Pastelland Forum

This is a little forum game I've been working on. As I've said in the off topic thread, it's a text based adventure about an ordinary tourist who becomes stranded on a mysterious island.

Post your commands below, if you fancy joining in. No need for signing up, just post any command. I will be try to process all commands given after each post, though if two of them disagree with each other, I'll try to keep things simple.

So, without futher ado, I give you 'Stranded'. Hope you enjoy.

~~~~

Chapter One - Destination Uknown

The piercing grey light of morning plays across your eyelashes as you awaken, the chemical cocktail of sleeping pills still heavy in your mouth. Opening your eyelids just a crack, you see the dull fractal patterns of a garishly decorated airplane seat back, lit by dusty shards of morning sun, which streak violently across the cabin though the aircraft’s portholes. There is a loud, deep moan, and it takes a few second for your throbbing head to realize the sound is spilling from your own lips. Where are you? How did you get here, wherever you are? Your memories have been reduced to bright colourful smudges by the exotic physcoatives pumped into you, vague images of darkened rooms and glistening airport terminals. Nothing concrete, however, no matter how much you probe the dark recess of your mind. Start with the basics, you tell yourself, in an attempt to settle your now rapidly fluttering heart. Yes, the basics.

Your name, you remember your name, surely? After a few, fragile seconds, it comes to you. Martin, is your name, you recall groggily. Martin McCarthy. At least, that name seems pretty familiar. You like the sound of it, anyway, so until you find out otherwise, you decide to keep it as your name.

The next question to address is how you arrived inside the aircraft. You remember Copenhagen. You remember the international airport there. You remember the great glass caverns of terminals, and you remember the flickering orange lights of huge boards, displaying the names and times of flights. Arrivals or Departures, delayed or on-time. Those illuminated letters and numbers once must have meant so much to you, but now they’re meaningless. Just a jumble of pointless facts. You have no idea where you were flying to or from, and no idea why you were there. You just remember Copenhagen.

Looking around, and blinking heavily, you try to discern exactly where you are. Your head is beginning to clear of the pearlescent fog that clouded the corners, your vision sharpening into perfect clarity. Standing gingerly, you steady yourself on the cheaply moulded plastic armrest, and take a deep breath. The air reeks of mildew, and stale cigarettes, which is doing nothing for your throbbing head. Slowly, you take one fumbling step into the aisle, your footfalls disturbing the heavy dust on the cabin’s threadbare carpet, and the creaking of the floor snapping through the pregnant silence, now accompanying your heartbeat in a slow symphony of tension and expectance.

The window is covered in a thin film of mould and grime. You try to wipe it clean with the sleeve of the thin windbreaker wrapped around you, but despite clearing a thick gash though the dirt, the window is still too coated outside with the collected particulates of several decades of unpleasant weather for you to make anything but gently blurred silhouettes, surreal impressions of landscape and lighting that twist the reality outside into a thin film of dark streaks and twisted shapes. Wherever it is you are, it’s morning, or perhaps evening, and it’s cold. It’s very cold. You only notice the temperature now, a thin chill in the air. You pull the windbreaker closer around you, and listen to the gentle whistling of wind that you can hear rattling across the shell of the plane. Occasionally the tapping of rain dances across the metal, but it doesn’t do anything to clear the grime from the outside of the portholes.

What now? You thoughts are still racing, and clouded by a deeply ingrained sense of disbelief, heightened by shock and the throb of a migraine. A large part of you still believes this is perhaps some sickening dream, some nightmare kidnap scenario concocted by your wandering mind as you dozed gently from your flight from Copenhagen. Maybe even now your eyes are flickering beneath their lids, your lips silently forming wordless expressions as your brain whirrs through the surreal self-constructed landscape of your dreams. Perhaps the elderly women sitting next to you is giving your comatose form disapproving glances as you shift in the seat and murmur something about kidnap. Perhaps.

Of course, in the back of your mind, you know the truth. Your heart sinks slowly when you realize it. This is real. You aren’t dreaming, you aren’t hallucinating, and you really are here. Trapped in the cabin of a stationary aircraft, drugged and possibly even kidnapped, reality begins to set in. You have few memories and even less hope. You are stranded.

The real question is, what do you do next?

Command: examine the surroundings and look for any useful items.

Slowly, you step back from the window, and examine your surroundings more closely. The rows of darkened seats crammed into the cabin sit empty. The fabric is well worn, touched by hundreds of passengers, now cold and abandoned. The eight rows of four are split by a central aisle, and you begin to move up it, checking each row for any shred of evidence as to your location. You spot an aged travel magazine spread eagled on the floor beneath one of the seats, and pounce on it quickly, picking it up, and leafing through it. Bleached pictures of lush South American jungles and windswept Patagonian Pampas, all under the banner ‘Visit South America’, are your reward. The text is nothing but thinly veiled advertisement for Argus Airlines, evidently the company who once operated this aircraft. You roll it up, and slid it into your pocket anyway, however worthless it may be. It is a small victory, something gained in your fight for answers, however tiny.

At one end of the plan cabin is the door to the cargo section and the cockpit. At the other, another set of doors lead to more vague rooms. Probably a toilet, and a service area. The actual exit to the plane is there as well, a tempting beacon of freedom, but you resolve to finish looking around before you get out.

By this door to the cockpit, however, is a clipboard, hung on a small hook. It reads ‘horario reparación’, and goes on to detail the times and dates of various repairs that will be taking place, presumably to the plane. ‘Motor 1 - June 12’; ‘Motor 2 - June 22’; ‘Navigation Systems - July 12’; the list goes on, over several sheets of notepaper in fact. Some of the items have ticks next to them, but evidently the planes reconstruction is nowhere near finished. There is, however, something of more interest to you, on the floor below the clipboard. A red ball point pen, its plastic glints gently in the light.

After your examination of the front end of the cabin is complete, you stalk back to the opposite end, to check the remaining sections of the area. There is a carry-on baggage rack that is being used by whoever is repairing the plane as a tool shelf. A toolbox and several cans of oil are sat on it, along with other documents; diagrams of the plane and instructions on repair, mostly annotated in Spanish with red ball point. There might be something interesting among the coffee stained papers, if you would be willing to committing the time taken to reading through them all.

With your examination of the cabin complete, you ruminate on what steps you should take next. The exit door is ever present, but there is also the other sections of the plane to explore, which might yield other potentially useful objects or pieces of information.

explore the rest of the plane

(I'm putting this on hold until I get images sorted out.)