Episode 16: On Mothers and Missiles

"One of the most common questions that people have upon crossing the breach is "How do the peoples of the promised land have such high technology with considerably less time under their belt?" The reason we are so much more advanced lies in three simple answers- First, Souls are just more powerful that Coils. Period. We will always be capable of things that you are not, like generating elements from thin air or shape-shifting. Second, we all share one language, so there is little communication breakdown. But lastly, and most importantly, we uncover fantastic technology not just through research and development, but through our own archaeology. The Antecedents were capable of things we still don’t understand, but through reverse engineering we were able to re-create such technologies as Hoverjets or Repulsor Fields. Every single archaeological dig in Eden has a team of two to two hundred engineers on site to figure out the devices that they discover. This leads to some rapid and unexpected leaps in technology, as well as a distinct corporate interest in Archaeology.

We are, in a way, starting over- fortunately, we can build on the backs of giants. Every new discovery from Atlantis or Median or any of the countless hundreds of other archaeological sites turns up more fantastic knowledge, although some of it is not so well understood. It is safe to assume that the peoples of the Antecedent Empire left behind such primitive systems as Magic and Science in favor of new technologies that no one now has the education or possibly even the genetic makeup to comprehend."

- Program Michael 12, Chancellor of Sciences at M.C.U.

"Say goodbye to gravity and say goodbye to death

Hello to eternity and live for every breath!"

- Iron Maiden, The Wicker Man

Now I’m warning you now, this column’s not gonna be laden with quantifiable game information. This experience had a lot more to do with the feel and mood of The Last Exodus than The meat of the information, so If you’re looking for lists of keen powers and stuff, you’ll have to wait until next week. But I promise I WILL deliver.

That said, I’ll admit it.

I’m an equipment goob.

Oh, I know that we are supposed to be so enlightened these days, in a world where your character is more important that what he carries, but I LIKE knowing my character has a pair of magnet-boots tucked away somewhere. It’s like running through a toy store with a zillion dollars of someone else’s money. And the only thing better than equipment?

Vehicles. Oh, yeah.

That’s right.

Something big and fusion-powered with wing missiles and proton cannons and ailerons. Ailerons. I don’t even know what they do, but man, they do sound cool, hunh?

So this here, in a nutshell, is pretty much the main reason I freak out when Last Exodus gets compared to Vampire or Unknown Armies or some similar occult-in-modern society game. Yeah, sure, the Chain and the Chamber and the Order and the Regime skulk around and undermine the government and try to influence the media.

But that’s now when they’re flying the latest model Templar Aeronautics Aetherspace Superiority HALO-10 Gyroscopic Fighters on a trench run against a half-mile long Eternal Reichship- RECKONER-class Mobile Bio-mechanical Tactical Aetherspace Pacification Platform that’s threatening our fair city with Ballistic Hellfire Plasma!

Goob goob goob.

I’d like to see your average Tremere Archon deal with that!

Yes. Star wars was obviously at least as much of an influence here as any Vertigo Comic or the Old Testament, as I have been saying. But I feel that there’s another influence I should mention here that’s probably more pervasive than any other I have brought up.

Or at least, that’s what I was thinking a few years ago when standing on the tarmac of Lincoln Park airport with a parachute strapped to my ass. That, along with "What the hell am I doing here? This is insane."

My mom walked toward me and slapped me on my back and informed me that I looked& well, like a turtle, which I did, but I didn’t need to be informed of it.

Mom, on the other hand, looked like a pro. She had on a deep blue flightsuit covered with the various patches and insignias of all of the pilot’s organizations to which she belonged. She pulled on her leather helmet and pushed her goggles high up on her forehead.

"You still sure you wanna do this, kiddo? Josh got pretty sick last time."

I nodded.

"Aerobatics isn’t like flying around in the Stinson or a Cessna or something. There’s no roof, you’re outside. It’s just you and the sky. We’ll be pulling some pretty heavy G’s so make sure that you’re breathing steadily. If you think you’re going to black out, let me know. "

I’ll assure you, no matter who you are, you have absolutely no idea how odd it is to hear this from your mother. As I grew up, I learned that something had gone wrong with my mom somewhere. According to television and movies and the like, mothers were supposed to stand around in aprons and bake pies and stuff. Mine rode around on a Harley until she had me, then sang in a rock band before deciding to get her pilot’s license. Well, after that she was addicted. And when simply defying basic laws of gravity was no longer amusing enough for her, she took up the sport of Aerobatics, which, near as I can tell, is a sport too extreme for any sort of mainstream audience. Quite literally, Aerobatics is about pushing an airplane- a machine of already dubious safety- to it’s absolute limits by spinning, looping, dropping, and stalling the thing in a – get this- controlled manner.

Right.

So why was I doing this?

Three reasons. First off, I would have to turn in my guy credentials if I was gonna let my mom do this thing that I was too chicken to do. It’s bad enough that my mom will always be a bigger badass than I will ever be, but I could at least make a good show of it to assuage my own testosterone.

Second, she met Han Solo. No joke. The man is a pilot himself, and flew into Lincoln Park once while puttering around the East Coast. Well, apparently (other pilots have backed this up) she gave him a few pointers on Aerobatic maneuvers that he later studied when making "Six days, Seven Nights." Yes. My mom taught Han Solo how to fly. I will never, ever top that, but, again, I had to make a good show of it.

Last, I knew I wanted to throw some dogfighting and flying (after all, Eden is all sky) into The Last Exodus and I figured the best way to write about it would be to check it out for myself.

This seemed like a good idea until I saw what we would be flying in.

My mom’s aerobatic plane was a Pitts Special, N29GS. It was a one-seater, so it wasn’t gonna be of much use here.

The plane we would be flying actually made me gulp like a frightened cartoon when I saw it. It was blue, a bi-wing open cockpit two- seater.

Let me repeat that in case you missed it. That was OPEN COCKPIT.

It was also a little smaller than a Volkswagen. I mean it. As I learned, an Aerobatic plane is little more than an giant, emotionally disturbed engine with a chair on it, and some wings thrown of for good measure. It’s not the kind of machine that makes one brim with confidence looking at it. When you see that the only thing between you and a 10,000 foot fall at speeds in excess of 500 miles and hour could, in a pinch, double as a soap dish, your first instinct is to run like David Duke at a KRS-One show. But I had something to prove.

I piled into the front cockpit (an embarrassing name for a hole to be stuck in, I might add) and watches the propeller spin. The machine took off with a surprising amount of grace and at speeds that most people will never get to feel hitting them in the face in their entire lives. At six-hundred-plus miles per hour, your mouth blows open like a cartoon if you open up too wide, even with the windshield in front of you.

I tried to make a mental note of this.

"Okay!" Mom yelled, "We’re gonna break and do a snap roll! You ready?"

"Well, mom, I’d appreciate if we could dispense with words like "Snap", "Crack", "Break", "Smash", or "crunch " for the duration of this fli&-"

And then we did a snap roll. Or, the majority of me did. My stomach has decided to stay put as the rest of the plane rolled around it’s axis, which was the beginning of the trouble.

At this point I realized two things.

First of all, Rein-Dot-Hagen, Stolze, and Tynes had the right idea, because near as I could tell, research into modern-occult supercool occult games rarely progressed beyond hanging around smoky clubs hitting on white girls in plastic outfits and had nothing at all to do with snap rolls. At least, not with your pants on.

Second, the souls who pilot the HALO-10 and Eternal Reich Adjudicator fighters were made of some sterner stuff than what I was used to. Adventure is rough stuff, and there’s a thousand concerns you never even considered. I mean, think about it. Someone has just popped a missle off at you and you swing up into a steep climb to dodge the shot.

While you’re worried about things like not blowing up, are you even considering the fact that the G’s could well knock you unconscious? You had better be, or as mom’s buddy put it, "It could be a real short trip." But this isn’t a concern for your character. As you sit around the gaming table and defy the bad guys and beat the odds, you’re not worried about the strange secondary and tertiary concerns like blood flow and how tight your helmet is or that your mouth should be more full of bugs than a new Microsoft release with Jesse Camp as product developer.

No, you’re there to save the day. And that’s what you do, most of the time. Why is that? Because your characters are larger than life. They’re heroes, man. Not like us.

As I zoomed back and forth over the fields of Lincoln Park, New Jersey, I realized just how hard it would be to close that gap. But to stop trying would be to admit a greater defeat I’d want to face, and I’d pack up the games for good. It’s important that you risk it, and try and blur the lines between your characters and yourself a bit sometimes, because you can bet that your character is at least in some part something you want to be. So go for it. Try not to kill yourself.

Now the art of writing this message into The Last Exodus is gonna be difficult indeed, because if it’s too subtle, there will be no point, and if it’s obvious, some yahoo in Bobble-Yer-Yambag Arkansas is gonna socket-hump his grandmother while fellating a billygoat and claim right there on the bench that he did it because I, Reverend Sean Benjamin Jaffe of the Church of Synister Creative Systems, told him he should try harder to be the Antichrist.

Ritalin, kids. Read it, live it, love it.

So we land. But not after doing snap rolls, loops, barrel rolls, and hammerheads (a hammerhead is the single most insane maneuver in the Aerobatic Pilot’s arsenal of potential suicide, wherein one pulls straight up until the plane stalls than drops back into a straight line. To replicate this sensation close your eyes and tilt your head back while bending your knees slightly. Hold your breath for ten seconds, then have someone whack you in the face as hard as they can with a dictionary.) I crawled like a dying reptile from the cockpit and lay flat on the ground staring at the sun for a long time.

A cluster of pilots gathered around and looked down at me, and one looked to my mom.

"Jesus, Kathy, I think you broke him"

"He’ll be fine. He just needs to walk it off. Right, kiddo?"

She smiled brightly at me.

Oh well. A mom is a mom is a mom.