#I hate the quest system in this game man I cannot tell what quests unlock what

[syntiment]

Me standing at the gates blocking me from entering the area to go buy a discounted marwari- 

Let me innnn- LET ME IINNNNN

[theggning]

Perfect timing for me to ask you this: what's your thoughts/opinions on Deacon?

It's always a good time to ask me to tl;dr, friendo, I love never shutting up, ever.

Ah, Deacon. The man of mystery, the liar, the Railroad's number one agent (though he'd rather you not believe it.) Everybody's favorite egg in shades. I really like Deacon. He's hilarious, handy in a fight, his voice acting is phenomenally fun, and has a lot of wise things to say about the lies people tell you to make you act in their interest.

Of course, Deacon's main character trait and personality is that he lies constantly. He is, admirably, upfront about the fact that he's a liar, and doesn't expect anyone to trust him. Sometimes his lies are clearly meant to be a joke. Sometimes they're a test, to teach the Sole Survivor a lesson about spycraft. But when it comes down to it, Deacon doesn't lie about important things, or things that will get someone in danger. He lies, with varying degrees of believability, so that when he *needs* to lie, nobody will know whether or not to believe him. He disguises himself, often poorly, so that when he *needs* to disappear, nobody will spot him.

But the thing Deacon lies about the most is himself. As with all the Railroad agents, his name is a pseudonym. He lies about being a synth (he isn't) and going places and seeing things. He lies about escapades he's been on and missions he's run. Even his appearance is a lie, as he admits he undergoes surgeries to change his face every so often. Every one of his affinity conversations ends with a charisma check revealing that he was lying.

And lies are all that you get from Deacon, until you reach his final affinity conversation. There, Deacon, unusually emotional and distraught, confesses that in his youth, he was a member of a gang called the University Point Deathclaws-- a hate group that targeted synths. After a particularly brutal murder turned Deacon away from the gang, he met and married a woman named Barbara. But years later, his old gang showed up at their doorstep and murdered Barbara-- as it turned out, Barbara was unknowingly a synth. Deacon proceeded to butcher every one of his former friends-- and impressed by his prowess and believing him to be sympathetic to the cause, he was then recruited by the Railroad.

If you believe that this story, too, is a lie, then we're left scraping for a motive or a baseline or just, anything we can actually use to pin Deacon down as more than a fleeting shadow.

People much more eloquent than me have dissected this reveal and all of their points are good and sourced, and they will do a much better job of it than I could, but in short, I do believe Deacon is telling the truth about his past. Everything from the acting to the expressions on his face to terrible things he confesses about himself point to real, genuine heartache under his usual glibness, and it also provides us a motive, one magical golden key that unlocks the most important facet of Deacon:

This man hates himself.

Deacon absolutely fucking hates himself. He hates his past, he hates his choices, he hates how he used to behave and believe, he hates what it did to the woman he loved. He views his service to the Railroad as atonement, that he also doesn't deserve and never will. Not only does the Railroad necessitate secrecy, making up lies, changing his face, turning himself into a mystery, but it also allows Deacon to pretend to be anybody else but himself (as MacCready ice burns him in one of their exchanges.) He fears that if anyone finds out the truth about him, spots even a small sliver of his real self, they will hate him as much as Deacon does. And he'll deserve it. The only future Deacon sees for himself is to die in service of the Railroad, in service of freeing the synths that he used to hate and victimize, in service of an organization he feels he's completely unworthy of belonging to.

This, I'm sorry to say to his fans, is the actual characterization/meta reason why Deacon isn't romanceable. Deacon hates himself so much that he's unwilling to let anyone know who he really is. He only barely feels comfortable exposing part of his past to the Sole Survivor at the end of the affinity conversations-- a romance would require letting someone in further than that, and Deacon not only refuses, but feels like he doesn't deserve it. Like, I cannot stress enough that in a canon full of companions struggling with self-image and varying degrees of hating themselves, Deacon is the undisputed Grand Champion of hating himself. He has a LONG way to go to finding even the slightest bit of worthiness in himself.

And that's really the sad and poignant part of Deacon. We can believe Deacon is a fun and likable guy with good intentions and a good cause. We can believe that a person can change at heart, can try to make up for their mistakes by doing good things. (I believe it!) But the tricky part is making Deacon believe it-- a man so thoroughly sunk in his own self-hatred that he truly doesn't believe he deserves to be forgiven.

Well, that was kind of a downer, so I'll rattle off some other fun facts about Deacon to close this out...

Deacon seems to be very well-read, with an interest in pre-War literature. OR MAYBE HE'S LYING?!

He is, however, very likely the same person as John D., a Railroad agent mentioned in Desdemona's terminal who came up with the dead drop system, the pyramid structure of secrecy, was the only survivor of an earlier Institute raid on Railroad HQ, and was also instrumental in rebuilding the organization. This raid took place in 2266, over 20 years before the game starts, so it's actually very likely that Deacon is in his 40s or even his 50s.

We all know Deacon (poorly) follows Sole through the early parts of the main quest, but he's been following them a lot longer than that. Deacon discovered the Institute's apparent interest in Vault 111 and theorized there was something inside that they wanted. This led Deacon to stakeout Vault 111, where he apparently sat and watched the doors for some time until the Sole Survivor emerged. (You can find his spot in the trees on a hillside overlooking the Vault doors. There's a chair, a few bottles of water, a sun shade, and the Railsign for "ally" carved nearby.)

And stolen verbatim from the wiki:

At one point in 2275, Deacon was kicked out of HQ by former leader Pinky Thompson because he was "sick of the lying, face-changing son of a bitch," after Deacon had spent a month as a ghoul, which "freaked a lot of people out."

[applin-around]

Paradise AU

Well, since it’s Pokemon Day, let’s go ahead and talk about the Paradise AU (totally not because I just finished typing it. Nope, planned it all along). The AU is supposed to be viewed as a game with branching paths, so I’ll be doing my best to portray my thoughts while giving the proper effects. We’ll only be covering the Galarian Region and Gordie as the player character. If enough people want, I’d be happy to share Allister as the PC and what’s going on in the other regions’ DLC.

The game starts with the narrator- a woman- talking about how the Regions have fared. It’s set on a Pangaea of all the regions, rather than them being apart. She recounts how Johto has become a massive raider kingdom, ruled by an Overboss with a few smaller bands, with their ferocious dragons quelling even the thought of rebellion. She explains how Unova suffered the worst of the attacks, almost everyone who survived remains in the ruins of a subway system. Hoenn is little more than a bunch of settlements just trying to survive. Alola is all but abandoned to the horribly mutated pokemon.

Galar? Galar seemed to have avoided just enough that they’re not quite so savage. The glittering jewel of the wasteland- Wyndon- far to the north. Smaller towns dot the landscape, but none capture anyone quite so much as Wyndon. Getting inside those walls is the dream of many-a-wastelander.

Gordie especially.

The scene cuts to black. He can hear people speaking. He hears a gunshot, then a ringing. The panicked voice of someone shouting for tools. 

His vision returned after a minute of silence. He’s in an old shack, a stranger there beside him. Strange… He can’t remember anything. Except for the face of a woman he… He thinks is his mother?

From there, the player gains control of Gordie. I’ll be covering the rough plot of each region DLC and personalities of characters. Please note that there are quite a few OCs meant to fill roles, but they’ll be largely ignored.

The Galarian Region is the base game. You have five endings without any updates or DLC

The Savior

The Savant

The Champion

The Demon

The Tyrant

Each ending is in lowering values of morality. The Savior and The Tyrant are completionist runs doing absolutely everything in one value of morality, good or evil. Savant and Demon are below, and The Champion is a special ending.

There are two main factions you can side with, plus Leon as a standalone. Before we get into the factions, let’s get into the characters.

Gordie is, as established, the player character. He has a default build you can go with- which is what he has if you’re playing as Allister, but can be customized however you see fit. Your choices will affect his tone and how he speaks to people.

Kabu is a veteran of a defunct group of military survivors. He’s one of the last survivors of the crisis that saw them all destroyed, working to keep himself hidden and away from others. He’s one of the first companions Gordie can get, within the starting town. He reacts badly to disrespected history and to the idea of machines having free will.

Piers is a former sniper for the faction that’s trying to gain control of the North. He was honorably discharged after an incident and never went back. He’s carrying with him the horrible guilt of his sister’s death and refuses to talk to Gordie about it without high enough affinity. He hates mercy killing and despises the faction coming up from the South. Gordie will lose him if he sides with that faction at all.

Melony is a doctor, working inside Wyndon. She’s one of the leading medics and she’s really just trying to help all these refugees trying to escape the battle before it tips. She’ll follow Gordie to the ends of the earth if he needs her to, and being around her increases his healing but lowers his intimidation. People just aren’t afraid of a man running around with his mommy.

Allister is a cursed child, which comes into play as the PC as well. He has a ghost trying to take control of him, and Gordie’s actions can influence if he loses control or not. It plays a much larger part as a player character.

Raihan is an unallied fighter. He’s just trying to survive out here and he really doesn’t want anyone taking control of his home. He’s the one to push Gordie towards siding with Leon. He is a powerful ally to have, both off and on the battlefield.

Other characters, generally, are refugees or trying to live a simple life. Gordie can recruit almost all the gym leaders as a temporary companion. For example, Milo is just trying to keep his farm going to feed Wyndon. Gordie can recruit him to help him find the cause of what’s causing problems with his water.

There are other factions, but the big players in Galar are what’s referred to as Legion, from the South, and Galar’s Rose, from the North. Leon’s faction is small, mostly just him, but he’s fighting hard.

The Legion is a glorified band of raiders to most in Galar. They hurt people and pokemon, they force people to obey, they’re slavers and criminals. Gordie can side with them but at the cost of the option of a good-morality ending. What they do is evil. Gordie cannot be good if he allies with them.

Piers’ personal experience with The Legion is worse than the other characters’. He despises them and will open fire immediately. He refuses to be near them and play nice, he will not disguise himself as a member. They’re the ones who killed Marnie, he’ll tell Gordie. That’s a half-truth.

Galar’s Rose is trying to protect the region, but they’re battling against a threat that’s horribly devoted to their leader. Cut off the head of the Seviper, they think. But that’s much easier said than done. All their assassins have been caught and killed. They’re different… Gordie can get any of the moral endings except the Tyrant. It really depends on how he handles things with them.

Generally, they are well-liked. Kabu seems a little against them but doesn’t specify. He won’t abandon Gordie, they’re better than The Legion.

Hammerlocke is the choke. It’s what they’re battling over. Control of the city that cuts the Region in half. Whichever faction takes it has a clear shot to take over and unite- or conquer- the rest of Galar. It would be Gordie that acts as the tipping point. The player’s input and control over his actions.

Now… I have one quest and scenes that keep playing in my head. Let’s cover that.

Gaining enough affinity with Piers unlocks a quest. You travel with him to the site of the incident, where he explains the incident. He walks along the path and tells Gordie of what happened. Finally, he stops at what seems like nothing. He drops down to his knees, his voice becomes choked.

He tells Gordie what happened to Marnie. Someone took her from him, sold her to the Legion. He chased them here, he hadn’t even realized it was the same place until after it was over. He had nothing, but as he watched from his vantage point, through his scope… He had only one way to save his sister from the horrible life she’d be subject to. He didn’t have enough bullets or resolve to go charging in to save her. He had only one option.

Two weeks later, if Gordie is not traveling with Piers, the broadcaster- the narrator- will speak to him through a radio station. Someone’s requested he come, alone, to pick someone up and escort her to her brother. She hasn’t spoken, but they think she will once she sees her brother. Gordie arrives at a refugee camp, a little ways from where the incident took place. Quite a few miles, really. Across the lake. He arrives to see another doctor with a Bronzor tending to a young woman. She’s sitting up, but her eyes look dull. She has a similar scar on her forehead to Gordie.

The doctor helps the girl stand and tells her that Gordie is going to take her to her brother. Her eyes get a light brighter. As Gordie walks her to Wyndon, he can talk with her about how she’s been doing. Weeks pass before they arrive. He leads her up the tower and calls Piers over. He looks… And the girl pushes past him. Excitedly running, light returned to her eyes. At the sight of her, Piers is shocked silent… But she runs into his arms. He drops to hug her immediately.

This quest gains a massive amount of affinity for Piers, and whenever he’s not traveling with Gordie, he’s much happier. He’s happier in general and fights harder. He has someone to protect now. He’s not just fighting because he has to. Because he wants to.

That is one of the examples of how Gordie effects the world around him… Though this quest can take a dark turn if Gordie sides with the Legion after… But we’ll leave that alone for now.

Gordie can save or ruin the lives of everyone in the wasteland. It’s all up to the player.

[ranjxtul]

Hard Feelings

So here I am, finally back with a sequel to The Necromancer’s Doctor (still indulging my favourite ship) but this time with 3k words of character study. As far as I’m aware no warnings apply. Ships of course are Anna Ripley/Delilah Briarwood

The castle’s hallways are hollow. Sounds seem to echo more than they did before and that hollow ache traverses not only the cavernous stone but the souls of those living within. Anna Ripley has watched Delilah Briarwood for two weeks. She has barely spoken a word in that time frame.

It has been two weeks since Sylas Briarwood’s demise. It has been two weeks since fate or perhaps some god to which Anna Ripley has seldom given more than a passing thought has intervened and irrevocably changed the paths of Delilah Briarwood and herself. In general, she has never considered the divine or any power above man’s ingenuity beyond a comfort at best or frivolous entertainment at worst. When she met the Briarwoods, their zealotry for the god which they only called ‘The Whispered One’ irritated her on her bad days, but otherwise she ignored it. Now, she finds herself wondering what will happen to that worship and to that devotion. She had deduced Sylas had been directly tied to it, and with his death what would this god do?

Anna almost laughs at herself as she considers it. She is actually considering a God’s influence. To what extent does she believe it though? And to what extent does believe it has and can touch her? To what extent has it touched the current situation? Or is the current situation one made purely of human desire and action? These uncertainties spin in the doctor’s head as she moves about her day.

Perhaps she is foolish for even considering a higher power. After all, it was her gun, her actions, Delilah’s magic, and their lust that brought them to that moment. That modicum of thought brings her to a new tangent: her own emotional state. Ever since she was a child, she has learnt to rationalise and put emotions secondary and of course Delilah is just the opposite. Her blunt, cold intelligence is what gave her the job she had for King Bertrand though, that wretched king. It has carried her so far, but Delilah Briarwood uprooted all of that.

The necromancer spun her own arcane traps over Anna and whispered sweet nothings in her ear. She undid her at the seams and made her vulnerable whilst Anna attempted to do the same. She searched and searched. The woman in her bed for so long was a puzzle to unravel until she was something more. But it is possible Delilah beat her unintentionally at her own game. She found and unlocked a very deep part of Anna Ripley which the woman has not faced in years.

She’s scared. And she hates herself for it. She isn’t supposed to be scared. She is always sure, but now she only finds herself sure when she is dissecting a vein or working with chemicals but around the woman who laid her bare in every way, she is unsure. She wants Delilah. She knows that much. She wants to feel more of the warm rush in her chest and she wants to have what she grew up believing she could never prioritise: love. Then again, she doesn’t know when any of this has changed, and some small voice laughs in the back of her head telling her to stick to anatomy and medicine; however, as she glances over at the dark haired woman lying listlessly in bed. She has no instinct to flee.

And she has no idea what scares her more: the fact that she wants to stay or the fact that she cares as much as she does for the pain in her darling’s eyes.

Delilah’s dark eyes stare glassily up at the ceiling. The embers of thoughts flicker and fight to stay alight as grief and all-consuming conflict take residence in her mind. Slowly, she processes what she can. Little by little she labours through the emotions and sickening feeling in the pit of her mostly empty stomach which accompanies them.

Sylas is dead. He is dead. The more she says it, aloud or in her head the less real it becomes. Soon it is meaningless. It is almost like the first time he died and she cried out to the Whispered One for help, it just doesn’t feel real. But this time, somewhere in the hollow numb feeling, she knows that it’s real.

On a certain level, she’s processed that fact and she’s okay with that. Love in life is not subject to eternal permanence, even as much as she’d like it to be (oh it’d be so much easier if it were). On a more surface level she is flickering between surging grief, guilt, and numbness. Grief for the man who consumed her life, loved her, and guided her. Guilt for still feeling the love for the cold doctor in her bed; after all, without the doctor, there wouldn’t be grief. They’re contingent concepts. It’s fitting, Delilah muses, for grief to follow a doctor; a doctor is a mortal herald of death. And from the grief and guilt sprouts the withering numbness.

She sinks gladly into the unfeeling abyss. In the first few days she cried her tears out and screamed her throat raw in grief. Then, in the succeeding days she cried more as the demons waged war in her head. Now she’s given in and she lets them fight. She lets them dig their rapiers in and lets the pain course through her body in rushes, and then she happily sinks back into the numbness. It’s easier to process it all that way.

She can’t go back. Her life-string has been woven in this way, perhaps by her own choice and heart but perhaps by divinity. Either way, she is on an unsure path. She Sylas and Anna fled the Empire with the intention of just that.

Taking over Whitestone had several purposes. One was to take advantage of its political isolation to continue to hide, and another was for the Whispered One. Delilah wonders now if it was all worth it. She doesn’t in that moment quite consider the bloodshed in its full glory but she considers: was it worth it? She grew up in Wildemount and trained in the Rexxentrum at the Soltryce Academy. Years later, the teachings still ring in the necromancer’s ears. Though, looking back even after all these years of attempting to remember she cannot remember everything properly. She does remember the extreme magics, the harsh measures, and the suppression of any trait teachers deemed ‘soft’ or ‘unsuitable.’ Perhaps why none of her actions seem outlandish.

Still, worth it or not, she is ‘leading’ a people alone, her partner is dead, and her lover is responsible. The absurdity of it all almost sparks a bit of laughter for intellect’s sake. The principal of absurdity is simple (at least in this particular context) and she mulls it over in her head: anything that is outside of a society’s perceived norms and values. She can almost laugh at how absurd her situation is. Her response is also absurd with respect to her desperate search to find a meaning in any of this or a reason. It is human nature to look for such an abstraction in these situations, but she has yet to find any and she doubts she’ll find any.

Even thinking of her God. Even praying to him. He does not answer, and so Delilah awaits his retribution and punishment. She’s known since Sylas’ death that he would have his justice. Sylas was his tie and his prize. She knows she could continue in their quest alone and hope for the best, but is it worth it?

That is the question she finds herself facing at all corners no matter how hard she attempts to avoid it. Suddenly, everything she envisioned at the Whispered One’s side seems distant and useless. Perhaps Anna’s cold logic had a point. Gods and man seldom stood side by side.

She knows she still believes in divinity, but she doesn’t know is if she is disillusioned.

Delilah has been disillusioned about many things in life. It’s bound to happen when one is so strongly rooted in the emotions that run red and blue through the system of veins in the human body working in conjunction with the rapidly firing delicate neurons. Her response to disillusionment is always the same. She falls and falls hard until she hits the ground with a hollow crack. The same hormone filled blood that pulsed in her veins spills onto the cold stone and she weeps. She berates herself for believing in the follies of what was promised. She’s naive by no means, but she’s not half-hearted.

The blood on the stone dries and then she rises and claws her way up, promising herself to be better. Promising herself she’s never going to fall down the same hole again. She learned her lesson with her schooling. She knows the academy is not a place for the faint of heart or the naive like she perhaps was as a child. She rose atop and conquered the academy, however. Deliah Brairwood was a professor at the academy.

When she married Sylas, she found herself caught in the happiness of love and marriage and peace, something she’d seldom experienced since she was a child. Then he’d gotten sick and her rose, love filled glasses shattered, but from the ashes she schemed her way out. She raised Sylas from dead.

Now, here in Whitestone, she had believed she is wise enough, but she seems to be wrong. Once again, she found herself caught up in her heart and the fallout crushed her wings and silenced her heart. She’s like a phoenix; a dark feathered, dangerous bird, and she’ll rise from the ashes but right now she can only lie in the rubble and reform.

     Delilah isn’t sure if she feels that way with her God. He has been silent. There have been no whispered dreams. No signs. Silence. Her ideals as dictated by the Whispered One stand, but on a hill of sand, falling grain by grain. If she becomes disillusioned with him, maybe the fall won’t be so hard. After all, she’s already bleeding onto the stone. What’s one more layer of rubble?

Delilah does realise that she has Anna Ripley by her side. She is not alone, and if she can just speak, perhaps the woman beside her can help her rise. At that thought though, a pillar of self-pitying guilt rises in her gut along with some bile. If only she hadn’t started to fall for the doctor.

If only it had been left at midnight kisses and being fucked into submission then in the morning returning to their working relationship. Delilah laments the simplicity of what it once was for Sylas was supposed to be her love, but gazing at the dark-haired pale woman beside her she cannot regret feeling for her. It is human nature to be this complex she supposes, but it becomes tiresome.

In some ways, Delilah admires Anna. She admires her rationality and her ability to block out the emotion of a situation. Anna can observe a situation for what it is easily; whereas Delilah has issues doing so. Of course there are a multitude of other traits which Delilah loves about the woman, but that is one trait she specifically admires.

She wonders if she had Anna’s perspective if perhaps the situation would be less arduous. She swallows the thought painfully as her own inner monologue chides her: she is stuck with herself. Little does she know though, Anna’s rationality is clouded.

They’ve not communicated enough, and it is not for a lack of trying. Anna is trying to understand where Delilah is in mourning, and she is trying to understand how the woman copes. From what she can ascertain observationally, it seems to be in short bursts of emotion and now she’s shut down. Delilah is following the model for the stages of grief it seems.

At least that’s what Anna’s medically trained brain says, but this newly awakened young, quiet voice in her head reminds her it’s more complicated. Humans aren’t psychological models in a book and of course Anna knows this but she’s never paid much attention to the fact. This voice however, is forcing her to do so. Delilah is more than her grief for Sylas.

After all, she recognises there wouldn’t be any need for grief had she and Delilah not begun an affair. She assumes there’s emotion behind that and most likely some sort of processing and dreadful anticipation with that God of hers. Though, that loathsome fear that lives in this new voice in Anna’s subconscious stops her from unpacking any assumptions. She doesn’t know anything, even when Delilah tells her what she feels, or in the past has told her, she truly doesn’t know. Feelings are a guessing game. She doesn’t want to wade through hints and clues and jump to any incorrect conclusions, nor does she want to be unable to solve a particular puzzle of emotion. She hates uncertainty and in this case, she doesn’t want to be hurt.

She’s spent her whole life letting any and all weapons (both figurative and literal) richot off of her titanium shell. It’s not an arduous task; in fact, Anna prefers this to letting things affect her. Focusing on what is important to her is more rewarding and much easier than focusing on what others have to say. In some light, she supposes it is a flaw. Her hubris did get the best of her. It is what set her on the path with the Briarwoods to Whitestone.

But, underneath layers of hubris and the very essence of Anna Ripley the voice now awakened and filled with fear of being hurt by the woman beside her. Is this what it is to love? Is this what it feels like to want someone on a level beyond flesh and stolen kisses?

She always told herself she’d be in love with her work. After all, the sinew and bones she loves working with were her first love, but now she has someone. She’s always been a practical woman and she’s never seen the practicality of having someone to love. They can hurt you, but now she wrestles with herself. Delilah Briarwood is something to her. She is more than just something.

Are the fear and the vulnerability and the uncertainty that now plague her being signs that she loves the mourning woman before her?

It is on the fourth day of the third week that Delilah drags herself out of her bed. Anna is about the castle, and a surprised Cassandra De Rolo watches with weary wide eyes as an exhausted (despite having slept for days) Delilah makes her way through the halls. Her footsteps echo. She notices and thinks that maybe the echo is more prominent than before.

She finds Anna in her lab below the castle. The only sounds that reach her ears as she slips through the door are the sound of a saw and metal against metal. Those sounds echo too. When she takes in the scene before her, a sigh of relief almost escapes her lips.

It is so familiar. Anna is sitting hunched over on one of her stools, hovered over a flayed open arm of a body. Delilah can’t tell if the subject is dead or alive, and frankly has no desire to know. “Anna.” She says in a voice that is her own but carries a false bravado.

The doctor’s head sharply whips up. Her face morphs from a thin line to a more neutral expression and she raises an eyebrow, “Oh, Delilah. You’re up.”

“Yes.” She considers belaboring the point or making small talk, asking about the affairs of the castle, but all of that seems pointless in the moment. “Are you doing anything important?”

Anna glances back over to the open arm, and back over at the necromancer in front of her. “No.” She stands abruptly. She can finish what she was doing later. After all, human flesh is all the same reddish brown no matter what. “Is there anything you need, darling?” she raises her brow further as she makes her way into the hall, Delilah following.

“I wanted to just talk to you.” The voice is soft and the words are words Anna has been dreading. Not because she doesn’t care for Delilah, but because most likely she’ll have to sort out emotional assumptions.

“Go ahead. I’m listening,” she says anyway with a nod.

“I- I’m sorry for grieving him,” Delilah says almost immediately the cadence of her voice becoming much more rushed.

“You’ve every right to do so.” Anna says with a small nod which she hopes is encouraging. Then she adds, “You loved him for so long, and did so much for him. You’re allowed to mourn his loss.” She observes the woman’s face for a reaction.

The one she receives is only a brief wince, “Yes, that is true; however, I don’t want to come off as…” she trails off, for once at a loss for words, “as insensitive toward what I feel for you Anna. Because that hasn’t changed, and I don’t believe it will. His death is just… quite a bit to process. You know it was never my plan for him to die. I hadn’t quite fully formed what exactly my plan was, but his death wasn’t part of it.”

This grief ridden Delilah is a shell of the woman Anna knew, and she doesn’t shy away from this for once in her life. She decides to stay in that moment, but she’s not a woman of words in situations like these. After all, she knows the flesh, it is her trade. So, she pulls Delilah down for a kiss, gentler than usual. She hopes to convey an apology for her lack of words and any semblance of understanding she can muster. Thankfully, Delilah reciprocates.

When the women pull away, Anna’s brown eyes meet Deliah’s green eyes with intent. “It is okay to mourn.”  

[ciathyzareposts]

Missed Classic 83: Asylum II (1982) – Introduction

Written by Will Moczarski

Introduction: Prelude to a Sequel

Asylum must have been a major success for Med Systems Software, as the team of company president William F. Denman jr. and Frank L. Corr jr. teamed up once more about one year later to program its sequel, simply called Asylum II. The original version of this game seems to have been written – once more – for the TRS-80, and the game marks several forks in the road for Med Systems Software: It was the last game by both Denman and Corr as well as the last adventure game they developed in-house. They published three more games by Jyym Pearson but apart from that, the following years saw only re-releases and re-packagings, mostly of their short-lived Asylum brand. Asylum II, in particular, was confusingly re-released as simply Asylum for the Commodore 64 and the Atari computers in 1986. This was the game that made me first encounter Screenplay, the company formerly known as Med Systems Software, and the desire to go back and play through it gave me the idea for this whole marathon.

Asylum II has the same graphics and the same plot as its predecessor – once again, you are a mental patient who needs to escape from the asylum before he goes “insane.” Both the asylum and the game’s concept of “insanity” have a b-movie feel and don’t even make an effort to come across as realistic. If you haven’t read my other three playthroughs of Med Systems’ trademark “Continuum” games (Deathmaze 5000, Labyrinth, Asylum), you may be surprised at the wireframe 3D graphics that apparently challenged Sierra’s claim to have released the first graphic adventure with Mystery House in 1980. However, these games evolved from a different tradition – that of 3D maze games, a viable mainframe genre that first came into contact with the yet-undeveloped genre of the adventure game in the famous Hunt the Wumpus and its many clones. The “Continuum” games thus progressively qualify more and more as adventure games – while the plot of this latest iteration is not very complex, there are some notable NPC encounters as well as actual puzzles apart from geographical ones. I have very mixed feelings about this game as I kind of enjoyed Asylum but it took me a very, very long time to solve it and I had to resort to a hint sheet in the end. As my memory of the game’s Commodore 64 port is more than hazy, I don’t really know what to expect. Sometimes that’s a good sign, though, innit?

The highest art is no art, the highest form is no form, the biggest surprise is no surprise?

The first two hours of Gameplay

As the other “Continuum” games largely started out as mapping exercises, I figure that this game will be no different, and I’m right. I start out in a small cell and as soon as I make a move, I am told that I should have looked behind me because objects are sometimes hidden in devious places. At least the game acknowledges its own cruelty – I think that may count as a step in the right direction. When I turn around, I find a nut fork which serves as a key for quite a few doors in the starting maze. I open my cell door with it and start my escape.

Two doors down there’s an inmate I can free by applying the nut fork to his door, too. He’s quite helpful, too, as he tells me that the goal of the game is to escape through the exit marked “doctors only” – but it will be necessary to look like a doctor, “wear a doctor’s coat, maybe.”

It’s Meta Man!

I see where this is headed – hopefully, there will be no cat hair camouflaging involved. Beyond the fellow inmate’s cell (who runs away screaming after having provided me with the necessary information) the maze proper begins. I spend about an hour mapping the beast which turns out to be 23 by 18 squares. Along the way, I find several things. For your convenience, I will just spare you a rundown of my painstakingly slow progress and rather tell you about the hotspots:

a. There is a very long corridor (18 squares long) on the western side of the maze. The previous game had one, too, and I vaguely remember being chased by a race car there. I walk its entire length several times but nothing happens – maybe there’s no puzzle here this time around.

b. I find two teleporters that spit me out on the diagonally opposite side of the maze, respectively. It’s more painful to find and map them this time as you can still see your dropped items from the other side of the maze. Still, they were not too difficult to figure out.

c. Next to the very long corridor there is a succession of doors. I can open all but one of them and find several items there: a bird costume, a bean bag, a stethoscope, and a steel key. The steel key doesn’t open any of the doors in this maze – so far it’s (seemingly) useless.

d. There is a pay phone in one of the dead ends in the mid-eastern portion of the maze. When I examine it, I am told that it also has a receiver but I can’t seem to interact any further with either.

e. I find an axe in the southeastern part of the maze. When I pick it up, someone builds a wall behind me and traps me in a small portion of the labyrinth. This is not too bad, though. I can use the map to find the place where the fresh wall must be located and smash it with my newly-found axe. Also, I stumble upon an electrician with a sign. The sign tells me to “look up” and if I follow suit, I am crushed to death by a cartoonish piano dropping from the ceiling. I can also kill the electrician with the axe and he leaves behind a fuse.

f. The northeastern portion of the maze is entirely made up of a circular structure with twenty doors, ten on each side of a long corridor. I can open each of them but don’t find anything behind them. However, I can hear someone running around and slamming doors in the distance. After some experimenting, I find that I can lock the doors with my steel key. This is a rather painful endeavour as you have to lock all twenty doors to achieve anything, and at almost every turn the other inmate (I assume) slams the doors, making me read the message time and again. I have to doubt the reason behind this design choice, as this is neither a puzzle nor a fun obstacle but rather an unnecessary chore. However, after having locked all of the doors, the inmate (I assume) can’t run away anymore and I can hear him bang into one of the doors somewhere in the distance. Strangely, I don’t encounter him but he leaves behind a candle and some matches.

I don’t recall ever hating an NPC I never even saw this much!

g. There are two doors on the north and south walls of the maze. I cannot open the one to the north but the one to the south leads me to another part of the asylum which offers a bit more content.

In my second session, I explore the second part of the asylum which seems to be made up of a hexagonal structure. Once again, my knowledge of Asylum is helpful as that game had a pentagonal structure. I don’t know how to properly map it in Excel, so I translate it into a flat layout. Neither the nut fork nor the steel key is of any use here but I can enter three of the many, many rooms without a key.

First up is the psychiatry from which I can hear “psychiatric mumblings.” If I enter, the psychiatrist literally talks me to death – I die of boredom and have to start over. As control is taken away from me as soon as I enter the room, I assume that there is nothing else to be done here. Behind another door, there is the electro-shock room. This doesn’t sound good, and indeed I get strapped down immediately when I enter (I assume) and after the “therapy” I am returned to my cell. As I can’t do anything here, either, this may just be a handy shortcut. The third door is marked “surgery”, and I meet a rather friendly surgeon there. He regretfully tells me that he can’t help me, though, as he doesn’t have any drugs for the anasthesia. A bit further down the corridor, I find a door marked “doctors only” and get excited just reading that. Unsurprisingly, I cannot unlock it yet.

Now this is where I’m stuck for a while and I tend to blame the game for it. Having run out of things to do, I return to some points of interest like the pay phone or the very long corridor but nothing happens. Then, suddenly, I find a gold key just lying there in the middle of the first maze. Did I overlook it on my first mapping excursion? Truth is, I didn’t. I restore back to verify this, and after some experimentation I discover that the key only appears after I have entered the hexagonal structure and returned to the first maze, and this even only if I have freed the inmate. What a cruel move! Ninety minutes into the game, my trust is already gone.

The gold key brings about some progress: I can unlock another door to the west of the maze and find some circuits behind it. Maybe this has something to do with the electroshock therapy? I try to fumble with the circuits but to no avail. At this point, I have actually solved this problem (in my next play session) but I will keep the solution to myself until next time. Let’s make this another parser game, then: What did I have to do to manipulate the circuits?

I can also enter the room next to my cell now – I find a rocket belt there and immediately guess what this is for: the very long corridor. This seems to be right but once again, I’ll tell you all about it next time. Thirdly, I can unlock three more doors in the hexagonal structure: a film set where I get chased out by a “mad movie producer”; the scientist’s room where I encounter someone who needs “a battery, magnet and some copper” (my first quest!); and the room marked “doctors only” – but of course I don’t look like a doctor (yet) and one of the guards spots me right away: “an escapee! Take him to electro-shock!” This also confirms that I play as a “he”, quite unnecessarily (for a game with a first-person perspective) determining my gender.

   My Excel map so far.

Stay tuned for more (mis)adventures in the wacky asylum and don’t forget to guess the score! The first part got a healthy 32 points.

Session time: 2.5 hours Total time: 2.5 hours

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it’s an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won’t be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 20 CAPs in return. It’s also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.

Med Systems Marathon Overview:

(a) 1980 Summary [P1] (b) Reality Ends (1980) [P1] [P2] (c) Rat’s Revenge [P1] / Deathmaze 5000 (1980) [P1] [P2] [P3] [P4] (d) Labyrinth (1980) [P1] [P2] [P3] (e) Asylum (1981) [P1] [P2] [P3] [P4] (f) Microworld (1981) [P1] [P2] (g) The Institute (1981) [P1] [P2]

Jyym & Robyn Pearson Mini-Marathon Overview:

(a) Curse of Crowley Manor (1981) [P1] [P2] (b) Escape from Traam (1981) [P1] [P2] (c) Earthquake – San Francisco 1906 (1981) [P1] [P2] (d) Saigon: The Final Days (1981) [P1] [P2]

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-83-asylum-ii-1982-introduction/