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	Message: : : Last time on tour of duty we killed some of Tfear’s personal guards and we : got whisked away to an old Jarro station orbiting Lh’owon to activate a : weapon to contain the W’rk before Tfear’s Trih Xeem unleashes it to wreak : chaos on our reality. : When I signed up for Infinity’s Tour Of Duty, I preemptively declined to : write up Aye Mak Sicur. I just looked up “preemptive” in wiktionary and it : says it means to deter an anticipated unpleasant situation. That’s not : accurate to what I mean, because I wouldn’t call this unpleasant. I just : assumed I couldn’t do this map the justice it deserves. But honestly… who : could? It reallyy just needs to be played. So from here on I’m going to : pretend we’re going into this with no expectations, like this is just : another map and I’ll try to save the Masterpiece of Level Design speech : for the end. : We start in a cramped room with a few slimy cubby holes. The door is jammed, : but some investigation shows us a strobed light next to one of the slime : holes, and we get stuck when we go in that particular one. Some button : mashing opens a tunnel flowing with slime. Are we entering a Jjarro sewer? : That would be some sixty million year old sewage we’re wading through. : We can hear the s’pht’kr battling it out with some hunters and I help them : out a bit with my flechette through the narrow windows. This map has my : favorite ambient sound effect in Infinity: the creaking metal sound. : Helen’s Guardian of Steel has a similar sound and it scoffs in the face of : those who say “metallic levels have no atmosphere (or something like : that).” It makes you feel that the place is ancient and barren, but at the : same time something could be happening where you can’t see and a big hunk : of old metal could fall off the ceiling on your head. : Anyway. : We pop out in a place with a lift to a 2x canister and a teleport. There’s a : terminal near the door (that’s jammed) which says: : : Wow, so the W’rk is doubt. Does that mean when Tycho refers to himself as : doubt he is… was that even Tycho at all on bagged again? Did the work use : some time travel powers to possess Tycho and speak through him? This is a : crazy theory, but perhaps Tycho and the W’rk have been merged in the same : way Durandal and Thoth are. Yeah, that does sound too crazy… but Tycho was : leading on that he knew a bit more than he should have on his own. : It’s only thanks to Thoth speak that I made a connection like that. Thoth’s : weird crypto-dialect helped me understand more than plain english would : have. Weird, isn’t it? But then something’s clogged up their thought with : an overthought unravel and it appears Durandal has taken over with : typical UESC Marathon AI instruction-speak. None of Durandal’s sass; just : boring Leela-like instructions, with some hints that Thoth is trying to : fight his way back to the surface. We need to find uplink chips (what : else?) and contain this crazy thing before the Trih Xeem lets it escape. : The teleport zaps us in the middle of open fire with Hunters with no time to : enjoy the scenery, though out the window we can see the part of the : station where one of the uplink chips is waiting and a juggernaut is : floating outside (to answer the implicit question: no, you cannot kill : it). We have tons of rockets from the last map and it’s pretty much the : only thing I got since I used up the flechette, so we might as well let : her rip. A button at the side of the window will lower a bridge outside : connected to the door on the platform we teleported in on; this is : something that we should remember for later. There are a lot of ways to go : from here; this is an open ended map, and could by far be the most : nonlinear and confusing maps in Marathon history. I choose to look for the : place where we teleported in at the start, where we see a dead shield : charger and pattern buffer teasing us, the other end of the jammed door : where we started the map (it’s still jammed on this side, so we can’t : return there quite yet), and down some other stairs we see the narrow : window to the sewage where we shot through to kill the hunters in here. : I suppose now’s as good a time as any to whip out the map, no use keeping up : a pretense that we don’t already know where we are. : : We’ve seen fragments of this place in our dreams before, or if we have not : taken the hard paths to find the endings of the timelines beyond our : dreams, this would be our first time visiting it. In any case, now we have : the full Jjarro station accessible to us, divided into three rings. : This map is so dense it literally pushed the infinity engine to it's limit; : it has 1024 polygons, which was the maximum the engine would allow at the : time. For trivia, this is based on an M1 fan map called Pfhactory, and : then expanded as Pfhactory N'Utopia, and then reworked a third time into : the result we have here. I've attempted playing said map in M1 on aleph : one... but just got a bunch of black textures. Bumping around and looking : at the map revealed I started in the same sewage area. : Backtracking to the hall we came from, there is a teleport that takes us to : the lower floor of the main elevator we’ve seen on our previous visits to : this station. The teleporter in this shaft was once a level exit, but now : we can use it to get back to the big window room and inactive pattern : buffer. Taking the elevator up to the juggernaut we’re dreading reveals a : welcome surprise of S’pht’Kr distracting him and the hunters, so we can : make a break across the room to the 2x charger and pattern buffer. Whew, I : needed that! I’m pretty sure the physics are evil and allows the : juggernauts to respawn, so I’m not sure if he should warrant my attention. : Also, the first uplink chip is in the middle of this room; I think that’s : worth mentioning, and we should go pick that up. : Now, due to the security officer’s crippling inability to hold two uplink : chips at once (even Duke Nukem could carry two guns), we have to find : where we plug this thing in. : If we explore the narrow shaft to the south, we can find some ammo in the : not-so-dead-ends-since-the-doors-open-now and we can jump across a gap in : one of the tall shafts to get to a door with a yellow canister. Where to : go, where to go, hmm… can you tell I’m writing this as I go along without : a pre-conceived plan of the most optimal route? Just thought you’d like to : know I’m wandering aimlessly. : Well, we can drop down to the place we “started” after that sewage swim, and : we can run through that “troll corridor" I mentioned the last time I : wrote up one of these levels. This time the door at the end is open and : there are no teleporting troopers, but there are hunters on the other side : we’re familiar with. : At the terminal where I exited that other time, we see Thoth lamenting his : poor moon Pthia. : : It’s very sad. : At least, that's what I thought at first. Some emails with Martin and reading : a page of the volunteers series reminded me that the Lh'owon moon is : K'lia. Pthia is yrro's partner the w'rkncacnter killed. I mixed the two : words up in my head somehow. : Interestingly, this terminal shows us a ship we’re familiar with from Ne Cede : Malis. Remember, it’s the first thing we saw out the window when we : started this scenario? Is this retroactive time travel sheenanigans at : play? Or is this Tfear’s attacking vessel we’re looking at? : Martin and I have discussed this terminal at length: VBB: [...] Maybe I : should ask you some questions to help me look like less of an idiot in : this write up. Like, Thoth's terminal with the ship on it—that's the thing : we saw outside on Ne Cede Malis, isn't it? Is that supposed to be the : station we're on in this map? Because it doesn't resemble it well... I was : guessing it could be tfear's ship or something, but that could be the : smaller ship in the image that looks like it's attacking it. [...] : Martin: [...] Hmmm, I've never actually given that terminal pic much : thought, which should seem odd given that it is really one of the few : unique pics in Infinity. Yeah it looks a lot like the ship we saw outside : at the start of NCM, and as you say, it kinda ain't the station we're on! : Bring it up for further discussion - the terminal message itself is also : odd, not surprisingly. The forces in balance and then nothing sounds liken : the mystery we've been trying to solve all along - but is it actually that : in the failed timelines, "balance" led to the destruction of : Lh'owon and the W'rkncacnter and bad things ... and now we're screwing : with the "balance" and ending up with something slightly more : than "nothing"? Is this an innate failing in the concept of : balance? [...] : VBB: [...] What I called the "Thoth terminal," that's my bad. It : does make sense that this Yrro character from the mythology was writing : about his lost partner Pthia. I get confused because I mix Pthia and K'lia : in my head so I thought he was talking about the 11th Clan that left a : thousand years ago, but they're not lost; they've been found and are : kicking the Pfhor's butts! But K'lia will be lost due to the fact that the : singularity will cause a sun to go missing and that moon is no longer : folded into some alternative space. So what's the significance of that : Ship in the terminal pic if it's something relevant (and as old as) the : yrro/pthia mythos? In Carrol Street Station that terminal got erased and : overwritten by a desperate human, apparently destroying a several millenia : year old antique message. It has the Thorandal symbol, not the S'pht : symbol with a "s'pht translator active" message though, so I : don't exactly comprehend the details of what's going on with that message : or who put it there. [...] : Martin: [...] Umm right, I might need to go back to reading things up : again, the yrro terminal is a bit odd here really. You're talking about : the arther frain term on you're wormfood right? I wonder if it had a : precious[sic] incarnation. [...] : Oddly there’s a door leading out to space —which is locked, obviously— but : you have to wonder what this is and why it is here. A boarding area for : other ships? : : I die a bit and it’s just… honestly there’s too much to explore to describe : coherently, but there’s sort of a docking bay like place we can drop into : from the main juggernaut room above, and if we somehow navigate around the : ship to get to the platforms above the room, we’ll find a button that : opens the windows and turns on an alarm to reveal a juggernaut and a kinda : radio dish looking thing (???). : : Anyway, near here we find the place to plug in our uplink chip. Thorandal is : on a terminal nearby to give us the update explaining what this machine is : actually going to do when activated and where the 2nd chip is (I already : spoiled the location near the beginning, but Thorandal is here to confirm : it): : : That chip is in a weird location, as we’ll see, and it’s tricky to get to. A : singularity capable of swallowing the nova would kinda make Tfear’s : efforts to wipe out the s’pht’kr and flee futile, wouldn’t it? In M2 we : were at a stalemate at this point because of the nova and had to wait some : 50 years or whatever for the humans and s’pht’kr to team up and bomb the : pfhor home world, but if the s’pht’kr can just stomp tfear and battle : group seven right here and now without any effort or severe losses, it : should mean the pfhor will be losing a lot faster. Too bad none of the : aftermath of this alternate timeline is explained in the scenario’s ending : (semi-spoiler). : Anyway, if we go back to the big window with the button to lower the bridge, : we’ll see a door opened up to the sewerage where we started, and the : teleporter to the door on that platform. Now we can lower the bridge and : teleport up there to the second uplink chip (alternatively you can rocket : jump, but really, now). : I got stuck in the bridge while battling the hunters when the door closed and : had to press the inside button to lower myself back down to get inside : again. Why did the Jjarro design this bridge thing like this? Well, BUNGIE : designed it for the puzzle, but what’s the in-story purpose of something : like this? I think this area may be risen at default to give room for : incoming ships outside, possibly, like those folding bridges for ships : passing underneath IRL and the water world of Mario Bros 3. That’s what I : think, anyway. Now we can jump to reach the floating uplink chip and read… : this terminal: : Okay, there's like, 26 more pages of this, but you know what? Go look it up : on the story page. I'm very sorry to Martin or PS or whoever it was that : took the time to take 27 screenshots of this hexadecimal mess, but I ain't : posting it here just to waste my own time and effort bloating up the page. : Seriously, go read it all here if you're so interested. Then tell me I'm : a lazy piece of smashed nebulon for omitting 90% of that filler. : This is a continuation of the hexadecimal started way back on Ne Cede Malis, : and supposedly putting them together creates a marathon map file called : Hats off to Eight Nineteen! I've never played the map myself ( ), but we : have seen it in terminal images in some of the durability knife story in : our dreams, and I'm pretty sure what we see in the image is all there is : to it. We do see another terminal in that screenshot, and it does have : text, but instead of covering that map in it's own entry I'll post that : terminal text here. I could just tell you it's bad fanfiction, but... here : it is to read for yourself: —no, no, I'll spare this tour of duty entry : from one more textwall and just give you another link. My research tells : me this was someone in Double Aught's idea for a future, non-Marathon game : (an rpg maybe?). : We have left the Big Lipped Alligator moment and will now proceed with our : scheduled Tour of Duty. : The second uplink panel is near those inactive shield charger and pattern : buffer on the other side of the jammed sewer door (the uplink panel itself : was inactive until we activated the first one, I think). Inserting the : second chip rewards us with the active pattern buffer and a 3x charger! : The jammed sewer door opens, and traveling through the muck again and : reading the terminal gives us our goodbye message: : : and we are warped to the finale screen. : I'm tempted to say "make of that what you want" to minimize word : count, but that's not why we're here, is it? We don't get an epilogue : summarizing the history of everything that happens between the humans, the : s'pht, and the pfhor like we do in Marathon 2, leaving a lot of : differences unaccounted for. What about Robert Blake and the Bobs? Thoth : didn't send us to a pfhor refueling station to hijack for their escape, : and Tfear had us slaughtering and trapping them for enslavement, so we : don't know if they're okay this time. Presumably the pfhor lost the war, : but everything else in the M2 ending screen has been demoted to fanfiction : because of infinity. I hate to say that, but can you call a timeline that : essentially didn't happen canon? That's the thing, though. What if M2 was : real, and infinity was all a dream? Despair, Rage, Envy, Aye Mak Sicur - : DREAMS. It would be fitting for an expansion pack for none of it to count. : Yes, that's what infinity is, fanboys - an expansion of Marathon 2, not a : sequel. The scenario's not called Marathon 3; it's Marathon Infinity, so : stop speculating about Bungie making "Marathon 4." That : irritates me greatly. : That's an entire paragraph and I haven't even started covering the contents : of the endscreen. This screen is normally incomprehensible to all but the : most attentive of first time players, and even after bathing in : Marathon's story until you're a Marathon encyclopedia it's still a mystery : what it means that you are destiny. Leaving us in the dark as to what's : happened after the w'rk was contained in a singularity, it skips forward : to describe the closure of the universe Durandal and Tycho were both : seeking to escape. This screen is narrated in the second person, and it's : not told who is talking to us, but the easiest thing to assume is this is : Durandal (or thorandal, whatever). It certainly can't be S'bbhuth, because : this screen tells us he attempted to escape only to meet his doom. So... : was S'bbhuth another rampant AI? This lends credence to that theory, : thought it's still likely he's some kind of immortal jarro or s'pht : hybrid... thing. : The art itself shows some kind of tiny ship hurtling in an orage void, and : then a big hand etched into a bloodstain. This symbolizes... I don't know. : Is it all the player, w'rkncacncters, Durandal, or what? : What's important to take away from this is nothing else in the universe (or : at the very least, S'bbhuth and whoever is talking to us) survived the : closure. We alone, the player, escaped. We are Destiny, retroactively : namedropping a game Bungie would make two decades in the future (as in, : last year. Do you feel old?). Whether Destiny the game has anything tied : in with Destiny the Mjollnir Mark IV Battleroid security officer, I don't : know — I haven't played that other game — but this may have something to : do with the supposed Jjarro technology that was used to create us that we : tapped into a new level of potential in Ne Cede Malis. Whether we're aware : of what we were doing or not, the title of Destiny refers to our ability : to undo any natural course of events and pick a new timeline. Nothing is : allowed to deviate from destiny's plan because we'll continue dreaming : until we eat the right path. We are the vessel of fate, making history go : our way even when there are multiple outcomes. We have died a thousand : times, and will die a thousand more until we meet success. The pattern : buffers make it all a foregone conclusion. I guess that can all be an : analogy for having a save feature in video games, making mistakes : meaningless as players can just jump back in time with the benefit of : hindsight, but that's a discussion we don't need to derail to. : Here's some more of our correspondence about this: VBB: I never checked : out the volunteers series much (I just noticed Hamish compiled it all in a : volunteers link under "facts and puzzling things about..."). : It looks like they did the exact thing we're doing now. So... why are we : making another series of writeups? (Because we have maps?) He's more : succinct about the level architecture than I was (i.e., assumes you : already know it and doesn't mention it much. I take the opposite : approach). I disagree with some of his asspull theories. He says the : player talks directly to S'bbuth in the first terminal and I'm certain : that's all Thorandal (the overthought interruption is Durandal's side : trying to take over to do the talking in human-readable dialect). He says : the "we, as Durandal" line is referring to the Jjarro working : through Durandal which... no, it's just Thorandal clarifying that the : Durandal half of him who was the SO's master is the one giving you : freedom, which is more personal to us since Durandal has manipulated us : from the start. : [...] : I don't buy that Infinity and the M2 ending are the same timeline. I mean, : the way M2 ended, the W'rk should have wrecked everything, but it doesn't : refer to Durandal as a merged entity and it makes a refrerence to that : refeuling ship full of humans you saved in the M2 timeline which couldn't : have happened in the Tycho and Tfear enslaved timeline we were in. Bah... : I put a more effort into these private emails than I do in the write ups. : Martin: Volunteers is a main link off the story page front, it's just that : there are so many links it's hard to spot. I read some of them back when : they were posted and have read them a few times in the years since. I came : to understand much from them, and always consider them as a reference for : our purposes, but some stuff I have only come to understand this time : around; that's kind of why we're doing it. As you said, we have also been : a lot more thorough and included a lot more discussion, but I consider it : to be building upon volunteers and all the rest of what's on the story : page, rather than being a one stop shop. We stand on the shoulders of : giants :). Plus of course we have new people that were not around back : then, PS was hardly born even. And it keeps the place on life support :). : Not reacting emotionally to your dissing volunteers or anything, just : other stuff to think about. : [...] : My take in few words is that what we do in infinity then allows us to return : to the m2 timeline - the w'rkncacnter issue is dealt with in all timelines : somehow? And then things continue just as m2 told us, without the : catastrophic stuff that it rather forgot to mention. I just can't see how : else to deal with the two games. The fact that durandal has nothing more : to do with humanity can be understood as he's busy hanging with thoth and : learning all sorts of more interesting stuff, before we eventually get to : infinity's end screen and the end of everything. We were pretty important : really. Of course the fact that durandal exists on his own at m2's end is : a problem for this, but I'm sure there's a way around that somewhere :). : Well, that concludes Tour of— But Wait, There’s more! Down in the main window : room where we teleported in from the sewage is an elevator leading up to a : 3x canister, and there are several other health canisters behind doors and : spawning ammo on top of crates (the AR ammo is useless to me since I never : got one). There’s a really big hallway with lift stairs and a juggernaut : floating around that I ran around in a few times, but never mentioned as : it is not necessary to complete the map, just a nuisance if you stay in : there too long. : The real bonus is up in the central juggernaut room. If we go into one of the : corridors and tab a wall inside a drop, the wall will open, revealing a : secret we can hop into. : : Inside is a bunch of ammo, a hunter, and a terminal. Before reading the : terminal, I want to take a moment to read the terminal. What am I talking : about? Well look at what terminals look like in the Jjarro station with : Goran Svenson's Hi Res texture pack: : This clearly says something. It's barely legible, but it is readable text. : I will do my best to transcribe it: : ~text terminal interface ~2992 dud : : It's too bad, perhaps : if I could have delayed : the pfhor from using their : weapon, I could have sent : you to explore the ruins of : Lh'owon. Perhaps what you : found would give us the answers : that we ???? need so desperately: a way to stop the chaos. The purpose of : the station to which you're currently : standing, and why the chaos hasn't come. : : here yet, that with each ????(second?) the : chaos grows, I am doomed to die : here, after so many triumphs. I have. : : So, just a copy/paste of what Durandal said on Ne Cede Malis. : Now, for the actual contents of the terminal we're looking at. : : : : : : : : : : There you have it. Grek Kirkpatrick named one of his cats Grendel. A terminal : on either Son of Grendel or Bagged again has "Hastur rules the : earth" hidden in the text, incidentally, as well as the initials gjk : (I think. Maybe that's on another map). : So ends Marathon Infinity and begins the Vidmaster's Challenge. The vidmaster : levels themselves are remakes of levels we've already seen and aren't much : to commentate on, but that hasn't stopped me in the past. Martin, : surprisingly, has never played the Vidmaster levels before, so if we : should tackle those, I'll leave him to take up the mantle, under the : conditions that he stop this kindergarten nonsense and scratchstart Try : Again on Total Carnage difficulty, punching and grenading all switches and : not using caps lock for the run key and all that. (we must revise to : "turn always run off") : I'll put it to a vote in the comments whether we should do these or not. I : say yes, so that's one vote in favor so far. : Did I say I was going to monologue about why this map is a masterpiece at the : end? Meh... this may already the longest write up in the ToD series and : the map speaks for itself. Just go play it. : : : : : : : : : : *dies from carpal tunnel*
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