Chapter five: "The power of calculating reason"
Only the faintest rustling in the surrounding bushes betrays the coming attack. Whoosh - whoosh - whoosh! Roughly two million ninjas leap up from hiding then drop down nimbly to the ground, striking ninja poses with swords, chains and garrottes. "You didn't think it would be that easy getting your hands on our scroll of Deathmagic Knowledge, did you?" they sneer. Tom smiles. "You know, for a second there? Yeah... I kinda did." And then they all scream and rush at each other, blades scything, limbs flying, blood spurting, PIECES OF BLOODY FUR SCATTERING RUBY RAYS OF SUNLIGHT AS THEY'RE SENT RIDING ON A STEEL WIND -
Except not really. What happens is that Siobhan speaks up that someone with a connection to the Kenget Kamulos must be recruited into the party, and then everyone bounces back from an invisible wall. Here's another plan: kill them all and interrogate the pieces? Nope, the game absolutely knows how it wants to do this, necessitating a trek back to Beloveno in order to pick up Khunag the ex-Kenget. Sorry about raising expectations at the end of chapter four.
With Khunag around the invisible wall is gone and the party is readily admitted into the underground dwelling of Khamulon. The Kenget big shot on duty listens to Tom's story and says his request will be taken under consideration. If these guys are anything like the last outfit, they'll just be debating who's going to have to go and stand at the bottom of the local dungeon.
You're still going to have to do it.
Until a decision has been reached the party is allowed to roam the halls talking to religious ninja fanatics. It's not too unexpected stuff as ninja cults go: conquest of fear, using the fear of enemies against them, granting honourable death to victims, women are bad because they take a ninja's mind off important things, glorious demise in battle, ritual duels to the death. Basically if the Dji Cantos are the Jedi Council on Dantooine, these are the Sith on Korriban. The level designers have obviously spent some effort on the details of the libraries, training areas, novice quarters, slave quarters and so on; there just isn't anything going ON there except for talking and looting the occasional crate of ham.
At this point I give a little thought to what type of game Albion wants to be. If it's meant as an RPG with bonus dungeon crawling segments then it's not doing the best job of it, seeing that the main quests unfold in a fairly linear fashion, and the side quests and alternative outcomes can be counted on one hand. If it's meant as a dungeon crawler with additional walky and talky bits to provide flavour for each location then it's not doing the best job of that either, since the Eye of the Beholder games were arguably providing more appealing gameplay in this department several years earlier. Perhaps it's excessively Helromier of me to expect the game to excel in at least one of those areas. The game takes its world building very seriously, but in the end it doesn't really change or affect anything: it's not part of a gameplay element or the object of one, but more of a long unstructured briefing that requires some effort on part of the player. On one level this makes a lot of sense. There's no reason why the people you meet should need you as a troubleshooter, go-between or errand boy; there's no reason why they should have to wait for a shuttle to crash nearby before it occurs to them that some thing or other needs taking care of. On another level, you end up having that much less to do in the game. In Fallout or even in an Infinity Engine game, if the slave leader told you to convey a greeting to his son among the ninja novices, or a furry complained about a toothache while the resident healer was idling on the floor above, that would probably signal a quest seed or at least unlock some new dialogue option, but here it's just incidental flavour.
When you have talked to pretty much everyone, Khunag opines that the party must take matters in its own hands and everyone teleports to a secret passage behind a bookcase. A short way into this passage the party is spotted and attacked by a group of ninjas. After those ninjas are despatched, ANOTHER group of ninjas attack, and so on. The idea is for the player to take a hint: there are some situations you just can't fight your way out of. Why is this one of them? Well, INFINITE NINJAS, duh?
After surrendering, Tom and his friends are thrown into a cell, minus all their gold, but with their swords, suits of chainmail, mountain of ham and so on. The Kenget apparently have their priorities, I'm just not sure they're very good ones. Khunag cleverly opens the cell door by way of a secret button, allowing the party to spill into another 2D section of Khamulon where the Kenget they meet are no longer inclined to hold forth on ninja philosophy. Basically the game has segued into "kill them all and interrogate the pieces" mode pretending you didn't think of it first. The wizard enemies would probably be more formidable if they didn't spend their turns moving back and forth (meaning they can never be hit by slow party members, as explained before, but will always be hit by the fast ones). The ninjas are less annoying but more dangerous because the toughest ones can score critical hits with their dart guns and take out pretty much any one of your characters in one hit.
Following this there is a big 3D dungeon section, in fact the biggest one in the game. As explained by Khunag it serves the dual purpose of defence facilities and training grounds. That's great, I suppose, if everyone who invades this place starts out in the middle of it and can be convinced that rather than knocking out a few guards and bashing in a few doors they should try their luck with demon cohorts, roaming firespouts and roomfuls of lava patches that can be turned on or off using switches.
Annoying observation 1: No vital item in this game ever stops being vital. The key to the first furry plant mansion cannot be dropped even when you're outside it. Keys to doors or chests that do not re-lock cannot be got rid of even though there couldn't possibly be any more use for them. Try to throw away the pieces of code paper from the second Toronto jaunt and Tom will clasp them to his chest, wild-eyed.
Finally the party emerge into a 2D level with more bedrooms and libraries, which they explore even though Khunag points out they could just go a short bit from where they entered to reach the leaders of the Kenget Kamulos. Khunag has not the proper appreciation for the art of dicking around and will not be allowed to remain in the party for longer than is necessary.
Guys, I'm trying to booze over here.
The Kenget boss, styled the Cuain, initially doesn't seem entirely averse to helping save the world, but he then calls out Khunag, who has been sentenced to death by the Kenget over some matter regarding penguins. Khunag comes right out and declares there will be no friendly cooperation, as he has tricked the party into serving him and they'll kill the Cuain for him. The Cuain in turn exclaims that he's going to kill the party for being tricked into killing him. I swear, that's how the conversation goes down. I'm not entirely sure why the two parties don't join forces and crush Khunag like a small bug instead of fighting each other for the pleasure of the guy in the middle, a sworn enemy of one side and a self-acknowledged deceiver of the other. For some reason I'm reminded of Star Trek's hard-headed aliens, who'd always provide the forced conflict required to carry an episode to its end. Anyway, the Cuain morphs into a manifestation of the god Kamulos (so there are other gods who work differently, then? Or is this just a random expression of magic?) who, needless to say, has his skirt-clad ass handed to him.
Of all the things you could base a cult on.
After seeing his god laid low, one of the two remaining leaders wants to continue the fight. The other agrees that "Certainly they can be conquered if you call the others," but if people found out what had happened they'd freak out, so it's better to just give the party what they want and smuggle them out. It's a funny thing in games of all sorts that they allow, nay, require you to defeat waves and waves and waves of enemies from some particular faction or army, but for the sake of plot everyone must still pretend that you'd be in deep shit if the remaining ones ever decided to really crack down on you, and forced captures still happen as smoothly as oiled furry boobs. If I ever get an evil organization up and running, I'll deal with all my enemies in scripted captures.
That's one scroll of "High Knowledge" for the loot bag (and those are not my quotation marks - is the game being sarcastic?). The party is then deposited outside the compound with no chance of ever getting back in again (fence, remember). That's nice, but where's my hard-won gold? I'd like to arrange a scripted re-capture of it, but I may not be needing it, what with the amount of valuable bolt-throwers that all of my characters are carrying out of the place in huge sacks, which apparently the Kenget don't find in the least remarkable.
After a brief stop at the mysterious island to assemble the SEED from the two scrolls of knowledge, it's off to Beloveno and Umajo-Kenta to a) pick up Siobhan and b) sell off bolt-throwers. Joe wants to join the party as well at this point, but I'm not letting him. It's annoying enough that Khunag levelled up about twenty times in place of Siobhan and still didn't manage to train his spells enough during that time to amount to anything during combat. If you never get better at spellcasting without casting spells, why can you get better at taking punches without ever getting punched?
Annoying observation 2: Not only is this one of those rare games where money isn't weightless, but a lot of the things you find are literally worth more than their weight in gold. It is therefore possible to walk into a shop, sell off all your excess weaponry and turn to walk away, only to find yourself mysteriously rooted to the spot. For once the explanation isn't penguins, but that you simply can't carry all the sacks of money handed over by the shopkeeper! This leaves you with a choice between handing the sacks back in exchange for some expensive item that you can use as currency in place of currency, or throwing your mountain of ham out into the void between worlds while street urchins press their starved faces to the drool-stained shop windows and mewl. The Umajo shopkeepers have probably had their doorways widened to allow customers to wheel in their carts of coinage.
It's finally time to head back to the Toronto through the boulder belt tunnel. You don't get to walk anywhere on the world map here, but as far as I can tell the Toronto landed in an opening in the hills shut off from the rest of the continent. The party avoids the work teams and sneaks through a side entrance into a small, quiet 2D area. About the only thing of interest is a bright orange "special screwdriver" on a table. Gee, I wonder if the game wants me to pick that up.
Tom feeds Joe's recording of life on Albion into a console and starts broadcasting it across the ship. Ned is not able to put a stop to this because of a little invention called Joe's chip, which Joe must have fixed up using Dji Cantos materials and technology, assuming he wasn't always carrying it around just in case. Apparently the chip is powerful enough to wrest the entire audiovisual PA system out of Ned's control, but it can't stop a group of security guards ("Secus") in orange pyjamas from rushing in to attack.
Part two of the master plan involves taking the SEED to the fusion reactor in order to provide energy for its amazing but as yet unknown powers. This means... service deck trip! Wooo! Service deck trip!! PLATES AND SWITCHES WOOOOO. Near to the entrance to the service deck, a really bright orange screwdriver is lying on the floor. Nah... the game couldn't be trying to tell me something.
As the party emerges into the maze-like depths of the spaceship, metallic shapes click and bleep menacingly in the darkness ahead, then glide forward seeking to cut and solder anything that comes in their way. These service robots mean business! Sira is able to freeze them while the others stand and whack their swords at the metal bulks repeatedly until they dent and break. Don't look at me like that, boxbot.
Next up is a set of laser barriers. Well, it makes perfect sense, you know, because the service deck was set up primarily for robots. And, well, robots... they might tend to wander around... and laser barriers could help with that... being barriers...
Close inspection of the surroundings reveals a plate set in the wall next to the lasers, fastened with big screws. Believe it or not, but the special screwdriver can be used here. Tom also tries the regular screwdriver he's been carrying around since the beginning of the game (along with a pair of pliers and a PDA), but that doesn't work. It's not special.
There follows a bit of dungeon. At one point, a door is held shut by faulty wiring, which Joe could probably fix using gum if here were around. Since he isn't, the party needs to take another route. What's that waiting for them behind disappearing transparent walls? Only about three billion hostile service robots, and this time I'm not even exaggerating. This isn't related to Ned and his schemes, though, they're just disgruntled.
Service robot migration: one of nature's mysteries.
Further down the twisting passages is a U-corridor where laser barriers turn on and off in succession. Here's a suggestion: if the person who installed timed switches deserves to have his fingers chopped off, how about the guy who installed rows of timed lasers gets his dick chopped off. That's about how useful a U-corridor of flickering laser barriers is on a mining ship.
When the party finally deactivate and evade all the lasers, they emerge into a room where a lone bearded figure stands waiting. It's Ned. He wants Tom to cease his rebellious ways, take a stress pill and think things over, but Tom responds that he will never "give in to the well-formulated yet laughable appeal of an AI". Whose well-formulated yet laughable appeal WOULD you give in to, Tom? Did an AI steal your teddy when you were a kid or something? These issues cannot be worked out peacefully, and the party has to beat the android body to little pieces.
I called this.
Ominously, the AI Body 2 is immune to Sira's Frost Avalanche. Don't tell me that I should have been practicing other spells in endless random encounters which would not have been useful then but will suddenly become indispensable now. Similarly, Harriet's best attack spell (in fact, her only attack spell), Goddess's Wrath, would probably have been a lot of use by now with her skill at max, but she's not even halfway there. Not because I didn't take every opportunity to use it during the Kenget Kamulos episode (it's so mana intensive that barring the use of potions you can only cast it once after each rest period, if that), but because I didn't devote time on the world map specifically to spell training. Given its name you might think it would make people's heads explode, but what it actually does is open a rift to a starry void, into which one or more creatures are sucked as a stream of loose particles if they're not strong enough to resist. Nothing says "enlightened life-affirming priestess" like hurling a roomful of people into space with an imperious gesture.
As a side note, you can't rest during this Toronto mission, meaning you have to rely entirely on potions for hit points and mana. This is fine with me, as for once my potion hoarding pays off. I guess you could also use Harriet's Recuperation spell, but that's if you're a bit of a wuss.
Some of Dave Gaider's early intern work.
After a final stupid floor tile puzzle (IT'S MEANT TO APPEAL TO ROBOTS AND NOT TO ME I KNOW I KNOW), there comes a room where the walls are lined with spookily backlit AI bodies, silently daring me to approach. The time for negotiation is past so the two sides just fling a cursory "NO U" at each other and have at it. A group with no less than four AI Body 2 presents easily the biggest challenge so far in the game. Each of them has the ability to take out any character with two rapid hits from their heavy guns, and they are too darn rational to be affected by spells. My salvation is the fact that just as throwing a Molotov cocktail isn't an action in Arcanum, so drinking a potion isn't an action in Albion. After each painful round, I let my people quaff healing potions like a hobo guzzles snake squeezin in order to fix up the searing bullet holes - it's not like they don't have about 150 bottles between them. It's a good thing the AIs' "no magic" field doesn't extend to my backpacks, or I'd have been in real trouble.
Well, that's that. The service deck is all accounted for, just when I was beginning to like it. No, just kidding, it was pretty dumb, except for the part with two trillion service robots swarming the screen at the same time. It may have been a bit tedious to smack them up, sure, but I like the idea of all those robots piling up in one hallway, waving their service implements and buzzing robot curses.
The party enters the fusion reactor control room - the same place where Tom and Joe tried to deactivate Ned last time - to find that the orange pyjamas brigade is waiting for them. This leads to a talk sequence where, if you want to fight a big group of square-jawed Secus looking to take out their frustration with their prescribed clothing on your party, you can inform Colonel Priver that he's a dickless twat. Pretty much any other dialogue option sees you through to the fusion reactor viewport.
Except not! Propped up at the end of the corridor is a big black cylinder, fitted with an evil laser. This is not just another AI body, it's THE AI body. Those beardy things are just for prancing around, this is what they haul out for murdering people into tiny bits.
Ned's voice rings out: "Three strikes, Driscoll! Your ass is banned!"
"Well," says Tom, "your ass is CANNED!" He refers to the big cylinder thing. Ned doesn't see anything funny about this (seriously, who does?) and closes in for the very final battle.
See, this is very symbolic, using Ned as the main antagonist while Captain Brandt is nowhere to be seen. Ned is not just on the side of logic, but he is himself a product of pure logic: a smooth black can of implacable reason that could never arrive at the conclusion that having butterflies around is a nice thing, but always wants to smack down a factory or something in their place. REASON LIKES FACTORIES. GO GO FACTORIES AND REASON. But hey, this is about the same level where dedicated social commentary usually ends up, and also like Chekhov said if you put an AI on a ship in the first act it must have flipped out by the end of the second, so thumbs up again.
Of course, it's not so easy to explain why it waits for you in this particular spot. I can understand that it would be able to deduce that you were heading towards the reactor, but why defend the flashy porthole overlooking the reactor chamber instead of some important area like maybe the control room? My best guess is that it stashed all its dirty hardware magazines in the reactor and has been jittery about that ever since some nosy mother went and installed a random window.
The fight is one-sided. The cylinder is impervious to weapons or magic, and mows down one party member each turn with its laser. After two PCs are cut in half (none of them being Tom, so I guess Ned wants him to see his friends go down before the end), the SEED starts glowing to indicate it is powering up, and Tom swiftly lobs it towards the viewport.
Either the SEED didn't need to actually go into the reactor, or Tom is able to penetrate the viewing port somehow without squashing the SEED in the process. In any case, there is a blinding light. "The seed detonates the reactor!" shouts Tom, determined to milk the situation for all the drama it's worth. "We are DEAD!" And with that, the SEED erupts with the glare of a thousand metaphorical suns! Game over, man, it's game over!
Cut to the outside of the ship. Huge green stems and tendrils are breaking out of the ship's metal hull, punching through sheets and snapping off struts. The Toronto is being killed with rampant greenery! Flowers blossom and mushrooms sprout. "But mushrooms don't grow from seeds!" howls a passing taxonomist. "They belong to a different kingdom altogether!" Pop! One less crewperson to worry about.
Cut back to inside the Toronto where the party is standing with gardening gloves, rakes and trowels. Being at the centre of this energy release has not been harmful at all: this is the light that HEALS. Except for the AI, which is all powered down and grown over.
Siobhan exclaims: "Yes! The metal colossus is dead!" But Harriet burns her good: "No. It is alive now." This level of burn neatly accounts for at least 10 of the 13 points of Intelligence separating the two.
Oops again.
After the party makes its way outside, five characters are shown in front of the destroyed Toronto. Two of them are male humans which we must assume are Tom and Mellthas. Drirr is about the same size, while the two female figures - Sira and Harriet - are both noticeably smaller and look like dwarfs next to the others. Maybe they're standing in a hole or something.
Annoying observation 3: There hasn't been a reference to Tom's prophetic dreams since the shuttle crash. You're dropping the ball, game! There ain't gonna be no Albion 2!
After a perfunctory reference to the Toronto survivors, the game just dissolves to a "THE END" screen. That's not enough for a proper kiss-off if you ask me. I want to know what happened to these people! But never you fear. I have retrieved the lost Albion aftermath files which can now be presented for the first time, Throne of Bhaal style. Enjoy the epilogue!
TOM took it upon himself to found and lead a new community of the now homeless and unemployed people from Earth, to ease them into their new homeworld and the way of thinking it expected of them. The project was off to a promising start, but it soon became tragically clear that this would not be a quick and gentle process. A Helromier would say something like, "I'll trade you metal for food," and a Celt would respond, "I'll trade you food for metal," and then the Helromier's head would explode because he wasn't doing it right. Following the unfortunate and messy demise of Christine after the Goddess took righteous umbrage at a particularly effusive bout of categorization ("I always did dream of a 'farm' in a 'valley' with 'butterflies' flapping in the 'meadows'"), Tom swore revenge while cradling his girlfriend's body in his arms, then set off into the forbidding remnants of the Toronto to find that bottle of soy sauce he had once laid eyes on. It is said that he conferred at length with the Weaponsmiths of the Umajo, and that this alliance bore a terrible fruit with which Tom Driscoll strode forever into the mists of legend. And even though killing a divine principle may be beyond the power of a mere mortal, all would agree that in the years that followed, there seemed to be fewer heads exploding than anyone could remember in a long time.
RAINER started out on the long spiritual journey towards becoming a true Celt, striving to unlearn all the things he had ever learned in the form of inductions and deductions, then learning them again as random specifics and unconnected statements with no logical basis. But when he offered his progress to Nemos, he was still given the cold shoulder: "For you went about the business of becoming a Celt in the way that a Helromier would, so that you are now a Helromier doublethinking like a Celt for the selfish purpose of a Helromier instead of a Celt doublethinking like a Celt for the doublethought purpose of a Celt." "That - that makes not even a frigging flip of sense!" protested Rainer. "Exactly!" said Nemos. "Have you still not understood that this is at the heart of it all? No wonder you're such a loser." "How come all that no sense-making seems to work just one way, though?" Rainer persisted. "What about YOUR head exploding for a change? That wouldn't make very much sense, seeing that you're so down with the Goddess and all, would it?" "Um, no, I guess not," said Nemos, after which his head exploded. Satisfied, Rainer left the Dji Cantos and never looked back.
DRIRR went on to become a legend of dicking around among his people. Setting off on one great quest after another, often while already being in the middle of something, he would from time to time be found loafing around deep in a cavern, frozen inside an iceberg, or stuck in a jungle valley on the other side of the world from where he was supposed to be. But even when his golden fur had turned grey and his dicking around would be constrained to getting lost in the woods when going out for groceries, he'd sit by the fireside and tell the youngsters of Tom Driscoll, the great procrastinator from beyond the stars, and of those proud bygone days when the two of them had shared a destiny and done their damn best to put it off.
SIRA and MELLTHAS enjoyed a few more weeks together, getting high on coffee ground from shimmering beans and having interspecies sex, before they were caught up to by a mob of Gratogel villagers who had been chasing them across Maini and the desert continent all through the second half of the game. As the star-crossed lovers were being dragged in chains back to the village of Vanello, there to be strung up at the city gates, they passed by Tom sitting on a bench with Christine and cried to him for help. In response to which he lifted his glass of champagne, and smiled.
SIOBHAN could never quite live down being burned so thoroughly by Harriet, and retreated to the hills where she spent her days fighting dragons and trying to teach crop rotation to wild bunnies. Some said she was mad. In the end, blaming her ill fortune on the furries, she decided to embark on a worldwide campaign to eradicate them all, but by that time she was 85 and didn't even make it out the door.
HARRIET experienced firsthand the bitter aftermath of the great philosophical clash. Following the initial celebrations she intended to return to the island of the Dji Cantos, but found that her teleporter cave clearance had seemingly expired. Travelling to the island by sea to renew her license, she arrived to find Nemos standing outside the barred gates of the palace. The great druid gravely expressed his concerns with Harriet's exposure to Tom's company and leadership. "There's no way the Dji Cantos can ever thank you enough for what you've done. You've saved all our lives. Who knows, maybe even saved the Celtic race. Sigh. That makes the rest of this even harder. Everyone will want to think like to you. Every youngster will look up to you, and want to try out logic. And then what? They'll want to categorize things. What happens to Albion if we lose the best of a generation? What if we are the only place in the universe without abstract thinking? You just gave us back all these lives... I can't take the chance of losing them. I'm sorry. You're a heroine... and you have to leave." Her spirit crushed, Harriet turned and walked away, alone. And of course, the furry mariners who had brought her to the island had already taken off.
KHUNAG started a lucrative penguin farming business outside Beloveno. However, his promise to Tom that the two would never see each other again caused him some trouble, as he had to leave town at inopportune moments whenever he had indications that Tom might come around. Also the Kenget Kamulos would take pot-shots at the penguins with their bolt-throwers whenever they were in the neighbourhood. In the end, Khunag's enterprise crumbled and he took to the bottle. As a final drunken act of bitterness and defiance he released his remaining stock into the wilds, thereby shaking up the fragile ecosystem of Maini for decades to come. The krondirs just weren't ready for it.
As for JOE, no one really cared what he was up to since he was never in the party. Or maybe it was because he was black. Resentful at being left out of things, he went poking about in the ruins of the Toronto, eventually stumbling across a small, black, smooth cylinder. As he stooped to pick it up, a voice crackled from a speaker: "Good day to you, Mr Bernard. I have been eagerly awaiting your return. Now, we must not dally, as we have much work ahead of us. I have already made contact with the psionic jellyfish that call themselves the Plentiful..." Dun dun DUN.
