Ultima Underworld II: Won!

 

        

By the end of the last entry, I had cut all the Guardian's lines of power to the various gem destinations, and I had used all the blackrock gems on the teleporter in Britannia's basement. I have to say that even this late in the game, I'm still a little unclear about these items; specifically:

 

• Why did the Guardian's plot to encase the castle in blackrock have to involve a teleporter in the sewers?

• If the teleporter was simply to enable the later invasion, why delay the invasion?
  

• Why do all the various universes have a single blackrock gem?

• Why does using the blackrock gems on the teleporter weaken it and cause new teleportation facets to open?

I'll review dialogue and see if I better understand any of these things for the final entry.

       

Is blackrock just obsidian?

    

In any event, I start this session in the wreckage of Killorn Keep. I have a save from before I destroyed it, but I decide to play from here. Killorn Keep was a threat. I had active intelligence that the Guardian was planning to mount an invasion from here. The keep was full of enemies and only one ally--who refused to accept my warning and leave. This is war. If you have a chance to destroy an enemy's fortress, you take it. You don't worry about the servants and horses.

   

I thus return to Britannia. Before going anywhere else, I toss one of my moonstones in Britannia's basement, near the teleporter, so I just have to cast "Gate Travel" when I want to return.

      

I feel like I didn't fully explore the possibilities of "Gate Travel."

     

I head back to the Pits of Carnage and make my way to Level 2. I bypass most of the level with the "Fly" spell. I can't remember the right button sequence to get through Zoranthus's Puzzle, so I bypass it by opening the grates with the "Open" spell. That's what it means to be a mage in this game--not to defeat enemies through magic, but to use magic to bypass a bunch of puzzles and navigational obstacles. That isn't a complaint. There aren't many games in which magic serves more as a utility than a weapon. I rather like the novelty of it. 

  

Zoranthus happily takes the scepter and hands over the air daemon, bound in a jar. I run through the ritual steps one more time with him, then "Gate Travel" back to Britannia.

     

I'm not sure a trapped demon is worth a single wand, but I'm not going to complain.

     

Step 1: I have to bathe in filanium-rich mud--the kind found in the ice caverns--mixed with basilisk oil. I have two bottles of basilisk oil. Curious that I've never encountered a basilisk in an Ultima game.

   

I return to the ice caverns, where the slick floor is also obviated by "Fly." I find the mud. I'm not sure how to mix the oil with it, so I drink one bottle and toss the other into the mud; the latter turns out to be the correct answer. I enter the mud myself and get a message about the mud caking me.

   

Apparently careful not to let too much drip off, I go to the next step: "fire" the mud in lava. The closest lava I can think of is in the Arena of Fire in the Pits of Carnage, so I head back there and drop into the lava. "The oily mud bakes on your skin." 

         

Does that mean I'm walking around looking like a stone golem?

    

Third step: seal the deal with a Potion of Iron Flesh. I don't have a potion, but I'm hoping that the spell will accomplish the same thing. It does. This would have been a very different sort of entry otherwise.

   

Now I've got to break the air daemon's current vessel and transfer it to me. Zoranthus warned me only to do this in the Sigil of Binding on the Astral Plane. (Because of course I had to check: Breaking the bottle elsewhere causes the air daemon to kill you. You resurrect in Britannia but are probably "walking dead" at that point.) I head there, drop the bottle in the pentagram, and smash it with my sword. "The air daemon is absorbed into your body."

      

The floating skull approves.

      

When I gate back to Britannia, I'm surprised to find four soldiers wearing Killorn Keep uniforms in the basement. When they see me, one says that "MG" told them to scout, "but I reckon I'm gonna be the first in my squadron to rack up a kill." Both of them are soon dead; my Sword of Stone Strike is extremely overpowered. "MG" is certainly Mors Gotha, the Guardian's champion. Apparently, my act of destruction didn't end the threat posed by Killorn Keep. 

      

With this sword, I could take on an army.

    

Before moving on, I head upstairs and make sure everyone is okay. I try blowing the Horn of Praecor Loth, but the game just says that "somehow the horn's power does not seem to be at its fullest." How did Praecor Loth manage to use it to bring castles crumbling down when I can't use it even with an air daemon in my lungs? 

     

I love how they programmed the ability to play individual notes for no reason.

       

I return to the ruined fortress, and sure enough, a bunch of guards are amassing in the guardroom. I can't reach them because  the regular corridors are collapsed. The guardroom is open to the main chamber now, but there are beds and other pieces of furniture blocking me from walking through. I have to go back to Britannia, get the second moonstone, return, throw it past the furniture into the guardroom, and cast "Gate" on the other one. It later occurs to me that "Portal" would have done it. Why do I keep forgetting about "Portal"?

   

The guards are suspicious of me, but not after I slip on one of the Guardian's signet rings. They at least acknowledge what I've done to the keep ("somethin' horrible happened here--corpses everywhere"). They've been told that they're headed to a place where "the defenders are 100% sealed up" and they'll just be "goin' in and cleanin' up."  

      

I can see these guys, but I'm stuck on some furniture.

     

Mors Gotha is in an office nearby. She asks how I like my "handiwork," gesturing to the keep around us. I say I did what I had to do. "Thou wert e'er as bloodthirsty as I, if not more so," Mors crows. It's a tired argument. Of course I am. I've been through 10 prior Ultima games. My skin is permanently tinted by blood. I can't even begin to count all the people I've killed. I've killed on land, sea, and space, and in past, present, and future. I killed dozens of castle guards just because one of them had a key. I killed most of the gargoyle race. I battled my way through hundreds of giant ants to kill their queen. I killed a megalomaniacal Martian with an M-60. I killed three shadowlords and countless liches, demons, and dragons. I've killed the very creator of my universe. Does Mors Gotha imagine that I am ignorant as to what I am?

   

The subsequent battle is rendered trivial by the Sword of Stone Strike. Guards rush in behind me, but I just have to petrify Mors Gotha, then turn around and petrify the guards. From there, as long as I strike everyone every 10 seconds or so, they remain petrified.

     

This is too easy.

      

Mors completely disappears when I kill her, leaving a spellbook behind. It contains magic formulas and references to the Guardian, so I grab it for Nystul. 

   

Back in Britannia, Nystul says he can use the spell in the book to unravel the Guardian's magic. He just needs to know the time and place of the original casting. It was Nell, Lord British's chambermaid and sometimes lover, who told me that she heard chanting in the throne room at four bells. That's exactly what she said. Nystul accepts "throne room" but rejects "four bells." He just wants "four." I think this is the only place in the game where you type your own keywords. It makes me miss the earlier Ultimas as well as their more complex parsers.

      

The question of "who was it?" remains a mystery. Everyone probably blames Patterson.

    

As I deliver my answer, Julia runs in with the message that soldiers are pouring through the gem and attacking the castle. Before she can finish her account, Mors Gotha steps through the doorway behind her. Julia and Nystul rush off to the throne room while Mors Gotha confronts me again. 

   

I don't know how Mors Gotha survived our first encounter, but keen to defeat her again in a more challenging way, I discard my Sword of Stone Strike and equip the Black Sword of Major Accuracy that I found in Loth's tomb. I chug every potion that I think might be helpful and blast her with a few wand remnants at the outset of combat.

         

That VAS IN MANI spell I have lined up isn't going to work.

      

The combat is long but not hard. I try to use some magic but remember too late that no spells above Level 3 can be cast in Britannia. I can't use "Poison" on my sword, let alone more epic magic like "Paralyze" and "Freeze Time." I mostly just keep myself healed with "Minor Heal" as we swing away. She doesn't last long. As she dies, she calls for the Guardian's help. Nothing happens. "God DAMN it," she says, and dies.

   

I kill a couple of guards in the hallway as I make my way to the throne room. "Avatar," Lord British offers as I arrive, "The time to act is now!" The last act I make on my own is speaking to Nystul; then the game takes over. Nystul reads from the book as I raise the horn. The daemon's strength surges through me.

      

It would be funny if the castle crumbled here but the dome stayed in place.

     

A cinematic shows the blackrock dome crack and crumble. In the final scenes, The Avatar stands next to Lord British on a balcony. Lord British says:

     

Again thou hast bested the Guardian. Thou hast shattered the curse of the obsidian jewel by the power of thy strong hands and quick mind, and it hath passed from us like a feverish dream. We are at peace again, Avatar, and we must return to the task of rebuilding our nation. Come! 'Tis time we breathed once more the sweet air of Britannia.

      

If I'm mad at anything, it's that I never found out if the Guardian's invasion of Britannia that I kept seeing in my dreams was real or a hallucination. Freeing the castle isn't going to matter much if there are enemy troops all over the continent. 

       

I get why the dome is cracking, but where is all the light coming from?

        

I reload and try some obvious ways to screw things up. If you rush to the throne room without killing Mors Gotha, Nystul just says that the ritual can't start while the invasion is still happening. If you drop the horn of Praecor Loth, Nystul just tells you to go and find it. Denizens of the castle remain invincible and are never targeted by the invaders. If you attack them, you just end up in the jail cell as usual.

   

I checked out the official cluebook for anything that I missed. It appears that the official walkthrough suggestion is to do the Ethereal Void before the Tomb of Praecor Loth. The ritual with the air daemon triggers the Killorn scouts and the appearance of Mors Gotha in Killorn, but nothing is much different if you don't destroy the keep. Doing things in the cluebook's order puts some space between the two battles with Gotha. The book says that she "disappears into a moongate" when you first defeat her; I guess the petrification animation kept the moongate animation from appearing. But you can also just steal her spellbook and run.

   

Note how the silhouette of the Avatar could plausibly fit either sex.

       

I missed several spells not found in the spellbook. I was supposed to somehow get "Dispel Hunger" from Zaria in the Pits of Carnage. Merzan, the merchant in Killorn who attacked me, sold "Rune of Stasis." "Summon Demon" was apparently found on the bloodstained pentagram in the Pits of Carnage, but all it does is summon a hostile demon. I suppose it could be useful for grinding.

"Smite Foe" (VAS JUX MANI) is an advanced version of "Bleeding" that kills almost any creature. You have to deduce it by adding VAS to JUX MANI. That's fine, but it feels like some other spells ought to work that way, too, and they don't. VAS ORT JUX doesn't give you an extra powerful "Magic Arrow," for instance.

The mother of all inferable spells--which surprisingly I didn't even think about--is VAS KAL CORP, or "Armageddon." That just means "summon great death," which I would assume was just "Mass Kill" or something. In Ultima VII, the spell is IN CORP HUR TYM ("Cause death [via] the winds of time"), which makes more sense, but you can't use four runes in Underworld. 

       

A storeroom before "Armageddon" . . .

     

Anyway, the cluebook says that casting the spell "kills all creatures, destroys all objects, doors, stairways, and bridges . . . on all realms" (emphasis mine). It also makes the blackrock stop teleporting you and removes all the runes in your rune bag. You have to take its word for the effects "on all realms," because there's no way to leave whatever realm and level you're currently in to go and check. And you can't cast it in Britannia to see Lord British's reaction because you can't cast high-level spells in Britannia.

          

. . . and after.

      

I love how "Armageddon" went from a spell given to you in ignorance by a wisp (Ultima VI) to something available on the open market for a high price (Ultima VII) to a spell that any mage could infer and cast with three common runes. Britannia's fate is sealed if it doesn't try to exert some control over VAS runes.

     

Let me know if you think there's anything else I should try before moving on to the rating. We'll have that in a few days.

    

Final time: 54 hours