Act II

Design notes

Ezra & Julian are a new companion. Still don’t need a companion selection interface, since there are only two of them, unless we want to limit the player to having one companion present at a time.

Julian is a different form of overworld travel, which can reach some places (both full scenes and overworld vignettes) that are not available when driving.

Major Characters

Ezra & Julian
Shannon Marquez
Carrington
Lula
The doctor/healer
Church janitor

Themes

Space and architecture
Life away from home
Tourism

Locations

Complex (camera movement or multiple joined scenes)

Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces (former cathedral)
Museum of Dwellings (former neighborhood)
Forest Village (former empty forest)
Church (former office space)

Simple

Doctor/healer’s House
Carrington’s art car

Repeated

Equus Oils

Main Narrative Summary

Opens with Lula in her office at the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces. The player controls her through the dialog engine. If the player has met Carrington in act one, he arrives and has a conversation with Lula requesting to use some cave space for his play. Otherwise, Lula sorts through some paperwork, making decisions to approve or disapprove proposals for space usage, and other surreal bureaucratic busywork. At the end of the scene, the camera pulls out to reveal the entirety of the Bureau.

Conway’s truck drives into the Bureau. Conway and Shannon exit the truck and have a conversation about their confusion and having hit a dead end.

Conway and Shannon talk to the Bureau receptionist, who directs them to an “ingestion clerk.” They are bounced between a few offices in a bureaucratic tangle. Conway’s leg is getting worse, and Shannon takes increasing notice of the strain this walking is putting on him. They get routed to Lula’s desk. Lula indicates that the Zero functions differently from other highways: that they can’t expect to navigate it rationally or by planning.

Lula used to rent a house on a Dogwood drive, but that street name has been changed. Many of the surrounding street names have changed since she lived there. She suggests that perhaps another street has been renamed to “Dogwood” to replace the lost one she used to live on. The files recording those changes are not frequently used, so are in the Bureau’s storage facility. The storage facility used to be the Bureau’s office, until they grew and moved into their current space. Lula can help them comb through the files and identify the correct Dogwood address, if they go and retrieve the files (to wait for a formal file transfer process would take too long).

Lula also learns of Conway’s injury, and recommends the doctor, who works from his home in a neighborhood of Bowling Green. Shannon strongly suggests that they visit the doctor and have Conway’s leg fixed up before they continue. Maybe she feels that she’s to blame for his injury, since it happened while they were doing her audio tests in the cave. The doctor’s address is also kept in the storage facility.

Somewhere in the Bureau’s main room, they also find a trash bin labeled “Bureau of Secret Tourism,” stuffed with bizarre tourist pamphlets. These pamphlets give hints to navigating the underworld (the overworld of the Zero, in the caves), to find underworld vignettes.

Conway and Shannon travel to the storage facility, a boxy office full of cabinets and boxes. It is currently being used as a church. This church was originally situated in the space now used by the Bureau. The details of the church are projected on the wall with old overhead projectors — a projected pipe organ, a projected congregation, projected stained-glass windows, etc. The only real person in the building is a janitor, who explains the history of the church & the Bureau, and how they swapped sites. He himself is not a member of the church, and no one really attends anymore, but he keeps the projections running out of respect. A sermon is in progress as Conway searches the archives.

As they’re about to leave the church/storage facility, Conway collapses. The janitor recommends he visits a faith healer that he knows, but Shannon suggests they visit the doctor instead. The player chooses which to do, and they get directions.

Conway and Shannon travel to the doctor/healer’s neighborhood, to find it’s been razed and replaced with the Museum of Dwellings, which is still under construction. They come to understand that most of the original homes have been moved into the museum as exhibits, and their inhabitants still live in them. They travel up through the partially-constructed museum, looking at the different dwellings but failing to find the doctor/healer. Near the top, where the building is mostly incomplete and skeletal, they meet Ezra, an eight-year-old boy. Ezra & his friend Julian (a giant eagle) have been helping some of the neighborhood’s inhabitants by flying their homes and belongings, piece by piece, to an area in a forest nearby. Ezra thinks the doctor/healer may have been moved to the forest. Julian flies Ezra & Conway to the forest; Shannon will stay with the truck.

Conway and Ezra search the forest for the doctor/healer’s house. Ezra climbs trees while Conway limps along the ground. They meet former inhabitants of the doctor/healer’s neighborhood who now live in the forest. Eventually they find the doctor/healer’s house, and the doctor/healer agrees to try to help with Conway’s leg.

The doctor/healer has an assistant who makes some allusion to the costs this process will incur.

Ends with Conway receiving anesthetic or going into a hypnotic religious reverie at the doctor/healer’s house and slipping into unconsciousness; maybe there’s some distortion of reality as he falls asleep and things get weird momentarily before ending. Maybe Lysette appears in the scene briefly. Then Act 3 will open with his unconscious dream/memory/hallucination of loading the truck with Lysette, before he wakes up.

Overworld

There are effectively three overworld-type scenes, though two of them share a map:

Normal driving overworld. This is moved southwest from Act I’s overworld, so that it centers around Bowling Green, with the farmhouse/onramp near the northeast corner.
Overworld while flying. This is the same map as the driving overworld, but while flying with Julian the player doesn’t need to stick to roads and there is a separate set of overworld locations & vignettes available.
Underworld. This is the overworld map along the Zero. It uses a hidden-road shader, so roads are only visible when you’re near them. The roads are inconsistent and changing; if you drive north and then immediately back south, the roads may look different. The road gets pieced together from pre-designed chunks. Navigation is done by ritualistically doing things like driving counterclockwise in a circle three times, etc.

Driving Overworld Vignettes

Weigh station turned impromptu truck-show
Abandoned van full of sheet music and fast-food wrappers
Overgrown abandoned subdivision
(graphical) A traffic jam near the end of a road that looks like a dead-end on the overworld view. Conway gets out of his truck and walks past several cars that are waiting in stalled traffic. At the front of the line of cars, he finds a construction site where workers are building the road. The workers complete a new section of road (just a few yards), and the cars all creep forward onto it and then stop again as the workers begin on the next section.

Flying Overworld Vignettes

Underworld Vignettes

Side Quests

Secret Tourism Brochures

There are a few brochures in the Bureau of Secret Tourism containing information that can be used to access interesting locations in the underworld. The instructions are sort of cryptic and/or ritualistic, and involve gestural driving rather than navigation (in contrast to the surface overworld).

James Beckworth Carrington’s Play

The player can encounter Carrington in the underworld. His car is parked at the side of the road. Conway suggests some space to use for the play, based on what the player has seen at this point, and Carrington agrees to start work on the play there. He suggests that Conway come by later in the evening to see how the production is coming along.

Equus Oils

If the player returns to Equus Oils, they can talk with Joseph about their experience on the Zero. Joseph will open up a bit about his own connection to the Zero, but not too much yet. While the player was away, Joseph’s niece stopped by and installed some games on his computer, which Conway and his companions can play:

A chatbot like Eliza
NCAA basketball game
An action/FPS game
A dungeon crawler

Music notes

Pipe organ music in the Bureau
Recorded pipe organ in the church/storage facility
Music cue when Julian appears to fly Conway and Ezra to the forest village
Maybe some subtle music in the forest
The band could be in the museum of dwellings, in one of the exhibits?
Some kind of hallucinatory audio when Conway is going under at the end