Shooter-RPG Hybrids Where You Play an Insane Undead Person Dressed Like a Stripper (Or, Why You Should Play Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines)

The Golden Age

Once upon a time, there was a game development studio called Black Isle. They were a division of a company called Interplay, and they worked almost exclusively on RPGs. From 1997 to 1999, the various members of Black Isle produced Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Planescape: Torment. Which is to say, that they made, consecutively, three of the greatest PC RPGs of all time.


Then, for whatever reason, they broke up. I like to imagine epic fights over bizarre gameplay ideas, people brandishing fake power gauntlets at each other, elaborate gambits being played out to manipulate each others minds... But it was probably just the usual conflicts with "The Suits" at Interplay.

Anyway, the Black Isle members, once the dust had settled, ended up at two companies. One of them is still alive today, the other....isn't.

But before it died, Troika Games put out a few amazing games. This piece is about their last published work, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (V:TMB).


If I wrote a Deus Ex game about witches, I'd call it Deus Hex

I got the idea to write this while browsing on PC Gamer today. Richard Corbett (whose Crap Shoot articles are a great read, both for nostalgia, and for his wit in ripping apart some truly bizarre design decisions) had a piece posted about great PC Games downloadable on the cheap. V:TMB was highlighted in the article (along with both the Fallouts and Planescape), and Richard caught my attention by calling it one of the only games that's earned the right to be called a successor to Deus Ex.

I'd never made the comparison before, but it's apt. Like Deus Ex, V:TMB is a first-person game that hybridizes RPG and shooter elements. Also like Deus Ex, it's a game that's fundamentally about how the player approaches a hostile situation. You can infiltrate, you can seduce, you can blast your way through. When the game fails (and, as much as I love it, it does fail in places), it is because the player has had their options stripped from them - usually in the form of unavoidable enemies or a direct boss fight. But in the missions where it gets this balance right, it feels like a supernatural take on the Deus Ex design.

The games also have similar RPG elements which affect infiltration possibilities, with V:TMB's stat points filling in for the skill experience system in Deus Ex, and clan Disciplines taking the (slightly more limited) place of Aug Canisters. These elements of choice, of making trade-offs in character build, are more pronounced in V:TMB, though - whereas in Deus Ex a character built for a certain infiltration style could usually muddle through a different method with the help of equipment, a Vampire built for silent melee kills is going to be in trouble when it's time to pull guns or talk his way through a situation.

But at its best, V:TMB actually surpasses Deus Ex by doing something its "predecessor" doesn't: building a fun, interesting world to spend time in between missions. Deus Ex is great, but it's sometimes weakened by the linearity of its levels. Sure, you can do a few little odd jobs around New York or Paris, but the game is mostly built around the big setpiece infiltration missions.

While V:TMB has setpiece missions too (including one of the best haunted houses ever presented in gaming - a long sequence in which there are no monsters or enemies, only the house itself trying to alternately scare and kill you as you unravel the mystery of its haunting), but it also has large open "hub" maps full of strange, interesting characters with sidequests to offer you.

And that speaks to the the key difference between the two, I think - Deus Ex feels like a shooter that uses RPG elements to enhance possibilities and force choices on the player. V:TMB, on the other hand, is an RPG that also happens to be a shooter. It has an RPG or adventure game's focus on plot and writing. For all of its amazing successes, Deux Ex is not a memorably well-written game. The characters are there to spout their philosophies and give you someone to shoot or save. V:TMB, on the other hand.... Well, V:TMB has the Malkavian path.

I LOVE the Malkavian path.

Bloodlines - like Character Classes, but way more gothic

For non-nerds: The Vampire: The Masquerade bit of V:TMB's title is the licensed property the game is based on. Vampire was a tabletop role-playing game published by White Wolf Publishing (the game has since been replaced with a new series, Vampire: The Requiem). In Vampire, the players play newly awakened undead coming to grips with the horror of unlife and the moral quandaries of being a predator and all sorts of other melodrama. Each Kindred (as Vampire: The Masquerade characters are called), comes from a particular vampire clan, each with their own special powers and weaknesses.

All of these clans are available to players in V:TMB - they're the titular Bloodlines. Clan choice, done at character creation, affects your base stats, which vampire powers you get, and what your weakness is. For some, this is fairly minor - an increase in social skills or a special set of magical powers. For others, it's a huge change to gameplay - the Nosferatu clan is hideously ugly and trigger potentially game-ending consequences when seen by humans, so playing as them makes the game a significantly more stealthy (and less fun) affair.

And then there are the Malkavians.


Depth means being able to play as a cognitively disabled person

One of the little things I always loved about Fallout was that it allowed you, on character creation, to make yourself really, really weak in certain areas in order to buff others. You could dial down your strength, or your speed, or your luck, and you'd spend the rest of the game dealing with those consequences. And if the stat you chose to lower was your Intelligence... Well, that made for a very different game. Because low-INT characters, to reflect this weakness, couldn't really communicate in English. They could mumble and mutter, but, if you built a character with an INT stat below 4, he or she would have a functional IQ of around 60. People you talked to would give up in frustration, or take advantage of you, or even give you a little charity sometimes. You could still muddle through the game, but it was a strange experience.

It wasn't in any way, shape or form a sensitive or accurate portrayal of cognitive impairment, but it was an interesting alternative to the normal way of playing. I was always impressed with all the extra work that went into the low-INT path. Sure, it was usually just a few lines of mumbling, and the NPC telling you to go away in nicer or ruder ways, but it was still a lot of extra content placed in the game to simulate this weakness.


Behold, the heading of the section, all clothed in black and white. I hope it will be my friend!

Which brings us back to the Malkavians. Because the weakness of the Malkavian bloodline is that they are, to a Kindred, insane. It can take a wide variety of forms and disorders, but every one of them is significantly deranged in some way. And so, to reflect that, Malkavian players in V:TMB have an entirely separate set of dialogue options. For every single conversation. In a game that has hours of dialogue. Hundreds of new lines written into the game. Amazing.

Most of the dialogue is re-wording of the stuff a sane character would say in the situation - "Who are you?" becomes "Who is this dark demon I see before me?" - but some of it is completely unique - playing in to the Malkavian strength, supernatural insight.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: Mental illness is not fun or funny. People with mental illnesses are not mystic sages or psychics. They are people suffering from diseases and disorders. While it is possible that such serious hindrances may lead, as a side effect, to an altered perspective giving you some kind of special insight, mostly having a mental illness is about constantly having to fight to live a normal, happy life. End note, back to the magic vampires).

The Insight comes in two forms: Whispers that play distractingly in the background, and the altered dialogue. Sometimes that means simply having extra things to ask, but the game's writers also delight in hiding information in the changed choices themselves. The Malkavian dialogue almost never refers to characters by their given name, instead using nicknames, often related to some hidden aspect of the character. A Malkavian, in asking a character of someone with a secretly duplicitous nature, might refer to them as the child of Janus - the two-faced god.
Or they might ramble incoherently without any real insight being shown... All part of the fun.

If there's one thing that makes V:TMB a GREAT game, it's this. A willingness to put in a significant amount of extra work to give the player a new way to play through the game - a macro example of the multi-path design of the individual missions. (It doesn't hurt that most of the Malkavian dialogue is wonderfully strange - conversations with stop signs, convincing a nosy questioner that you're not the person she thought you were, you're her long lost turtle.... All sorts of weirdness abounds).


It's this attention to detail that makes the game not only a worthy successor to Deus Ex, but also to the Black Isle games that preceded it. Which is to say, it's a game that blends some of the best aspects of Fallout and Deus Ex. So why aren't you playing it right now?

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is available on Steam for $20. The game has been EXTENSIVELY patched by fans since its release - get patches that restore a ton of cut or buggy content at www.planetvampire.com.

Richard Corbett's round-up of cheap downloadable games is here. It's a great sampler of a lot of amazing games.

"I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the zebra did it." (Or, Every Story is a Mystery When You're a Detective)

One of my favorite pleasures in life, as I've mentioned before, is what I call "The Rush." The jump of realization and epiphany that comes when you suddenly understand something that was previously kept hidden from you. When I experience it, I tend to give off a little laugh at the sheer, wonderful cleverness of it all.


(The Rush is what Q is talking about, I think, as the reason he spares humanity in the Star Trek: The Next Generation finale, "All Good Things...", the moment when Picard saves humanity, not through technology or bravery or even the power of friendship and loyalty (although his plan does require all those things), but in the moment at which his mind expanded to understand the bizarre nature of the problem. It's that quality, Q says, that marks a species for greatness, and I've always had a soft spot for that idea.)

There are plenty of opportunities to find the Rush, at varying degrees of difficulty. Whole genres of video gaming are built around encouraging players to epiphany. But prior to the invention of gaming, people looking to simulate the feeling (that is, those who don't get it naturally in jobs that rely on problem solving capabilities) were probably best served by reading mystery stories.

"Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?"

-Oath of the Detection Club

If you've read mystery stories with any regularity, you've encountered one that relies on at least one of the things damned in that lovely oath. Is there anything more upsetting than to have a never-mentioned clue appear out of nowhere to let the quirky detective suddenly lay a solution in front of the readers?

For me, and, I imagine, many others, the mystery story is a kind of game (ignoring the books, usually written for children, which make this explicit by presenting each chapter as a case and asking the reader to try to solve it), a race between the reader and the fictional detective to see who can solve the murder or robbery or what have you first. The detective has the advantage that, being a fictional creation, sprung from the forehead of the author, his eventual victory is inevitable. Barring some twist or narrative trick, the mystery WILL be solved by book's end.

The reader, on the other hand, has the advantage of being directly exposed to the text (or camera, in a filmed mystery). This limits the number of things the reader has to focus on to the bare minimum of what the author is willing to describe (or the director willing to show). At the same time, the reader/watcher also has the knowledge of all the literary conventions or editing tricks that a given genre has given rise to - foreshadowing, long lingering shots of significant objects or characters, all the tricks writers and directors use to imply significance that are invisible to the characters within the story.


(An example of an inversion here - I recently saw the excellent Source Code, and infuriated my mother by calmly pointing out the film's mystery villain within minutes of the film's start. I was able to identify him not because he was focused on, but because he seemed, very intentionally, to be OUT of focus... An act of misdirection that primed me to suspect him, and which I was only able to recognize through knowledge of the meta-information of editing/shot composition.)

Authors/directors can, of course, use those same tricks to mislead, subvert, confuse, or outright lie to the viewer - but that's all part of the fun. One of the joys of Andrew Hussie's amazing Homestuck (available at www.mspaintadventures.com) is the way it uses foreshadowing, established narrative structures, and pacing to play elaborate games with reader expectations.

Part of the fun of a story is its unpredictability, and this one has had plenty of it so far I think. Unpredictability is a significant basis for suspense, and I'm sure has other benefits we could examine. But I think there is also enjoyment value in occasional predictability, or rather, guessability. Setting up some obvious clues, and running with them to their logical conclusion. It's like throwing the reader a bone, particularly those who may be prone to feeling a little overwhelmed by getting perpetually outfoxed by the narrative.
-Andrew Hussie

There are pages and pages of speculation on Hussie's stories on his forums, and while some of it is asinine stuff and mindless guesses, a vast amount of it is strongly informed by the reader's understanding of how stories work generally, and how Homestuck - which is based on multiple viewpoints, subversions of dramatic moments, sudden bursts of epic action that significantly alter not only the content but also the tone and genre of the story, and a thousand other strange and wonderful elements - works in the specific. Weight in these arguments (which have a pretty good batting average of coming out true) is often given to considerations like the amount of time the text has spent with a given character, obscure bits of foreshadowing spread over the course of hundreds and hundreds of pages of story, and the nature of reader expectation itself. Each of the speculators is a detective, sifting through the text of the comic to solve the mystery: What happens next?


Of course, Homestuck isn't really a mystery story at all. But that's kind of the point: Every story is a mystery story, if you're willing to think about it. Every story can be a race between the reader and the director to work out how it's all going to end, what the next pages hold. The Rush from working out where a plot is heading, through clues both textual and subtextual, is as strong as the one produced by any product of LucasArts or Sierra.

Plus, the level of thought required to accurately predict what happens next forces the reader/watcher to actively engage with the work. Anything worth reading, I think, is worth thinking about. Obviously, there are shows or books that we treat as popcorn, that allow the reader/watcher to "shut their brain off" and just experience. But really appreciating something for the merits its creator was trying to express, to give it the full benefit of the doubt and assume that it was made by people who were thinking and caring about what they were producing (dangerous, because when you're wrong, a work can be ruined for you - see my entire relationship with the TV show Heroes) requires having your brain on - a process I've always found exhilarating.

The Beauty of Limitations (or, Just Because a Thing Sounds Stupid Doesn't Mean It Isn't Awesome)

Nintendo is a weird company, and they make weird decisions. Cartridges instead of discs for the N64. A motion-controlled non-HD console. Friend Codes. The Virtual Boy. And every time Nintendo announces another weird decision, my first instinct is to scoff, to say they've lost their touch for good this time. But I don't. For one simple reason.

Because that same Nintendo, following their weird instincts, made the DS, which is a) about as weird a collection of design choices as you could cram into a portable console, and b) one of the greatest consoles of all time.

Gimmicks (or, Comparisons Between Two Different Games About Teenagers Trapped in Shibuya for a Week)

The DS, when looked at as a list of features, is a gimmicky mess. A Wi-Fi-connected dual screen clamshell with built-in microphone and touch screen? It sounds like a platform designed to support about five first-party titles that exploit all of its mechanics and a billion pieces of shovelware where you touch the screen to throw a snowball at a monkey (I'm looking at you, Wii).


There is a belief that, when a piece of gaming hardware includes some innovative or strange feature, every game released for that system needs to use it. The big example here is the Wii - the system is a one-trick pony (albeit a pony that's very big, and very multi-faceted, like some sort of giant spider pony). Without motion controls, the only reason to play a game on the Wii is if it's an exclusive - Mario Galaxy would still be great without motion controls, but you wouldn't bother playing Madden on the Wii without them.

The beauty of the DS is that, except for the dual screens, all of its features are ignorable. Relatively few games use the Wi-Fi connectivity (which is good, given how useless the DS is with common security protocols) or the microphone. Most DO use the touch screen, but more often than not as an enhancement to the other controls (which is ALSO good, because the DS touch screen really isn't sensitive enough for fine controls - 5th Cell made Super Scribblenauts 1000% better than Scribblenauts just by letting you control Maxwell without having to use imprecise stylus controls).

What this translates to is an avoidance (for the most part) from weary, obligatory uses of those features. The system has a D-Pad and 8 buttons, so designers don't HAVE to use the touchscreen if they don't want to. And at the same time, it's there when they have a really good idea for it.


Square Enix's The World Ends With You is the best example that comes to mind of the DS features being used right. TWEWY uses everything on offer - combat occurs on both screens at the same time, with the upper screen being controlled with the traditional face buttons and the bottom screen's battle commands using every possible implementation of the stylus AND the microphone. A person playing the game looks like a total spaz, desperately scratching and blowing at their screen while furiously typing commands in on the D-Pad. Players can use Wi-Fi and passive contact with other DS owners to get bonuses. Hell, the game even uses the system's clamshell-closing Sleep Mode to kill a bonus enemy. The game was designed to use every feature of the system to the fullest, and it works on every possible level.


Contrast with Atlus' Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor. SMT:DS (And as much as I love the system, I will NEVER be able to defend the rampant tendency of developers to give their titles for it those particular cutesy initials) is a turn-based strategy game that incorporates traditional JRPG fights into its combat system. It doesn't use the microphone. If it has Wi-Fi, I honestly don't remember it, and the touch-screen is used only for menu commands. The only DS feature the game really uses is its inherent portability - it turns out turn-based strategy games work great on a system you can pick up and put down at a moment's notice. Past that, it's a game that could be on any system - and it's still great, one of the system's best titles. Because it wasn't on every platform... it was on the DS.

Why was that?

The Strength of Limitations (or, In Which a Controversial Argument Is Made Against the Noble Console Port)

The DS is not a powerful system. I'm not tech-minded enough to know all the details, but everything I've read says that it's roughly equivalent to a Playstation One. Its major competitor (in the pre-smartphone game world, anyway) is the Sony PSP, a system that absolutely crushes Nintendo's handheld in terms of graphic.

And that, I think, explains a lot of why I've spent roughly 10 times as much time with my DS than with my poor, neglected PSP.

The PSP , you see, is powerful enough that designers can, with a little work, make reasonably faithful portable versions of home console games. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, God of War: Chains of Olympus, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. These are all good games that take the console experience and make it portable.

And that's why, on a fundamental level, they're boring. I have a home console, I've played those games already. Being able to play them on the bus doesn't make them anything new or exciting for me. It doesn't push designers to do anything except get existing games and mechanics to work on a smaller screen and a weaker processor.


But the DS can't do that. It's just not feasible to try to force a current-gen game onto the system (the sole exception I can think of being Disgaea, never the most technologically-demanding series in the first place). So even when the DS does get a console port, it's something fundamentally different. Weird strategy games, chibi-fied platformers... They can't just recreate, so they have to innovate. Have to step out of the current juggernaut genre (the first-person shooter) and try something else.

Genre (or, (or, How the DS Woke the Sleeping Princess Called "Adventure Games" With a Kiss, And It Was Totally Hot)

There are genres that have been left behind by the mainstream because they don't fit the image or the requirements a studio wants for their home console releases. Niche ideas whose small audiences don't support the cost of developing for a current-gen console. Adventure games, visual novels, first-person dungeon crawlers... All rare or extinct in the current generation. But they've found new life on the DS, because none of them demand powerful hardware - only good design.

(It doesn't hurt that the DS's mouse-like stylus design makes it great for adapting genres that have typically been most successful on the PC - the adventure genre, relying as it so often does on clicking hotspots and choosing dialogue options, is an especially good fit).

At the same time, relatively low development costs and unique features like the stylus mean that developers could delve into their experimental side. Surgery simulators, mini-game collections premised as historical recreations of fictional NES games, rhythm-based cheerleading games where you play as tiny men encouraging a white blood cell depicted as a hot nurse to eradicate a virus... All games that wouldn't have fit on a home console, but which work perfectly on the DS. Whole genres either created or pulled from the dust-heap and given new life.


A Justifiable Bout of Cranky Nostalgia (or, The Good Old Days Are Called That For a Reason)

I'm a little hesitant to write out this last point, both because it seems highly objective and because it makes me sound like an old fart, but here goes: The Super Nintendo era was a golden age of gaming. It existed at a point where technology was developed enough to make interesting experiments possible, without demanding huge investments of time and money to make a visually competitive title. After this comes the Playstation era, where games begin to bloat, with huge amounts of time and money being put into things like CG movies, where play times ballooned into the 80 or 90 hour ranges. We learned a lot in that era, but we also lost a simplicity, a fun that's vital to keeping a gamer interested in the hobby.

I see the DS as the answer to a question: What if the SNES-era never ended? What if developers were allowed to experiment, because the games they were developing weren't so expensive that an interesting failure would cripple the company? You might get a catalog of quirky platformers, deep RPGs, well-written adventures, brain-bending puzzles... And all of them available on-the-go, and at a lower price point, to boot.

So here's to you, DS. Resurrector of the Golden Age, Last Bastion of the Light. Your 3D cousin may eclipse you in the market, but never in my heart.

Salute!

Confessions of an Intellectual Drug Dealer

Hi, I'm Will. And I'm a puzzle addict.

I've always liked puzzles, for a simple reason: I'm EXTREMELY arrogant about my intellect, and I have a talent for abstract thought. I may not be the fastest kid in the class on a math problem, or the first to diagram a sentence, but when the teacher asked how to get the chicken, the fox, and the bag of feed across the river, I was the first man on the scene.

(In the last few years the phenomenon of the ARG - Alternate Reality Game - has both fascinated and repelled me. ARGs are giant puzzles that enterprising people -often but not always working to market a product in an innovative way - hide on the Internet and in the real world. ARGs create an amazing sense of the world as a place full of hidden secrets, but they're also frustrating. I was the smartest kid in Mrs. Dason's third grade class, but when the puzzle is available to the entirety of the population of the Internet, I almost always end up just watching the crazy mental gymnastics of the players at the genius end of the Bell curve with a mixture of awe and deep, deep envy.)


When I played my first adventure game 15 or so years ago (Space Quest 5, if you're curious), I was instantly hooked. Abstract thought mixed with funny writing and weird, interesting worlds? It was a perfect fit (barring the times I got stuck and had to beg my Mom to let me call the Sierra Hint Line in the sad days before I had Internet access). Over the next few years I devoured Sierra and LucasArts' back catalog, in search of new characters, cool plots, but most especially... The Rush.

You've felt it. The moment of epiphany, when your brain locks in and you and the game's designer experience a kind of time-delayed telepathy. 5 or 6 different elements come together in a new configuration, and your brain makes the logical leap. The feeling of dawning understanding. Endorphins for the mind. The Rush.

An easy puzzle won't evoke it. If the solution is obvious from the second you see it, there's no thrill, no challenge. Nonsensical difficulty won't, either, when you're just bashing away with trial and error until something finally works. The Rush only happens when your perspective suddenly shifts. The meaning of the impenetrable code becomes crystal clear, the Sphinx's riddle becomes suddenly obvious.


The single best evocation of The Rush I've ever found isn't from a video game at all. It's from the incredibly kinked mind of a guy named Jeff Webster. A few years ago, Webster started a site called Weffriddles. The premise is very simple: Weffriddles is a series of pages, each of which contains some sort of hint or hidden information. The player uses these hints to find the url of the next page. The puzzles start out extremely simply, but become beautifully, wonderfully, terribly complex.

My friend Kevin and I used to do weffriddles when we were bored at our lab jobs. This would inevitably turn into a competition, as each of us fought to be the first to get The Rush on the next puzzle, like two drug addicts fighting over their fix. The beauty of the riddles is that they are almost all quite simple - in hindsight. It is only once you have made the logical leap, felt The Rush, that things fall into place. Before that, you can spend days staring at them in incomprehension.


I have since tried to take up the Weff role myself. My Minecraft server is littered with mazes and obscure puzzles. I get a visceral thrill out of watching people navigating a teleporter maze I constructed over the course of a week. I find myself badgering people into playing through this stuff, because it gratifies the time I spent constructing it; because, as an asshole, I get off on watching them struggle with something I understand completely; and most of all, because I want them to experience The Rush.

Because that telepathy works both ways, and when someone solves a puzzle I've laid out, just for a second, there's someone else in the world who's thinking like me.

(Weffriddles can be found at www.weffriddles.com, and if you are of a certain temperament, will come to dominate your mind for weeks at a time)

Length as Storytelling

I've been replaying Persona 4 lately.

It's one my favorite games, and its only real competition for best PS2 RPG is its immediate predecessor, Persona 3. What I find fascinating about both of these games is that they use what became one of the sometimes-unfortunate defining traits of the Japanese RPG - their extreme length, especially when compared to other genres - and used it for storytelling purposes.


Game length is one of those nebulous topics where I find my opinions changing every time I think about it. I have felt cheated in the past by games that ended too abruptly, and been bored by games that were clearly full of padding to extend play time. What it comes down to, I think, is that a game should last for as long as it's fun, and as long as it has new things to say. Portal and Braid come to mind, as short games that explore their mechanics thoroughly in ~4 hours and then end, and I don't know that I've ever heard many arguments that those games need to be longer. (Portal 2 is significantly longer, but it earns those hours with great extensions to the basic gameplay formula, with constant shifts of setting, and with writing that continues to serve as a reward for players even if a puzzle isn't holding their attention).

But RPGs have often touted "length" as a major selling point. Boxes would claim 40, 60, 100 hours of gameplay, as though it were an end within itself. What this often translates to, however, are long, uninteresting cutscenes, slow-paced battle systems, needlessly obscure puzzles, unfocused, meandering plots. Padding.


Contrast, say, Chrono Trigger, and its sequel Chrono Cross. Trigger is generally considered to be one of the all-time best JRPGs. Cross... isn't.* There are a lot of factors at play to explain that, but the one that I want to focus on here is the fact that Chrono Cross is roughly 3 times longer than its predecessor.

Chrono Trigger is an unusually short game for its genre - about 20 hours, if memory serves. But it is also an extremely tight game - every action your party takes flows naturally into the next, into the next after that, from the opening Millenial Fair to the finale, where focus spreads to give each character their own character-defining sidequest and the player is given multiple options to tackle the final challenge against Lavos. I could chart every major story beat of the game from memory, if I was so inclined, and while that's partly out of familiarity, it's also because everything follows a logical order.

Chrono Cross, on the other hand, meanders. It runs through a cast of 45 playable characters and tons of NPCs. The player's end goal changes numerous times, distractions butt into the plot every few hours.. It's messy and it's tiring and it's LONG. At one point you're organizing a concert, then you're walking in a high-tech city from the future, then you're trapped in a crazy painting world. It doesn't feel long because the designers had a long story to tell; it feels like the designers were told to make a long game and threw a bunch of different ideas together.

(*Mind you, I do like the game. It has a good battle system and a great soundtrack, and it tries to deal in-depth with some interesting concepts that Trigger only deals with in subtext. But it IS a mess.)


Speaking of meandering, didn't I start this post by talking about Persona?

Persona 3 and Persona 4 are an odd blending of genre - they mix fairly hardcore RPG elements derived from their parent series, the Shin Megami Tensei games, with the time management and character-focus elements of a Japanese dating sim. The premise in both games is, basically, the one described on the TV Tropes page "Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World" - you're a high school student who must manage his social life during the day, and then use the power derived from your links to other people to fight otherworldly threats at night.

The games are long - my first playthroughs of each were in the ~60 hour range. But what makes them interesting in a discussion of game length are the way they use that longevity to their advantage. I would say about 40% of that time is spent in the actively RPG parts - exploring dungeons, fighting monsters, fusing Personas to increase your strength. The other 60% if spent socializing with your teammates and friends.

What's key here is that the games both take place over roughly a year. Your character goes (as long as you're managing his development and time properly) from a timid, coarse, friendless stranger into a brave, eloquent hero with a wide circle of friends supporting him in his fight. Huge swaths of game time are devoted to things like school trips or festivals. These occasionally lead to breakthroughs in your investigations, but they're mostly just chances for your character to interact with the rest of the cast, flirt with girls, listen to jokes, bond with friends.

Persona 4, especially, devotes a HUGE amount of time to the interactions between your main character and the other members of your party. As such, it's one of the few games that I've ever felt really conveys what a friendship is like - as much wasting time and shooting the shit as it is fighting to keep each other alive. There are concrete gameplay benefits to spending time with your friends, as they gain power the closer your bond is, but it's also pleasant. I find myself responding to these characters on an emotional level I usually don't, and that's at least in part due to the amount of time I've spent with them.


The player can generally chose to spend time in the dungeons to break all this character-building up with more traditional RPG stuff (Persona 3 makes this more mandatory because there's a limit to how long your characters can spend in the dungeon per trip, but Persona 4 does away with these limits) - but not always.

There's a long sequence in Persona 3 where the team, having reached a point of despair, refuses to enter the dungeon at all. As such, you can only watch them listlessly waste their days until a new catalyst sparks them to action. In gameplay terms, it lasts for maybe half an hour - but it's an extremely effective way to force the character's mindset on the players. It's boring, it's grim - it's good storytelling.

At the end of the day, the extreme lengths of these games make them FEEL like they take place over a year. It gives the player time to form attachments that mimic his character's, and those emotional resonances make the more epic beats of the story significantly more effective when they hit. All of which leads to a game that's way more affecting than others of its ilk.

What Happened at the Library Today

A woman just had a seizure behind me. I'm at the library at Chicago and Ashland, and she started to convulse and almost scream. Loud, inhuman, angry noises, and her body seemed to twist as if trying to pull itself apart.

She's sleeping now, gently snoring, sprawled across a few chairs. The man who's with her - a homeless guy I've seen at the library a few times before, held her throughout. He whispered "there, there" to her as her body bucked and fought. He was concerned, but not alarmed. He ignored the stares of the other patrons, told people grabbing their phones that they didn't need an ambulance. It was just a seizure, she had them all the time. Normally she had them in the mornings, but today she was having them in the afternoon. She'd quiet down in a few minutes.

He was calm, collected. Once her shaking had subsided and she had drifted off to sleep, mind and body exhausted by contortions, he turned back to his computer and waited for her to wake.

What's scarier? The loss of control? The realization that the human body, brain included, is not under the sole jurisdiction of the conscious thing we call "I," but merely a collection of connected cells that can suddenly cascade in painful, humiliating ways?

Or that this man, who I've judged before, for having less than me, for not always being able to bathe every day, treated what must be an incredibly stressful daily occurrence with grace and dignity, while I sat here, scared, and fucking BLOGGED about it.

Issue Nineteen: Assasin

This is late - I've been depressed. Also, no detailed summary - KM tricks Sir Miles, he and Fanny break free. Ragged Robin, Jim Crow, and Boy locate them magically. Miss Dwyer turns into a monster beetle, and Fanny and KM are still trapped in the base with her.

Everybody has a secret origin, and they all suck. Bruce Wayne is a crying little boy, Clark Kent is a farmboy. King Mob was a rebellious kid in a band.

That's why you wear the costume. You can talk all you want about "protecting your loved ones," but the truth is: Nobody would be impressed by Peter Parker fighting crime in jeans and a T-shirt. When you wear the costume, you become an icon. You take on meaning, become more than human. Hilde puts on a wig and leather and becomes Lord Fanny. And Gideon Starorzewski wears a suit made of pop-culture deities and rebellion and Michael Moorcock stories and magical traditions and becomes King Mob.

And the question remains: Is King Mob a good person to be? Dude destroys SOULS. Not in a "I shall destroy your soul, verily, let us wax wroth" way, but in a "I just ripped your aura out of you, and now you are going to cease horribly" way. I mean, it's right there in the title of this issue. ASASSIN. He's not a magician, not a shaman. If he's got the mirror stuff inside of him (and we can assume he does, since it seems to go hand-in-hand with having a Barbelith/magic stone experience), he doesn't seem to be using it.

Fanny runs through lust and filth because that's how she connects to the gods she uses as an interface between "her" and "the magic" (which is also her). King Mob is way more straightforward - his idealized version of himself is a badass superspy from a convoluted conspiracy thriller, and thus he lives a life where he gets to be that. That means he shoots dudes in the head, rips off auras, tosses off cheesy one liners. James Bond as totem animal.

Jim Crow drives around in a big hearse, because Jim Crow walks with death. And we keep getting told that death is no big, because life is a transitory existence and we're all going to wake up into infinity and blah blah blah. But, you know, just because a man's "initiated" doesn't mean he's good. Sir Miles is initiated. He's wearing a costume made up of aristocracy and he does some pretty crappy things with it.

So the question stands: Is King Mob a good guy?

I mean, it's not like the "scorpion gods" are other, evil gods messing with us. We keep getting told that ALL the gods/aliens/whatever are masks being worn by Barbelith. Is "Dude what kills better than anybody" a vital component in a team whose job it is to save the world? Is King Mob a necessary, aggressive part of the defensive program? Would you read a comic book if it didn't have awesome gun fights and explosions?

Once you've seen the big circle in the sky, once you have your magic stone, is that the end of growth? You pick your totem and you get your superhero costume and then you just fill that role for the rest of your life? Because King Mob just got tortured within an inch of his life. Yeah, it was a trap, but he was crying. He was close to broken. Does he just get back up and start shooting people again?

Or has all of this just been the secret origin of something even better?

Michaels & Sullivan: Holistic Sudoku

INT. OFFICE - DAY

The walls are covered with clippings from newspapers. Some of them have headlines that read things like "Sudokuists Supreme Sizzle Snake Smugglers," and "Puzzle Patrons Pummel Petty Pursesnatchers." Others appear to be solved puzzle pages. One whole wall seems entirely devoted to a massive, thousand-cell puzzle. A man, MICHAELS, is slumped, asleep, in a chair behind a desk piled high with pens. His face is ink-stained and grizzled, and his breath stinks of whiskey. Suddenly, the door bursts open and a fast-talking palooka with a lot of moxie (SULLIVAN) walks in.

SULLIVAN
Michaels, wake up, you worthless son of a Quizzler, we gotta case!

MICHAELS (groggily)
What? Who is it... Marlene?

SULLIVAN
Damn it, man, do I LOOK like Marlene? We both know that two-bit hussy walked out on you the minute Big Will Shortz flashed his bankroll at her. Now get your booze-soused brain in gear, we GOTTA CASE!

MICHAELS
All right, all right, I'm up. What's the skinny, Sully?

SULLIVAN
No skinny this time, boss, this one's all fat. The Clogstein Diamond's been lifted. Filched, even!

MICHAELS
Where's the canoe factory, Sullivan? That's flatfoot business. There's no angle. No percentage for numbermooks like us.

SULLIVAN
Boss, the gumshoes are stumped. See, the only dirt they could dig up at the scene was a Sudo! They figure the crim left it behind, as a clue, Gorshin-style!

MICHAELS
You got my attention but you ain't got my heart, ya loveable galoot. The boys in blue aren't the sharpest tacks in the tack shop but they can solve a Sudo if someone throws it in their faces. Why's this our business?

SULLIVAN
That's just it, Michaels. They solved it easy, sure, but then... when they filled all the numbs in, it formed 9 smaller sudos... and when they solved that one, another 81. By the time anyone realized what was going on, four coppers were dead and another 20 in the doctor house. This ain't no normal Sudo-crim, boss.

MICHAELS
Sully! The numbs in the first Sudo... anything twig you oddstyle about them?

SULLIVAN
Whaddayamean, boss? Looked fresh to me.

MICHAELS
And a clock just looks like a sundial to a caveman. But to a space caveman.. Sully, I'd bet you a year's pencils that those numbers were all prime. He's back.

SULLIVAN
Who's back, boss? What are you chewing on?

MICHAELS (standing up, putting on his hat)
Get my gun and my erasers, Sully. We're on the case. The Cross-Hatcher's gonna pay for what he's done.

Issue Eighteen: Messiah

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 18

"Entropy in the U.K. Part Two: Messiah"

Synopsis
Sir Miles continues to interrogate King Mob. KM is injected with a drug called Key 17, which causes the user to be unable to distinguish between written words and the actual things they represent. Sir Miles convinces Gideon that he has cut off his fingers and destroyed his face.

Flashbacks show King Mob spending time with Aboriginal people in Australia. He declares himself "Scorpion Dreaming" and is allowed to descend into Ayer's Rock, where he sees a gigantic, fish-like spaceship, and then begins to have a "Barbelith" experience similar to Jack Frost's.

Sir Miles, unable to prove that the man he has been torturing is King Mob, is forced by his superior Miss Dwyer to drink her milk, which has been tainted by nanomachines related to the archons of the Outer Church. Using the psychic boost they give him, Sir Miles finds a memory of King Mob performing a tantric sex ritual with Lady Edith Manning, and discovers that the Invisibles learned Jack Frost is returning to Liverpool.

Boy investigates the apartment King Mob keeps in his "Kirk Morrison" persona, only to find that the police are already there. She is grabbed by a policeman, but fights him off, and is driven away by a random passerby who enjoys seeing people stand up to the cops. She arrives back at Invisibles HQ, frantic in her certainty that something has happened to KM and Lord Fanny, only to find that Ragged Robin has recruited Big Jim Crow to help them.


I'd like to show you something now. A mirror.
I was having trouble breaking this issue down, until I was hit by a sudden revelation. The whole first volume of The Invisibles is a meditation on shamanic initiation. And we get some of that, with King Mob's flashbacks. But Gideon isn't the character being initiated here: Sir Miles is.

Sir Miles is the one gaining access to a language "whose words do not describe things but are things" in the form of the drug Key 17. It's Sir Miles who has a "magic stone" forced into him in the form of Miss Dwyer's archon-changed milk. He's reliving memories of his youth, having parts of his identity stripped away, reacting with fear when touched by a higher world. And he comes out of it with power and understanding.


Of course, in regards to a lot of it, he refuses to listen. Part of the fun of the Gideon Stargrave interludes is the way they reflect and contain the world of The Invisibles in them. Gideon is being pursued by a psychically created double (shades of Sir Miles being a mirror image of King Mob) while his trusty assistant rattles off yet another variation on initiation - it's all there, if Miles and his unsavory associates had the capacity to listen. Even more so when KM, re-living his Barbelith moment, starts rambling the heavy stuff.

"Qabbalexic neurostasy.. trans-mater... ellipticryptic hymgnosis... ectogens... infoplacental halluciongenesystems." Frankland dismisses them as speaking in tongues, as if that makes them less important instead of more. None of that stuff, far as I can tell, is English, per se, but it brims with ideas. And all of them relate to a connection between language/information and birthing. Rebirth from flesh into ideas. It's the Barbelith experience, in word form, and Frankland and Miles just skip over it like an impatient reader moving over the page.


Gotta dreaming?
I don't have a lot to say about King Mob's Australian experiences - it's one more version of the initiation from another angle, with the descent into the rock mirroring Fanny's descent into the underworld and Dane's trip down into the tunnels. The idea that Ayer's Rock itself is a magic stone, one for the entire planet, is an interesting one, though. The hippy from a few episodes back (in fact, the one where half of the sex ritual we see in KM's mind takes place) talked about the planet itself becoming sentient. Maybe he was closer to the truth than we thought - we've been told the end of the world is coming, and the entire planet being initiated into magical awareness would look a lot like that.


Speaking of that ritual - it's essentially King Mob having sex with time itself, merging Edith in her 20s and Edith in her 90s, youth and death and all the years in between, sinking into and losing himself in it. If the "gods" are just us, unmoored from time, then King Mob has found a handy way to commune with them...

Slight Delay

Hey, Chicago got hit with a blizzard a few days ago, and I got stuck at a friend's house, not conducive to writing. Next issue will be up tonight.

Issue Seventeen: Entropy in the U.K. Part One: Dandy

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 17

"Entropy in the U.K.: Dandy"

Synopsis
Sir Miles begins his psychic interrogation of King Mob. However, instead of actual information, he can only find bizarre science-fiction stories about a dandyish super-assassin named Gideon Stargrave. King Mob claims that he is a writer (Kirk Morrison, whose books have been seen before in the series) and that these are ideas for a book he's writing. Miles eventually manages to push deeper, and discovers King Mob's younger self, a violent rebel not unlike Dane McGowan, and learns that his last name is Starorzewski. He prepares to physically torture KM to extract more information.

Sir Miles also reports to his superior, Miss Dwyer (previously seen bringing Dane McGowan to Harmony House in the first issue). However, he is horrified to learn that an archon of the Outer Church, The-King-of-all-Tears, is about to manifest himself on the earthly plane.

In flashbacks, King Mob has a conversation with his friend and mentor Elfayed, in which Elfayed tells KM his theory that humanity is consuming its environment at an advanced pace because it is preparing to metamorphose into something new.

Ragged Robin and Boy, worried over KM and Fanny's disappearance, split up - Boy to check out King Mob's apartment, Robin to "go see a rock band."

A police officer named Harper is in an armed showdown with a criminal. Harper's phone rings, distracting the criminal, and Harper kills him. He answers the call, which is from his old friend Jack Flint (seen in a strip club in a previous issue) and is told that Division X is being reactivated.


Wizard prang, old bean!
Have we ever talked about the fact that King Mob is Grant Morrison? Not in a subtle, a few details pulled from his life, sort of way. His fantasies in this issue are from wish-fulfillment comics Morrison wrote when he was younger, he's an author (who publishes under the last name Morrison, no less). As much as the Invisibles is about the transformation of its characters, it's also trying to transform us, to act like a how-to guide for enlightenment. And Morrison is leading the charge, here, with a character who is essentially himself but idealized, Invisible.

And in this issue, he lets that mask slip. One of the things I've always loved about this one is the complete, un-self-conscious way Fanny and KM slip into their cover stories - every reaction they give lines up completely with the events of the shooting, and with how a normal person would react to them. And I think, at least partially, this is coming from a real place. KM is in as bad a situation as he's ever been in, and he's tapping into real, legitimate fears to make "Kirk Morrison (also KM, of course) seem scared shitless by what's happening to him.


A bit of the old ultra-violence
And meanwhile, his mind cycles through adolescent fantasies (steeped in violent rebellion, crazy sci-fi elements, big explosions, the Gideon Stargrave bits are like a timeline of the development of the ideas that eventually matured into The Invisibles) that get closer and closer to the ways Morrison thinks today, as Sir Miles smashes against his psychic resistance. There's even a gorgeous shout-out to The Prisoner, with King Mob and Sir Miles saying some of the show's opening dialogue, along with a shot of Mob, dressed as The Prisoner, is pursued by the ominous Rover (who looks uncannily like the Invisible blank badge).

And why not? This is King Mob's origin story, but it's also the origin of this whole book. The Prisoner, with its surreality, its strange sci-fi plots, and especially its focus on self-determination and individual freedom, is as much a parent to this book as Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories, which serve as the template for all the Gideon Stargrave stuff. There's even a shout-out to Orwell, with Sir Miles referencing Room 101 from 1984 - the worst room in the world.

And at the end, Sir Miles does break through - at least a little. He finds that young man, Polish, bushy head of hair, last name Starorzewski... But when he finds him, he's got a solid colored circle at his back, and he's holding a gun that kill ideas. Sir Miles may think he's broken KM, but he's got a lot to learn.


Casper the benign tumor
We also get another conversation with Elfayed, and once again he's talking about mummies. Last time this came up, I associated mummies with preservation, stagnation, but maybe I was wrong. He's much more inclined to think of them as prototype cocoons, as more symbols of transformation and change. (King Mob, awesomely, says the mummy reminds him of the Invisible man - he's right, in multiple senses of the word)

It's another reminder of the principle he lays down earlier, "As above, so below," (shades of the way Fanny's near-death experiences reflect her "higher" descent into the underworld, as well as Ragged Robin talking this issue about making friends with your cancer cells). The human body consumes itself as it dies as part of a transformation into something new, just as humanity is consuming the world for the same reason. Fanny manages to get a laugh out of one guard, and it's an entrance point into bringing down the whole base. Small changes reflect bigger ones.

As above, so below.

Issue Sixteen: London

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 16

"London"

(I usually don't like to re-post too much of the book in one block, but the abduction sequence in this issue is important enough to include as a whole)



Synopsis
Dane McGowan is once again living on the streets of London. He sees members of the cell looking for him, but continues to hide, and is wracked by guilt over the enemy soldier he shot.

He once again sees the words Barbelith spraypainted on a wall, and suddenly recovers much of his memories of his time with Tom O'Bedlam. Most significantly, he remembers what happened the first time he saw the word painted on the wall of the subway tunnel.

Dane is abducted by aliens, who tell him he is the chosen one, and implant a "magic stone" that will allow him to produce the magical superfluid known as magic mirror into his forehead. When Dane realizes that they are not really aliens, they remove their disguise to show their true form, telling him "the soul is not in the body, the body is inside the soul," and that they are a higher form of humanity.

Dane is woken from his reverie by the appearance of Sir Miles and the Hunt. Miles tells the boy that he has been tricked and manipulated by the Invisibles, and offers him a place of power and safety with the enemy. Dane refuses, and the Hunt attacks him. Dane channels his psychic abilities in a massive act of self-defense, destroying all of his attackers except Sir Miles. Miles attempts to psychically dominate the boy, but Dane manages to overpower him. He holds a gun to Miles's head and is about to shoot, before being stopped by a police officer.

Dane, acting off of a recovered memory from Tom, goes to a locker that has been left for him. Unlocking it with a key Tom gave him, he finds a Tesco's bag. With the supplies inside, Dane cuts his hair, changes his appearance, and begins hitchhiking north, back to Liverpool.


The Invisible man
And suddenly we're back where we started: Dane McGowan, losing himself on the streets of London. Except this time, it's not a controlled experiment. The Invisibles are all still around him, but they don't know he's there. And this time, the Hunt is real.

But most importantly, Dane McGowan is no longer the person he was. He has killed (and felt deep remorse... I can't help thinking that the juxtaposition of Dane's grief at the dead soldier and those pigeons taught him not to kick is intentional.) And he's been through enough, now, that when he sees Barbelith sprayed on the walls of the city, he can recover some of the things that happened to him the first time he saw it.


Be as strong as you can. It always hurts.
It's important to read this issue after She-man, because Fanny's story sets up a lot of parallels here. Dane briefly realizes that he is BOTH standing outside, and down in the tunnel. The paint forming the word Barbelith will always be wet, fresh. Magicians exist outside time, and this is the story of how Dane became a magician.

In the light of Fanny's experience with the Aztec gods, it becomes easier to see the aliens who abduct Dane in a similar light - metaphors for the Other, the more advanced. UFOs and conspiracy theories are the modern myth, and the consciousness communicating with Dane uses that imagery to obfuscate the frightening truth. And just like Fanny before him, Dane sees through the illusion. That's part of the test.


There's a little bit of confusion, for me, when this particular entity uses pronouns. It declares "you" "The chosen one," who has been "/(elected)/" to save the world. I think this might be the point where we break from the Hero's Journey mold we've been operating in for Dane. Because, while Dane is powerful, and he will be important, I don't believe that he's the actual, literal Messiah. It goes against everything the comic seems to be about, the idea that everyone can become Invisible, to have a character who comes in and saves the world by dint of how perfect and special he is.


It seems more likely that this is what anyone who gets to this point is told - and it's true. Once you get to this level of understanding, leading people to "/(global peace and harmony)/" (those /( are what the aliens use when they're... not lying, exactly, but using simplified language to express something we can't understand). It is part and parcel of learning magic, the way the universe works.



Try to remember.
Or, hell, maybe he was /(elected)/. The right man in the right place, chosen by a group that can see everyone in every time. Maybe Dane McGowan was the right man for the job.

Because that's Barbelith's last big revelation (for now, anyway). That all of these aliens, these mysterious circles in the sky... They're just big, cosmic versions of the Invisibles badge. The magic mirror exists outside of and reflects time, and when you look into it, what you're seeing is yourself. Your whole self. The "aliens" and the "gods" are just what we look like from the outside, reaching into the universe to help the parts of us stuck there. No gods. No monsters. Just humanity, reflected.

In the end, I've only one true teaching for you, Dane, one simple word: Disobedience
If there is something special about Dane, it's not the psychic powers. It's that complete unwillingness to join anything. That immature "Fuck you" to the idea that any group or side has his best interests at heart. He's the permanent outsider, rebelling against everything, and, when he finally taps into that rage, the results are spectacular.

I find it interesting, that when Jack Frost unleashes on the members of the Hunt, he almost seems to be attacking the page, as well. Maybe it's just a stylized way of showing carbon monoxide, but it LOOKS like Jack has thrown paint thinner onto the pages, erasing his opponents from the universe. When he has his psychic duel with Sir Miles, the same thing occurs, seeming to blot his opponent out of the page itself.
And why not? Magic is the manipulation of the rules of reality, and reality is the book.

The most interesting example, though, is when Dane goes to the locker Tom left for him. This might be a huge coincidence, but Dane opens locker 23 (a reference, I assume, to the many conspiracy theories related to that number), and directly next to him is the page number of the issue - 23. Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems like Dane is reaching into the page itself for the items Tom left for him. A secret cache, passed from one reality manipulator to another.

And what's in the bag? Scissors, a new shirt. Ways to change your appearance. Ways to become Invisible.

Issue Fifteen: Apocalipstick

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 15

"She-man Part Three: Apocalipstick"

Synopsis
In Mictlan, Hilde watches her future life beside the death god Mictlantecuhtu. He tells her that she must turn away from the world and come into his kingdom forever. He shows her the star demons, who include Orlando in their ranks, and say they will consume the world in pain and suffering soon. Hilde protests that she is not dead yet, and offers him a joke in exchange for knowledge and safe passage from his kingdom. He accepts.

Her joke (What are pink, wrinkled and stiff and make women squeal? Cot death babies) makes the bone god laugh, and he allows her into his garden. There, she learns the secrets of magic, and is shown that the gods are just masks, behind which lies the strange red circle called Barbelith.

In Rio de Janeiro, an 18-year-old Hilde is working as a prostitute. She is taken to a party where men in animal masks brutally rape and beat her, then throw her from a moving car. She returns to her home and contemplates suicide, but resolves to stay alive. Moments later, John-a-Dreams comes to her door, and asks her if she has ever heard of The Invisibles.

In present day, Lewis Brodie reports to his superior, Sir Miles (who appears to have been wounded in an altercation earlier that day with the missing Jack Frost), that he has captured a member of the Invisibles.

Lord Fanny attacks Brodie, but is unable to match him physically. She is saved by King Mob, who arrives at the apartment and begins battling Brodie. However, Brodie manages to get to his gun and shoots KM through the stomach. He then fires his gun into Fanny's face, but (due to her magical manipulations) it misfires, and she slashes him through the crotch with a shard of broken mirror.

Brodie dies after seeing a strange vision of his childhood cat. Fanny passes out. And Sir Miles and his troops arrive at the apartment, realizing that they've managed to capture King Mob.


I'm already on my knees
So the question is: How do you become Invisible?

It's not just rebelling. It's not just learning to do magic. It's not martial arts training or knowing how to shoot dudes or any of that other action hero bullshit.

Being Invisible is stripping away the self, giving up who you were. Dane McGowan gets pissed when the cell members call him Jack Frost because he doesn't want to face a truth - Dane McGowan is gone, given up willingly when he jumped off the building at Canary Wharf.

For the girl named Hilde, it came on a night when she was working the streets of Rio, during Carnivale. A room full of faceless men in animal masks (and a strange light in the corner?), raping and beating her and then throwing her out of a moving car. It was kneeling on a bathroom floor, trying to get her hands to close around enough pills to end the pain. And realizing that this was as bad as it could get.

It would never get worse. COULD never get worse. And she had survived it. Could now draw strength from it. In that moment, Hilde was gone, and Lord Fanny was born.


Don't make me laugh! It hurts too much to...
Lewis Brodie dies in this issue, and I'm still not sure how I feel about the man. At his core he's a brute and a murderer, but the edges of his character have weird twists and turns. He recognized the mirror stuff, after all (although maybe we all would, when confronted with something like that). He has an almost hero-worship-like attitude to the mythical King Mob, as though KM is some sort of archetype or rock star he's been trying to live his life toward. And then there's the stuff with his cat.

Brodie mentions the cat in all three issues - first to Sir Miles, and then when he sees the magic mirror. And Hilde, when she drinks the tea during her initiation, sees a black cat among all the aliens and mantises and weirdness. I'm worried I'm missing a reference here, to some Aztec god that Brodie unknowingly worships with his love for his dead cat. Lewis asks "Who's that WITH you?" Death, presumably. Cats have traditionally been seen as psychopomps, those who lead the souls of the dying to the land of the dead.

Or maybe it's just that we all have gods, living in our heads. The things we love, and still think about. And in exchange for keeping those ideas alive, they can give us gifts. Like taking laughter into the face of death.


Cot death babies.
Which is how Hilde survives her meeting with the bone god, of course (for now, anyway). Her patron is the goddess of filth, and she tells a joke that merges sex intimately with death, and gets a chuckle out of old Mictlantecuhtu. In such a way, she is allowed to leave death... for a time.

And death is not so bad, when confronted by the alternative that Mictlantecuhtu lays out - unceasing torment by the creatures he calls the star demons. Among their number is our old friend Orlando, who still bears a grudge for things to come. Spirits of pain that threaten to overwhelm the world, death stands as a respite from their ministrations.

Mictlantecuhtu speaks of needing payment for his services in dismissing the demon (back in the windmill). Is the payment Hilde's joke? Or is it the entire situation with Brodie? Did Fanny throw herself into danger because being brought near to death again was the death god's payment for his help? The joke she told merged sex and death - and so did getting high and bringing Brodie home. Are they reflections of the same event?


We gods are only masks
In any case, she survives, and learns the ways of magic. "That language whose words do not describe things but ARE things." We'll be seeing that idea more and more, language as the bridge between our thoughts and reality (and the way the languages we are taught constrict the thoughts and realities we can operate in)

And then, one more monstrous god, skull-faced butterfly with wolf's paws... almost a composite of the various gods Hilde has dealt with... And that is pulled away to show what all the gods really are. The truth behind every myth of ascension and magic. The hidden circle.

Barbelith.


And we learn one more thing. Magic mirror is a reflection of reality, yes. But it's also a liquid, pliable, constantly moving. And when you reach out, gently, and change it (so that a bullet, say, fails to fire)...

That's what we call magic.

Issue Fourteen: She-man Part Two: Day of Nine Dogs

The Invisibles
Volume 1
Issue 14

"She-man Part Two: Day of Nine Dogs"

Synopsis
Hilde, the young Lord Fanny, continues her initiation on the steps of a pyramid in Mexico. She steps into the jungle and is confronted by the god Tezcatlipoca, who challenges her to pull his heart from the doors of his chest before they can close on her (with death as the price of failure) she does so, and forces him to show her the way to Mictlan, land of the dead, so that she can learn magic. She moves through higher dimensional space to get there before reaching the court of Mictlantecuhtu, lord of death, who welcomes her to his kingdom, telling her that she is dead.

Other flashbacks show Fanny as a transvestite prostitute, being degraded and eventually badly beaten by her clients.

Lord Fanny, in the bathroom of the club, quickly pulls the "magic mirror" back into her and, charmed by the Outer Church assassin Lewis Brodie, takes him home to her apartment. They fool around for a time before Brodie pulls a gun and demands she tell him everything she knows about King Mob.

King Mob asks Edith Manning to help him find Dane McGowan, and she eventually agrees. The ritual itself is not shown. On the way back to London, KM picks up a hitchhiker, who speaks at length about conspiracy theories that seem to complement the events of the book.

Taking a break from the search for Dane, Ragged Robin and Boy relax in a bar. Robin pulls a Tarot card to determine what will happen to them next. The card she pulls is Death.

Kirby, beaten in the previous issue by Brodie, is found by his friends. King Mob questions him, and, learning that Fanny is in danger, rushes out to rescue her.

In a strip club, a man named Jack Flint is told that Division X is being reopened, and that he has been reactivated.


I truly believed in Tezcatlipoca. I just didn't ever think he was real.
Speaking to the young Hilde on the steps of the pyramid, the butterfly spirit Tlazolteotl says a very curious thing.

"The mystery will open up to you and you must reach out of time, grasp its heart and make your bargain with it." And then Hilde proceeds to the trial of the god Tezcatlipoca, where she follows those instructions in typical myth fashion. There's a hint, there (one we've seen before in these pages) that much of the more mystical symbolism encountered in The Invisibles is acting as a metaphor for one, central process. Hilde views it as a test by the god of darkness before descending into the land of the dead. Jack Frost headed into the tunnels below London and smoked the blue moss, then jumped off a building and fell to somewhere... else. King Mob's hitchhiker talks about information crashing into ours from a higher reality. And even Lewis Brodie seems to recognize the magic mirror, the time stuff, from somewhere. There's something fundamental to humanity in these mysteries, and we've built framework after framework over the millenia to understand and tap into them.

For Lord Fanny, the framework comes from the patronage of Tlazolteotl, goddess of filth and lust. And so she wears her priestly uniform, subjects herself to pleasurable degradation, leaves clubs with dangerous men when she's too high to see the warning signs. (It is telling that her dangerous encounter with Tezcatlipoca, where she must bargain and risk with a god of darkness, is intercut with working as a prostitute - she has to be brought close to filth and death if she's going to learn.


It's the time stuff, isn't it?
And in exchange for all this, the butterfly whispers the secrets of the universe to her: that time is not a linear process, but a 4-dimensional construct, with all elements of itself accessible at once. That events cycle because they are all the same event, a reflection of a higher truth. Hilde is dying on pyramid steps as Fanny is horribly beaten while working as a prostitute as Lord Fanny is attacked by Brodie as Fanny is living her entire life, moving forward toward her inevitable, eventual death, and always, Hilde is descending into Mictlan, the land of the dead.

And to get there, she moves through "backstage," where people and buildings and the world are just 2D cutouts. We've been here before, when Jim Crow lifted a puddle and walked through, when Jack Frost rode his bike. Lies-to-children, mythic representations of a single true place. And just on the other side of it (through the magic mirror) is Death. Everybody gets there eventually. The trick, of course, is to get there - learn something - and then... make it back.


Speed. Madness. Flying saucers.
So that's Fanny's story this issue. Not much to say about Boy & Ragged Robin, although I find the presentation of their story in newspaper-esque strips delightful (and possibly a continuation of the Prince Valiant-esque panel detailing the history of the pyramid last issue? Looking through the third issue, I can't seem to find a parallel, so it's probably just a coincidence).

The page of King Mob and Edith, with her thoughts presented on the page from within her smoke, and none of their words in bubbles at all, makes me think of last issue, when Fanny was vomiting panels. High enough that her thoughts are merging with the comic's superstructure? Or just artistic license?


The hitchhiker KM picks up lays down some foreshadowing for the America-based Volume 2. (And I just noticed that, with King Mob's red glass sunglasses in this issue, he's essentially walking around with two Barbeliths on his face).There's nothing I can remember about the future of the series about him being anyone in the know, so it might just be an example of the collective-unconscious acting in Invisible-types (even if they aren't members of the group proper). And as King Mob points out, he really believes it. Whose to say his belief structure is any more or less accurate than Aztec gods, hm?