Serpent Isle, Day 16

This will be a shorter entry than I typically produce, due to the fact that this part of the game was somewhat buggy...The bulk of this day was spent in he Castle of the White Dragon, which was full of clever traps and mocking insults from my companions as they tried to destroy me. Interestingly, the first encounter I had was with the king of the White Dragon himself, who I was nonetheless able to destroy with ease. Most of the castle involved finding keys in assorted locations; I should add that I didn't explore anything close to the entire castle! I'm not sure why, but I never made it in the dining room or kitchen or one of the studies; I never found the keys, but I remember from my first effort playing the game that those rooms were at least interesting...In any case, I went downstairs as soon as I could, and made the remarkable discovery that if I were killed by monsters in the game, I would be spontaneously resurrected with Iolo, Shamino, and Dupre, even though their evil counterparts were wandering around the basement of the castle! This fact incouraged me to destroy them as quickly as possible and get out, lest something else go wrong.

Killing them proved to be fairly easy. Trying to fight them outright simply got me killed, so instead I cast mass sleep and killed them. When resurrected, they were all contaminated by Chaos and refuse to talk to me except to say random insane phrases. Guess what I had to do? That's right; off to solve three more shrine quests! At least these are not as boring as the tedious Ultima V shrine quests. Anyway, I had already done the quest at the temple of Discipline, so I merely fetched more water. At the temple of Ethicality, I had to give up some gold and also fight Batlin to the death, and save a man from some flames. I failed the gold-giving-up test once because I failed to notice I had some gems in my backpack. The guy at the test refused to let me take it again that same day, so I simply reloaded an old game and re-took it. The temple of Logic required that I navigate a maze (kind of an annoying maze, too) and then solve a "murder" mystery, of who killed one of the automotons and stole his key.

I forgot to mention another bug--after their crazy counterparts were healed, my companions immediately joined me instead of hanging out at Monkey Isle. So I basically had to carry around a bunch of insane buffoons to these temples. Dupre was cured quickly, but at the temple of Logic, Iolo died in one of the maze chambers, and I had to fetch the water and resurrect him to cure him. Right after I did that, a random monk appeared to me and announced Xenka had returned, and I was whisked off to Monk Isle to chat with a very grouchy ex-farmwoman. She complained about the people in Moonshade, and asserted the justness of Lord British and his virtues.

I wish I could add a section on Day 17 here and do a combined day, but unfortunately too many interesting things happened on that day so I am stuck with this rather lame entry. I am happy, however, to report that I've broken my monthly-entry record since I began working! Oh, I just remembered something I can talk about...a decent part of the second half of this day of Adventure was spent trying to find anything in the Isle of Crypts. Apparently, it turns out you need the blackrock serpent of balance (yet another random quest item) before you can get anywhere, but nothing in the game tells you this fact. I had to check a walkthrough after a great deal of frustration (there is a plaque that reads, "Stand here to continue in balance" and I stand there but nothing happens, argh!).

As a final way to add some space to this entry (so I can jam this last screenshot in, mostly), I'll note that I had to kill a whole lot of jesters, each of whom had one lonely piece of garbage in their inventories.