Session 42

"As a robot, I don't know how much you're aware of what God got up to before your kind came along? Did you ever hear of 'religion'? When God was younger, he and his sister sort of just toyed with mankind. They set people up to think of them as kings/queens above all kings and queens that exist. It was a bit chaotic and inconsistent for a very long time while the two of them got used to working with people - then eventually they fell out and she left the planet. The problem was the God was too clover for her (this is his sister I'm talking about now). He liked to study things - observe the structure of the world. But she was stupid and thought that took the 'magic' out of everything. You know, he even tried to be nice to her. They had a fight, but he called it off because he knew that just killing all her followers wouldn't show her that he was right. Instead he thought he'd show her the power of organisation, of coherent thinking. His highly disciplined Christians set about converting her druids (no two of which ever had the same idea of what they believed really) peacefully through words. But she didn't like it. She had a sulk and just flitted off, leaving the planet and taking a handful of her backwards druid-folk with her."

Phillipe didn't really know what to do with this information. He understood that the holy commission for the development of artificial life had created him all those years ago. But they'd also pretty abruptly replaced him and made him redundant with the next generation of robot. Having to listen to a priest give him the back-story was a bit painful considering how callously he'd been basically scrapped and left to find his own way in the world. And on top of that it was still a long way from clear what any of this had to do with Joe Bernard.

"Is this really important father?"

"I tell it to all of you detectives when you come along. I really feel that it's the least I can do considering. I mean, you can't really find out about Joe's disappearance without learning about the world being over. And that's the sort of thing that I think it's easier for people to take in when put in context."

"You said before that the world had ended. Are you telling me that this wall" (he put his hand through a plaster wall) "is just a trick of my sensors? That I'm just an AI running a complex simulation of the world when in actual fact there's nothing physically here at all?"

"Um... no. I'm not saying the world isn't REAL. That would be idiotic. No, listen to me and I'll explain."

"Well can you just cut the context short?"

"Ugh. Ok. Well, the point is that his sister leaving really REALLY annoyed God and pretty much everything he's been doing in the last 2000 years has been geared towards getting back at her. In that time he played around with religion, trying to make it more workable and scientific, but really he just lost his hold on it. There were too many religions about - after him and his sister had been just larking about with them for so long. Plus, they started to take on lives of their own - people didn't want to re-assess their understanding of the world in the light of new evidence, so you ended up with claims that the earth is flat despite everything..."

"This is still very waffly..."

"*sigh*. Well the long and short of it is that around 1900, God ditched religion altogether and got into science instead. He didn't have to worry about being king-like, he just set up a framework in the world where people got rewarded (by and large) for cataloguing the way the world worked and organising things ('discovering' things and 'inventing' things). Instead of holding onto ideas - he trained people to celebrate throwing them away when a better one came along. Secretly guiding this science driven world has been his little project for the last 300 years and it's worked marvellously for him. With the construction and deployment of the DDT corporation's vessel 'the Toronto' - he can FINALLY get back at his stupid wishy-washy sister."

"I see. And the point is that Joe Bernard signed up to be on the Toronto's maiden voyage, and that's why his disappeared..."

MEANWHILE, ON THE PLANET OF ALBION

Wiping his mouth (did I mention that he'd been drooling?) Nemos gives the bean a little squeeze. Just a tiny little squeeze - like you might give the buttocks of an attractive co-worker who you fancied, had fallen up against and wanted to have a little gropette of but didn't want to get into trouble. Just the lightest little tiny squeeze, just for drama - not so much as it would squash the bean.

Very like an attractive buttock, but bean bulges a little in response to the squeeze. The bean is firm. Perter than you might expect for a bean that's already been put in a salad then on someone's face.

Then, covered in salad dressing, it slips out from between Nemos's fingers and flies into the air.

"Quick! Catch it!" Cries Hoff.

"What's going on in here... Oh cripes! A bean! I'd better not let it fall!" announces another druid walking into the room at that very instant and grasping at the slippery buttock-like bean only for it to go *pwoit*out of his grabbing fingers like a wet bar of soap and fly back across the room the other way.

"I've got it!" says Dirr trying to grab it too but, again, firing it into the air instead.

Several other Dji Cantoses rush in to see what the commotion is and soon they're all running around catching and accidentally re-launching the bean around the room.

There is a full-screen static image of the chaos that ensues. I love these full-screen images and this is probably the best one from the game so far (apart, possibly, from the weird poking-jesus-in-the-eye from back when that murderous hag and her mute simpleton boyfriend were still part of the team). A crowd of dignified Dji Cantoses are all reaching up trying to grab the oily bean and text describes the palava in full.

Eventually the bean falls into the cupped hands of Tom who wipes the oil off on his shirt and gives the bean a little squeeze himself just to make sure it's stable now.

"Wow... So firm!" He murmers.

"So Nemos..." Hoff starts, turning around to find the sects spiritual leader amongst grumbling intellectual elite of the planet - all rubbing their heads or elbows where they bumped into each other grasping for the bean. All except one who, having been fallen against by one of their co-workers, finds it is only his buttock that is bruised. But only very very gently bruised.

"Byyyeeeeeee!" Nemos cries over his shoulder as he rides out of the main hall on his micro-scooter, texting as he goes: "U wont B-leev who I jus tuched up lol chips ok 4 tea?"

"Oh... I thought we were going to enchant this thing with the secrets..." Tom says, clearly confused.

"Yes, well..." Hoff brushes himself down crossly. "We'll just say that whole rumpus counted shall we? Ok? Good. Well no point shuffling our feet. May as well go save the planet or whatever it is we're doing today."

"Wait!"

It's Joe! He scurries over clutching a VHS cassette.

"Here's the video I've been making. I'd forgotten how much I like documenting stuff! Just as well eh, since that's all I've been doing since you left!"

"Joe! Hi! How's the video going?"

"I... I just told you Tom... Anyway, I've really been getting into it. Y'know, it's given me such a new zest for life! I'd always known I liked discovering and logging stuff - but I'd somehow forgotten about it all--"

"When you took up a career as a flight mechanic on a space ship?"

"...Yes. When that happened. Anyway, the upshoot is I've changed my mind. We SHOULD save the planet after all."

"Joe... We were going to save the planet before... that's always been the--"

"Oh. Yeah. No. Totally. I know... I mean... I mean that... What I mean is that I'd like to come help save the planet after all. Y'know, 'cos previously I thought I'd be no good fighting through to the Toronto's power core, what with me being a mechanic and whatever. Only now that I've made this video I could show everyone so they can learn about all the stuff I've been documenting... I think I'd like to do that first-hand. I'd like to be the one who presses the button to play the tape..."

"I dunno Joe. I mean, we've only got one position available on the team at the moment... I was thinking maybe we should get that harridan murderess back... Or the mute guy..."

Joe fixes Tom with a mysterious stare.

"No, Tom. You think I should come with you. Even though I don't have any combat skills. You never know when you might need a jet engine repaired..."

"Oh stop faffing about and come on you two." Hoff intercedes, speeding the whole thing up. And off they go to save the world.

Joe isn't kidding when he says he's completly useless. To get to the Toronto we first have to go through the tunnels of hoover-attachment-monsters that the Dji Cantos are maintaining on the continent of Umajo. Now, by this time Dirr is pretty much able to smash these beasties to bits on her own (having levelled up quite a lot since last time they were here).

"Hey Siobhan! Isn't this your skin?"

"Oh - thanks Dirr! I've been wondering where that went!"

Dirr pulls the skin out of the defeated monster and Siobhan slips back into it like it was a jump-suit.

"Wait a sec... There's another one in here..."

"Oh, that'll be mine!" Tom pipes up. And he's right - he too hasn't had a skin since last time they were here, but somehow no-one had noticed that it was missing.

"Wow - you're right Tom! You DON'T have any skin! I just thought you'd... y'know... forgotten to moisturise or something..." Hoff says helpfully.

On their way through the gang pass a sort of grille of stalagmite and stalactites, behind which is a treasure chest with quite a lot of ace booty in it!

"You can carry this lot Joe. You need something to do..."

"soon... sooooon..."

"What'd you say sorry?"

"Um... I said... Yes. Of course I'll carry this for you. A pleasure..."

Outside the caves the game flashes up some text to the effect of: "The gang nip through a tunnel that Tom and Joe noticed when they were escaping the Toronto before. This takes them right into the heart of the ship."

It's a shame they didn't put this tunnel in the game. I'd've loved to have seen how they envisaged the insides of the Toronto's mines and to be honest they could've put this in instead of the rubbish wasteland of east Umajo (where I previously spend hours of my life - WEEKS of the characters' - wandering aimlessly around).

I regain control of the gang inside the Toronto.

This is quite exciting now since I'm finally ACTUALLY on the last step of the journey...

"We should find a video terminal... So I can show everyone my documentary..."

"Remind me why you think that's important?"

"So that all the people on this ship know about the Dji Cantos. They'll all know the specifics of how their magic works. What the various powers they have are. They'll know the names of everything on the planet. The NAMES!!!!"

"Well now Jow. I don't want to put a downer on your documentary. But if we do this then the Toronto will know we're back on board and it's bound to send people to try and kill us off before we can cause it any more problems..."

"Well... Yes... That's true. BUT - the video also tells everyone that we're going to destroy the ship. And if we don't show it, no-one will know to flee the ship and start mingling with the people of Albion."

"Ah - so you're saying that if we don't show the video, everyone'll die when we blow the ship up. Of course. Well there's a terminal..."

As this conversation has been happening, Dirr's been leading the gang down a corridor that is strangely devoid of people. What happened to the continual hubub of people going about their business at the start of the game?

Well never mind. Joe pops the tape on and everyone sits back to watch it.

"It's quite... dry... isn't it." Says Tom after the first half hour (which details the specifics of the Dji Cantos's political structure, magical capabilities, island location and religious observances)

"Well there was a lot to tell people." Mumbles Joe, a little offended.

"Oh no, I'm not saying it's BAD. It's just... Well it's an educational documentary isn't it. And I was just expecting something a little more lively... But probably it wouldn't have been as in-depth..."

A further half hour goes by and the ship is filled with the sound of Joe's monotonous voice saying things like "The ingredients in the magic berries that allow you to cast spells with them are thus: 14 parts menzomagitherine, 11 parts water, 4 parts oxomysticalthiastrichlomine..." and so on.

Eventually Dirr snaps - grabs a microphone that's attached to the video machine they've linked up to the monitor network and says "We're going to blow the ship up. If you don't all get out now, you'll be horribly burned. Horribly burned almost to death! If not to death!"

There's the distant sound of screaming miners and their girlfriends running out of a space craft while the doors down the hall immediately open. A group of guards (some still yawning having only just woken up from a documentary fuelled coma).

It's the first real test of the teams abilities - and it's really tough. The guards (who are probably all AI driven robots) have guns and we've got nothing but sticks and some crummy spells.

However - Siobhan and Dirr manage to plug away at the enemy while Joe is immediately stuck unconscious.

"Damn you, security guards! Damn you for not believing in the sanctity of human life - no matter what planet it's from!" screams Siobhan, using a magical knife to fire-storm a row of their attackers.

The fight is tough. Very tough. But eventually my team come through successfully.

"Look Joe! Guns! Now you won't be so completely useless to us!"

We pick up loads of artillery but soon notice that it's 100% useless.

Now I'm not sure if this was a bug or my own failure to understand something. But the guns come with "Cylinders" (which I assume is ammo). Only if you equip a gun, no-matter how many cylinders you have about your person it ALWAYS says it's out of ammo. There's no way to use the cylinders on the guns to load them. There's no way to equip the cylinders like you might expect to equip a quiver of arrows. I am completely stumped on how to get the guns to work at all! In the end I give up, imagining it must just be a decision the developers made - you're not allowed the guns since they'd probably be too powerful. How exceedingly annoying.

No one seems too bothered that we've just killed something like 8 (potentially) human ship-mates and the crew set off down into the first-person ventilation system.

"Oh, after you Siobhan" Joe says - indicating the way down the ladder ahead of him. "After all - ladies first!"

Siobhan steps past, but Joe was just a little bit in the way and they bump up against each other for a moment.

"Oh, I am sorry" Joe says. But secretly he thinks "So firm... So very firm"

Which is surprising since her skin's been languishing in a monster's tract for a good few weeks.

Down in the vents we must solve puzzles to progress. This is no surprise and I'm not going to go into any detail on most of them since it's sort of pointless trying to get you to visualise a load of trigger plates and imagine how satisfying it would be to manage to bypass some lazer gates or what-have-you.

However - puzzles and traps aren't the only things lurking in the vents now...

"Oh look, Joe! It's one of thoe cuddle-bots from before! Aww... Look at it coming towards us... Isn't it sweet! Opening up it's top hatch... revealing a robotic arm with a... What's that thing that's attached to it? ARRRRRRGGGG!!!!"

Turns out that it's a cattle prod. The cuddle bots have turned nasty! As it wanders up to us - just like the ones we saw before when we had to get them to land on pressure plates - this trundling mush-room shaped automaton whips out an electrified baton and clouts the intrepid pilot round the chops with it.

Dirr springs into action and clobbers the machine as hard as she can - but it doesn't make a great deal of impact.

Siobhan joins in but really they're only taking a sliver of health off at a time.

Then suddenly KABOOOOM

Oh yeah - I forgot about Khunag.

Stepping out of a wardrobe he hurls a fire-ball at the over-amorous killing maintainance droid - deactivating it in pretty short order.

"Take THAT!" He proclaims - releasing a load of doves from his sleeves and into the confined space of the below-stairs space-vents and trying not to notice the smell of burned feathers as they almost all just stray into the criss-cross lasers of a heat-ray security gate. It's ok because they're mostly carried through an airconditioning fan near by. Only that just pulverises them and leaves the air hanging with feather dust.

Everyone would be grateful except that they're too busy sneezing.

So the hug-bots are evil now are they? That's a bit of a pain in the bum since this area is crawling with them.

Thankfully though, they're really REALLY slow in combat and always take their turns last. This, combined with the fact that they only ever really turn up in 2s or 3s means that Khunag can dispatch with them by and large.

Only then we find a huge glass wall.

A huge glass wall with LITERALLY hundreds of hug-bots behind it.

My stomach sinks. There's a big button on the wall begging to be pressed and I know that if I do it I'll be asking for more hugging than I can possibly cope with. 3 at a time is fine - I can let them kill Tom and Joe while my resident ex-Kenget flames them to bits. But hundreds? No chance.

I want to make it clear too that this is LITERALLY hundreds. Shuffling around behind the glass barrier are more mushroom shaped hug-bots than I can count. It's mental! I've not seen this many enemies at once in the game EVER. Let alone surprisingly-tough robo-enemies!

But this is a great example of why Albion is a fantastic game. I've not been grinding at all. I've not been power playing and my characters are (I'm pretty sure) many-many levels less experienced than they could be by this point.

Obviously opening the door and killing a billion robots is one of the super tough last-dungeon challanges that've been put in place for power-house players. BUT there's another way!

When I decided to take on Joe instead of going back to fetch a decent character (that was a choice by the way - Joe says he'll come with you, but he also lets you know he's going to be no use in any fights. You CAN ditch him and go fetch one of the other characters you've had on your team at other times if you want to have a super-tanked squad for the final push) I was doing exactly the right thing.

Before I open the chamber of hugging I scurry around the dungeon looking for any "chests" (they're not chests here, they're funky little supplies cupboards, but it amounts to the same thing) with supplies in. Only I discover a series of panels that Joe can "repair". They don't seem to be doing anything but since I've found a couple I look for more.

In all there's something like 4 and... yes! When I've repaired enough a different door opens! I'm able to walk AROUND the room of robots!

"In your FACE hug-bots!!!" Shouts Hoff - excited because she was sure she was going to die.

"I could've taken them you know..." Khunag boasts, now safe in the knolage that he's not going to have to prove it. He pretends not to notice the teams sceptical, knowing glances by suddenly being engrossed in holding a red ball between his fingers, rubbing it and turning it into two red balls. Then rubbing it again and it turning into three etc etc etc.

Everyone's in high spirits and we skip through several further laser-puzzles pressure plate traps.

Only then we round the corner and BLAM.

A big gang of Hug-Bots "jumps" us. Shuffling into us and brushing up against the team.

I'm not worried at first but then they take out Khunag straight away - almost like they knew he was their main threat.

That's pretty bad! My front line - Dirr, Tom and Siobhan - do their best to clobber some of the pushy mushroomputers but they only manage to pick one off. Then Dirr's taken down. Then Siobhan's taken down. And Tom...

Joe's completly useless and to be honest he might as-well flee. He makes a move to but is zapped to bits before he can get away.

"It's down to me" thinks Hoff. "This is my moment. It's now or never."

Rummaging in his pockets Hoff looks for something he can use. It's ridiculous - but the team was scraping by on Khunag's fireballs before. He knew it was stupid to rely so heavily on one man.

"Lightning trap eh?" It's a scroll. Looks like the only useful thing to hand. Casting it, it places a small, seemingly innocuous white circle in one of the squares of the battle grid. Now it's the Hug-Bots' turn and they've apparently never seen anything like this before. It looks like... YES! One of the stupid cyber-sex-offenders blunders straight onto the thing. It's zapped and thrown into the air by the force! As it falls down it takes 3 points of damage!

Wait... Three points? That's rubbish! Oh no!!! It's got to be all over now hasn't it?

Well maybe... or maybe not!

"I can move faster than these things..." thinks Hoff. "And they're not too sharp... They seem happy enough to walk onto that thing... I wonder if..."

And so he starts running back and forth across the battle grid. The lightning trap remains in the environment even after it's been triggered and as he scampers too and fro our intrepid, aged scientist lures the machines over and over again onto it's electrifying trigger - chucking his almost completly ineffectual boomerang crystal axe at them all the while. It might not do much, but even the mightiest rock will eventually be warn away by rain...

"Ha!" he cries out "Suck science!! Suck science you stupid robots!" Elated, Hoff dashes back and forth and - slow it might be - but the process is successful! One after another the robots take so much damage from repeated zapping that they crumble! It's amazing! Hoff can't help laughing!

Pretty soon there's only one of the things left! It's taken probably 15 minutes of my real-time life and I'm not completely sure I'm proud to admit it. It's one of those times when I often thought "it'd probably be quicker to quit out, re-load and then kill these guys the proper way... But I've started now...

Only then, somehow, I'm cornered. Maybe Hoff forgot to move - maybe he got too carried away lobbing his axe about... There's only one robot left and it's taken a pretty prolonged beating from that trap...

Sitting at my desk I think "Seriously? Can I have messed this up after spending so long on it? I found a way to move around so that the slow-poke cuddle-bots could never get me and it was working! I can't've invested all this time only to mess the whole thing up by forgetting to move one turn?"

There's only one thing for it. I'll just have to chuck my boomeraxe at the thing and hope for the - OH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!!! The axe actually killed that thing!!!

Stunned silence!

Hoff actually fought off 5 Hug-Bots on his own! Hoff! Rubbish Hoff who hasn't done a thing right for the entire game so far!

If I could high-five the dirty little sprite person I would've! It's amazing!

Everyone rests up and we're back in the game!

"I killed them everyone! I saved the day! Look! Look at all the destroyed robots! That was me! And I used science to do it! ME! Using science! And all I suffered was some very very very slight buttock bruising! Could you ARRRRGGGGGGGGGG"

Hoff drops lifeless to the ground with a smoking laser hole through his boob. Oh no! It's the AI's Bearded Body!

"Ha ha ha Tom Driscoll. You thought you could stop us mining the planet to bits? Don't you realise that the DDT corporation NEEDS all the minerals in this planet? Don't you realise how EXPENSIVE getting here was? This whole trip was a massive risk to the masters. A risk I intend to make sure pays off for them!"

"You're going to stop me? You remember this little guy?" Tom holds up his flame-marble which was so effective against the robo-body last time round.

"HA! You don't think I can adapt? Stupid human! You won't find this body so easy to destroy!!!"

However, we do.

I was surprised actually how easy the AI turned out to be. Really we just rushed him and hacked him to bits (while those who has ranged flame-attacks used them).

It's mad that it's all over so suddenly. I guess the AI is the main baddy - so that fight will've been the final boss really... weird.

Actually... even weirder is the fact that there's a colour-coded pressure plate puzzle to solve AFTER the final boss.

That's odd. I guess it's to allow me access to the engine room to let me throw the seed into it. But it's quite uncommon for games to put puzzles after their climactic encounters.

We wander around for a while gathering fragments of a code which - when combined in the right order - open a large bulkhead into what I assume will be the engine room. Then we have a quick rest so Hoff can recover from his victory killing.

"Here goes then guys!" says Tom, leaning over to press the button to open the doors "Looks like we did it!"

Beep.

Gaswooooooosh.

The doors open.

Funny... Doesn't LOOK like the engine room... And... Who're all those people?

The chamber ahead is dark - filled with back-lit alcoves. And standing in each alcove is a human figure... More than one... as I creep confusedly forwards I can make out that stood in each of the alcoves are two or three human figures. Eerily still - statue like...

As the team tentativly walk into the room a voice declares

"Ok. So maybe THAT body you could deal with... But how about... ALL OF THESE!!!!!"

OH CRAP!!!

THE ROOM IS FULL OF AI ROBO-BODIES!!!

AND THEY'RE ALL RANK 2 AI BODIES!!!!

There is absolutely no fighting. Tom and co are immediately set upon by the Toronto's super-human cybernetic avatars and they pummel us.

The avatars all have guns and all move first. Within one turn Tom, Khunag, Dirr and Siobhan are struck down with laser bolts...

There's just nothing I can do! They outnumber us by so much! Maybe if it was jut one, I could wangle something like with the hug bots - but the gang's down before they can even flee! And this is just the first set! They attack in groups of five - but there's something like 10 groups of these guys to deal with!

Laying on the ground - a cyber-avatar's boot on his neck - Tom looks over to Dirr. As his vision fades and the blood drains from his body he manages to gurgle...

"Looks like we should've levelled up some more after all..." He's right. Now we'll actually never be able to complete the game since, with the team at the relativly low levels I've left them at, this final battle is actually just impossible...

I can hardly believe it! Seriously?! After all that? The game lets me squeeze through this far - then nails me with a brick-wall of indestructible robo-nemesises?

There's no point re-loading since the doors are all locked behind us - there's no way we could grind from this point even if we wanted to...

Dirr turns her mangled face towards her human companion. She's followed him right into the bowels of a gigantic metal monster, the likes of which she'd never imagined in her whole life. And now she lies dying - knowing that her failure dooms the entire planet too. There's just one thing she feels she needs to do...

"Tom... I should've told you ages ago... I just didn't know how to bring it up... I'm... not... a female... ughhh" and with that, Dirr, the turns-out-not-to-be-a-woman-after-all, breaths his last.

"Oh yeah" Thinks Tom. "I should've noticed the lack of boobs..."

Then he dies too.

THE END

Session 41

Wandering the desert, Nemos is looking for a particular hat. The desert is really really large and he has to search for the hat by walking over every inch of it. It takes him days, maybe weeks to do a full sweep of the desert. When he doesn't find the hat, he has to go back to the start and sweep the desert again... He sees himself as an observer might and knows that the search is futile because the hat is in a hat box. But because he knows he doesn't know about the hat box, the hat box won't be there. He knows the hat box won't exist until he's told about it. But he can't tell himself this and just watches himself wandering around aimlessly for ever...

"AAARRHHAGGH!!!" Nemos screams into the upturned salad bowl of salad and sits up straight as he jolts awake. "What an appawling dream!"

"Ah you're awake. Shall we finish our story?"

Nemos groggily picks a rocket leaf out of his beard - un-aware that this is just the smallest part of the got-salad-all-over-his-face problem. He trawls his memory for what exactly these people will've been talking about. The whole POINT of post-office-hours nap time is that you don't expect to need to be any good in a meeting after you've had one. He decided to stall for time...

"Please go on..."

But the story is painfully familiar.

"Well in the end we met with this Sojekos. He was a grumpy old man but told us that HE wouldn't be able to give us the secret of how to destroy metal. But Kossotto could! Only Kossotto was a grumpy old man. Sojekos said 'he's even grumpier than me' - so that must be pretty grumpy (I mean, this Sojekos guy hadn't even yet told us who he was!) Anyway, you'll never guess where Kossotto hangs out..."

There was a pause during which Nemos was supposed to attempt to guess...

"Was it... Inside your... shoes?"

"Um... no. How would that even work? No, he spends all his time hanging out in the deepest parts of the dungeons of the equipment makers. Anyway, we were all 'um, hello - we've just trawled that whole place and didn't see him' and this Sojekos guy is all 'well maybe he went to get some milk or something'. Anyway, off we went back to find him."

Nemos pulles himself up off the floor and looks into a near-by mirror. Something about his face felt weird but he couldn't put his finger on it.

"URGH!" He involuntarily exclaims as he looks at his reflection. His features are mostly hidden, but he knows that to maintain his dignity in front of the strangers he will have to pretend that this salad-face was something he'd done to himself on purpose. Quick as a flash he grabs a cherry tomato and a pasta tube that have fallen on the side and presses them onto his eyebrows. Turning to the team he mutters "Oh, I was just alarmed that these had come off... Do carry on..."

He's not sure why the team are looking at him with the same kind of expression you might have on your face when you catch your hypnotised mum carrying a sack of swag and climbing out of the smashed window of a ping-pong-ball factory... His impersonation of someone who'd NOT been caught doing something without any memory of why had been impeccable, hadn't it?

"Well we went all the way through the equipment maker's dungeon AGAIN - so that's another 4 days - and eventually got back to the monster infested bottom floor and can I just say, I have NO IDEA how you're supposed to win some of the fights down there. There's these fear monsters right - we've met some of them before and normally they're ok because they come in groups of 2 or 3; just about manageable. But when you have to face 7 or 8 at once it's just impossible to do anything! They all just cast 'run away' on you and there's nothing you can do because you lose control of yourself and just run away! We ended up having to run past every fight in there because otherwise we'd only have run-away cast on us and then be picked off slowly as they run up and pinch our retreating bums... to death!"

"Hmm... uh-huh. Yes, yes, interesting. Do go on" Nemos cupped the tiny cube of goats cheese on his chin thoughtfully and over-did the impression of someone who's at all interested.

"I mean, I just don't know how you're supposed to win those fights - no matter HOW tough you are! Well... Anyway... So eventually we're sort of battered from wandering around this dungeon looking for this guy, so we nip over to the healing pod they've got down there that we told you about before. And just as we're bathing in the mysterious curative light, who should pop up but creepy old Kossotto. Ah, and this is the bit I'm a bit worried we shouldn't have done."

Tom clears his throat nervously before carrying on. Since the Dji Cantos are the secret peace keepers of the planet, he's worried that by upsetting the balance of power in the economic engine-room of the world he'll get into trouble. Nemos, however, is wondering why he's expected to give a crap about stuff that's happened anywhere other than the pleasure island...

"So... You know how we didn't really know who this guy was? He was just a friend of this Sojekos who, in turn, we also didn't know anything about. They were just shady characters who it seemed wanted to help us? Well - Kossotto told us he'd give us the secret of destroying metal but ONLY in return for the secret of how to mine without upsetting the goddess. He told us that he was sick of having to rely on the miners\mountain priests guilds to get minerals for his 'work' - but he didn't tell us what that was... Well we thought about it and decided that since the world NEEDED this secret to be saved, we should tell him what he wanted to know - anything, as long as we get the tools to prevent the Toronto eating everything..."

"And DID he give you the secret?" Nemos's lust to know all there is to know about everything on Albion kicked back in as he started to remember the context of this conversation.

"Oh yes. He told it all to Dirr. But honestly, do you think we should worry? See, as we walked away we were thinking about it... Here's a stranger who hangs out in a darkened catacomb with an army of fear demons (which, if you think about it, he's probably summoned - hence their not attacking him). He's got access to the equipment maker's labs (do they know he's down there? None of them mentioned him to us...) and now has both the secret of mining without getting cursed... What if... What if he's not entirely nice? What if he did something like... make armour and weapons for his fear demon hoard? What if he used his knowledge to set up a rival city of manufacturers, but one that's not divided into three guilds - one that's entirely filling HIS pockets? Him and his demon league could completely destabilise the region! We should go back and do something about it, shouldn't we Nemos?"

But Nemos isn't listening. He's taken Dirr by the arm and is getting her to run him through the secret of how to destroy metal.

"Um... Nemos?" Tom calls.

At that moment, Nemos jumps up and down, pumps the air with his fist, saves his game and goes to get a cup of tea.

"WOO!" He shouts through from the kitchenette as the kettle boils. "I can't believe it! We've actually done it! The Dji Cantos have ALL THE KNOWLEDGE OF ALBION!!! THIS IS FANTASTIC! YES!!!! I KNEW WE COULD DO IT!!!! I'm going to go down in history as the man who FINALLY re-sealed the Dji Cantos's position as intellectual secret super elite of the planet! YES!!!"

He does a little dance on the spot.

"Yay!" Hoff claps his hands and runs over to hug his former master in celebration.

"Woah! Get away from me old man!"

"Oh... I... I'm sorry..."

"Ugh! I'm trying to enjoy this good news. I don't need your wrinkly old face-print on my cape."

"I... Um... Well... Well ok... But... Well now - ok. In that case. What about this weapon you promised us then eh?"

"Um... Weapon?"

"Yes. YOU remember Nemos. You promised that these secrets were being gathered because you needed them to produce a weapon. You can remember that can't you?"

"I... Well..."

"You remember how, since last time we saw you, there's been a giant mechanical monster actually eating the planet? You know, irrevocably annihilating areas of the continent of Umajo?"

"Errm..."

"Oh yes. You remember. Because you told us that rather than being able to do anything about it right away, you had to have these extra secrets. Extra secrets that we justs spent a good month and a half gathering for you. That's a month and a half of planet eaten by this monster because you had to have the secrets before we could beat it. Well now you HAVE the secrets. Where's this weapon then? Eh?"

The kettle clicks off in the kitchenette. Nemos struggles - his brain having difficulty catching up. This dreadful old earth-man seems to have a chip on his shoulder about something... Come on... A weapon. A Weapon to slay a giant metal monster... His eyes dart around the room, scanning for something to get him out of this scrape... There's nothing... But then he remembers the salad! He's a genius!

"Ah, well I'm glad you asked me about it." He says smugly. "It just turns out I have the weapon you seek right here."

Reaching up to his face, he plucks off the first thing his fingers come to. Some sort of green bean - ugh! why do people bother putting this stuff in a bowl for him?!

"This - which I've been keeping on my face for security - is the weapon we will enchant with the secrets you've brought me. This will become the SEED... The divine tool of Amoeba that will halt the Toronto's unrelenting mangling of our home world!!!"

There's a sort of deeply-unimpressed silence as the team look at this haricot bean. A silence that is imperceptibly broken only by the whirring of a video camera in the shadows...

Session 40

"Nemos! Good news! We've got both the secrets you asked for!"

Nemos is sauntering out of his office eating a salad. He flicks a chick-pea into his mouth while his brain spins up - trawling his memory for what exactly it is he asked from these people. The trouble with pre-lunch naps is that you're just no use in a meeting until you've had some post-lunch coffee and a post-coffee fancie. http://www.bestofbritish.com.au/Uploads/Images/2104628frenchfancies.gif

"The only trouble is we fear we may have destabilised the economy of Umajo - the continent that's strict, self-regulating policy on information sharing has been both supporting the planet's economy and keeping unbridled, environmentally damaging expansion in check."

Why are there only pink fancies left. What is the point of having a secret palace of leisure when everyone else always eats the yellow fancies?

He put his salad (which was rubbish anyway since it didn't contain any sugar and he'd picked out all the ham already) on the side and started rummaging in the cake cabinet.

"Very interesting my friends" (best not try and guess at their names he thought to himself. It doesn't do for the leader of the planet's most supreme minds to show any kind of weakness) "Why don't you tell me all about it?" (Ha! Stall for time! AND it looks like I care at all! Oooh! An un-opened box! That's two yellow's for me and I shall have one of the browns while I'm at it!)

It is several days since the climax of the team's adventure in the lair of the Kenget Kamulos. Killing the Murder Pope after he'd Murder Morphed into Murder Jesus was - according to the other Kenget high-ups - supposed to be impossible. Interestingly they didn't mention the additional insult of his having been killed by a lady but then they also decided not to take revenge right away. They ushered the gang out of the fortress by a back door muttering about how they were going to have to try and cover this whole thing up. If it ever got out that Murder Jesus - divine assassin legitimiser of the Kengets - could be slain people might start to question exactly how much they want to put up with having a child-snatching, death-fuled sex catacomb in their mountain after all...

Outside, the team had furiously given Khunag a piece of their mind. He'd said he was sorry but that the previous Murder Pope had been the only man he'd ever truly loved and the fact that he'd not only been killed, but also that the killing had been pinned on him, was so heartbreaking he'd've grasped any opportunity to get his own back on the blighters that did it (as he did this he contritely pulled a weeping dove from his sleeve, did a backwards roll into a cupboard then stepped out of a different cupboard playing a sad tune on a violin which, when shaken, turned into a big spotted hanky for him to blow his mournful nose into).

It'd been hard to stay angry with the guy so Hoff suggested that he make it up to them by helping them save the world and they'd say no more about it.

As such, Tom gives a greatly shortened account of how they got the secret of enchanting objects to Nemos.

"Well the secret of enchanting objects was easy to get. We just found our new friend here" (indicating Khunag) "who already knew it and had grown disillusioned with being bummed by the physical manifestation of a god that shouldn't (and, it turns out, probably doesn't anymore) exist."

Nemos choked momentarily on his cake. Then, thumping his chest, he did the smile of a man who'd just been given much too much information about the person who'd only moments ago been asking him to pick a card any card. "So nice to make your acquaintance" he managed.

His eyes welling up at the memory of his beloved former beaux, Khunag just nods in response and disconsolately sticks his beautiful assistant back together.

"After that we thought we'd spend a while selling a LOAD of gear we'd acquired and using up all the training points we'd accrued... I got Siobhan this lovely WAR HAMMER with 20 attack points as a congratulations present... Um... not that we did anything she needed congratulating for you understand... I just... Well we..."

"It was my birthday" Siobhan helps out. "And I just can't get enough of that 'CLANG' sound..."

"So then we got all our magical weapons re-charged and bought Hoff some spells in preparation for our quest to get the secret of destroying metal. What a good use of money THAT was, wasn't it Hoff"

Tom shoots a barbed look at his hapless team-mate who hadn't had any idea that he wouldn't be able to learn any of the spells they'd bought while they were in the shop. As far as he could see there'd been no-way of checking before you'd bought them what kind of magic-user you had to be to be able to learn them.

"Then we went and made use of the critical training Siobhan's uncle offered us".

Another barbed look. Siobhan sheepishly avoids meeting it - it's hardly her fault that her uncle refused to give them mates rates. And besides, even though it bankrupted them, they did get 2 units of training for Dirr and 1 for her.

"And then we set of for the equipment maker's guild!"

At this point it suddenly sinks into Nemos's brain that - HA! - these are the people who he sent out to get those secrets off of the idiot people of Albion! Their coming back here successfully means that there's no more knowledge on the planet that the Dji Cantos don't have for themselves! This was such good news he had the other brown fancie out of the box and propped himself against the wall to listen to the tale with satisfaction.

"Well now, we've been there for weeks since then. You can see that all of our shoes are pretty much warn through from walking. I tell you Nemos - I have no idea WHAT the equipment makers were thinking when they built their workshop. To be honest - what would they have lost from having the one or two offices they had in an above ground shed? PLUS - what is it with people on this planet and keeping deadly - SERIOUSLY deadly - high level monsters in their work-places? Is it some kind of show of machismo?"

There is a pause that Nemos recognises is designed for his input so he makes a sort of nose-basted "Tch" sound and does a head-bob that he thinks will convey enough sympathetic "Yeah, isn't it just typical but what're you going to do about it eh?" to prompt Tom to move on without dwelling much more on this point.

"Well anway - this place was a total labyrinth of passages, each one taking several hours to walk down. PLUS - none of the rooms seemed to have anything in them that looked like it was related to making equpment. There was this room full over levers and diagrams of spikes that I'm SURE was connected to the building's security system. Well that exploded on us a few times when we played with the buttons in there so we eventually just moved on hoping for the best. Then there was this room full of pressure plates (which we ignored at first, but then we found that if you threw a bucked of water on the flames lighting the room you could see a secret pattern on the plates in the darkness which allowed you to access a chest that just had some jewelery in it... Not exactly 'equipment' though is it?)..."

Another pause. This time Nemos did a sort of shrugging head-shake gesture to suggest "Cor - what are they like".

"THEN we found this room where, I'm not kidding you, you had to ACTUALLY JUST WAIT AROUND for hours. HOURS. It had this, like, sign on the wall just that says "8:00 - 11:00" on it. Well we figured at first that this was a clue to when the mechanically locked doors down the way would open so we dashed over there just in time for 8:00 only to find that it wasn't that. So we go back and Dirr says 'maybe we have to be in HERE between those times?' so we give it a go. Well we would've rested to pass the time but none of us were tired and you know what it's like. You can't really rest when you're not properly tired can you? It just makes you feel all antsy and bothered."

Nemos nods. He knows exactly what they mean. When you're awake you're awake and there's nothing to be done.

"So we stood still for an entire day until it got back to the right time." (YOU HAVE TO STAND STILL IN AN EMPTY ROOM AND DO NOTHING BUT WATCH THE IN-GAME CLOCK TICK ROUND TO THE RIGHT TIME!!!!!!! ARRRRG!!!!!!) "and yep! This lever pops into existence at 8 on the nose! So we pull that and it doesn't seem to do anything so we treck over to the mechanically locked doors and check them and yep! One of them's open now too. And in there there's this lever that opens the other and we saunter over to that but you'll never believe it! The way is blocked with spikes! Well you remember that room I told you about with the levers that kept exploding? Well it turns out we have to back track all the way there again (which is two day's walk down passages you know!) to re-doobery the configuration in there before we can carry on. Now this is PARTICULARLY frustrating since we had a spike smashing hammer with us - not Siobhan's one, we wouldn't use a nice hammer on them, but a specific-for-the-job one we found lying around. So four days later (that's 2 days to the levers and 2 days back) we get to go through this door and find that it leads to a sort of mine!"

Nemos is slightly regretting having not asked Tom to cut to the bit where he tells him the secret. Even just hearing about this interminably over-protracted lead-up to their visit to the dungeons of the equipment makers is making him want to bang is face on his keyboard and throw the mouse out of the window - he can't really even imagine why they'd've bothered actually putting themselves through it.

"Well we didn't really see much down this mine you know. Loads of magical barriers about the place - you said, didn't you Dirr - you said we'd never get anywhere down there..."

"That's right. I said 'We'll never get anywhere down here. But let's carry on just in case we get somewhere'. I'm a sort of optopessimist you see. My mother was a prostitute."

"So we're not getting anywhere so we try jumping down this hole we found. Down that we found this staff - might be magical, but not very... it just seems to change the colour of certain flames... - and some more jewelery. Seems they've got a funny set up of moving walls down there. We played with them for ages but I'll be honest with you, we couldn't figure out how to progress and we were being hounded by REALLY tough monsters we just had no hope of killing so we left that bit."

Nemos's mind is wandering. He's thinking about who he's going to put on feeding duty today. Usually the hoover-attachment-face monsters that Contos developed for them only get fed once a week, in order to keep them ferocious. But now that the genetic engineer behind their creation had died, the Dji Cantos were going to have to start a proper breeding program to keep the numbers up and produce ever more ferocious specimens. That meant that the arduous task of throwing dead warniaks to them had to be done at least once a DAY now and since Harriet had mysteriously vanished lately, it meant someone important was going to have to do it. It was going to cause arguments, he knew it.

"...So then past the weird magic curtain doors we found a healing field but there was nothing else down there. Just monsters."

The story stops. Nemos wasn't really listening but he's sure that, since he's not been told the secret of destroying metal, there must be more...

"So... What happened next?" He prompts.

"Guess." Tom says.

"Did... you... find the secret of destroying metal under a sofa?"

"No".

"Did you... All find happiness as a troupe of performing musicians?"

"Nope."

"Did you... get consumed by paranoia in the face of a world where the individual seems insignificant compared to the tidal pull of the masses?"

"Not even close."

"I give up then..."

"We walked for DAYS back to the surface. We had to tramp for ACTUALLY DAYS down those stupid passages all the way back to the equipment makers above-ground house to ask someone for a clue. It must've been SOMETHING to do with SOMETHING down there - but we just had no idea what so we mounted an expedition back to the very start of the whole maze."

"And could anyone help you?" Nemos asks. Feeling the tedium of all that leg-work even just by hearing about it.

"No."

Surely keyboard smashed with hammer? Mouse thrown into furnace? DOSBox flattened and taken for recycling?

"So what did you do?"

"Well basically we wandered the streets for ages thinking that maybe that whole quest might've been a red-herring. We'd pretty much given up."

"I'd started writing a letter to my friends back home to let them know the world was going to be ending soon and that they should do anything they'd been putting off now otherwise they'd miss their chance" says Dirr.

"Yep we'd all given up on any kind of positive resolution so I got a tattoo. Just to see what it was like - look!" Siobhan rolls up her sleeve and shows Nemos a mass of raw and exposed tendons with a sort of bluey black smear tattooed into it.

"Oh it's lovely" he says.

"Well anyway - eventually we found a building in town we'd not been into. So we thought we'd pop in just to be nosey and it turns out it's the halls of the mountain priests. The guards were all 'you can't come in' but I was all 'errm - but it's important!' and they were all 'oooh - sounds important! You'd better come in!' So anyway, then we meet this guy Penkko. He's a representative of Sojekos, but Sojekos wasn't there and we didn't really know who he was anyway and..."

Alas. The clock strikes 5. This story has been going on for FOREVER and it's still not got interesting. Nemos slumps into his post-office-hours nap without warning. Knocking his salad bowl off the side-board as he tumbles to the floor. It lands upside down on his face.

"It looks..." states Hoff "Like Nemos's response to this part of our tale is that it is so drawn out and frustrating that he would rather try and drown himself in vinaigrette than have to go through it with us."

"To be honest, I can't say I blame him..."

Session 39

The executive priest placed his paperwork neatly to one side as Phillipe's caterpillar tracks chewed up his office rug.

"I'm very sorry about this" intoned the detective "my client will pay for the damages."

"I'm sure she will. And how is Mrs Bernard? I'm impressed that she's still sending people to find out about her husband, considering that every single detective she's hired so far has found out the truth and reported it back to her. I suppose she thinks that if she doesn't like them, continuing to examine the facts might eventually change them. But then what can one expect from a cyborg - did you notice that's what she was?"

"PROCESSING" Embarrassingly Phillipe's automated response unit kicked in to give a reflex answer to a detected question while his speech processors were busy - having been sequestered for information analysis. He hated when this happened because it showed up how out of date his hardware was, but there'd been a LOT of new data in what this man had said already...

"Oh dear. You're rather old-fashioned aren't you. Yes, she is a sort of conglomeration of various pieces of machinery who were connected together (kitchen mini-droids, an optical analysis device, navigation modules from a shuttle, that sort of thing) and housed in a human body - which was, itself, then greatly modified; plastic surgery, prosthetics etc. The whole mess just about functions by running all the computer parts' communications through the human brain so that through highly efficient team work their AI's have sort of become co-dependant and amalgamated - not to mention augmented by the natural chemical workings of the living organ. The wretched thing delights in how hard it is to pin down exactly what she is - is she a group of AI's? Is she one AI formed from several? Is she an animal that has been kicked into life through mechanical intervention? The whole thing is disgusting... yet wouldn't it be delicious to study? Too bad the world has ended. Now, I suppose you want me to take you through what we did with Joe's body?"

"PROCESSING - PLEASE WAIT"

MEANWHILE, ON THE PLANET OF ALBION

I cannot tell you how awesome this dungeon is. Quite simply, this has been the most exciting part of the game by absolutely leagues. Properly edge-of-the-seat stuff.

It starts out with Khunag busting you out of your prison cell. I don't remember exactly how he does it, but presumably he uses his shunvisibility powers.

"Excuse me" Tom propably called to a guard to came over to the bars. "I'm really lonely. Could you tell me a story?"

"Well ok. But I'll have to keep it short..."

As the guard proceeds to tell Tom The Tale of Walter the Rabbit and his Amazing Dressage Routine, Khunag is able to walk over, reach through the bars and take the keys off his belt. The guard - completely focussed on blanking his caddish ex-brother-in-arms - refuses to acknowledge his presence even to the point of letting him get away with this rather than have to look at or speak to him.

"...And then, even though he'd bungled the half-pass, he knew that what was REALLY important was having tried his best. The end. Now you be good in there!"

"Thankyou!"

When the guard had walked away Khunag let the team out of the cell.

This is a 2D top down section - in an area of the castle I've not seem previously. Since it's a dungeon, I assume I'm looking for a way up and back into the main area of the citadel.

Suddenly - the guard comes back!

"Oi! Get back in your prison!"

"Listen - we don't want any trouble! We're just trying to--"

But it's no use trying to be peaceful now, the guard attacks and I'm forced to kill him (and then take all his sweet armour and his amazing axe!)

"What're you doing Siobhan!??"

"Well he wasn't going to need it any more..."

"Yeah - but we're hardly going to be able to defuse this situation if you rob the body of the man we were forced to kill!"

"Well maybe it's a disguise? Maybe I'll pose as a guard, taking you to see the chamber of secret knolage?"

"But Siobhan, no-one is going to be fooled by this! This is a colony of muscular, hairy men. You're sexy lady with flowing golden locks. And boobsies. And no skin!"

"Well you don't know 'til you try..."

Suddnly "Oh god! Miguel's turned into some kind of bacon woman and let the prisoners out! We've got to kill them!"

Another fight ensues and we find we've now killed three or four guards.

"Ooh - natty shoes..." exclaims Khunag as they put down a gad-about Oqulo. His fighting style had been to hop around the battle grid so that I was constantly having to run at him in order to land a blow. "You can't hit me! You can't hit me! Float like a butterfly, sting like a ARG!!!"

Thankfully his system hadn't completely worked. It mean he was a pain in the bum to kill, but ultimately he was just delaying his defeat - once he'd run out of magic points he could dodge around all day, but he was never going to kill me by throwing no-fireballs.

"This is a total disaster! We can't just kill all these people and expect the Kenget Kamulos to give us the secret of enchanting magical items! What're we going to do!" Dirr exclaims.

"I've got a good idea" Khunag helpfully explains. "Let's just kill our way out of the problem!"

"Seriously? Are you mental? This is a citadel full of trained assassins! How could we hope to kill our way out?"

"Well now, since you're in the citadel of the Kenget Kamulos, you've got to start thinking like a Kenget Kamulos. And they have a saying here: 'no-one eats just one segment of a satsuma""

"What does that mean?"

"Well you've started dealing with your problems by killing people, now you should just roll with it. No point letting the rest of the satsuma go to waste..."

"But... In this example, isn't the rest of the satsuma living people?"

"I killed my way through my Baccalauréat..."

"Oh come on then. Let's get on with it."

And so I completly ditch any thought of peaceful negotiations and just kill my way through the corridors (looting corpses as I go) until I reach some stairs.

But hold on! These stairs are stairs DOWN! Deeper into the dungeon! That can't be right? But it turns out it is! The only way to get out of the area I'm in is down these stairs.

Of course, this means that the screen fade that covered our transfer from the secret passage to the prison cell must've skipped the whole of my team being brought into the prison this way. Which means that Tom, Hoff, Dirr, Siobhan and Khunag must've already seen the whole of what comes next once already (coming from the other direction). And yet none of them seem at all concerned. Not one of them says "Oh god, there's no way we'll get back to the main bit of the citadel through here! We're totally doomed" which is what I'd've been thinking if I'd known exactly what I was about to go through.

Downstairs we drop into first person mode. The way out leads through a sequence of puzzle chambers. In the first you must lure a fire-sprite onto a pressure plate. In the second you must light some braziers by triggering fire-ball traps (everyone dies except Dirr and Siobhan, so they have to rest before they can carry on - a stupid error that I didn't even think about at the time, but which used up a precious rest's worth of food supplies...)

In the next room a tiny button releases a whole bunch of demons!!

Now, unlike most other dungeons, the game pre-explained why there might be demons in this one. One of the boring things that the Kengets told me while I was chatting to them was that creating a demon is dead easy for them and hence they make them all the time just for a laugh (or as guard dogs maybe). I think this would also explain why the druid's dungeons were full of demons earlier on too - Kenget Oqulos just can't get enough of summoning them to show how tough they are, so they'll've just flooded the whole place with them!

Anyway, we find a stash of potions (which up to this point I'd not really been using - I'd pick them up and hold onto them, but mostly I just used magic or resting to do all my healing) and a nice hat for Siobhan that matches Dirr's

"Oooh look! We match now!"

"Snaps!" the girls bond over fashion while Hoff looks on with boiling jealousy. Why had all the girls always locked him out of this kind of friendship and clothes talk? Even to the point of deciding that he's actually a man so as to avoid having to talk girl stuff with him?

The next room is actually quite full of assassins. And my cheery "oooh what an exciting dungeon" demeanour starts to be a little bit rocked by the fact that they're turning up in groups of 3 or 4 now... This won't be quite the breeze I was expecting...

Also the room is some kind of elaborate looking boudoir with an area in the middle marked out with curtains. I can't resist taking a peek at what's behind the lush purple velvet - but am a little alarmed to see that it's just packed with the "fear" demons - freaky floating hands with eyes... Are the Kengets even pervier than I thought?

We kill everyone but only Tom and Dirr survive this time. Another costly rest ensues (and again, at this point I have no idea how precious my food supplies are).

Round the corner from the floaty hand bedroom are two sets of stairs down. Again, my stomach sinks a little - this dungeon looks like it's going to be a bit more extensive than I was expecting. I was thinking that there'd be a bit of a gauntlet to run, but then I'd be back in the citadel thieving the secret. Not so it would seem - turns out there's going to be some exploring and maze navigating...

Down the left steps I meet a new monster type! They're called "plagues" but are actually just zombies. Why have THESE wandering around your castle? Unless... no... they wouldn't be THAT pervy would they?

All the doors are locked down here so I pop back and try the other stairs. Oh god! I get seriously pummeled by some super tough assassins here - Khunag goes down almost instantly as does Hoff (who's got all the magic items). Dirr and Tom only survive by relying on his fire-bead that he's aparently had all along. Very little food left after this rest.

Next there's a sort of chasey-flame puzzle that kills the frame rate. You have to trick loads of living flame sprites into moving onto coloured panels that evaporate them - it's very very tricky, but patience wins out!

Carrying on we pass a statue of the cyber-demon from doom and slip through a curtain into a large chamber filled with booths.

Each booth is surrounded with privacy curtains and inside most of them are couples of demons waiting for your arrival.

"Why... Why would the Kengets keep demons in these little private booths Khunag?"

"Well now, we have a saying here: 'If your companion's out of town on a job, the next best thing is a monster he created by breathing life into an embodiment of his most dreadful fears and emotions'".

"Are... Are these make-out booths?"

"Ooh look! Someone's left a treasure chest in this one!"

Past a fire-ball trap (which is a total nightmare to dodge and we lose more health again) we go down some more stairs into a room full of more monsters and more cyber-demon statues.

It's another tough fight and in order to heal afterwards we have to crack open the healing potion stock pile (not to mention the mana potions - since you don't get any magic-points back when you rest if you've not got any food).

Round the corner is a door with a pressure plate you have to stand on for ages before it'll work. Through there Khunag points out that we've now arrived in "The Beatmaster's Breeding paddock".

This dungeon is epic. I'm cracking through the write-up at lightning pace because I don't want to bore you, but honestly it's immense! The Beastmaster's Paddock zone is extensive and tough enough that it could have been a quite satisfying dungeon all on its own!

I open a door and kill some more wizards for their loot. Some of them are carrying a couple of bits of food which means I can eek out my potion supplies a little longer. Then I start opening cages and letting the animals out.

This is a really really bad move. There are hundreds of monsters in cages here - most of them pretty darn tough. I kill my way though 50 or so (using up all my food for resting and all my mana on lightning trap spells and healing) before I get to a room full of level 3 Kizzes that I just can't beat.

This is frustrating - how am I going to beat the dungeon if I can't get past them?

Well, how about running past?

In Albion, if you flee from a fight you have a grace period where you can't get into another one of about 4 seconds. Doesn't sound like much, but it's often long enough to get away from a scrape OR to get past an impossible enemy - the only risk is that fast moving enemies will kill you before you've got everyone out of the battle grid.

I manage to slip past the kizzes and find that actually there's no treasure in this area at all. ARG! I'VE WASTED SO MANY RESOURCES GETTING HERE!!!

Well... it's ok... I've still got some potions to be getting along with. And some of my magical items still have some charge in them...

I wander over to another area and am attacked by some wizards who think I'm part of their training... I'm not 100% sure what the point of this is, but this particular bunch of guys stop you before your fight and say "Oh! You must be our next test of worthiness! Come on then, let's be having you!"

I just about manage to kill them and get nothing much for my trouble except I have run out of grub again. This is going to make the rest of the dungeon very tough.

I can't rest any more and am having to round around monsters now (this means luring them out into wide open spaces, then scampering around them without triggering a fight - since they'd be able to do me too much damage before I could flee properly and I want to save up the few remaining potions I have). But there's only locked doors and chests wherever I go!

Well, locked doors, chests and more and more pens full of monsters that I can't spare the resources to take on. I can't help wishing I'd been better prepared since, if I'd've stocked up on enough food and potions with the money the Dji Cantos had given me, this place would've skyrocketed my characters's XP!

Eventually - as I pop open yet another pen, expecting to have to run away - THE BEASTMASTER appears! He's presumably been in here feeding the various nasties that are lurking inside.

He absolutly mangles me. I manage to get away just about but have to run a mile on a desperate provisions search.

Turns out there's a few secrets I missed earlier - I find a couple more potions and (most pleasingly) a "frost axe". I find this when I open a door into a room full of rotting debris.

"Oooh - look at all the piles of junk!" exclaims Siobhan. "I bet there's something good in there!"

"Yes, but it stinks of rotting meat and death... And look at all the zombies"

But it's no use arguing. Siobhan has us flitting about the room plunging out hands into the neatly heaped putrifying zombie food just in case there's something useful in any of them and to be fair to her, the raid comes up with the goods! A Frost Axe is an exceptionally good weapon and one that I'll have to make sure I make the absolute most of. No more fighting any monsters unless I REALLY need to!

Backtracking even further I find that a door I thought was locked can be opened with secret buttons. But all it yields is a load of locked chests (and I used my last pick to look at that stupid anvil back in Umajo! I bet these chests contain mountains of food and supplies but without anything to crack the lock they remain completely out of my grasp!)

"Can't we just smash the chests open?"

"What a totally ridiculous idea Dirr. Smash the chests? Can't you see they're made of wood?"

"Yeah - it's only wood--"

"Totally impregnable wood..."

"Impregnable? Are you barmy I--"

"TOTALLY IMPREGNABLE. Come on. Off we go..."

I return to the beastmaster with a heavy heart and low expectations. There's no way one lousy frost axe can swing the balance of the fight is there... or IS there?

Turns out there is! Fantastically I can use the axe's frost spell to repeatedly incapacitate the blighter! He takes almost no damage from every hit on him, but since he can't get away or fight back we're ultimately able to completely smash him to bits! Wahooooo!!!!

Also - turns out that Tom's sword (called a Danu's Light) has a magical healing power he can use... And it's a really powerful healing power... Oops! How did I not notice this earlier? Well never mind - it actually looks like things are on the up and up! And now we've beaten the beast master, the end of this deadly maze must be but a stone's throw away.

WRONG. There's still ages left!

Using the beastmaster's key I head through a locked door (still no joy on the chests though - stupid beastmaster wasn't carrying any keys for those) and find... More stairs!!! Oh no! I'm never getting out of here!!!

Down a floor we're confronted with a fire-ball and lava puzzle. This is a really nice, satisfying puzzle combining a load of stuff I'd learned about earlier in the dungeon AND suddenly they introduce ANOTHER new monster type! The freaky cloud guy!

This frost ace is coming in amazingly handy - finally, since wassername left to hide out with that mute idiot druid she snared with her wiles, I can stop people in their tracks again! I didn't realise how much I'd missed that spell!

The puzzles on this floor are quite cryptic. I push a lot of secret buttons, stand on a lot of pressure plates and pull a lot of levers - but to what effect I'm never quite sure. I have to go down some stairs to a mini-dungeon where mysterious buttons and levers must be interacted with. Then I have to back track (the whole time I'm dodging monsters so as not to have to use any of my precious charges on my magic items) and navigate round a weird timed-portcullis maze (that's sort of like something in a fun house except that it's full of zombies who I have to fight because - annoyingly - there doesn't seem to be a way of avoiding it).

Never mind though because I score a few more potions plus a speed amulet and...

"Hey look what I found Tom!" calls Hoff "It's a musical crystal! Like the one you carried around for ages because that weird building didn't want"

"Fuck you, Hoff."

"Oh but I..."

"Leave it Hoff" (this from Dirr). "Just hold onto the crystal and move on..."

It seems I can't progress at all at this point. I've been everywhere I can and it's not even as though there's a locked door stopping me. None of the levers or buttons I've found and pressed seem to have done anything and eventually I'm reduced to trawling all the walls for secret buttons (this being the only thing I can think of that I might've missed) and amazingly I actually manage to find one!

It's halfway down a huge long corridor where there's no other reason to stop - but there it is and voila! A wall opens to reveal... Some stairs down. Stairs that lead to... EVEN MORE stairs down! I can only guess that this path would've been more blocked if I'd not done all the stuff on the previous floor...

This place is EPIC sized. I think this dungeon so far has been the same size as the whole of Dungeon Master...

On this next floor are two huge chambers of pressure plates. One has a pattern on it already which I match in the other - but to no effect. Round the corner is another pressure-plate/fire puzzle that opens a door to a room where... The floor gives way!

What?!?! I've gone through the whole dungeon and have now arrived in some kind of sub-dungeon cave system? Am I EVER going to get out of this place?

"This place looks like it's been abandoned for EVAH" Khunag helpfully points out.

This new floor is massive. It's sprawling and totally open to exploration. Paths lead in all directions but monsters are everywhere - as are locked chests I can't get into. There's a pressure plate puzzle I can't work out and and something weird to do with door-frames that appear and disappear but I can't hang about long enough to solve any of it 'cos now I'm being constantly hounded by huge groups of baddies. I just have to dash from one area to another hoping to find some treasure or tools I can use to beat back the opposition. I've drunk all the potions I had. I've eaten all the food. Danu's light is out of charges and I don't want to waste any of the mana that my spell casters still have (acquired with the last of the potions) since I'm sure there's going to be a boss somewhere eventually and the game's not giving my anything new to fight it with!

Suddenly I find myself horribly trapped! I walk through a door that then locks shut behind me!

A flame trap is triggered and there seems to be no escape until at the last moment...

The walls give way!!!

I'M FREEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

The releaf of having got through the first-person dungeon is immense! I'm suddenly back in the Kenget Kamulos citadel in 2D. Indeed, I'm even back in a bit I recognise!

Only now all the assassins are angry with me... It turns out that actually my ordeal isn't quite over yet!

"We've got to get to the inner sanctum!" Khunag exclaims. "Our only hope is to take the secret by force from the Murder Pope himself!"

With one last burst of energy the team dash through the halls of the underground city - dodging encounters with wizards and assassins as they go until they reach the chamber of the Murder Pope.

The stage is set for the final battle.

Everyone is exhausted.

The Murder Pope is sat at a table having a sandwich with some of his buddies, then gets up to talk to us.

He starts into the usual "ha ha ha, you'll never get out alive" speech but then...

"Khunag? Is that you?"

"FINALLY someone notices me!"

"So you've come back for revenge eh?"

"Revenge? But Khunag, I thought they wanted to get revenge on YOU? Why would you need to get revenge on them?"

"Well Tom. I actually never murdered the Murder Pope at all. Arrrrrrgh (which was the previous Murder Pope's name) was killed... BY HIM!!!" (points at Murder Pope)

"AH HA HA HA HA HA! It's too late Khunag! No-one will believe you! I don't know how you tricked this bunch of idiots into helping you get in here..."

"Woah woah woah! Idiots? We're here because we need the secret knowledge of how to enchant magical objects!"

"Seriously" retorts the Murder Pope. "Didn't you realise that Khunag, former top-companion to the my predecessor would have that knowledge?"

"*GASP*"

"Is that true Khunag? We're trying to save the world here and you've dragged us through a CITADEL OF ASSASSINS instead of helping us just to get revenge?"

But Khunag is in tears now. "I LOVED THAT POPE!!! AND YOU MADE EVEYONE THINK I KILLED HIM!!!!"

"Shut up and fight."

At which point the Murder Pope channels all the power of Kamulos and morphs into Murder Jesus!!!!!!!!!

What? I thought Murder Jesus wasn't real? Didn't the Dji Cantos say that none of the other gods people believe in on this planet are real?? What gives here?!!!

No time for thinking. The final battle is upon us! Murder Jesus in his crazy hat looms down with terrifying power and a temper to match!

There's nothing we can do! We've used everything! We've got no aces up our sleeves and even re-loading's not going to get us one since we've not had one for ages...

"Oh... unless this would help?" suggests Hoff producing a sun dagger from the recesses of her clothing.

It's the slenderest of threads. With the sun dagger I can blind Murder Jesus. But that doesn't stop him attacking, it just make it less likely he'll hit anyone.

But a slender thread is sometimes all you need.

Hoff focuses on repeatedly blinding their adversary forcing him to move in and use melee attacks (which Dirr can just about absorb as long as every OTHER turn Hoff gets busy healing her).

Khunag can just about pull together some more fire-balls - and so can Tom with his flamy bead. Siobhan has a crack at stabbing him up too.

It all goes wrong when the dagger runs out of charges and there's no way to blind him any more. As soon as he gets his eye-sight back Murder Jesus smushes up Dirr. On his next turn he takes out Tom.

Khunag's got no magic points left so he may aswell not be there and all Hoff can do is Heal Siobhan up.

Siobhan stabs at Murder Jesus. Just a scratch! This is a disaster!

Murder Jesus clobbers her with his mighty divine fist.

She's hurt... But not dead!!!

No more healing coming her way - Hoff's out of magic now too... It's all down to you Siobhan... Don't let us down....

She takes a deep breath...

Raises her axe (stolen from that guard all that time ago)...

And takes her make-or-break swing at the physical embodiment of a killing obsessed god that shouldn't exist....

I can hardly bare to look at the screen....

And then......

CRITICAL HIT!!!!!

MURDER JESUS IS DOWN!!!!!

SIOBHAN FRIGGING KILLED HIM!!!!!

OH MAN I CANNOT BELIEVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*JUMP OUT OF CHAIR!!! PUMP AIR WITH FIST!!!! SAVE GAME!!!! CUP OF TEA!!!!!*

----just a brief thought on balancing, while you've read this much already----

I would love to believe that this always-on-the-brink-of-being overwhelmed balancing was intentional on the part of the developers. It's one of those sequences in a game where, by luck, I have been exactly well prepared enough to be able to scrape through but always by the absolute skin of my teeth. One of those sequences where you think "I need to remember this experience and work out how to reproduce it on purpose".

I guess there's a chance it was SLIGHTLY intentional. The huge number of monsters that you never need to fight might well be the result of someone saying "this dungeon needs to be challenging for those player's who've power-played and ground up to this point - so we need lots of monsters in there. BUT it needs to be possible for those players who've got really low level characters by comparison. So most of the monsters should be optional."

To be honest, locking you into a dungeon with a finite amount of supplies in it was a really bad move on their part in terms of fairness. It was really only luck that meant I never QUITE ran out of equipment completely. But at the time the game was made this was pretty standard practice. I can imagine the conversation in the office "If they don't want to engage with the game and buy up all the food and weapons they can before going into the CITADEL OF ASSASSINS then they're an idiot and deserve to get pummelled".

But then again - would this dungeon have been so thrilling if they hadn't made that bad decision and locked me in? If I knew I could be constantly popping out to rest and re-supply all the time? It's only because I knew I had to make it with just the stuff I had that it was so satisfying to get through! The experience of that last dash and fight with Murder Jesus was exactly the same seat-of-your-pants game-desperation you get when you're just 3 levels away from level 100 in Llamatron and you've only got one life left so you know you've got to perfect it despite the levels being crazy hard at that point. But then you DO make it! Against all the odds you're in the zone completely and you're suddenly on a screen full of nothing but cute camels to rescue and the game's telling you you're amazing and you just think "WOW! That's a feeling Gears of War could never come CLOSE to giving me!"

session 38

It's raining. Tom, Hoff, Siobhan and Dirr are freezing. They're stood outside the ancient underground citadel of the Kenget Kamulos.

"Listen ducky - your name ain't on this 'ere list, so you 'aint gettin' in. I didn't make the rules up you know. An' I've been stood out 'ere with just a pack-a-mac on for goodness knows 'ow long 'cos my relief is off gaddin' - inni Brian..."

The other guard who is much more of the silent "undress you with his eyes, visualise his wicked way with you then cover you up with an imaginary dust-sheet before you've even opened your mouth" type nods.

"I said to the duty manager that 'e'd 'ave to arrange someone else to take 'is shift since we all knew there's no way 'e was goin' to come out 'ere in this weather today. I tell you! I do my bit - We ALL do our bit, don' we Bri'"

Further nodding.

"But that lad's got no community spirit! No community SPIRIT I tell you! Spendin' all day down the piaza with his dirty great protigé 'hanging out'. As though the rest of us don't have protigés! I've got a lovely protigé but I don't spend me 'ole life messin' with it!"

The team turn and walk away. This conversation obviously wasn't going anywhere and besides - the fact that they could hear it carrying on even as they rounded a corner and went out of sight of the guards suggested their involvement wasn't particularly important to it.

"Hold on a second..." Tom stops with an excited look on his face. "Those chaps's uniforms looked JUST LIKE that chap we met in town a while ago... That retired magician!"

"You're right!" Dirr replies "And since there's only 4 of us now, we've plenty of room in the team to take him on! I wonder if, were we to pop back and hire him, he would be able to get us into the Kenget's lair."

"Yes. I wonder that thing too. If we hired him... COULD he get us into the Kenget's lair where only Kenget's are allowed to go?"

"He is a (former) Kenget. So he might just be able to do that thing which we need to do..."

(as an aside, I should mention that this unsubtle hint dropping was actually done in the game with a block of text - it wasn't that I worked it out myself. Also - since you need to have him on the team at this point, I think that it makes Siobhan the only completely optional team member in the whole game. Everyone else HAS to join you at one point or another, even if you can ditch them and re-hire them afterwards... This makes me like Siobhan even more than before since she's sort of an underdog. Since she's completely pointless and adds nothing to the story of the game she becomes a sort of sympathetically tragic figure for me)

When the party arrives at the house Khunag is hanging out in, they appear to have caught him unprepared.

"Join your party eh?" He says while hurriedly trying to stuff a load of eagles and electric guitars into a hollow paper maché mannequin of himself (at the same time trying to diguise what the mannequin is by draping his cape over it's face)

"What're you doing Khunag?" asks Dirr.

"Oh... I'm just... Kissing a beautiful lady..." Khunag makes out that he's kissing the mannequin hoping that by pressing his face firmly into its he will hide its painted on beard. "OW OW OW"

"Errr - everything ok Khunag?" Tom, concerned, tries to get a better look at what's going on. But as he sees him approach out of the corner of his eye, Khunag sort of sex wrestles the dummy to the ground as though starting into some much more intimate process than most people would consider normal in front of 4 strangers.

"Woah! We should leave!" Hoff cries out - he'd not met Khunag before (although the team would almost certainly disagree) so his first impression of him is of a man so wholly surrendered to carnal desires that he'll publicly mount an obviously paper replica of himself stuffed with birds and clanging musical instruments.

"No Wait!" Khunag announces - flinging the dummy behind a curtain and turning to face his audience, arms raised above his head and lips pecked and bloody. "Of COURSE I will come with you! You caught me in a moment of unpreparedness but..." his eyes scan wildly around the room for something he can use to impress his new team mates. "...Khunag can never be caught..." he edges away from the curtain and back towards the team, moving his hands around infront of his face as though mystically coming at them through a sort of shrowdy invisible mist "...Totally without his wits about him. OH HO! I HAVE YOUR NOSE!!!" He makes to grab at Siobhan's face, then pokes his thumb between the top 2 fingers of his fist.

Alas, the terrible trick is made no better by the fact that his thumb has skin on it but Siobhan's nose very obviously doesn't.

"Shall we get going then?" someone suggests...

"Um... Yeah... Yeah, let's just go..."

Later.

"...I 'aven't 'ad a moment's REST since she bought that cor anglais. I told you Brian, didn't I, she's up and down with it every which way and there's no point saying to 'er. I SAID to 'er I said, 'listen, you 'aint going to impress anyone. You'll just scratch it all up the sides and no amount of rubbin' it with a spat on chammy's goin' to 'elp..."

"Can we come in please"

"Well alright, but I'm not 'ere for your entertainment am I. Eh? EH?"

When we enter, we're taken to see Rhain who is one of the Murder Pope's select few companions.

The citadel of the Kenget Kamulos is a pretty typical dungeon lair. It's dimly lit - preserving the all important air of mysterious anonymity. It's peppered with columns with shackles on them for you to chain people up to. Whips and clamps and that sort of thing can be found on all the tables. The floor is stone which makes it easy to mop up though - so it's practical too. Well groomed beards and tight-fitting robes seem to be the style here.

Rhain can be identified by his leathery hat of office and Tom and the gang immediately start their pitch when they meet him.

"Please can we buy the secret of enchanting objects off you? We've got cash!" (this is mostly true - the Dji Cantos gave me something like 1000 gold to offer in return for the secret, but I might've slightly spent a bit of it on food supplies earlier on since everyone was starving and I didn't know really how much hospitality I could expect from a cult of trained assassins).

Rhain shifts in his seat and there is the creaking of leather but no-one in the team can quite see where it might've come from.

"Normally we'd kill you up just for suggesting such an exchange" he intones. "The Kenget Kamulos's secrets aren't for sale you know. HOWEVER - turn around for me."

He indicates that Tom should give him a twirl. Tom complies, assuming that Rhain's assessing his weaponry. "I imagine he doesn't want to bite off more than he can chew?" he whispers to Khunag as he turns on the spot.

Khunag rolls his eyes.

"I think that we won't kill you right away..." Rhain licks his teeth in contemplation. "Why don't you go make yourself comfortable while I go have a word with the Murder Pope about your proposition."

Albion has dipped its toes in and out of the standard fantasy setting for the whole game so far. Although it's in space (and a lot of the game is in weird alien terratory) we have had a lot of olde worlde magic and villagers stuff that's not a million miles away from standard D&D fare. However, up to this point it's never quite gone completly Forgotten Realms. The villagers are all mud-huts and dirt-farming, the world's had a more pre-medieval feel to it than your usual Tolkien rip-off. But the Kenget Kamulos could (apart from their name) have been taken directly from the pages of a Dragonlance novel or any other generic fantasy. They live in a stone-mason's dream dungeon in a mountain, are a powerful yet reclusive society with a love of arched gables and an obscure power structure. They're all either wizards or mighty warriors. You get the feeling (from how lavish and beautifully put together this area is) that the developers really enjoyed making this part of the game since it was their chance to put a straight up fantasy citadel in.

Although the Kenget's culture seems a little odd.

While waiting for Rhain to get back to us, we took a stroll and talked to a random, rugged, bearded chap who was wandering around looking tough about what sort of stuff goes on here.

"What's with the murder pope then?" we ask.

"Oh the murder pope is the man who is our worldly link to Kamulos - the god of doing a murder. He is our leader here and head of our religion..."

Hoff sniggers and nudges Siobhan, muttering "Religion! Hee hee - they think they have this murder god! What a joke! They don't even realise that the Dji Cantos can fact-prove that only Amoeba and Amoeka exist! What a bunch of idiots!"

"So tell me about being a Kenget Kamulos then?"

"I am a Martial Arts Kenget. I'm only a level 4 Kenget though. You see there are 5 levels of expertise - level 1, you learn the basics of using small weapons. At level 2 you learn one handed weapon technique. At level three you learn about firing your ranged weapon. At level 4 you are shown the secret of two handed weapon technique and then you have only the fiftth level to master."

"And what's the fifth level."

"Achieving the fifth level is every Kenget's goal where you enter a sort of nirvana state - called Arsetorn - where your skills are so good that you can finish a man off with just your fist."

"Not a lot of women folk around here I notice..."

"Women are meaningless to us. Kengets buddy up with each other as companions."

"Oh... so... how do you keep numbers up?"

"We abduct young boys."

There is a moment of stunned silence. Then the team move on.

I'd like to clarify that this isn't made up or particularly embellished. There's lots more that the people in the citadel will tell you if you talk to them (including the fact that "Kenget Oqulo" are magic using assassins who can achieve euphoria just by thinking about finishing a man off) but most of it is pretty dull.

One interesting fact comes to light as you ask around though... Apparently Khunag is a TOTAL bastard. So much so that the Kengets shun him to the point of seemingly not even seeing him.

It's quite bizarre - EVERYONE seems to know what a totally ball-bag the guy is, but no one ever acknowledges he's right there in the room (indeed, he spends the whole time boastfully naming every room you go into just to show off that he's been there before "Now THIS is the second library. I think this is my favourite library, since it's a little less showy then the first library - y'know, the touristy one..."). I only hope this shunvisibility cloak that he's acquired holds up since the story is that he's a PROPER git and if anyone deigned to see him they'd almost certainly feel the need to kill him AND us.

You see, it turns out there's this tradition of no-murdering-day which happens on new year's eve. On no-murdering-day, the Murder Pope (he's called the "Cuain" in the game, but the basically describe him as having a popescent relationship with Kamulos, so I'm translating for ease of understanding) goes to bed and won't get up until he has the vital fluid of a Kenget (of priestly rank or above) splashed on his face.

All the ranking Kengests duel to see whose going to have the honour of waking up the pope with their spurting juices, but last year (while everyone was distracted fighting over this) Khunag murdered the Murder Pope instead, in the hope of being elected the next Murder Pope himself (he was one of the Murder Pope's special companions you see).

People were outraged that not only would the Murder Pope get murdered, but he'd be murdered by his bosom-buddy AND on NO-MURDERNG-DAY!

Thankfully they caught Khunag out and elected someone else as Murder Pope instead. But he escaped and subsequently if ever any of the Kenget catch up with him, they'll TOTALLY get their revenge!

Actually... it turns out there's quite a handsome ransom available to anyone who catches Khunag and brings him to justice.

""Ransom you say? What size ransom are we talking about here..?" Asks Tom.

"Oh, millions of gold coins. He's the most hated enemy of the Kenget Kamulos you know!"

"Interesting... what about secret knowledge? You think that if someone were to bring in Khunag, they could take secret knowledge instead of the cash?"

"Oh certainly! They could pretty much take whatever they wanted!"

"Oh... gosh... gang!" Khunag pipes up "You know I've just remembered a secret passage! Yes... There's a secret passage leading from the bedrooms to the chamber of knolage! No need to part with the gold or ANYTHING valuable to get at the Kenget's secrets! Crumbs how silly of me not to think of it earlier. I'm sure we can get the secret of enchanting weapons without having to bargain with anything we might regret parting with later heh heh heh! Right guys? Guys?"

Since Rhain's taking ages to get back to us, we let Khunag take us up the secret passage.

Alas, someone catches us at it.

"Oi! You lot! So you couldn't wait for Rhain to respond to your offer and you thought you'd just nick what you wanted eh?"

"Well... um... You see..."

"Now you can surrender, or be dead... Which'll it be?"

Dejectedly the gang give in "Surrender please".

And with that we have all the gold we'd been given to buy secrets with taken off us (annoying since I could've spent much more of that on cool gear before coming here if I'd've known that not having it all wasn't going to be a problem in the negotiations) and we're thrown into a dungeon within a dungeon with no chance to escape.

Oops.