a brown outfit that didn't seem to fit him well with goggles around his neck and a helmet under one arm and me in my faded clothing and no pumpkin.  We couldn't look more like strangers from different worlds.

  He introduced himself as Lothar Glogner from the Belkan Air Force from the Belka Nation and demanded to know what nation I hailed from.  When I failed to give him an answer, he pulled out a sword and the Endermen I knew best reacted to my fear at the swift movement and fled the scene while others looked up into the sky.  No one interfered; I don't think they could see us clearly enough to make out what was going on, if what Sven wrote is anything to go by.

  I had been ignoring the upward glances of the Endermen for a while now and both the Belkan and I were taken by surprise when a giant balloon dropped from the sky with the largest basket I've ever seen under it.  The balloon was massive made of finely woven cloth with a strange mechanism under its opening that somehow belched fire in timed bursts, I couldn't see who or what was c controlling it.

  The ungainly craft landed heavily on its basket, bounced before a young Enderman tumbled out of it, and freed the mechanism to keep the mechanism from spitting fire.  He dropped a large rock on the ground attached to the basket with a sturdy rope.  The mechanism kept the strange furnace flaming but the giant balloon never left the ground.

  The yellow-eyed Ender was as tall as I am, and he wore clothes, in particular green tinted goggles the same as Lothar had around his neck and a purple and yellow scarf.  With his unusual and mostly silent craft secured, the youth rushed over to the only humans in the area, and grabbed the sword to look it over and thrust a hand at my chest, his claws were short so he didn't actually hurt anyone but it was still startling.

  I don't know what he hoped to find but he knocked me to the ground and a few things scattered on the crushed grass before Kefka had a chance to realize I had been attacked.  He spoke in a dialect I didn't immediately understand but I was able to pick out that this was Festus and he loved human things and especially gold.  He rushed to the plane and gabbed about its' 'wings' with his hands on the flat protrusions from the main body of the Belkan craft.

  The Belkan pilot snatched my flint and steel from the ground and flicked it at the plane to start a fire.  Between the canvas and the dry, grass under it, the thing caught surprisingly quickly and the flying Enderman squealed in alarm and tore a branch from a nearby tree to try to put it out.  He stepped on and tripped over his scarf and the fresh branch landed on the fire, which fueled it, and the odd craft was burning in no time.

  The sky craft burned quickly and the young ender wailed as the pilot turned his back on everyone and left smoldering wreckage and us but not before he fired a rocket into the air.  The blessed night was broken with a flash of light in green yellow and gray that faded into cyan and magenta and that's the last I saw of the odd person.  Festus wailed over what he called an airplane and sat on the ground until the last ember went cold before he dragged himself back to his own craft and rose into the waning night.

  Belka, what kind of place is it where man has made a vehicle that can pierce the skies and dance among the clouds.


                                                  Henri Lemark