BloodNet – Elvis Lives!

Written by Will Moczarski

 

Before my next session of playing BloodNet I decided to consult the manual once more, originally to refine my combat skills. But then a chapter about “jury-rig components” which I had previously ignored caught my eye. It contained lists of items necessary to jury-rig certain weapons, armour but also electronic lockpicks and a cyborg. I learned that the tub, nozzle, and hose I got from that one kid in Central Park (I forget his name) will enable me to build a flame thrower. But the lockpicks and the cyborg were particularly interesting to me because they corresponded with two open quests of mine: the lockpicks may be vital in opening the locked door inside TransTech while the cyborg will probably enable me to finally download either Elvis or Charlie Flyer (or both of them). Two other sentences were also quite interesting to me: “If a jury-rig attempt fails, you stand a chance of breaking a component.” And: “One of your party members must have a tool kit for a jury-rig to be attempted.” Does one of my party members have a tool kit? I have to admit that I’m not sure.

For the cyborg I will need a cyborg body, a cyborg head, a cyber arm (only one!), a cyber leg (only one!), and a spark board. I never would have guessed the spark board had I not consulted the manual. The electronic lockpicks can be jury-rigged by carrying a lock dbase, a lockpick casing, and a diagnostic unit. Sounds doable, maybe I’ve picked them up already at some point. I also learn that the mysterious dermal filament is necessary for all sorts of suits – initial dispersion suit, refraction shield, electrolytic suit, inert rad suit, and arno suit. 

Another section about vampires in combat seemed pertinent as well but since I haven’t encountered any of them after the opening sequence (Sampson doesn’t count, right?) it may become important later on.

The medium is the message.

Anyways, it’s back to the streets of New York. I’ve made a list with some odds and ends last time, and that’s where I start. The first item on my list is “read Gerry Soo’s note”. That’s right, there was one guy hanging out at the Café Voltaire who alternated between three languages. His note, aptly, is written in the same three languages, and it says: 

“La curiosite seriez digne de recompense. 

J’admire ceux qui cherce la verite. Los

poderes te Cyril pueden ses usados

para bien o para mal. Welcher sacher

du dienst, kummert mich nicht. Gip

das wort mittler ein, um unseren

geheimnisvollen freund zu tressen.”

That’s bad French, bad Spanish, and bad German. Let’s see what Google translate can tell us about it: 

“Curiosity would be worthy of reward. 

I admire those who seek the truth. 

Cyril’s powers can be used for good or evil. 

I don’t care which thing (cause?) you serve. 

Type in the word middle to meet our mysterious friend.” 

Cyril is the name of some geezer also hanging out at the Café Voltaire. He’s some cyberspace genius and won’t talk to me face to face. I assume that Gerry’s note points me to his well. However, there is no well called “middle”. I try some synonyms and words with a similar meaning and come up with “medium”. That works. 

In the well I meet up with Cyril who’s floating around in a dragon soul box. He tells me that he senses an evil in me and wants to help me. He also implies that I might want to help that evil spirit from someone and he can help me stifle it if I give him “a material object belonging to whoever is at the root of this difficulty.” Now I admit that I skimmed over this too quickly the first time I read it and thought I might have to get some personal item from Van Helsing. I have since solved this puzzle but it also touches upon another bullet point so I’ll tell you about it below.

Rank these gangs in order of increasing machismo.

The next item on my list was “check out if there is a well called ‘noun’”. I got this from solving Benny Puzzle’s crossword riddle (see last post) but only understood the possible implications when I did my write-up. Now I was eager to check out the address “noun” and found myself interface to interface with a security ICE. This one didn’t just kick me out but asked for a security sequence. It even gave me all of the necessary hints. I won’t spoil this one for you so if you want to give it a shot in the comments, be my guest. Let’s say 10 CAPs for the first one who comes up with the correct answer. 

Suffice to say that this wasn’t too difficult and I was able to enter the well safely. Inside I found Charlie Flyer’s imagination as well as – after some searching – the Babel code. I remember that some posh woman in the Metropolitan Museum of Art asked me to get this for her daughter. When I give her the code she rewards me with 25000 dollars. That’s quite a lot even for this game. 

Milk and cookies kept you awake, eh Sebastian?

Bullet point number three was concerned with two locations I had been unable to enter: the cloisters and Trinity Church cemetery. In both instances I was attacked by quite strong opponents right away because they recognised me as a vampire. I went over my notes for some time before I noticed that one of the Nancys of the street gang that only consists of Sids and Nancys (know what they’re called? oh yeah, you do) had given me an Instapigment because I was so pale. Everybody who gets that I’m a vampire remarks on my skin tone so this must be the solution! I put on the instapigment and can now enter both locations unharmed. 

Trinity Church cemetery is a haunt (no pun intended) for vampire hunters who supply me with a stake and garlic. I can also pick up dirt and a coffin here but for the life of me can not figure out how to drop them both in Renfield’s place and rest in there as he suggested. Renfield is a weird little guy I came across at the Hellfire Club and who desperately wants to serve a vampire master, i.e. me. In other words, he is as fanatically devoted as the original R.M. Renfield from the Bram Stoker novel. The leader of the vampire hunters, one Louella Travesty, feeds me the clue that a vampire can only do evil when his body is intact. I don’t know if this is true or some misguided hunter lore but I’ll have to fight vampires eventually so perhaps it’s pertinent to remember this.

The Cloisters are quite a big location with six different screens. I meet a lot of Sirs, one Lady and one Archabbot Herschel there. They provide me with stakes, holy water, a stuff called Nosferatutam which makes my blood poisonous to vampires and even offer me their mythical soul blades. The problem is that I have to pass a mirror to get Sir Theodoric to give me the blades and that is kind of a deal breaker. I haven’t found a solution to this yet but I’ll try to tackle it in my next session. There’s still a lot to do before I’d actually feel stuck.

What happened to "red-clad whore"?

Another knight called Sir Anias tells me that he has recently lost his best friend Sir Randall to the vampires, and what’s more, he lost face by proving unable to retrieve his breastplate during combat. I don’t really know what’s worse for him and he’s desperate to get that breastplate back in order to afford Sir Randall a proper funeral. I’ll be on the lookout. In one of the other rooms there’s one Sir Helveticus who lost his younger brother Stewart Tolchinsky to the lure of the streets. He may be on red lifters and about 18 years old – Helveticus offers 25000 dollars if I find him. My first idea is that it could be that young drug addict in Central Park but I had him join my party because he’s a good jury-rigger and even brought his own toolkit. I assume that Helveticus would have recognised him or at least the other way around.

In the room depicted on the screenshot above there is a recluse and a seer called Sebastian who immediately sees through my Instapigment disguise and right into my soul. That may become a problem because according to one of the other knights Sebastian is the only one capable of performing the bonding ritual which makes the soul blades effective against vampires. So...I have managed to enter the cloisters but still need to convince two of the knights that I’m not a vampire (but it’s who I am!). Fortunately, I reread Cyril Thorpe’s offer at some point and figured that he might stifle my evil aura if I brought him a personal item of Sebastian’s. It’s not too much of a stretch because Sebastian’s precious rosary beads are lying right there in broad daylight and they must be good for something, right? It takes a bit of trial and error before I get it right because this game’s interface is not really made for use-something-on-something puzzles yet it contains a handful of them. The correct solution is to drop the beads at Cyril’s feet in real life, then talk to him in his well. He speaks some words of wisdom and effectively gives you a +20 protection against detect evil or something like that. It’s enough to fool poor Sebastian. 

I almost called this post “Moczarski Blog Post”.

Sebastian only tells me to come back with a soulblade, so it’s back to the mirror puzzle. As I said I haven’t solved that one yet so let’s just move on with the next bullet point: “Kill Ludwig Sampson and search his well.” Oh yes, that felt good. This time I gunned down Sampson quite unceremoniously, taking his Schonbrun 52, some Sinusoidal Pulse Gun Plans, and a Cyborg torso. In his now unprotected well I found a “Sampson Text File” which contained...the main quest, possibly? It says that to reverse the effects of vampirism I need to kill Van Helsing (my progenitor), have an exorcism performed by a holy person (mother Mary, I assume), and “possess Incubus to excise the vampiric aspect while he is rendered as a cyberspace entity.” Does this mean that vampirism can only be reversed since the advent of the cyberspace? No wonder that Sampson gave up on this piece of moon logic. It’s probably just the game designers’ way of tidying up the main quest but still: this means that I’ll have to find the lost children because they’re the only ones who know where I can find that Incubus. 

Moving on… “Kill Shock Maraud or get his dbase first.” You probably don’t remember this but there is this street gang (the game calls them “rage gangs”) hanging out in the Strawberry Fields of Central Park which in this game is a separate location from the park. They are holding illegal boxing matches using Bruce Kelly’s “Imagine” mosaic as the ring. When I talked to their leader Shock Maraud he told me to bring him a rimbus dbase before Van Helsing got there first. On my first few attempts I was unable to enter the well called “antibody” because I was apprehended by a very aggressive ICE right away. I gave up on it and soon Shock Maraud’s goons followed me everywhere, making me fight them over and over again every few hours. 

What this game needs is not more combat.

Having stepped up my cybergame in the wake of my visit to TransTechnicals headquarters I was now able to enter the well using my brand new level 4 cloaking chip. I found Charlie Flyer’s personality there as well as the rimbus dbase. When I took the dbase to Shock Maraud before the second day was over he happily took it from me and offered to join my party. When I declined he wasn’t too peeved but after a while the timer went off regardless and his goons still came after me. They must be this game’s random encounters. At least they are just as annoying. 

WHO’s a dead man?

The next thing I tried was to “Find a way to download ‘Elvis’ into a body of sorts”. I had encountered this “virus” in a Dragon Soul Box somewhere in the open cyberspace. He called himself Elvis and asked me to download him into a proper body somewhere. Now that I had consulted the manual about jury-rigging I noticed that I was already carrying a cybergenetic arm (an Ude Utsukushii 66), a cybergenetic leg (a Sheehy G), a cyborg head, and a cyborg torso. I was only short one spark board. I bought the spark board at Strongarm Tacktick’s and Dodge was able to jury-rig an Elvis cyborg. I then USEd the “Elvis mind” and to my surprise I had a new party member. 

She said she’d like to meet a boy who looks like Elvis.

Another one down. I also managed to “Find a way to open the locked door in the Nanotech lab.” Once I had found out about jury-rigging this was a no-brainer. I was already carrying the lock dbase and was able to buy the other items from one of the merchants, I think it was Strongarm Tacktick again. Inside the storage room I found fiber optic cable, a praxis 3000 deck, an Azrael Soul Box (you can see it in the pictures above already in all it’s flamboyant glory) as well as a Level 4 Cloak Chip. The TransTech cloak chip I got from killing the security chief also enabled me to visit one of the wells that had previously locked me out due to “incompatible hardware”, the one called “TTheat”. There I found Kimba West’s, Jason von Senden’s, Braque Picaro’s, Deirdre Tackett’s, and my own security records as well as a data cage key. 

I gave the cable to Kimba West who was thankful but didn’t really give me new clues. Also, I was now able to hire both Hakim Maghsoudi and Cisco Alvarez but so far I didn’t feel the need for even more talented deckers. The only two things I haven’t done yet are these:

• Investigate McCalaster and gather evidence of his extramarital affair(s).

• Enter the Inner Sanctum of the Hellfire Club.

Also, there are two new locations I didn't check out this time: a well called “blackwood” that Lazlo Greene told me about, and the Notional Labs at TransTech. Moreover, there’s a locked cabinet at Bellevue Hospital just waiting to be lockpicked, and the data cage key may be crucial for one of my  new bullet points: 

• Free Banks Verbatim. Banks was the guy “Zeus” had told me about in her NYU dormitory. I had forgotten all about him and only remembered his conundrum when I found the data cage key.

• Trick Sir Theodoric into thinking that I’m not a vampire to get him to give me his soul blades. I’ll need to make my reflection visible in the mirror. I’ve got two sets of HoloFilm. I guess that one is for McCalaster. The other one might be for this but I’m not sure how filming works in this game. We’ll find out next time.

Keeping track of everything is becoming a tad tedious so I have spent most of this session’s time restarting the whole game and filling in a very detailed Excel file. It has made things a lot easier and I haven’t run out of things to do but I’m not quite as enthusiastic as last time and don’t even know why. Maybe the game has already overstayed its welcome. Or will the grand finale compensate for everything in the end? Be sure to read the CRPG Addict's latest coverage, too!

Session time: 3 hours 30 minutes
Total time: 11 hours