Oddworld Forums - The Quest for the Orb

At last! Sorry about the very long wait, though I think that this chapter's worth it, it's a good one. I like the end of it a lot. It had the intended effect on me anyway! It's the sort of thing that would excite my English teacher.

Chapter 6, Paths

Barry’s head swam. The pain in his shoulder was now coupled with a throbbing pain in his skull. Someone grabbed him by the feathers and yanked him up onto his knees, just in time for a fist to catch him hard the jaw.

"Enjoying yourself Mud?" He was pulled to his feet and the sligs made a circle around him again. Their captain continued, "No, don’t bother guys, he wants to run, he can run!"

The slig pulled a rope out of his pack and grabbed Barry’s wrists, his left arm screaming in protest. Then the slig tied his wrists together, pulled the knot unnecessarily tight and leered at Barry.

"Bandage his arm, someone, and we’ll get going. Old Oily won’t give us anything if he’s the wrong one and we bring ‘im in dead."

One of the sligs tied a course bandage round his left shoulder, and then the captain yanked the rope and set off at a steady run. The other sligs followed.

At first it was easy for Barry to keep up, but the sligs legs were mechanical and didn’t tire out. After five hours Barry was struggling to keep going. Every time he lagged, the slig yanked hard on the rope round his wrists, which in turn pulled on his wounded left shoulder, which ached anyway from supporting the weight of his arm. Normally he could have kept this up but having only slept a few hours in the last three days and the pain in his wounds that seemed to be sucking up so much of his energy wore him out.

It was around 3 O’clock when they began. At around 10 the sligs slowed down to a walk, too late to give Barry any comfort. The idea of torturing their prisoner seemed to give the sligs energy. Barry remembered enough of sligs to know that even they would be feeling tired now and at any other time would probably have simply slumped down and refused to go on until morning, whatever they were told by their bosses. But simply seeing him gasping with pain, blood flecking his arm and chest seemed to urge them on.

It was midnight, 13 O’clock (Oddworld time) by the time they decided to stop. Their captain had them tie his ankles together and then tie them to his bound wrists behind his back, leaving his immobile, lying on his left side, weight on his left shoulder, squeezing pain from the wound. He knew he wouldn’t get much sleep tonight.

The sligs lit a fire and slumped in a semicircle around it, between him and the flames, blocking most of the heat and light from him. They pulled out cigarettes, food and what Barry guessed was beer and talked amongst themselves for a while. Barry ignored most of what they said, until he heard a few words that caught his attention.

"Most of the sligs from the factory are out here. Whatever Gopemi lost must be worth a lot." The captain, quiet, sounding almost conspiratorial.

"Worth a lot to us," The second voice was loud and drunk, a big contrast to the quiet voice of the captain. "They won’t even tell us what we’re looking for, what does that say about it?"

"It doesn’t really matter, what could we do with it?" Another, muffled speaker, sounded tired.

"What? Take it! Sell it to the highest bidder: get a nice little sum to keep us going till retirement!"

"Like you could ever save any money!" Another slig, mocking the loud voice. "Anyway, Old Orily will dig into the Mud and find what he’s looking for."

"Old Oily? He couldn’t find a scrab if it bit his arm off. He’ll get vykkers to look…" The captain was scoffing their boss in a strong contrast to his previous voice, but Barry was hardly listening. Orily, their boss was Orily. Director Orily of Orily’s Gear-works, the factory where… where Jason had worked. The one he had been aiming for! He was in with the right sligs!

With that one comforting thought, the first to hit him in what felt like seasons, he drifted into sleep. But he slept lightly, waking many times in the night from haunting dreams of the shadows of his past.

The sun was high in the sky when Barry was jerked awake by the sligs. His shoulder now ached with pain; dark bruises flowered around the wound. His headache, he noted eventually, had packed up and given in, but it was little comfort at the thought of what was ahead. His limbs ached from being held in position all night, and when the ropes were untied and he was ordered to his feet he found his legs stiff and reluctant to move.
In the end it was a long time before the sligs moved on. It appeared one of them, Askar, the loud voiced slig he’d heard the night before, had indeed had too much to drink and was wrecked, reluctant to open his eyes, let alone move on.

Barry was surprised to find himself almost impatient with the hold up. Now he knew he was going the right way he was more than willing to get going and put the forest behind him. He wasn’t the only one; all the other sligs were impatient, wanting to move and get back to the Gear Works to have a break. Their captain was almost jumping with anger, shouting at the hung-over slig (with little positive effect) and kicking him every few minutes (also with little positive effect).

In the end he ordered the sligs to move on and leave Askar behind, lying on the ground, refusing to move. They tied up Barry’s wrists again and dragged him along, less aggressively than the day before (for which he was very pleased).

Within 10 minutes Askar had staggered up behind them, but kept to himself for the march, wincing at every sound above a whisper, eyes almost closed anyway and looking very touchy. When the captain decided to start a stirring round of ’10 Fat Glukkons Standing on a Ball’ he groaned loudly and shoved the mute slig who had been leading Barry away and grabbed the rope, yanking on it with every other syllable, hanging back to kick him and generally taking his rage out on the unfortunate mudokon.

They stopped at midday, tying Barry to a tree and having a meal before continuing. By evening the trees were thinning and Barry could see pillars of smoke ahead, illuminated by the light from the setting sun. He guessed that they were maybe a day’s walk away.

That night they tied him to a tree a few metres from the camp. They seemed to have forgotten to make him miserable in the excitement of being in sight of the towers of thick smoke that told of the nearby factories and the sligs’ home.

They tied his ankles together and left his wrists tied, and they set one of the sligs sitting nearby, who quickly fell asleep. Sitting awake, Barry risked removing the Orb from his loincloth and feeling its warmth between his hands. It seemed so strange that all this trouble to spread out from that one ball. He wondered how he’d get it past the security in the factory, but told himself to tackle that problem when the time came, as he’d always done. He looked up into the sky, trying to spot the moon with its mudokon-paw shaped crater among the stars, but it seemed hidden. He couldn’t spot it. He remembered, eventually, that it was the wrong time of the season, and neither of Oddworld’s moons would show in the sky for several days still.

He tucked the Orb away and once again fell into uneasy sleep.

Our survey says...

Three years after this story died out, I'm back to let you guys know what happened next. Writing fiction is no easy feat, and it's always painful to come to the end of a good story or series to find that it was never finished, and you will be forever left wondering what would have happened next. I remember trying to piece together threads of Sl'Askia's stories using hints given in annotations to her art and in Teal's partner-stories.

So, encouraged by the birth of the Fanfiction Library, I have decided to write a summary of the unwritten parts of this story to let any past or future readers know where the quest of the Orb would have ended. I hope readers new and old can enjoy this conclusion and I'm just sorry I never finished it!
Of the next chapter I wrote only the first paragraph, but for the sake of posterity, here it is!

Chapter 7, Goal

It was only a few hours the next day before they came out from under the trees to a wide plain of thin grass. Looking up, Barry could see 3 tall chimneys standing over the horizon, blowing thick clouds of smoke into the air.

* * *
* * *

And that is pretty much the end of this story as it was written. The main reason it died was partly a long lasting writer’s block and also a dip in my interest in Oddworld. By the time I go back into the amazing universe that this story called home, I’d really moved on as a writer and as a person, and really by then this story was never going to get finished, despite what I told myself at the time and for a while afterwards.
But as a reader I hate to find a story unfinished, and so I now dedicate myself to telling you what happened to the Orb and its bearers; how would this story have ended?
Well…

Barry is led to the factory and as he enters he fakes one more attempt at getting away, during which he hides the Orb behind a machine near the factory entrance. He is stopped, searched by vykkers and then made a slave.

In the factory, he strikes up a relationship built upon mutual dislike with another mudokon called Frank. He generally causes small trouble, to get the management’s attention, walking the fine line between getting thrown into the caves and getting shot, and when he has the opportunity he goes to the place where he hid the Orb and retrieves it. Later, as his troublemaking grows more serious and he senses the end is near, he drops the Orb down a water overflow pipe that leads into the caves below the factory.

Eventually he pulls off a big stunt that gets him in so much trouble that he’s thrown into the caves. Unfortunately, Frank was caught up in the mess too, and is thrown down beside him. Barry tells Frank about his quest and after a few arguments, the two set off together to find the Orb and escape.

Exploring the cave by touch and hearing alone, they find the water overflow pipe and follow the stream of water that runs from it, in search of the Orb.

They loose sense of time as they walk, but many days pass and their hunger becomes unbearable. The stream gets wider as more rivulets of cave water join it and they are afraid that they will never find the Orb.

Eventually they are captured by a tribe of mudokons who moved into the caves generations ago to escape the marauding industrialists and now inhabit the caves, living in the cold and dark. The tribe feeds them fish and bats’ meat but hates outsiders passionately and plans to sacrifice them to the Darkness. The pair discovers that these mudokons fished the Orb from the stream and are keeping it as a holy relic.

With much difficulty, the two mudokons manage to escape, steal the Orb and run for it. Pursued by enemies who know the caves and the darkness much better than they do, their only hope is to reach the daylight where the cave-mudokons would never dare to set foot.

Travelling night and day and with their enemies closing in, they finally reach the surface, but as they run out from a rocky hillside into a green forest, Frank is struck in the back by a poisoned dart; a last payback from the furious cave-mudokons. Dying almost instantly (anyone who has played Abe’s Oddysee will know how terrible a bat’s venom is) his body falls into the now deep and powerful stream. The Orb, which he was carrying, is lost and Barry is unable to find it. He follows the stream until it becomes a river, until it joins a great inland sea, until the day he dies. He never finds or hears rumour of the Orb again.

Part 5 begins 10 years later in a much darker world.

Abe is dead, executed in the city of Nolybab before Queen Margaret. The mudokon’s few attempts at mustering an army are crushed and all seems lost for native Oddworld.

A mudokon warrior named Godfrey is hunting one day when he is injured and stumbles into a cold river to slow his blood flow and hopefully save himself from the wound. In the river, he finds a metallic green ball, and not knowing what he has found, takes it back to his tiny village. He and a few friends, with nothing else to live for but life itself, decide to take it to a hermit of a shaman who lives some distance away. They take a dangerous journey through industrial territory in which many of them are killed or captured. Godfrey and three of his friends reach the blind, old shaman’s hut, where he identifies the Orb and recognises that he must take it to the temple of Paramonia and activate it.

In part 6, the shaman, ancient, blind and lacking any hope for a happy future, heads to Paramonia with Godfrey and his friends as guards in the hopes of restoring peace to Oddworld.

The once great forest of Paramonia is now overrun with industrials, logging and hunting and raping the earth. They journey through the bleak territory, collecting a minute amount of spooce still growing where it can. The shaman refuses to acknowledge it but the mudokons, still possessing some will to fight, collect it and prepare it and give it to the shaman. Avoiding sligs at all costs, with many near misses and the shaman growing daily weaker, they come to what remains of the temple itself. It is decomposing, dying, being slowly destroyed by the usurping industrial world.

One of Godfrey’s friends is captured by sligs, and they are forced to leave him to torture and eventually death at the hands of his captors. Climbing higher, Godfrey himself and the other two mudokons die to sligs or to the temple’s own traps (one naturally had to go to the enormous spikey pendulum-boulders that were the bane of every AO player). The blind shaman, using the last of his strength, climbs towards the top of the temple. Alone, he finds himself face to face with a gang of sligs who he narrowly defeats using the tiny amount of spooce the warriors collected for him. In the process he looses his shaman’s mask. Alone, he enters the top room of the temple, overlooking the decrepit Paramonian forests. He places the Orb on a pedestal in the centre of the room and light like a new-bon sun bursts forth from it. Suddenly he can see again.

The shaman stands at one of the windows of the temple, looking down on the wasteland below. Hundreds of masks and metal pants lie where they were abandoned, and sligs gather near the base of the temple, sharing with each other the brotherhood and companionship that they had long forgotten and always craved. A mudokon stands beside the old shaman; the warrior who was captured in the lowest levels of the temple. He asks, “What will happen now?”

The shaman smiles, looking down on the burnt ground that was once the great Paramonian forest; “The world will heal itself. It will take time, but the earth is laid bare for planting and the soil thirsts for new life. This place will be a swamp for those below. As for the rest, we will nurture it as we find it. The creatures of Mudos will come back out of the corners of the world and will be restored to the land that was once theirs. The smoke will clear as the furnaces die and the sun will shine out on a ready world.”

“You have given Oddworld a future, Old Man.”

The shaman nods and casts the broken pieces of his mask out of the window. “Then let us be the first in centuries to breathe of free air.”

* * *

So ends my first attempt at making an epic saga. It’s sad to let it go and to an extent I do regret not finishing it, but at least now you can all see it and enjoy a conclusion that I hope was satisfying. This story will always be pretty close to my heart, as it really seems to cover the point where my writing went from somewhat childish and scattered to actually becoming solid and something near good. Reading the first section or so always makes me shudder at my cheesiness, but I won’t forget the feelings of pride I had as I churned out some of the later chapters.
Thanks to everyone who gave feedback and encouragement during the original run of this story; I really couldn’t have accomplished anything without the support I get from my readers.
So thanks for reading, enjoying and commenting.

Splat.

(Oh, and sorry Searge; I don't remember what game it was :p)