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INVENTORY:
* TROPHY 5
* SKILLS PACKAGE (unopened)
Skills:
(Empty)
Max’s head hasn’t yet fully cleared, so it’s confusing when Hemera steps away from him. Whatever she’s going to do next, she needs enough space to work up a head of steam.
He pitches himself out of the path of a spinning projectile. It’s shiny metal, and it leaves an annoying trail of sparkles behind it.
A boomerang. It glances off his leg, tearing at skin, and deflecting it towards the wall. But it abruptly changes course midair, settling right back into Hemera’s hand.
A magic boomerang. Back on his feet, Max assumes a defensive crouch. If she throws again, he’ll…well, he’ll figure something out. Hemera hurls the weapon, and Max dives out of the way, crashing into a somersault. The boomerang abruptly reverses direction and nearly catches him on the return trip.
Max hobbles to the far side of the platform, and Hemera marches after him, closing the distance one step at a time.
Why walk? Why doesn’t she use the teleport skill she stole? Maybe the boomerang just destroys skills rather than transferring them, but that would be a pretty lousy game mechanic. What’s going on here?
The next throw anticipates which way Max was planning to dive for cover, and he awkwardly twists out of the way, landing roughly on his elbows. Pain radiates up and down his arms. Getting up takes great effort. He’s too slow, and the returning boomerang clips his arm.
Another heart gone. But if the next hit shakes his trophy loose, his health stats won’t matter much anyway.
Max stumbles against the wall; no room to maneuver as Hemera presses a fresh attack. There has to be something else to do. The unopened skills package. Deploy skills package. He doesn’t even have to say it out loud anymore.
SKILLS:
* POW
What’s a pow? Prisoner of war? How is that even a skill? Back in the training level, he saw a brick labeled POW, but he never got to see what it does. Anyway, it can’t be worse than unceremoniously getting robbed of the final trophy.
It reminds him of the scroll’s message, the one he threw back in Hemera’s face, to “beware the power that be.’ Maybe it is a skill—maybe ‘pow-er’ was wordplay on the verb ‘to pow’; that is ‘one who POWs,’ as in comic book sound effects[29]. He wordlessly deploys the skill.
A massive earthquake rattles the castle, bouncing everything up a good meter and abruptly back down again. A cascade of ancient mortar dust clouds the air. That kind of violence should’ve bounced Max off his feet, but it doesn’t affect him at all. Hemera, on the other hand, flies off her feet, tumbles head-over-heels, unwilling or unable to as much as put her hands up to break her fall. Her beautiful face smashes against the invisible floor.
But something even more wonderful happens: all of Hemera’s inventory items spill out in all directions. Among other things, four trophies slide away in the four compass directions, not to mention the magic boomerang.
Max grabs the nearest trophy, which chimes into his inventory.
There’s not enough time to grab the rest of them before Hemera recovers. One trophy topples over the edge, leaving two above, plus the weapon. Of the three things remaining on the level, Max thinks he can get two of them before she does. Decision time—go for the trophies and let her keep the weapon? No, that will only lead to her eventually wearing him down and winning the pieces back. Boomerang it is.
It chimes into his inventory. He immediately hurls it at the nearest trophy in sight, and the boomerang zaps it back to him, at nearly the same time Hemera collects the last trophy on their level. Three out of five ain’t bad.
Max takes aim at Hemera. Hurling the boomerang feels as natural as throwing stones back at the camp. He executes a perfect throw, giving Hemera almost no chance of maneuvering out of the way.
The boomerang passes harmlessly through the space where she used to be. OK, so the teleport skill remains active. That complicates things. And looking over the edge, he sees her on the ground below, collecting the fallen trophy.
There’s got a be a way to get down, quickly, without killing himself. Even a magic boomerang needs to follow Newton’s Laws of Motion, right? Maybe not, if it’s able to spontaneously reverse course in mid-air. Max tries an experiment: he jumps in the air before hurling the boomerang. The equal-but-opposite reaction pushes him backward. He jumps again when catching it, for a similar effect. It gives him a good kick, but enough to slow freefall?
Then Max notices the floor beneath him isn’t transparent any longer. A layer of black is seeping in through the outside wall coating everything.
That clinches it. Max plunges over the edge.
footnotes
[29] Cf. Lichtenstein, “Sweet Dreams, Baby!”, 1965.
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