THE ODYSSEY

     This is a venture into storytelling via Loderunner.  The Odyssey takes Jake on a collosal journey, high and low, to a mountains peak and to a lava chamber deep in the earth.  The locales are based on a story of mine, about, believe it or not, the Bluebird of Happiness.  The settings are preserved but the story is open to interpretation.  Some levels are fairly easy while others are quite difficult.  Presented below is the basic outline.

     Jake awakens, bedraggled, in a prison cell which seems strangely familiar.  His memory is distant and unclear.  Feeling the petals of sleep begin to open, Jake realizes that he is fully awake for the first time in weeks.  He struggles up the ladder, freshly taken with a memory of the outside world.  He wishes to escape.
     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.  His new consciousness will be the only way out of here.
     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.

     Jake has been delivered from captivity.  He 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 glorious reunion with the sky, Jake heads for home.  Arriving there, he discovers an assassin waiting in the attic.  Alerted, 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.
     Jake takes the magical portal in his attic to the foot of the great mountain Pirgyd.  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 Jake arrives at the Oracle.  Swirling the pool of water, he peers down, and sees... a clue for the future?

     Jake climbs out of the ice chambers only to find himself sweating.  He is in a hot room with a lava-filled hot tub.  From there he ascends past the 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
