Pastelland Forum

ENIHCAMBUS wrote:

Sublevel 105 wrote:If you try, you could make good movie for any story.
;P

But movies aren't something artistic, that anybody can make if they got the talent, they are corporate business.

Oh Wait...

Movies are artistic by default, other thing is the director sacrifices the artistic part because he knows he already has a granted sum of big money and he won't even try, like superhero endless remakes.

SUBMACHINE 6
THE EDGE

2039

Getting to the Edge

The movie starts where the previous one left. The whole Mover sequence from the Sub6 game is shown, with Mike obviously in it. He gets intercepted by the system and arrives to the scanner room, in which he is asked to remove all metal and harmful items he has and drop them in a deposit. He can keep his bag with food. Then, the air pressured door opens before Mike's eyes and the credits start.

Meanwhile in the Corridor, Mollock is angry because Mike has escaped with the Mover, which he thought it couldn't travel through the void. In fact he didn't know what was a Mover, so he is also angry at Fake Mur because he didn't tell him anything about that. Fake Mur explains he only knows the Mover goes to the Edge, aka the Defense System of the Subnet, but he doesn't know anything more, as beyond the Corridor there is no more man made Submachine, instead there are locations self-created by the subnet.

Mike is decided to go after Mike and get him, and he asks Fake Mur if there is any way to go to the Edge. Fake Mur tells him the Mover can go back again to the Corridor, so they can take it too. But Mollock says there isn't any 'they', as he forces Fake Mur to stay in the Corridor/Lab so if he discovers something important in the Edge, Fake Mur can't take advantage of it. He is not bothered for if Fake Mur tries to get out, because he knows he won't. So, instead, he chooses Lisa, Hugh and Bob to accompany him.

In another place, a group of people arrives after being teleported with the 3-axis portal. When they talk about wondering where they are, we can see one of them carries some Cipher plate models, so we can deduce that people is the Ancient Section exploration team with the remaining undiscovered (til now) 4 Cipher plates. Their names are Sean, Sharon, William, Arthur and Jenny. Suddenly, the doors of the room close and they get locked inside, and they soon realize the room is a trap which could kill them. [I'm still deciding which kind of Saw-like trap could be here.] The trap kills Sean.

Exploring the Edge

Mike arrives to the cliffs. There, he starts solving puzzles and he sees notes written from previous people warning him about the DS being an unsafe place, and that Murtaugh didn't warn them well (the infamous 'Don't believe in his lies'), so he gets nervous, but he keeps exploring. Mollock, Bob, Hugh and Lisa arrive later, and they seem more lost, but eventually they find traces that Mike has been there, so they finally decide to keep looking more traces. They could have got him faster, but in a scene they get lost inside a section of the cliffs, so they have to solve other puzzles than the ones Mike made.

In one of the scenes, Lisa and Bob are alone together in a room, and they stop to rest. Before that, Bob has realized Lisa is so interested in meeting Mike, because as he is her brother, he wants to know more about the real Murtaugh. But Bob asks her if that's the only reason she wants to find Mike. Lisa keeps quiet and silent for a short time, a little bit anxious, and Bob finally implies that Lisa has some kind of attraction to Mike, and she finally admits she feels something for him, that has been developing over all the time she has been monitoring him. Bob highlights the awkward truth: she is in love with her actual brother. But as they've been separated since Lisa was less than 1 year old, it feels as if they were complete strangers. The duality of their relationship will start in this film.
Bob asks Lisa what happens with Hugh (they are currently in a relationship), and Lisa says she has never really loved him.

Ancient Section team, now with only 4 people, is still shocked from the death of Sean. They are horrified and unable to keep going, because they think there will be more traps. But they have to get out from there, and they continue, now with more caution, wondering which kind of place is that and why would a lethal trap be put inside. But in the least expected moment, Sharon gets trapped inside a net and [I'm still deciding which kind of Saw-like trap could be here.]. Sharon finally can't get out and gets drowned.

Mike, meanwhile, has get out of the cliffs and sewers, and he has taken a lift to the Secondary DS. There he deduces he is at the Edge, where Fake Mur told him he had to deactivate it. He learns there is a network system that he can get inside, with the connection pod he found previously. When he connects it to the first hole, while touching it, he is being completely transported to a virtual dimension, so he is actually inside the System. He finds a communication system that sends messages to the Lab, and he manages to send a message. Luckily, Fake Mur receives it, showing he neither had idea that could happen. Fake Mur is happy because he can tell Mike directly how to deactivate the DS. They, together, keep deactivating protocols with Mike inside the System.

Meanwhile, there are only 3 people left in the Ancient Section team. They start to develop the theory that Murtaugh himself has put the traps there, as last time they saw him he was showing signs of mental illness. What they don't know is that they knew the Fake Murtaugh, durgged with antidepressants due to the bad treatment Mollock gave him. Also, they mention they saw Fake Murtaugh some weeks ago, which implies that the story of this team in the traps is actually set some years ago than the present story of Mike. [I set the year to 2034, that's 5 years before present, but that's not mentioned in the film]. Jenny is the most angry one, because he was personally humiliated to all the other ones from Fake Mur and Mollock, and she wants to find him.
Later they arrive to a room with egyptian patterns, it's the Chronon. There, they play a bit with the hourglass stone, and they realize than when they rotate the wheel, the room next to it changes its appearance from well conserved to rusty, and they are not 100% sure but they think they're travelling in time. Suddenly, when the room is rusty, the stone breaks and falls, and they get trapped in their future. Yes, exactly in 2039. So now, every character appearing in the film, for the first time in the whole saga, is living in the same time as the rest.
Before trying to repair the stone to go back to their time, they decide to see if something in the Edge has changed 5 years after. And it hasn't. Jenny, Arthur and William arrive to the third trap, still in the sewers area, which [I'm still deciding which kind of Saw-like trap could be here.] ends up asphyxiating William. Taken by the panic, Arthur and Jenny run out of there, scared, and later they stop. Jenny sees Arthur is slightly injured, and as they're in a safe place, she decides to go get something to cure him. In her search, she eventually discovers the Mover, and sees it takes to the Lab, where sure there is some bandage to cure Arthur. Suddenly, a thought passes her mind: maybe Murtaugh is there, and she can get revenge...

Shutting down the Edge

Mike arrives to Primary DS. He keeps deactivating it with the puzzles and with help from Fake Mur, who during the time learns that the Edge has been self designed by the subnet to get rid of human presence. At some point, he gets horrified because he sees that since Mike entered the System, the System has detected him and there's an internal counter than when arrives to zero, will virtually delete Mike if he is inside the System, or take out all the oxygen in the DS if he is physically outside it. They realize that when there are very few minutes left, but at the end Mike manages to deactivate de whole DS before dying.

Leaving the Edge

At the Corridor, Fake Mur takes a break from helping Mike and he gets out of the computer room. When he does it, he suddenly faces Jenny, which is pointing at him with a gun. Jenny asks him why he 'put all those traps and killed all her mates', and Fake Mur tells her he didn't do it, and actually no one did it. It was the subnet itself, which created those traps to prevent humans to shut down the net. Also, he tells Jenny he's not the real Murtaugh, he's actually his brother, and he didn't mean to do all that harm to the exploration teams. Jenny, crying, asks why all of this is happening, and Fake Mur stays there, comforting her.

The scene cuts to Mike, resting in the final room, next to a vent, because he is exhausted. But in that moment, Mollock, Bob, Lisa and Hugh enter the room and find him. Mollock tells Hugh to give him the gun, and he does. Lisa asks why the scanner let them keep the gun, and Hugh says he doesn't know, only the scanner didn't recognize it. Mollock is now treating Mike to come with them or if he tried to escape, he would kill him. But unexpectedly, Arthur appears, who somehow managed to arrive from the low area to the higher one, and Mollock instinctively shoots him and kills him. Lisa shouts, and in all that mess, Mike goes quickly to the vent and opens it, to run away. He goes up the vent pipe and exits the outside, facing only a one-direction portal. In that moment, Bob and Hugh catch him and he can't escape. Mollock arrives and sees the portal. In an unexpected cliffhanger, his face changes and he says that if there are more locations beyond the Edge, he is already more advanced than all of them and he will explore them alone. At that point they all realize Mollock is mad and he won't care anymore about any of them. With everyone still digesting what Mollock said, he takes the portal and disappears to the unknown. After that, the portal is so old and rusty that breaks alone.
Lisa tells it's the moment to go to see Fake Mur and tell him about what Mollock did, because everything from now would be different.

~

CHARACTERS

Mike: main character (alive)
Fake Murtaugh: Murtaugh's brother (alive)
Mollock: Fake Murtaugh's raptor (alive)
Lisa: Murtaugh's daughter / Mike's sister (alive)
Hugh: Mollock's assistant (alive)
Bob: Mollock's assistant (alive)
Jenny: Ancient Section team (alive)
Sean: Ancient Section team (†)
Sharon: Ancient Section team (†)
William: Ancient Section team (†)
Arthur: Ancient Section team (†)

Clark Manfield: (state unknown)
James Manfield: (†)
Wolfgang: lighthouse keeper (†)
Ship Team: (†)
Basement Team: (state unknown)
Tomb Trap Team: one person (†)
Murtaugh: Mike's father (presumably alive)
Einstein: lighthouse cat (state unknown)
Sir Henry o'Toole: lighthouse architect (†)
Liz: Wolfgang's friend (state unknown)
Anna: Murtaugh's wife (†)

i said this was going to be huge

Glad to see you can still continue it!

SUBMACHINE 7
THE CORE

(From now on, real Murtaugh is just called Murtaugh)

2021

The first thing we see is different shots of the Real Murtaugh walking by some subnet locations, with dark lighting and concrete walls. A narrated voice that is himself is telling his dear Elizabeth that during the time he was resting from his amputation accident, he had the chance to be in peace with himself and distracted from work for the first time in many years. The only thing he regretted was not having taken care of the family. But he later explains that short after, he developed strange powers around the are where is former arm was. He could first move some objects a short distance, then he could levitate them, and then he could create a small magnetic field around it. he got so fascinated that he kept experimenting, until he came back to the Hut, only to see his family wasn't there.
He tells Liz when he came back to the submachines, his powers magnified, until one day it happened the best thing it could happen to him. At the time he's saying that, we see Murtaugh facing a wall and from his arm void, a neon-like cyan arm surges from his shoulder and creates a karma portal. Titles appear.

2039

Corridor

Mike, with the others (Lisa, Hugh and Bob), is at the system sending a message to Fake Murtaugh, telling him Mollock has escaped taking the rusty portal and leaving it unusable, and telling that one unknown guy is dead where they are, and what should they do. Bob says he could fix the portal electrically, and if the failure only depends on that, the portal could function again; but they need to get back to the Corridor. Meanwhile there, Fake Murtaugh reads the message and writes them to keep the corpse there for the moment and come back here to decide what they do. Jenny is next to him, and when she reads Arthur has died he breaks down and asks if Mollock has hurt more people like him. Fake Murtaugh says he's hurt a lot of people.
Suddenly they hear a strong noise at a room near him, and they go wtf. Jenny slowly opens the door with a gun pointed and he finds a guy with a scientist coat laying on the floor with a broken arc next to him. Before they say anything, Clark interrupts them and helter-skelter excuses him and tries to say he won't do anything bad and he seems so overwhelmed and worried. Then he looks at the broken arc pieces and he gets even more anxious, breathing quick and loud. Jenny re-thinks and tells him to calm down, that they will help him.

When they take Clark outside, he introduces himself and asks which year it is. Jenny says '2034' and Fake Mur says '2039'. Then Jenny says Fake Mur is probably right, and he now knows why he sees Jenny looking the same as when he saw her last time. Clark gets like so dramatic, and says he has travelled through time. Jenny cuts him and says 'So you can see at this year apparently time-travel is a thing, I myself have done it too'. Clark then points at the broken arc and says that he hasn't explained well: he has travelled in time and space, and that thing is the only thing that could take him the other side again, if it didn't break. So he's trapped in the future.
Both Fake Mur and Jenny look impressed, and Clark asks if they know the Root. They do, and Clark asks if it still exists and if Fake Mur can take it there, and he accepts. Jenny says he has new Cipher plates that could lead them to new unknown locations. So they take a Lab portal. Clark seems amazed at all that technology.

Meanwhile, Lisa tries to approach Mike more. It seems he gets along with her very well, and it seems he likes her too. Mike asks if his father is in the Corridor, and Lisa says yes, but quickly adds a 'but...', which she after says it doesn't matter. So Mike gets nervous and excited to see his father for the first time in almost 20 years.

At the Root, Fake Mur and Clark test the Cipher plates Jenny has got and they arrive to some new locations, which they find more rusty and decayed, slowly breaking apart, a thing they find strange. (Some of these locations are from SNEE)
When they come back to the Corridor, Mike is arriving with the Mover, together with Lisa, Bob and Hugh. First Fake Mur gets happy to see all of them alive, and then Mike asks if he is Murtaugh. He says that yes, he is, and Mike hugs him with emotion. 'I've been waiting so much time for this moment, to know who is my real father', says, and everyone gets uncomfortable. Then Fake Mur says 'Well, you know Lisa now, too', and Mike says 'Yes, and Hugh and Bob, they've been so nice with me', implying he doesn't know the whole truth. Later, when Lisa and Fake Mur are a moment alone, Lisa admits she hasn't yet told Mike she is his sister, and Fake Mur knows she likes him.

After Clark and Jenny introducing themselves and talking about the exploration teams, they talk about Arthur's corpse, and they find strange there isn't a kind of cemetery, or place to bury people in the subnet. They decide to bury him next to his other mates when they arrive.
Now they gotta go to the Core, where apparently Mollock is. They have to get him before he does any hurt to the subnet, but the problem is that neither him nor them know what is beyond that portal Bob has to fix. During the time he's been recluded, Bob has been trying to reverse engineer subnet's mechanisms, mostly without success. So this time he hopes to be able to fix that Edge portal. They take the tools, and the food, in case they have to be a long time outside the Lab. Then Fake Mur thinks a moment and tells Hugh will go explore the Root and Lisa will go with him, to be closer to the Corridor in case the others need to message to be rescued. Later, Fake Mur tells Bob he did that to keep Hugh distanced from them, because he thought he's problematic for the team, and kept Lisa with him because he didn't want her to be more together with Mike.

Core

On the way to the Core, Mike tells Fake Mur how excited and curious he is to have found him after all that time, and Fake Mur seems not to be able to tell him the truth. When they arrive to Arthur's corpse, they find he's not there. Bob, the only one he's been there previously, gets so confused and Fake Mur suggests maybe there are more people who have taken him, but Jenny denies the existence of more alive explorers. Later, Bob is ready to fix the faulty Edge portal, but they see it's been already fixed. Jenny tells what the traps did to them in Sub6, and she says maybe the subnet is building and fixing things by itself. Fake Mur arrives to the conclusion that they don't have any more control passed this point, and they should take the portal to see if it really leads to the Core. The main mission is to stop Mollock.
They arrive to the Sanctuary, where they find a new kind of gem and a kind of energy fields that block passing through where they are placed. But Clark isn't sure those fields are subnet-created. In fact, he recalls having worked with similar or equal type of fields back in his present, at the 60's. He mentions they're Von Toten's fields, named after his discoverer. They also find some traces of Murtaugh, which leads to think he's near them. There, they use the first karma portal, the Core door. The place they find leaves them astonished, they keep a lot of time admiring the surroundings of the Northern Palace and they start exploring the South Garden. This is the first Submachine movie thought to be screened in 3D. Some of the scenes there are beautiful, and as they keep exploring and learning, real Murtaugh's story at the Core (see below) keeps advancing through flashbacks. Fake Mur learns that since the Core breakdown, there are subbots here, whom he only had read about. They later explore the Northern Palace, and they find the Capsule, which they think it's the next step to find Mollock.
They decide to get what they need to open the Capsule, for what they need to go to the Observatory. In their way, Mike starts doing so many questions about the real Murtaugh, too personal that he doesn't even know them. So finally he decides to tell Mike he's not his father, and moreover Lisa is his sister, because she's also Murtaugh's daughter. Mike suddenly starts remembering all that happened in the Hut, and she remembers the little baby that he used to play with. He gets shocked and upset with Fake Mur.

Meanwhile, Hugh and Lisa are at the root with the Cipher plates, trying more rooms. But in one of them, one of the plates break and they can't go back to the first room, and they try to be back through another place. They end up finding a 3-axis portal, and they take it, but after taking it, they don't remember which coordinates were The Root, so they get lost. Although with the 3-axis portal they can go back to the Lab (000 and 001 aren't difficult to remember), they visit some SNEE rooms, and Hugh gets more excited to explore on his own, than following Fake Mur and the others.

Soon the group starts understanding Subnet is more alive than they think. After having read that Subnet is slowly degrading and breaking apart, Fake Mur sees they are a threat in the place they are now. And suddenly it's too late to get it: subbots are still controlling the Core, and the group ends up caught in another Sub6-like trap. But they're taken to a room where subbots are. They're not human, but their machinery ressembles one of them. They can produce human-like voices and they have a high AI, although they're not humanoids. They've caught them because they're the first humans to have penetrated the Core since the breakdown, and they want information. To debilitate the group, they get divided: Bob, Clark and Jenny are locked in a prison cell (875) and Fake Mur and Mike are left in the same room.

Although Mike is upset with Fake Mur, he tells him now they have to be united and try to escape the subbots.
Clark gets to escape the prison. He tells Bob and Jenny to stay there to not raising the alarms, he will later come to them. He solves the puzzles and recalls the Capsule, takes it and arrives at the Liz's Ship. There he finds Mollock, who he has never seen before, and in a panic attack, Mollock attacks Clark leaving him inconscious while he escapes. Later Clark awakes, and realizes what has happened. During his ascend to the last chamber, he finds new material to build a new space-time arc and the final part of the Murtaugh story at the Core is being shown along. He sees the green portal for the first time, but Clark decides to build the spacetime arc and later rescue the others.

Meanwhile, Bob and Jenny start to feel attraction for each other, and they end up having an intimate moment, fearing there are cameras and with the doubt about if subbots are really robots or they have human feelings. Fake Mur and Mike defeat the subbots and disconnect them, rescue Bob and Jenny, and they all head to Capsule. As they imagined, Mollock is already not there, they suppose he has taken the green karma portal. Before doing so, Mike suggests to visit the future with the arc, to see if Mollock has managed his goal (to control the subnet) and take advantage to stop him. Clark says he will do that alone, cause the arc portal is very unstable and he doesn't wanna put them in danger. He changes the time but leaves the place the same, to be more secure.

Clark comes back from the future, half a minute in the present time after having left, but actually he has been there almost an hour. The others ask what he has seen. He is calm, but a bit confused. He says basically the subnet has't changed at all, apparently. Then Fake Mur asks if he has seen Mollock, and Clark says: 'That's the strange thing. The one controlling the subnet isn't Mollock... it's Hugh'.
They all look each other.

Murtaugh's plot
Sometime between 2021 and the present
The Murtaugh story is presented as flashbacks through scenes during the movie, at the same time Mike's team discover things about the Core.
Very resumed: after discovering he can create karma portals which can teleport them to different areas, he decides to research more on that. His asociality has always made him not caring much about the family, so the only thing he does is writing a letter to his brother saying him to take care of their children and wife while he will be a long time away from home; without receiving any response ever, because he never knew his wife's death and brother's rapture.
He then discovers some of his mates at Kent's New Physics Research Centre (KNPRC) are working in the subnet, at the Core. He contacts again with them, after years of being away from working there, and he gets invited to show his new discovery. At first everyone was amazed, he could create small portals teleporting him through different short areas, but soon he could transport to longer distances, even finding new locations (SNEE, for example). He kept distancing from the workers there and soon he 'went mad' and didn't even talk to them or look at them, as if he was alone at the place. The Core started breaking apart and collapsing, and one time workers decided to stop him. One day, when Murtaugh was at the Lighthouse, they decided to pour sand over it, letting him trapped inside.
Murtaugh decided to create the big portal to escape the Core, but somehow he seeked revenge and tried to enter again. He did that through the Sanctuary, where he created the portal Door to the South Garden. He then saw how broken was the Garden, and realized the destruction he caused. He finds a scientist, and forces him and asks him where the others have gone. The scientists tells they've all gone to Liz's Ship, with her. When he gets there, he starts shooting them, killing some of them. The remaining ones escape with Liz, and when he arrives to the top, there is no one. Furious, he creates the green karma portal, his first one, the most powerful and long one, and he takes it.

~

CHARACTERS

Mike: main character (alive)
Fake Murtaugh: Murtaugh's brother (alive)
Mollock: Fake Murtaugh's raptor (alive)
Lisa: Murtaugh's daughter / Mike's sister (alive)
Hugh: Mollock's assistant (alive)
Bob: Mollock's assistant (alive)
Jenny: Ancient Section team (alive)
Clark: scientist (alive)
Murtaugh: Mike's father (presumably alive)
Scientists: people working at the Core (†, and some of them state unknown)

James Manfield: (†)
Wolfgang: lighthouse keeper (†)
Ship Team: (†)
Basement Team: (state unknown)
Tomb Trap Team: one person (†)
Einstein: lighthouse cat (state unknown)
Sir Henry o'Toole: lighthouse architect (†)
Liz: Wolfgang's friend (state unknown)
Anna: Murtaugh's wife (†)
Sean: Ancient Section team (†)
Sharon: Ancient Section team (†)
William: Ancient Section team (†)
Arthur: Ancient Section team (†)

SUBMACHINE 8
THE PLAN

2039

At the first scene, we take a look back to the group formed by Hugh and Lisa, who were last seen in the previous film exploring some SNEE rooms, but the plot later centered in the other characters and theirs didn't develop more. Now Lisa is getting tired of exploring, and worried about her other mates, who could be in trouble. She asks Hugh to get back to the Corridor, and Hugh finally agrees.
But when they're tracing their path back, they hear a sound of objects being moved in a hallway near them. They immediately think they're not alone, and, just as their guess was correct, they catch a man by surprise. The man turns back and faces them, his face first changes but then he smiles and he says: 'surprise!'. He is a resurrected Charles.

-

After the initial titles, we see Mike's group, still shocked at the recent discovery Clark has made. If the one who will take the control of the Subnet is Hugh, why are they following Mollock and not him? Mike thinks Lisa could be in danger, and now everyone starts to understand the temerous behavior Hugh was adquiring over the time he was recluded in the Corridor.
Somehow, they still decide to go for Mollock and they take the big green portal, although fearing they could be distancing more from Hugh and Lisa. But something goes wrong when they're travelling: the natural linear path they 'experience' when they're inside a portal breaks when all of them suddenly feel a strange force deviating them to one side. This is the first time that this happens, and when the group finally lands, they stare a moment at each other, paralyzed, asking what was that.
"I think we took another path", says Fake Mur, and they start looking the place. It seems like another part of the Core, as it is also 'suspended' within this black void. But it's not the same, it's another ambiance. It's a small island, or top of a mountain, with strange machinery and a small cabin docked into the rock. On the inside, they find several units of a strange device with 8 buttons and two electrodes. But none of them work. Clark tries to open a small thing in the ground, and suddenly it opens, throwing a green laser beam, that almost hits Clark. They don't know what would have happened if it did. Jenny deduces the hanging electrodes have to be put in a person's head, and then everyone is reacious to use the device, thinking it could harm its mind. But Jenny decides to try it, and get help from her mates if something goes wrong. Clark suggests Jenny to point the device, called navigator, to the beamer. She hits the first button but nothing happens, but when she tries with the second button, she suddenly disappears. Then everyone gets frightened because they don't know where she has gone and if she can come back, but after a few seconds she's back again with them, she tells she's just pressed the first button.

They understand the navigator it's another type of teleporter and every button leads to (at least) one fixed location. Once they recovered from the incident, they agree to explore the place, maybe finding traces of Mollock. They start going to where Jenny has gone, the second button, which she says it's quite similar. But while Bob is getting the navigators, he notices there is one for each of them except one. So Bob decides to wait for them. Just when they're gonna leave, Jenny can't help to be worried and kisses Bob, making an awkward situation in which no one knew about their romance.
After the group leaves, we see the camera distancing from Bob and focusing on a small area, in which we see Mollock hiding, with a navigator connected. He then presses a button and disappears too.

-

We get back to Hugh, Lisa and the newfound Charles. It turns out he didn't die when leaving the Lighthouse. He tells he was able to survive because he had the power to re-generate his wounds with a special power he got from the subnet energy (later, when Charles's not with them, Lisa confesses to Hugh that she was probably joking or he was mad, because the bullets were blanks. Then we see a flashback from the Sub 2 movie lighthouse scene where Mike awakened, but from Hugh and Lisa's point of view. It is revealed that both them were actually awake and of course they did know who was Mike, but they were worried because they didn't know who the inconscious bald man was. Lisa tells Hugh that Bob is waiting outside the Lighthouse with starter pistols, for if something goes different as planned. When Mike wakes up, they have to act as if they don't know him and discretely guide him to the top of the lighthouse. The whole event in Sub 2 movie was, therefore, staged, but the still unexplained Charles's presence somehow disrupted the plans, although they managed their goal at the end).

The couple soon notices Charles is very different from the first time they saw him. Now he's more secure and distant, paranoid and a little bit mad. He thinks he can manage to get to the end of the Subnet, thinking he will be the first person to do it, and therefore managing to control the whole system. During the days since the lighthouse events, he has been getting ammunition and preparing his penetration into the deep subnet, although he hardly knows how does it work and what is in it. But somehow, when explaining his plan, Hugh looks motivated to follow it, argumenting that Fake Mur and Mollock's plan was stagnant and weak. Charles and Hugh get along very quickly, but Lisa isn't very comfortable with the situation.

-

Meanwhile, Mike's group is exploring the locations. In the Cardinal Mosque they notice they have to first open the inactive beamers, because to get the buttons working a laser is necessary. Even Fake Mur can't understand what's the relation of the lasers and the navigator and what's the technology that's making it work, but he's very uneasy with some electrodes in his head. When they open the beamer to the third location and Clark teleports there, Mike looks the map on the Cardinal Mosque and sees there are seven lights and three of them are activated, showing three different superimposed maps. That makes him think while he tweaks the buttons, and when he sees the maps appear and disappear, he tells Jenny to go to the third location and tell Clark to come back. When Clark arrives, Mike asks him for the GPS he has. As they are in the subnet, it's not like a regular GPS, it just tells the geotags. Mike asks him if he can teleport, stay quiet and write down the geotags he sees. He does, and when he comes back again and shows them to Mike, both immediately realize. They're not teleporting to other locations, they're just staying in the same one. Somehow, the location changes as if there were alternate universes. Or that's what they think first, but that theory goes beyond any known law until the moment.

Still bugged, they keep exploring. They keep solving puzzles, until they arrive to the fifth location, or layer. Fake Mur recalls having read about the layers in the notes found in the Core. There, while the others look at the water in the entrance of the Temple, he explains the basic concepts and theory of the interlayer travel, trying to make it the easiest possible to be understood. They are just changing between layers of reality, and the limited structure of the location they are in is the Plan that they read about in the Core.

Somewhen between 2030 and 2039

While Fake Mur explains the interlayer travel, we can see flashbacks of Murtaugh creating the big green portal, and while travelling, realizing what he has done to everyone he knew. Overwhelmed by the guilt, he changes direction and creates another dimensional portal inside the first one, forming a knot. Then we see scenes in different lapses of time of Murtaugh creating the navigators and visiting the layers, putting special emphasis on layer 3, his native one. We see many destroyed places, and Murtaugh crying and regretting having created all those portals.

2039

Mike suggests maybe Mollock is in another layer just between them, and Fake Mur gets chills. According to the navigator, there are 8 buttons, but Fake Mur read once that Murtaugh told there were only 7. If so, what's that eighth button for?

They decide to explore the remaining two layers and if they don't find Mollock, they will come back with Bob to the first layer. But then, they hear a strange noise near them. Fearing it's Mollock, they go quickly, but there's nothing. Now they know he's there and they start a chase that will last until the end of the movie.

-

Lisa has been following Charles and Hugh, who are planning to find the real Murtaugh, continuing the search that Mollock started. They aren't afraid of Mollock and Fake Mur, because Hugh knows they know very few things about the subnet and they are much less advanced, and they're not an obstacle.

During their exploration, they also discover the karma portals. That's when they go back to the Lab to take some tools. They find their first karma portal there, which leads to the snow room. As they don't know anything about Murtaugh's arm, they think it's another machine-made portal. While Hugh gets confused about snow existing inside the Subnet, with no way of being able to form, Lisa suffers the effects of karma travelling. Somehow, it makes her dizzy and unwell.
They also visit the Study (628), where they also travel layers with the switching device, another kind of navigator. The difference is they still don't know a thing about the layers.

When Lisa realizes that Hugh doesn't actually want to come back with the others, she takes a hard decision. During this time, they've also been finding and solving puzzles, and in one of them, she sees the perfect opportunity to escape. They are at the Looping Sphere (917), which is known to be random, and when Hugh and Charles are distracted, she turns another direction and ends up in the portal room before them, but she becomes nervous and changes only the two final digits at random. She ends up in 966, the Altar. Then, she realizes what a crazy thing she's doing, but instead to reach the Corridor, she overcomes her fear and explores the karma portal she finds there. She travels difficultly through it, and she ends up in wiq, concretely in the Armory. Therefore, without knowing, she arrives at the Plan, at the layer 6.

-

While searching for Mollock traces, Fake Mur discovers some irregularities in some rooms. For a short moment, one can travel from one layer to another without using the navigator, only being there in the exact moment. This is discovered when Clark flashes quickly in and out of a sewer on layer 4. Fake Mur tries to take these small chances to see if he can transport Bob with them, to other layers. They've been visiting him from time to time in layer 1 to tell him the progress, but it would still be dangerous for him to travel without a navigator.

The small breaches just show how the Subnet is starting to collapse.

In layer 7, they read the note from the Bamboo Town, which tells the story of a woman visiting it with the interlayer travel. After reading it, they wonder if they're also travelling through time. And they start to wonder who could the woman be, and why did she know about the layers.

They end up at layer 5 exhausted, not having even coincided with Mollock at any time, and they finally manage to take Bob to layer 5 with them, when Fake Mur finds a small glitch where they are. Just after that, Mollock appears through the same breach, and Mike savagely jumps to get him, but he disappears again. Then a fast persecution takes place, with Mike following Mollock through all layers, destroying many things around them. Until they arrive to layer 6. Mollock and Mike suddenly see Lisa, Mike shouts at her but Mollock takes her and directs her to another small breach, going to layer 5. Mike arrives later and before he can do anything, Mollock points Lisa's head with a gun, preventing everyone to approach. A high tension moment happens before we hear a gunshot and Mollock starts to spit blood, letting Lisa go (who runs to Mike).

Fake Mur has a gun in his hand, and after shooting Mollock, he throws it to the water. Mollock is finally lying in the water, which slowly turns from blue to red around them.

Mollock asks Fake Mur why did he do it. Fake Mur suddenly lets all the rage out of his repressed body, and says words which he has been wanting to say from almost 20 years. He accuses Mollock of having ruined his life and having destroyed every single bit of happiness within him. He makes him notice all the pain that has inflicted to him and his loved ones, making him suffer. He also reminds how exploited he was, and how he tried to cover the more possible clues he had from Murtaugh to avoid Mollock to find him. All he did was to protect his brother, and finally he's happy that he won't be able to see him again.

Mollock says: 'I just... wanted to know...'

After saying that, Fake Mur spits on Mollock's face, saying 'I wish you find in hell all the pain you caused on Earth', and he starts crying, at his knees. Mollock says 'sorry', and dies.

Mike asks Lisa how did she arrive to layer 6, and she briefly explains her travel and what Hugh and Charles are they trying to do, so they must stop them. When Fake Mur recovers, they solve the last puzzle and head to the Temple door, leaving Mollock's body there, flooding the water with his blood.

~

CHARACTERS

Mike: Murtaugh's son (alive)
Fake Mur: Murtaugh's brother (alive)
Mollock: Fake Mur's raptor (†)
Lisa: Murtaugh's daughter / Mike's sister (alive)
Hugh: Charles's assistant (alive)
Bob: (alive)
Jenny: Ancient Section explorer (alive)
Clark: scientist (alive)
Murtaugh: Mike's father (presumably alive)
Charles: Subnet invader (alive)

James Manfield: (†)
Wolfgang: lighthouse keeper (†)
Ship Team: (†)
Basement Team: (state unknown)
Tomb Trap Team: one person (†)
Einstein: lighthouse cat (state unknown)
Sir Henry o'Toole: lighthouse architect (†)
Elizabeth: Wolfgang's friend (state unknown)
Anna: Murtaugh's wife (†)
Sean: Ancient Section team (†)
Sharon: Ancient Section team (†)
William: Ancient Section team (†)
Arthur: Ancient Section team (†)
Scientists: (†, state unknown)

two more - and I will finally be able to read it...

can't wait

next chapter is scheduled for april 2018

cool!
good I didn't start to read story. Or I would have to wait for two years.

RuloCore wrote:next chapter is scheduled for april 2018

serious? o_o

Vortex wrote:

RuloCore wrote:next chapter is scheduled for april 2018

serious? o_o