Serpent Isle: Shedding Our Skins

 

Another missing item recovered.

    

Here we are, 14 entries and 50 game hours into Serpent Isle, and we're finally about to confront Batlin, the reason we came in the first place. There's a palpable excitement as we cross the threshold of the outer walls--an excitement diminished when we see that the portcullis has been dropped again. We sigh and make our way back through the secret mountain pass and up into the pantry again.

This time, instead of a magic barrier, there's a wall of flames in front of the entrance to the main keep. I cast "Great Douse," and of course it doesn't work. We walk through the fire, which I guess is illusory. 

     

That it didn't burn the doors is probably a hint.

       

The foyer is full of discarded armor pieces, the stairway upward choked with rubble. We head right into what appears to be a throne room. A paladin and a gargoyle are standing at the north end of the large room, staring at the throne. They turn as we enter. "'Tis the avatar!" one of them cries, and they attack. During the ensuing combat, Batlin enters from a western door. I frankly didn't expect to see him so quickly. We exchange a few blows.

   

Suddenly, he cries, "Thou art too late, Avatar! Nothing can stop me now! The girl is dead and the last Bane is mine! Soon I shall rival the Guardian himself and crush thee like the irritating insect thou art! I shall open the Wall of Lights and destroy the world! And thou art powerless to follow me!" He yells for Palos to follow him and blinks out of existence.

       

Have we heard of this "Wall of Lights" before? I don't remember that we have.

   

Our battle has left a paladin and a fighter dead on the floor. I'm not sure who they are. As we continue exploring the keep, the Earth Serpent suddenly speaks to me telepathically: "Seek the Temple, and within it, the Eye of the Moon." There's a lot of new terminology in this keep.

   

We head upstairs and discover that, unfortunately, Batlin wasn't lying: Cantra is dead, spread-eagled on the bedroom floor, surrounded by blood. A Xenkan monk gates in as we contemplate the scene--honestly, why does everyone have that spell except for me!?--and says he'll take her body to Monk Isle to see if it can be resurrected.

       

Got it. We won't let the massacred teenager trouble us.

      

An amulet on the floor is labeled "Batlin's Medallion." We grab it. There's nothing else in the keep except a few magic scrolls, a little money, and another fighter who attacks us in the western dining room. Beatrix makes no more appearances, Shamino has nothing to say about the castle, and there's no way that I can find to reconcile the former lovers.

   

Batlin mentioned going to the frozen north, so that would seem to be our next stop, except that we clearly need some warmer clothes. As far as I know, that means going all the way back to Monitor to buy them from [shuffling through notes I wrote a lifetime ago] Cellia. Back we go, back through the forest, back through the grass (swish-swash, swish-swash), back through the swamp (squelch, squelch), and so forth. We fight a lot of swamp battles and get poisoned. The Avatar has to cast "Mass Cure" when we reach the other side.

       

Note that the runes for "Cold Blast" seem to be VAS FLAM. This is because in this game, "F" means both FLAM and FRIO.

        

We stop at the Sleeping Bull and exchange everything for Monitor's currency (monetari), then head to Monitor. (For some reason, Devra won't exchange for gold bars. Why make an already-complicated system more annoying?) At Cellia's shop, we buy four sets of fur boots and four sets of fur hats. We already have one set, and we already all have cloaks. I haven't seen fur gauntlets or anything to replace body armor. I then head to the training yard and have Shamino, Iolo, and Boydon train with Shazanna; they all need dexterity. They all manage to defeat her in their training. At this point, all my characters are Level 7 except Boydon, who's Level 6. I don't know how many experience points are needed for Level 8. Dupre is in the lead with 4,690. It occurs to me that I never found an intelligence trainer, not even in Moonshade.

     

I'm glad Celia is one of the few Monitorians left alive.

         

After we leave Monitor, it occurs to me that I didn't think to stop by Harrna's house and tell her about Cantra. Whoops.

Next, we take the teleport hub to Moonshade, exchange everything for Guilders, and visit Pothos the reagent seller. If there's an easy way to figure out how many reagents you have, I don't know what it is. Reagents don't automatically stack in your containers, so if you want to know how much sulfurous ash you have, for instance, you have to take the time to manually drag each clump of ash on top of the others until you've consolidated them all. But the spellbook tells you how many more times you can cast each spell, so an easier way is to triangulate based on the numbers in the spellbook. When I arrived at Pothos's, the lowest number in the spellbook is 14, corresponding with "Flash," "Reveal," and "Unlock Magic," along with others. The reagent they all share is sulfurous ash, so clearly that's what I need.

      

Do you want to try to count all that?

            

I'm not sure I've mentioned in any entry so far that Serpent Isle makes changes to the reagent list for the first time since Ultima IV. In addition to the long-time canonical list (blood moss, black pearl, garlic, ginseng, spider's silk, sulfurous ash, mandrake, nightshade), we have blood spawn, serpent scales, and worm's heart. (Agnium, phosphor, and zerine are not reagents for spells, so I don't know why I've been carrying them around in my reagent bag. I have no idea what they do.) Unfortunately, Pothos doesn't have most of what I need. Blood spawn has to be created by mixing stoneheart (from the Mountains of Freedom) with blood from the caster via a ritual bloodletting device. Blood moss is not sold on the islands (at least, not in Moonshade or Fawn); it has to be picked up in the swamp south of Moonshade. Pothos doesn't sell ginseng. Thus, after a couple of purchases, I head to the swamp but only find a few sprigs.

   

The teleporter hub takes us back to Monitor, and from there to Sleeping Bull, where I finish buying Ensorcio's spells. Then, Darva changes my guilders for filari, and we're off to Fawn to buy ginseng from Delphynia. I nearly give up the enterprise when she proves impossible to find, except at night, when she won't sell me anything. After two days in the city, I finally catch her in her house during the day (and yes, I check the healer's place regularly, too) and spend most of the rest of my money.

   

Back we go, through the swamp, fighting alligators, fighting tentacles, fighting slimes, everyone gets poisoned again, we get lost, we figure it out, exit at last, "Mass Cure," hopefully for the last time. We go north through the forest to the mountains, then west to the cave. At the entrance, everyone dons their new furry outfits. 

        

Hopefully it doesn't matter that I'm wearing metal armor and gauntlets, as long as I have a warm hat and boots.

         

We take a slightly different way through the pass and find something we didn't find before: a teleporter in the middle of some ruins, surrounded by flame. It dumps in a cave where a ring of water surrounds an island. A stone path leads to the island, which has a raised stone dais and a statue of a harpy. A plaque reads: "GANNT THE BARD WANDERS NO MORE." Something appears and just as quickly disappears--I don't even see it. But it drops a note on the ground. The note purports to be from Gannt--author of those awful books of poems. The note asks the reader to take vengeance on Captain Stokes of The Mustang. One night at the Sleeping Bull, Stokes stabbed Gannt in the stomach when Gannt complained about Stokes's noxious pipe. A key lies on the dais, and the note says it will open Stokes's house, west of Fawn. I think I remember a locked building there. A teleporter pad takes us back to the dungeon we came from.

      

This was a fun diversion.

         

I don't know what's going to happen when I visit Stokes's house, but I like this little side quest so far. It tells a very human story and rewards players who have taken the time to read the books. I do wonder who set up this elaborate tomb, complete with a teleporter from another dungeon, but I'll let that go. Both parts of Ultima VII are at their best when they're using the full screen interface to set up these little vignettes, but I think The Black Gate rewarded this type of off-plot exploration better than Serpent Isle. It would be fun to have a Skyrim-sized game using the Ultima VII interface in which you just wander around and find things.

The rest of the dungeon is legitimately difficult in ways I didn't notice or didn't experience the first time, maybe because my armor class is lowered. In addition to lots of goblins and acid slugs, there are traps everywhere, including blue flames shooting out of the ground and caltrops scattered throughout corridors. The caltrops are particularly annoying because you can pick them up and move them, but there's never any place to put them so that your party won't go blundering into them anyway. I have to heal a few party members when they fall unconscious.

     

Shamino falls asleep on top of some caltrops.

     

We make it to the exit, and mercifully no one starts complaining about the cold. I study the map. Rather than circle the frozen north in a resolutely clockwise or counter-clockwise pattern, I decide to explore it in sections. The fingers of the mountains create natural canyons that look easy to explore one at a time, starting with the one I've emerged in. We've actually explored most of this area already. There's the cave with the bears and the cave of the ghosts of the trappers killed by the sorceress.

     

Ah, Maine in June.

        

Soon, we're out of that first valley, looking at pack ice on the coast. The next valley dips a bit east into the mountains, and there's a cave in here on the north side. It leads to a small t-junction with another polar bear, both passages ending in dead ends. We can see some Ophidian ruins on the other side of the corridor but we can't reach them. There do not seem to be any secret passages.

   

A little ice worm is waiting when we exit the cave. We kill it. It has a worm heart on its body; so that's where they come from. There's another cave just to the west of the first, but it also dead-ends without taking us anywhere. A third cave to the west of the second gets more interesting. We find five pedestals, each with a plaque depicting a single serpent rune. Two of the pedestals have runes on them, and there are three runes on the floor. The skeleton of a previous adventurer lies on the floor, with a full set of warm gear.

   

Was Roe Adams involved in this game?

   

I have to cast "Translation" to read a note on the corpse. It seems to have been written by a representative of the forces of Chaos. He taunts the forces of Order, saying they'll never get into his city because they don't know the password to open the gate. The plaques have the letters CISIG, which doesn't anagram to anything. The same letters are found on the runes, so I put the runes on their associated pedestals. Nothing happens. I find that by double-clicking on the runes, one of two things happens: a nice sparkle, or a puff of black smoke. I assume the sparkle is good, and through trial and error, I string together the runes in an order that spells ISCGI. There's a puff of smoke at the gate and a vision of the Great Earth Serpent appears. He says, "Thou hast forgotten something." 

       

Oh, yeah . . . the second reason we came to the Serpent Isle.

            

No sooner have we entered the next valley than a furry horned creature appears. "Thou . . . the one . . . Gwenno spoke," it says. He introduces himself politely as Bwundai of the Gwani. The supposedly ferocious "ice goblins"  are actually intelligent teddy bears. Suddenly, we become conscious of the fact that three of us are wearing Gwani cloaks. "But you seek Gwenno. Gwani death temple on island north," he continues. "West of Ice Dragon Caves." That doesn't sound promising. Assuming we might meet more Gwani, we run back to the trappers' cave and grab bear, wolf, and leopard cloaks from their bodies and treasure chest, leaving the Gwani cloaks behind.

      

The party performs a quick change.

       

This valley has four caves. The first leads to a large cavern with two Gwani. "Thou art Avatar!" The first one greets. They are Baiyanda and her mate Mwaerno. Mwaerno is a hunter and doesn't say much. Baiyanda is a healer. She drops the unfortunate news, although it was telegraphed by the seance in Moonshade, that Gwenno is dead, her body interred at the sacred Gwani Death Temple. I ask where that is, and she says it's not for me to know. Gwenno is at rest, and even if I found the temple, I could only unseal her body with the sacred Horn of Gwani, which has been "taken by [a] fiend who steals our dead from us." She'll heal us, but she doesn't use magic. She uses herbs and other natural methods instead. She mentions that the blood of the Ice Dragon can cure almost any sickness; it's probably the only thing that can cure Neyobi, the daughter of the chief, who has fallen ill. She asks us to help find some and gives us a bucket to put it in. She knows of two dragons, one to the east and one to the north.

    

Iolo has absolutely nothing to say in response to Baiyanda's account, but when I speak to him afterward, he laments Gwenno's death. "Oh, Gideon," he says. "How could our good and noble quest have ended in such tragedy?" In fact, that's 0 for 2 on noble quests ending in tragedy.

          

Anything the Avatar can say in response is amusingly insensitive.

              

The next cave has a single adult Gwani and a Gwani child sleeping on a fur pelt. "It is the one foretold by Gwenno!" he greets. (Didn't Gwenno mention her husband to these people? Am I the only one she talked about?) This is Myauri, the hunting master and mate of Yenani, the Gwani chieftain. He is also the father of the sick Neyobi and another Gwani named Kapyundi. With him, I get to ask how Gwenno died: "Gwenno killed by The Trapper's men." 

  

I'm already fantasizing what I'm going to do to The Trapper when I wander into the next cave and meet the Gwani chief, Yenani. She tells how the Gwani used to rule the north with the help of the Horn of Gwani, but it was stolen by a thief who took it to Skullcrusher. Gwenno apparently told her that the Avatar would save the Gwani from extinction. 

       

Given our track record lately, I wouldn't count on it.

     

Penguins appear as we head north into the next valley. One of them follows us for a time. We kill another polar bear, another ice snake, and some blue tentacles that erupt from the ground. A snow leopard appears but fortunately isn't hostile. A train passes by--no, that's outside my house. What the hell? It's two o'clock in the morning! 

We come to another cave. An injured Gwani passes by and warns us that an Ice Dragon is inside. He tried to kill it but was wounded and is heading back to Baiyanda for healing. We enter, but he must have meant a different cave. This is an abandoned Gwani home with nothing of value but some spider silks in the corners. 

     

Penguins, polar bears, and snow leopards co-exist in the Serpent Isles.

       

Further north, I find Kapyundi, also injured. He says the Ice Dragon killed three of the hunters that went after it. "Must return to village in shame." He suggests when I get to the Ice Dragon cave, I use a second, secret entrance instead of the main one.

   

We've now reached the northern coast. We move east and find another cave, but a locked door greets us immediately on the other side, and it can't be picked. A little further along from there, the mountains end at an inlet. The map makes it look like there's room to squeeze between the mountain range and the water, but there isn't, so there must be some other way to reach the northeastern part of the island. 

   

The answer turns out to be an "ice raft," near where I met Kapyundi. Once the party is on it, I double-click and find that I can maneuver it in any direction, although there's no visible means of propulsion. At first, I wonder if I can take it all the way back to Monitor, but it turns out that the sea is a maze of ice floes that limit your movement. I follow a leftmost path. A new enemy rears its head from the frozen waters: a frost serpent. It has missile attacks that devastate my party, killing Boydon. I have to reload. 

     

These guys were a lot harder than the Ice Dragons.

      

After a long while, I come to an island so far to the north that it's hidden by the title of the map. It has a network of caves blocked by ice walls. There seem to be groups of megaliths on the other sides of the walls. I try attacking them and casting "Explosion," but nothing works. I assume this is the Gwani death temple and I'll need their horn to bring down the ice barriers. I return to the ice raft.

       

I shall be back with the Horn of Winter.

           

Another long journey through the maze puts us on another island, this one swarming with hostile snow leopards. We come to a field of corpses and scattered limbs. Suddenly, the Ice Dragon appears! I have all kinds of plans to try potions and spells on him, but two seconds after we enter combat, he's dead. Someone must have gotten a critical hit. I use the bucket on his body and get a bucketful of blood.

          

That seemed too easy.

      

A cave beyond the dragon beckons. We enter and are immediately confronted by a second Ice Dragon, which also dies quickly. Then two Ice Dragon babies attack us, and we also kill them. I feel a bit bad because the Gwani gave me a long spiel about how they live in balance with nature and only kill Ice Dragons when they have no other choice. I've apparently just killed an entire family. The rewards are a lot of gold--coins, nuggets, bars--a magic axe, and a magic sword. We find even more treasure on another part of the island, by the body of a slain adventurer. Only on leaving the island do I remember that I was supposed to go through a secret side door. I didn't notice one.

     

The dragons tidily keep their valuables in chests but leave body parts all over their lair.

      

There's another cave on the eastern side of the island. Polar bears and--fine, I'll go to the manual and look it up--"ice corpsers" attack as we explore the hallways, where teleporters send us this way and that. We fight some "magical ice creatures" and a few ice trolls and find some more treasure, spell scrolls, and magic weapons. Honestly, there's not much else the game can do for me in the way of weapons. I'm sure some of these magic melee weapons are better than magic axes, but magic axes still seem like the best choice for most battles. More useful are a pair of magic gauntlets and a magic helm for when we don't need these fur caps anymore.

      

Did someone at Origin get paid for this?

       

More maze, then another island. There's a wrecked ship on it, bodies strewn everywhere. A skull has a sparkling crown on it, which I cannot take. Nearby barrels have reagents, gold, and potions. I use a crate to step up to the ship's deck, where I can see a book. This causes the corpses to come alive and attack as skeletons. They're easy to destroy. The logbook indicates that the sailors were looking for the "miser's treasure" but their nerves were frayed by constant storms and other obstacles, and they eventually turned on each other. The hold has more gems and gold.

     

Geez. Pack it in, pack it out, guys.

           

One final island. It has more penguins than the others. And penguin nests. Sitting in the middle of one of them is Magebane. As I noted when I saw the image of it, the sword is on a nest that also has a blue egg. There's a nest nearby with neither. I take the blue egg from Dupre's pack and put it on the vacant nest, then grab the sword. The penguins start attacking us. Of course, I'm not going to kill penguins, so I go running back to my raft, off the island, and back to the mainland.

   

Back at the Gwani caves, we take the Ice Dragon blood to the sick child and use the bucket on her. Nothing happens. We go around talking to the Gwani, and they don't acknowledge that anything has changed. I have to reload the game from the penguin island and try again. Apparently, we were supposed to just give the bucket to Yenani. We do that, and later when we visit Neyobi, she's all better. 

     

I think it's the name of a Jedi.

    

Unfortunately, the Gwani give me nothing for my trouble, so I'm not sure why we did all that. Yenani says that she hopes "some day" she can help us. Thus, I'm not entirely sure how to move forward. I don't think I missed any paths that I could take with the ice raft. I can't use the obvious password to get into the Ophidian ruins because I've "forgotten something." I didn't find any new serpent teeth. Maybe I need to poke around looking for secret caverns or something.

      

On the matter of equipment, we're still missing:

      

• The glass sword, which is apparently in the hands of Hazard the Trapper.

• Rudyom's Wand, which was replaced by a strange apparatus that might have belonged to the exiled necromancer Vasculio. I might have missed something back in Moonshade on this.

• The blackrock serpent, which Batlin probably has.

• Five torches replaced by a pumpkin. Since Shamino's list didn't even mention this substitution and torches are a dime-a-dozen, I assume we'll never be sure about this one.

     

I enjoyed this session. There were a lot of serendipitous encounters, and the Gwani didn't have the same exhausting level of dialogue as other NPCs in the game. I don't like feeling stuck, though.

   

Time so far: 56 hours