Wrath of the Gods Page #20

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Chimaera’s lair, and rammed home the secret weapon. And

with a great, gasping groan of rage, the Chimaera gave up

the ghost.

You enter a strange landscape. A man stands looking at the

horizon. When you talk to him, he screams:

MAN:

Run for it! The Chimaera!

He runs past you and out of frame. The monster appears

and lets out a mighty roar. You draw your sword and click

it on the beast. The Chimaera jumps down to your level. At

first you seem to be holding your own. But then the monster

wears you down, pounces, and blasts you with flame. Fade

out; fade up on Sisyphus (next page).

Once you’ve got Pegasus (page 135), you’re mounted up

already when you fly into this scene, where the monster

waits. If you draw your sword and attack, you die again.

If you fly in on Pegasus and attack the Chimaera with an

unsharpened lance—the staff that you take from one of the

heroes in Jousting (page 77)—you also die again. You need

to take out your sword in the pasture just before you board

Pegasus and click it on the staff to sharpen it into a proper

lance. If you’ve done this, you jab the monster a few times

before you die once more. You still need to put the lump of

lead from the Clubbing Contest (page 100) onto the tip of the

lance before you board Pegasus. Now you maneuver it into

the monster’s mouth and kill the beast.

Gesturing triumphantly (and receiving 50 points), you fly off

into the sunset on Pegasus.

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Sisyphus

HADES CATACOMB WITH INCLINE. Sisyphus (SIS-i-fus)

was founder and king of Corinth (CORE-inth), or Ephyra

(EF-i-ruh) as it was called in those days. He was notorious

as the most cunning knave on earth. His greatest triumph

came at the end of his life, when the god Hades (HAY-deez)

came to claim him personally for the kingdom of the dead.

Hades had brought along a pair of handcuffs, a comparative

novelty, and Sisyphus expressed such an interest that Hades

was persuaded to demonstrate their use—on himself.

And so it came about that the high lord of the Underworld

was kept locked up in a closet at Sisyphus’s house for

many a day, a circumstance which put the great chain of

being seriously out of whack. Nobody could die. A soldier

might be chopped to bits in battle and still show up at camp

for dinner. Finally Hades was released and Sisyphus was

ordered summarily to report to the Underworld for his

eternal assignment. But the wily one had another trick up his

sleeve.

He simply told his wife not to bury him and then

complained to Persephone (per-SEF-uh-nee), Queen of the

Dead, that he had not been accorded the proper funeral

honors. What’s more, as an unburied corpse he had no

business on the far side of the river Styx at all—his wife

hadn’t placed a coin under his tongue to secure passage

with Charon (CARE-on) the ferryman. Surely her highness

could see that Sisyphus must be given leave to journey back

topside and put things right.

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Kindly Persephone assented, and Sisyphus made his way

back to the sunshine, where he promptly forgot all about

funerals and such drab affairs and lived on in dissipation

for another good stretch of time. But even this paramount

trickster could only postpone the inevitable. Eventually he

was hauled down to Hades, where his indiscretions caught

up with him. For a crime against the gods—the specifics of

which are variously reported—he was condemned to an

eternity at hard labor. And frustrating labor at that. For his

assignment was to roll a great boulder to the top of a hill.

Only every time Sisyphus, by the greatest of exertion and

toil, attained the summit, the darn thing rolled back down

again.

You find yourself at the foot of a gloomy incline, where a

sweating man leans against a boulder.

SISYPHUS:

Say, do me a favor, will you? Roll this

boulder to the top of the hill…

Clicking on the boulder walks you over to it and sets you

up to push. You nudge the boulder up the incline one click

at a time. You get it to a small ledge at the top and step

aside. Suddenly the stone goes rumbling back down again.

Sisyphus barks out a laugh, then collects himself.

SISYPHUS:

Ehem… Never let it be said that Sisyphus does

not return a favor. You’ll never beat the Chimaera

without the winged horse Pegasus.

You’re free to click your way to an exploration of the

Underworld. If you go a few scenes away and come back to

Sisyphus while you’re still in the neighborhood, you return

to find him just having reached the top of the hill with the

boulder; he’s holding it in place by sheer force of will. You

take him by surprise and it rolls back down again. Sisyphus

raises his eyes towards the heavens in exasperation. He

sighs.

SISYPHUS:

Thanks a lot. I suppose you want another hint.

When fighting on horseback you’ll want a proper

cavalry weapon.

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If you die again because you didn’t sharpen the point of the

lance, Sisyphus is exasperated:

SISYPHUS:

For the love of Zeus, this is bad enough

without you barging in here all the time.

(sighs)

You’ve got a lance more or less, but before you go

into combat you must consider that it’s pointless.

If you’ve died because you still lack the lead:

SISYPHUS:

The lance alone won’t do it. You want to give that

Chimaera a bad case of indigestion.

If you die yet again:

SISYPHUS:

Are you sure you want to keep tangling with the

Chimaera?

The second time you drop by while in the neighborhood, the

boulder rolls and so do Sisyphus’s eyes.

SISYPHUS:

I’d invite you to tea but I don’t get a break.

Rock Slab 2

HADES CATACOMB. This is another scene where you push

100

a rock aside to make a passage into Hades Crossroads (page

73).

Stadium

STADIUM ENTRANCE. The arch in this scene is from

the actual stadium at Olympia, Greece. Ancient Greece, of

course, was the home and birthplace of the Olympic Games.

Robert Graves suggests that these contests originally arose

out of footraces between young women for the honor of

becoming chief priestesses.

Clubbing Contest

ARENA. When Theseus (THEE-see-us) set out on the road to

adventure, he encountered an impressive series of challenges

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right away. Perhaps the most interesting of these came in

the form of an evildoer called Procrustes (proh-KRUS-teez),

whose name means “he who stretches.” This Procrustes kept

a house by the side of the road where he offered hospitality

to passing strangers. They were invited in for a pleasant

meal and a night’s rest in his very special bed. If the guest

asked what was so special about it, Procrustes replied, “Why,

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