This time they sent a better assassin (part 2)

Continuing my first competent playthrough of Space Assassin… I made my way more or less randomly down hallways and past guard robots, and a cool anti-gravity transit thing, to an indoor pool. The indoor pool sucked me into a current (strange in itself!) and deposited me out of a river, onto what seems to be a grassy plain, forest in the distance, and so on. Except that the river is gone. I figure this must be a holodeck situation, either that or the pool filter drains out 36,000 miles down to the planetary surface?

Fortunately, our previous scouts (my prior playthroughs with skill 7) mapped this place out a bit, and before long I’ve made my way to a village of friendly people. I show them the alien button thing I grabbed earlier, and they have one just like it, which they let me have for free. And voila, the two snap together to form a “Pan Dimensional Homing Device.” I don’t know what that is, but it sure sounds like a required quest item!

The natives send me on my way in a canoe. The river gives way to rapids and ends in a lake in a canyon. For whatever reason, I just decide to dive down to see what’s below. Two things down there: a) a submarine, and b) Cthulhu. Fortunately it’s just an imitation knockoff (“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Cthulhu”) and I kick its ass with little trouble. I then board the submarine and press the only button, and it takes me on a long journey…

…back to the pool room where I came in!

Okay, so that was weird. I thought holodeck, but it’s actually connected to a pool? I’m conflicted and confused here, and it’s about to get even weirder. The next room past the pool isn’t a room at all, but a path straight out into the sky. And I don’t mean a gantry on the outside of the ship — although we are supposed to be in a spaceship on orbit, this hovering path is only a few miles above the ground, like some crazy bridge stretching for miles in mid-air. So I do what anybody would do when looking for someone on a spaceship, I hit the sidewalk.

I wander for a bit, and find a small cube-shaped shed. It’s evidently a cryodrome, with two cryochambers currently occupied. I’m given the option to revive the folks inside, so of course I do. The first is a big, scary spider. But since it doesn’t attack, and I happen to like spiders a lot, we decide to chat. It’s a brief but pleasant conversation, and the spider gifts me a can of Mollusk Be Gone just in case (I guess) I ever run into another Cthulhu? The second chamber, well, I know these books well enough not bother – there’s always one with help and/or treasure, and one that just eats luck or something.

I hit the sidewalk again, and arrive eventually at another cube-shaped shed, this one housing a biological lab and museum of medical experiments / abominations. It’s pretty grody. There’s a human on the table, with tentacles spliced onto his body. I’m given the option to go take a look, but I’ve played Beneath Nightmare Castle so I know where this is going – noooope!

The path goes on for some time, before ending at a tower and putting me back inside the spaceship proper. It feels good to be back somewhere sane, with corridors and walls and all. Unfortunately, it’s at a guard post. They don’t ask for my ID, so I fidget a bit waiting for them to ask, so I can do that line again. Eventually, I have to prompt them with “You want to see my ID?” before I can yell “Here’s my ID!” as I pull out my rifle. But it’s not as funny the second time. In action movies there’s always some witty one-liner, but I guess it’s harder than it looks.

After a humorous one-liner quip to gloss over the fact that I’ve killed two people, I move on. The guards were apparently guarding a pool full of octopus-human hybrids, kind of like that laughably bad no-budget Mexican movie from 1971, Octa-Man. (see it with RiffTrax; super funny). So that weird gift of Mollusk Be Gone actually came in handy!

The next room has a large, armored alien creature with a disintegrator gun, which wants me to answer a puzzle… if I am intelligent enough. Jerk.

So okay, time out.
About the time I got out of the sub back in the pool, this whole spaceship stopped making any sense at all.
Paths and T junctions in the air, dead ends with hints and loot, a random pool of octa-men, and now a sphinx wannabe?
This is just goofy.

Anyway, I know from many FF books that when the guard stops you for a puzzle, and they offer you “do you want to attack?” that it’s a trap. It always is “yeah, no, he killz u; lol” because what good is a puzzle Trialmaster room, if you can just stab them and move on? So I roll my eyes and ask “What is your riddle, sir?”

I’ll tell you tomorrow.