ATG Quest (skim, post, be happy)

[Kusaragi]

(Glances around the lonely thread.) It doesn't seem anyone has been in here in a while.

*Pokes Wiskers* Are you still alive?  

[Kalstolyn]

I must say, I have been holding my breath to see what happens next for more than two years, and am nearly ready to expire from asphixiation (read: I was really loving this game and am sad to see that it appears to have ended prematurely. I would offer to carry it on, but the guild is pretty dead these days and I'm no Jimmy... it wouldn't be the same without his flare for the... Jimmy-ishness).  

[WiskersThCatfish]

MAN

it was a trip reading this again

Kals, I'm so sorry I didn't ever continue this, especially after seeing your nice post complimenting it. I don't actually really remember why I quit doing it. I remember having a ton of fun putting it together. Doing the art was a pain, but looking back on it as much of a terrible artist I am I actually didn't do too bad of a job expressing what I wanted people to see.

I was inspired to do this after reading through one of my most favorite things: Ruby Quest, which is an old adventure game that was posted on 4chan's traditional games board using the same style that I copied here.

Even after eight years I can still remember some of the notes that I used as the basis for what I was making here. I'll never be able to to actually finish what I started at this point, but I can at least fill in some of the blanks to let anyone who revisits this old thread know what was going on and where it was all headed, so anything you read below this is essentially spoilers for ATG Quest, so if you want to let the mystery live on stop reading.

Anyway I worked out this kind of comic-book-ie horror storyline about a town called Octopus Rock that was ripped out of time and space by some eldritch force; a pinch of Lovecraft a peck of Silent Hill. Basically the conceit of it was that all of the survivors left in Octopus Rock after it was knocked loose were given some kind of "superpower" X-Men style, each of them can do one special thing that could help them survive in the new, dark re-envisioning of their hometown.

Remember the trait system at the very beginning? How there was one trait that was locked in as "???"? That was Andreas's superpower, and my plan was to reveal it to you when we hit an appropriate part of the story. The superpower was linked to the fact that he had yellow eyes, but if I'm honest... I don't actually remember what it was.

But I DO remember what Charlie's superpower was. Charlie describes the room he came out of as having two crumpled bodies in a pool of blood left in it, and after going down the hall we also see more blood smears. After crawling into the room blocked by the rubble, Andreas would have met a second, fatally wounded Charlie that was able to squeeze past the i-beams because his head had been smashed until it shattered. This is where the whole superpower thing was meant to be revealed, when you meet the dying Charlie and then later see that the two crumpled bodies in room 204 are also BOTH Charlie. Charlie's super power is that he can clone himself when he's under great stress.

So who killed those other Charlies? Who wrote the bloody messages? What did the messages mean?

Easy. So when Octopus Rock was being ripped from time and space and hundreds of people were finding that they now possessed strange, destructive powers Andreas, and others managed to escape into an old elementary school that happened to be abandoned (late summer) and nearby. Andreas was being pursued by someone who had gone mad with power and was slaughtering everyone with their newfound abilities. He was able to lock himself into room 203 and hid with the lights off until he woke back up having lost all of his memory of the incident. In the meantime, his pursuer found Charlie and several other people who were trying to escape in the school. One of those escapees used their power to collapse one of the classrooms, accidentally killing themselves and several others in the process, but Charlie always seems to make a clone just before he bites it, so he managed to escape into room 204, where the pursuer killed him twice, and then chased a third clone down the hall. Thinking they had done their job they used Charlie's blood to write the message on the wall and then left. But Charlie managed to spawn one more fresh clone and then drag himself into room 205 where Andreas would have eventually found him.

Who was the crazed pursuer? I don't actually remember. I'm pretty sure I hadn't gotten that far in my writing yet, but they probably would have ended up being a pretty central antagonist to the story.

Lastly for the message itself. The half of the message we saw in the game was actually continued on another part of the wall to the west. the whole message read "If I had words..." "...to make a day for you."and it is the opening lyric to If I Had Words which you should recognize if you've ever seen the movie Babe. I've always found that song to be pretty evocative. The scene it's in pretty consistently makes me cry. That song actually has a pretty cool history, it was a pop song in the seventies, and a classical composition about a hundred years before that, the version from Babe borrows the lyrics from one and the instrumentation from the other, it's just beautiful. Anyway, I was watching the movie around the time that I made this thread and I just thought it would be cool to use those lyrics as a way to illustrate just how madcap and creepy my villain was.

The last thing that I wanted to say is that I'm a big fan of seeding references into my work, be they from other pieces of media or my own stuff. Octopus Rock, the name of the town the main characters are trapped in in this game is actually something I borrowed from a Sex Pistols lyric. I also have reused in many stories that I've written, but this thread still marks the first time that I ever used it. My way of paying homage.