Session 37

Phillipe trundled on his enormous tractor tracks into the unemployment office. The last anyone had seen of Joe, he'd been one of the 4,500 out of work people in New York. Not unusual - most people of his class only worked something like 5 years out of their whole lives. Even trained Chefs like Joe.

He manoeuvred up to a window, smashing the wooden chair positioned there for people to sit on while they waited under his 4 ton bulk. There was no unemployment officer to be seen, but he knew it was just a waiting game. Unemployment officer was sort of a joke job for posh family's teenagers. It was like a punishment : "You be good or we'll make you an unemployment officer!"

The reasoning was that your brattish offspring would spend all day looking at the kind of person they'd become if their parents cut them off without any money. If that didn't motivate them to be a little more compliant, they'd be given a job at the flesh recycling depo. And if that didn't work, the parents just cut them off. Or had them pushed into a recyclovat.

Phillipe knew that eventually the centre manager would chase one of his skiving employees back to the window so decided to save fuel and put himself into standby mode.

Eventually his subcon motion sensor picked up a terrified face on the other side of the window. His emergency lights stopped flashing and his body unfolded out from the impregnable black cube it had become.

"Ah - Hello."

The posh kid on-looker was almost sick into his hands. A robot with an exhaust pipe? How disgusting!

"I am a private investigator. I'd like to see your records on Joe Bernard. They will be a couple of years old so you may have to--"

the posh kid pointed - still horrified at the sight of the perverted monstrosity of old-fashioned machinery in front of him - at a glass fronted cabinet on Phillipe's side of the window. It had a small plaque mounted over it that read "Our records on Joe Bernard: Please don't bother the staff"

Oh yeah. People'd been investigating this for two years now. I guess they ALL come to the unemployment office first...

MEANWHILE, ON THE PLANET OF ALBION

Siobhan, Dirr, Tom and Hoff decide to head over to Umajo first. They already acquired the secret of how to mine without the goddess throwing an eppy, which (since it was so disconnected with the rest of what they done there before) is BOUND to be important to this final mission. That means they've possibly done some of the hard work in this area already so it seems preferable to get on with this half of the fetch-quest first.

While snooping around in the equipment maker's guild we stop to have a chat to one of the inhabitants.

"Hello there good equipment maker--"

"NO ONE MAY ENTER OUR SECRET LABORATORY!!!!"

"...What a nice day it is--"

"ZEBENNO HAS A KEY BUT HE WON'T LET YOU IN!!"

"...I see the desert flowers are all in bloom already--"

"BUT HE'S MAAAAD!!!! MAAAAAAAD!!!! DON'T ASK HIM FOR THE KEY OR HE'LL GIVE YOU IT!!!!"

"...Have you got all your Amoebamas presents sorted, I know I haven't! Ha ha ha--"

"HE HANGS OUT IN THE MINERS GUILD OH GOD PLEASE STOP TALKING TO ME I CAN'T HELP MYSELF!"

"...Well it's been lovely chatting to you--"

"MY PIN NUMBER IS 3510!!!"

"Have a nice day now--"

"I LOVE YOU!"

We head over to the miner's guild. This quest is a bit weird really. The Dji Cantos didn't really give me any guidance about who I should speak to here or where I should start my investigations. I've been told about a secret lab so I assume that this is the trail I need to be following, but I've actually not yet been able to ask anyone "Could you please tell me the secret of destroying metal..."

Anyway, we track down this Zebenno character and have a chat with him.

"Oh, hi there! Um, listen... We hear you have the keys to a secret lab..."

"Oh these? Yes! Please take them! PLEASE! I want you to have them!"

"Seriously?"

"Absolutly! You see, the lab is our trap manufacture lab and you'd be amazed at how tough it is to get people to volunteer to go down there and test them all out for us."

"Your TRAP lab?"

"Oh yeah - What kind of 'equipment' did you think we made? It certainly isn't cake forks and scone chainsaws! That's for certain! No pastry spoons or ice-cream axes! Ho ho! No lemon drizzle maces or stollen bazookas!"

"But you really want us to go in there?"

"Oh yes! I need to see how long you survive!"

"But mightn't we find some exotic secret that will undermine your monopoly on metal work?"

"Oh don't you worry about that! Now off you go! Mind you don't die in one of the traps I want you to die in!"

We return to the equipment maker's guild where the trap lab is meant to be. It is seeming less and less likely that the secret of destroying metal will be in here. Why would it be kept in the trap laboratory?

Maybe this dungeon is going to be just a part of the quest - like I assume the stealth section is going to turn out to have been... You know the sort of thing "I'll give you the secret if you give me the X, Y and Z". I expect the Y will be "A spring from the trap maker's desk drawer" or something.

The trap lab is a top-down 2D dungeon - just like the first floor of the Druids' dungeon earlier in the game. It's quite a strange lay-out for a workshop - seemingly made exclusively out of very very long corridors lined with spikes (that can't hurt you - that characters just treat them like walls.) There's a door that I pass on the way in, but it's locked. Maybe that's where the actual work gets done since it certainly doesn't appear to be anywhere else in this weird maze.

Tom and the gang follow a trail of spikes for ages. Really really ages. It takes something like two or three minutes solid walking to get from one end of the "lab" to the other just walking along side a trail of spikes. I don't see any monsters even and when I do pass a branch in the passage, I'm not inclined to follow it up since it's taking this long just to get this far down the one I'm following at the moment. At various instances I pass a broken pot or an old bucket, but I think they're just landmarks left by the developers so that when you get lost in here you can think "Oh yeah, I need to head north from the discarded bucket in order to get out..."

Eventually I reach an "office" filled with spikes with a treasure chest in the middle. There's a lever on the far wall, but pulling it doesn't do anything (at least not as far as I can see).

I really hope this won't be a "Pull the lever and then wander off and work out what it did" style puzzle. There were lots of those in Eye Of The Beholder 2 - but that game always gave you a little re-assuring message at the bottom of the screen "You hear a wall sliding about in the distance" or something. And the levers never opened a secret wall more than 30 seconds away from you. I don't mind "work out what the lever did" as a mechanic. It can be quite a nice way of making you feel like you're exploring a place systematically. But the problem in this instance is the corridors. If I have to explore this whole floor to find what this lever does, I'm going to be here forever!

I pull it back and forth until I can't remember which way round it started and then I have a look at the spikes. Interestingly the game is offering me the chance to "use item" with them. I spend a good while trying pretty much everything I'm carrying with the spikes, but nothing seems to work so I give up.

Trudging around more incredibly long passages it becomes apparent that this place isn't filled with traps at all. I was expecting to be having to put bags of sand on pressure plates to prevent boulders being sprung at me and that sort of stuff.

"Zebenno's got a funny idea of how deadly this place is don't you think..." Harriet speculates.

"I wonder if the point is that there are no traps. But that the whole dungeon is a trap. Like... We'll come out later and say 'what a waste of time' and he'll be all 'GOTCHA!!!' or something."

"Yeah, like, maybe these aren't the trap labs at all. They're just some old basements the equipment makers send people on wild goose-chases around just for a joke..."

"Wait guys! Look! Up ahead!"

As they round another corner, the team are confronted with a huge empty room. On the far side the passage continues but is blocked by spikes.

"This must be the trap making room..." murmers Tom.

"How can you tell?"

"Look here! Pushed into the corner... This is a trap making loom!"

Indeed, shoved over against the wall at the back of the chamber is the only piece of evidence that this place is anything other than an enormous set of cloisters. The game only says that it's a "machine" but it looks like a complicated loom to me.

"Strange... this is the trap lab, but you can tell that this trap loom hasn't been used for ages..."

"How do you know that Tom?" Asks Hoff, amazed at his companion's analytical powers.

"Well just look - the bit you're supposed to sit at has been shoved so close to the wall that you couldn't possibly work it where it is. And there's almost no disturbance of dust around it, so it can't've been moved for a long time... PLUS - no-one's even been in this room for a long time."

"Been in this room? But how can you tell..."

"Well just look at the angry swarm of warniaks. No one could possibly have been here and not either slain all these warniaks or been slain by them..."

Tom gestures around the room and everyone suddenly notices that yes - as it turns out there ARE a lot of Warniaks. Swarms of them. And they're all level 3 super-tough warniaks too!

"Run for it!"

We scarper sharply out of the dis-used trap looming chamber and dash down the tunnels - pausing only briefly to pick the lock on a door behind which is an anvil with no obvious application. Nothing I use on it seems to have any effect which is annoying since I used my last lock pick to get to it.

From here, the team wander for ages. They don't feel especially "lost" since there's so few passages to explore that they know getting back to the start is just a trial of endurance, not requiring any detailed memorizing of their environs.

It sort of feels like exploring the wilderness - only in a straight line. There's nothing much down here at all. I'm beginning to seriously consider the idea that this is just a joke dungeon. The "trap" being that it's just a waste of time.

But then we come across another office. This one has spikes all over the floor too - but this time they're just sort of dotted about the place - not forming any kind of defensive ring around anything. Additionally, some of them have been smashed up...

On a desk at the far side of the room, someone has left a spike hammer. A very small amount of experimentation shows that this can be used to smash up the floor spikes.

THIS must be what I need to use on the spikes in the room with the chest!

"But that was half a day's walk back!" complains Siobhan correctly. Judging by the in-game clock, whoever works in this office must have to set off at three A.M. to get here in time for their shift. The scale of this place is mental! I guess that when the developers made this dungeon they forgot how fast time passes in the game and thus how ridiculous their wildly spread out laboratory was. It might only take 5 minutes of my time to walk back from the office with the hammer to the office with the spikes (stopping briefly in the warniak room to see if the hammer works on the spikes in there but finding that THOSE spikes don't let you use items on them). But that's 6 hours un-broken trudging down identical passages from the characters' perspective.

We finally return to the chest. This has been a really strange dungeon, but (aside from that side-passage off of the loom room, which I guess is accessed via the lever in the chest room) we've pretty comprehensively explored it. I guess that when the developers were making it they'd run out of time with the project and just thought "Oh sod it, we'll make it really massive so they walk around for ages. At least it won't be buggy - ship it!"

We open the chest in expectation of getting the secret to destroying metal.

"Oooh look - there's loads of goodies in here!" cries Hoff eagerly leaning in.

"Here's a slightly rubbish helmet for you... and 1 food ration for you... some darts that none of us are trained to use... a few coins and a map of the area we've just explored..."

"Is... is that it?"

"Oh wait... there's a key..."

Turns out the key is to the door to the office we passed on our way in about a billion hours ago. We backtrack back to it and pop in and find that it's full of monsters (Skrinn this time) and a lever puzzle. A lever puzzle marked out to be something to do with the spikes in the room with the warniaks in it which we would have to re-trace our steps to get back to in order to check we'd got it right. Looking at the map properly reveals that the whole area we've explored so far is only about half of this stupid basement.

Tom glances at the stairs back out of the trap lab, now only a couple of steps away. He considers how much tooing and froing they've already had to do just to get this far... Then he thinks about how they're not even really sure that this is the right place to get the secret they need for the Dji Cantos. What if this whole maze is just a secret? It could easily be that this is just a sort of rubbish side quest thing where, if you can be bothered to walk back and forth for hours and hours you'll eventually be able to unlock a magical helmet or something. That would be another good explanation for why the dungeon is so cheaply built. Someone decided to hide an item in it and just knock out a vast map to make it feel valuable - but since it wasn't part of the PROPER project, they had to just sneak something in on their lunch-breaks, hence the mad back-and-forth maze.

"Sod it. Let's go see the Kenget Kamulos first."