THE ODYSSEY

The Odyssey is a story told through Lode Runner.  It is based very loosely on a set of locales and concepts from a story I once conceived and will perhaps someday write about, oddly enough, the Bluebird of Happiness.  This tale, however, is about Jake Peril, the Lode Runner.  In this file Jake is taken on a lengthy journey, high and low, to a mountain's peak and through a hidden world beneath the crust of the earth.

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Jake awakens, bedraggled, in a prison cell that seems strangely familiar.  His memory is hazy.  Feeling the petals of sleep begin to open, Jake realizes that he has not been fully awake for weeks.  Desperate to learn where he is, he climbs up a nearby ladder.  The sights he is confronted with are sickening.  All around him, eternally doomed men struggle.  One crosses to Jake on a bar, halted only by a hard wall.  One slogs about above him in binding goo.  One is forever climbing a ladder to nowhere.  Jake shudders and listens carefully.  

From somewhere on the floors above, Jake hears footsteps.  He hopes with all his heart that someone has been here to help him, waiting for him to wake...  Otherwise he has little hope.  Patience, he tells himself.  Any escape requires patience above all.

Delivered from captivity, Jake slips around his jailors and finds the path to the outside world.  (Or does he?  Level 2 contains a warp.  Perhaps Jake can find the key.)  Upon his long-awaited reunion with the sky, Jake heads for home.  Arriving there, he discovers an assassin waiting in the attic.  Put on alert, Jake embarks to discover the cause of his imprisonment and the key to his future.  He will visit the Oracle, in the legendary chambers of preserved ice far below the Earths crust, which is written about in the tomes of lore that his adventures have amassed in his library.

Jake sets his magical portal to the correct coordinates, and then passes through it to the foot of the great mountain described in his books.  He makes his way up the mountain until he reaches the gateway to the icy chambers.

After drilling his way through unmeasured passages of solid ice and dispatching of various subterranean guards, Jake arrives at the Oracle.  Swirling the pool of water, he peers down, and sees... a clue regarding the future?

The matter of leaving the Oracle is one that Jake had not thought out well.  He decides that he must go upward, and eventually all will be well.  He climbs out of the ice chambers only to find himself sweating, in a hot room with a lava-filled hot tub.  From there he ascends past the so-called Stairway to Hell into the inverted catacombs in the structures ceiling.  (Another potential warp here.)  He is an intruder in the realm of the immortals.  He makes his way to the great Dome, climbs into the rafters, and eventually, after a climb that seems to last forever, discovers a sight he had never imagined in his wildest dreams: The Rainbow Wall.  This is the most beautiful level I have ever created, and is to be taken seriously.
     Following the vision the Oracle sent him, Jake is transported back into his own world, only now he possesses the power to see into his captors minds.  He sees their motivations and vows to destroy them.  The final level is a bombfest you wont want to miss.

-Thorin N. Tatge
