The Nether.

"What do you think?" Alex said, standing at the doorway of her new home.

"Hah, neat," Steve said, fiddling with a cigarette and a match, "can I come in?"

Alex moved out of Steve's way, and he entered the house. It was modestly decorated with colorful walls, and laterns hanging from the ceiling. A staircase was adjacent to the door, and on the other side of the foyer was a dark archway leading into the living room.

"Oh ho ho, fancy!" Steve said.

"You like the archway? It's made of pure polished obsidian!"

"The thing must've cost a fortune!" Steve said, still fiddling with the match as he went to walk through the archway. Then it all seemed to happen at once: Steve tripped over the bottom of the obsidian arch, fumbled the match going down, and it dropped onto the small section of obsidian floor. "Whoops," said Steve, but before he could stomp out the fire, the match exploded into a burst of glowing purple vapor, which filled the archway with a transparent swirling glowing plane.

"What the fuck!" Alex said, stepping back. Steve stood up, on the other side of the plasma. "You ever uh, seen anything like that before?" Alex asked.

"What do I look like, I scientist?" Steve said.

"Go on," said Alex, "touch it."

Steve took his cigarette and poked it through the purple vapor. Arcs of glowing gas swirled out of the portal, poking the cigarette with energetic tendrils. The cigarette's shape deformed as it entered the violet smoke, but did not reappear through the other side.

Steve's face scrunched up and, concerned, he pulled the cigarette back out. It was fine, though a fair bit warmer than it had been before.

"Well that's... peculiar," Alex agreed, "Now go and actually TOUCH the thing."

"I don't want to. It's your arch Alex, you touch it."

"It was your match, Steve."

"Well you're the one who trapped me in your living room!" Steve said, "Let's just do it at the same time."

"Fine. Let's do this. Ready?" Alex said, tentatively holding her hand out near the swirling vapor. Steve did the same on his end. The tingling from the tendrils of plasma was disconcerting enough on its own, but when they pushed their fingers into the archway, they felt the disturbing sensation of their hand entering and merging with the vapor. They felt their fingers swirling around into the rest of the vapor. Steve jerked his hand out and shook it, finding it had been intact, but Alex kept her hand in the portal. Her wrist, stuck within the plane of vapor, felt the annoying pins-and-needles sensation one gets when their arm is asleep, but past that, her hand felt warm and very dry.

"Warm as hell in there," she mumbled. She cautiously pushed her arm further through, and as more and more of it mixed into the vapor, causing the purple haze to tint first skin-tone and then a green shade which matched her shirt sleeves, she felt as though she was being pulled in.

"WAIT!" Steve said.

Alex tried to jerk her arm back, but this merely had the side effect of pulling the rest of her body in. She vanished in a puff of violet smoke. Steve stood in the living room, speechless, for a few moments.

"I'm trapped in here," Steve said.

"Fuck." Steve said, looking down. He turned away from the portal and considered breaking out the window. There were curtains on them, they'd be a hassle to deal with. But he didn't want to ruin Alex's nice new house. He paced around for a few minutes, anxiously, unsure what to do, muttering expletives under his breath.

"Fuckit," he said, and walked straight into the archway.

His whole world changed around him. He didn't have time to notice the distinctly uncomfortable sensation of his left arm, swung forward as he walked, dematerializing, before his vision warped and blurred as his eyes dissolved. He lost any notion of proprioception, and his ears, now nothing more than vapor, stabbed horrible, alien wails and growls into his head. He tried to scream but he couldn't, at least until his momentum carried him forward to the other side of the portal, where he emerged screaming, eyes closed. He collapsed onto the ground and shuddered. He started to sob, but caught himself, and merely cried out again. "WHAT THE FUUUUUCK!!" He yelled. His sound echoed many times into the space he found himself in. His senses finally recovering from being disassembled and reassembled, he opened his eyes, which were already dry. It was hot, it had to be at least a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and he was already sweating. The air was so dry that the sweat evaporated as quickly as it surfaced, and he was kept dry and cool enough to stay alive.

"Steve, is that you?" A voice cried out.

"Alex?"

"Steve! It's you! I thought you'd never come!" The voice said. It came from behind Steve and behind the portal. Steve now noticed that what had been a very clean 4 meter by 5 meter archway had turned into a sharp, rounded off, organic-looking arch embedded into reddish rocks. Steve stood up and shouted, "Alex! Where are you?" Before she could answer, Steve saw that there wasn't even a quarter of a meter of clearance between the edge of the other side of the portal and a five meter drop.

"Down here! Below the arch!" Alex said.

"I see you," Steve said. He could only barely make her out in the dim violet light, but saw her sitting against a wall of the cave.

"I've been calling for help for nearly an hour!" Alex said. Steve paused. Surely he hadn't been dawdling for an hour... it had been, well,

"It's not been more than five minutes since you got in there! And I definitely didn't hear you anyway."

"I'm trapped down here," Alex said, and audibly winced, "and I think I broke my arm when I fell. Tried digging my way out, but the rocks are too sharp and jagged."

"I'll get you outta there. You got a pickaxe?" Steve said.

"What kind of person brings a pickaxe on a house tour?"

"Me," said Steve, pulling a pickaxe out from his pack. "Ol' Rusty Trusty. I got it enchanted by the minister. Thing's unbreakable." He held up a battered, rusty iron pickaxe with a faint blue glow.

"Were you planning on mining my house?"

"Of course not, but you never know when you'll need to dig yourself outta trouble. And I guess it came in handy here, didn't it?"

Steve lifted the pickaxe up and began hammering away at the reddish rock. He found they were brittle, easy to chew through with the pick. Presently he heard a loud, ear-shattering cry. It sounded like the ghost of a cat having a bad dream, and its voice echoed through the massive volume of cavern behind Steve. Steve stopped to look out at the source of the sound. "What the hell was that?"

"I've been hearing that horrible cry over the past hour off an on. Can't tell what's making such a ruckus," Alex said.

Steve stared out into the vast cave. It was bigger than any ravine or chasm he'd ever seen--and he'd done an awful lot of spelunking in his youth. Shimmering golden lights hung from the top of surfaces like stalactites, when he looked over the ledge he saw bubbling pools of magma. "Shit. Lava down there. No wonder it's so hot here. It's a miracle we're not boiling as it is."

"Speak for yourself," Alex said.

Steve kept peering out until he spotted the source of the cries. It was a large spheroid white balloon-like creature that was drifting around. A mass of at least six tentacles trailed below it. It drifted over the lava pit and began to sank, before expanding and rising further up. Its eyes and mouth were horizontal slits, and every time it cried, a dim red fire could be seen glowing inside its mouth. Its reddish eyes peeked open, and it spotted Steve. It cried out, a shrieking cry which pierced Steve's ears, and he covered them. He then noticed a ball of fire was heading towards him.

"SHIT, IT'S ON FIRE!" Steve yelled, and he dove into the portal.

"STEVE?" Alex yelled. The fireball exploded upon impact with the platform Steve had been standing on, and the whole area surrounding it, was reduced to flaming rubble. The ghastly balloon, for its part, turned away and disappeared into the reddish haze in the distance. Alex's ears were ringing, and the explosion knocked her to the far side of the pit she had been in. When the smoke cleared, she saw that she could see out into the voluminous cavern which Steve had been surveying, and the archway had fallen down, cracked, and the violet haze was completely absent. Alex, wincing, ears still ringing, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of her, stood up. She walked towards the portal, weaving between flaming sections of rock and large boulders. She rested her hand on the archway. She put her hand through the empty archway, and determined that yes, in fact, it was now nothing more than an arch of volcanic glass.

Steve, sitting up in the living room floor, staring at the empty, cracked obsidian archway, lay back down, muttering curses under his breath. "I'm gonna need more than a pickaxe."

--------------------------------------------------------

Steve stood up and went to survey the damage. Immediately surrounding the archway on the living room side, the carpet was ripped and charred, the floorboards were splintered and charred, and sharp bits of obsidian lay on the ground. On the other side, the marble floor was cracked as well. The obsidian frame was cracked, with big gaps in the top and bottom. A small piece of red rock was smoldering in one corner of the frame.

"No one's going to believe me," Steve muttered to himself, so he walked up the stairs to try and find a storage cellar. He found a few water bottles, which he swiped, and a diamond pickaxe. "Man, Alex is loaded," Steve said.

"Put down the pickaxe and put your hands up," said a voice. Steve stood straight, dropped the pickaxe, and turned around. A man in police uniform was pointing a crossbow at him. Steve raised his hands.

"Arsonist AND a thief, eh?" The officer said.

"What? No! I'm not here to cause grief!" Steve said.

"Then just what are you doing here then? The neighbors hear a horrible explosion, and here you are in someone else' home?"

"I'm just Alex's friend! I'm trying to rescue her! There was a... a portal! Every minute we spend out here she spends uh... ten."

"Portal eh? Tell it to the administrators."

"No, officer, you don't understand, Alex is in grave danger. I was just trying to find some stuff to help her."

"Is that what you've got in your bag, then?"

"What? No."

"Gimme your bag."

"No!"

The officer approached Steve and kneeled down, inspecting the contents of the bag.

"Bag of holding. That's expensive stuff, I bet you stole it. Chain mail? You going to war or something?" The officer said.

Taking his chance, Steve whacked the officer in the head with the blunt edge of the pickaxe. He was knocked out cold. Steve yelped as he did this, and he swiped the crossbow and the officer's arrows.

"I'm really sorry but I don't have time for this now," he said. He took some more random supplies, raw materials. There were chunks of logs--that would come in handy. He ran down to the kitchen to get some food. He ate a piece of porkchop and took a few preserved steaks. He rummaged around for a few more supplies that he could use--and he tore the window blinds off of the living room windows as well. *Could be useful as a rope ladder,* he thought.

"I haven't been on any adventure like this since my spelunking days. Hell, I've never been on an adventure quite like this. Alternate world, smoky portals, horrible alien monsters..." Steve said, trying to reposition the shards of obsidian in the portal frame. He had to tape some of the ceiling pieces together. "Hope that'll hold," he muttered. He was about to light the portal, when he realized: "wait, almost forgot." He went back into the kitchen to find a first aid kit.

He stood in the living room, and lit a match. Three more officers poured in the front door. "Freeze!" the officer in the middle said. "Drop the match," she said, "Now."

Steve complied, and the obsidian archway sparked and sputtered as violet smoke evaporated out of the cracks in the archway. It wasn't as instantaneous as it had been last time, but it was soon enough that a barrier was formed between Steve and the officers.

"What in tarnation?" The officer on the left said.

"Shoot it!" The middle officer said. The officers on the left and the right shot at the portal, and then at Steve, and both times the portal swallowed the arrows.

"What kind of sorcery is this?" The right officer said.

"Beats me," Steve said, "but for sure it's deadly. Luckily, I don't care about my life anymore. Goodbye cruel world." Steve said, only half-feigning agony as he vanished into the portal.

After regaining his composure, he surveyed the landscape. He was surprised to find that the portal was in another spot, 8 meters away from the ruins of the former portal. He saw the flaming rubble of the old portal, with its cracked frame. It was about four meters lower than it had been, and resting crooked on a particularly large boulder of the reddish rock.

"Alex!" Steve cried out. He heard his echo, and the only thing he heard in return was the cat-like shriek of the ghastly balloon things. Steve feared the worst. How long had be been in the real world? Thirty minutes? An hour? At any rate it would have been several hours since he left. It was incredible those fires were still burning. Steve walked past the crater and climbed down into the pit that Alex had been trapped in, but she was nowhere to be seen. Steve wasn't quite relieved, but at least there wasn't a dead body.

"Alex?" He shouted again. Nothing.

Steve took out a torch and inspected the area more closely.

---------------------------------------------------

Alex woke up in a room which felt much cooler than she had been accustomed to. More importantly, it was not the nook she'd dug out with Steve's pickaxe, which she had fallen asleep in. "Where am I?" She said, startling up. She was resting on a bed of gravel, which she figured was a lot better than the sharp jagged mess that most of the surface seems to be made out of. She examined her arm, which had been placed in a sling fashioned from some kind of leather. A greenish cream had been spread on her cuts. When she touched it, it felt very hot, but it clearly had a numbing effect.

"Hello?" She asked, standing up. The room's floor was gravel, but the walls were a brownish reddish brick, hastily laid down with no real mortar. The bricks were all cracked and old. It was clearly not laid down by professionals. There was no door, only an archway of brick, and the room was lit with meter-sized chunks of the yellowish glowing rocks that hung from the ceiling. She cautiously exited the room, finding a small village cobbled together from more or less the same materials. Haphazard bricks, gravel, and red rock.

She heard a groan. It was not the groan of a human, or the growl of a zombie, but something different. A horrible monstrosity came out of an adjacent building, golden sword in hand. It was a bipedal creature with the face of a pig covered with rotten flesh, with exposed skeleton. Alex stepped back and pulled out the pickaxe. Another one came out as well, this one unarmed and with less decayed flesh. It oinked at the sword-bearing monster, who looked at Alex, growled, and walked back into its hut. The second pig-creature approached Alex and presented a small golden can. It grunted at Alex. Alex looked at the can suspiciously, and took it.

"Thank you?" Alex said. There was something sloshing around in the can. The can felt cool, and Alex unscrewed the cap. The liquid inside looked like water. She sniffed it. It smelled rotten, but she was extremely dehydrated, and after a tentative taste of the liquid, she guzzled the can down. Realizing it was pure gold, she started to pocket the can, until the pig-creature oinked sharply at her."Oh," she said, and handed the can back. The Pig-creature took it back into its building. Alex decided to walk around the village. Another pig-creature was tending to some mushrooms. *Nothing but decay, here*, Alex thought.

Alex found that the village was built into a cliff near the roof of the cavern. She could just about make out where she had come from at the far side of the cave and closer to the middle in altitude. She couldn't be sure, but she thought she saw a violet glow--but the heat haze above the lava prevented her from being able to make it out for sure. She was near a cliff, and there didn't seem to be any way down from here.

A ghastly wail pierced the village. Some of the pig creatures looked out of their buildings. The Ghast spotted Alex and vomitted a fireball. "Shit, that must be what destroyed the portal!" Alex said. The fireball hit the ceiling of the cave, causing an explosion which rained red rocks down onto the village. A large building was completely buried. Alex didn't expect that the shoddy construction of the huts would bode well for whoever was inside. The pig creatures saw what had happened to their hut, looked at Alex, then at the Ghast, and they all charged out of their homes weapon in hand. The smaller ones picked up rocks and futily threw them across the hundreds of meters of void. The rest threw glowing yellow spears with golden tips, but the Ghast was too far away. The sounds of growling pigmen echoed all around. The Ghast was drifting closer to Alex, but was facing away. When it faced again towards Alex and the village, it unleashed another fireball. One of the most rotten of the pig-creatures tossed Alex his sword. Alex caught it, but had only seconds to do anything with it. She flailed the sword around in the general direction of the fireball, looking away from it and shutting her eyes tight. She felt something hit her sword, and she opened her eyes, seeing the flaming ball getting further away.

The pigmen cheered her on as the next fireball flew towards her. This time she held the sword firm and deflected the fireball. The Ghast, drifting under no particularly strong power, aimlessly wandered directly into the path of its own fireball. The fireball burst the Ghast open, and a shower of rain fell down from its empty, bag-like corpse. A team of pigmen ran into a tunnel, and moments later Alex saw them collecting the fluid remains in golden cups. Alex nearly vomited.

She tried to return her sword to the horrible monstrosity that lent it to her, but it backed off, held its hand up, and grunted. She put it down, and the pigman stepped back, looked at the sword, and looked at her. After a brief awkward moment, he picked the sword up and put it directly back into Alex's hands. "Oh... thank you." She looked closely at the sword. Its hilt was composed of a hard metallic yellow rod, and the blade seemed to be made out of a gold.

Presently the pig creatures equipped pickaxes and went over to dig the covered building out. Alex went over to help, taking out Ol' Rusty Trusty--the gray/brown color and blue glow of which turned a few eyes--and joining the effort. After a few minutes of digging, the partially collapsed structure was revealed, and a family of rotting pigmen crawled out. The pigmen cheered in their jarring, gargling, oinking way.

----------------------

Steve found a trail of two sets of footprints in a patch of gravel leading away from the former pit that Alex had been trapped in. They were bipedal, but hoofed, clearly not Alex. Unfortunately the prints were only visible in the gravel, and Steve had nearly gotten himself lost. He came across a pack of horrible monsters of piglike appearance carrying golden swords. He noticed their hoofs. "Hey! You! Over there!"

The pigmen turned to face Steve. "Yeah, you," he said. "Do you know anything about my friend? Smaller arms, orange hair. Broken arm."

"Uuuhhhhrrrrrrgggggg," responded the pigman.

"Ya speak english?" He asked. One of the pigmen looked at another other and oinked. "Guess not," he said, and climbed down off of the hill he'd been standing on, and went to survey more of the area. The further he went, the more ubiquitous the pigmen turned out to be. He hiked up to an isthmus which connected two landmasses which were separated by a lava lake. The temperature grew unbearably hot as he approached, and he was forced to back off or else be cooked.

"This is hell, isn't it? I've opened a portal to hell. Pools of lava, lava waterfalls, and the god awful smell too." He sat down for a snack, and tore open a packaged porkchop. A pigman eyed him suspiciously. He heard the wails of a Ghast in the distance, and was put on guard--he couldn't see the monster yet, so he finished his meal. He fished the crossbow out of his backpack, and fastened a bolt into it. "I hate this place," he said, "I'm never coming back."

Steve noticed something shiny peeking out of a cliff, and went over to check it out. They were white quartz-like crystals. He took out the diamond pick and dug out some of the crystals. Perhaps they'd be worth something when he got home--proof of his travels at least. In fact, he thought, he should put a few samples of the unique rock that forms here in his bag.

He kept walking, and just as his legs were beginning to weaken, he saw something through the haze. Something big. A dark structure, composed of bridges and massive columns. "Oh my god. That's got to be where they've taken her." After a bottle of water and another porkchop, and a short rest on a patch of gravel, Steve was ready to make a run for it--or at least as ready as he'd ever be. His legs and arms ached and he wished he hadn't been wearing the chain mail all this time, but he soldiered on until he came up to a patch of strange soil he hadn't seen before. This wouldn't have been a problem under usual conditions, but Steve couldn't help but see... well... terrified faces engraved into the sand. It was more than a little disconcerting. He tapped the sand with his pick. It was fine. But when he stepped onto it, he realized how futile this was. There was no point in continuing. For a few moments he slowly drudged on through the sand, but stopped, and, sobbing, he slowly walked back off the sand and onto the red rock. *Wait a minute. What am I thinking. My friend needs me!*

Steve stepped back onto the sand, and realized that the sand was grabbing at his feet, slowing him down, all the while thoroughly depressing him. "Oh it's all pointless!" He said. He shuffled back to the rock. "Oh. I see. Of course." He ran across the patch of sand, and even as the sand grasped at his legs and soul, he kept going forward, though he found it increasingly depressing. He fought off thoughts of he and his friend dying horribly in lava, or being lost forever in this bizzare land, and by the time he had crossed the sand, he felt almost like an empty husk.

He felt much better on the normal rock. "That's a dreadful material. Sucks the soul right outta ya." He stared up at the fortress above. "I'll have to find a better way around."

------------------

Steve heard a smacking sound, like someone who was being really obnoxious with a strip of gum, but he couldn't quite make out where it was. Perhaps it was on the brick walkway dozens of meters above him. He shook it off, and kept looking around for a way to climb up to the structure. He came into an opening to another large cavern, and heard the dreaded cry of the ghastly balloons. Two of them! One was minding its own business a quarter of a kilometer away, perhaps it didn't see him. The other was not ten meters from his face. It was facing him, but its eyes were not open. Close now, Steve could see that the creature had tear ducts which were continuously producing tears, which streaked down the monster's eyes. Steve backed away slowly, hoping the thing hadn't seen him. He tripped over a pebble, shouted, and kept himself from falling over, but now the Ghast's eyes were open.

"OOOAAAAHH!" Shouted the Ghast.

"Hit the deck!" Steve said, ducking down as the fireball flew past his head, hitting one of the large, bulky support beams holding up the bridges of the fortress. "Oh shit, it DID hit the deck! Hah!" Steve said, pulling out his crossbow. "Just one more shot," he said to himself.

He ran back to the support tower, and again heard the horrible thing's war cry. Steve ducked down, covering his head and ears. The explosion took down the support, and the section of bridge that had been supported collapsed down on one side, creating a ramp. Most of the bridge was intact, stable, but the end which was now at ground level was little more than a pile of bricks. Steve took his crossbow and fired it at the monster. At the same time, the monster fired off another fireball. The two each bounced off of each other. Steve's arrow flew back and landed at his feet, while the fireball hit the Ghast, which tore open in the blast. Satisfied, he returned to view his handiwork.

It didn't look safe, but it was the only way up. He clambered up the pile of bricks and, gripping the unsettlingly large handrails, he made his way up to the top of the bridge, where it met another support. He brushed himself off. He glanced down the side of the bridge. It was a long way down from here. He came across an entrance into a building.

*Clunk clack*, a sound went by.

"Skeletons?" Steve whispered. He prepared his best skelepidgin voice, and stepped into the building. He was greeted by a thoroughly confused skeleton archer.

"Greeting. Find friend. Seen?" Steve clicked.

"Intruder!" clacked the skeleton, pulling his bow back, and shooting an arrow which narrowly missed Steve's shoulder. He ran back outside and hid behind a wall

"What the hell?" Steve said, "What about the treaty!" And then he peeked his head back inside to the skeleton, "Treaty violation!" Steve clicked.

"No treaty, never treaty," the Skeleton clacked.

"Yes treaty. Monster treaty. Skeleton, zombie, human, villager, happy," Steve clicked.

"Human know not. Villager know not. Never happy," the Skeleton clacked, firing off another arrow.

"The interspecies alliance committee will hear about this," Steve said to himself, "Then again, that treaty was signed before I was born. Wherever that skeleton came from, he may have come before the treaty."

Steve threw a pebble into the room, and the skeleton walked over to check it out. Steve jumped at the skeleton when its back was turned, and wrestled away the bow and arrows. "Stop," The skeleton clacked. Steve ran down the hall, until he found a large room. Some skeletons, unarmed, were tending to some kind of reddish, wart-like plant, which were in troughs at either end of the room, planted in the brown depressing dirt from earlier. Steve figured he could take the unarmed skeletons out, but decided on a more peaceful approach.

"Greeting," Steve clicked. The Skeletons looked up.

"What thing?" Clacked the thinner one to the wider.

"pig man," Clacked the wider one.

"Human," Clicked Steve. "Find friend. Seen?"

"Human know not," Clacked the wider skeleton.

"Should leave. Intruder," Clacked the thinner skeleton.

"What that?" Clicked Steve.

The wider skeleton clacked a skeleton word Steve had never heard before, and continued "Make magic water."

"Me have some?" Steve clicked. The skeleton glanced at Steve's crossbow, then at the other skeleton, then at the warts.

"Yes," it said, and handed Steve a single one of the warts. Steve put it in his backpack. As he started up the stairs, he heard the skeleton word for "Get him!" and he started running. He came up to another bridge, this time it was set into a cleared out rocky tunnel. He ran down it. Arrows were being shot at him, and one had hit him in the back of his armor. At the other end of the tunnel, Steve stopped so suddenly he skidded to a halt. A tall, dark gray skeleton, holding a massive stone sword, blocked Steve's path.