Dude, my mind is blown.
After Margulis chuckles appreciatively at this response, we randomly shift to a screenful of rainbow-tinted translucent haze. Welcome to the Lair of Game Designers. Stash is in the dresser over there, the one with the lava lamp and the dogeared copy of Atlas Shrugged sitting on it. In the middle of this psychedelic freakout is a flat-topped space-agey building (meaning it’s white and architecturally stuck in the ’70s) with a space!helicopter parked out front. Jerkinov climbs into the vehicle and it takes off a moment later, leaving those unimportant Ariadne people to their doom. Oh, but look! Standing on the tarmac below Jerkinov are…his ex-wife and the little girl who must be Blondie Bitchpumps’s daughter! OMG! What a horrible tragedy! I mean, I thought they were both dead, but I guess I was wrong. Or they came back as zombies just to fuck with Jerkinov’s head. Either way, I call bullshit on this mouth-agape expression of tragic shock he’s got going on. Like he wouldn’t have noticed them, standing there in plain sight in an otherwise deserted area, before he got on the chopper. And like we’re supposed to believe he really gives a crap about either one, seeing that a) the little girl isn’t even his daughter and b) he saw fit to kill maim both of them before all this started.
Whatever.
The chopper zooms upward out of the flashback, leaving Jerkinov back in the much more drab real world of Cathedral Ship. But even though he’s not daydreaming, he’s still crazy, as Spooky Ghosts of Ariadne start appearing out of thin air and floating toward him. Jerkinov falls backward on his ass, scrabbling backward from the dead people. Clearly a perfect, non-jarring segue back to the gameplay. The party enters the GPP building, stopping first to read the plaque at the right of the door: “Federation Ministry of Energy–Space-Time Anomaly Research Laboratory.” So is it intentional or highly ironic that a major space-time anomaly happened here? I’m sure if I posed this question to the writers they’d answer, “Uh…both!” and then chuckle their stoned little chuckles, so let’s just forget it.
Other than the infestation of Lizardmen Gnosis (and they actually look like humanoid lizards, amazing!) in the lobby of the Space-Time Anomaly Research Penis, this place is a marked improvement over the rest of this dump. There’s some smart office furniture, a couple ficus plants, a glass elevator, and…a save point! Brothers and sisters, can I get a “Hallelujah!”? Or perhaps a “Penis!”?
By the way, since the save point in front of the mall, one hour, 22 minutes and 21 seconds have gone by. I technically could have made a whole recap out of the time between save points. Super.
Loading ...On either side of the elevator shaft, Ziggy, my lead character, finds things that look vaguely like ATMs. When he blows them up using his Boomstick Swiss army knife attachment, a light barrier in the elevator shaft disappears, leaving the path to the basement open. Well, except for the same barriers on the floors above, which must also be destroyed by our heroes, fighting more and more Gnosis along the way. I’m starting to feel like this dungeon is never going to end. Sixty years from now I’ll still be yelling at Jerkinov to shut up, only I’ll be waving a cane at the TV from my Craftmatic adjustable bed.
First the party heads through a back door out of the lobby to a large room full of office cubicles, with stairs on the left and right sides of the room. The bureaucratic tip of the Space-Time Anomaly Research Penis, as it were. But there are no crazed, red-Swingline-wielding Office Space or Dilbert types in here–just more Lizardmen and Vagina Plants. I’m sure all you white-collar slaves out there know a few of those in your office. I’m fairly sure I work for a Vagina Plant. While the Lizardmen shriek and flail around the plants in the back of the room, the Vagina Plants have holed up in the cubicles and attempt to surprise the party by jumping out at them. And…well, I have to say it is a bit surprising to see a giant bulbous plant monster jump out of an office cubicle and attack you. One of the Vagina Plants is guarding a treasure chest which contains a Magical Hat. The item description says this accessory prevents characters from being “Lost.” Well, here you go, Shion. Don’t say I never did anything nice for you.
The Zigster skirts the Lizardmen at the water cooler and heads upstairs to the right. A button on the wall near the elevator lowers a ladder on the other side of the shaft, going up to the third floor. Sadly, I know I have to go down, not up, so it’s not even getting me closer to getting out of here. The pain goes on. And even better, the walkway going around the elevator shaft has been blown up, so I have to backtrack and get around the Lizardmen and Vagina Plants again to access the other side. I can only hope you guys are getting a small chuckle out of my pain. That would almost come close to scratching the surface of making this worth it.
Once all the barriers blocking the elevator have been destroyed, the car glides gently down to the ground floor and its glass doors open automatically. One more stop in the lobby to heal and save, and it’s down to the lower level, a circular catwalk being patrolled by Lizardmen. Does anyone else think the idea of Gnosis running guard duty is a little stupid? They’re basically blobs of ectoplasm, but they’re marching around this place like Stormtroopers. On the bright side, their rigid–hee–formation allows KOS-MOS (now in the lead) to walk between them without getting their blood pumping for hot random encounter action. After picking up the scant loot around the circle, the party makes it to another elevator going down from the center of the circle. The lift goes down for about half a minute before touching bottom. Good grief, the shaft of this thing is huge. Shion must feel like she’s living a fantasy right now. At the bottom, KOS-MOS pushes a button to open the bank vault-like door. Cold air hisses from the opening hatch, to show us that no one’s been down here for a while, but also to be needlessly dramatic. Really, that’s probably the only reason.
‘She’s not supposed to like penises!’
To the surprise of no one except most of this moronic party, this room is home to the missing Golden Penis Plate. KOS-MOS walks toward it as if magnetically attracted, which gets lesbian!Shion all territorial and pissed off. She snits, “I don’t recall programming her that way,” as if anyone present believes her smart enough to have programmed KOS-MOS at all.
KOS-MOS confirms for those of us with more intelligence than a houseplant that this GPP is the same one that was on the Hoglinde. As before, she refers to it as an emulator, which prompts Shion to ask, “Are you saying that a real one exists somewhere else?” Oh, shoot me. Please. When KOS-MOS answers in the affirmative, that upsets Shion too, because she just doesn’t understand how KOS-MOS can know all this stuff that no one programmed into her. Or, to be more accurate, she doesn’t understand how KOS-MOS can know all this stuff that she, Shion, does not know. Shion, who knows nothing about Gnosis, who thinks robots create conscience and feelings out of thin air, and who thinks reading is less than fundamental. Need I go on?
No, I need not, because Jerkinov is here to carry on my rant. He emerges from hiding in the shadow of the GPP, all fucked in the head. I’ll save myself the trouble of wondering why the airtight seal on this place stayed intact if he came in ahead of the party, and just say that a wizard did it. Angrily, he says to Shion, “You…you’re the creator of that thing… And yet…you didn’t even know about that…?” Yes, he’s been torturing me with flashbacks and wank and hallucinations and all manner of horrible shit for the past three hours, but the man can sure knock Shion down a peg. Mad dap, Jerkinov.
Shion completely ignores what Jerkinov said to her, and switches into Concerned Caretaker Mode, asking if he’s okay enough to get out of here. Her question is answered when he starts fading in visibility like a Gnosis. But even though he’s totally not okay, he manages to glare at Shion with the best of them. “Escape? What are you talking about? You think you’ll survive…through something like this…?” Yeah, we know they will survive, but he has a point. And it’s not like these guys have been making any effort to escape, for all of Shion’s posturing.
Jerkinov staggers toward the faux GPP and gets ready for his final, epic attempt to bore the crap out of me with dialogue. “That’s right…” he gasps, “I…I was the one behind the disappearance of the planet Ariadne…” No one in the room even suspected him of this, so it’s a little out of the blue, but okay. “All that mattered was the recovery of the [GPP]. That was the reason behind the deployment of Vector and the military.” Okay, now I’m a little confused. Was he already a plant in the military before any of this happened? Here’s a guy with a major, major criminal record. He disappears one day after killing a bunch of scientists and MPs so he can join up with some purple-haired guy who sheathes his sword in his crotch region. But he can get access to a presumably very secure research facility, fuck with this extremely important and phallic piece of scientific curiosity, blow up the goddamn planet, and next thing we know he’s a commanding officer on a ship headed out from some other remote point to investigate the disappearance of that very planet? I can’t imagine it took very long for Vector or whoever to dispatch the Hoglinde to check out the gaping hole where Ariadne used to be. Either there is a very large time gap in this story, or Jerkinov is the speediest spy, like, ever.
The commander seems all ready to rant and rave some more about his evil deeds to these people who have no clue what he’s talking about, but he stops to swipe at some invisible adversaries apparently divebombing his head. He screams stupid things at his imaginary monster friends, while Shion looks Very Worried and resists the urge to huddle in KOS-MOS’s loving arms. Suddenly one of the imaginary monster friends becomes not so imaginary and materializes in time to fly into Jerkinov’s gaping piehole. Dozens more of the purple sperm-like specters penetrate him, as KOS-MOS analyzes their chemical makeup. Shion’s all, “What are those?” I try to slap her but only smack my palm into the monitor. Ow. Anyway, the purple Gnosis sperm are turning Jerkinov himself into a Gnosis, and are also making him glow like Our Ultraviolet Lord and Savior. I can’t really say I’m sad about this. Except that Shion gets to join in killing him, and even Jerkinov doesn’t deserve that.
Loading ...MOMO tells everyone that she “senses” Jerkinov is now a big ol’ purple Gnosis, when even Shion has that one figured out by now. Thanks for your input, MOMO. But Ziggy has a flashback to…uh…something weird–some other guy changing into a Gnosis?–and he says, “It’s the same…just like that day…” As if the rest of this crew doesn’t frustrate me enough, now Ziggy has to get all cryptic on me too? Jesus, let’s just fight the boss already.
We come now to the final boss of Cathedral Ship, and the fourth boss in sum: Gnosis!Jerkinov (the surprisingly non-phallic Gargoyle) and his two Oudogogue cronies. Shion cries desperately at the beginning of battle, “Commander! That can’t be you!” Augh. The stupid.