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 | PID Tour of Duty Chapter 7 | |
| Posted By: Lion O Cyborg | Date: 1/19/19 3:09 a.m. |
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Chapter 7: THIS IS MY BOOMSTICK! Last time on Tour of Duty, I found the DAMN violet Isfet crystal, the green crystal and the nuclear bomb at long last! I also began my descent to the very bottom of the catacombs proper, getting stuck in a small room with limited air and meeting the first of the Spanish speaking tomb raiders. Sweet Christ, I had absolutely no intention of this hiatus being this long. I was at project search the latter half of 2017 and each day there drained me, meaning I had no energy after getting home to concentrate on my Tour of Duty. When I finished it in summer last year, I had to spend a good while recovering, which turned into 6 months despite my wanting to start again. In that time as you may know, I’ve now become a proud Mac gamer, when I got a Macintosh with OSX High Sierra for Christmas 2017 for the sake of making Marathon maps more effectively than on Windows, as the Windows version of Weland as an infuriating tendency to crash whenever I try to draw a few lines, or rather trying line up each one correctly with either existing polygons and sometimes each other before filling. The Mac version doesn’t do that and Aleph One is cross platform anyway so it’s no trouble. Won’t stop me trying to use Weland on Windows too anyway as the idea was to use both. I also got a Sega Saturn, Dreamcast and I aim to save up at some point to finally get a new original Xbox to replace my beloved one that broke in 2006. But all of that is irrelevant just now.
This is the first time I’ve gone back to my old virtual machine after playing PID on my physical Mac and boy do I notice the difference: the lead ice skates effect when moving is in the game, but it’s only a lot more noticeable in the VM as it only has limited RAM. My physical Mac runs really fast whereas PID here runs like molasses going uphill in January. With crutches.
I clear out two rooms of ghasts and save my game in a new slot. Now. I am supposed to go east but I’m sure you all know what’s coming if you’ve read the past entries. I think I’ll go south.
YUCK! I ain’t sticking around for this death message. Reload! Reload! Reload! Those oozes are green because they are made of the poo of typhoid victims. Unlike the regular non diseased ones, they cannot be killed at all. I also can’t hope to get past them without at least one blocking the narrow hallway where they lurk. The next couple of rooms have ghasts in them, the second of which contains an AK47 SABOT round which I immediately place into the cedar box to print more, and a dead Spanish speaking treasure hunter (likely Mexican) with some comparatively useless assault rifle ammo, a rifle of his own and a gas mask.
This is Juan. He can’t remember who his friends were.
The oozes’s digestive tracts are inconceivable anatomy wise as when you look in their mouths as they attack, they seem to stretch on forever. Cue Nietzsche quotes about Lovecraftian horrors. Javier was the one who took led them here. They were looking to find the W’rkncacnter’s vial and raid the pyramid’s gold. Javier survived and we will meet what’s left of him later. Juan died of a poisonous snake bite in the jungle, but the poison only killed him right before the typhoid poo monsters attacked. For some reason, they ignored him and ate the others instead. They will do the same for us if we are poisoned. Maybe it was acidic or toxins salt the meat for them to eat later, only the door closed. Juan also tells us that they tried to help Pedro but they couldn’t move the door.
Possibly both? Or hallucinations as your brain decays and you lose more and more memories? I’m currently fatigued as I write this and the idea doesn’t bear thinking about, as I’ll be going to bed soon and resuming tomorrow. Before I continue, I check out the gas mask.
The mask was probably intended to protect you from the next boss after the typhoid oozes but it doesn’t work. If it was meant to be used as armour, then it likely wasn’t coded in time. Anyway, you know the potion of raw sewage I found near Muller? I have to drink that to deliberately poison myself so the oozes leave me alone. I also must drink a bottle of silver afterward because as far as I know, poison never wears off on its own.
My thoughts exactly; I’ve just been sick on the floor too.
This is creepy. They’re just standing there, with the discarded guns still on the floor. There’s bones in this hallway too and they aren’t human. What else was killed by those things? I actually took too long preparing the snip and I was nearly ambushed by a pair of ghasts that came around the corner. Their moan as they attacked tipped me off. I drink some silver in the next room to cure my shigella, sleep to heal and make some more SABOT magazines and save my game. The next room contains the second major boss fight although the term “boss fight” is rather generous in this case.
This is what happens when a serial killer when a belching problem steals from the BCC’s costume department. Good thing it’s not a pack of teletubbies on steroids, whose monitors are taken from Doom 3: ROE’s Bruisers. *shudder* This guy is Malice, though I originally misremembered the name as Selfishness (which is what he’ll go by if I ever make Path of KAP). Like our diseased fecal friends next door, he can’t be killed and even though the gas mask may have been intended to protect against his toxic gas breath, the code wasn’t written in time so it doesn’t work.
To leg it through the room, shooting as many ghasts as I can with my AK47 as using my limited remaining SMG ammo in my next couple of attempts led nowhere. First I get some extra sleep to make more SABOT rounds. As I run through the hall, I snag the lead box at the first corner near Malice, barely dodging his shot and grab a violet potion at the final corner before I run into my first tear outside the warp zones.
Without wasting a second, I plunge through it. *12 hours later(?)*
Wait, it gets worse! All the remaining floors are among the hardest of the game, containing exclusively ghasts and two monsters we have not fought yet; poisonous skitters and greater nightmares. All exits are tears from now on so there’s no turning back. They also seem to send us much deeper underground than the ladders went. Before moving on, I look at the violet potion I just picked up and the lead box.
I don’t know what real world analogue to the violet potion would be but if pressed I’d go for grape Ramune which I tried at the annual Japan day in Cults this year. It’s delicious and tastes like fancy sweeties I bought from a candy shop as a child. I can’t quite place them either. Possibly refreshers or wham bars? Anyway, the potion here makes you invincible for a short amount of time; a very short amount of time if my 2 or 3 playthroughs on my physical Mac are any indication, namely during the final boss.
The lead box is vitally important. We will need it on the final floor until the end of the game. Picking it up (and it’s contents) brought us to 36 XP and I 24 health. It also has a secondary use as it contains this:
The game says I don’t notice anything interesting but there is something interesting about it: next to the red cloak and Amethyst Ring, this is one of the only equipable treasure items that has an effect on you and unlike the other ring it’s actually worth 2 shits. The Amethyst Ring makes crystals charge more slowly but this one does the opposite. That is very useful in the floors to come. The two teleporters in the room with me lead to the west section of the map. My goal is the two blue potions to the south. The skitter webs are now a sickly green, which should be a warning as to the monsters on this floor.
This is my BOOMSTICK! My favourite gun in the game next to the assault rifle, the grenade launcher behaves more like a shotgun, only much more powerful and with no spread. I’d love it if someone could rip this gun from the game, port it to Aleph One and add a secondary fire mode that fires incendiary grenades that behave exactly like the ones in Strife. That’s what the Boomstick Shotgun I thought of for Path of KAP would be: this grenade launcher with Strife’s grenade launcher secondary fire as its own as a reference to that game. Unfortunately, the muzzle flash blocked the view of the venomous skitter I just shot.
These skitters webs contain poison. Considering the other stuff in them, I dread to think what those poisons are. Getting hit once is a death sentence, or at best a waste of colloidal silver, as it’s the only way to cure poison. This is why you must converse every potion you find. The final boss requires itwn own share of potion hoarding too.
These guys showed up straight away too. The blue greater nightmares are armoured, requiring SABOT rounds or HE grenades to kill. Their ball lightning tracks you, forcing you to take cover behind walls. Fighting them alongside groups of venomous skitters is never fun. I now reload my savegame and try again. I’ll spare you the journey to the potions. All that happened is that I couldn’t avoid being poisoned and I levelled up my grenade launcher skill. The middle teleporter in at the start leads to a similar room. Its two teleporters lead to the east side of the map, which has a blue potion and a violet one. It’s basically more of the same aside from a hallway to the south that has skitter webs and a tear that leads to the next floor.
But I don’t want to take the tear maze! This floor is awful. There’s too many skitters and greater nightmares that shoot at you in the wide open spaces of each half and it’s hard to find time to rest and heal at the start. Just before the save pentagram I get ambushed by a greater nightmare as soon as I teleport in. I think the tear behind me leads to the previous floor, but I know there’s no way back from there. My goals are the potions tucked away in alcoves and corners here. Two silver potions in the south half, two silver plus a red potion in the north.
The floor’s namesake is in the north half and it can occur elsewhere if you kill 7 ghasts in the same general area according to the PID story page. I’ve never done it.
Unlike Please Excuse Our Dust, which is a bad floor not counting its namesake, this one is a lot better. The monsters are still tough but the layout is nice and there’s a small teleporter maze that isn’t too difficult after learning where they go (or using guide). My aim here is to get 2 blue potions, 2 red & 1 violet. The first tear I take leads to a couple of small rooms connected to the left “Square Skitter Web Testicle” on the map.
Following the hall north and around to the east, past a couple of poisonous skitters and a few greater nightmares, I come to the right web testicle and the first red potion. The hallway before the potion room is wide enough to dodge web balls despite the web columns on the east side. I become an expert at the AK47 before getting this far and I’ve been relying on the Boomstick in the rest of this part of the map. The second of the two teleporters in the first room leads to the north part which has the violet potion guarded by more monsters. This place is also heavily infested with green webs. I access the second teleporter room by one of the side tears and the first one I take there leads to the south of the map. There’s 3 rooms with monsters in them down the south hall and the 4th door leads to a hallway, culminating in a webbed area with the second red potion. The final teleporter goes to the upside down flag or radio shaped room at the far east. The main flag area is a good place to be swamped by skitters and nightmares and there’s no room to dodge in the flagpole where you enter. As predicted, I get poisoned by a skitter that was waiting at the end of the flagpole. The southwest of this section has both the colloidal silver potions, one in the second of the two monster rooms, the other just before the door back to the teleporter room. The tear leading to the next floor is in the south of the radio/flag.
Bottom floor. Tools, Guns, Jewellery, Lair of Mumm Ra’s Boss. There’s two save runes right away and an ambush of monsters. I head north along a long, spine shaped pair of hallways. The nooks are great for dodging webs and tracking ball lightning, but they don’t protect against earthquakes. One of the northmost niches on the east part of the spine has a web column in it to trip you up and a similar area on the west part of the spine is actually a small room filled with more webs. There’s a couple of uneventful rooms, one of which has a blue potion in it and now I’m in a room filled with monster corpses and a couple of dead bodies.
I try to speak to the headless body first but it doesn’t work. That makes sense as he has no brain anymore, therefore nothing to communicate with. He only has an assault rifle. I pick up the blue glass vial lying on the floor. This is it.
This is the vial containing the W’rkncacnter that Muller and the Mexican tomb raiders fought so hard yet in vain to get to. It isn’t good. Someone has opened it and the human sized avatar of the W’rkncacnter that the full thing manifested inside the capsule is free. I think the God’s avatar is trying to speed up the waking of its full self, and the full W’rk may have enlisted Muller telepathically to do it too. How else did Muller know so much about the pyramid? The only thing the god didn’t count on was its own dreams and nightmares manifestations killing Muller and his squad. It can’t control the monsters, so the Isfet crystals, ways to reach it etc. may all have been a ploy the W’rkncacnter dreamed about to set it free. It’s just we were able to exploit that after it lost its original purpose. The other body has some useless types of assault rifle ammo and at long last, the gold key!
Now I can finally open the gold door in the swampy area and take all of the gold I find there for myself. But first things first…
That tells me all I need to know. I can only assume the W’rkncacnter itself has the alien gemstone and it is carried by the avatar that Javier released. I continue through a couple more rooms of monsters until I find the 6th and final Isfet Crystal, guarded by a greater nightmare.
The black Isfet crystal petrifies monsters and it’s always a 1 hit kill. However, it can only be used 6 times before shattering. Just ahead is the final save pentagram before the worst part of this floor: the teleporter maze. If you thought the one in Never Burn Money was annoying, this one is even worse. The map that Perseus Spartacus provided reveals the way through the maze. It’s 4 rooms with 4 tears in them which all look identical. Some contain Greater Nightmares. One tear leads to the final floor. I leave you now and definitely intend to be back very soon for the last chapter. I will see you all next time for the final chapter of the Pathways into Darkness Tour of Duty: Wherever Chaos Exists…!
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