Newstocks

The Cradle, Part Two

I plug the fuse in.

From deep within the Cradle, the low, loud hum of a long-silent generator slowly whirring back to life. The lights above flicker and come on.

I remain motionless for a long time, my senses straining to detect any sign that the Cradle has been alerted to me. Nothing. Time to move. I head back along the flooded passage, up the ladder, and throw the switch to open the portcullis.

But before going through, I remember: I have a job to do. Heading back to the lobby I see the drainpipe that the girl in my head told me about. Pulling the vial of her blood from my cloak, I drop it into it.

Again, her disembodied voice speaks to me. Thank you, she says. My blood is now outside the Cradle, but the Cradle still has a grip on me. She tells me to find her nightdress in the white hall and destroy it in the furnace in the morgue.

I go back to the portcullis and pass through into the exercise yard and the lounge beyond.

As I step back inside I begin to hear a different noise from up ahead, a scratching sound. Rats? Roaches? Dropping back into the shadows I peer into the gloom.

Through a doorway, an electric light hangs from the ceiling. It's flickering and crackling, as if a mosquito is repeatedly hurling itself against the bulb. As I watch, brow furrowed, the door starts to open.

Heart racing, I shrink back against the wall, not daring to look. Something is coming, shuffling over the flagstones. With the blood roaring in my ears, I fight to keep calm, praying that I remain unseen.

Frozen, I watch as a humanoid figure shuffles into the pool of light in front of me. Now this light, too, has started flickering. The creature appears to be dressed head to toe in sacking, its head and hands covered by metal cages. It emits a low moan as it moves past. As it moves out of sight, I release my breath. The light stops flickering.

Before it can return, I move as quickly as I can through the shadows and into the hallway it came from. Passing under the light, I am momentarily exposed when it starts to crackle and flicker again.

Fighting rising panic, I see a darkened side corridor up ahead. Rushing into it, I turn and crouch just in time to see a second creature passing under the light where I stood seconds earlier.

It seems that I'm not alone, after all.

The Cradle, Part One

I've just broken into the derelict asylum/orphanage called the Cradle. The place is in darkness, the only light coming from the moonbeams filtering in through the narrow, barred windows. There's a low, eerie howl somewhere in the distance. The wind, perhaps. Water drips unseen.

There's a narrow stair to my right, winding upwards. Crouching, so as to make as little noise as possible, I creep up.

From somewhere above, a faint thumping. It gets louder as I ascend. Eventually, the stairs end in a narrow door. The thumping seems to be coming from behind it. I thought this place was abandoned? For a long time, I stand outside the door, mustering my courage.

I reach out, turn the handle. The door creaks open. The thumping stops.

I'm in the attic. The room is empty, save for a couple of crates and an old painting. Something catches the light atop one of the crates. Edging forwards, I see a fuse. I slip it into my pocket. A dark stain on the floor next to the crate catches my eye. Is that blood?

I move over to the painting. A picture of a young girl. She looks familiar...

Suddenly a voice in my head, her voice. She's a prisoner here. The Cradle won't let her go. She wants me to find a vial of her blood in the storm cellar and drop it into the drainpipe in the lobby to get it outside the Cradle. Only then will she be free.

Over to my right, by the blood, a strange blue light is now burning in the air. It's casting a shadow on the wall... the shadow of a young girl. But there's no-one to be seen.

I want to run back down the stairs but I'm terrified that the sound of my footsteps will attract less benign attention. Still crouching, I move back down them as quickly as I can.

I enter a dormitory. Metal bed frames line the walls. It's deserted, but there's a strange sound. At the far end, a chest, locked no doubt. I want to look inside, but while I'm picking the lock my back will be exposed. Dare I? As I creep forwards, the murmuring gets louder. Oh God, is it worth it? I pull out my lockpick. Quickly, I work the tumblers. The lid flips open, I grab the silver candlestick inside, and spin around.

There's no-one there.

I come to an iron portcullis next to a switch. I flip the switch, but the portcullis doesn't budge. No power. The conduit to the switch passes through the floor. Nearby, a convenient opening in the floor, and a ladder going down. Peering into the gloom, I can see the floor below is flooded. The fuse box must be down there.

Don't make me go down there, I whimper, peering into the darkness. But I have no choice.

Down the ladder, along a flooded stone passageway and into a small room. Several shelves hold glass vials. At the back of the room, an iron cage. I move towards it.

Suddenly, the girl's voice again. This is where they kept the new arrivals before a room could be found for them, she says. Don't go in there. If you do, the Cradle may see you.

I back away, bumping into one of the shelves. The vials on it rattle, one almost falls off. I grab it. It's full of blood. Must be hers. It's still warm.

Back along the flooded passageway, and right. Past iron pipes, into the generator room. There's the fusebox. I pull the fuse out from under my cloak, reach forward, then hesitate.

The Cradle is in darkness now, and I'm terrified of every shadow. Yet so far, I've seen no-one. The Cradle may not yet know that I'm here. But if plug that fuse in, the lights will certainly come on. And then...

I need to open that portcullis. But I fear the light even more than I fear the dark.

Fat tax

A bill before the New York Assembly is proposing to add "modest surcharges on the very food products and sedentary activities that are linked to the lifestyle changes involved in the explosion of childhood obesity in the last 20-30 years".

Targets of the bill would be snack foods and sweet drinks, the sale and rental of movies, admissions to movie theatres, and the sale and rental of video games and video game hardware.

So why aren't books included? If I sit at home reading books all day, am I really less likely to get fat than if I'm playing video games or watching TV?

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Finally finished Tomb Raider: Anniversary yesterday. I hadn't played any of the Tomb Raider games before, although I had tried the demos of both Anniversary and Underworld and found them a bit frustrating, particularly compared to the Prince of Persia games (which I enjoy). But when I saw Anniversary for a mere $5 in a Steam weekend sale a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't resist picking it up.

I ended up having a bit of a love/hate relationship with the game. Even though it's a couple of years old now, it still looks good (apart from a few clipping issues), and the scale of some of the settings is impressive. On the downside, the camera could be temperamental, sometimes not showing enough of the environment to judge your next jump properly. Worst of all, however, was the need to fight the controls to make Lara go where I wanted her to, particularly when trying to jump perpendicular to the wall during a wall run.

Overall, however, I liked it, and I'm now likely to pick up Legend and Underworld if they end up in Steam's bargain bin too.

New games

My WoW subscription doesn't run out for a couple more days, but having already hit level 80 and seen every 5-man dungeon in the expansion, I decided to quit early. There's a lot more in the game that I could do (get the Explorer achievement, solo some old dungeons, play some battlegrounds, do the rest of the new Northrend quests, try to get enough gold for my epic flying mount, do some raids with my guild) but right now I really want to sample some of the other games and demos that have been building up over the last three months. So the last couple of nights I've been doing just that.

Quite enjoyed The Graveyard, even though it's better described as an interactive piece of art rather than a game. You walk an old woman down a path in a graveyard to a bench, sit down, listen to a song, then walk her back out again. That's it. It's more of an emotional experience than anything else, and quite effective. On that basis, I'm probably going to give The Path a go when it comes out, too.

Despite not being a fan of tower defence games, I enjoyed the demo of Defense Grid: The Awakening so much I'm going to buy the full game on Steam when the price drops a bit. Guess I am a bit of a graphics whore, after all.

Didn't enjoy the demo of Red Alert 3. Wasn't that impressed with the graphics, and I got absolutely slaughtered, which seems to happen to me in all Command & Conquer games that I try these days. The cut scenes were agreeably cheesy, though.

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a game I've had my eye on for a long time, but after playing the demo I was left a bit underwhelmed. Although the concept is cool (draw any shape on the screen and it becomes "solid", interacting realistically with the other shapes), the levels were all incredibly easy and I think at $20 it's a bit overpriced.

The demo of Men of War looks good (despite the bland name) and comes recommended by one of the folks over at Rock Paper Shotgun. But it's another World War II real-time strategy game (do we really need any more) and the voice acting is absolutely the worst I have ever heard in any game. Ever. Think I'll probably give it a miss.

Still looking forward to checking out Flower on the PS3 and Fallout 3 and Empire: Total War on the PC.