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	Message: : : : Tempus Irae 20 …evil so singularly personified… : Last time on Tour of Duty we tried to remember our instructions from the : previous Repository level, as we explored the K’alima, trying to blow it : up. Typing this up, I find myself thinking of Blake’s 7 episode Seek : Locate Destroy and Vila’s speech to the guards: “Hello there. How are : you? Excuse me wandering about your premises but I wonder if you can help : me. I’m an escaped prisoner. I was a thief but recently I’ve become : interested in sabotage. In a small way you understand, nothing too : ambitious, I hate vulgarity don’t you? Anyway, I’ve come to blow something : up. What do you think will be most suitable?” Mind you that’s pretty much : the conspicuous approach we, as the SO, take to most missions :D. And yes, : we made a bit of a dent on our first foray, climbing up and down between : engineering drive reactor cores and smashing firewall switches. : And then we approached a wall and teleported to the next level, this level, : instantly … it was just my writeup that took another month *sigh*. But : here we are! Now, looking back at the last terminal, we are heading down : to the auxiliary reactor core to smash more switches and then we can point : the ship at the Sun. Sounds good! : We start in a roundish room with a view available of where we just came from, : but that little window starts closing shortly after we arrive. A door : opposite doesn’t want to open, but then the side walls start opening on : their own, revealing some Hunters that want to kill us – get in line! They : fail anyway, and we proceed ‘left’ through a door to find quite a : wonderful haven: a 2x shield recharger, an oxygen recharger, a terminal, : and a Pattern Buffer! Also a door that starts opening and then immediately : closes again, but I guess you can’t have everything! The map and the : spoiler guide suggest there’s not much going on beyond anyway. : The terminal is communication from some “rebel” Pfhor I guess, going against : the decision from central on the previous level that Ha’rar would be : executed for treason for trying to overthrow the Command Mecha. They have : come to understand that this whole business of messing with history is not : a great idea – yay for Pfhor self-awareness! : : : : : Heading back out, we quickly join back up to where that door wouldn’t open to : start with, so at least this is not a massive detour level. There is : another door that is just slightly open, but again, not to worry, that is : absolutely the style of the time! We find a Fighter in front of another : terminal, trying to send a message to further the conspiracy to save : Ha’rar, but unfortunately we interrupt him, à la Infinity. We then proceed : down some stairs – the start of a rather impressive figure 8 from here, : with several rooms off to the sides, and various Pfhor along the way. The : spoiler guide says that the whole level is 36 World Units tall, which : isn’t something I readily understand, but the idea that combined with the : previous level, it sees us descend 54 storeys, that I get, and … wow. : : : : : The first room off to the side from the stairs takes us back up a bunch, and : has us look out over the chamber and indeed witness the execution of : Ha’rar, a Fighter against several Enforcers. Well that was never really : going to go any other way :(. The spoiler guide says we should sit and : curse the injustices of Pfhor society, but I think it was just partly our : fault what with the previous terminal. Anyway, we can’t do anything about : it, and at this point I got distracted by something else. My examination : of the full map, a little after I got here in my playthrough, made me a : bit suspicious – let’s take a look. : : : First of all, this level really is into stairs in a big way! Unfortunately : the main staircase gets lost a bit in the 3d rendering, but the height as : mentioned earlier, is clear from the massive scenery space to the right. : But more specifically on the 2d map, right where we are now, near the : bottom of the figure 8, there is some weird overlap – a secret! Indeed, : the wall here opens up to reveal a 3x recharger, and then a lift down, : which we can see in the 3d map, and really does take us a long way down, : in fact all the way to the end of this set of stairs, plus it gives us an : invincibility powerup to boot! But that way we would miss some interesting : stuff, so let’s save it for later. : Carrying on with the staircase as normal instead, we have an annoying : downhill fight with a bunch of Fighters and Invisible Enforcers. I think : the latter are actually doing their enforcing job as well here – perhaps : these were some of the Ha’rar sympathisers? RIP. The next side room is : nearby, and affords us a view out into a massive open area with some : Juggernauts. It’s just a small observation room though, we can’t get any : closer, and that’s never a bad thing! : The next side room gives us some ammo, and a terminal, which starts off as a : S’pht one, berating us for wasting time here, but then gets taken over by : this new merged Tycho-Us entity, which carries on the whole S’pht liars : sentiment, suggesting that they put our world in danger in the first place : – I thought that was Durandal calling the Pfhor, but I guess the reference : may be to things longer ago than that. I like Tycho saying he cannot : tolerate more than one of himself – when the M2 final screen tells us that : later Pfhor AI personalities were all based on images of Tycho. Plus, in : himself he has always seemed to be a candidate for split-personalities :). : : : : : : : : We can run around the rest of this room – I just tried jumping off the : platform and it worked; then I started wondering if I could get back up, : and thankfully this was no Defend THIS bridge :). Anyway, I don’t think : there are secrets of any kind; in fact there’s nothing of interest at all, : a bit of a waste of quite a nicely shaped room, but hey, I guess that’s : engineering!. : The next side room lets us look over the Juggernaut area again, quite a bit : lower down. We still can’t access it at all, but this one does take us to : a terminal that documents experiments with “nonmagnetic-fusion drives” in : these Juggernauts – it says they weren’t sure what would happen when they : were destroyed, but when I finished reading they were dead anyway – not : sure if something dramatic happens on TC. The promised S’pht’Kr choose to : help out here, rather than coming inside where we could use them! Either : way, the terminal explains the differences between the standard : Juggernauts and the newly-designed ones in this scenario. Interesting : stuff. : : : : : : : And then we reach the bottom of the staircase again, an encounter with some : Drones, and a 3x shield recharger and oxygen recharger. A small path leads : to a ring inside the ring created by the staircase – both sides take us : promptly to teleporters just like the ones we encountered during the : previous level, and indeed at its end, with the blue electric fence : textures. And again they just jump us a few inches to the other side, and : on we go, to find a Pattern Buffer and another terminal. Umm, no it’s not : quite that simple. When I was reading about the heights in the spoiler : guide, I noticed the line “the teleporters in the middle ring are : duplicated at -9 WU and 9 WU” but didn’t really get the implication at the : time. These teleporters actually also chuck us back up 18 World Units, I : guess mainly because they couldn’t make the level any taller at this : point? Well anyway, the polygons are duplicated at least as far as we can : see beyond them around the arc of the ring, so it is not at all obvious! : Anyway, I mentioned a terminal! : : : : Tycho might just be referring to the invincibility powerup, and it is : probably a good idea to go and get it now – all we know so far is that : there is a massive lift up ahead: what could possibly go wrong? Having : said that, you can’t access that secret from the bottom of the stairs, so : he would be referring to a pretty big backtrack, and there’s a bunch of : SPNKR ammo just hanging out by this terminal, so is there a SPNKR : somewhere as well? There’s no mention of it anywhere, and I think I’m only : missing one because of Never Satisfied, so I guess there is no deeper : conspiracy here. Shame we won’t get to use that ammo though! : Well, anyway, set the lift to head down before you go and get the : invincibility, or it will pretty much wear off before you get to the : action. At the top of the lift there is a ledge with two switches, a blue : one that activates the lift, and a red one that sets a series of doors to : the left slightly opening and closing repeatedly. The same layout is : present at the bottom of the lift’s journey, but the doors open fully, and : we carry right on through them! : It’s a decent fight, with Blue Hunters and a MOAC as well as some Green : Hunters and hangers-on. We stand in a long open space lit at its dead-end, : which feels like it wanted to be a door, but never got around to it. Along : the way there are ways onto those other rounded staircases we noted on the : map, and boy are they dark. Not good to be playing this with the sun : around! I mean Marathon was always a dark game, and I guess I ask for it : by having its brightness on “Dark”, but it’s extra hard on stairs … and : when there’s half-a-dozen Invisible Enforcers on them as well. Quite a : nasty encounter even on Kindergarten for writeups :). : These were the stairs to the left that I went down, and after dealing with : the Enforcers, we are presented with a door, which heads us through a : corridor underneath that we were just in before. Through the door at the : other end, there’s a terminal that goes through the statuses of the : various systems here in engineering. Currently only the weaponssubsystem : is off-nominal, in fact marked as shutdown – did we do that *cute, : innocent face*? : : : : : : From here we can go to the left and right, to rooms with walls of : brightly-lit engineering … stuff, and as we go by, panels open up to : reveal our destructible circuits! So we destruct them – and that is all we : need to do down here. Those instructions at the end of the previous level : said as much, even to the point of the panels sliding open as we arrived! : The terminal reports changes, with interlockingsystems in critical error, : and failsafeinterlock failure, yay! : : : : : : But it is not obvious that we are finished down here, and we are not used to : going back to earlier terminals for success messages in this series, so I : spent some time checking out the other stairs to the right. : These take us up to some switches – the left one activated and the other : unresponsive. If we deactivate the left one, a door opens just opposite, : to a corridor with the door closed at the other end. After things have run : their course, the right hand switch becomes responsive, but it just closes : the near door again. However, if we go through the door and then activate : the right hand switch, we can get through to the other side of this : corridor, kill another Enforcer, and get some very slight views out at : another inaccessible space on the map. : Not being able to work out anything else of note down here, I eventually : headed back up to check the terminals. The one at the top of the lift now : has a bunch of garbled text, starting with “I have repressed Tycho for the : moment”. Huh. Wasn’t it a merger of Tycho and the SO that was ranting at : us earlier? Is this our own image trying to take over? Great, now we’re : talking to ourselves! : : : : : : : : But that doesn’t get us off the level. For that we have to return to the only : vaguely S’pht-y terminal we’ve seen around here, where they told us to : stop wasting time. Now they tell us that we’re off to smash more circuits : and open some Enforcers to vacuum – well they are trying to fix the stuff : we broke … that’ll teach them! It’s a very small level, as is the : following one, so should be quick to write up, and there’s the added bonus : that VBB has done writeups for the Mt Vesuvius levels, so we really are : almost out of the woods here! : : : :
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