vials of human feces

Don't mind the items in my hotbar ecks dee

I have had similar things happen in my base, there is one spot where there are smoke and ender particles if you look closely and some weird lighting. It is probably Herobrine, because it was in a weird structure.
The floating gravel will hopefully convince you:

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
See? It's herobrine

and are the transparent armor stands warps or something?
Edit: Ok I googled it, and I found on the minecraft wiki that Herobrine was secretly added in 1.12 and that he places transparent armor stands, and their use is currently unknown.
They can only be seen in spectator mode. Same as Herobrine, he currently does not attack the player, though some witnesses who have seen him in their worlds have suddenly died for no apparent reason, sometimes repeatedly, regardless of their gamemode. There is no death message when that happens.

maybe someone was lagging?

@CraftyMyner It would be easier to just remake that part with something else.

Yay, the only parkour that was easy is going to be removed, as well as being replaced with something that will probably be at least 10x harder! I love this update!

@NerdieBirdieYT @Jordi223b Ahhh good point. Perhaps signs or item frames then, although that would look worse. You could just replace the vines with ladders tbh.

Wouldn't ladders make it too easy? You can stand on ladders, but you can't stand on vines.

Does this mean that the vine pk will be replaced with something really difficult?

Then it went forward to