Tsel do Bahn, Part 2

My Final Project has been kicking into high gear - we have Alpha turn-in on Tuesday, and as the QA Producer, I've been busy helping the programmers and artists hammer out bugs left and right - but I've still had some time to work on my own personal project, Tsel do Bahn. I've basically made two big pushes: Improving the player's ability to impact himself (and his awareness of it), and the player's ability to impact the environment.



Above: The improved HUD, with status indicators and the Sheathed Weapon.

The first thing I'll mention are potions, and their statuses. You can see those statuses indicated in the HUD on the image above; from left to right, they are Armor Up, Attack Up, Speed Up, and Invincibility (star sprite courtesy of Super Mario All-Stars). Each of those statuses are currently granted by a potion, used from the hero's inventory in the Pause screen as a (stackable) one-shot item. Drinking multiple potions of the same type will combine the durations of the potions, but will only use the value (effectiveness, or strength of the status granted) of the weakest potion.

The 'Sheathed' weapon is my interpretation on Zelda's classic "have more than one tool accessible at a time" mechanic; here, you select the Sheathed weapon on the Pause screen using the Talk key (defaulting to Left Alt), and switch between them using the Tab key. This still allows you to have more than one tool at your disposal without going back into the menu, but keeps me from having to worry about that tool's effect happening if you talk to someone, and from having to get away from the number of buttons on a Game Boy - if Weapon is B, and Talk is A, and Tab is Select, with Enter as Start/Pause and the Arrow Keys as the D-Pad, then I'm set on buttons for the game.



Above: The Fosse Grim weapon, about to break a breakable block.

The other push I've made, allowing the player to interact with the environment, has focused on a set of three tools: the Cane of Somaria (idea from Nintendo); the Fragarach, or as I misspell it, the Fargarach; and the Fosse Grim - tools of Earth, Wind, and Sea, respectively.

Tsel do Bahn already had the Sokoban functionality in it; namely, you can push blocks into pits to turn the pit into passable terrain. Using the Cane of Somaria, you can create a block of your own, wherever you like, and push it into a pit. If you use the Cane again, though, the old block will be unsummoned, and the pit will un-fill, becoming untraversable again.

The Fargarach is a sword that, when charged up - ohr, yes, I've implemented hold-the-button-down charge attacks, by the way - creates a gust of wind that pulls enemies towards you, or pulls you towards its endpoint, much like a conveyor belt. There are, of course, other gusts of wind that can exist without being summoned by the Fargarach's help. A stream of wind can be stopped by pushing a block in its path, including a Somaria-summoned block. A stream of wind (including a Fargarach-summoned one) can also turn a windmill, visible in the image above, middle-bottom; this acts much like a switch or a button, causing things to happen when activated by wind, or when deactivated by stopping a wind with a block.

Finally, the Fosse Grim is a violin that acts as a ranged weapon, shown in the image above. When its charged-up attack is used, its musical note will create a temporary waterspout on impact, which can harm enemies further. This waterspout will also destroy breakable objects, including cracked blocks - which, yes, can be pushed around to block wind or fill pits.

The three tools above are going to form the backbone of puzzle-solving elements in Tsel do Bahn - I may implement more tools, but I can now say that there are enough in there to form enough non-boring, non-repetitive puzzles that the game will be alright if I don't add any more tools. Combined with the ability to switch to a second tool without pausing, and the ability to boost one's combat potential for a limited time and at a cost of resources, I can fairly say that Tsel do Bahn is now transitioning from "Tech Demo" to being an actual - dare I say it? - game.

But, it won't be a real, full-fledged game until it has a few other things... Like, say, music and sound effects, or maybe a plot and some dungeons. The latter two will come when I try to make this a Real Game for NaNoWriMo, but the former two... Maybe that'll be what I tackle next. Who knows? I just hope I have the time to, with Final Project kicking into a higher gear for me.

Pokewalkin'

I got my girlfriend Pokemon SoulSilver a few days ago, as an early birthday present. She's played one of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, thinks Pokemon in general are adorable, and loves old-school RPGs, so I figured it'd be a good fit for her. I forgot about the Pokewalker accessory that comes with it, though I remembered, after purchasing it and seeing it in the box, that I had thought it kinda silly when a friend showed it to me back when HeartGold and SoulSilver first came out. (If you weren't aware, the Pokewalker is a pedometer that you can load a Pokemon from your actual game into in order to level it up, 1 EXP per step; you can also catch additional kinds of Pokemon and find a wide variety of items on it, both of which would be difficult to do in the early parts of the game.)

So it's a little surprising to me that it's been so fun to mess around with it.

Now, a caveat: I enjoy going out for a walk. Yes, I live in Florida right now, and it's incredibly hot and muggy and unpleasant outside, but even so, I enjoy a good stroll. So, when I use my girlfriend's Pokewalker, I'm actually walking with it. As an additional caveat, I was a big Pokemon fan back in the day - in fact, the original Pokemon Gold is my favorite version, hands-down. So, in retrospect, I'm basically a big ol' mile-wide-bullseye for Nintendo here.

But this isn't my copy of HeartGold, or my Pokewalker, it's my girlfriend's. And that actually made it more fun. Not just in the sense of, "it's someone else's toy," but because I can use it to help my girlfriend out. By catching Pokemon she couldn't catch for many hours of gametime, and finding useful items for her, I'm helping her playthrough without disturbing the sanctity of her saved game; for any couple, this is an amazing arrangement and one that should be much more commonplace.

Also: The Pokewalker reflects a growing trend, reflected in the video below, by Jesse Schell.

http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/#video-48439

He talks about how games are encroaching on reality, and how eventually, every game will have a portion in reality that translates into increased power or access within the game. While I think he goes a little bit far in his end-game scenario, mostly for reasons of balance and inter-corporation co-operation (though his presentation is hilarious and well worth the watching), he is, basically, describing exactly what the Pokewalker does: By doing things in the real world, you become more powerful in the game world.

Not only does the Pokewalker allow you to interface reality with fiction, but it also encourages 'good' behavior - in this case, walking and getting exercise, although the Pokewalker's instructions say that it won't work well if you're jogging or doing other non-walking activity. It's as if the game is actually encouraging kids, subtly, to go outside and play; something parents have been wishing video games would do effectively for the past 25 years, if not longer.

Because of this, and Nintendo's overall goal to tie their game systems to the idea of healthy lifestyles (see: Wii Fit, Boktai, among others), I would not be surprised to see a similar accessory become standard issue for whatever comes after the 3DS or the Wii - something similar to every gaming snob's prized cause, the VMU. A little pedometer that can have game mechanics loaded on to it from a specific game, then wiped and re-mechanic'd for a different game, but always able to read your daily step count, or heart rate, or BMI, or galvanic skin response... You get the idea.

And given how much fun it was for me to play with the Pokewalker, I hope the console manufacturers do, too. I wouldn't mind walking around and collecting Star Bits, or Missile Upgrades, or gold pieces, or whatever else the games I play would want to give me for being a good, fit person.

Tsel do Bahn, Part 1

I'm in Final Project now - a team of Internal Producers, Developers, and Artists making a game over the course of five months. We've finished the documentation stage, and the group has started on making the prototype: tough work for the developers, lots of back and forth with the artists... and nothing for the internal producers to QA test yet. While there's always a need to edit documentation, that work requires only one IP, not all four that I have in my team.

Since I'm also not allowed to program alongside the developers (for good reasons, admittedly), I've resumed a personal coding project that I started almost six months ago, and have worked on on-and-off as school allows. It's a Zelda-style game, with text-file scripts creating the rooms and interesting features (people, pits, blocks, treasure chests, and enemies). I'm using sprites from The Legend of Zelda GameBoy games, as well as Final Fantasy Adventure, so don't think I did the spriting work too.


The game in action - the hero, on the left-hand side, is about to push a block into a pit in order to travel beyond it.

My original goal was to create a simple Zelda-style game with Sokoban-style puzzles, where you push a block into a pit to turn it into passable ground, and that's where the name comes from (a portmandeu of "Zelda" and "Sokoban"). I've coded that entire functionality in this month, and I'm pretty happy with it, though I can already see how I can improve it a little.

I've gotten a few other things into it, too, as our documentation phase has wound down: multiple, switchable weapons with different stats and animations; a (rudimentary but functional) pause screen where you can choose between those weapons; tons of new functions for the scripting engine, like 'place actor', 'change sprite', 'change solidity', and 'change layer'; and map-specific dungeon keys, with a HUD ticker to keep track of them.


The rudimentary pause screen, with three weapons selectable in the corner.

Mostly, Tsel do Bahn is an exercise in me programming and designing a game with no constraints - there's no due date, no budget, no documentation. It's also an effort to keep my programming skills sharp, and to learn more about a reasonably common API (PyGame - though Tsel do Bahn also uses BuzHug for its databases). But, honestly, it's also an attempt to make the kind of game I want to play - an old-school top-down action-adventure, with puzzle elements, open to others to create their own quests.

It's also something I plan to continue with - I'm hoping to have enough tools, enemies, and interesting bits to make it a viably playable experience. My ultimate pie-in-the-sky goal would be to use Tsel do Bahn to complete NaNoWriMo; instead of writing 50,000 words of fiction, maybe I'd make 50 rooms of dungeon-puzzle action.

8-Bit Worldview

Most people relate things they experience to things they've already experienced; this is normal. Some people relate things they experience to fictional experiences they've had, such as books or movies. I'm pretty sure that's normal, too.

I view the world through the eyes of the games I've played.

Partially, this is because of my own focus on gaming - while I've also read a ton, and watched my fair share of movies and TV, I can't exactly say I haven't put a lot of thought into the "how" and "why" of video games.

Partially, though, it's because it's a darn useful way to look at things. No other media could so easily have taught me the concept of "left" and "right" as did Super Mario Bros. In fact, I taught my girlfriend the same method - she has problems keeping "left" and "right" straight without thinking about it for a second - and it's helped her remember which is which much faster than before.

Not to mention "Link to the Past" and the cardinal compass directions.

But I've learned more from videogames than just directions and other simple concepts. I've also used that paradigm as a way to interact with people. I'm introverted, not terribly so but enough that it can be tough to initiate a conversation or pipe up and say something. Video games, however, teach a worldview that encourages extroversion: It's always a good idea to walk up to every NPC in town, and talk to them, because they will always say something worth listening to (if it's not actually helpful, it's often immersive, or at least funny). In fact, in many games, the only way to advance is to talk to people without being prompted to. This may be bad game design nowadays, but back in the day such invisible event flags were pretty standard.

It's also taught me about working in groups. In my younger days, I often hated working in groups because I'd be the one smart kid in the group who'd want to actually get the work done. Many games discourage this, by presenting challenges that require multiple people (with varying skillsets!) to overcome easily. However, a smart player can still overcome many of these challenges with a single character if that character is overleveled, with a broad range of skills - and I very much try to be an overleveled person with a wide range of skills, thank you.

Finally - finally for now, at any rate - it's taught me to keep working, if only just a little, after a job is done. There's always the chance of post-game content, or of an ending not being a 'true' ending, or of a treasure left behind in a fully-explored area. Unlike all the above, this is a lesson that I'm still working on incorporating into my everyday life... But actually making a game, through my school's Final Project, seems to be a gauntlet of nothing but object lessons in this.

Not that that's a bad thing. I may not have to learn all the lessons video games have to offer, but I do feel a compunction to level them up regularly.

Encounter'd

I attended a session of D&D Encounters last night, going to the local gaming store with my girlfriend. I'd never been to this gaming store before, but she had; neither of us had played there before, however.

We wandered the store for a while, before we asked to sign up for Encounters proper, and looked at the products (an impressive selection! Lots of miniatures! Dice, dice, dice!). That's one thing you can't get online or at a big-box store - the variety of tools and shiny things that pertain to one specific aspect of one's geekery.

The actual Encounters experience was largely positive for both of us, though my girlfriend didn't enjoy her character (the fighter) as much as I did mine (the psion). We both kinda dug the Dark Sun campaign setting, and appreciated how it's a move away from standard fantasy, though we both decided that the setting's FallOut-esque post-apocalyptia was an acquired taste that we could, in time, acquire.

The group of people we gamed with were friendly and fun to play with - most had been playing at that table in Encounters since the start of the Dark Sun adventure, but one or two were just as new as us.

All in all, we both thought it'd be worth trying again - I'll probably try to give it a go at the gaming store closer to my school, and my GF might give it a go if her usual D&D group goes on hiatus again, plus or minus when the Dark Sun stuff ends and they go on to the next set of encounters.

Frantic Frenetic Final Fight

I just finished The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and that's what I'm going to talk about - if you haven't finished it, then be warned, there may be spoilers ahead.

The final boss rush had some frustrating moments (protecting Zelda from Malladus' meteors was tough, as was playing the flute - but I think that's because my DS' microphone is messed up). But the final, final blow, where Link and Zelda have to pierce Malladus' crystal, was a wonderful moment, because I got into it. I was rubbing the screen very hard, wanting Zelda to hurry to assist me, and I was pretty desperate to finish the fight - I was out of purple potions by this point. The fact that we're staring the big bad guy down while we're exercising our (that is, the player's) strength to destroy his head-crystal is also pretty darn awesome.

That all said, the entire final fight was beautifully done - a combination of almost all the skills that the player has picked up, excluding the individual tools (and that might be okay, since the bosses that are weak to Link's tools are replayed through the enemy-rush minigame back in Castle Town). Train combat, sword fights, Phantom usage, even the flute bit, all serve as a kind of 'greatest hits' montage within the final fight, and it serves very nicely, very nicely indeed.

Fame

I just read an interview with Brian Fehdrau by the site Super-NES.com, about his work as lead programmer on the game Secret of Evermore. It's one of my favorite games - yes, even among such greats as FF VI and Chrono Trigger - and one of the first games I played that really made me think that I wanted to (and could manage to!) make games when I grow up.

Now, in the interview Fehdrau also talks a lot about the reception the game has had, both when it was first released and later, in emulation. He mentions that he had trouble looking at the game without a critical eye when it first came out, especially in light of the sentiment of the time - the game got middling reviews and was widely blasted for being a 'replacement' for Seiken Densetsu 3 for the US audience. This was also in an era when there were few, if any, console RPGs made in the US, so the game was also considered to have a 'strange' aesthetic, which didn't help matters.

However, over the years, as the truth about Seiken Densetsu 3 and Square's inner workings came to light (SD3 wasn't coming over anyhow, basically), people have been able to accept the game on its own merits, and it now has a much greater following than at the time of its release, though that following is still small compared to the greats of 16-bit RPGs. This includes Fehdrau, who has seen the growth in the game's acceptance mirror his own growing acceptance, and even love, of the game he helped make.

What fascinates me is that relationship between the game and (one of) its creator(s). Not to say the rest of the interview isn't worth reading - it is, and it made me think a lot about being a new person to the industry, getting that first job, and trying something crazy and hoping it'll stick with the public. But to have a game languish, die, and be reborn - through online shrines, fan-made patches, and even a few stalled sequel attempts - must be an incredible, life-defining thing.

I mean, Secret of Evermore defined my life, at least a little bit. For the man that coded it, saw its flaws as they were crafted and its quirky charm as it grew... Fehdrau also speaks a little about Jeremy Soule, the music man for SoE, and you can see him thinking similar thoughts about the game's incredible, atmospheric music and sounds as they're being created, and the man behind them. Layers upon layers of respect and adulation, here.

I hope, someday, to be able to say that I've had an experience similar to Fehdrau's; that I helped make a game whose fanbase has only grown.

Walking in Sunshine

Whew. That's a walk!

A little over two miles there, plus the two miles back again, according to Google Maps - plus or minus the parts where a human can walk but Google Maps doesn't see a pathway. So, four miles total. While it's a lot in one go, it's not the farthest I've ever walked - one day back in my bachelor's I walked eight miles in one day. I used to have a photo on my phone of my pedometer from that day, because I managed to hit exactly 20,000 steps.

I figure, eventually I need to go for that distance in a single stroll. Not today though.

It was beautiful out, sunny with plenty of clouds and a little breeze the whole time, though warm and muggy as is the wont of Orlando. I played a lot of music and finished up listening to a podcast.

...These are the feelings I'd like to capture in video games. One of the most enjoyable things I can do in a game is simply to wander around the setpiece areas and enjoy the scenery. Dungeons & Dragons Online enables this reasonably well; I love it when I'm out with my girlfriend, killing kobolds or orcs, and just stopping our advance through hundreds of minions to say, "Hey, the harbor looks beautiful from up here. Hold up for a second and turn on mouselook." Or finding hidden little nooks and crannies of the outdoor areas, getting not only a nice little 'secret spot' but also getting a token amount of EXP for the effort.

But those explorer-y moments get old after the first go-through; that secret spot is no longer a reward when your second character finds it, let alone your tenth. Procedurally-generated content might fix this, but for truly realistic-ish landscapes, you can get into some heavy fractal math that requires an awareness of how that kind of math can result in uniteresting, illogical, even frightening results. Still, even an environment that's only fun to stroll through once would be an achievement.

I can't wait for the day when we have immersive vieo game environments - where you actually walk around on a little treadmill, surrounded by the fantastic scenery, maybe with a breeze coming over yonder hills... Imagine taking a walk through Hyrule Field, or Coneria, or Myst, not to mention even more fantastic environments - multiple moons hanging in the sky, or underground forests of crystal and endless, glowing night.

..."Getting there is half the fun" is easy to say, but as of yet we cannot make it entertaining gameplay. When we can, maybe we'll be closer to something important.

Paddling, and what it meant for the Wii.

I just got back from Downtown Disney with my family. We visited their five-story arcade complex there, and played a variety of games, very few of which the average gamer would have in their home. One of these, and I forget the name, was the one where you're in a inflatable raft, and you're sent to a river in the distant past to go see dinosaurs just before the extinction-level event occurs.

There's no score to keep, but it actually is a video game and not just an "interactive experience", whatever that difference might actually be. There are meaningful in-game decisions to make: the path branches at several points, each with different dino-events occurring for you to gape at. There are obstacles, mostly the cliff-walls of the river, and there are consequences to your in-game actions - you can be "splashed" by actual jets of water, and the raft is constantly bucking from the action on-screen. There's even a goal, in that the faster you go through the river the more you get to see before time runs out (and from the map displayed at the game's end, it looks like there are a few large areas at the end that my family didn't get to in time); however, I don't think the goal is the point, given how low-key its existence is.

But what's most salient about this game/ride is the controller. Instead of buttons, D-pads, or analog sticks, you have an oar. It has skateboard wheels attached to the end of the blade, so that when you row, the wheels contact the airbag that supports the raft, and you get some resistance to your movement - the motion of the wheels is what the game registers, and it moves your raft down the river accordingly. Now, this is a control scheme that might be familiar to people who go canoeing, rafting, or are otherwise regularly on the water without engine or sail... But for the average person, gamer or no, it's completely new and different.

My father doesn't play video games, I've played them for years and years, and my siblings play less than I but more than my father. But they all enjoyed the experience immensely, at least in part because of the new controls, because it leveled the playing field and made the game an experience where my father wouldn't be frustrated at the technology and want to quit. In short, because we all sucked equally, it was more enjoyable for all of us.

(Now, to be fair, other things are at work here: the game has a very simple and understandable premise, with whatever limited gameplay mechanics it has hidden from player view completely, which aids the new controls in leveling the field from gamers to non-gamers, for one. For another, the physical feedback of the raft bucking and the oars getting resistance on the 'water' made it more intuitive. Thirdly, it was a completely co-operative game, which generally helps ease frustration. And so on.)

So, I would argue that the Wiimote does something similar for people who are new to gaming: because it was, at its release, so new and different from what the average gamer had years of experience with, we all sucked pretty much equally at it. Being at the same (low) skill level made co-operative and competitive play more fun for people new to the system, who would then go out and buy their own, to either get practice in or simply to share the newbie experience with others.

Obviously, not the main reason the Wii exploded into money, opening up a new segment of the gaming market. But I'd say it was at least a contributing factor.

Let's Play: For Professors

Note: Consider this a "first draft". There won't be many citations in this essay, at least not at the moment. But I'm hoping that eventually I could whip it into a more promising shape... Right now, though, this is just an idea I've had for a while that needed to get on paper.

Definition time. Do you know what a "Let's Play" is? It's someone sharing their experience of a video game, with their own commentary on top of it. They can include radical new takes on a game, information on content that was cut from the game, or just thoughts and observations (not always on the game in question). They can be either recorded video of gameplay with audio commentary, or screenshot reproductions of important moments with textual additions.

You can check them out here.

Definition time over. Thesis time now!

Now, the "Let's Play" format (hereafter, "LP", or "LPs" in the plural) is fun to read, but that's not why I'm writing this post. The point I'd like to make is that LPs represent a crucial step in the acceptance of video games as a critique-able, interpret-able art form. Rather than simply being a run-through of the game for experts, or a walkthrough for those stuck in playing a game, they offer a few things that have been available for more conveitonal art forms for years, but have been lacking from gaming: a way to experience the work in general without putting in inordinate amounts of time, a way to provide additional information about a work in context, and a format to provide and foster artistic interpretation of a work.

Consider a book, movie, or a piece of music. In all of these cases, it does not take someone a large amount of time to experience the work once; however, it will of course take many such experiences to truly digest the work and know it well enough to discuss it in a scholarly fashion. This is also true of video games. The difference, however, is that unlike the majority of books, movies, and pieces of music, they can require upwards of 80 hours for a single playthrough, a single experience. In addition, most games have multiple paths to take, all of which may be necessary to see the work from all angles and begin to know it well enough to discuss in a scholarly manner. This does not even include those games that have no well-defined (or, rather, have a user-defined) end-point, for which there can be no approximation of play-time beyond the statistical.

Now, a Let's Play does not substitute for experiencing a game first-hand. In either its video or text-and-image format, it cannot convey the feel of the actual gameplay, much as a video of a play does not convey the emotions of performing in the same play. What an LP can do, however, is greatly shorten the time it takes to experience a game the first time, from that typical of video games to that more typical of movies or books. When an LP covers the salient plot points, items of interest, and background information of a game (not to mention material that might not be included in the game itself, such as cut, exclusive, or paratextual content), it allows a scholar to experience a game for the first time. This, in turn, allows a scholar to more quickly dive into the game-as-text itself, now being at least familiar with its important parts, and not having sunk half of a month of work into simply reaching and defeating the final boss - and this allows a scholar more time to work on a scholarly view of the work, and lowers the bar for entry, allowing more scholars "in".

As has been stated, a Let's Play allows a scholar to see not only the text of the game itself, but also material that, while not part of the game proper, may provide further elucidation on a game's themes, or perhaps information as to the author's intentions. When an LP splices in cut content, they allow a scholar to see that cut content as it "could have been", in the context of the game as a whole. When they add official information that is not included in the game ROM, such as passages from instruction manuals and strategy guides, they not only can clear up things made unclear in bad translations or the LP writer's choice of path, but also provide a quick reference for further investigation; that is, more sources to investigate.

And when a Let's Play includes the LP writer's commentary, silly or scholarly, they perform the work that critiques of literature and textbooks on art have done for decades: interpretation of a work, which is itself a foundation on which one can build further critiques and investigations of a piece of art. While a typical LP covers the entire length of a game, from beginning to end, this means that, while comprehensive, they often leave plenty of room for further work: interpretations of individual scenes, game mechanics, and other portions of games as unconnected from the rest of the text. An LP writer often invites others in his or her community to contribute to the work, in the form of their own commentary, or interpretive artwork, or even competing LPs; in this way, each LP is itself a boiling stew of jumping-off points for further work. Finally, a good LP is always a fascinating read on its own merits, apart from the game it examines - and as a good read, it is itself a text that could prove worthy of interpretation and examination.

Since a Let's Play produces the foundation, support, and even the simple interest and time to invest in a scholarly work on a video game, it seems that they are, in fact, a critical step in the acceptance of video games as an art form, as they provide so much towards the experiencing and interpreting of games.

Reading "Let's Play"

So I read a lot of Let's Plays ("LPs") - the screenshot type, of course; anything else would be "watching". I also read them aloud to my girlfriend, and she enjoys it. I try to do voices and such. She enjoys them enough to make sure her computer is recording every chapter, in fact.

So I was thinking, that might be a good way to keep in touch with her while I go to school in Florida. It wouldn't be a supreme amount of material... And if I decided to get creative, I could splice the screenshots into a video and send a whole presentation instead. But at the least, the audio files alone would work well in a "RiffTrax" sort of way; just read along with the original material while I read aloud.

Of course, I'd have to step up my readings a little - when I'm just doing it for my girlfriend, I don't worry about things like coughs, or mispronunciations, or anything like that.

But still, could be fun.

Being Productive

It's been almost a year since I was productive at work, wherever that work was. Back when I worked at Netsmart, I didn't have too much to do from December on through March; at my current temporary job, I haven't had much to do for the past few weeks, since I started in September...

But today, at that temp job, we finally started the week-long project we had been hired to do. And we were pretty hard at work all day, for nine hours, no lunch.

And I liked it. I had forgotten how nice it was to be productive at work, it had been so long since such a thing had happened. I hope I can keep it up.

I also hope that I'll be similarly productive when I get back to school, but that's another matter...

Anxiety; or, Dnd and My Little Brother

I played DnD 4 with my little brother, once, back in August. I gave him a Dragonborn Fighter (Lv. 3) to play, and ran him through a little town and some kobolds. He liked it, we both had fun, and he said he'd be willing to try it again.

So why am I so nervous about telling him I have another session planned out and ready to go?

A little background: My little brother is a big sports fan. Football, baseball, basketball, it's his thing. And that's fine; playing in organized sports has been good for him. But he also likes reading novels, and he's big on the Twilight series and Harry Potter right now. He also enjoys choose-your-own-adventure stuff. So it's not like I'm throwing DnD at him out of the blue.

I planned it out, made some unique monsters, and I think it'll be at least mildly entertaining. The big thing I'm "doing" in this session is introducing him to the fantasy flavor of DnD - the first session I did with him was in the 'real world', and this will start there, but move to an Eladrin town, etcetera etcetera. So there's that - I don't know how he'll respond to the fantasy setting. But if he accepts it, it would certainly make things much easier on me to make more sessions for him, simply because then I can use the whole flavor of the system and not just he mechanics.

I talked this over with my girlfriend, and she suggested that I'm afraid of rejection here. I don't want him to say "blah" to it. And as long as I'm worried about the fantasy, or about not having the 'right' materials to play, as long as I'm anxious enough to not ask him... well, he won't have the chance to say "no".

So I'm going to gather up my courage, and ask him sometime tonight if he wants to play. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever, just try to set a time and go at it with him. That's my plan.

I'll report back with results when there are some.

EDIT: Of course he says "sure". So hopefully tomorrow, we'll play.

Questions from Full Sail

Recently, I've been getting in gear to go to Full Sail, a school in Florida that focuses on new media - television, radio, movies, and video games. I'm aiming to get a Master's in Video Game Design. As part of the application process, I had to answer a few questions, chosen from a set of 10, about my relationship with video games in general, and certain aspects of them in particular - guilds, or mods, or LANs, to name a few.

Below are my responses, c/p'd from the text file I sent to Full Sail yesterday. I think they say a lot about me, and it's the kind of soul-sharing I need to do more of, so... enjoy.

---

3. What computer game genres do you prefer to play?
RPGs, platformers, action/adventure, the occasional puzzle game. All of these games share a commonality of exploration - while all games have secrets and oddities in their worlds, these genres are, in my opinion, the most likely to offer up a game world that would make me want to *not* accomplish anything relative to the plot or even to the improvement of my character, and instead simply go for an idle stroll, taking in the aesthetic of the world, and personally discovering the world's hidden treasures.

6. What electives did you take during your undergraduate degree program?
I didn't have much time for elective courses, as I had an absolutely full course load for all four years of my undergraduate degree. However, there was one non-required course that's stuck with me: the Digital Storytelling class I was able to take, an experimental one-time-only class for both Computer Science and Business majors. It concentrated on how digital media, the ease of creating new work within those media, and the even greater ease of piracy, was shaping how stories were told and profited from.

It was not the first time I worked on CS-related material with non-CS students (in fact, my school had many classes designed for such collaborations, centering around modeling and hard sciences), but it was absolutely the best. The group discussions were insightful, our projects were all interesting, and all of the required reading has stayed on my bookshelf to this day. Bar none, it was my favorite class, because it allowed me to step outside of the requirements of Computer Science, and let me study something I was truly interested in and could contribute to.

---

I'll answer questions 4, 8, and 10 in one long answer, because, for me, they all tie together.

Back in 2002, I found an online community that was working to create a pen-and-paper RPG based on the entire Final Fantasy video game series, the "FFRPG". I lurked for a while, joined their forums. Around 2006, I became an official developer for the project. Although it was mostly finished, it still required a lot of proofreading, and a system for non-combat magic, both of which I contributed heavily to. I worked heavily on the Chocobo Racing rules, greatly expanding them and adding more depth to what was, originally, a not-entirely-finished system built to emulate the famous minigame of Final Fantasy VII. I also helped with a lot of little things, like terminology and flavor text, and participated in the original play-test campaign in 2003 or so. The official release of the completely unofficial FFRPG was in 2008.

Through all that experience, I gained a deep understanding of the Final Fantasy series, the differences and shared themes between each game in the series. I also gained a deep understanding of game balance, playability, and the need for a game system to allow players to try off-the-wall solutions without being artificially restricted.

During my time so far with the FFRPG, I ran and played in a number of campaigns - a series of gaming sessions tied together in an overarching plot, like an episodic television series or, yes, a video game. I started a play-by-e-mail game in 2003, and it lasted for four years before coming to a conclusion. I also played in a few games run over IRC, though the majority died out within a few sessions. Perhaps the biggest and most social game ran in the system (or that I have ever been in period) is the 'guild game', a style I helped to create.

This 'guild game' is not completely dissimilar to the guilds of MMORPGs, but it is subtly different: A large group of people (in this case, usually ~50) come together to socialize, roleplay, and have fun in the game together. The main difference is that the GMs on the other side are making the world, monsters, NPCs, quests and other bits as the game progresses, as well as solving problems and handling bad players. Instead of the guild forming within the world, as in an MMO, the world forms around the guild's need for adventure, storytelling, and other forms of fun.

The first real guild game in the FFRPG community was one of the first campaigns I played in, the Playtest Campaign in 2003, though it quickly died off. In 2005 I revived the idea in the community, and created another campaign, "Adventurer's Guild"; this one lasted slightly longer, and had fewer problems, but was still done in by a number of factors (see below). The community liked the idea, though, and ran with it; several other guild games came and went over the years. However, each guild game had problems similar to the last: GM negligence, player in-fighting, scheduling conflicts, waning interest.

Some of those problems, especially in Adventurer's Guild, were my fault. As the creator and first GM of the game, the other GMs and players expected me to keep everyone in order, to keep people's morale up, to keep the game moving and fun. Due to my own reluctance to take the reins, and the few harsh rules I did implement, the game died quickly once the initial sheen wore off. While later guild-style games learned from my mistakes, none of them could overcome them fully; at least, I thought so.

Finally, in 2009, the developers of the FFRPG, myself included, having officially finished the game itself, created a guild game to 'show off' the final result. This game, "Triumph of the Returners", has so far had more players, more interest, more co-operation and more overall fun than any guild game in the community to-date. We've learned lessons from the mistakes I made in Adventurer's Guild, and those that others made in later guild games. As of my writing this, we're still running it, and people are still having fun with it.

My own ability to help run Triumph of the Returners has been greatly improved by taking to heart the mistakes I made in running (or, rather, not running) Adventurer's Guild. I've learned to listen to the people around me, both fellow leaders and followers alike, and to neither blindly follow their advice nor to completely shun it out of hand. I've learned to keep people's interest in the project, and to not let a lack of time or preparation spoil people's fun - mostly, by reserving the time to make the preparation necessary. Finally, and most importantly, I've begun to learn how to not fear being in charge. The responsibility for others' entertainment is not a weight, but a challenge: "Can you top yourself, and their expectations?" I can; I have; I will again.

A Year and a Half

...Since I last posted.

Last time I posted, I was one semester away from graduating college. Now, I did that a year ago. Old hat. Didn't attend the ceremony, and got only one piece of paper for my two majors (which were, as far as the school was concerned, completely separate things up to that point).

Last I posted, I had recently put down a few ideas for RPG campaigns, and the like. Since then, I've run one of those ideas - the "no humans" FFRPG idea, in Aetas Procella - and that campaign feels likely to either die or resurge. I need to get inspired for it to continue.

Since then, I've gotten into some other things. I've been programming a lot more, on my own and with my girlfriend's help, and I've learned way more from that than (I feel like) I did in school. I've also gotten into the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, specifically because it's not nearly so crazy and confusing as the 3rd (or 3.5th) edition was. I play with a bunch of my old High School friends now, every Sunday-night-ish.

What else... Speaking of my girlfriend, she's still the same gal I was with as of last post. We've been together for, what, three and a half years now? Wow.

And the big news: I'm going to grad school, this november. Full Sail, for a master's in Video Game Design. It's only a year-long program, but it's supposed to be intense. It's also the best step I can take towards "what I want to be when I grow up". (Yeah, stil - after 15 years of wanting to make video games, I'm about to be academically certified to do so.)

Lesse, what else...

Oh, I had a job in that missing year-point-five. Worked at a place that does databases for hospitals and doctors. It would have been an okay gig, except they didn't have any work for me to do. So I got laid off about six months in. But I saved oodles of cash, and that's all I needed from them. (I also learned that there is only so much internet a guy can surf in an 8-hour workday and not go crazy. Pretty sure I read the entirety of TVTropes.)

I picked up guitar, and my GF started learning the mandolin. I can't play much but I know a few chords and the melodies to a few songs (Kids on the City Corner, Chocobo Theme). I just tuned my guitar yesterday after about a month of neglect, and it sounds so much better.

Got a PSP, many many new games, and not enough time (!) to play them in. I still want to go through my whole collection, sometime, and finish every single game. I do have a Backloggery now, though, so I can say that I have at least 183 games, of which 66 (or 36.5%) are unfinished. When I look at it that way, it doesn't seem like such a huge project... But not every single one of those games is good. Many, but not all...

Oh, and my family has two new dogs since I last posted. Jack Russel Terrier and a fluffy little white mop. Both purebred, and the little fluffy white one isn't yet pottytrained (and that's after six months of trying very hard). Lovable dogs, both, but I miss the days when the house didn't smell like urine.

So that's a quick overview. Maybe I'll post again? I won't make any promises.

87.4%

...Give or take a point. I'm in the finals week of my seventh semester, and just turned in my Senior Thesis paper. So it feels like I'm done, even though I have a few tests yet to go, plus a paper due at 6 PM that's only 1/3rd finished.

I feel good. It's the first time in a long time that I haven't had three papers hanging over my head, with more entertaining things to do besides. Someone dulled the academic sword of Damocles, or whatever its equivalent sharp, pointy, hanging-by-a-thread is in academia. Spear of Failure? Ice-Cream Scooper of Apathy? I'unno.

And I may try to keep this blog updated. I'm still attached to the name, at the least.

I should probably go and study. Or at least, be somewhere besides the campus cafeteria. Whee!

Some ideas, for future reference.

This is what happens when I watch too much Star Trek: Enterprise.

Idea one, for an FFRPG campaign: Uses only non-human races. Essentially a Chrono Trigger type deal, with Humans erased from the timeline; the party must travel through time to prevent the same thing from happening to all races.

Idea two, for a video game (or maybe something else, with tweaking): A history professor is somehow sent back in time, due to a war involving time travel in the future. He has a camera that transforms into objects he takes pictures of. Using that, he has to keep history the way he knows it, stay alive, and figure out a way to get back to his own time.

...Oh, yeah, and this is the first post to this blog in a couple years. I may actually start posting to it again; I'd kind of like to. But if not, I can still use it as a scratchpad.

In The Interest of Secrecy and the Stoking of Ego

http://www.geocities.com/elemental_knight1/password.html

Because I have delusions of grandeur. If you like the story as far as you've seen it, hit me up for the password and i'll probably hand it over to you. I'm a nice guy like that.

The main reason for this is that publishers dislike buying something that's been previously published, and apparently, this blog could possibly count. Even though I don't intend on turning this story into an honest-to-$diety book, I do intend on using the story in some other medium at some other time, possibly in the future, so secrecy, even the tiniest amount (which this is - the password isn't at all strong), is nice.

Besides, this way I can keep the story together on one page. It's not as fun as serializing it, but you can always go back and read it again later with ease.

Whoopsie.

I just realized that, besides the excerpt from my NaNoWriMo book, I haven't posted in this blog for the entirety of October. And most of September.

Whoopsie.

So don't mind the gap in the archives or anything. There's nothing there to miss.

Tequila Intermission (Part I - Very Rough Draft)

PART I: Tequila Mockingbird

Chapter 1

The young man in the golden armor sat down at the bar, letting his sword lean against the varnished oak. On the television hanging above the countertop, the nightly news droned on about a rampage through the city by a giant stone monster. He asked for coffee.

“You look like hell, stranger,” said the bartender. Small, smart, and black, Mockingbird Bentley was the lady everyone on campus complained to. She didn’t mind it, really, since they learned quickly enough that she was spoken for. She set the stale coffee down for the man in the armor, and watched his friend pull up a stool. Nodding at the new arrival, she said, “O’Connor. Look what the cat dragged in.”

The new guy – O’Connor – didn’t crack a smile at Mockingbird’s joke. He put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket “Yeah. I’m the cat. Or my truck is. Or whatever. And I’ll have the same.”

Surprised at his lack of curiosity, the bartender shrugged and poured another cup. She always kept a pot of the bad bagged stuff going, since it was the only kind the Tequila Mockingbird stocked and it kept her awake during the studying hours of the night. Most of the students dropped their pencils and picked up their steins after midnight.

“So,” she said, handing off the latest cup of coffee, “what’s your story? If you’re looking for the anime convention, you’re half a year late.”

The man in the golden armor shook his head. He took a sip of his drink, his gauntleted hand wrapping around the mug with no concern for its heat. “Nah. I know when the Con is. That ain’t it.”

“Then what is it?”

“What, you don’t recognize me?” The armored man looked up from his coffee, straight into Mockingbird’s eyes. The right eye was obscured by a square piece of clear-green glass, hooking around his head to a white plastic thing that looked like half a headphone. He gave a weak smile, and said, “C’mon. No? Geeze. It’s me, Jack!”

She looked a this face closely, and glanced back at Jacob. “…Hodge? Yeah. I see it. ‘Splains why you’re with Jacob this time of night anyhow.”

“Hey!” Jacob said, pretending to be hurt.

“But you still ain’t answered my question yet. Why the get-up?”

Jack, the armored man, took another sip. “Turn the TV down and lock the door, would ya? This isn’t the sort of thing I want to tell the student body, let alone the whole world.”

Mockingbird glanced at the clock. At only eighteen-past, it’d be another twenty minutes before business even began to exist. “Yeah,” she said, dragging her keys from her pocket. “Yeah, alright.”

“You know how me and Jacob go out to the park sometimes? Just to hang out outside, y’know, get some fresh air in while we kick each other’s asses at Advance Wars. That’s what we were doing this afternoon. I seem to recall Jacob having me in a corner at the time, about to overrun some of my cities with his tanks…

“Anyhow. Middle of the afternoon, playing video games, no one else around to bother us for half a mile, when this beautiful girl steps out of nowhere wearing this armor I have on now…”

Chapter 2

The woman in the armor certainly was pretty. Long brown hair, brown eyes, a tan and all the curves Jack and Jacob, both college guys with healthy libidos, could ask for. The fact that she held a large, menacing sword at the ready caught up with them a moment later. The fact that this sword was pointed at them came right on its heels.

“Jack Hodge?” she asked, keeping her eyes on them both, though one was covered by a green monocle. She was breathing harshly, like she’d just run the marathon in her plate mail.

Jack blinked, but answered “Yeah. Uh, who’re you?”

She smiled, let the blade drop to her side. Then she let the blade drop to the ground. And then she, herself, dropped to the ground, a dusty fwump rising as she hit the grass.

Her body began to turn translucent, a shiny gauze stretched over a glass mannequin. And it kept going, from translucent to transparent, and from transparent to nonexistent. Her armor disappeared with her, as did her sword; only her single leather gauntlet and her green monocle, attached to a chunk of white plastic, stayed behind.

The two guys sat silently for a moment, staring at the impression she left in the slightly muddy ground.

Finally, Jacob remembered to pause the game. “What the hell was that?”

Jack shook his head. Instead of answering, he knelt down from the park bench, looking more closely at the outline left by the bent grass.

Jacob nodded. “Yeah. Whatever it – she – was, it was messed up.”

“Yeah,” said Jack, “Yeah, it was.” He poked the leather gauntlet the woman had left behind. It didn’t move. He gently took it from the ground, turning it over in his hands. It had nine tiny gemstones inlaid on the back of the hand, each a different color and all of them dull. The whole thing was gilt, too. For leather, it felt pretty sturdy.

Jacob simply watched, though he did interrupt when Jack went to put it on his own right hand.

“Dude. Don’t.”

“Why?”

“Because that glove just came from who knows where, and did who knows what to that girl?”

Jack looked at the gauntlet, and nodded. “Point.” He set it back down, and picked up the white chunk of green-and-white plastic.

The white part was mostly a rounded square with an indentation to fit over a person’s ear. It looked like it was made in a factory somewhere, though Jack couldn’t find any “Made In Taiwan” marks. The green piece reaches around in an L-shape, so that, if you wore the white part right, the green part would be right over your right eye.

“It’s a HUD. A Heads-Up-Display,” said Jacob from the bench. “Fighter pilots use ‘em, though they’re getting more and more widespread.”

“Oh.” Jack started to put it over his right ear, but stopped before it got too far. “Before I do this, I want to acknowledge just how dumb it is.”

“I’d guess ‘Very’.”

“Yeah. So I probably shouldn’t do it.”

“I’m with you.”

“But I want to know why the girl appeared in front of us, asked for me, and then disappeared.”

Jacob nodded. “Yeah, alright, I’m curious too. But I don’t think it’s a good idea, and if you disappear too, I get to smack you when you come back.”

“Done.”

Jack set the HUD down, and picked the gauntlet back up. He looked up at Jacob, shrugged, and put it on.

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” said Mockingbird, nursing her own cup of coffee by this point. “Why did you let him put that thing on if you thought it was a bad idea?”

“Because that’s how it always works in the video games. A beautiful maiden, distress, maybe a disappearance. But it all works out in the end, right?”

The bartender shook her head. Turning to Jack, she said, “and why did you do all that, and put on her armor, when you knew it was a-“

“Because it all works out in the end in the games and the books,” the man said with a shrug. He readjusted his sword on the bar top, moving it out from where he wanted his coffee to go.

“You’re both insane.”

“Yeah,” said Jacob, “we know. But it gets better – and I haven’t heard this part yet.”

Jack blinked. This wasn’t the park.

It was, instead, a bright white void. There was no ground to stand on, no trees to look at, and no grass to hold the imprint of a beautiful woman.

He was also wearing her armor. Apparently, his blue jeans and T-Shirt had been replaced by her golden plate mail, leather boots, and loose cotton pants and undershirt. His right hand still wore the leather gauntlet she had left behind. It had a little give to it, but still had that fresh, crinkly, “just got me at the hardware store” feel to it.

Jack looked up when a voice – her voice – carried itself through the void. “Jack. Nice to meet you.”

“You’re the girl who just disappeared,” he said, though he wasn’t really sure he could say anything to someone who wasn’t there.

“Yep. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your question before – I was dead before you finished. I’m Krystal.”

Behind him, Jack heard a solid footstep. He turned to see the same woman from a few minutes earlier, clad in her own armor, but without the gauntlet.

“I don’t suppose I could ask what the hell’s going on?” Jack said.

“Yes, you can, though I don’t have all day to tell it to you.” She shrugged. “Long story short, I was sent to find you by everyone else in here. You’ve got a long, tough road ahead of you.”

“I do?”

“If their experiences are anything like what you’ve got to go through,” said Krystal, “oh yeah.” As she said this, many other figures – all in the same armor, pants, and boots – stepped forth from nothingness. None of them were as well-defined as Krystal was, though this didn’t make Jack feel any better.

“…Oh.”

“Yeah. That’s what I said, too,” said Krystal, waving everyone else away. They all stepped back into the white ether, leaving the two of them alone. “Let me give you the quick rundown on what you’re up against, and what you’ve got, as the Elemental Knight.”

Chapter 3

“First off, the gauntlet.” Jack looked at it, still stretching his fingers in it. Krystal nodded. “Yeah, that one. It’s the Golden Gauntlet, and that’s where you are right now. It carries the armor, the sword, and the spirits of everyone who’s died while wearing it. It also holds the Elemental Gems, but that’s another story.”

“Second, the armor. Pure mythril. It can take just about anything you throw at it.”

Scratching his head with his free hand, Jack said, “Why isn’t there a helmet with this thing? Or leg armor? Or anything but just-the-torso-armor?”

Krystal shrugged. “I dunno. I never said they put a whole lot of thought into it.”

“Oh, goodie.”

“Yeah. Third, the sword. The Elemental Blade can change itself into any other weapon you know intimately, and is made of the same stuff your armor is. It, too, is pretty much indestructible.”

“I don’t know how to use a sword. Or fight.”

“I don’t either, really,” said Krystal. “But all those people I showed you thirty seconds ago? The spirits trapped in the Gauntlet? They do. Their skill is your skill. Finally, there’re the Elemental Gems. Each one, when alight, lets you truly access magic of that element. When you get out of here, you’ll have at least one lit up already.”

Jack waved his hands at Krystal to get her to stop talking. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Magic?”

The woman sighed. “Yes, magic. Now shut up and listen, because we’ve got about a minute before you have to go out there and kick some ass.”

This, indeed, shut Jack up.

“You’ll know how to use that magic, in some basic form, just like you’ll know how to fight – from us, the spirits in the Gauntlet. You’ll also have AXIS to help you – and before you ask, she’s that thing I had on my face. Let’s see, what else… Oh, go with your instinct. In whatever it is you’re doing, go with your instinct. Got it?”

Jack laughed at the absurdity of all this. “No?”

“Tough, because we’re out of time.”

The void began to tremble and shake around him as Krystal took a step back, fading into the void. “Hey!” said Jack, shouting, “What the hell? You’re gonna tell me all this in two minutes and just throw your arms up and say, ‘I’m done’? Hey! Just what am I up against? HEY!”

Krystal’s voice rang from nowhere, vibrating with the void. “That.”

Jack blinked. He was back on the grass, with the sun shining down and the gauntlet on his hand. He looked up at Jacob. “What the hell just happened?”

“Bright flash of light, you had her armor and sword, and then you looked up at me and asked ‘what the hell just happened?’,” said Jacob, a little incredulous. “Which is something I’d like to know too.”

Before Jack could answer, the ground shook tremendously, knocking them both flat on their faces. It kept shaking, rhythmically, like when a child stomps around in a tantrum but on a far greater scale. Looking up, they both saw the trees bending and cracking through the forest, as a huge stone golem crashed through the park, towards the city.

Jack watched the monstrosity as it left the park, the quakes getting softer and softer as it did. “So that’s what she meant…”

“What who meant? Was that glove lined with LSD or something?”

Jack blinked, and gave the gauntlet another look. One of the gems on its back – the red one, specifically – was glowing with an inner light. “Might’ve been. Too late now, though.” Jack stood up, his left hand unconsciously grasping the hilt of the blade that had appeared there while he was tripping, his right reaching down as he stood to grab the chunk of green and white plastic. “This is probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever said, but… Let’s hit the road!”

Jacob gaped at his now insane friend. Slowly standing up himself, he said, “What, in my truck? You want to chase after that thing?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because it was, like, fifty feet tall! And huge! And smooshed trees!”

Jack nodded. “And when it gets inside the city, it’ll smoosh buildings and people.”

“…And you think you can stop it?” Jacob was already digging in his pocket for his keys.

“Oh, hell no. But I gotta try.”

But Jacob had already taken a running start for the tiny in-park parking lot, where they’d left his battered old ’92 Ford. “Then try we will!” he shouted, jangling his keys in the air. Jack laughed at the absurdity of the afternoon, and dashed after his friend.

Chapter 4

“I told you, you’re both nuts.”

Mockingbird was leaning back on the opposite side of the bar, her coffee cup drained of its horrid brew. Jack, still in his armor, just nodded. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time – I mean, you can’t just let a huge stone golem trash your city, right?”

“Well, yeah,” said the bartender, “but why would you just take off after it two seconds after getting thrown into God’s junk drawer?”

“Junk drawer?”

“Where he keeps the souls he doesn’t have much use for, but can’t bear to get rid of.”

Jack didn’t laugh. Jacob, though, did. “Makes sense.”

“I took off because heroes always take off,” said Jack, still nursing his coffee. “When some big baddie comes to town, ready to blow things up and take the Princess, the hero always goes after him and wins. That’s how it always is in the video games, in the books, in everything. And it worked.”

“Well, don’t stop tellin’ the story right there!” said Mockingbird. “Keep going! How’d you do it?”

Jack shrugged. “I’unno. My short-term memory kinda shut down once I hopped in the bed of Jacob’s truck.”

She turned to Jacob, expectantly. “No, I don’t remember either. I was too busy trying to keep us alive on the road to bother remembering anything.”

At this, there was a flash of light over the unoccupied barstool next to Jacob. The light quickly formed itself into the image of a young, skimpily-dressed woman stretching her arms. “Yeah, that’s why I’m around.”

Jack vaulted over the side of the truck bed, landing on both feet and shaking the frame as Jacob started her up. The engine roared to life, and Jacob yelled out “Here we go!” as he kicked it into reverse.

Jack knelt in the truck bed, examining the white and green object Krystal had left behind. He placed it over his right ear, and found it to fit just about perfectly. He pushed it into place, and felt his ear pop with the pressure of being sealed in. The green plastic-glass fit perfectly over his right eye, leaving an effect like badly-made 3D glasses. He tapped the body of the device, first hearing the noise through his skull, then through his ear. “This thing on?”

A diagnostic rundown appeared inside the green half of Jack’s vision, quickly scrolling through. A giant question mark appeared, and the device held there for a second. Then it buzzed in his ear, and he felt a tiny electric shock all through his head.

A giant checkmark replaced the question mark, and he heard a young woman’s voice – not Krystal’s – through his right ear. “Hello? Who’s this?”

“Jack Hodge. You know Krystal?”

“Did she die?”

Jack was surprised at the candor – he hadn’t thought of it as death, since he didn’t see her leave a body behind – but nodded silently.

“I think she wanted to.”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. Didn’t have the chance to ask her. Who are you, anyhow?”
The voice sighed in his ear. “Artificial Experimental Intelligence System 1.4; ‘AXIS’ for short. You said you were Jack Hodge? The guy Krystal was looking for?”

“That’s me. I just want you to know I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, and I was hoping you did.”

“Oh. The golem got here, too?”

Jack smacked his face with his hand. “The giant stone monster that rips apart trees? Yes. Yes it did.”

The green HUD flashed with information as the truck took a sharp turn, sending Jack rolling into the side of the truck bed. Jacob yelled back, “Sorry!” Looking over the edge of the truck, Jack saw that they were on the freeway that cut straight through downtown. Traffic was erratic and sparse, since most people had gone home for the day already.

Standing up, he saw the golem a mile ahead of the truck. “I think we’re on the right track, don’t you?” he shouted to his driver.

“Oh yeah! Totally got his trail!”

Jack nodded, and said to the air, “Any idea how we make it stop moving?”

The voice in his ear laughed. “Let me find out.” More information flashed across the display, resolving itself into a basic humanoid figure. In the figure’s chest area, something big and red was beeping. “That’s the key rock, the rock with the magic that holds it together. You destroy that, it all tumbles apart like so many pebbles.”

“And… how do I do that?”

“What, from this range?”

Jack refocused his vision on the golem. They were catching up, but the debris of asphalt and cement it left behind was going to be brutal on Jacob’s driving skills.

“If you’d be so kind.”

“You can’t,” said the female voice. She seemed a bit annoyed at him. “You need to make it slow down.”

“Again, how?”

“Fireballs.”

“What?”

“Oh, shut up and let me.” Another electric shock surged through his skull, dying down quickly but not disappearing. Jack saw himself raising his gauntleted hand at the monstrosity, felt a surge of energy flow from everywhere in his body to his hand, saw a ball of hot, glowing fire form in his cupped palm. Then, his hand flattened, he adjusted his aim, and the fireball shot forth as if from a cannon.

The golem nearly tripped over an overpassing bridge, though its stone surface seemed only scorched.

The voice in his ear said, “There. Does that make sense?”

“No! No, it doesn’t! And next time you want to borrow my body like that, I expect a better warning!”

Jacob banged on the back window of the truck’s cab. He yelled, “Please tell me you know what you’re doing!”

Jack knelt and shook his head, placing both arms on the roof of the truck’s cab and aiming at the golem. Closing his eyes, he willed himself to repeat the steps that the voice-

“-The name is AXIS, thanks-“

AXIS had shown him. Energy surged from every inch of his body, collected in his hand, and shot into the stone skin of the beast ahead. It stopped its rampage, turned, and roared.

Jacob, from the driver’s seat, slammed the brakes, cursing as the truck skipped along the cracked pavement. But Jack wasn’t paying it any mind. As the truck began to spin around on its front wheels, he put his right foot on the tailgate, and leaped. A corner of his mind calmly asked What the hell did I just do? Jump off the back of a truck going at 60 MPH? Yeah, okay but was silenced by the rest of his brain. Unspoken volumes of insane combat wisdom flew through his mind, telling his body exactly how to take that giant leap, how to spear the monster with his sword so that he could hang on, how to drill a hole with a constant barrage of close-range fireballs, and how to shove his blade deep inside the beast, piercing the keystone.

The insane combat wisdom then immediately left his conscious mind, at which point the questioning part took over and promptly announced that it had no clue how to get down.

Thankfully, gravity provided itself. The stones that made up the golem crumbled from their humanoid shape, forming a hard, rocky pile underneath Jack. The dust alone could have cushioned his fall.

“Hey!”

The silence was nice.

“Hey!”

Not entirely comfortable, but nice.

“Hey! Jack, man! Wake up!”

And it was probably over.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m awake.”

“Your eyes are closed and you’re on top of a giant pile of rubble. Excuse me for think you were dead.”

Jack sat up, opening his eyes. The world was still half-green, the freeway was cracked and pitted, every other streetlight had fallen down, and Jacob’s truck was miraculously fine. He was still wearing the armor.

“We won?”

Jacob looked around. “You beat ‘em. I don’t think anyone’s dead. So yeah. We won.” He sat down on the rubble next to his friend. “You owe me a six-pack, by the way.”

“What?” Jack laughed. “Why do I owe you a six-pack?”

“Oh, it’s tradition. Whenever your buddy drives into the mouth of hell for you, or risks his life for you, you owe him a six-pack. Just consider yourself lucky that I’m rounding down to just the one.”

Jack laughed again. And again. He lay back down on the rubble, laughing to the streetlight-washed heavens, laughing to Jacob, the idiot who drove and flicked off Death at the same time. He heard a voice in his right ear. “Hey, Jack?”

Jack stopped laughing, the dust from the crumbling highway and golem getting into his lungs.

“Jack, I don’t know if you care or not, but there’re a bunch of people headed this way. A few of them in flying machines, a few in those deathtraps on wheels…”

“Oh,” said Jack, to no one in particular. He turned to Jacob. “We should get out of here. Let someone else pick up the mess we made.”

Jacob nodded, standing up. “Yeah. This is the last thing I want on my insurance.”

“And I owe you a six-pack.”

“And you owe me a six-pack. Of the good stuff, dammit.” Jacob started climbing down the rubble, and Jack followed. He decided to sit in the truck bed, lest he get dust all over his friend’s truck cab. Also, his sword wouldn’t really fit.

Chapter 5

“And then,” said Jack, “we came here and got some coffee.”

Mockingbird nodded slowly. Suddenly remembering that she had a business that might require running, she looked up at the clock – Almost ten till midnight. “Might wanna take your armor off, then, because I’m opening up again.”

Jack nodded. “Yeah…” He thought for a minute. “…Though I don’t know how.”

The hologram on the barstool next to Jacob sighed. “The same way you put it on, doofus. Magic.”

“Yeah, well, I’m new at magic, all right? Sue me. Now, how do I do it?”

“Just will it away. That’s magic. You will something to happen, and if you’ve got the energy and the willpower and the creativity for it, it happens. Mostly.”

Jacob, looking back and forth from hologram to human, said, “Magic? That’s what the heavy artillery was before? Magic?”

“Yeah,” said Jack, concentrating on his leather-covered fist. Now, two gems were alight – the bright, dark red, and the earthy, dusty brown.

“Cool.”

“Ain’t it, though?” Another flash of light – first red, then brown, then white – and his armor and sword were gone. He was back in his dustless blue jeans and a gray T-Shirt.

Mockingbird shouted out the door, perhaps a little too loudly, that the Tequila Mockingbird was open again. The hologram on the barstool disappeared, and Jacob got up to turn the news broadcast’s volume back up. Jack sipped his cold coffee.

“You think they’re talking about it on the news?” said Jacob, turning up the volume just a little too loud.

“…Story tonight: Giant monster loose in downtown?”

“Yeah, I think so,” said Jack, looking up from his coffee. Despite himself, he kinda wanted to hear what the news had to say about all this.

“Live on the scene is our Action-12 SkyView Omnicopter and Roy Taylor. Roy?”

A scratchy, radio-droned voice broke from the TV as it circled the pile of rubble and its spiderweb of craved pavement. “Thanks, Denise. I’m currently circling above the scene where the monster was defeated just a short time ago by two unidentified men, one supposedly wielding a sword and golden knight’s armor.”

The screen cut to a recorded interview clip with some flannel-wearing pedestrian, who said, “You should’ve seen it, it was amazing! I’ve never seen a guy leap like that; it was like Michael Jordan an’ Sir Lancelot or somethin’. It was nuts!”

“Nuts indeed, say the police, as it’ll take quite some time to clean up this mess. Expect huge delays here tomorrow morning, and huge questions concerning the two men seen facing the monster down. They reportedly left the scene shortly after defeating the monster in a red Chevy, presumably an early-90s model. If you have any information concerning the origins of the monster, or the people who fought it, you can call our Action-12 TipLine at 614-555-8731. Denise?”

Jacob looked worried at the reporter’s last few sentences. “Do you think they got a license plate off of the truck?”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t think so. The kind of people who’re out and about at eleven o-clock aren’t the kind to right down a bunch of numbers like that. It’s the kind of thing they’d get shot for.”

“Crazy inner-city nutjobs.”

“Welcome to the city, Jacob.”

“Screw the city,” said Jacob, walking away from the TV and grabbing his keys from his pocket. “Let’s go home.”

“Amen,” said Jack. He dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter, put his coffee cup over its edge, and followed Jacob out the door.

END PART I

INTERMISSION

Snap.

Jack’s hand, sheathed in the Gauntlet, held just above the thumb and forefinger a tiny, lighter-like flame.

Snap.

And it was gone.

Snap.

And back again! He could do this all day. Not because he particularly loved fire (though it was pretty), but because it was easy magic. It didn’t surge through him or drain his energy away like the fireballs did yesterday.

Snap.

Jacob walked through the kitchen/dining room, oblivious of Jack’s on-again, off-again relationship with his little fire.

Snap.

This one was a little bigger than it ought to be, Jack thought, but it was still fine.

Snap.

He noticed the Gauntlet’s brown gem was lit, too, just as the red one was. If red is fire, then I’ll bet brown is Earth. It had better be, considering what I went through… Maybe I can make a little cloud of dust or something.

He concentrated on his fingers, poised to snap yet again, not even noticing as Jacob wandered through again.

Snap!

AaaaBEEPaa! AaaaBEEPaa! AaaaBEEPaa! AaaaBEEPaa!

Jack looked at the fire that now encompassed his gauntlet-sheathed hand. Looked up, at the smoke alarm directly above. Looked at Jacob, who was splayed out on the floor; the shock of the smoke alarm’s noise must have sent him flying.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” said Jack.

“So, that’s the house. It isn’t much, but we call it home.” Jack spun his arms around in a grand gesture, the living room whirling around him in a half-green haze.

The female hologram flickered into life in the office chair, behind the desk where Jacob had set up his computer. “It’s not bad,” said the hologram, “and it’s a lot better than running all over the globe.”

Jack nodded, since he rather preferred having a house to live in over wandering the world on some asinine quest. “Hey, question.”

“Yeah?”

“How can you talk? I mean,” Jack said, passing his hand through the translucent woman’s head, “How do you make sound come from ‘here’ when there’s nothing solid ‘here’ to make the sound?”

“Magic.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Just because I’m a computer doesn’t mean I don’t come with a little magic. That’s how I fit into such a tiny casing – a normal computer of my power would be… the size of the house, I guess, where I come from.”

Jack nodded. “I won’t say that makes sense, but okay.”

“My turn,” said the hologram, sitting on her knees and looking over the swivel-chair’s back at the computer itself. “What’s this thing? I can sense the connection, but I can’t get in.”

Jack caught himself staring at her well-made ass, and quickly responded. “That’s a computer. What you’re sensing is probably the WiFi we have set up for my old laptop.” He knelt down and hit the power button. “We hooked it up so I can store backup stuff on his machine – old eBooks, and stuff – and it’s a lot easier to play against each other if they’re on the same network.”

“Ah, there we go. It’s on the network now.” She stared at the machine casing, and the password screen flashed through several thousand passwords before it began loading up an Apple desktop. “Establishing connection… And… Oh. Oh wow. What’s all that?”

Jack looked at her, confused. His brown eyes saw through to the chair, the floor, but not what she meant. “All what?”

“All those other machines. Out there. They’re not on the same network as this one and the other one – you called it Brunhilde?”

“Oh. I think that’s the Internet. It’s a bajillion other computers linked together to trade information.”

AXIS’ hologram grinned. “Sold!” she yelled, throwing her arms into the air like a child on Christmas day. The hologram disappeared, and the desktop flashed open Firefox, which itself flashed through web-pages faster than Jack could keep an eye on them.

“…Right.” He gently took AXIS off his ear, feeling the light prickling that meant she was disconnected from him, too, and set her case down on the desk. “Don’t get lost in the porn,” he said, and headed to the kitchen for a soda.

Jacob sat down at his computer, a textbook in one hand and a can of beer in the other. Nice of Jack to actually buy me a six-pack. But I ain’t gonna tell him it was just a joke, so…Wait. His desktop was filled with at least ten Firefox windows, each with ten tabs, and each tab, it seemed, was filled with pornography, flashing past his eye so fast that he almost couldn’t register the flesh tones.

“…Why is my computer showing enough porn to choke a donkey?”

AXIS’ hologram popped into existence beside him, looking embarrassed. “My fault. I can see why Jack said not to get lost in it, though… There’s a lot of it.”

“Yes,” said Jacob, taking a swig of his beer and watching the porn fly by. “Yes there is.”

“Explain to me again how this is a good idea?”

Jack and Jacob were in their backyard, such as it was. It was tiny, more just a thick strip of grass that ran alongside the back of the house. But it was fenced in by high, wooden fences on all sides; it had been installed by the owner, who knew the neighbors didn’t much care for college kids and their parties and all. On one end of the wide strip of grass was Jack, Jacob and AXIS; the other, a bunch of old, empty cardboard boxes they had scavenged from the junk in the house.

Jack shrugged. “I gotta practice on something, and I don’t think you want to be on the bad end of a fireball.”

“Well, yeah,” said Jacob, “but where’re you gonna get all the boxes you need to keep that up? Pretend you’ve got an eBay business and get ‘em all from FedEx?”

“…Yeah, actually. That was the plan.”

“All right then.” Jacob pulled up an old lawn chair, and set it in the corner of the backyard. “Fire away!”

Jack nodded, looking at his clenched fist inside the Gauntlet. A flash of light – red, brown, white – and he was wearing the golden armor again. Reaching behind him, he pulled his sword from nowhere and held it at the ready. He looked at the stack of cardboard boxes, on which he’d drawn a rather angry face with a Sharpee, and willed his blade into flames. He felt that same energy stir, but it seemed like it wasn’t sure where to go. A part of his mind said this is stupid, but the rest of him told it to go to hell.

Why not just tell it what you want?

Yeah, well, all right. It’s still dumb, though.

Shut up.

Jack leveled his blade at the cardboard boxes again, willed the blade to alight again, and quietly added, “Flame Sabre.”

It complied. All down the blade’s length, red-hot fire rose and engulfed the mythril. It flared a little above the upper edge, and then faded into nothing.

“Tell me that’s not impressive!” said Jack, satisfaction in his voice.

“It’s impressive! Just don’t light the yard on fire.”

Jack nodded, and half a second later, the flames were extinguished. He stuck the sword into the ground, and it stuck nicely. “Now watch this. I picked it up off of an old cartoon that was on this morning.”

He clenched his right hand into a fist again, and it glowed with a dark, muddy brown sphere of energy. He raised it high into the air, said “Terra Cracker”, and slammed it into the dirt, bringing his whole body into the punch. The blow forced a shockwave through the backyard, down an almost straight line and under the stack of cardboard boxes.

The boxes tumbled over. The box with the angry face was sideways in the grass.

Jacob looked at Jack, who was himself not entirely pleased. “That didn’t turn out like you wanted it, did it?”

“No,” said Jack. “I was kinda hoping the ground would swallow it up…”

Jacob shrugged. “You had something with the, uh, the Flare Sabre thing. That was nice.”

“Yeah. I’m gonna be using that one a lot.”

Jacob stood up from his lawn chair, and walked up next to his armored friend. Looking at the pile of cardboard boxes, he said, “Against what?”

Jack shrugged. “I dunno.”

END INTERMISSION