LAST TALES OF MONKEY ISLAND - EPISODE 2

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

Winslow and I are walking towards the rotten pier where the Captain Dread’s floating house was once moored, yet… something doesn’t quite fit!

G: “What is it that you just said, Van Winslow?”

W: “I said that our old ship, the Shouting Seagull, sank while I was trying to keep her on course during a storm, not far from Blood Island!”

G: “What? I thought it was the Narwhal! I thought her name was “The Screaming Narwhal”!

W: “Uhm… yes, sure, the unforgettable Narwhal! How… clear and detailed my memories are! How well I remember it! Oh, those were wonderful times, when we wouldn’t set sail if you didn’t point the finger at the compass first, weren’t they?”

G: “At the map. You would always ask me to point at the map.”

W: “Right, yes, that’s what I said! Here it is, captain, look at it! Look at how beautiful and magnificent it is, the ship we’ll challenge the pre-established rules of time with! Look at… the SHY CUTTLEFISH!

G: “Are you sure that tiny raft is going to hold the sea until Chronos’ Grave, Winslow? There’s scarcely room for both of us, and besides, it looks like is going to fall into pieces!”

W: “Oh, sorry if I didn’t book you a a first class cruise, you twit!”

G: “I’m afraid I didn’t understand you very well.”

W: “What? I said no word, sir! You’ve become rather bizarre. Did you follow the high fiber-and-iodine diet I suggested? All the same, you know all too well that these waters are no longer safe. Or maybe they’re even too safe, since the Triad monitors them 24 hours a day with colossal ships, which are practically unsinkable. And besides, those ships are armed with devilries that most people find unfathomable.”

G: “… so, if we don’t stand a chance of winning a fight on an average ship, why not using an absurd one? That’s brilliant thinking, Winslow, there’s nothing more to say!”

W: “So the only way we have to reduce the possibilities of being seen by those fanatics is to sail with etremely small ships! You’re an alpha class wanted person. So… if they catch sight of us, we’re done for. If they attack us, we’re done for. If they take us prisoners… oh, I don’t even want to think about it!”

G: “Alpha class?”

W: “That’s their way to denote the most reckless, violent and disgusting survivors of the old age of piracy!”

G: “I know that somehow I should feel offended but… I can’t help feeling incredibly flattered…”

W: “So hug the mast of the Cuttlefish! Let the baby feel the overflowing love of her captain!”

G: “Couldn’t we just set off?”

W: “…”

G: “Now don’t put on that hang-manatee look!”

W: “…”

G: “Stop it immediately, Winslow!”

W: “…”

G: “OKAY, OKAY, I HUGGED IT, ALL RIGHT?”

W: “Great, Captain! Now let’s get a move on. The colossal vessel of human history won’t get back on course all by herself! Now get hold of the oars! Point the finger at the compass! We’re setting sail for Chronos’ Grave!”

G: “Again with this “point-the-finger-at-the-compass thing”? It doesn’t even make sen… hey! Curse you, Winslow! Wait!”

I try to leap from the dock while the raft is already a good two metres from the shore. I dramatically miss it. I reach it swimming and I land a blow to my assistant on the occipital region. I take my oar and we finally leave. The night waters are calm and sleepy, while a noble full moon guides a wild eyed Guybrush Threepwood and his even more wild eyed first officer Van Winslow on their odd rescueing mission. And speaking of hallucinations… they’re gone! I’m feeling great! No more Dread, Bart, Fink or Hugo, with his imaginary but still despicable Lavander Oil TM! But I suppose it was all too normal, considered how long I haven’t set off for any great new adventure. Take the sun away from a plant, the ocean from a fish and a daily massive dose of violence away from LeChuck, and all of them will soon start imagining talking stones and bad tempered carpenters. Or at least, I guess so. However, returning at sea is like getting a tack of icy water straight in the face. It suddely wakes me up and digs up sensations I thought I had forgotten. The outstanding one… damn, my stomach is emptier than the Club 41 during the “Blonde Beard-Biscuits-Plus Night”. After all it’s really difficult to attract clients with a slogan like “Have breakfast at the Club, with more cockroach grub!”.

G: “… slurp…”

W: “Come again, sir?”

G: “Nothing. I don’t think I’ve already asked you this, but… what’s in that enormous sack, Winslow?”

W: “Uhm… food supplies, captain.”

G: “Oh, great, I’m really hungry. Can I have something edible?”

W: “No, sir!”

G: “Right. MAY I have something edible?”

W: “No, sir!”

G: “Something edible?”

W: “No, sir!”

G: “Damn, Winslow, open that cursed…”

W: “Look, Captain Threepwood! We’re there!”

I see it. All of a sudden the sky has turned misty, the sea has began to stir… and there it is, at the horizon. The grave of Chronos. It’s hard to describe what I’m seeing right now. It’s like some sort of infernal tornado, ferociously torn to pieces by a thousand shocks. It’s as large as an island and it shakes the ocean below until piercing the peak of the sky itself.

G: “So… beautiful…”

W: “Thank you, sir! You’re not the first who noticed that I’ve lost a considerable amount of weight! You know, the secret lies in constantly groping…”

G: “I was talking about Chronos’Grave.”

W: “Oh, yes, the island. Provided we could call that colossal dimesional distorsion an island. Uhm… I advise you to hug the mast of the Cuttlefish… “

G: “I think you should stop it with this human-warmth-wanting-raft-thing… it’s rather disturbing!”.

W: “No, captain, what I mean is… you should hold on tight! We’ve just gone past the Point of No Return!”

G: “The Point… of No Return?”

Winslow lays down his oar and invites me to do the same. I follow his advice, and I quickly wish I’d never done it. The currents are getting more and more violent. We can no longer keep the raft on course. It’s part of the plan, my right hand man assures me. His licence to plan is definetely revoked, I answer back. The Cuttlefish is picking up more and more speed, down headlong into the vortex. Now it’s no longer the current which is pulling us, but an invisible force, mightier and more terrifying than a typhoon’s wrath. A typhoon whose new galley bumper has just been scratched. The sky slowly fades away. In its place there’s only a flash of lightnings convulsively following one another. Everything is more and more blinding. Everything shakes. We lose every landmark. It’s impossible to perceive the space around us. I think the water below us disappeared. We’re in a huge tempest of… nothing! I turn around. Beside me, Winslow is yelling at the sky with his hands on his hips, a challenging look on his face.

W: “IS IT THIS ALL YOU CAN DO, TITAN? IS IT THIS?

G: “I don’t think we should provoke him in this way…”

W: “THESE ANCIENT DECEASED GODS ARE ONLY COWARDS, CAPTAIN THREEPWOOD! LET THEM SMELL YOUR FEAR AND THEY’LL TEAR YOU TO PIECES LIKE A PACK OF POODLES WITH THEIR KNUCKLE OF HAM! BUT SHOW THEM YOU’RE NOT AFRAID OF THEM AND THEY’LL GO OFF WITH THEIR SACRED PROTUBERANCE BETWEEN THE LEGS! SHOUT! YELL! YELL AT THE TITAN WHAT YOU THINK OF HIM!

G: “Sacred protuberance? But what… uhm, alright… ONLY ONCE I HAVE MET SUCH A COWARD!

W: “It’s not fair, you used one of the Swordmaster’s insults!

The raft slows down. The light fades. Water is back again beneath the hull. An impenetrable mist suddenly wets us. But it’s no normal mist, it’s… it’s as if strange and obliterating shadows are flowing through it! Yes, I’ve got a feeling… as if scores of undefinable ghosts are lightly brushing against us, observing us, with the very same careful morbidity of gravediggers measuring our dead bodies.

W: “We’re in! We’ve crossed the barrier of Unreality and now… we’re deep into the heart of the tomb!

G: “See? There’s no scrape Guybrush Threepwood’s corrosive and sharp tongue can’t get us out of!

W: “There’s no way it’s because of your jabbering, so don’t you play the hero of the day, you sort of bad trained macaque… WELL DONE CAPTAIN!

G: “What did you say, Winslow? Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention to… what’s this place? I think I see something… or someone… through the mist. And these images, these sounds… so elusive… far, incomprehensible… “

W: “They’re shadows of what once was. Or of what will be. Who knows? These are the crossroads where every spirit passes, long gone or still to come, every spirit which has or will have experienced even only a single breath of life. Basically, we’re surrounded by pure primordial chaos. “

G: “I didn’t understand much, but I’ve already heard this sentence many times during the drinking tournaments of “Experimental Ipecac Beer” on Puke Island. “

W:“But the mind can set the chaos in order! Hold these!”

G: “The Strangest Sextants?”

W: “They’re called “Sextants of Santa Fe! Hold them in your hands and listen! Sailing through the mists of Chronos’Grave you can’t reach every place or time, but there are some precise restrictions…”

G: “Restrictions? Like, I can travel back in time but only if I accept turning into a flaming giraffe body? Or, I can save Elaine’s life, but only if I agree to a hot extramarital relationship with Ozzie Mandrill?”

W: “You’re interrupting me. You’re absent minded. You’re shillyshalling pointlessly. When I met you on the Scabb Island bridge you were barely listening, too. And then, the painful methods I used to keep you focused turned out to work rather well….”

G: “Studded knuckle - duster. Got it. “

W: “As I was saying, as things stand now, we can reach only those places and times the person holding the sextants lived and now remembers. So, the future is unapproachable, just like those places and times we’ve never visited. “

G: “Van Winslow…”

W: “That said, in order to go back to a specific moment from your past, you’ll just have to hold on to the sextants and remember that very moment you want to reach. The instruments will react to the mental energies of their owner and show the way to that precise moment in the space - time. “

G: “Winslow, I just don’t know how to tell you, but…”

W: “Oh, by the revolting Iapetus’ progeny! What is it now?One more trivial observation on flaming giraffes and I leave you again on Scabb island tossing and turning in your…”

G:” No, Winslow. You talked about memory. The point is… well, I don”t remember anything about Elaine’s murder! Everything is so damn strange. Confused. All I remember is… I had a splitting headache, Elaine was dead, people were after me… that was atrocious! I ran away from Booty Island and…”

W: “This doesn’t matter.”

G: Doesn’t it? “

W: “No, it doesn’t, because… what we’ve got to do now is… uhm…test the instrument with some… trial questions!”

G: “Oh, so we’ve just risked being turned upside down, shocked and drowned, and still we don’t know whether the Sparkling Sextants are going to work… Great!”

W: “Sextants of Santa Fe, damn! They’re called Sextants of Santa Fe! Answer me now, and, however paradoxical the expression may sound in a place like this, don’t waste time! If the Titan finds out that we’re trying to interfere with the Flow of Existence he might even smash us with all his might, crushing us into unconscious particles condemned to lay here forever. “

G: “Yikes!”

W:“But I must admit this is just the most pessimistic guess. He may just as well kick us out of here. Anyway, we’ve got to move, so focus… do you remember when you fought against the Pirate God LeChuck?”

G: “Of course I rememember it! That coarse pirate vaporized my candid spiritual essence and crushed the bones from my zombie body into dust!”

W: “No reaction from the sextants. Wait a sec… Zombie? You were… dead at the time?”

G: “‘course I was! And you should know it, you were there pushing buttons and flirting with ambiguous merfolks all the time!”

W: “Damn… damn!”

G: “Problems? Did you repent mating with huge talking fish?”

W: “The instrument doesn’t work if it tries to link with a dead man’s memories!”

G: “But I’m alive!”

W: “But you were dead when you memorized those events! By the sacred beard of Hyperion’s cousin, I…”

W: “Winslow, you may have found me on a desert island laughing histerically to myself, but I must bitterly notice that you’ve really become the King of Fools lately! Of course, the situation wasn’t at all reassuring earlier, but now it’s even more embarassing… what, did you get too stressed when you were looking for the Thousand Times Shocking Sextants?”

W: “I said they’re called… calm down, calm down… every fiber of my body is calling for a cold blooded murder, but this wouldn’t make things get better anyway… it wouldn’t make them better… now let’s breath… let’s think of happy memories… now let’s get back to our questions: so, you were dead… and who had killed you?”

G:” LeChuck!”

W: “As predictable as the cirrhosis during a long journey oversea! The instrument is moving… excellent, excellent… go on describing what happened!”

G: ” I was on Flotsam Island. I was drinking a toast to the simultaneous end of both my process and the brutal threat of a cruel French surgeon with a cold grogatini. That is, until that lout of LeChuck broke into the party and ran me through with…”

W: “Twelve degrees north, eight minutes west, time declination sixteen, two winter rotations of the anterior bow!”

G: “Elaine, Winslow! We’ve got to go and save Elaine!”

W: “Precisely, now row with me! Hurry up! They’ve found us!”

I realize that too. Those subtle spirits which first stayed still and gazed at us have now become furious and restless. It’s as if they’re shouting at us in a language that’s more ancient than the universe itself. Or maybe it’s Finnish. While we’re rowing frantically towards some unknown place, the waves beneath us grow full of hate. The sky above shines bright with the crackling dance of a million lightnings. Then, at a very precise point… we come to a grinding halt. After a few seconds some images appear on the misty clouds. At first they’re fuzzy, but they slowly become clearer and clearer, until… they’re real! There’s me! Two years ago! I’m here, on Flotsam Island and… I’m dying! Elaine screams. I’ve just been treacherously ran through by that sack of scum of LeChuck! Where did Winslow take me? We’re in the wrong age! Before I even get the chance to ask him anything, he violently snatches the sextants out of my hands and…

W: “Sweet dreams, you idiot!”

He hits me with them on the head, more and more times. Now… I don’t feel any pain. I’m half asleep and I’m going through a sequence of patchy and confused images. Winslow raises the sextants and screams something. He’s ordering the time to stop. Or his underpants to clean, I’m not sure about that. Darkness. I see those blinding lightnings again. Everything shakes. Elaine! A splash. A long and flowing beard. The waters are calm once again and once again I open my eyes. I come round.

There’s no sign of Chronos’ Grave. We’re in the middle of the ocean, though I don’t know where. Winslow is there, serious and still. My heart skips a beat when I see who’s on his side. Now he’s on the raft with us, gazing silently at the waters, the blasphemous among the blasphemouses, the abominable among the abominables, the indecorous among the indecorouses.

LeChuck… is back!

TO BE CONTINUED

What really happened on Chronos’Grave?

How could LeChuck come back?

Which are the prerequisites to enter a “Experimental Ipecac Beer” Drinking Championship?

What will happen on the Shy Cuttlefish, now that Guybrush and Van Winslow are together with their all-time enemy?

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

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