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	Message: : : Last time on tour of duty, Tycho promised us a party with Tfear's personal : guards. : We are teleported into a large octagonal chamber with an open sky and nowhere : to go. We see some ominous looking skeletons resting in the room with us, : we feel the platform beneath our feet slowly descending as we wait to meet : our fate below. Some pfhor onlookers are cheering us on silently in a high : opening we can’t reach, shield chargers and pattern buffers behind them : taunting us. : The map: : There's not much to it. This is just an arena. : Weapons and ammo teleport in, one of the doors open and the battle begins as : we meet some black armored pfhor fighters! : : These guys are bigger and badder than any class of pfhor fighter we met : before, and I mean that literally because the sprites got scaled up in : size. These are the mutant hulk basketball players of the pfhor species. : Scratchstarting, the only guns available to us are rockets, the flechette, : and our pistol we won’t be using. The ammo respawns, so go nuts, but be : careful not to land any finishing blows with a rocket. The pfhor will drop : uplink chips, but ONLY on their soft death. The hard death gives you no : reward, so we have to kill all of them with the flechette to get the : secret on this map (or our fists… if you’re nuts). If you do use the : rockets and push them into the lava— oh yeah, the platform we started on : lowered down into a pit of lava— some strange force will make them fly : back up, so no worries about losing the chips in lava. If we fall in : ourselves we find out there are lifts around the outer ring of lava. I : think my perception of wind pushing them up was more cool. : After they’re dead, we’re free to go in the room they came from to insert : those uplink chips, save at a pattern buffer, recharge (3x!) and read a : terminal from our new merged construct: : That &ci1lc smells like a reference to Tycho, or Tycho trying to hack in to : stop duranda... thothrandal... duranthoth... S’bbuth(?) from trying to : reach us. If the latter, I don’t see why he’d bother as the language is : too cryptic for poor dumb Security Officer Us to understand. The Tour of : Duty Us do try, though, and here’s my attempt to untangle it. Right, got : the red &cilic out of the way already, so, we’re greeted with : Decline.Decipher.Decadence. Triple D. I don’t know what that means : (perhaps it’s Double D of Ed Edd n’ Eddie’s super form). Maybe this is : symbolic of Durandal initially wanting to reject (decline) thoth’s : mind-meld, us struggling to decipher what’s going on with both the : timeline and his strange speech patterns, and the two merging together : ultimately lead to creating a construct with the brains (decadence) to : stop the chaos and set the timeline straight? “Left behind by one” seems : to refer to Thoth, while “and one rampant” is Durandal. “New comes” is the : new construct created by both their minds that is greater than the sum of : it’s parts (I keep calling them “constructs.” Thoth speak is getting to my : brain). The rest of the rambling appears to be the Thoth mind trying to : tell the durandal mind that the two of them are blending into one entity, : though I suspect that part about doubt may be another Tycho reference. It : ends with line.cipher.cadence (lcc) which, again, I don’t know. : When we’re ready, we push the button in this room to open the next door to : meet our next wave of challengers, the monopoly boardwalk blue troopers on : steroids. : : After dispatching them, we insert their uplink chips in the chamber they : emerged from (one at a time, as we don’t have the ability to carry two) : and press the magic button to reveal: : : It took me quite a few tries to get a screenshot without a magenta hue from : their plasma, and this is the best I could manage. These guys are a bit : larger than your standard hunter, but not quite as big as a MOAH. Don’t be : mislead, they are just as tough as the MOAH and their plasma has this : irritating tracking ability that makes it near impossible to engage them : unscathed. The fighters and troopers on steroids were about as large as : the common hunters, which makes me ponder if we’ve been fighting that : genus of the pfhor species all along since M1, just in weak green or brown : hunter armor. Fusion shots activate their hard death, so we can’t rely on : super effective attacks, lest we land a critical hit and miss our reward. : I don’t have a Zeuss scratch starting anyway, so… it takes me quite a few : tries to not accidentally finish off at least one with a rocket, and the : last button reveals—you guessed it—a juggernaut! (Sorry; I lied when I : said I'd stop using longdashes) : The interesting thing about this Juggernaut is it will always be a brown : major no matter the difficulty (MAYBE kindergarten has a 50% chance of : changing it to a silver balloon? Idunno). This is something I didn’t know : for a long time since I usually play on either Major Damage or Total : Carnage, but if we played all through M2 and Infinity in normal difficulty : or below up to this point we would have only seen the weaker gray : Juggernaut minors. This is because the map editor only has one object for : juggernauts, and the physics in this level is designed to only spawn major : juggernauts. Or is this just the first time the “juggernaut major” map : object has been used? I don’t claim to be an expert on marathon mapping : mechanics; I just know there’s something different about this situation. : This is the first time someone playing easy would have ever met a brown : juggernaut, so it counts as a climactic boss encounter for them, right? : Double Aught could have added a new boss enemy here, but due to Marathon's : dedication to minimalism we got a bunch of recolors. Comon, aren't : grendels and potato anuses a way more cool addition to this series than : actual new enemy aliens? : An interesting thing I’ve considered: is this juggernaut Tfear? Considering : that the terminals we're about to read will suggest he's still alive, : probably not. Marathon has a tendency to ditch video game logic in favor : of realism logic (except in a few gameplay instances), so an admiral isn't : likely to be the biggest baddest warrior in the whole army; he's more : likely to be a guy hanging back giving everyone else orders like a pokemon : trainer. : Well, I’m going to do this the lame way and run around him to the finish. We : can ride up an elevator on the opposite end that just opened and brutally : murder the spectators who I guess were marked as both blind and death to : prevent them from rushing into the battle themselves. : We find a shield charger and a terminal, which I accidentally ran past in my : playthrough as I was running from the juggernaut, but let's just pretend I : stopped to read it: : : : Heh, back in the beginning I thought it was Tycho trying to infiltrate : ThoRandal’s message, but it was really them that hacked the pfhor’s : network to talk to us, which makes more sense given the situation we were : in =) : “Victorious units” was a poor assumption. Interesting that the destination is : to “gladiator” units. Is this an inaccurate choice of translation, or were : those hulks on steroids slaves themselves? Oh, I don’t mean those hulks, : we know they’re slaves. That was a confusing word choice on my part. : Thorandal is—hmm, Thorandal. I like that. It sounds like Thor (and Thor : sounds like pfhor)—by the way, I really like that it’s so easy to make the : longdash on a mac—option+shift+minus—windows has this ghastly system of : unicode you have to memorize and enter it on the numpad to make it work : (no, you can't use the numbers on top. It has to be that thing on the : right that the original marathon made you use to move by default) after : holding down some other buttons—where was I before I went off-topic? (last : time I’ll abuse the longdash, I promise) : Thorandal’s dialect has changed to language we can more easily interpret. Is : Durandal’s will taking prevalence? It’s Durandal’s language, but he’s : talking about things only Thoth would know, like The W’rkncacnwhatever, : s’bbuth, and the jarro machine. Or, at least, Durandal would carry the : pretense of ignorance because he only shares information with us on a need : to know basis ;) : Thorandal has contacted “S’bboath,” which the story site will tell you is : just an alternate spelling of S’bbhuth. That debunks the “Thoth + Durandal : = S'bbuth” theory earlier… or does it? We’ve had foreshadowing that Thoth : was anticipating merging with something, and may have at one point been : merged with another AI until it was split apart, waiting for it to return : (remember the terminal on We’re Everywhere?). Could Thoth have been : attached to S’bbuth before the pfhor invasion? It’s plausible… the cryptic : s’pht history/mythology terminals from M2 mention the leaders of the s’pht : clans merging into one entity... or splitting apart... or something like : that. (Go back and look it up if you're confused, because I'm not digging : through that mess to find the right terminals to show here.) : Notably, this is the first time we get an adequate explanation of what : w’rkncancters are: chaotic godlike entities trapped in stars and storms : whose memory has survived in folklore for over 60 million years. If you : read the manual to pathways into darkness, you may recall that the alien : god was estimated to have crashed into the Yucatan peninsula sixty million : years ago, which is coincidentally when scientists believed a meteor : killed the dinosaurs and set the climate into the ice age (Bungie’s sense : of humor is pretty lulzy, right?). What do I mean, estimated ; the jarro : explicitly told us it was sixty million years ago so we must take that as : a solid fact. To cut down a long-winded ramble short: Marathon really is : the sequel to Pathways into Darkness, in more than just the spiritual : successor sense. This war between Jarro and the W’rknacncter cited in : Lh’owon mythology is the event that flung W’rks… I’m just going to call : them W’rks from now on- into Earth and Lh’owon’s star. : We have to make a leap across a gap to an elevator to kill the last of the : spectators, where we find a PB and another terminal, which I skim through : without reading to avoid juggernaut fire, but I can plaster the message : for posterity here: : : Well, that explains why the spectators weren’t fighting us (storywise). It’s : interesting that Tfear command specifies they will be executed first, then : mentions the bets they made will be confiscated, because it makes sense : they’d be concerned about their money after they’re dead, right? What are : these “wagers?” Is it confirmed the pfhor use currency? This is a race of : slave traders so are they dealing in conditioned species trafficking? I : had the impression the lowly fighter caste didn’t have the social status : to own slaves and their pay mostly consisted of food and a wall to plug : their head-flap into, so what is this aspect of sub-willful rank pfhor : culture being downplayed here? : If we didn’t insert the secret uplink chips, we would get an exit message, : but since we did, thothrandal teleports us to a secret chamber full of : ammo we may have looked down into from the arena above, but was : inaccessible until now. I’m playing on Total Carnage so I get to take all : of it =) : And now the exit message: : : : Well, off we go to have an epic boss battle and finally see what the alien : god in PiD looks like! Well, not really. Due to Kirkpatrick's scattered, : cryptic storytelling style and the lovecraftian-esque "less is more, : and nothing is everything" ideals to worldbuilding in this series, : (spoilers) we never see it. : The next map is a big one. It may take a while for me to do a write up of it. : It also concludes the Marathon series as a whole... and, it goes without : saying, it will be the last Tour of Duty entry lest we take on the secret : vidmaster levels or unofficial scenarios. It's been a fun ride. See you : next time as we enter a place that seems familiar to us, as if from an old : dream, but we can't quite remember...
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