LAST TALES OF MONKEY ISLAND - EPISODE 1

THE LAST INHABITANT OF SCABB ISLAND

Deep in the Caribbean…

Scabb Island

So I break into the stinkin’ deck of his demon ship and tell him: “Now you’re in for it, you bilious bag of barnacle bait! So LeChuck cries: “Guybrush, have mercy! I can’t take it anymore!

Yeah, I’m Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate. I’m sitting here, deep into the night, right in front of a nice crackling fire on the beach of Scabb Island, telling one of my stormy adventures. Just look at all these people sitting around to listen to me! Hundreds! Maybe thousands! And everyone’s here, standing still, pining for every single word of my thrilling story. Voodoo, fork - armed peasants and inflexible judges!

Once I’m done, they all stand up, calling my name, cheering me… and the praises! Their praises sound like a distant echo into the ocean! Yeah, it’s great, and they’re all there… Bart,Fink… Elaine… Stan… Horatio… Van Winslow… Morgan LeFlay…

No, not at all.

Yeah, alright, I kicked the Pirate God LeChuck’s unholy butt two years ago. But… y’know, once there was a song that went more or less like this :”Well, I’d rather be a pirate on Scabb than the scab on a pirate!”. Yet I guess that nowadays you’d be lucky even if you saw half a buccaneer’s ghost around here. To tell you the truth, since LeChuck’s schizophrenic ambition’s been cut down for the very last time, things have got only worse.

Now I’m the last person on this dark and fetid island, and I’ve been here for a year so far: well, for the first time in my life I can understand how it felt for Herman Toothrot. When you’ve been alone for so long, well, your mind starts playing tricks on you… you see people that are not really there… you live experience which never really happened… imagination confuses you, mystifies you, tortures you… imagination… yeah, maybe it’s there I’ll live my last adventures… after all, Guybrush Threepwood’s age has come to its end. The age of piracy itself has come to its end! Now we’re in the age… of the Triad!

Certainly, if you look at it from the right point of view, being the only soul on a deserted island is not that bad. You can spend all the time you want on the beach building sand galleons, for a start. Or you can make up witty puns with the names carved in the marble gravestones. Uhm… well, my galleons look more like some big pile of seagull droppings, that’s for sure. And I’d swear a gravestone insulted me once!

Still, the island is full of old abandoned ships, and if you don’t care about worms, rats, foul smell and debilitating illnesses you might come down with if you eat rotten food, then of course you can always take advantage of lifelong supplies! By the way, my stomach is rumbling… I guess I’ll take a stroll down to the kitchen of the Bloody Lip Bar… ”Aye Aye, Captain!” I wave at captain Dread. They hanged him eight years ago on the pier of Phatt Island because he spat on the beach during the governor’s mother’s official visit. Wait a sec… the governor’s… mother’s… official visit. Yeah, I guess I got it right.

And then… ”Aye, Woody!”. One more time I try to take away my doubts about rodents and wood with the old carpenter. They gunned him down when he gave a particularly superstitious pirate a leg made with the wood from some second-hand coffins.

He wishes me that an old wizard may turn my flesh into an excellent wood, neither too young nor too old, so that he can bury me deep into a grave with millions of woodworms. Just as usual.

What, ghosts? No… if only I were really haunted by some ghosts! Now, that would be a really good occasion to set off looking for some rootbeer and start one of those epic duels, just like in the good old days!

No, they’re nothing more than stupid, maladjusted shadows. Dull and trivial visions from my mind.

Yes, well, it was a bit disturbing at first, but after a while… I got familiar with it! I got used to it. Now, here comes Woodtick’s old rope bridge… I rememeber when…

“Where do you think you’re going, fancy pants?”

Great! When you think your grotesque phantasies have come to their highest oddities, that’s when the most vivid vision of Largo LaGrande comes in! The same, stupid, annoying midget… he’s not taller than two chicks! He’s waiting for me at the end of the bridge. Really, I can’t think of anything more pathetic…

“Wake up! Wake up!”

Ouch! The shadow of Largo is giving me a working over, just like the old days! Though I must say that it’s the first time one of my ethereal and vaporous mental images causes me all this pain…

“Look at me! Hey!”

The shadows of my mind are getting clearer, I’m back into the real world now.

G: “Mr Winslow! It is really you?”

W: “Sir, Captain! I knew you had gone missing, but I really didn’t think I could ever find you here on Scabb Island! You looked… confused… your glance was so dull and you didn’t answer me… Sorry if I had to be a bit rough to make you listen to me, but… it looks like it worked!”

G: “Ouch… damn, that studded knuckle duster will be the death of me, was it really necessary?

W:” Yes, sir… ”

G:” Why did you come looking for me, Winslow?”

W: “Sir, that matter about Elaine… ”

G: “You’re wasting your time here, Winslow. Those times are over, gone, dead! Buried metres down into the earth! I don’t want to talk about it ever again!”

W: “Murdered in broad daylight… just in front of the crowd, and now every soul in the Caribbean knows that Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate, killed his wife… and that he fled from Booty Island, he ran away, never to be seen again! I don’t know much more about this story, but I’m sure you’re innocent! Well, I’ll be blowed if this doesn’t sound fishier than LeChuck’s filthy linen cupboard… there must be something behind all this!

G: “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!”

W: “Fine! Then I’ll just have to tell you that… I’ve got the solution! The solution to everything!”

G: “Last time I heard you saying something like that, you organised one of those parties with limbo and tropical cocktails… honestly, I’m not in the mood for… “

W: “No, sir, no… I can bring Elaine back to life, I can fix it all… “

G: “What?… I don’t want a zombie wife!”

W: “No one’s going to give you a zombie wife, sir… have you ever heard of Chronos Grave?

G: “… I hope this isn’t just another one of your exotic dishes with the secret ingredient!”

W: “No sir… Chronos Grave isn’t a recipe… it’s a place. At first, it had a different name. It was called Lucre Island. A nauseating, clean and colourful piece of land, where the worst, infected scum on this earth would crawl… bankers, traders, tourists! That is, until two years ago, when LeChuck got there. The Pirate God LeChuck. He tore it to the ground with some of his strange voodoo weapons, and as a result… well, something apparently impossible happened… “

G: “Did the bankers become less greedy?”

W: “I’m afraid they had to, when they got disintegrated, sir. But I wasn’t talking about that. Y’know that strange swamp on the island, the so-called “Swamp of Time”? Well, that swamp started spilling over and swallowing everything up. Time down there started to become more and more distorted. Space was now deformed, and the whole area became a vortex with no logic nor sense…

G: “That sounds like a perfect description of what happens when I drink too much of those bowel crushing remedies for hangovers…

W: “Aye, I’m sure of that, sir! If only you knew some of the terrible stories people who’ve been there can tell… sometimes ships, lost at sea for years, resurface. Some others disappear without ever coming back. There are those who tell that they travelled through the years, reaching ancient pasts, or remote futures… it seems that the corsair Basilius Von Braun accidently killed his father when he was young, vanishing into nothing while he was still holding his pulsing heart. What once was Lucre island… now is Chronos’ Grave… the immense swamp out of time, or, according to the new legend, the tomb of Chronos, the Titan… where forever he lies after an ancient conflict with the Gods… “

G: “Tita… what?”

W: “Oh, stop it with this foolish play!”

G: “What?”

W: “Ahem… I said… some jars derive from excellent clay!

G: “And… what’s the matter with that?”

W: “Oh, well… you’re making me lose the thread! Well, those who enter the mists of Chronos Grave run the risk of ending up in strange ages and places, if it were not for the fact that I’ve been doing some researches, and here you are… “

Winslow pulls something out of his clothes… it looks like a sextant… but it’s not a sextant. There ‘s more than one sextant, and they’re mounted up together. But… they have some strange quadrants… strange levers… strange needles. It looks more like a modern piece of art, rather than like a navigational instrument. Aesthetically unpleasant. Definetely too tacky. I must get one for my collection!

W: “Now behold… THE SIX SEXTANTS OF SANTA FE!!!”

G:“The name’s even tackier than the looks!”

W: “Don’t go by the looks, captain! This is the only tool we have to interpretate the mists of Chronos’ Grave, and to find a course through them, towards the times and the places we want. I built it, thanks to the thousand year old wisdom of some… friends. With this… we can fix it all! We’ll go back in time and prevent it from happening again! Things won’t go wrong another time. And you… you’ll have Elaine back! And nothing of all this will have ever happened. “

G: “What… I don’t… “

W: “You have two choices ahead of you, sir. You can come with me now, and put an end to this nightmare, forever and ever. Or, you can stay here on this island ‘till the end of your days, eating flies and piling up seagull droppings on the beach… “

G: “THEY’RE SAND GALLEONS!”

W: “As you wish, sir. But perhaps you should know that if you choose the second option, I’ll hit you with this sextant, and I’ll do it violently. I’ll knock you out and take you to Chronos’ Grave by force. So… what now?”

That old, stinking fatty of Van Winslow! I’d have hugged him, if only he weren’t some sort of a crazy bipolar loon strangely and suspiciously attracted by Yours Truly. After what had happened on Booty Island I practically swore that I would never set out at sea again, but… could I really fix it all again? Have Elaine back? Maybe I could have avoided the birth of the Triad, and prevented the Caribbean from turning into this sort of… The mind boggles at the possibilities…

G: “Hey, Winslow! Put down that thing, right now!”

Winslow’s already hovering his sextants over my head. I stop him in time. You can count on me, I tell him. He puts them away. He puts away the studded knuckle duster too! Then… hey! Wait a second… something doesn’t quite fit…

TO BE CONTINUED

Who or what is the Triad?

What happened to Elaine Marley?

Will Guybrush Threepwood and Reginald Van Winslow ever manage to find their way through the stream of time to save the Caribbean?

Find out about it, and keep up with the next episode!!!

Last Tales of Monkey Island

Plot, idea, writer:

Danilo “Voodoomaster” Lapegna

Thank you to:

Dave Grossman

Danilo “Iena” Puce

Michele “Mightypirate” Giardi

Cover:

Ciro “Olmo” Cangialosi

Other illustrations:

Daniele “Nemiant” Severo

Fabio “Il_Ratman” Venuto

Vito “Vitoner” Lanci

Logo:

Alessio Pianesani

This is a no-profit fan project. Every copyright is owned by Lucasarts LTD

http://www.lasttalesofmonkeyisland.com

http://www.facebook.com/LastTalesOfMonkeyIsland

http://twitter.com/#!/lasttalesofmi

You can listen our Last Tales Soundtrack by Riccardo Messori on:

http://www.youtube.com/user/lasttalesofmonkey

Buy the Telltale and Lucasarts Games!!!