Bridging the gap between Fantasy and Philosophy

New Horizons: Chapter 4

A few minutes later, Brinsley crouched in a corner, dictating under his breath into his recording unit and sipping from a cup of tea in between sentences. “After I left the prison floor, the scope of this trap became evident. The stairs ended at the next floor, and as soon as I stepped into the hallway the door behind me closed, sealed, and then fused into the wall. Immediately after that, a high strength disruptor field started up.  My plan to forgo the standard equipment came in handy there – no disorientation.   So I’m now in an area where all electronics and most magic are completely shut off. Fortunately this communicator is entirely passive on this end, so I can still keep notes even if I won’t be able to retrieve them until I leave.  The disruptor field does explain why the guards were all using old-fashioned gunpowder weapons, though, they wouldn’t be affected by the absence of electronics and magic.

“Whoever set this up clearly wants to capture people unharmed, because they’ve avoided the wide variety of traps that would kill someone instantly. Based on what I’ve seen so far, this place is set up to weed out the weak heroes and then make the ones that pass all of the tests easy to capture. I suspect that now that the trap has been sprung, I will be forced to proceed in a fairly straight course towards a confrontation, encountering traps and puzzles of increasing difficulty along the way. Boy, are they in for a surprise.”

Having finished his tea, Brinsley picked up his rock-on-a-string and his stick, made sure his sword was still in its scabbard and in prime condition, and set off down the hall. As expected, the traps were easy to identify and avoid. He moved quickly, and after a few minutes he finally found himself at what appeared to be the end of the traps. Brinsley stepped into a large arena-like room, dotted with hazards and obstacles of various sorts. The room was painted in simple, dull colors just diverse enough to make conventional camouflage useless to anyone who wanted to change positions. At the far end of the arena a large window was cut into the wall, and a masked figure with a long dark cloak sat in an ornate throne on the other side. Brinsley could see several servants and guards in the background, and assumed that this must be Volere Darchon, a supposition that was confirmed moments later.

“Greetings, adventurer” the man proclaimed, his voice echoing through the large arena on finely crafted acoustics. “I am Volere Darchon, super-genius, and you have fallen into my trap.”

Brinsley groaned to himself. “He called himself a super-genius. The phrase has become so tainted over the years that the few people who could use it legitimately have opted for more sensible sounding terms. ‘Super-genius’ is limited to those who really mean ‘evil-genius’ but are too self-righteous to admit it. At least this explains the clichés – the man have have gone at least partly insane at some point.”

“You have two choices,” Volere continued “you may either surrender now, which will be relatively painless, or you can fight my champion until you change your mind, which will hurt. A lot.” He tilted his head back as if preparing for an evil laugh, but Brinsley cut him off before he could start.
“I’ll take door number 2” he said, attempting to lighten the situation. “That’s the fight with the champion” he clarified with a sigh after Volere gave him a confused stare.

“Very well hero” Volere said with a sneer. A previously hidden door below the window swung open, and the champion walked out. “I shall enjoy your suffering.”

Brinsley began combat commentary, taking full advantage of his recorder’s ability to record his thoughts far faster than if he was speaking normally. “My opponent is a muscular human male of approximately my height, also armed with a sword. I wonder if this is the standard champion that everyone faces, or if Volere keeps a whole stockpile to match different fighting styles. He’s got stubble, thick wavy hair, and a roguish smile, but there’s a sinister and sadistic glint in his eyes. He’s dressed up far too fancily for a proper fight, although at least he’s been sensible enough not to wear anything that would restrict his movement. Imagine the kid at every school who’s popular and successful despite being a complete jerk to everyone, because he’s got looks and talent – that’s who this guy is.  I can tell from the way he moves that he’s a master duelist, but unfortunately for him that’s all he is: a duelist. Let’s see if I can give him a lesson in proper combat and teach him to be a better person while I’m at it.”

Brinsley drew his sword but did not adopt any combat stance, he simply held the sword loosely at his side as he walked forward. His opponent performed several sword flourishes and fell into a sideways dueling stance. He shook his hair in what was probably supposed to be a charming gesture, clearly still in the mindset of performing in front of an audience. The effect was ruined, however, as Brinsley simply adjusted his course slightly and kept walking right past the champion, on a path that would keep him just out of sword range. He timed his pace perfectly, just fast enough so that his opponent had to rush to switch locations, but not quickly enough the man could leap in front of him in a stunning display of athletics. The champion shifted his weight and his footwork in preparation for a charge, but Brinsley had already stopped. The end result was that it appeared as if the champion had been facing the wrong direction and just had to reposition himself.  He did not seem pleased, and a grim sneer crossed his face.

“No blows have even been exchanged yet and he’s already brimming with rage, this will be far easier than I thought. And now for my next trick”

Brinsley finally brought his sword up, adopting a traditional dueling stance, but orienting it at a point 10 feet to the left of his opponent. The champion was clearly not up to dealing with such an unusual development, but knew that moving again would make him seem even more ridiculous. So he opted to attack, an impossibly quick horizontal triple slash that demonstrated a skill far more well-developed than his temper.

“The fight begins in earnest now. In the early days of my career, or even in the middle days for that matter, this gentleman would have been a challenge. He has incredible skill with the blade, definitely good enough to deserve the reputation he seems to have here as the champion. But he lacks experience. Clearly he’s used to fights where the judges are on his side and the opponents are unskilled and scared. I’ve been fighting ten degrees off center this entire fight, and he still hasn’t figured out what he’s supposed to do about it. He’s tasted rage and confusion, now I think it’s about time I throw fear into the mix, show him just how badly he’s outmatched.”

The next assault the champion launched was met with a flurry of spinning parries that launched the two combatants into a complex but predictable series of rotations. When it was over, Brinsley was facing away from his opponent, a fact which threw the champion of balance for a moment before he recovered and stabbed. Brinsley parried the blow behind himself without looking, cut all of the buttons off of the front of the champion’s coat, disarmed him, and spun inside his guard to land a solid torso punch with his free hand. It was blatant showing-off to a degree that Brinsley disliked, but it had the desired effect.

“That’s got him properly terrified, and I think it was enough to snap him out of dueling mode. That precious ‘fight-or-flight’ instinct that humans are so proud of is finally starting to stir. Now we’ll see what he can really do.”

Since this is my first game review, I should probably take a moment to explain my reviewing style:  I don’t intend to be a major game reviewer.  I play games because I like to play them, and when I review them it will be because I feel that one of them is worthy of sharing.  So you will not see game reviews from me very often, they will rarely be about brand new games, and they will always be very positive.  The same goes for movie and book reviews.

So, FUEL.  FUEL is a racing game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where fuel is currency.  That’s technically the extent of the plot, but there are enough hints scattered around the world that with enough imagination you can infer some pretty interesting stories.  What sets FUEL apart from other games is that the game world is huge, due to a technology called procedural generation.  If you want that explained in detail by a much more computer-savvy person than myself using words you can understand, look at Shamus Young’s blog here.  The very short version is that, rather than storing the entire map bit-by-bit, the game just stores a much smaller map and has a formula for extrapolating that map back into full detail.  The result is, again, huge.  And very good-looking.

The premise of the game is that the world is divided into several areas.  Each area contains races that you can compete in, and winning those races unlocks new vehicles and areas.  Although “unlock” is a bit misleading – you can drive anywhere in the game you want right from the beginning, unlocking an area just gives you access to helipads that allow you to essentially teleport between locations.  Races consist of checkpoints (sometimes every few seconds, sometimes only one for the start and one for the finish) that you have to drive through in order, and they are scattered through the same immense world.  Each race is open to a particular class of vehicles (trucks, bikes, buggies, etc.) and further limited to either on-road or off-road vehicles within that class.  You can also go into ‘free ride’ mode and simply drive around the world, which is probably where you’ll spend a lot of your time.  While in free ride, you can find new liveries (different paint options for your vehicles) and specially marked vista points (scenic overlooks).  You can also find challenges, which are less important races with more unusual rules.  And, of course, barrels of fuel are scattered around to supplement what you win in the races.

As a racing game, FUEL hasn’t met with much critical acclaim.  I, however, think it’s great and find it to be lacking in most of the problems that have kept me from enjoying most other racing games.  I would be confident recommending the game purely on the strength of the actual races, but take that recommendation with a grain of salt knowing that people who play other racing games haven’t tended to like it.  But it is, at bare minimum, competent.  The AI doesn’t cheat (at least not obviously), the vehicles handle in a way that feels intuitive, the controls are remarkably simple, and all the tracks are interesting.  I didn’t buy it for the racing, but it was good enough that I ended up playing through all of the races anyway, long after they were necessary to unlock anything.

Where FUEL really shines, however, is in giving you a gigantic, varied, and beautiful world to drive around in.  Driving from one corner of the world to the other at top speed (130mph) takes over an hour.  I’ve spent many hours simply exploring and enjoying the world.  Terrain ranges from immense red rock canyons, majestic pine forests, volcanic lakes, snow-covered mountains, salt flats, ocean coasts, marshes, and everything in between – including a city.  And all of them mesh seamlessly into each other.  There are storms that roll over the landscape, and a complete day/night cycle (although it’s always a full moon).

In part 2 I’ll cover the ways in which FUEL fails to deliver.  It is unusual for a game in that its flaws are aggravating not for their severity, but for the ease with which they could have been removed.  And in part 3 I’ll look inside the game itself, talking about some specific vehicles and races and speculating about the hidden plot.

I’m not going to attempt to explain what all has happened to me the last several months.  Suffice it to say there was a lot of stuff, and most of it was personal.  But the relevant thing to come out of all that for you readers is that as of two weeks ago I’m living on my own now, which means I can finally set an actual writing schedule.

So, not only is the site coming back online now, but I’m going to try to bring it back with an actual schedule.  Here’s the planned weekly output:

2 Galen’s Journey pages

1 Short Story entry (New Horizons for a while, but I plan to branch out)

1 Non-story blog post

2 Miscellaneous other things (may include extras of the above)

Day 6 – 3:00am

Brinsley walked through the door and into a tunnel, in one hand holding a stick with a bent paper clip stuck to the end, and in the other holding a rock on a string. As he walked, he kept the rock bouncing off the floor and walls in front of him to trigger any traps, while periodically scraping the paper clip across the wall.  For some reason, the walls were constructed out of a peculiar alloy that could be made to resonate in a way that disrupted nearby electronics.  Brinsley assumed it had been chosen because it could resist the acid in the lake, by why the inside of the tunnel was not padded by something was a mystery.

As he approached the security station his opinion of the security dropped a notch – there was only one guard, and he sat staring obliviously at computer monitors.   The room was so well shielded that he hadn’t even heard the sound of the rock bouncing down the corridor.  Brinsley continued his walking pace until he was right up to the window and waited. A few minutes later, the guard finally looked up from the monitors for a moment and nearly fell out of his chair in surprise, hitting the alarm button on his third attempt. A pair of minions burst out of the door, quickly enough that Brinsley assumed they had been about to go out on patrol, but they were not prepared for a warrior of his caliber.

“I’ve often heard it said that you shouldn’t bring a blade to gun fight” he said as he tumbled between them, cutting the chinstraps on both helmets as he went past. “Unfortunately for you that goes both ways.” As the guards spun around he grabbed the barrels of both guns and twisted, causing the two men to hit each others’ now-unprotected jaws. They both went down. “A rifle is not a close-combat weapon” he concluded as he spun in through the door.

The remaining guard at the security station, rifle still leaning against the wall, stared in terrified amazement and quickly complied when Brinsley pushed him out into the tunnel and locked the door. A quick check through the security system revealed that it was limited to this tunnel, as Brinsley had assumed. He was surprised, however, to note that the inside of the tower showed none of the artistic touches of the outside. Once past the walls the impression of dark stone was abandoned, replaced by a décor that resembled a cross between a luxury hotel and an office building – all light plaster walls and modern lighting.

Day 6 – 4:00am

Brinsley continued to walk through the corridors, expressing his professional distaste at the operation of the Tower of Doom. “There’s too much unused space, I’ve gone ten minutes now and not seen anyone. Everything in a building should have a purpose, all this empty space just uses up energy and cleaning staff, and gives infiltrators like me a place to hide. I’ve seen three different auditoriums and a whole variety of laboratories and workshops, but none of them are in use. They don’t even look abandoned, it’s like no one has moved in since they were built.  The security is also atrocious – clearly whoever set up the external system had no input on the internal one. Whoever built this place clearly did not plan on anyone getting this far. I’d expect a trap, but it’s not even set up well enough for that. The architecture is all wrong for ambushes or cut-offs. I expect to find more activity as I go higher – at the very least there has to be a floor for all these guards to live on and a prison floor, and they’ll probably be next to each other.”

His suspicions where confirmed a short while later, and when he discovered that the prison floor was unguarded he decided to stop and take a look. “No guards again, in keeping with the running theme of heavy overkill with no follow-through. It’s like serving hundred-year-old wine as a lead in for a meal of dehydrated beans.  The doors are state-of-art and nearly escape proof, but if anyone did manage to get out the only thing to stop them or even sound the alarm is a motion sensor at the hall entrance, and even that turns off with a single button from the other side.

“The really alarming thing is that there aren’t any prisoners either, which means that all of those abducted villagers are either dead or someplace else. I hope they’re alive, but I’d better not be dealing with a slave trader; I have trouble controlling my temper around them. Wait, here’s someone, way in the farthest back cell.”

Brinsley pressed the large red button marked ‘Open’ and was mildly disappointed when it, too, turned out not to be a trap. The sleeping man inside opened one eye, then abruptly sat upright.

“You’re not a guard” he said.

“Not last time I checked, no.” Brinsley responded. “Brinsley Sheridan – adventurer” he left off the traditional statement of rank that should have accompanied such an introduction.

“Not the Brinsley Sheridan?” the man exclaimed with a doubting stare.

“No, just a Brinsley Sheridan” Brinsley responded, and when the man seemed to accept this Brinsley was reassured that his decision to avoid an alias had been correct.

“I’m Laurie, archon 1st class.” That spoke volumes about his identity, Brinsley knew. Archon was another type of  SENTINEL classification – while adventurers traveled the Planes looking for adventures (hence the name), archons were ordinary people who had acquired a travel license for their own personal activities. Most were entertainers, politicians, or merchants. The ‘1st class’ designation, rather than a measurement of skill as with adventures, indicated the limitations on cargo and guests that could be transported – 1st was the lowest. The fact that he had not given a last name meant that he didn’t want his identity known at this point.

“As for what’s going on” Laurie continued “I can tell you a fair amount, because I’ve been nearby since this whole thing started. Volere Darchon operates a very tidy operation. He’s done everything by the book – bought the land fair and square, even the villages. He pulled some shady business with ‘misdelivered’ eviction notices to give him the legal cover to start abducting people before they had a chance to move out, but he’s been careful to make sure that no one official can touch him. Here’s the funny thing, though: all the people he took were released shortly afterwards, just not back to their homes. He’s been taking families one person at a time and giving them free passage to any country on the continent, with the only condition being that they can’t tell anyone what happened or contact anyone still here for any reason. It’s like he wants to create the perfect image of an evil overlord without actually doing anything wrong. Assuming he keeps his promise, and I have no reason to suspect he doesn’t, the people that are sent out get a pretty luxurious set-up at their new location as compensation.

“There’s one other thing, though. You’re not the first adventurer to come through here. Five others just this week have been through, offered to rescue me, kept going up, and never returned. Since minions keep showing up to feed me, I can only assume that business is still going on as usual. Several of those adventurers seemed really competent, so I can be fairly sure that there’s some kind of really impressive trap up ahead. My theory is that this whole place is set up to attract and then capture or kill adventurers for some reason.”

Brinsley smiled, this was more like the kind of adventure he had been hoping for. “So why are you still here?” He asked.

“Well, I don’t entirely know. As soon as they saw my Archon ID they stuck me here by myself, and I haven’t gotten any of the cushy offers everyone else took. I didn’t go with any of the adventurers who stopped by because the first two didn’t offer and after that I knew better.  I think I’ve got an escape plan figured out, but I don’t want to risk it without a distraction.  And, I’d like to become an adventurer, so I keep hoping one these times somebody will make it back from going upstairs.”

“Well Sir Laurie,” Brinsley noticed a slight wince at ‘sir’ and filed the information away for later “I am that somebody, and you are quite welcome to go adventuring with me. I will return shortly. Do you want the door left open?”

“Closed is fine, if it’s open the guards ask questions when they bring dinner. Good luck Brinsley, many others have said the same, but I hope you’ll be different.”

Brinsley got the impression that Laurie had said that before, but he appreciated the sentiment.  He tipped his hat to Laurie, and spun out of the room with a dramatic flourish.  Humming under his breath, he returned to the stairway and set off upwards towards the promise of greater excitement.

Day 4

Brinsley walked down the side of small country road that ran through the woods, lamenting the decline of everything good in the world since the last time he had gone adventuring. The recorder he had was perfectly capable of reading brain waves and picking up an internal monologue, but he liked talking aloud occasionally.

“…three whole days in the woods and not a single encounter! Not even something as minor as a rabid raccoon! Fifty years ago I’d have at least ran across a bandit or two by now. This modern world is all well and good for the common folk, but there’s no excitement left in it. And the waste! Yesterday I came across a pile of trash on the roadside, not only had some idiot left it there, but it wasn’t even worth throwing away! I found everything I needed for a proper adventuring kit right there. I gave the old one away to a drifter, he can trade it to someone for a meal, and I certainly didn’t want it. Piece of junk didn’t even have a paper clip! But now I have a proper set of equipment and a perfectly functional if tarnished tea set.
Tomorrow I should arrive at what I’ve learned is called “the Tower of Doom” which will hopefully hold more excitement than this forest. The last town I went through had been properly terrorized, so at least I know there’s something worth investigating. That would have been a real disappointment, to get all the way out here and find out it’s really “Darchon’s House of Acupuncture” or something else like that.”

Day 5 – Morning

As morning broke, Brinsley was already on the move. He was invigorated by a sense of adventure he hadn’t felt in years, and the excitement had made it difficult to sleep in. The terrain had changed during the last afternoon, rolling hills and forest being replaced quite suddenly by a canyon filled scrubland. The path now followed the edge of an old riverbed, a 20-foot cliff rising on one side and the mucky remnants of the once-proud river on the other. Brinsley had enough experience with wilderness analysis to know that whatever had happened to the river happened recently. It reminded him of the beginning of his first adventuring career, when he and the rest of the Horizon Dancers had taken on the last of the big water pirates.

The sound of approaching military footsteps coming around the corner snapped him out of his reverie, and he quickly ducked behind a convenient shrub. The four troops that walked around the corner wore black armor and oversized helmets with narrow visors.  They looked so much like minions that Brinsley almost laughed, someone clearly had a fascination with painfully strong clichés. They were, however, equipped with advanced ceramic armor and some form of energy rifle, so as much as Volere Darchon seemed to care about preserving stereotypes he certainly wasn’t concerned about fitting in with his surroundings.

After they passed, Brinsley did some speculating about what that said about who this “Darchon” was. “Probably some absurdly rich Agricorp brat who read too many comic books and decided that an evil empire sounded neat.” The fourth plane, Technor, had been entirely buried under one gigantic city. One company, named Agricorp, managed the very basic infrastructure, and made ridiculous amounts of money off of it. “They do a good job, but like any group of hyper-rich people with a superiority complex, they tended to produce a large number of people with power and influence that’s significantly out of sync with their intelligence. Here on Arcania, we call them ‘nobility’ but there are a lot fewer of them and they already have kingdoms. Something about Agricorp breeds idiots at an alarming rate. At least the managers are still bright, and they know enough not to get angry when pipsqueaks like this get taken down.”

As he rounded the next corner, he stopped for a moment to take in the sight in front of him. The riverbed came to an abrupt end about a hundred yards further on, walled off by a concrete dam. Whoever had done the construction had done a remarkable job of designing the dam to very clearly express the message “Do Not Enter”. The smell of stagnant water wafted from beyond, indicating that an artificial lake lay on the other side. Rising up over the dam, probably from the center of the lake, was a huge black tower with four smaller towers coming out of it midway up. The central tower had a standard cone roof, but the four smaller ones each had a large skull with fires burning in the eyes, facing out. The whole thing was expertly painted to look like stone, but such a structure would have been impossible to keep stable without steel or something even more advanced. “Well, at least he has style” commented Brinsley “And the security seems well designed too. There’s a door in the dam with no guards on it, which would encourage would-be adventurers to sneak in, but I’ll bet anything that it’s an underwater tunnel with no branches, and that there is a security station on the other end. Time to go topside and do some scouting, it’ll give me a chance to brush up my camouflage skills.”

Day 5 – Evening

Moving carefully and stealthily, Brinsley had made it to the edge of the lake and found a small cave to hide in. It bore the signs of having been inhabited, but whatever had lived there had left some time ago, probably about the time the tower had been built. Brinsley was just able to fit, and he lay there silently recording his findings.

“The original landscape appears to have been a lake fed by two rivers and emptied by two more. All four rivers have been drained, indicating some upstream construction as well. The four riverbeds roughly align with the four small towers, and the doors in the dams are the only land entrances. The lake itself has been expanded to be almost perfectly circular and has been quite thoroughly trapped. What appeared to be water was revealed to be highly corrosive acid, and the only thing living in it is a type of genetically engineered carnivorous algae. In addition to being able to survive the acid, the algae has been modified to glow brightly when feeding, causing it to act as an alarm system as well.

“The riverbeds are patrolled regularly, but with enough variance to make them unpredictable. They appear to exist solely as a trap, as I have observed no traffic other than the patrols. All actual movement is carried out by air – the roof of the center tower turns out to be a hologram disguising a landing pad. The only magic in the place is a maximum strength anti-magic ward, the kind set up to counter everything, which is probably the most expensive thing in the whole tower. So “Darchon” seems to have something against mages. The final obvious piece of security is a grid of anti-air auto-lasers. It’s on a pretty sensitive trigger, as I found out about it when it took out a pigeon. Incoming aircraft don’t follow any particular route, so there must be a way for it to recognize friendly targets. If I had my old equipment, that would be my way in, but I’m starting over, and that means I’m going in through a riverbed tunnel like a rookie.”