bathymetric | The Story So Far...

Round 1

Once upon a time, a man tried to build his fortune at sea. Professor Gunnar Maelstrom, one of the heads of VILE, had a question in his mind he couldn't quite define. Something he sought to discover. So he built a vast structure below the sea, a research facility, to answer that question and, in the process, craft an army of thieves. As I said, fortune.

He gathered twenty-five subjects from across the multiverse, using the blueprints to some sort of interdimensional transmission machine, and created a simulation in which they would fight to the death for him. A simple set of rules and a little encouragement each week, and that would be that. He remained in another facility, and left the day-to-day running of the experiment to one of his protégés, The Assistant (nee Angel).

Weeks passed. Murders began. And as the murders began, something curious happened: every Friday night, when Saturday rolled in at midnight, every one of the test subjects awoke in their bed on Sunday morning, bright and early, as if they had just fallen asleep. This was the first of many mysteries.

But as the weeks passed, new areas of the facility also began to become unlocked. And with them came new opportunities for investigation, and answers to the mysteries that plagued the test subjects. A set of colored keys, for example, which unlocked various color-coded secret areas. Objects and other signs of the Assistant's past. Strange red messages. The Assistant was remotely controlled into killing a rule-breaker. There were a number of objects left from, it seemed, some prior inhabitants. And soon, the contents of a secret room led to the confirmation that the current test subjects were not the first set that The Professor had collected.

At the fourth execution, something went wrong. The test subjects were introduced to Agent Night Owl, who they would later come to know as The Failsafe. Soon after, they found her quarters, hidden underneath the facility and within its walls. And the ouija board started connecting to multiple other people - someone who spoke in red and someone who didn't.

Having grown fond of the Assistant, the survivors banded together to try to spare her from a terrible fate. This led to the Failsafe being called in to replace her.

Then the final case happened, and the facility started to break apart. The Professor was running out of time and resources. Endgame approached. Even the vending machine started to panic a little.

Meanwhile, the digital backups of the murderers and their victims had been moved to a second copy of the facility, where things had been going... interestingly. In the last week or so of their time, the backup facility began to Collapse, for lack of a better word. And as it did, they learned what had happened to those who came before them. They also, as it happened, managed to escape the collapse with a number of small glowing orbs that seemed important!

A year or so before, in the same facility, 25 strangers were brought together for a rudimentary version of the same exercise. Things proceeded as normal for several weeks - murders, bonding, the occasional spark of romance - until the remaining survivors banded together and rejected the premise of the experiment. The Professor used the latent brainwashing in Angel, aka Subject Delta, to create a case that couldn't be solved and force the experiment to end with a mass execution.

Even before this, the survivors found, he had spent a long time planning. They discovered several things: Subject Alpha, Subject Beta, and Subject Gamma, the predecessors of Subject Delta. The facility, they learned, was a simulation built to house the experiment without causing permanent physical damage to the test subjects - so they could be brainwashed and processed into thieves, just as the first round of test subjects had been. One of the members of the first round even made a brief appearance in the deadland simulation while it was collapsing, even if poor Max Caulfield ended up facing off against Kirei Kotomine and not exactly faring well. They also found evidence of a mysterious incident involving a cruise ship, which would come back later. They also learned what happened to Saturdays! ... They had been woken up from the simulation and grilled on what motives would convince them to kill.

The survivors faced off against The Professor, who made them prove what they had learned about the events prior. They determined who had been here before, and why. They determined so many things that he personally emerged and presented the survivors with a choice: join him or return home without their memories of the place. This choice, naturally, didn't go over well, and Maelstrom's old enemies stepped in to offer a new choice: kill Maelstrom or destroy his legacy. The survivors chose the latter, sending Maelstrom back to William Birkin's Wild Ride and joining with Carmen Sandiego to bring back the dead and, eventually, restore the minds of the dead.

Round 2

Once upon a time, a man tried to build his fortune at sea. Handsome Jack, former head of the Hyperion Corporation, sought riches for a reason he couldn't quite define. Something that drove him to control. So he outfitted a cruise ship with all sorts of appropriate resources - a wave pool, a roller coaster, flamethrowers - and prepared a ritual for unfathomable power. As I said, control.

He gathered twenty-five subjects from across the multiverse, using the blueprints to some sort of interdimensional transmission machine, and created a situation in which they would fight to the death for him. A simple set of rules and a little encouragement each week, and that would be that.

Or so it wound up being. See, Jack - or The Captain, as he preferred for as long as he could maintain the distance - tried to kick things off by killing the passengers their very first day. As I said, flamethrowers.

Some sort of malfunction, however, stopped the slaughter, and forced Jack to turn to his second option - actually going through with the same sort of exercise that Maelstrom had (or would? Time gets a little strange here.) before him. In the place of an Assistant, rather than Angel (who happened to be his daughter! What an odd coincidence!), Jack used Davy Jones himself as a proxy, declaring him the First Mate and setting up slightly ramshackle accommodations for the guests. But at least they had the same semi(?)-sentient vending machine with them!

And so, yet again, the pattern repeated. Weeks passed. Bodies began to pile up. Rather than execution by a simulation of someone close to each, culprits were fed to the kraken by Jones himself when voted out. The ship began to open up as the weeks wore on. Or... should that be "the week?" After all, the passengers quickly found that after each murder, time itself reset to the beginning of the week they had arrived.

A little conversation with Jones and a little investigation found out the cause - they were traveling into The Bermuda Triangle, with the aim of accomplishing some dark ritual. This, naturally, cast something of a shadow on the abundance of cruise ship amenities and luxuries. Over time, the passengers also began to find a number of strange puzzles left for them, built into the environment itself.

The third execution was the first to go wrong. Alice struck the Captain before being killed, revealing to the rest of the passengers the face (such as it was) of their kidnapper. Over the next few weeks, various passengers began to receive visions from a mysterious figure claiming to be able to save them - or at least to help them get revenge on Jack. The passengers also managed to make contact with Calypso, heathen goddess of the sea! Things were certainly moving in some sort of direction.

The sixth execution was even more eventful: Handsome Jack was killed. The passengers rejoiced, but... their celebration was short-lived as Jack's body rose, possessed by the true mastermind of the whole affair.

But, to backtrack, let's talk about the dead for a moment. After being devoured by the kraken, they all found themselves in the vast expanse of Davy Jones's Locker. For a long while there was little to do other than explore, picking away at shipwrecks among the desert, """led""" by the intrepid Guybrush Threepwood, who helped teach the dead how to be real pirates! Sort of. It was made a little easier when at least half of the population was murderers. But as the end of the ritual approached, the land of the dead became a little more lively. The ocean appeared, of all things, as well as a number of crabs and supplies. A boat even washed ashore, containing... well, mostly crabs, but. Eventually, all those crabs helped the dead move their intact ship to the ocean so that they could move towards escape! They even picked up their dead Captain, though... he wasn't exactly let go on his way, when all was said and done.

And finally, they met Calypso herself, in the flesh. She explained that she intended to take their ship back to the land of the living to buy the survivors enough time to end things. After all, all the diplomacy and debate a person can muster is only so effective in comparison to, say, an indestructible pirate ghost warship. But they figured out and executed a plan anyway.

Alright, back to the living. The ship finally made ground at a lighthouse, and the survivors had a precious small amount of time to look around and find out what they could before facing off with their ghostly current captor in the body of their former captor. They learned a number of things - that Davy Jones had hidden what information they had found through the use of puzzles since the true Captain was not very good at them, a curious book of rituals containing an even more curious poem about the parameters of a familiar blood ritual, voodoo dolls, and much more - and convened in the lighthouse to face the true villain of the exercise. Though they also gathered, with Jones's remote guidance, some parts to... something? With the promise that it would help later.

And soon enough, they were able to band together and draw out the true identity of their captor - the dread ghost pirate LeChuck, of course - and once they knew enough about him, and he drew them into direct combat? They put the parts together into the Ultimate Insult and let it blast.

And that was that. They met and freed Jones in exchange for their powers returned and passage home, which Calypso provided in a rather curious way - sending Carmen Sandiego, the first victim, home, where a ship much like the one they had just been on had teleported before...

They were reunited with the survivors of Maelstrom's second game (the first, well, Carmen was still working on), and that was that! Mostly.

Round 3

Once upon a time, a man tried to build his fortune at sea.