Day 3: Extreme Temperatures, Extreme Stress
Greetings, villager observers! Today was an extremely productive day for me, and I learned much about villager anatomy, and psychology.
Not long after finishing the villager's new "quartz and gold" roads, they began to shower me with bread and vegetables. While I'm not clear what they consider a viable exchange rate for valuables, it did occur to me that they might have been attacking me by throwing produce. In the interests of science, I assumed the worst (that the villagers have gone violent), and began today's experiments accordingly.
Shiny rocks = bread? This certainly explains their bartering system.
It's rare to see villagers exposed to the elements in their native habitats. It doesn't happen often enough that a village is built near a lake, or volcano, or in the nether, so little information is known about villager survivability and adaptive tendencies. To find out more, I constructed two new shelters for the villagers: one filled with water, chilled by packed ice underneath. The other, a villager-sized cauldron, pre-heated for experimenting!
To comfort the ice-box villagers, I painted a face on the wall of the pool, so they always felt like they were being watched over. They responded with fear, for some reason.
The icebox villagers were, for the most part, unresponsive to the cold water. A few of them began tossing a potato back and forth, and making a noise that I assumed to be laughter. Meanwhile, in the oven, the subjects were huddled in a corner, muttering and pointing in my direction from time to time. Without knowing more about their primitive language, I was forced to use careful observation and deductive reasoning to piece together their intended meaning. Naturally, I concluded that they were planning on building a massive armored spaceship, to take back their village by force.
Regarding temperature extremes, it seems that villagers are completely immune to the cold, and anything other than direct contact with fire causes them to make evil plots. Direct contact with fire causes them to burst into flame like rice paper.
I left the plotting villagers to their work, curious to see what they built. Interfering would only spoil the experiment. Fortunately, I had something to check up on!
Having been in his new home/cell for 3 days straight, Barnaby began talking to himself, absent any friends to interact with. In his spare time, he carved a potato into the vague shape of a villager head, and started calling it "George". On the other side of his cell, he had fashioned a carrot into a shiv. It would seem that villager sanity is a fragile thing, and any tiny inconvenience can push them over the edge. I genuinely felt bad for Barnaby, so to help him feel better, I built a zoo outside of his cell, so he could see all the local wildlife!
Barnaby snuck the occasional glance out the window at his new zoo.
Mostly, he showed his appreciation by babbling to his potato. I'm still not certain what that means.
In light of today's experiments, next week will be a real treat! We will begin introducing petting zoos into villager's homes, installing a new plumbing system, and "testing" fireworks on villagers. See you soon!