Just Adventure original

The Immortals of Terra: A Perry Rhodan Adventure Walkthrough by Peter Olafson

by Peter Olafson about 105 minutes to read

Some general notes to get
us started.

Certain "sweet spots"
on the screen can be hard to find. In those cases, use the "S"
key to scan the display. All interactive locations will then show
up as glimmering yellow doughnuts.

Some regions require a
great deal of running back and forth. To move quickly from screen
to screen, right click when the exit icon is displayed.

Computers often hold answers
to hard questions. Periodically run your new topics and items past
a "positronic."

If you can’t find a positronic–the
output from the one at Thora’s museum is apparently in Klingonese
and last three segments don’t have computers at all–just ask around.
Eventually, you’ll find someone who knows more about that item or
topic than you do. Good sources include Kari Levian and her boss Malcolm
Daellian at the Waringer Academy and Ijgarsha and Ullban Krems in
Elmo Dater.

And if you can’t find a
positronic or a solid source–Perry’s essentially alone in some segments–don’t
forget the journal in your PDA. Perry writes a lot of things there
he doesn’t expressly state within the game.

You don’t have to do everything
outlined here. I’ve included some tasks that are purely informational
or just add color. Heck, you don’t even have to do everything characters
in the game put forward. Immortals offers up a fair number of red
herrings.

Finally, while most of
the game’s core puzzles have one solution, you’ll find some small
variations here and there. I’ve outlined the ones I’ve discovered.

Your comments and corrections
are welcome. Your can write to me at .

This document is copyright
2008 by Peter Olafson. It’s free. You may not sell it, distribute
it, modify it, excerpt it (except for "fair use" purposes
in news coverage), edit it or publish it in any fashion without my
prior written consent.

The
Solar Residence

You’ve seen the game’s
intro and know that giant robots have attacked a kung fu-fighting
supermodel on a rooftop. Downstairs in his office, Perry Rhodan knows
only that there has been an attack on the Solar Residence. Some equipment
is broken; some is simply disobedient. Perry can’t visit certain areas
and rooms. (He can’t even get back into his office.) A colleague (Reginald
"Bully" Bull, whose portrait is your first inventory item)
has invoked a special law and Perry’s authority is limited.

And he can’t–that is,
you can’t–just pick up and leave. You’re going to have to sort out
what’s happened and then make your escape.

You can explore this starting
area now in nominal fashion and, on the roof itself, acquire a portrait
of kidnap victim Mondra Diamond for your inventory. This allows you
to ask other people (and eventually your office computer) about your
best friend.

To reach the roof, you’ll
pass through the Hall of Fame. Its entrance isn’t obvious. From this
end, you can’t actually see the portal. It’s the niche on the left
side of the starting foyer just below the door to Atlan’s office.
(That’s the one on the far left in the starting hallway.)

This takes you into a broad,
two-segment corridor lined with 10 information kiosks–all currently
non-functional. Exit at the far end, cross the Crystal Lounge (named
for the singing crystals–currently silent–that are suspended here)
and enter the teleporter. Perry asks for "Residence Parliament,"
but the two accessible "transmitters" are semi-broken. (That
is, they work, but send you automatically to their last destination.)
You’ll find yourself on the Residence’s ruined Terrace, where you
learn from the guards that Mondra has been kidnapped by robots of
"non-Terran origin." You’ll have to zap back down again–over
time, the guards offer a range of excuses for shooing you away–but
you won’t leave empty-handed. Mondra’s portrait has been automatically
added to your inventory.

Keep returning to the roof.
You won’t be able to explore it for a while yet, but you’ll sometimes
get useful information from the guards–notably, a reference to the
presence here of anti-shield capsules, which will allow you to knock
down an obstacle after you get into Mondra’s office.)

Now we’re going to get
the power going again. This will enable you to read the room numbers
in the hall where you initially appear (a necessary step for unlocking
the accompanying doors), reactivate all the cleaning robots (including
one in this starting hall) and the information kiosks and an annoying
Perry Rhodan hologram in the Hall of Fame.

It’s pretty straightforward.
Backtrack to your starting position and make your way around the central
wreckage to the right side of the room. You’ll see another teleporter.
This time, Perry asks to go to the "Surveillance Center."
That isn’t happening either. Step into the light and you’ll reappear
in Mondra’s glider hangar. Perry steps off to the left to take in
this malfunction and a guard zaps through right after him. (He’s here
to prevent you from using the glider you’ll find at the far end.)

Follow him. Walk toward
the bottom right corner of the screen and then right, past the damaged
section of wall, into the hangar proper. You’ll find a technician
named Yuri and the guard here. (The guard has a name, too, but you
don’t get it until later.)

Also Mondra’s glider. This
will eventually be your way out. But you can’t use the glider yet.
If you try, the guard stops you.

Just use the reddish door
(the one with the wheel against the rear wall) and you’ll find yourself
in a utility room. Use the terminal on the right and a big temporary-power
switch appears in the middle of the screen.

Click on it–you don’t
have any choice, actually–and you’re done! The current flows. Among
other things, you’ve turned on the left-hand terminal and additional
functions for the right-hand one. Click on the right-hand terminal
again. You’ll summon a blue display with five columns. These are the
controls for the doors on the starting level. Perry speaks up here,
identifying the middle column (with "936" at the bottom)
as his own, the left-hand ones (479 and 836) as Atlan’s and Gucky’s,
and speculating he can use this to unlock these doors.

Actually, you can unlock
Perry’s door right now. The trick here is simply plugging the number
from the bottom of the central column at the top of that column as
well … but by using arrows to cycle through alien symbols.

Now, no one has told you
that the symbols at the top are the numbers from the bottom. You’ll
soon get a bit of data that makes this clear–it translates the symbols
into numbers–but at this stage, a little leap of faith is required.

But you can sort this out
of your own, and, when you do, you’ll find that all the information
you need is already right here. The alien symbols are already in place
atop the columns for Atlan’s and Gucky’s offices. Gucky’s office number
differs from Perry’s in only the first digit and that digit happens
to be the third digit in Atlan’s office number.

Hence, the symbols atop
Perry’s column (936) should be, from top to bottom:

the bottom symbol from atop the 479 column
the middle symbol from atop the 836 column
and the bottom symbol from the 836 column

Once the right symbols
are in place, you’ll see a line of current from top to bottom in Perry’s
column. We’ll return to this utility room a little later to plug in
the data for Bully’s and Mondra’s offices. (Note that you can’t get
into Atlan’s and Gucky’s offices. Their sections of this display show
damage and inspections of their respective doors in the starting hall
reveal they are broken as well.)

Now exit the right-hand
terminal and use the left one. This will permit you to redirect the
cleaning robots and your "avatar" (that malfunctioning hologram
mentioned earlier) to different sections of the Residence. (It will
come in handy later in distracting guards on the roof and the hangar.)

However, right now, the
terminal doesn’t work at all and Perry mentions finding someone to
fix it. So why are we looking at it? Because looking gets you a picture
of the terminal, which allows you to talk to people about this topic.

Exit this display as well
and return the way you came. When you reach the damaged wall outside
the hangar, you’ll see a new technician at work. Use your use "Maintenance
Terminal" topic with him. He’s not qualified to perform that
kind of work, but will make other arrangements for the terminal’s
repair.

Also talk to him without
a topic to learn what he’s doing here. The thermo-scan glasses he’s
wearing effectively provide a kind of x-ray vision. Click on them.
Perry then invades the bionic’s personal space and the bionic manages
to say with a straight face that he needs the glasses now, but suggests
they might become available a bit later.

Return to the starting
hall, where you’ll find red lights flickering above three of the four
doors–the one over your own door is green–and the cleaning droid
doing its thing.

Here you have several tasks:
re-explore this level, retrieve the office numbers for your neighbors
Bully and Mondra, and check out your newly-opened office.

Now that the power is back,
exploring will get you an additional portrait–that of Ulan Soso–for
your inventory. You can then check him out on your computer in your
office and collect a key item. (You’ll pick up another portrait, for
Aimo Martel, in the office itself.)

Ulan Soso’s portrait:
Just use the kiosk for "The Solar Residence" (Soso is the
structure’s architect) in the Hall of Fame we visited earlier en route
to the Terrace. Those terminals are working now.are working now.

They are devoted to the
topics "Thoregon," "Monos," "The Solar Residence,"
"Atlan," "New millenium, the Swarm," "Super-intelligence,"
"The SOL," "Encounter with IT, Immortality," "The
STARDUST Mission" and "Andromeda and the Masters of the
Island." The Solar Residence kiosk is the second from the end
on the left side of the hall at the end nearest Perry’s office.

Note that the data on a
given kiosk isn’t always displayed right away. A distorted screen
and one of three cryptic messages may pop up at random. In those cases,
you’ll need to activate the terminal a second time to call up the
actual display.

Cast in vague, almost poetic
language and spoken in an ethereal and almost comuter-like voice,
these messages are intended to provide an early clue that Mondra is
in danger (for players who haven’t visited the roof), that events
are in motion and, above all, that you must "HURRY! … HURRY!
… HURRY!"

(Actually, you don’t have
to hurry. Events in adventure games rarely are time-sensitive, and
all events in this one are keyed to your actions.)

But one message does contain
a helpful nugget: "You must find the undying myth!" You’ll
find references to this myth a little later in Mondra’s notebook.

Perry can’t as yet identify
the messages’ source–given their appearance here, we can judge they
must come from a talented hacker–and you won’t be able to guess at
it until we reach the next segment. You’ll hear from this seeming
ally again at Waringer Academy.

You’ll want to check out
all the kiosks. Immortals is based on a long series of science-fiction
novels–the first appeared in Germany in 1961–and these terminals
offer a lot of history and background. (once you get into Perry’s
office, you’ll find a bunch of these novels on the right near the
door.)

In addition to the kiosks,
you’ll now find this hall occupied by the malfunctioning Perry Rhodan
hologram and an active cleaning bot. The former is supposed to serve
as a virtual tour guide, but glitches out during its first line. Once
repaired, this obvious fellow offers a way out of the Residence.

The office numbers:
In the starting hall, simply examine the light over Bully’s door–the
one to the right of your own–to get his number: 938.

And Mondra’s is … well,
you can’t tell what Mondra’s office number is just yet. A former secret
agent, she has her own ideas about privacy and her door plate has
been somehow obscured. That task will have to wait on the availability
of the thermo-scan glasses being used by the bionic outside Mondra’s
hangar. (Technically speaking, you don’t have to see -any- of the
door plates to unlock these doors–but I recommend you adopt this
slower route to let yourself into the game gradually.)

Perry’s office:
And now you get into it. Click on the info terminal on the near right-hand
wall to receive a message Mondra sent before her abduction. She’s
planning to meet with Bully on the Terrace to discuss "quite
alarming things" about a charity exhibition she’s planning at
Thora’s Museum on Titan and "something going on with Martel,"
and wants you there as well.

Speak of the devil: The
next message is from Aimo Martel himself. He proposes a meeting in
his lab at the Waringer Academy to discuss a new technology which
he is eager to keep out of "the wrong hands." This gets
you his portrait. Perry tries to reply, and can’t. His email’s been
locked down by Bully’s blackout.

You’ll want to run all
the portraits by your computer. It’s at the top of the stairs. Lots
of background here–plus you get something new out of it. When you
run Soso’s portrait, a bit of code called "Swoonish omega decimal
minuscules" replaces it. Run this by your PC, too, or just look
at it. It’s a number translator. Too late to help with your office
door (though it can, should you defer that task until later), but
just in time to help with Bully’s door and especially Mondra’s.

You’ve done what you can
do here. Get back to the utility room, call up the right-hand terminal
and use the plus and minus signs at the bottom of the column to the
right of your own to plug in Bully’s office number (938) and the arrows
at the top to pick out the correct alien symbols. As with your number,
this one pretty much translates itself. The top two symbols atop Bully’s
column should be the same as those in Perry’s and the bottom symbol
should be the top one from the 836 column. (If the symbols prove elusive,
just use the Swoonish omega decimal minuscules to make the translation.)
Again, the correct number is rewarded with a solid line of current
through Bully’s column. Back in the starting hall, you’ll find the
light above his door has gone green.

In Bully’s office, grab
the remote control on the floor to the left. It’s broken. You’ll learn
that if you try to use it on the broken model (the Blues saucer) on
the table to the left over by the window. You can have it repaired
later by the hangar attendant Yuri and recharge it in the Robotics
lab at the Waringer Academy. You’ll use it twice to good effect later
in the game.

Try the computer, too.
It needs a password. You don’t have it. Perry already suspects the
password is the name of one of Bully’s model ships, but which one?

You can go get the remote
fixed now, but hang around for a bit. Something’s changed at the far
end of the Hall of Fame. In the Crystal Lounge, you’ll find a new
character. This fine fellow seems fascinated by the crystals suspended
here–now that the power’s up, they’re singing again–and is whistling
to stimulate their responses. (This is a bit of foreshadowing. You’ll
do something similar at the end of the Waringer Academy segment.)
He’s the repairman summoned by the bionic outside the hangar entrance.
Talk to him about the maintenance terminal and he trudges off to the
utility room. (He doesn’t have much to say on other topics, but can
alert you to the general crappiness of Bully’s remote control.)

Problem solved?

Not exactly.

Follow the technician.
He walks slowly but evidently works really fast. When you step out
of the teleporter on the hangar level, you’ll find him chatting about
soccer with the bionic working on the blasted wall. When he sees you,
he breaks off and reports bad news: As he feared, the terminal uses
old technology and he can’t fix it without some further help. The
bionic puts in that you should talk to building architect Soso. Alas,
as you’ve already discovered (when Perry tried to reply to Martel’s
note), you can’t send out messages.

In any case, it’s a red
herring. You already have the info. Simply show the technician the
Swoonish omega decimal minuscules and he trudges off to continue his
work. He won’t be done for a while yet.

Another small change has
occurred, and you might easily miss it: The bionic isn’t wearing his
special goggles any more. They’re now sitting atop the case just to
the right of the ruptured wall. Click on them. Perry politely asks
the bionic if he can borrow them, and the technician agrees. These
will allow you to read Mondra’s hidden door number.

But you’re already down
here, so let’s tackle a lingering task and pick up a new inventory
item. Follow the round-bodied repairman to the right again. You’ll
recall the remote we picked up in Bully’s office is broken. When you
pass Yuri, you can talk to him about it and he’ll identify part of
the problem and fix it for you.

Or don’t. It turns out
this repair isn’t required. If you skip over it, you’ll nevertheless
be able to recharge the remote at Waringer Academy and use it twice
with no ill effects.

Then make for the utility
room. The technician’s back at work. Steal his lunchbox from the the
floor. (Apparently Perry’s courtesy extends to the bionic but not
to Cebulba-like technicians.)

Now get back to the starting
hall. In your office, you’ll find your computer projecting a colorful
swirl. You’ve got female: It’s Tamira Sakrahan, the First Terran.
She doesn’t actually tell you anything, but takes in your story, asks
if Bully is using his authority against you ("I hope not,"
says Perry) and promises to see what she can do. (She never gets back
in touch. It’s just a cameo by another seeming fair-weather friend.)

Outside Mondra’s office,
use the thermo-scan glasses on the protrusion above her door. There’s
her number: 256. Hustle back down to the hangar–where you’ll find
can’t give back the thermo-scan glasses just yet–and the utility
room (where our lunch-less pal is still at work). Activate the right-hand
terminal and plug in "256" at the bottom of the rightmost
column.

Now for the alien symbols
at the top. You already know one of them (the 6). That bottom symbol
is the same as the one in Glucky’s and Perry’s columns. However, the
2 and the 5 are mysteries–albeit minor mysteries, given that you’ve
already accounted for seven of the 10 symbols (the six numerals in
the pre-set symbols, plus the starting "0" symbols on the
three right-most columns–and it’s easy enough now to find the remainder
via trial and error.

But maybe you don’t dig
trial and error–in which case you can look them up via under your
ever-useful Swoonish omega decimal minuscules, which translates all
10 very neatly. Plug in the code. The column lights up. Get back to
Mondra’s office.

Yes, you’re finally in–but
not that far in. You’ll find your access to a box blocked by the brown
aurora of an illegal military shield and access to the far end blocked
by a carnivorous plant. Try to run past the critter (or interact with
it) to get its portrait for your inventory.

And what do you do with
a portrait? You run it by the computer back in your office and learn
that Suurg flies have a calming effect on the plant. Perry here notes
that Mondra breeds those flies up on the roof. You’ve probably already
heard from the guards there about anti-shield capsules. Those might
help with the box.

But you don’t have freedom
of action on the roof. Every time you use the teleporter outside Mondra’s
office, the guards here send you back down after a brisk Q&A.
You’ll have to find a way to distract them, and you’re about to find
one.

Get back down to the hangar
entrance. You’ll automatically return the thermo-scan glasses to the
bionic. (Perry here offers to buy them and the bionic raises the possibility
they’ll be returned to you later.) Press on to the utility room and
the technician announces he’s completed part of his work and takes
off for lunch. The cleaning robots can now be reassigned. And a bunch
of cleaning robots reassigned to rooftop duty would be an ideal distraction.
Call up the left-hand terminal and send the bots to the Terrace and
then get up there yourself to capitalize on the chaos they sow. The
guards are so busy with the industrious little droids they have no
time to deal with you. You have the free run of the place.

Start by grabbing the robot
head over near the central dome above and to the left of the teleporter.
Then poke around inside Bully’s blasted cleaning robot (just to the
right of the teleporter) to find the missing piece of that Blues saucer
model from Bully’s office. (You’ll notice the piece contains the rest
of the model’s name. This is the path to the password for Bully’s
PC.)

Now climb the stairs to
the headless statue at the upper right and, at the top, grab the anti-shield
capsules on the right side of the surrounding path. Finally, check
out the big bowl at the top of the stairs. Mondra bred her Suurg flies
here. That’s what’s flying around in the background. You have only
one thing that could serve simultaneously as both fly bait and fly
trap: the technician’s stolen lunchbox. Use it on the bowl and sit
through the post-purchase-reinforcement spiel to to capture a few.

And now to put your new
gear to use. Get back to Mondra’s office. Use the anti-shield capsules
on the shield around the box. The shield goes bye-bye and you’re free
to take the broken robot and strange lens within. Use the lunchbox/Suurg
fly trap on the Carnivora and it stops trying to bite your head off.
Now you’re free to visit the left end of Mondra’s office. Claim the
notebook from the left side of her desk.

In the lens and notebook,
you now have the two key items in the game.

Also have a peek at the
alien artifact to the right of the desk. This isn’t required, but,
if you use the lens on the artifact, the device’s purpose emerges:
It is a holographic projector. But what is the dragon-like creature
it displays? Read the notebook. It identifies this as a member of
an alien race called the Illochim. It also gets you a portrait of
Mondra’s pal Kari Levian, who’s going to be a big help to you when
you reach the Waringer Academy.

And really -read- Mondra’s
notes. Among other things, they contain the available information
on the lens, point back to its previous owner (a mysterious "Q.B.")
and forward to a likely source of information on its use and provenance
(Malcolm S. Daellian at Waringer), raise the prospect of Kari (who
is Daellian’s assistant) serving as intermediary and supply a script
translation table that’s way too detailed not to be of eventual use.
(It’ll help you through a puzzle at the end of the Thora’s Museum
segment.)

Outside the office, you’ll
be met by the technician, freshly returned from lunch, and your avatar,
out of position, who identifes the tech as Richard Klabund. The technician
then trundles off to repair the avatar side of the left-hand terminal
in the utility room.

Back in the starting hall,
you’ll run into the bionic from the hangar entrance, who appproaches
as though he’s going to punch you in the face … and restores to
you the thermo-scan glasses. (They’ll come in handy in the Waringer
Academy and Thora’s Museum.)

Return to Bully’s office
and use the Le-Clyi piece on the Blues saucer over by the window.
That completes its name: Le-Clyi-Lercyi. However, despite what Perry
said earlier, that won’t work as Bully’s password. But notice that
the ship has been added to your inventory. To what purpose?

Actually, a couple of purposes–but,
for now, just so you can run it by the computer in your own office.
It turns out Lercyi was a celebrated Blues ship commander whose unpronouncable
name was recast as "Leclerc" in Earth history. And -that-
is Bully’s password.

While you’re here, run
the rest of the new stuff, too. You’ll learn the lens might be more
precisely identified with an ultra-high-frequency scanner. The deactivated
robot from Mondra’s box is a Martel model designed for use in "prestigious
chambers and as service robots for high-ranking political and business
figures." Though most of its functions have been destroyed, it
contains a recording in its main memory.

Finally, the robot head
appears to be Blues technology and the embedded transmitter indicates
it was operated by remote control. Perry says this doesn’t make sense.
The Blues are occupied with other concerns. Why would they attack
the Residence?

Now get over to Bully’s
office, plug the "leclerc" password into his computer and
you’ll be able to read an email from Mondra to Bully (she commissioned
him to look into Martel’s work), view blueprints to the Residence’s
forcefield (which briefly gives Perry pause) and Martel’s Robotics
Institute and surveillance photos of Martel–one of them with a fluffy-haired
man whose face is in shadow, You’ll automatically download the institute
floorplan. This is followed by an annoyed, broken-up message from
Bully that … well, it doesn’t really tell you anything except that
it’s a "really bad time" and he’ll explain everything later.

If you wish, you can pop
back to your office again to take a protest call from a Blues ambassador–apparently
set off by your computer’s analysis of the robot head. (How’d the
Blues hear about it? Perry hasn’t had a chance to tell anyone.) In
any event, his denial of your non-charges is the first appearance
by these high-strung folks, who look like a four-eyed version of Mayor
McCheese. They’ll play small roles in the game’s Waringer Academy
and Elmo Dater segments.

There’s not much left to
do here but plot your escape. But that involves your hologram and
the technician’s still working on the terminal that directs that it.
You need to perform one more intermediate step to trigger completion
of his work.

Maybe someone could help
with the deactivated robot? The bionic is gone and the next useful
words from the tech in utility room will be his last words to you.
But the hangar attendant Yuri is still around. Use it on him and he’ll
place it atop the nearby energy source and fire up its video recordings.

You’ll see Martel talking
to the fluffy-haired man from the surveillance photo and a woman with
short white hair whom we haven’t seen before. Martel’s concerned their
appearance here has jeopardized their joint plans, and makes reference
to having sent them a drill. Then Martel sees the bot recording and
tells it to stop. Too late. The woman draws on the droid. End of transmission.
A journal entry clarifies what you’ve seen: "It appears that
Aimo Martel was holding secret negotiations with Arkonides behind
my back." This gives you your next destination: the Waringer
Academy.

You’ve already run Martel
past your office PC, but "Arkonides" is a new name. You
can’t look it up on the your computer–you won’t get a portrait of
your nemesis until late in your visit to the Waringer Academy–but
you can pick up a few tidbits from the kiosks in the "Hall of
Fame." These include the entries "The STARDUST Mission"
(via the right-hand kiosk closest to Mondra’s office), "Encounter
with IT, Immortality" (the left-hand kiosk in the next closest
pair) and "Atlan" (the right-hand kiosk in the pair second
closest to Perry’s office). The Arkonides’ "Divine Empire"
is Terra’s chief rival.

Once you’ve seen the video,
pop in on the technician in the utility room. He’s done and you can
now reassign the avatar to any accessible room in the Residence save
the Crystal Lounge (where it met you and the tech Klabund earlier),
the Terrace and the utility room. (See "Odds & Ends"
below for details on additional fun with the avatar.)

Send the hologram to the
hangar. It’ll automatically distract the guard (who turns out to be
a midshipman named "Pit Djingels") with its spiel and you’ll
automatically board Mondra’s glider.

Next stop: Waringer Academy.

Odds
& Ends

Once the technician Klabund
finishes his repairs, you can have some non-essential fun by assigning
your avatar to rooms other than the one in which its services are
required.

Then just go to the room
in question and talk to the hologram. In your office, recognizing
you as Perry Rhodan, the avatar defers to your own descriptions. In
Bully’s office, it calls attention to his spaceship models. In the
Hall of Fame (the hallway to Monda’s office), it now says its lines
properly. (Before the repairs, it always fizzled out.) In the Foyer
(the starting hall) it says … about what you’d expect.

And in secretive Mondra’s
office, the avatar refuses to offer a description! "Monda Diamond
does not wish me to provide you with more details on her quarters,"
it says. "I am also not permitted to answer any questions regarding
her quarters."

"Like I said before:
paranoid ex-agent," says Perry.

(Until you send them off
to the Terrace, you can also dispatch the cleaning robots anywhere
except the hangar, Crystal Lounge and utility room. But, being that
they just stand around idly, they’re not much fun.)

Waringer
Academy

The Regent’s presence here
might tip off Mondra’s kidnappers, so, when you click on the door
out of the Landing Platforms, Perry automatically goes undercover–transforming
himself into "Laszlo Daikonu." Just follow the tunnel to
the tram platform and click on the transparent sign to select a destination.

Initially, you can travel
only to the Foyer. (And, in fact, you’ll never see most of the destinations
on the sign.) The tram appears almost instantly, you’ll step aboard
automatically and off you go. When you arrive, just click on the escalator
to reach the reception area. Talk to the young lady at the desk to
the right and you’ll receive a day pass.

This’ll get you to the
Academy’s Cafeteria. But that’s a dead-end at this point.

So are inquries after Aimo
Martel. Talk to the receptionist about him and discover one of the
hazards of undercover work: Neither Martel nor anyone in his department
knows anyone with your cover name. Ah, but try Kari Levian’s name–if
you don’t have it, read Mondra’s noteook–and, surprisingly enough,
you’re good to go. It turns out your undercover DNA came from her
boss’s laboratory, and Kari thinks on her platform-shoed feet. Just
use the central teleporter.

Talk to Kari at length.
A question about Martel wins you an update to your ID card identifying
you as a member of her boss’s staff. That’ll help get you into the
Robotics Institute. The robot head gets you a portrait that allows
you to search a computer for an employee in the institute’s Mobile
Android Systems unit.

Ask about the singing crystal
on her desk. She’ll give it to you. After all, something of Mondra’s
might help in your search. (Actually, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free
card for the end of this segment.) And the lens gets Kari out of her
chair to tell Daellian of your arrival. You can then muck around with
her stuff–using her console to collect email from your computer (a
second garbled message from Bully, characterizing the situation as
"too unstable" and ordering you to stay put), stealing the
container of flies from beside her chair and using it on the nearby
Carnivora to get the plant dung beside the pot. (Even Perry wonders
why he’s carrying this crap, but it’ll come in handy real soon now.)

Hello? Anyone here? Kari
doesn’t return from Daellian’s office in a timely way and you’ll have
to try to use the teleporter to trigger her return. She reports that
Daellian wants to see you, but is involved with his work, and could
you come back later?

Sure, why not? As we’ll
see shortly, the stuff acquired in her absence has supplied you with
the means to jump the Academy’s turnstiles. Once you’re done with
this next phase, come back here and Daellian will be free to chat.

Back in the Foyer, use
the Robotics Institute portrait you received from Kari on the public-access
computer at the bottom of the escalator. It’ll cough up the photos
of a pair of Academy staffers who might be able to help you with the
robot head: Brendan Huber and Nar-Khol. (Alternatively, you can use
the portrait on the receptionist at the info desk. She’ll mention
that Huber and Nar-Khol are working today and that Huber’s in the
Cafeteria!)

Run the plant dung by the
positronic as well, and pay special attention the last couple of lines
of the entry. It contains a medicinal substance that can be used to
treat headaches or sober up a drunken man. That’s about to become
relevant.

Then get back on the tram.
Kari’s handiwork on your ID card hasn’t changed your access. You’re
still confined to the Landing Platforms, the Foyer and the Cafeteria.
But, thanks to the plant dung, the Cafeteria is no longer a dead-end.
Select that as your destination, and just head right from the tram
platform to enter the Cafeteria proper.

In the center of the place,
you’ll find a man bent over a counter–evidently knocked on his ass
by the food fed to him by his Blues acquaintance.

For details on Blues cuisine,
click on the tan strip at the front of the counter on the right side
of the Cafeteria–you can then get more info by clicking on individual
menu items–and the signs that flank the Cafeteria entrance. "The
Blues consider their food to be a real delicacy," says Perry,
"but it’s completely disgusting." )

The sick man should look
familiar. It’s Huber from the results of your computer search. Talk
to him. (If he won’t talk to you, you haven’t run the search or talked
to the receptionist in the Foyer.)

This guy needs something
strong to wake him up. Talk to the counterman for a parody of a ’90s-coffee-shop
spiel. You’ll automatically order an espresso. (Check out the picture
on the coffee mug. Isn’t that you?) Alas, it won’t be strong enough
to kick Huber out of his stupor, so don’t give it to him as-is. (You
can, but you’d just have to go back and get another one.) You’ll have
to tweak it a bit with plant dung (which changes the espresso to "flavored
espresso"). That wakes up the scientist, albeit in the worst
of ways, and he’ll ask what you want.

Huber can offer comments
on a variety of topics–including the first hint that your remote
control is out of energy–but you only need to want him to analyze
the robot head you found on the roof of the Solar Residence, so turn
it over for his inspection.

And, just like that, you’re
inside the Robotics Institute. You’ll automatically use your ID card
on the swipe-card gadget at the security desk. (The guard makes a
curious comment about your "accident.") Huber then takes
you through the unit’s key-coded front door–give a listen to the
musical code as he does–and shows you the hallway leading to the
individual labs, the teleporter to Martel (keyed to Martel’s voice),
the doors to the hangars where equipment is assembled and finally
his own rather cluttered domain (Robotics Lab 2 on the schematics
in your inventory), where he sets to work figuring out what makes
that head tick.

Note also that, when you
express interest in the Explosives lab, Huber hustles down the hall
to steer you away. That’s a significant hint for later.

In his own lab, the scientist
asks you not to touch or take anything. Of course, this being an adventure
game, you’re going to touch everything that can be touched and take
everything that isn’t double-bolted to the floor, so you’ll eventually
want Huber to clear out.

But it’s better to have
him on hand for some of your prodding, as he’ll provide more details
than Perry can sort out on his own. For instance, make sure to check
out the black-and-white video screen at the left rear of the lab.

"The greatest super
drill of all time," offers Huber. "No material out there
is too hard for this drill." That must be the machine you saw
Martel discussing with the Arkonides. He said it had been shipped
out. But Huber says the institute is waiting for the final OK from
the Regent. That’s you. And you don’t know anything about a giant
laser. Is this the project Martel wanted to discuss with you?

Huber also provides useful
details on the voice simulator–a little gadget just to the right
of the pressure-cooker like device on the table in the left near corner.
It’s designed to permit an android to speak in different voices. With
Martel’s voice, it could help you get past the acoustic lock on the
teleporter.

If you haven’t already,
ask the scientist about Bully’s remote control. He’ll tell you it
needs energy. You can restore it by using the remote on the recharger
(that "pressure cooker" I mentioned earlier.) That gives
you the ability to fly the Leclerc ship using the remote. (Not now.
You’ll do this to get back into the lab later in the game.) And Huber
picks this moment to give up his unrewarding task and seek the help
of fellow scientist Nar-Khol.

"If you give an ordinary
Ara a piece of an unknown life form [the text says "information"],
he’ll do almost anything for you," he says.

Again, that’s a big clue
for later in the game.

Huber then takes off with
the robot head and leaves you blissfully alone. Use this opportunity
to take the plastic box at the rear of the room just under the center
of the long video screen. You can also take the voice simulator if
you like or collect it later. (It’s an essential item, but you don’t
use it during this first visit to the lab.)

Also check out the device
just to the left of the little platform where the robot head was installed.
This runs the robotic arms operating in the background, and Perry
here raises the possibility of reprogramming them and thus distracting
the scientists. Look at the empty platform and he’ll suggest it could
be used to scan other items as well.

Optional: You can leave
the lab. The teleporter at the end of the hall won’t work for you,
naturally. Perry won’t revisit the security checkpoint, as, once there,
he might not be able to get back to the lab. And both hangar doors
and the ones into the Prototype Test and Explosives areas are locked.
But you can visit Robotics Lab 1 and listen to the exchange between
the two scientists before you’re chased out. Huber then escorts you
back, apologizes for his rude colleague and gives you a preliminary
report: The robot head comes from a Blues robot built by Arkonides
with Terran parts. He says that defies conventional wisdom.

But he’s not giving you
the whole story. (Perhaps Huber doesn’t have the whole story.)

You’ve run out of things
to do in Huber’s lab, but maybe you could take a run at the neighboring
one. Nar-Khol -really- doesn’t want you in there, so you’ll have to
create a little chaos in Huber’s lab to cover your escape.

Put the plastic box you
found on the platform formerly occupied by a robot head. Then put
the lens on the box. The machine starts to scan it, you’ll see a window
indicating that information is being downloaded (though nothing appears
in your inventory) and then everything goes nuts in the experimental
lab in the background. The lens apparently has reprogrammed the arms.
Huber and Nar-Khol come running. Nar-Khol offers the opinion that
the new code running looks like "ancient Arkonide." And
while they’re focused on the monitor in the upper left corner, you
can quietly move over to Robotics Lab 1.

Interesting. The display
at the left side of that lab reveals that parts of the robot were
made at Waringer–maybe even in this lab.

Someone here is in on the
plot.

More interesting: Examining
the display at the far right gets you a searchable list of robot types.
(You can’t use it yet, as it requires a model number. You’ll find
this useful in the Thora’s Museum segment.) And grab the ID card from
the counter across from the robot head. Perry here raises the possibility
that Nar-Khol’s access could be somehow shifted to his own ID card.
(You can’t reclaim the head or the robot torso on the right side of
the lab–Perry doesn’t want to lug it around–but you’ll be able to
grab the latter a bit later.)

You’re about to get the
bum’s rush. Once you have both the list of robot types and the ID
card, the two scientists show up. They are not amused, and you’ll
quickly find yourself atop the escalator back in the Foyer. Only one
place to go: back to Kari. She sounds kind of pissed, as though you’re
late for the appointment (or she’s been hearing Bad Things about your
antics), and ushers you in to see Daellian.

And here more of the plot
hinted at by the video extracted from the deactivated robot is revealed.
Cut to Nar-Khol, who’s talking to a hologram of the fluffy-haired
Arkonide. He discloses that a "nobody" named Daikonu, acting
in Perry Rhodan’s behalf, has brought in a robot head and scanned
a piece of supran. The Arkonide reveals in turn that he’s extracted
the location of a "key" from the captive Mondra and dispatched
a certain Tachio to collect it. (The "key" is prsumably
the lens and Tachio the white-haired woman who blasted Martel’s robot
… and she’s too late.) Also, that Rhodan must vanish and the robot
head with him.

Cut back to Daellian’s
inner sanctum, where you’re finally free to put your questions and
get a succession of occasionally-condescending but useful answers.
The lens is an alloy (meaning someone made it) and essentially the
Voice of God–potentially, a radio that can communciate simultaneously
with everyone in the universe. You’ll back get a Frequency Spectroscopy
listing all the frequencies it uses. Ask Daellian about this in turn
and he replies, "Knowing you, you’ll find a way to misuse it
for something." (Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. But it’s
a critical item in the endgame.)

A review of Mondra’s notebook
evolves into a reverie about a hacker named Quint Essence who was
obsessed with the myth of the Illochim–and who is evidently now trying
to extract data on the lens scan from Daellian’s computer. A Quint
portrait appears in your inventory. (Is this the same fellow who urged
you to pursue the "undying myth" back at the Residence?)
Martel’s portrait and the Robotics Instutute blueprints draw an unflattering
(though non-specific) assessment of that gentleman. Daellian doesn’t
trust him.

Give him either of your
ID cards. Daellian can’t meld them together, and kicks you back to
Kari. Kari can’t do it either, but suggests you seek out a cryptologist
among the Academy’s population of Gataser Blues. She suggests buy
them something to eat.

Here you’re interrupted
by a news broadcast: You’re wanted in your own disappearance! Authorities
are looking for Laszlo in connection with Perry Rhodan’s vanishing
act agt the Solar Residence.

You may wonder here just
how they connected Laszlo Daikonu and Perry Rhodan. Laszlo’s a recent
creation–his existence dates only from your appearance at the Academy–and
Kari and Daellian are the only ones who know your "secret identity."
They wouldn’t betray you. But it’s conceivable that the fluffy-haired
Arkonide has put two and two together based on Nar-Khol’s intelligence.

However, you’re not currently
in jeopardy and can go straight about the business of cobbling together
another fake ID.

You need to find a Blues
and something a Blues would want to eat. You’ll recall seeing a Blues
in the Academy’s Cafeteria–his food put Huber in a coma–and that
the Cafeteria is serving Blues cuisine. So hop on the tram again and
revisit that eatery. You’ll find the Blues at the back. Speak to him
about a "card trick." He is in no mood. Speak to the counterman
again–listen carefully for a reappearance of the wispy voice from
the kiosks at the Residence–and this time you’ll automatically order
a Muurt burger.

(For a little extra fun,
be sure to right-click on the burger in your inventory. You’ll get
a detailed description … and one of the psionic Muurt worms in the
sandwich will try to talk you out of eating them–at some length!)

Give the burger to the
Blues and his mood changes instantly. Fork over your original ID or
the stolen one and he’ll perform the requested surgery. And that’s
that. When you return to the tram platform, you’ll discover you now
have tram access to the Robotics Institute.

But this just means you
can reach the unit without being brought in personally by a Robotics
scientist. Even if you have the combination to the door, Perry will
find it inadviseable to open the doors within that aren’t already
locked. You need to shake things up in there–get people out of position.
Is there a way?

Naturally.

When you arrive at the
Robotics tram station, your attention will automatically focus on
a technician working beside a ventilation access point at the far
end. Weird fellow. He’s talking to himself and eventually walks off
to ask Huber for a part, leaving you free to poke around in his stuff.

You can’t squeeze into
the shaft–it’s far too narrow–but Bully’s remote-controlled model
spaceship can. Even if you didn’t have Yuri repair it back at the
Solar Residence, it’s good to go.

But how do you know which
way to send it? It doesn’t come with a camera or radar. You’re flying
blind.

Check out the stuff lying
around on the ground. There’s a toolbox, a tool, the grate that covered
the opening, the restraining bolts and, just below the hole, a silvery
square about the size of the belt buckle. Grab it. It’s a data carrier
and you can save the contents to your inventory (as, unhelpfully,
"a diagram or plan of something"). Clearly, it’s a schematic
of the unit’s ventilation system. But it’s not clear at all where
it starts or where it leads. The access points are marked, but not
identified.

Here’s a list:

The tram-platform access
point is in the lower left corner.
The Prototypes access
point is 13 squares straight up the shaft and then nine squares
right.
The Security checkpoint
access is three squares up the shaft, four squares right, three
up and two left.
There are three access
points off the horizontal section of shaft in the lower center of
the display. From left to right, these are: Nar-Khol’s lab (Robotics
Lab 1), the Experimental Lab (the one with the robotic arms) and
Huber’s lab (Robotics Lab 2).
The Explosives access
is off the horizontal shaft in the upper central portion of the
display. (That’s eight squares up the shaft, four right, two up,
12 right and three up.)
And the two access points
in the upper right and lower right corners are in the two hangars.

I guess Martel himself
doesn’t like fresh air.

Just use the craft on the
shaft. You’ll now switch to a view of the remote control. Just remember
that movement from square to square is performed using the forward/backward
direction buttons in the upper right corner and that you have to turn
the craft (using the direction arrows in the upper left corner) to
round corners. If you get lost, the large central button in the upper-right
corner kicks the saucer back to Perry and you’ll be able to start
over. And a similar one in the upper left corner presumably makes
the saucer drop out an access point.

Now where would the sudden
appearance of a miniature flying saucer cause the most havoc? In which
room did Perry express interest in during his first visit to the lab?
What room did Huber rush to steer you away from on that same occasion?

The Explosives section.
Huber said it was inhabited by "freaks."

Once you’ve reached this
access point, Perry will suggest you’ve found the right spot. Hit
the round button between the two directional buttons in the upper-left
corner. Maybe the craft blows up. (A radio-controlled flying saucer
with a self-destruct unit? Nah, probably not.) Maybe it fires a toy
weapon. Maybe it just scares the bejesus out of a scientist, who drops
then a vial of something ultra-combustible.

But the result is thunderous.
Smoke pours fom the ventilation shaft. When you walk down the corridor
to the security checkpoint, you’ll find the technician returning to
work, the checkpoint abandoned and the main door almost hidden behind
a smokey haze. Use your swipe card on the card reader at the security
desk and then try the door.

Still locked. But three
hints to the correct code are available.

You’ve been here before.
When Huber brought you into the lab from the Cafeteria, he plugged
in a five-digit code. I said you should listen. Did you? No, I didn’t
think so.

Each button has its own sound–faint but distinct–and the sequence
sounds a bit like the famous one from the movie "Close Encounters
of the Third Kind." If your sharp ears picked up the combination
then, it’ll work now. It’s 0, 6, 2 , 8, 4.
Use the thermo-scan glasses on the door. They’ll detect lingering
heat on the five buttons that comprise the combination. It doesn’t
give you the proper order, of course, and there are, uh, 120 or
so possible combinations using those numbers. But, hey, it’s a
start!
If you don’t recall
the pattern, no matter. Enter the abandoned security office–the
door is now unlocked–and use the controls in the middle of the
desk under the monitors. Then watch the central monitor, turn up
the sound and watch and listen.

Hey, is that you?

While you’re here, use
the voice simulator on the video controls. (If you left it behind
earlier, you’ll have to pick it up in Robotics Lab 2 now and then
return.) There’s been no hint we should expect to find Martel’s voice
here, but it does work. The device records his voice track from a
video transmission on the super drill.

OK, you’re in. Initially,
you’ll find only one room unlocked and unoccupied. (The door to the
Explosives unit has buckled, but it’s still in place.) In Robotics
Lab 1–the first door on the right–grab the multiple-frequency chip
from the counter at the bottom of the screen (handy in the Thora’s
Museum segment) and, if you still need the voice simulator, the robot
torso from the upper right corner. (Nar-Khol has apparently acted
on his instructions, and the robot head is gone.)

Do you still need
the voice simulator? Given his earlier experiences, Perry won’t enter
Robotics Lab 2 while Huber’s present. But there is a way draw Huber
out. The hatch to the right-hand hangar has apparently been damaged
by the explosion; it’s opening and closing on its own. Use the heavy
robot torso from Robotics Lab 1 to block the door. Then enter the
hatch and you’ll find yourself right beside the giant drill … which
turns out to be an illusion! Turn off the little holoprojector nearby
and it vanishes. As Martel said in the robot’s video, the drill has
been shipped out. Leave via the hatch and you’ll run into Huber. He
must have witnessed some of this on a monitor, and acts as though
you’ve just driven the drill off the lot. If you like, follow him
back into the hangar to witness the full extent of his distress. Now
that he’s out of the picture, you can enter Huber’s lab, grab the
voice simulator and get back to the security station to record Martel’s
voice.

One last step is required
to reach Martel’s office: Use the voice simulator on the strobing
blue light atop the teleporter. When it finally takes–remember, it
was only a 97 percent match–step into the pale light below. You’ll
rematerialize in Martel’s private suite to find its occupant dead–a
seeming suicide from a poison drink–and his possessions in disarray.

Those two facts seem at
odds with one another, and, in fact, the issue of Martel’s death is
difficult to resolve from the available evidence. If he’s a suicide,
why are his trophies all knocked about? A search or a struggle. Either
way, it means someone was here before you–as you’re about to discover,
there was–and that implies murder. If you still have doubts, click
on the chair beside the round table on the right side of the office
and Perry refers to Martel’s "murderer."

Take the sweet drink from
the table near the body. (This will emerge down the line as more potential
evidence of murder, but it’s also as a useful item in Elmo Dater.)
Search Martel’s body for a data crystal and use it on the computer
atop Martel’s desk.

This’ll start you wondering
again. It’s Martel’s confession. In this recording, he admits cooperating
with the Arkonides and says he realized too late that he was being
used. He expressly refers to his suicide and the poison. Could this
have been faked or coerced? ("Leave a suicide note or I’ll kill
you"?) That seems unlikely.

The crystal then vanishes
from your inventory but leaves behind a file on Kato da Trumort–finally
putting a name to the fluffy-haired man you last saw from behind talking
to the scientist/conspirator Nar-Khol.

What to do? There’s no
new exit and no clear pointer to your next step. Yes, it’d be logical
to return to the Academy’s dean to report Martel’s death, but the
explosion has locked the Robotics station out of the tram system.
And, apart from the hysterical Huber in the right-hand hangar, no
one’s around. The conspirator Nar-Khol has evidently fled and I guess
all the freaks in Explosives are huddling under their desks.

You have to leave Martel’s
office and return for events to proceed apace, and can either search
the Institute (if you left behind the robot torso) or simply teleport
right back in again. When you return, the white-haired woman from
the video steps from behind the teleporter. "Well, Laszlo, everything
OK?" she asks–just before she knocks you cold. This is Trumort
employee Tachio da Xena. If you’ve checked out #1 under "Odds
& Ends" below, you’ve already heard from her. And you’ll
be meeting her again.

(If Tachio doesn’t show
up, you haven’t yet collected the yellow drink from the table or the
multi-frequency chip from Robotics Lab 1.)

You wake up in a prison
cell in some heretofore-unseen section of the Academy–your Laszlo
disguise and all your possessions gone.

As soon as you rise from
your bunk, walk down the screen to the front of your cell to get the
full explanation. (The ensuring messages may not be available later
on, so do this before you take any other steps.) The guard approaches
and explains that you’ve been arrested for a wide range of charges
in relation to your investigations at the Academy–including the murder
of Martel. Once he leaves, the trio of cleaning robots over by the
bench approaches with a message that sounds very like the mysterious
ones you received from the information kiosks back at the Solar Residence
and here at the Cafeteria counter. The implication is that the droids
are here to help. You can’t interact with them directly, but you can
set in motion events that bring them into play.

For starters, you’ll need
the spoon from upper left corner of the little shelf on the cell’s
right side and the cup of water just below and right of the spoon.
Click on the center of the left wall (or simply use the urinal in
the back left corner) and you’ll learn something is written on the
wall. Splash your water here to reveal a riddle: "take the pen
in the light, close the contact in the gap.

"There’s nothing in
the either of the cell’s two fluorescent lights. But the language
of riddles typically is metaphorical, rather than literal, so make
a proper survey of the cell. In particular, check the pipe that runs
along the floor below the riddle to learn something’s stuck here.
Use the spoon to reach it and you’ll come up with a "small metal
pipe." This must be the "pen" and the instructions
must mean "take the pen into the light."

But what light if not the
lights in your cell? This seems to be a reference to the electro field
that keeps you confined here. A pattern of small, square lights periodically
winks across the field.

Use the tube on the forcefield
and the field responds, lighting up brilliantly. The singing crystal
on a bench outside your cell responds to the light and starts up its
song.

The second time you use
the metal tube on the forcefield, the crystal’s song draws the attention
of the guard. By the fifth time, the guard’s annoyed. He apparently
deals with enough kitsch like this at home. He now takes the crystal
off the bench and places it beside the three nearby cleaning droids.
One promptly cleans it up and then, after the guard leaves, deposits
it near your cell. This new proximity somehow has the effect of deactivating
the forcefield. You are free.

Your possessions are suspended
in a circular window beside the remaining cleaning robot. Press the
switch just to the right of the window and then activate the window,
and your pre-prison inventory is restored–less the robot torso (if
you took the torso but didn’t brace the hangar door) and the singing
crystal, which has now served its happy purpose. (Anything you picked
up from your cell also vanishes at this time.)

You can’t do anything else
here except make your way down the stairs to the glider bays. (There
does appear to be a teleporter on the platform above where your possessions
were stored, but you can’t use it.) The nearest of the three gliders
is open–evidently another gift from your secret admirer. Use it and
you’re off to Titan.

Odds
& Ends

If you return to the
Landing Platforms and try to retrieve your glider after you add
Nar-Khol’s access to your ID card, you’ll activate an optional sub-plot.

You’ll find the glider missing. Click in the screen’s lower right
corner, where it was parked, and Perry realizes it’s been moved
elsewhere and that he’ll have to check in to get it back.

Notice that the door back to the tram platform has closed behind
you. Click on the door to log in as Laszlo Daikonu. A computer
voice reports the craft has already been collected by its owner,
Mondra Diamond, and is on its way back to the Solar Residence
… and that "Mondra" has left a message for you.

It’s not Mondra. It’s Trumort henchwoman Tachio da Xena. The
speaker teasingly says she’d have given you a ride home (meaning
she knows who you are), but expects the in-bound security forces
will look after you. The computer voice then instructs you to
wait for the guards

You’ve been set up. Perhaps Martel is already dead.

You don’t have to do a thing to get out of this pickle. You’ll
automatically change back to your Perry identity to get the door
open. Then you’ll be instructed by the computer to meet the security
forces in the lobby. The Regent would draw all kinds of attention,
so, with the door still open, Perry switches back to Laszlo again.

Now you can reach the tram platform. But you’re not out of hot
water. As Laszlo, you’re a wanted man. The security forces really
are waiting in the lobby. You’ll find a whole cluster of folks–three
guards and a handful of what are presumably ticked-off Academy
bureaucrats–standing at the base of the escalator. If you send
Perry down the escalator, he’ll come right back up again and run
all the way back to the tram.

You can’t retreat to the Landing Platforms. Try and Perry explains
that if the cops catch up to him before he hashes this out with
Martel, he’ll have to explain everything and by the time he’s
done, the bad guys will have vanished. You’re limited to the Cafeteria
and Robotics–and, effectively, just Robotics, as you’ve exhausted
your options in the Cafeteria.

And that’s the end of this variation. From the Robotics tram
platform, you can make your way back into the Robotics unit as
described above.
Unlike other segments,
the Academy is inhabited by a number of non-story characters. You’ll
find them in the Foyer, the Cafeteria tram station and the Cafeteria
itself. Virtually none of them have anything of note to say. (It’s
a dozen variations on the theme "I can’t help you.") However,
a few have unique lines and one character turns up in three different
locations.

Talk to the alien who appears on the Landing Platforms tram platform
when you arrive at the Academy. Separated from his party, this
Unithan is a weird, needy guy and good for a laugh. (He wants
to cuddle. Perry begs off.)

If you do talk to him, this same critter turns up again, his
anxiety in full blossom, in the right near corner of the Foyer
after your first meeting with Kari. And after your meeting with
Daellian, he moves to the right side of the info desk. By then,
he’s located the rest of his party. "They’ve found a first-class
room for cuddling up in a group, and we’ll be meeting with the
dean of the Waringer Academy himself right afterwards," he
says. "Maybe he’d like to snuggle …"

Somehow, I doubt the flying coffin is the snuggling type.

You’ll meet another representative of this species–an altogether
more sinister sort of fellow, but still a snuggler–in Elmo Dater.

Note also that <ahem> none of the wandering female characters
seem to be wearing underwear! Our natural delicacy prevents us
from elaborating. But, up close, it’s hard not to notice.
And those wandering
characters? Ulan Soso is not among them.

When questioned about Swoonish omega decimal minuscules, Kari,
Daellian and the lady at the information desk in the Foyer all
report the Residence architect is wandering around the Academy.
That’s two more sources than required for a red herring.

But, as far as I can tell, Soso never turns up.
Useless Item Dept.:
The game’s good about finding uses for your inventory items. But
one from the end of the Academy segment never finds a special purpose:
"tray with food," which turns up with a glass of water
and a spoon on a little shelf on the right wall of your cell.

You can take this purported meal–it looks like breaded giant
cockroaches–and get a number of light-hearted descriptions from
Perry when you try to use it on various objects in and around
your cell. But I’ve never found a practical use for it. Our hunch:
This is an artifact from an alternate escape route that didn’t
make the final cut. (Perhaps the singing crystal wasn’t always
a required item?)
Neat Effect Dept.: Did you check out the soccer game–Solar London
vs. Asia Delhi–that being projected in mid-air in the Cafeteria?
The print in the sign
on the tram platforms and in the Cafeteria advertising Mondra’s
Illochim exhibit? It just reads "CDEFGHI." (There’s a
fair amount of alien type in the game that doesn’t translate into
proper English.)

Thora’s
Museum

You’ll find the doors at
the top of the stairs open. Once the hologram of the museum’s director
(who seems oddly familiar) addresses you at the far end of the entry
hall, they close for good.

Not that you had anywhere
else to go anyway.

Beyond the hologram, you’ll
find yourself before a statue of Thora with passages extending in
three directions. You can take the tour–the hologram will talk to
you in each exhibit–or start solving puzzles straight away.

Three puzzles touch upon
this initial section of the museum. Elements of two can be found in
the left-hand hall. You can’t solve either of these yet–they require
gear found deeper in the museum–so, for now, I’m just going to remind
you they’re there.

One involves this hall’s
central exhibit: a puzzle game called Ylohim or "ascending six."
(You’ll play this a bit later.) You won’t find much in the way of
details here, but you can get the basics from the exhibit description
(the stacked tiles close to the door). And you can try to pick up
the tiles that float above the pool. Unsuccessfully, as they’re too
heavy. But this raises the prospect that you might be able to lift
them later with the proper item.

The other one’s more basic.
At the far end of the pool is a hologram projector. This recreates
the projection of a flying Illochim directly above it. But it’s not
entirely a projection. Look at the Illochim and you’ll see it’s been
reconstructed around a real wing bone.

Can you get the bone? Eventually.
Activate the projector below and you’ll see it can be tilted backward,
and that the projection (wing bone included) moves with it to a position
at which it’s within reach from the ground. However, when you move
to get the wing bone, the projector automatically returns to its upright
position and the projection to its high-flying position. You just
need something to hold the projector in this tilted position, and
that’s still some ways down the line.

OK, here’s a puzzle you
can complete.

In the statue room, you’ll
notice that each of the three doorways has a blue band across its
portal. Click on one. These are teleporters. Though you appear to
be moving smoothly from room to room, you may be moving to a room
not physically connected to the one you’re leaving. It’s a kind of
high-tech version of a velvet rope. Perry notes in his journal that,
to get out of here, you’ll have to find a way to deactivate these
devices. To do so, you’ll have to first enable a terminal that doesn’t
look like a terminal.

Just to the right of the
statue, you’ll see a little switch on the floor. Throw it. This lowers
the statue for at long as you remain on-station at the switch. On
first use, Perry wonders aloud why it was so engineered.

Look at Thora’s right hand.
Doesn’t she look as though she was holding something aloft? What could
it have been, and is it still here?

You bet. Enter the hall
to the right. Check out the central exhibit. "Thora had a Dagor
sword like that, too," says Perry. (He should know; this immortal
of Terra was once married to Thora.) "There are several pictures
and other reprsentations that portray her as a Dagorista with her
sword raised. That would go well with the statue outside, too."

But click on one of the
forcefields that surrounds most other exhibits and you’ll learn blasting
through to the sword would require a lot of weight and energy.

Happily, you’ve found something
in this same hall with both weight and energy. The leftmost exhibit
against the upper wall is a Perikon 300 battle robot. Click on its
description high on the wall to learn it is Type 558025 (meaning you
can look it up on your recently-acquired list of robot types), that
it can be operated by remote control (meaning you could presumably
direct it with the remote control you swiped from Bully’s office)
and that it can react to enemy movements that precede an attack. (This
last feature will come into play later.)

Call up the list of robot
types you downloaded at the Academy’s Robotics Lab 1, plug in the
model number above and click on "OK." There’s the Perikon.
Nasty piece of work. At the bottom of the display, you’ll see it operates
on a frequency of 849,109.

You can’t adjust the frequency
on Bully’s remote in its current state. But you do have that multi-frequency
chip swiped from the same lab where you downlooaded the robot-types
list. Use it on the remote to modify it into a universal remote control.
Then right-click on the remote to call up the display. Plug in the
new operating frequency and hit the yellow button at the bottom center
of the display to exit. Now, just use the remote and point the yellow
mouse pointer at any location in the room. This monster will walk
over there on the double. Intimidating!

But you’ll discover that,
dishearteningly, the Perikon can’t build up sufficient momentum within
the confines of even this large room to penetrate the field around
the Dagor sword. You’ll have to first move it out of the room (the
exits at either end will work) and then click on the shield aroud
that exhibit. Here comes the robot, and there goes the sword.

Retrieve the sword from
the floor, return to the statue room, throw the switch to lower the
statue and then, without adjusting your location, use the sword on
the lowered statue. This turns on a display in the ceiling directly
above it. Have a look: It shows the planets of the Arkon home system
Tiga Ranton.

You’ve enabled a control
panel elsewhere in the museum.

To reach it, return to
the right-hand hall and use the steps at its far end. Do the same
in the next hall (an under-construction exhibit devoted to "the
invasion of the Yillod Zhymii:), and you’ll reach a small chamber
with a similar representation of the Arkon system at the top and a
big switch in the bottom right corner.

When you advance to the
middle of the room, you’ll hear screams that sound to Perry like Mondra.
Don’t rush onward. You can’t help her. Use the solar-system display.
The blue teleportation bands vanish from all the museum’s doorways.

And don’t throw the switch
in the lower-right corner. Right now, this dual-function switch disables
a pumping station. You’ll visit that station in just a bit, and you
want it functioning when you do.

Without the teleporters,
the museum is transformed. The three halls off the statue room remain
the same. But the left-hand hall (the Yillod Zhymii exhibit) is now
a dead-end. (The stairs at the far end lead nowhere.) The central
hall (the one behind Thora’s statue) now leads up the little room
where you turned off the teleporters and then to a new area: the "cathedral."
And stairs at the end of the right-hand hall now take you to a shadowy
storage room and then across a narrow bridge to a full cistern. I’ll
tackle these new areas once I’ve mopped up the old ones a bit.

See, when you disconnected
the teleporters, you also turned off the forcefields around the displays–making
this a good time to loot useful items from the exhibits. In no particular
order, you’ll want to grab:

the Arrachieda stick
(from the left corner at the near end of the under-construction
"invasion of the Yillod Zhymii" display);
the miner’s lamp (right
next to the Arrachieda stick);
the transport frame
(from the right near corner of the same hall);
the laser pointer (from
the pistol in the right near corner of the Arkonides weaponry display).

The last of these will
get you into the museum’s inner sanctum. The first three won’t see
use until you visit Elmo Dater. I’ll be back to pinch a couple more
items from the left-hand hall later, but that wraps up what you can
do at this stage. On to the new areas.

The Storage/Cistern
area: In the church-like storage room, grab the object jack
(a lifter for heavy objects) from the open crate on the right side
of your entry path. A click on the broken central window on the right
side of the room puts you beneath the window. Then grab the blue shard
of glass that’s right ahead of you. And did you notice the nuke emblem
on the containers to the right of the shard? These are Terran weapons
systems.

What’s a museum doing with
weapons?

From here, use the exit
stairs at the far end and then cross the high bridge to the cistern.
The water looks nasty, and Perry won’t use the anti-grav lift to descend
into it. But look carefully to the left and below the center of the
pool and you’ll see outlines of something on the bottom. "It
could be a glider or a rocket, or a giant upright clarinet,"
says Perry. You’ll have to pump out the water so you can get down
there and inspect it first hand. And the pumping controls aren’t here.

So let’s shift gears for
a moment. You’ve recently picked up an item that allows you to collect
the heavy Ylohim tiles from the left-hand hall in the initial section
of the museum–that object jack from the storage room–so hoof it
back there and use the jack on any of the floating tiles. You’ll be
rewarded with two new inventory items: the tiles themselves and instructions
on how to play Ylohim. Now you’re equipped to take on the next puzzle.
You just have to find it and prep it. Again, it isn’t here, so it
stands to reason it’s in …

The Cathedral area:
The centerpiece of this display is a vast robot–the one you’ve been
seeing in ads for the museum exhibit. You enter the exhibit on middle
of three levels. A teleporter to the right of the entrance moves you
between them.

At this stage, all the
levels may seem kind of frustrating. For instance, on this level,
you’ll learn that there’s an opening in the robot’s crotch that’s
exactly in the shape of the lens. But the lens can’t be inserted there.
(It turns out you need a bridge to reach the aperture.) You’ll also
find stacked tiles off to the left. This is a clue that you’re in
the right neighborhood to play the Ylohim game found back in the left-hand
hall.

But where to play? From
the grid displayed in the image of the exhibit’s upper level when
you step into the teleporter, you may think you’ve found the game
board … but you won’t see anything like that when you materialize
at the top. You’re stranded on a ramp high above the robot. (The door
at the end of the platform leads to the director’s office, but opens
only from the other side at this stage of the game.) ….

What’s missing?

Well, remember the exhibit
in the left-hand hall? The tiles there were floating above water.
You’re going to need to pump water from the cistern into the cathedral.

But where are the controls?
The three doors on the lowest level all appear to be locked. The central
one requires a positronic key (which is still some ways in your future)
and clicking on the left and right doors reveals only that they can’t
be opened by hand.

But look at the space in
front of the two doors. There’s a contact tile for each and your journal
reveals that both must be weighted simultaneously to get the doors
open. You’re not carrying any obvious weights. But your remote control
does give you the ability to summon a very heavy robot. Using the
remote control, plant the Perikon on the contact tile for the left
door while you stand on the one for the right, and you’re in. The
right door opens into the pumping station. (Note that if you reverse
the positions, the left-hand door won’t open. You’ll have to complete
your business here first.)

In the pumping station,
click on the panel on the machine’s left side. Here you’ll find three
dials and an indicator light. This should be green. (If it’s yellow,
you’ve inadvertently disabled the pumping station and you’ll have
to retreat to the little room where you turned off the teleporter
and throw the big switch in the lower-right corner to re-enable it.)

Don’t bother using Mondra’s
script table to translate the dial labels to English; you’ll get nonsense
words. Just turn the bottom dial and the right dial. Then hustle back
to the little room where you turned off the teleporters. Now throw
the big switch in the lower right corner. Now it starts the water
flowing. Perry’ll say, "Aha, sounds like a working pumping station."
By the time you get back to the cistern, you’ll find the water level
way down–exposing a fast Triagon glider of the type used by Arkonide
intelligence. Use the lift to descend into the cistern. You’ll find
the ship inaccessible and the door to the left locked.

This is a dead-end. But
it won’t always be a dead-end.

Return to the cathedral’s
middle level to find the water has risen to the cover the lower level.
Hope the Perikon’s waterproof. Use the teleporter to reach the top
level. Now you’ll be able to see the Ylohim game’s gridwork in place
down below. Simply use the game pieces on the gridwork. Your point
of view drops back to the middle level, and the game begins.

Ylohim:
The Game of the Illochim

You must manipulate five
hexagonal tiles to create a straight bridge across the water between
Perry and the aperture in the giant robot.

Initially, these tiles
are arrayed across the center of the grid. A special tile with six
red sides is already in place at the bottom center of the grid when
the game starts. It’s a foundation stone, but you don’t have to build
upon it. There are a number of solutions and you can build the bridge
from either end.

The other five tiles each
have two colored sides, with each color shared with one side of one
other tile. And that’s significant: To complete the bridge, the colored
sides must face the matching sides of the two adjacent tiles and,
while the bridge is under construction, the faces of adjacent tiles
can at no time be of different colors. Another restriction: To move
a tile, it must be adjacent at least one other tile. You’ll want to
guard against stranding tiles.

This would be far too easy
were it not for an additional wrinkle: You don’t simply move the tiles.
Effectively, you roll them around the sides of other tiles. Consequently,
each piece rotates clockwise or counter-clockwise as it moves from
space to space and each face of the moving tile thus changes direction
by two facings.

This adds another level
of strategy. You often won’t want to move a tile into position by
the most direct path. Instead, you’ll push another tile into its path
to lengthen the trip, extend the rotation and ensure that the facings
are correct when a tile arrives at its target hex

Here’s a blow-by-blow account
of our fastest run-through to date. Can you beat it?

Blue/Cyan tile moves
down and to the left.
Yellow/Red tile moves
down and the right.
Yellow/Red tile moves
straight down.
Yellow/Red tile moves
down and to the left.

The Yellow/Red tile is
now in place.

Cyan/Green tile moves
down and to the right.
Yellow/Green tile moves
down and to the right.
Blue/Cyan tile moves
up and to the right.
Cyan/Green tile moves
up.
Yellow/Green tile moves
down.

The Yellow/Green tile
is now in place.

Blue/Cyan tile moves
up and to the left.
Cyan/Green tile moves
up and to the right.
Blue/Cyan tile moves
up and to the right.
Cyan/Green tile moves
down.

The Cyan/Green tile is
in place. (It’ll move out of position at #16 and back into position
at #18.)

Violet/Blue tile moves
up.
Violet/Blue tile moves
up and to the left.
Cyan/Green tile moves
up.
Violet/Blue tile moves
up and to the left.

The Violet/Blue tile
is now in place.

Cyan/Green tile moves
down.
Blue/Cyan tile moves
up and to the left.

The Blue/Cyan tile is now
in place.

When the last piece moves
into position, Perry automatically crosses the bridge and installs
the lens in the giant robot. The monster wakes up. And down below,
underwater, so does the Perikon 300. You may recall from its description
that it can identify enemy movements that precede an attack. It does
so now, and opens fire on the big guy with devastating results.

Perry clears out of the
way, retreating to the little room with the teleporter panel and pump-station
switch. While he’s there, he’ll see the pump switch move back into
a lowered position. Someone at a different location is draining the
cathedral’s lower level. The robot’s wreckage and thus the lens falls
into the hands of Kato da Trumort henchman E-Frain who, after a pleasant
hello to you, vanishes into the newly-opened left-hand doorway where
the Perikon was stationed. (It seems to have been knocked over during
the monster’s collapse. Not to worry. Bully’s el-cheapo remote is
broken again anyway. And the little robot has served its purpose.)
When it’s all over, you’ll find yourself back on the cathedral’s middle
level.

When an adventure-game
designer closes a door, he usually opens a window. The battle has
produced a useful item. Use the teleporter to drop down to the lower
level. Right behind the teleport pad, you’ll see a pizza box-sized
object–a piece from the Ylohim game–that’d be perfect for wedging
the projector back in the left-hand hall in its tilted position. But
you’ll be back through this place again on your way out of town, so
don’t feel you have to go do it right now.

Enter the left-hand doorway.
The darkness in the tunnel beyond will eventually stop Perry in his
tracks. No, you don’t need batteries for the miner’s lamp–you will
later, but the thermo-scan glasses work fine here–and you’ll eventually
find yourself in a hexagonal chamber with an inactive teleporter at
its center and icons right out of Mondra’s notebook on the upper right
wall.

Look at the letters. Perry
opines they’re set in an Arkonide plastic that reacts only to colored
light. You have that laser pointer from the museum exhibit … and
you have that shard of blue glass from the storage room. Put ’em together
and you’ve got a blue-steel laser pointer. Use it to get a close-up
view of the wall and then to pick out the letters.

This may seem hard. It’s
like playing Hangman in a foreign language and without blanks for
the letters. Happily, you have a translation: the script table in
Mondra’s notebook.

You don’t get any hints.
Other walkthroughes I’ve seen report the second-from-the-right letter
in the bottom row comes already lit, but not in my games. (Possibly
it is in the European version of the game.)

But, really, what word
would the designers choose at this particular stage of the game? The
name of the puzzle you just finished: Ylohim.

Target with your modified
pointer that first letter, followed by the third letter from the left
and then the fourth letter from the right in the second row, followed
by the second letter from the right and then the rightmost letter
in the top row, and lastly the fourth letter from the left in the
second row. When the last letter lights up, the inactive teleporter
goes active. Step into the light. You’ll reappear in the director’s
office where you’ll watch the glider blast off from the cistern.

Grab the Tur-Ra-Cel badge
off the corner of the container at the left edge of your view and
the metallic object from the bench under the monitors. A click on
the crats nearby reveals OPerry thinks the museum dirctor is Kato
da Trumort. It turns out the robotic arm in the foreground administered
a truth serum to Mondra, so there’s probably not much her kidnappers
don’t know. And the machine between the bench and monitors is a computer.
Here you can read about Kato da Trumort (using his portait), Tachio
da Xena (which gets you her portrait) and about yourself … in very
unflattering terms.

And while you can’t run
much of your gear past this alien system, it does identify the "metallic
object" as a positronic key. You’ll find this useful both here
and on Elmo Dater.

The teleporter that brought
you here proves to be one-way only, so use the door to the right.
It takes you out onto another high bridge–this one leading to the
cathedral’s upper level (via the door you couldn’t open from the cathedral
side earlier).

You’re going to want to
try the positronic key on positronic lock on the cathedral’s lowest
level. But now it’s underwater again and, when you visit the little
room with the pump switch, you’ll learn the pumps are offline. The
water in the cathedral has risen to the middle level and the pumping
station is underwater and inaccessible.

Where can you go?

Well, what other part of
the museum’s water system have you visited?

The cistern. There weren’t
any switches there, but there was the locked door at the bottom. Is
it still locked?

On the way there, make
a pitstop at the Ylohim exhibit in the left-hand hall. Tilt the projector,
use the Ylohim game piece on it to keep it tilted and grab the Illochim
wing bone–the last piece of the museum’s third puzzle. This "charred
chicken bone" will come in handy in Elmo Dater. Now you just
want to get out of here.

In the cistern, use the
lift to reach the bottom. As I speculated, the door on the left side
is open … at least until you step through it. Throw the big switch
on the left side of the hall within to pump the water out of the cathedral.
Then use the positronic key to unlock the door around the corner to
reach the cathedral’s lowest level. Where to now?

Well, there’s another door
around the corner and down the hall from the one with the positronic
lock. The silo beyond is full of water, but, now that you have access
to the pumping station in the cathedral, you have the means to get
it out.

In the cathedral, make
your way to the right, behind the wreckage of the giant robot, and
enter the pumping station. This time, turn the left and right handles
on the pump, return the way you just came (i.e. through the door with
the positronic lock) and throw the switch again. Perry utters his
"working pumping system" line, the silo down the hall is
pumped out, and now you can open the door.

Within, a second Arkonide
glider. Your way out.

But how can you follow
Kato? You don’t know where he’s taken Mondra.

This’ll probably be a sticking
point for a lot of people. You may well wonder if you’ve missed some
small scrap of intelligence hidden along the way.

Nothing like that. You
just have to get back to the director’s office. Since the cistern
door is locked, you’ll have to go through the cathedral. It’s currently
full of water pumped in from the glider silo, so turn on the pumps
yet again, teleport up to the top level and exit back onto the bridge.
In the director’s office, walk toward the computer and you’ll get
an intact message from Bully … finally. Kato was headed
for an Arkonide mining colony on Gom Callaedus. Retrace your steps
to the cathedral one last time, teleport down to the lowest level,
step through the positronic door, throw the pump switch one last time
to clear out the silo and click on the glider.

Now, suppose you get back
to the director’s office, walk toward the positronic … and nothing
happens.

That means you’re missing
a required item. Immortals isn’t big on alternate solutions–though
it does have a few small ones–and the game won’t let you leave a
region without an item you’ll need to progress down the road. Make
sure you have the Tur-Ra-Cel badge from the director’s office, the
Illochim bone from the left-hand hall and the transport frame, Arrachieda
stick and miner’s lamp from the central hall.

Odds
& Ends

A natural question:
Can the Perikon perform any other, non-essential functions? Busting
through other forcefields or the museum’s front door, for instance?

Not that I’ve found.
That said, the robot can go anywhere you can go–including the cathedral
and across the narrow bridge to the cistern. However, once you open
the door to the pump station, Bully’s el-cheapo remote control breaks
again (this time irreparably) and you’re done (though the robot
itself still has a role to play).

A few exhibits in the
museum don’t relate (or relate only partly) to puzzles.

In the left-hand hall,
you can inspect a stone tablet with cuneiform writing, a Greek vase
depicting a battle between Heracles and Nereus (both on the left side)
and engraved coins and a golden trinket (both on the right). In the
right-hand hall, you’ll find a model of the Terebo 45K spacecraft,
an exhibit on Arkonide funnel-shaped structures and a blueprint for
a convertor cannon (all on the upper side) and an impulse beamer (on
the lower side). (The laser sight you recover after the exhibit forcefields
are knocked down comes from this beamer.)

At that time, you can also
inspect a model of the Arkon solar system Tiga Ranton (similar to
the the one above the Thora statue) on the lower side of this hall.

Elmo
Dater

The first task on Gom Callaedus
is to cannibalize the wreckage of your glider. You’ll want the plasma
converter (click on the silvery device visible below the opened hatch),
the beam collar (what looks like an orange screwdriver below and slightly
right of the converter), the water cannister (a bit to the right of
the collar) and the crowbar (above and to the right of the cannister).
Then make your way to the right along the path.

Here you’ll find a rock
coated in a pinkish "greasy, foul-smelling affair." Perry
won’t take it–not until you need it–and you’ll need it soon. Head
through the stone arch up ahead and down the hill on the other side.
Keep moving forward until you see the vast Elmo Dater mine down in
the canyon. How do you get down there?

The platform on the right
side of the screen is an inactive elevator. You’ll want to reactivate
its "heavy gas" propellant with a "targeted energy
impulse." From what?

You learned back at the
crash site that the plasma converter hasn’t discharged all its emergy.
But you can’t simply use the converter on the mechanism. It has to
be focused first, and the beam collar might serve that purpose. Combine
the two items and, boom, you have an improvised plasma beamer. Use
it on the elevator mechanism.

It seems to work. And yet
the elevator does not move. It’s also lacking a lever. Boom again:
Your crowbar does the job. Use it on the mechanism to put it in place.

And still the lift does
not move. Seems the whole affair could use some lubrication. Oy-vay.
Yes, its source is that same "greasy, foul-smelling affair"
Perry refused to take several screens back. (Perry’s only forward-thinking
when it suits him.) So truck on back to the rock and, when Perry refuses
to get this crap with his hands, use the damaged water cannister on
the stone to collect the "jelly-like lichen."

Back at the lift, use the
lichen … where? The previously-receptive lift mechanism is not receptive
to the pink grease. Maybe the crowbar would be?

Uh-huh. But it turns out
the crowbar is effectively invisible–it’s on the lift’s upper edge
in the upper right-hand corner–so you’ll have to hunt it down and
then use the lichen on the shaft. Operate the shaft, and the lift
descends.

Next thing you know, you’re
down in this dump, in the lower left corner of the screen.

Head for the tunnel entrance
in the left side of the screen. Nearby, you’ll find a pair of Blues
quarreling passionately over a doll one of them has found. Listen
in. It’s an endless, annoying, fascinating, one-time-only
exchange that offers a window into Blues idol worship and the volatile
quality of this strange race’s personal interactions.You can’t interrupt
them–they don’t even know you’re here–so just listen to
much as you care to hear (their conversation will cycle endlessly)
and then move on. We’ll touch base with them shortly.

Now head for the tunnel
in the lower right corner, cross the chasm to Ijgarsha’s Store and
talk to the shopkeeper. Nice outfit. Ijgarsha stresses that she doesn’t
buy goods, only sells them, but won’t elaborate on what she actually
sells until you demonstrate a need. You have such a need. Show her
the power-less miner’s lamp and she’ll sell you a power pack.

And you’ll pay for it with
what? You don’t have any negotiable cash. But apparently you do have
non-inventory possessions that you can cash in, because at the end
of this exchange you wind up with an Eldro-Ram credit–the moon’s
unofficial currency–that will see you through several purchases.
And you don’t actually lose any inventory items in the process. (Ijgarsha
is the only person who can extend such a credit, so do this now or
you’ll have to make an extra trip later.)

The shopkeeper can also
offer useful info on the lichen: Mixed with a drug called Sheed, it
forms an acid that would dissolve Arrachieda–the mine’s principal
product.

You already have Sheed.
You just don’t know it yet. It’s that sweet yellow drink that killed
Martel. Deadly to Terrans, but, on this drugged-up Arkonide moon,
the addiction of choice. (And, as such, an indication that someone
familiar with Gom Callaedus did in Martel.) You haven’t been able
to do anything with it up to this point, but once Ijgarsha (or, later
on, the clinic patient Krems) comments on the lichen, you can combine
the two in a nasty yellow-ish corrosive. You’ll need this acid later
to break into a closed clinic.

Your Eldro-Ram credit opens
up a somewhat wider world. Now you can get a checkup at a clinic and,
a bit later, buy inhalants at the Echodim "odor bar." The
checkup come first.

Retrace your steps to where
you left the lift and head up the screen. Ijgarsha didn’t tell you
word one about Kato. Now you can talk to the Blues. They seem to have
hashed out their issues over the doll. Just float Kato’s or Tachio’s
name. You’ll then get a referral–direct for Kato, more oblique for
Tachio–to Toregent the medic. His clinic is the first major milestone
here.

Now enter the tunnel. On
the other side, cross the bridge and enter the Echodim "odor
bar."

You’re not made particularly
welcome here. The bartender is fairly tight-lipped (though he’ll become
less so once you acquir the right topics). The two men at the bar
don’t have anything to say to you beyond variations on "get outta
my face, stranger." But in your presence they will talk bitterly
about the unspecified affliction that plagues the moon, the medics
who offer the serum only to those who can afford it and the Arkonides
effectively looking the other way.

Keep listening. They’ll
say a good deal more before you’re done here.

Talk to the bartender without
a topic and he’ll offer you an odor. Odor = hallucinogen. In fact,
you can’t order one just yet. (If you try, Perry says drugs are overrated.)
As mentioned earlier, you have to pay a visit to the clinic first.
We’ll do so now.

Back outside the bar, follow
the path to the right near corner of the screen and then head right
again. You’ll arrive on a tilted (and, appropriately enough, slightly
nausea-inducing) screen with Perry facing a structure with an orange
cross high on its face.

That’s the clinic. Go inside.
Two spooky nurses will check your credit–if you’ve neglected to set
up an account with Ijgarsha, you’ll get a topic so you can do so–and
then disinfect you and perform a swift checkup. (You’re fine.) Then
you can ask a few questions. (Either nurse’ll do; the reponses are
effectively identical.)

You don’t get much back.
Flash your Tur-Ra-Cel badge and they’ll doubt you’re the real McCoy
but nevertheless make a useless appointment with Toregent for three
days hence. Kato da Trumort? First: Yes, he’s familiar. Then: No,
he’s not familiar at all. My mistake.

Really, the only useful
info they provide is a hint that Toregent would be interested in the
Illochim bone. (They can also identify that pink goop that greased
the lift’s wheels as Trachivora Illoxia Laviola Transceps, but you
can get much of the same info from the sign beside the exit.) Basically,
you’re getting the big blow-off. You’ll have to be authentically sick
to see the medic and that’s where the "odor bar" comes in.

Get back there now. Necessity
is in the mother of invention, and Perry has had a change of heart.

To order an odor, just
activate one of the emitters in the bar’s cowl. The barkeep’ll set
it up for you. In the meantime, continue to listen to the two guys
at the bar. You’ll quickly come up with two new topics: Mad Hamilton,
an adventurer and conspiracy theorist known for plumbing the city’s
hazardous depths, and The Lower Levels. Your previously close-mouthed
barkeep has detailed answers on both of these topics. Hamilton may
turn up at Ijgarsha’s shop. (He doesn’t, but Ijgarsha does know him.)
And, on the Lower Levels, "the deeper you go and the darker the
levels get, the more obvious it becomes that you’ve landed in a vertical
dungeon."

After the odor starts to
flow, activate the violet mist to inhale it and go on a little magic
carpet ride.

Once you’ve completed your
trip, you can leave Echodim. After all, things just got extra-interesting.
You have new questions to ask and the entrance to the Lower Levels
(aka The Black Levels) to locate. Or you can go again. (Those issues
will keep until after you’re done here.) After the third ride, you’ll
wake up beside Toregent in the clinic’s sick bay.

The medic won’t answer
your questions unless you offer an inducement up-front. Aras are serious
scientists. The Illochim bone would fascinate any of them, and so
it fascinates Toregent.

But he’s also scared. In
this sick city, a tip to the Regent one day may mean a dead medic
the next, and he won’t betray anything of substance on Kato … save
that he’s working for someone. (This someone expands to an also-unspecified
"them" if you ask after Tachio da Xena–presumably the same
"them" mentioned by the men in the bar.) Your interrogation
here turns into a trade. Ask about the Lower Levels and Toregent leaves
to bring you the required serum.

This is an eternal wait
if you sit on your hands and an opportunity if you don’t. Talk to
the patient on the right side of the sick bay. On first contact, Ullban
Krems indicates he knows something about Trumort. So follow up on
Kato to learn there are far more powerful forces in play on the moon–including
an "omnipotent hacker" named Quotter Batt. This gets you
Batt’s portrait.

Now follow up on Batt himself
and Krems reveals a legend that the hacker has a lab deep in the mines
where he’s said to research immortality. A question about Mad Hamilton,
who knows those depths, reveals that adventurer is seeking Batt–he
believes him the gray eminence of Elmo Dater–and that Hamilton is
linked to Ijgarsha and possibly to the Aras (with whom he may have
some kind of deal). And Mondra’s notebook elicits this tidbit: Hamilton
thinks the mine was built by the Yillod Zhymii and has told Krems
something unspecified about Batt. (I suspect is just designed to draw
a line between Batt and Mondra’s mysterious "Q.B.").

The other big piece of
info comes via the "Lower Levels" topic. Krems can can get
you in there. But he wants something in exchange: new eyes. The implants
Toregent provided don’t work that well. This’ll get you an "eyes"
topic for your inventory.

The rest is just details
on items from your inventory. The "transport frame" has
come home; it’s a roller from the mine’s lift system.The lamp and
positronic key will prove useful down on the Lower Levels.

(Note that you need to
be careful with the order of your questions to Krems. If you run through
the two topics that yield additional topics–Kato and Lower Levels–you’ll
trigger Toregent’s early return, and you’ll have to defer additional
questions until your next visit. So save one or both of those two
topics for last.)

One way or another, Toregent
returns with the serum, scolds you for talking to his patient and
walks you out into the clinic proper. Your deal for the Illochim bone
still stands, but Perry tells the medic he first needs to do a favor
for a friend.

When you leave the sick
bay, you’ll notice new patients. The two Blues you met earlier are
now sick and trembling and rocking against the right wall. Talk to
them. They’re delirious and, in the case of the more distant of the
two, the naturally piping Blues speech is now speaky almost beyond
the theshold of intelligibility. (Thank god for captions.) A third
try will be directed to the nearby nurse, who says they’ve been poisoned
and the source of the poison is a mystery.

It’ll eventually turn out
they’ve been exposed to drugs hidden inside the blue doll. But you
can’t do anything for them either now or later.

So who’d know about replacement
eyes? That’d be Ijgarsha. She explains that organ trade is illegal.
but kicks you back to the Echodim and one Mackro da Thrang who apparently
deals in all sorts of unsavory stuff.

Thus armed, you can head
over to the Echodim right now. But you’ve also been supplied with
a topic that will penetrate the shopgirl’s all-business facade. Ask
her about Hamilton and suddenly she’s the one begging to know what
you know … and opening up on other topics once you pass along the
intelligence from Krems. Show her Mondra’s notebook to confirm Kato’s
presence here; his glider descended the main mine shaft this morning.
Ask about Trumort and discover he’s been questioning Elmo Dater residents
about Arrachieda, Sheed and "some Yillod Zhymii thing."
(Otherwise, Ijgarsha confirms or expands slightly on info you’ve already
received from Krems–except she seems to doubt the authority and even
the existence of Batt.)

Everything’s now riding
on your encounter with Mackro. And, naturally, he’ll have a request
of his own.

You’ll need to get advance
permission to meet with him. Use the "eyes" topic with the
Echodim barkeep and he’ll tell you da Thrang is in a booth at the
rear and to simply tell the doorman you want to see him.

Which doorman? There are
two. And wouldn’t you know it? The mohawked one visible during your
chat with the barman is the wrong one. He’s preventing over-30s from
getting in a young-people’s party. (Perry’s missed the cutoff by around
2,970 years.) Talk to this doorman three times to get a cute line
from Perry.

You want the melonheaded
doorman up the stairs to the right. And despite the barkeep’s cautionary
words about drop-ins, seeing this local version of Jabba the Hutt
isn’t a problem. The doorman lets you in straightaway. Mackro talks
to you straightaway. Perry wants eyes. Mackro wants a Blues doll–a
"naive represntation of a Blue creature" like the one you
heard the two Blues quarreling over when you first arrived in the
city. You’ll get a portait of the doll for your inventory. Mackro
makes as though it’s for his collection, but does he seem like the
sort of fellow who’d be interested in folk art?

In any case, the two Blues
are currently incapacitated, so this should be beyond easy.

Note that Mackro’s willing
to discuss other topics, including Mondra’s notebook, Tachio da Xena,
Mad Hamilton and Lower Levels. Two topics of particular interest are
your Tur-Ra-Cel badge and Quotter Batt. The first reveals that the
"Celis da Tantor" is supposed to keep away would-be visitors
to the moon. You encountered nothing of that kind and the guys at
the bar hinted at the abdication of the authorities on Gom Callaedus.
(And yet Bully will later report needing to official clearance to
visit the moon’s quarantined region.) Mackro also conclusively links
Batt to the hacker Quint Essence we heard about from Daellian. It’s
the same person.

When he leaves Echodim,
Perry stops and runs through what he needs to do. Cut to a call to
Kato in the city’s Lower Level. We can’t see the caller–Kato’s reference
an "ugly face" could be just about anyone here!–but we
can safely assume it’s Mackro (or perhaps a worried Toregent, covering
his ass). In any case, Kato now knows of your presence in the city
and is sending Tachio after you.

Make for the clinic. The
nurses go into their regular schtick until interrupted by Toregent,
who now asks for the Illochim bone.

Not so fast, chum. Ask
him about the Creature doll and he’ll lead you back into the sick
bay. Try to talk either of the Blues. Toregent reveals they are dying.
As reported earlier, they’ve been poisoned and the source is a mystery.
Try to talk to one of them again. Toregent says he can’t heal what
he doesn’t understand, and suggests you can explain their condition.

This sounds like an invitation
to cure them. Another red herring? Not really. I think Toregent means
simply that you might be able to sort out their illness, not to his
satisfaction, but to your own. Again, you can’t do anything to help
the Blues.

Try to talk to their sedated
forms a third time to raise the issue of the doll. When Toregent refuses
to turn it over, give him the Illochim bone. He’ll walk off screen
and return with the doll and serum. They’re yours. Toregent then leads
you out of the sick bay and, with a parting, mysterious comment about
your "influential friends," walks back through the forcefield
and out of your life.

Back to the Echodim? You
can do that. But to spare yourself an extra trip, first pay a visit
to the entrance to the Lower Levels. It’s not hard to find. There’s
only one path you haven’t yet explored–the one that continues left
from the odor bar. Use it now. You’ll go around the corner and find
yourself at the end of a bridge. Tachio’s waiting for you there. You
trade lines, she opens fire and the weaponless Perry runs away.

Now you’re equipped to
talk to one of two guys standing at the Echodim’s bar. Turns out he
has some experience with weapons. Offer him your serum–with your
cell-conversion camouflage, you won’t need it–and then instruct him
to "immobilize" Tachio.

The man takes off. You
can’t check on his success just yet, so go continue on into the back
room and make your trade. Mackro gets his doll … and the toxic drugs
it contains. On your way out, you should run into your recruit. (On
one occasion, I didn’t. To fix this, I simply returned to Mackro’s
sanctum and the merc showed up in the bar after I left a second time.)

He reports Tachio gave
him a hard time. But the job is done. You’ll automatically hand over
the serum and then you can return to the Lower Levels gate to question
the bad girl, who is suspended within a forcefield and revolving a
few feet off the ground. Tachio doesn’t reveal much–she’s all bluff
and bluster–but does disclose (via the Batt topic) that "he’s
important for reaching our goal … I think he has a pass or a code
or something." And their goal, just from repetition (it comes
up again in the "Lower Levels" topic), seems to be immortality.

Get back to the clinic.
Surprise. It is closed, with Krems still inside. (If you asked Mackro
about the serum, he implied that Toregent has vanished.) You’ll have
to break in to get to him. The lock’s that box in the middle of the
upper half of the door.

Did you consult Ijgarsha
or Krems about the lichen? If so, you can combine it with Sheed (the
yellow drink from Martel’s office) to produce acid. If not, now’s
the time to talk to Ijgarsha (Krems being temporarily out of the picture).
Then use your acid on the lock and off it goes.

Inside, you’ll find the
nurses disabled (check them out; they turn out to be androids), the
sick bay forcefield gone, the two Blues dead, Krems oddly forgetful
(perhaps Toregent drugged him?) and Toregent nowhere in evidence.
Give Krems the real eyes–he’ll give you his implants–and ask after
the Lower Levels again. He’ll then turn over an admission permit he
recently found among his belongings with instructions to give it to
a Terran seeking Quotter Batt.

Gee, Krems, did the note
tell you to trade it for eyes, too?

And now you simply have
to use this permit on the door to the Lower Levels.

Odds
& Ends

There are two notable red
herrings in the upper city. One involves the art of squeezing Sheed
from your Arrachieda stick. You can’t, but folks act as though you
can. Show the Echodim’s bartender the ore and he’ll note he doesn’t
have a tool to extract the drug and that there are other methods of
getting it out.

The clinic patient Ullban
Krems mentions one of them: a press. And while Ijgarsha and the Echodim
bartender do let you know by context that the yellow drink from Martel’s
office is a drug, they never expressly identify it as Sheed. Unless
you figure it out yourself and make the acid early in your visit,
you may well go through Elmo Dater thinking you need to first find
that blasted press!

As it happens, you already
have all the Sheed you can use. Your Arrachieda stick will find a
different use down in the mines.

Then there’s Ijgarsha’s
promise (via the Lower Levels topic) to provide you with supplies
for your trip into the depths once you have the serum. She never delivers
… and you’ll do fine down there with the stuff you’ve found on your
own.

The
Mines

Getting around is your
first issue. A chasm yawns at the top of the stairs. There’s a mine
car there, half-hidden behind power cables, but it doesn’t have power
or a track. It’s not going anywhere until you do some gruntwork.

From the entry point, send
Perry down and right into the miners’ washroom. Check out the five
lockers atop the right-hand wall and the corresponding positronic
locks above the nearby sinks. They go together. You’ll see that only
the three leftmost lockers have codes engraved on the bottom. Hence,
they’re the only ones you can open. Use your positronic key on the
leftmost locker–this writes the locker’s code into the key–and then
use the key on the uppermost of the three positronic locks above the
second sink from the bottom. This lowers and unlocks the leftmost
locker. It contains a metal rod. Repeat the procedure for the two
adjacent lockers. The second yields an odd-shaped tool and the third
a roll of tape.

You’ll find a use for the
metal rod almost instantly. Leave the washroom and look at the wall
across the hall. There’s a panel here. Call it up. It’s missing one
of its four levers. Back out of the panel, use the metal rod on it
and it’ll fit right into place in the second slot.

Call up the panel again
and throw both this lever and the leftmost one. The one you found,
topped by an emblem of a fan, has no obvious impact, but, yeah, do
it anyway. It opens the door to the ventilation system on the far
side of the chasm. The one beside it, topped with a electrical bolt,
turns on the power here. (Don’t worry about the remaining two levers.
They’re stuck but good, and you’ll never get them to work.)

Quit the panel and you’ll
now see a winking yellow light beside the door to the washroom. Perry
speculates it’s a lock. Your positronic key is gone–spent opening
the washroom lockers–but how about your admission-permit keycard?
Golden! The light now stays green and a narrow track for the mine
cart quickly unfolds across the chasm. Now you just have to get the
vehicle going.

Easy enough. There’s another
panel on the left wall right next to the cart. Call it up and you’ll
notice that a rod in the upper right corner seems to be missing–a
rod that looks very like your Arrachieda stick.

You know better than to
insert metallic sticks into electrical gizmos, right? It needs to
be insulated first. Use the tape from the locker on the stick and
then use the insulated stick on the panel. You’ll hear the mine cart
power up. Activate the cart and you’ll climb aboard and you’ll zip
across the chasm without incident.

When the cart stops, you’ll
find yourself outside the prisoners quarters. The hatch here is welded
shut–this is explained later in the video logs you’ll find at the
surveillance center–and you’ll have to find a way around it. The
hanging sign includes the names of the inmates. One that catches Perry’s
name is Quintin Bartholomew. "Q.B. … Quotter Batt," he
wonders aloud. "Well, it would make sense." Take the child
car seat (here called a "seat belt") from the ground.

This feels like a dead-end.
It isn’t. Walk down the right side of the mine cart and you’ll discover
you’re actually on a broad platform. Then head right to the ventilation
shaft between the two sewage exhaust pipes. If you threw the second
lever on the first panel back in the arrival area, the door here will
be open and you’ll be able to inspect the giant fan at the end of
the hall.

Look at the end of the
fan’s spindle and you’ll find the emblem of the Tur-Ra-Cel. Hey, you
have the emblem of the Tur-Ra-Cel! Put your badge where the spindle
is. The fan stops and you can walk between the blades.

When you come out of the
tunnel, you’ll be in a familiar setting. This is where Kato and his
hecnhmen were walking when they heard from Mackro that you were in
town. Walk right until you see another panel to the left of a tunnel
mouth. Look at it twice. It’s been sabotaged. Kids today! Your second
look determines that components are missing. You already have one
of the three needed (your permission slip for the Lower Levels) and
will pick up the remaining two in this region. One comes easy. The
other doesn’t.

Head right again, into
the tunnel, and then cross the Moria-like bridge to the prisoners
quarters. Walk down the dark hall, past barred cells, to a second
section of hallway where the perspective changes to an overhead view.
Between the fourth and fifth overhanging beams, you’ll find evidence
of fresh blood. Between the sixth and seventh beams, you’ll find an
exit in the upper wall. It’s awfully dark in there, so use your miner’s
lamp on the gap. Within, you’ll find Baldrion "Mad" Hamilton.
He’s dying–a victim of the sometimes-heard-but-never-seen "organ
hunters" that allegedly prowl the mine–but he still has a sense
of humor. "Perry Rhodan," he says. "I thought you were
just a hero from a science fiction series."

Don’t squander your questions
on mundane items. You have time for only three. Save them for some
combination of Mondra’s notebook, Kato, Hamilton himself and Quotter
Batt.

Hamilton doesn’t actually
say much of consequence. It’s mostly melodrama. The most interesting
answer comes via the "Mad Hamilton" topic. He asks if you’ve
heard of Venice. "They say it was built entirely on pillars.
That’s how this city was constructed too–on the pillars of the Arkonide
sins. This whole epidemic thing … all the poor creatures suffering
and dying in the quarters … do you think that it was a natural disaster?
There’s something here … Quotter Batt knows the way to it."

When he’s dead, leave the
room. You’ll hear slavering sounds from the next room. Hamilton’s
corpse is falling prey to the organ hunters who killed him. Return
to the cell and you’ll find the body gone. Take the circuit board
(similar to your "permit") that they left behind. This is
the second component for the damaged panel back beside the tunnel
mouth. And, to no purpose (beyond disrespect for the dearly departed),
have a pee in the toilet, if you like.

Back in the hall, continue
to the right. Ahead of you, you’ll see an odd apparatus under a beam
of light. Activate it to learn something’s been wrenched out of a
bracket. It’s not a great leap to replace that something with something
else that’s involved with light–the implants you received from Krems–and
they do the job brilliantly, focusing the light from above into a
tight beam that passes into a tunnel off to the right. Let’s see where
it goes.

Where it goes is a giant
pipeline stretching off into the distance. At the far end, you’ll
emerge onto a platform in an open space with a "bizarre structure"
off to the right. Look at the structure. It has no visible means of
support, and all the bridges to it have been removed. "Either
nobody is supposed to get in there, or nobody is supposed to get out,"
says Perry.

But the structure is not
entirely isolated. It is connected to its surroundings by a range
of cables–one of them within reach at the far end of the platform.
Turns out the transport frame you swiped from the museum fits neatly
over the wire. Can the child seat be connected to the frame? Well,
you can try–but it’s not going to work until you give the seat a
going-over with the odd tool from the washroom locker. Then use the
modified seat on the frame, activate the seat and you’re there.

Something nasty happened
here–a terrible odor wafts up from the grate–but it’ll take a little
while yet before you sort out the details. For now, enter the door
to the right and grab the communications unit off the console and
the circuit board from just above the skull and crossbones on the
left wall. This is the third component for the panel back at the tunnel
mouth.

That’s all you can do right
now. There are a couple of press-able buttons on the console, but
they don’t work for want of power. Nor does the left exit. Approach
it and you’ll hear more slavering noises, suggesting organ hunters
are waiting for you in the darkness beyond.

You’ll need to shed some
light on the issue first. Perhaps you’ve already guessed how. The
beam that passes through the giant golf ball on a tripod outside the
control room can apparently be re-directed with a handle just below
the sphere. But though this clearly can be operated by hand, the designers
aren’t letting you mess with it just yet.

So make yourself scarce
and ride the chair lift back to the platform. Retrace your steps down
the pipeline, through the prison and across the narrow bridge to the
broken panel. First use the odd tool on the panel to clean things
up a bit, then put your "admission permit," Hamilton’s circuit
board and the circuit board from the control room in place (the order
doesn’t matter) and finally click on the panel to turn it on.

Now, what exactly did you
turn on? Presumably the controls back in the surveillance center.
So it’s back to the chair lift for one last trip.

In the control room, you’ll
find the power’s on again–a couple of distorted video screens are
running on the back wall–and the two buttons are now working. They
summon video logs left by the commander of the garrison. (Either button’ll
do; the logs are the same either way.) This station seems to have
been the site of the Arkonide soldiers’ last stand. First, a pathogen
is reported loose among prisoners working in the mines. It seems to
turn them into ravenous, zombie-like monsters. Then the lower levels
come under quarantine. Soldiers go missing. Contact is lost with the
outpost’s home base. An expedition to the surface discovers the troops
have been sealed inside the mine. The pathogen spreads to the soldiers.
The zombies cut the base’s power. And then they’re coming, and it
all ends in a puff of smoke.

Drums, drums in the deep.

As mentioned earlier, if
you’re to progress beyond the surveillance center, you’ll have to
find a way to get some light into the next room. Your miner’s lamp
is gone–spent in your exchange with Hamilton–but the beam of light
that you focused with Krems’s implants can now be re-directed. Get
back to that bright "golf ball" outside. Activate the handle
just below the sphere. Do it again. The beam now descends through
the grate into the room with the terrible smell. I’m a bit unclear
how this lower-level room relates to the left exit from the upper-level
control room, but it’s apparently enough. When you re-enter the left
side of the control room, you’ll find the slavering sounds are gone.
The light has somehow scared the organ hunters away.

Use the left exit. In the
middle of the bridge beyond, someone begins speaking–much in the
fashion of the disjointed warnings you received from the kiosks in
the Solar Residence. It happens again on the next screen and again
on the one after that.

You’ve found Quotter Batt.
This is the way he talks–like a sentient computer that writes MadLibs
free-verse poetry on the side. Your challenge in this next sequence
is to extract meaningful messages from his ravings.

When the poetry reading
ends (only temporarily), you’ll find yourself in a high-ceilinged
chamber. An indistinct figure hangs from a crane above you, many wires
running from its body. This is Batt himself.

You can’t move. All you
can do here is talk. So talk to him. Ask first about Kato. The response
is a kind of rambling amalgam of what Kato is and things he’s said.
At the end, Batt shifts gears.

"They left a sign,"
he says. "Just one sign." You’ll be given a choice of six
similar symbols and must select the correct one to continue.

Is this the "they"
and "them" you’ve heard about persistently in the upper
city? Can’t be. Your best info is that Batt himself runs the place,
so that wouldn’t make sense.

"They" are the
Illochim. What’s the sign of the Illochim? You’ve probably seen this
insignia–it is featured prominently in the ad for Mondra’s museum
exhibit–but it may not have registered with you yet. Check Mondra’s
notebook. On the seventh page, opposite the page tagged "Kari,"
you’ll see a drawing of the supran lens. At its center is an emblem
like the one in the bottom left corner, so select that one.

Batt then asks, "what
does a person need, what is my ultimate happiness?" Again, you
have six choices: "power," "trust," "fame,"
"love," "truth" and "meaning."

This is tough one to parse.
The answer is not written down. Logically, it could be any of those
offered, but for the fact that Batt goes on to imply this happiness
is experienced "being to being." Thus the answer must be
limited to something that can exist between two people: "love"
or "trust." And note that Batt mentions that he "was
a child," which puts the emphasis on the special relationship
between a child and a parent. Part of that is love, naturally, but
the "ultimate happiness" has to be "trust."

Here Batt offers a somewhat
less chaotic statement. It seems to be about a creation of Mondra’s–"words
not to hear, sign not to grasp, not to see"–and it ends revealingly
with, "you carry with you, give it to me."

Batt wants Mondra’s notes.
She didn’t write them on computer, but in her own hand–complete with
fat exclamation points–and Batt, a supreme hacker who can’t take
direct action in the real world, hasn’t been able to snag them. Use
Mondra’s notebook on Batt and Perry will lay this out for you–attaching
his own proposed quid pro quo at the end.

But how to actually make
this proposal to Batt? Additional attempts to give the notebook to
Batt are met with the same spiel from Perry.

Really, you don’t have
much stuff left to drag around the screen, and you can strike this
bargain by exclusion. Try offering the two physical objects you know
Batt doesn’t want: the communications unit and the voice simulator.
He’ll say "no" to them with surprising directness and then
you can offer the notebook again and Perry states his terms explicitly.
Batt agrees without expressly saying so. He takes the book–I suppose
he lowers a hook or something–and Perry moves automatically down
the tunnel ahead of him.

"Now, to discover
the source," says Batt.

At tunnel’s end end, you’ll
find a dimension gate–essentially a heavy-duty, long-distance version
of the teleporters that have been zapping your atoms around since
the beginning of the game.

This is evidently what
Hamilton alluded to earlier. It’s never made clear exactly how this
gate is responsible for the epidemic in Gom Callaedus, but can assume
that a life lived in close proximity to such a primal force can’t
be a healthy one. Walk into the shimmering circle at its end and you’ll
reappear beside a similar gate on the asteroid Betha in the distant
Stellar Ocean of Jamondi.

Betha

Climb the path for a little
homage to the movie "Alien" and then drop down into the
canyon beyond. Make your way into the lighted underbelly of a cargo
ship (where you’ll see on the left that the drill parts have been
unloaded) and use the exit at the right rear to reach a little installation.
It’s unguarded, and you’ll have the run of the place.

That’s Mondra over on the
left. Look at her twice–she’s alive but in stasis within a living
crystal–and check out the gadget at the right rear. It’s a hypercom
communications terminal. You’ll have to boost its signal to contact
Bully, so use the communication unit you found in the mines on the
terminal.

And there’s your pal. He’s
followed you to Gom Calladedus but can’t trace your encrypted signal
to locate the asteroid. You’ll have to send him more information about
your location.

The data he needs is all
the way back at the now-deactivated dimension gate. Return there and
look at any of the three nearest stones around the gate to write the
ancient symbols inscribed there to your inventory. (The far stone,
in the lower left corner, gives you a little background on this place.)
Then return to the hypercom and use the symbols on the terminal. Bully
complains about the age of the language, and Perry impresses upon
him the need to get someone to translate it. Switch then to a brief
cut scene–more like an audio clip, actually–that indicates Kato
and his sidekicks are boarding the alien ship. Perry doesn’t know
what they’re about yet, but it can’t be good. Can you somehow throw
them off?

Yes. Remember: Kato thinks
Aimo Martel is dead. But you still have Martel’s voice on the voice
simulator. Use it on the hypercom terminal and Perry somehow cobbles
together a message to make Martel sound not only vigorously alive,
but in-bound and righteously pissed off. Kato immediately backs off
from whatever he was planning.

But now you have a whole
other problem. Use the hypercom terminal again. You’ll detect Quotter
Batt beaming data to the Illochim ship. Perry doesn’t say why. Check
your journal to learn he’s trying to contact these creatures to gain
access to their technology. "He wants … not Kato … I’ve got
to stop it!" says Perry.

Use the nearby teleporter
to beam to the super drill’s control room. The drill’s already doing
its thing–boring through the side of the Illochim ship. Look at it
and Perry gets an idea: Use the drill to set off an explosion of the
noxous gases within the craft.

But how? Perry won’t touch
either of the two control consoles here. They’re too complicated.
Never mind that in about fivbe minutes, they won’t be. We’ll have
to leave the idea behind for the moment.

Only one way to go: Press
down the hallway into the body of the Illochim ship. You’ll find some
spooky aliens in hibernation here … and indication of a light source.
Implication: The Illochim aren’t dead. They are just sleeping. What
would happen were they to awaken? Read your journal. Perry sees in
this yet another threat.

Follow the path left and
then forward from the entrance and you’ll find yourself face to face
with a giant sleeping Illochim. Walk toward the tube. The perspective
shifts and you’ll recognize the location: This is where Kato and his
henchman were walking when your voice simulator threw an imaginary
wrench into their plans. You may recall seeing something shattered
on the ground then. It’s still here: a broken supran lens. Click on
the Illochim and learn it has an impression of a supran lens on its
head. A receiver, perhaps? This device is somehow basic to the race’s
existence.

You may have lost that
lens, but you still have the Frequency Spectroscopy … and, in all
honesty, you’re about out of objects to combine. Put ’em together
and, from a position at the base of the hibernation tube, use the
voice simulator on the Illochim.

But I gotta ask: Why is
Perry trying to talk to the Illochim? What about letting sleeping
dragon-like alien monsters lie and all that? It seems to us that,
with no fewer than three people trying to contact the Illochim, they’re
more likely than ever to awaken.

In any case, you’ll get
a decided reaction–a surge of light and sound–and not just from
the ship’s sleeping inhabitants. After the voice simulator’s third
use, Kato and henchmen Nar-Khol and E-Frain turn up.

They do not try to kill
you. Rather, Kato complains how hard it is to find good help. And,
like every insecure master villain, he makes you an offer. With his
help, and the data you could glean from the Illochim, you could rule
the galaxy.

Joining him is not an option.
Running away is not an option. (Or rather, not just yet. Your path
is blocked.) And you can’t talk Kato out of his plans.

But you can distract your
enemies. Use the voice simulator on the base of Illochim one last
time. In the ensuing blast of light, the melonhead blocking your path
panics and steps aside, and you can retreat safely to the drill control
room. (What kind of enemy is this, anyway? You escape and Kato directs
snarky remarks to your back?)

Here, irrespective or previous
comments to the contrary, you must use the two control consoles in
tandem to overload the drill. I’ll explain how it all works, but don’t
be intimidated by the puzzle’s seeming complexity. Once you see the
big picture, it’s pretty easy. It’s just a matter understanding the
mechanism.

Each terminal has controls
for four of the drill’s functions all initially set at the median.
Importantly, the two terminals are co-dependent. That is, changes
in a function on one terminal create answering changes in a function
on the other and usually not in the corresponding column, proportion
or direction.

Here’s a list of these
interrelationships.

A change on the left terminal
…

… in the leftmost column
creates a corresponding change in the rightmost column on the right
terminal.

… in the second column
from the left creates a corresponding change in the opposite direction
in the leftmost column on the right terminal.

… in the second column
from the right creates a doubled change in the same column on the
right terminal.

… in the rightmost column
create a doubled change in the opposite direction in the second column
from the left on the right terminal.

A change on the right terminal
…

… in the leftmost column
creates a corresponding change in the second column from the left
on the left terminal.

… in the second column
from the left creates a doubled change in the rightmost column on
the left terminal.

… in the second column
from the right creates a doubled change in the opposite direction
in the corresponding column on the left terminal.

… in the rightmost column
creates an corresponding change in the opposite direction in the leftmost
column of the left terminal.

On top of this, there’s
a safety mechanism. You can bump up any given function by no more
than four clicks (two clicks for functions with a doubling effect)
above the starting median. But if a column on either terminal is bumped
up five clicks to the maximum or the four controls on either terminal
exceed a cumulative 10 bumps above the median the safety kicks in
and restores the starting settings.

To overload the drill,
you have to adjust the terminals to bring the output from each to
exactly 10 bumps above the median. Bump up the leftmost column on
the left terminal up by four clicks. (Each terminal is now four above
the median.) Bump up the second column from the right on the left
terminal up by two clicks. (The left console is now six above the
median, the right one eight.) Bump up the second column from the left
on the right terminal by two clicks. (Now they’re both at 10.)

Once you hit this target,
an alarm goes off and a package of protective clothing appears beside
the left-hand terminal in the manner of oxygen masks on airplanes.
You can’t open it. You are not meant to open it. You’re meant to use
it as a weapon. Grab it and bash either of the terminals. Down it
goes, and with it the safety mechanism. Use the surviving terminal
and turn all four of its functions up to maximum. The overload starts
to build.

That’s the game. You’ll
automatically use the teleporter and answer Bully’s hypercom message
on your way out. Bully blasts off from the asteroid just in time.
Everything blows up. Aboard Bully’s ship, a robot cuts Mondra out
of her crystal.

And Quotter Batt, launching
himself into the cosmos as pure energy, gets the last word.

But without captions. I
barely understood a thing.

View this guide raw, exactly as the archive holds it

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