2Long time no see! I'm not back, I'm just stopping by for a visit. I don't want to dedicate myself to a big story, but I've got too much swimming around to let any of it go. Welcome to my sporadically-updated solution: Brain Dump.
He walked into the heat as one walks into a brick wall, palpable, solid and unmoving. This was heat that had never known a cool summer's breeze. This was heat that stuffed and suffocated if one stayed too long. This was heat that killed.
That's what was intended for the villager who stumbled through the purple vapor of the nether portal. The portal to hell itself, or what most people imagined it to be. Burning, scorching, never-ending. No one survived in the Nether very long. No one found their way out of the Nether very easily. To enter was a death sentence.
A death sentence was exactly why this particular villager was there, standing on shaking knees, sweating, steaming. The portal was right behind him, health and safety and normal life were only a few steps away, but he could not return. If he did he would be taken and executed.
In that sense, the Nether was something of a mercy. It was where villagerkind sent those less desirables, those they deemed deserving of something worse than death alone, but it was not the final outcome. You could find another way out, if you were lucky.
This villager hoped to do just that, for like all those before him he didn't believe this was what he deserved, and he would avoid such a fate if he could help it.
Villagers were born and bred in the overworld, a place with water and sunlight and food. Here in the Nether there was no water, fire was the only light and the only food capable of surviving (that wasn't diseased and rotten anyway) was mushrooms.
Alone the villager could survive maybe a day. If mushrooms were plentiful he might make it three. His goal was to get out before either of those deadlines were met.
At first it wasn't so bad. The Nether portal was located in a cave in the netherrack, rock scorched black and red by endless fire. This cave was connected to a system of tunnels, varying in length and height. For a while it was easy to think logically.
For example, the villager thought, one of two races able to survive indefinitely in the Nether (and consequently used it quite often) were Crafters. It was from Crafters that villagerkind got information on how to make portals. In some areas known only by rumor Crafters had shaped whole sections of the Nether into domains of their own. So the most likely route out was through a Crafter's portal.
Now about finding one, it was quite a chance to ask for. In some places Crafters were thick, and so were Nether portals, and in other places there weren't so many but the Crafters made large and obvious signs directing to them. In other places, the ones likely to be closest to the villager, portals were hidden out of the way, tucked into nooks and crannies in the lava-filled cavescape.
The other problem on his mind was this: The villager was part of quite a large kingdom, one that was not so friendly to Crafters and so was avoided by most. There were very few who lived close, and the domains of these were usually a week away or more.
This made the situation quite hopeless to the villager, for because of their physical limitations villagers did not use the Nether for much more than a dumping ground, once all quartz within safe reach was exhausted. This meant they didn't know at all about the "subspace-bubble," or that every block you traveled in the Nether took you forward eight times in the world above; (that was where villagers thought the overworld was located.)
So the problem in this villager's mind was crossing many chunks of lava-filled ocean and red netherrack cliffs in perhaps triple the normal walking time, if he could manage the suffocating air and overwhelming heat while doing it.
It was as the villager was trying to do the math through the heat-fog that already filled his head that he nearly walked over a cliff and fell into a lake of lava, burning and bubbling far below.
Despair crossed his face once, but he turned back. There was no time to lose.