tl;dr I once applied to entranceway
Feb. 27th, 2012 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blimeyjamwallsDaniel here isn't in Entranceway any more, but PFF WHATEVER I am c/ping my app into this journal because I like it and I do what I want. This was originally written on October 2nd, 2010.
Name: Caz
LJ:cazrolime
E-Mail: hobbitesque-at-gmail-dot-com
IM: rianofski
Character Name: Daniel
Series: Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Timeline: The final sacrifical chamber, right before the confrontation with Alexander.
Canon Resource Link: Amnesia is an indie game and doesn't have its own wiki yet*, but here's its Wikipedia page and its page on TV Tropes.
*Except now it does: Daniel's page
Character Background: When we're first introduced to Daniel, he's staggering around a castle in the dark, struggling to remember his own name. But don't feel too sorry for him until you know what else he's forgotten.
To bring everyone up to speed, we need to back up a little. To the tune of three months, in fact. In May of 1839, Daniel was involved in an archaeological dig in Algeria, North Africa. It's not specified what position he held, but he did have enough clout to order around a team of men (though the expedition was led by a Professor Herbert of the British Museum). He probably should have had one of them take the first steps into the tomb they uncovered, especially since one particular chamber looked suspiciously ancient even compared to the 4th century architecture around it. But glory comes before safety measures and Daniel strode right into the chamber, only to find himself trapped inside when the great slab door fell down.
He freaked out for a while, but then after he'd all but collapsed he realised that the darkness of the tomb had been split by beams of enchanting blue light. He followed them to their shining source and put his hands around it, and straight away his mind was assaulted by visions of "spiralling towers, endless deserts, and impossible geometry".
The next thing he was aware of was the sound of grating stone; he was rescued, and in his hands was a stone orb, shattered into pieces.
Professor Herbert insisted that Daniel go home to London, in case he took a turn for the worse and endangered the dig. He had family in London, and though his terms with his parents might be charitably described as distant, he was very close to his sister Hazel. Back in Mayfair, more than a month later, Daniel was going through his belongings when he stumbled upon his diary of the expediton and the remains of the Orb, wrapped in a cloth. Oddly enough, the shards didn't even begin to fit together. Wondering if he'd imagined the whole thing, Daniel began observing the shards, and noticed something even odder: they seemed to change a little in shape and colour every time he looked at them.
Surely it was an optical illusion. But no, when he took careful measurements, his suspicion was confirmed: the shards were shifting.
He was understandably a bit freaked out, and consulted a prominent geologist called Sir William Smith. Not long afterwards, Smith was killed, and Daniel received word of Herbert's expedition being attacked by something unknown. Daniel began suffering horrible nightmares of a voice from the abyss, calling to him. Almost obsessively he tried to reconstruct the Orb; at last, the knowledge of how to fit the pieces together came to him as if whispered, and he found that once in place they joined seamlessly with no need for adhesive.
Daniel's level of freaked-outness was getting pretty high by now; he borrowed (read: snuck into his office and took) Herbert's book of contacts and made touch with them regarding the nature of what they'd been digging, hoping for some answers, any answers. He also spoke to Professor Taylor at the London Museum, asking him about Orbs; before long Taylor, too, was dead. Even Daniel's doctor died, and the way he describes it makes it sound like he found the body: torn into pieces and scattered about, the skin boiled off. Things were all sort of going downhill.
But then a letter arrived from a baron in the Kingdom of Prussia. Daniel had gotten many replies from Herbert's contacts by then, all of them varying degrees of useless, but this one was different. It didn't pontificate about artefacts or mock him for old-fashioned superstition. It simply said:
I know. I can protect you. Come to Brennenburg castle.
Alexander.
Daniel didn't know what to make of it, but it was enough to make him track down the castle and travel there. He was desperate to stop the - the curse or creature or whatever horrible thing it was - both for his sake and for the sake of the innocent men who'd died. He writes in his diary that he blamed himself for the deaths.
Brennenburg Castle and its baron impressed him very much: the castle for its majesty and mystery, and Alexander himself as a gracious gentleman, very much a Renaissance man. He actually felt safe, if only for an evening. In his diary he mentions Alexander's "strange servants", but doesn't comment on any horrible deformities, so perhaps they were more human-looking when he arrived or kept their injuries hidden. He does call them "a quiet lot", which would be an odd way of putting it if he was aware that their jaws were sewn to their chests.
Daniel's nightmares by this point were so severe that he could only sleep with the help of sedatives. Alexander heard his screams in the night, and must have realised how close the Shadow really was. Wait, what Shadow was this? Well, he sat Daniel down right there and explained that Orbs are massively powerful, and if the one who finds it cannot best it, its shadow will follow behind him like a sluggish beast, killing anyone and anything in its path until it has reclaimed the Orb.
Welp.
Daniel's suggestion was to throw the Orb away, but no: Alexander said that he would still be a part of the Shadow's path to it, and would therefore still die. Daniel's only chance was to banish the Shadow for good with certain rituals which, luckily, Alexander knew.
How come Alexander knows so much about Orbs? How come he's putting himself on the line to help Daniel? That's for him to know and you to worry about.
Daniel seems a little reluctant, in his diaries, to embrace "what I can only describe as magic". But he sucks it up and admits that he expected to have to deal with the supernatural, seeing as the supernatural has pretty much been forced upon him already. Over the next few days, Alexander took Daniel on tours of his many scientific workshops, he prepared for the rituals they would need to perform, and the two of them drew up plans to brace the ancient castle against the arrival of the Shadow.
Nearly a week after Daniel's arrival at Brennenburg, Alexander took him to the Inner Sanctum and unleashed a little of the Orb's power with a ritual meant to channel its power into them. It was the first time Daniel had seen what the Orb - or as he now calls it his Orb - could really do beyond making a nuisance of itself.
It burst into a blue, fiery light, filling the entire space of the Inner Sanctum with its glow. The experience was a repeat of what he'd seen and felt back in that creepy ancient tomb: "a mad whirlpool of impressions", weird visions and memories too alien to make sense of. He was terrified and fascinated in tandem, and would have stepped forward to take the Orb had Alexander not put a hand on his shoulder to hold him back.
Sadly, all this was relevant to the Shadow's interests, and its giant meat tumours started bursting through the walls and staining the blue light red - until Alexander covered the Orb with a cloth, ending the ritual. Apparently that was a sign that they'd run out of time.
The very next day, Alexander prepared the first warding ritual. Daniel was by now actively wondering just what the baron had to gain from helping him, because c'mon, you don't put yourself in the path of a deadly vengeful scourge out of idle curiosity. But if he planned to ask, it's a fairly sure thing that what happened next was big enough to blow the notion out of his mind.
See, here's the thing. The Shadow is all about slaying all those in its way. So to keep it at bay? It's a simple deal. Throw it someone else to distract it. A life for a life.
Better still, because Daniel was the fool who'd inadvertantly claimed the Orb, it was Daniel who'd have to wield the knife.
Alexander told him that as a baron, it was his responsibility to hold and punish criminals in his dungeons. Alexander offered him a man - a murderer, he said. And Daniel, desperate by this point, was worryingly quick to trust him on that. It wasn't the easiest choice, but if he could save his own life, and the life of the guy who was saving him, if he could do that by killing a criminal who anyway was condemned to death -
He went through with the ceremony (paint the man, cut the lines) and then afterwards (watch the blood spill) spent a good while freaking out (let it come) at himself and the whole situation. Alexander made all the arrangements, he wrote, Alexander said it had to be done. What else could he do? What else could he do?
The ritual which would get rid of the Shadow once and for all would take some time to prepare. Until then, the warding ritual had to be repeated, day after day. But they were all criminals, murderers and thieves, it was justified, it was justified.
And then Alexander began to teach Daniel to extract vitae. They'd need it, he said, in the final ritual. He could point to it with an accuracy that was preternatural. It was found in agonised blood. He showed Daniel the rack and the wheel, the bronze cow and the iron maiden.
Sometimes they protested that they didn't do anything. But that's exactly what a criminal would say, isn't it?
They needed more prisoners for the final banishment ritual. In mid-August, Alexander and Daniel, now quite the little apprentice, rode out in Alexander's coach to a small settlement where they kidnapped a dairy farmer, his wife and their two children. Out of desperation and desensitisation, and a ruthlessness that he'd only recently realised he possessed, Daniel went along with this rather unsavoury plan completely until one of the young girls escaped. He ended up chasing and killing her. It was not pretty. It was not something he wanted to consider himself doing.
It threw everything into question. How could he have done this? Were the criminals he'd killed, tortured, even criminals at all? How much could his own murderous life possibly be worth?
Not that much.
I'd like to be able to say that he accepted full responsibility for his actions, but he's a bit of a dickface so instead he blamed everything on Alexander. But he refused to take part in any more rituals, and since those had been his only hope, he basically gave up on the idea of saving his own life. Instead, he became determined to pay penance and redeem himself by killing Alexander and thus ending all the torture and stuff that went down in this castle of doom.
Not that he told Alexander this. The accounts blur a bit. According to Daniel's diary, Alexander left him high and dry to face the Shadow alone; according to Alexander, Daniel declared that he'd face it himself. Either way, Daniel vanished off Alexander's radar, because there was another part to his plan. He couldn't or wouldn't deal any more with the memories of having killed, the memories of having tormented, the memories of all the people who'd died either by his hand or by the Shadow's claw. And so he'd stolen a dose of the Amnesia potion sometimes fed to prisoners when the torture failed to produce vitae.
Just in case the drink was super effective, Daniel wrote a short letter to himself. It explained what was going on in the vaguest possible terms: he was hunted by a Shadow, he was doomed, he had to kill Alexander and redeem himself. Just the basic, vital stuff he'd need to know in order to carry out that task. Then he chugged the Amnesia drink and was catapulted into that introductory cutscene that was mentioned so long ago you've probably forgotten about it by now.
Though he meant to only destroy the memories of his crimes, the way he's staggering about saying "My name is... is... I am Daniel" kind of implies that he's having trouble hanging on to anything at all. He goes wandering through corridors, wobbling alarmingly, before he recovers his wits well enough to get his bearings. Memoryless, all he can do is wander the creaky, creepy castle corridors in a state of some confusion.
Castle Brennenburg is quite literally falling to pieces: huge pillars lie where they have fallen, banisters and staircases have crumbled, furniture lies broken and strewn about. The place was already in pretty poor nick, but the outright destruction is the fault of the Shadow, which is already close on Daniel's heels. He follows a trail of improbable rose petals, through dusty corridors filled with lamps blown out by eldritch winds and doors that fling themselves mysteriously open. And here it behooves the narration to mention that Daniel suffers from a rare and tragic complaint known only as a Sanity Meter. That is, his level of sanity will rise and fall depending on how many frightening things he has endured and whether he's been particularly successful in his endeavours lately. The short version: the more monsters he's been stalked by, the more likely he is to hear cockroaches skittering in the walls.
Anyhow, before very long Daniel has located (a) a useful oil lamp and (b) the letter to himself, from himself, which he left behind in his confusion. Armed with... not very much knowledge at all, what choice was open to him but to carry out its instruction to kill Alexander? (Well, several options including "not kill Alexander" and the ever-popular "look for an exit", if you want to be picky about it. But who can a man trust if not his mysterious amnesia-potion-quaffing past self?)
So Daniel sets off on his long journey to the Inner Sanctum, where the letter promises Alexander will be. He seems to be trapped in one wing of the castle, until he finds a lever which causes a bookcase to swing out, permitting him a route to the Entrance Hall.
It turns out that the Amnesia drink is an imperfect potion. As he walks through the crumbling Hall, Daniel experiences a flashback: he remembers a conversation between himself and a man with a resonant voice. The man - whom he calls Alexander - is leading him through the castle, telling him the way to the Inner Sanctum. They sound like they were on perfectly good terms, but who's amnesiac!Daniel to judge?
Downstairs is something disturbing: his path is blocked and choked with what looks for all the world like stretched meat. It's tough and pliant, and resists all attempts to break it. Either it's a sign of eldritch horror, or some butcher really needs to rethink his display.
A woman's screams for mercy lead Daniel down a corridor, but he loses the sound and finds himself uncomfortably close to another corridor that, swear to God, is breathing at him. That's so not the direction encouraged by a sane mind, so he retreats - only to run right into a grille in the floor, several feet beneath which is water that snarls and splashes. Daniel then blunders into a laboratory, where he finds evidence that Alexander was attempting to alchemically produce vitae, though sadly for all those prisoners, all he succeeded in inventing was a cleaning solution. A cleaning solution that happens to provoke a violent reaction in organisms.
Sounds like a useful thing to have when you need to get past a giant flesh blob.
While he searches for the ingredients, Daniel learns just where the meat is coming from: as he tries to open a door, the very stones of the castle warp and groan, and that same red flesh grows out of the door like a tumour. Suddenly, that door gets a lot less inviting. Speaking of creepy things, the growling and moaning Daniel hears as he explores is a little disconcerting, too. And the grand piano playing? Hey, maybe demon monsters like a little light music of an evening.
Now, Alexander wasn't the only one leaving notes around. Pages from Daniel's diary are scattered about as though someone used it to throw a confetti party, and thus he's able to learn about his own past: the dig under Professor Hubert, the Orb, the deaths that followed him. Piece by piece, using the notes he finds and the audio (and sometimes even visual) flashbacks he's still having, he starts to remind himself.
No doubt deeply, deeply weirded out, Daniel presses forward, advancing through doors both secret and regular-flavour, and hiding in wardrobes when footsteps get too close. There are written accounts galore; for instance in a glass case, as though they were so amusing that Alexander just had to display them, are pages from a book about cool rumours that travellers in the area should totally check out. Some guy called Agrippa who visited and later denied it; grotesque quasi-humans who steal livestock; and the Baron, immortal! Who could imagine such things!
I won't go through every note and every flashback, but suffice it to say that the Baron does not have great stores of the milk of human kindness. Heck, it gets increasingly evident that he isn't even human, and that he progressed quickly from alchemy to dogs to people in his quest for a supply of vitae. Oh, and he locked some guys in a cellar and fed them poisoned wine that made their bones grow out through their skin. Nice bloke.
By the way, the castle is still growing splattery, pulsing tumours. Tumors which invisibly slash at Daniel as though cutting him with blades. Don't fret, it's just his friendly neighbourhood Shadow, following him no matter where he goes.
Daniel concocts the solution, chucks it on the meat blockade and ventures forth once more, into the Distillery and thence to the Archives, where - oh shit all that water wasn't there a second ago, and oh shit the walls are suddenly covered in stretched-out tumours, and oh shit there's something snarling and splashing and coming towards him very fast -
Yes, the Shadow has decided to add "shallow water" to the list of neuroses that Daniel is going to have to explain to a shrink later on. For now, all he can do is jump from crate to crate when he can, wade really really quickly when he can't, and throw human limbs far away into the water to distract it. Why are there human limbs lying around down here? You seem to have forgotten whose castle this is. How is Daniel not a gibbering wreck at this point? It's a close thing. It's a very close thing.
Gee, seems like the only thing that could be worse would be, say, something loud and horrible chasing him down flooded corridors too fast for him to look back at it or even pause for a second.
Just as an academic example, you understand.
After this harrowing chase scene, Daniel finds himself in the back hall, a soothingly-lit and quiet place where he finds a fountain shaped like a baby's face on a giant rearing centipede with two carved legs sticking out of the pool at the bottom as though a woman drowned in there. You know, calming zen kinda stuff.
In a room off this hall is something awesome, something you hardly even see anywhere: Alexander of Brennenburg has a freaking passenger lift. A genuine ascending room - how neat is that? Admittedly, it's more broken than Daniel usually likes them, but he can fix that up quicksmart as soon as he's hunted down the mechanisms and worked out what's gone wrong. Because he's a mechanic suddenly I guess.
Whilst he searches for the relevant equipment, and then for the spare rods and cogwheels and so on which will fix it, Daniel runs across such delights as stuffed dogs which died to further Alexander's quest for vitae, and a cupboard full of human skulls. He also has his first really close brush with one of those strange servants of Alexander's; let's just say that they're not on the friendliest terms with him, and that hiding in wardrobes is something he's just going to have to get used to.
Remember that woman who was screaming earlier? Down in Storage, her sobs can be heard, though any attempts to locate her are fruitless. Perhaps she's just a mirage, a relative of the insectlike skittering and the grinding often in Daniel's ears.
I wasn't exaggerating when I told you the castle was falling down; Daniel has to mix an explosive and blast away the results of a cave-in before he can proceed. And in the unnaturally dark room beyond it becomes evident that, yeah, the woman's voice probably wasn't real, because all of a sudden Daniel is having a series of loud and disturbing audio flashbacks to -
Oh hell, that's the girl he killed. That's the actual moment of her death, heard out of time and out of context and leaving him to wonder just why the hell he's hearing murder in the first person.
He'll work it out.
When he returns to it, the lovely calming back hall is choked with massive tumours and its fountain now spits blood instead of water. Also there's a corpse in it out of nowhere. So in summary, not such a calming place any more. On the bright side, despite having been chased hither and thither by horrible monsters with their jowels stapled to their shoulders, Daniel manages to fix the elevator and begins his triumphant ride downstairs!
Except that it's hard to be triumphant when wood and plaster walls are suddenly sickly with the Shadow's stretched flesh, and when there's a thick, infinitely nasty snapping sound somewhere above your head.
Interesting fact: it was not until 1853, fourteen years after Daniel's misadventures, that inventor Elisha Otis would demonstrate an elevator with a safety device to keep it from falling in case of a cable breaking.
The ascending room plummets.
They must be near the bottom of the shaft already, because Daniel survives the drop with only some cuts and scrapes and a whole lot of dizzy feelings. It's all up in the air whether this is a good thing, though, because now he's in the castle dungeons, and you know the cliche of horrid dark dank dripping dungeons full of dragging footsteps and the odd distant shriek? Cliche is the farthest thing from your mind when you're actually walking around in one of those places.
The wandering monsters that are Alexander's servants have stepped up their efforts to find the poor chap. They can walk quietly when they want to. There are quite a few close scrapes. And as he moves around, Daniel is still being assaulted by memories - only now they're getting darker, taking a cue from his recollection of the girl's murder. He hears himself bursting into a cell and demanding to know where an escaped prisoner went, and then chasing her through the stone hallways. And that's before he even reaches the torture chambers, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
A tunnel, dug by that selfsame prisoner, gives him access to the lower part of the dungeons. There he finds a kitchen full of rotting pig carcasses, and a barrel of bright green acid, which funnily enough is just what he needs to get a padlocked door open.
Daniel finds himself descending into the sewers, which can be used as passageways except for the fact that they're (a) flooded and (b) full of poisonous fungi (aren't flashbacks useful for warning you about these things?). If he wants to get to the Inner Sanctum, he's first going to have to drain the water, and then he'll need some way of protecting himself from the poison. Like an antidote, or a protective mask or something.
Sadly, Alexander now becomes aware of Daniel's presence. He sounds sort of confused more than anything else, as if he can't quite grasp why Daniel's running around his castle pulling levers and things, but the possibility's always there that he is bluffing. Daniel has heard his voice before in the dungeons, saying things to the effect of "he escaped? Where is he now?", but that has a pretty much even chance of being (a) actually Alexander or (b) our dear protagonist taking a short trip off the rails.
Anyhow, Daniel has a grand old time splashing about in the gigantic stone cisterns, turning the wheels which will drain the sewer and lowering bridges to let him access more wheels to drain the sewer more. Part of this involved visiting the morgue, which is always a fun holiday destination, especially when there are dragging bloodstains on the floor, pentagrams on the walls and a whole host of bodies ranging from skeleton to fresh corpse to choose from!
Alexander chimes in to be creepy at his erstwhile apprentice: "I hear you breathing, Daniel. Do you hear me? Have you changed your mind?" It's not explained exactly how Daniel can hear him; there are pipes in the castle which channel screams and sobs from the torture rooms to the prison cells, but why they'd lead from the Inner Sanctum to the Morgue is anyone's guess. Though it's fairly heavily hinted by now that the baron isn't human, so perhaps he has his own ways of making himself heard.
Daniel finds a note in the Morgue, detailing the fact that Alexander had found an antidote to the poisonous fungi down in the sewers! Or, well... let's put it in his words:
The vaccine enabling my men to work in the fungi ridden sewer is a definite success ... note that an injection of vaccinated blood will work as a shield long enough to pass the sewers without any risk of infection.
So now Daniel has to protect himself from a poison using a vaccine that will stay useful for a limited timespan and then stop working (sort of like an antibiotic). Fucking medicine, how does it work?
The best part, the absolute best part, is that Daniel has to get that vaccinated blood from a day-old corpse lying on a slab. By drilling a hole in its skull and then sticking tubes in, and jabbing himself with the result. Pretty much immediately a shuffling servant comes bursting in, all freaky and jowly, its limbs not so much supported as replaced with rusty medical braces. One can only assume that it wants to ask Daniel what the hell he thinks he's doing sticking himself with strange blood without even checking out its blood type or anything, but its good advice goes unheeded as Daniel runs away, terribly fast.
He's drained the sewers now... well, at least enough to travel through them. They're still drippy and flooded and miserable, and we all remember what happened the first time Daniel had to wade through creepy water. Even worse than the potential water monster is the very definite presence of those damn servants of Alexander, even down here.
And speaking of Alexander, he's still communicating: "Turn around at once! You are carrying the Shadow with you!" Needless to say Daniel doesn't turn around, because uh, hello, he has a mission to complete here and it involves Alexander's head on a stick.
But the journals he's found, and the things he's heard... he's starting to have trouble placing all the blame at Alexander's door. Especially since he now finds a diary mentioning his own very first murder at that very first warding ritual, only ten days ago.
You remember we mentioned Agrippa perhaps visiting at one point? There's been evidence lying around that he did indeed visit the castle, that he somehow betrayed Alexander by keeping him from passing through a gate, and that Alexander saved him from death but not from being paralysed. And what should be down this staircase but a corpse, starved and malformed with a gaping wound of a mouth, hanging upright from many chains - which raises its head suddenly and introduces itself as Agrippa.
Jeez, even the friendly characters seem hellbent on giving Daniel nightmares.
He's fond of his Biblical references, rambling for a while about Daniel in the lions' den and great Babylon falling. Then he tells Daniel that it's kinda bad news that Alexander has an Orb again, since the Inner Sanctum is then basically impenetrable unless Daniel has another with which to best it. There was another in the castle, which Alexander took from Agrippa, but it was broken a long time ago.
Hey, I wonder if the pieces might still be scattered around somewhere?
By golly and gosh, so they are! "Apparently he uses them for torture now," says Agrippa. "They practically leak madness, which is quite useful I understand."
So off Daniel trots into the torture wing to retrieve them, pausing only to promise to bring back to Agrippa anything he finds regarding a man named Johann Weyer. Weyer was Agrippa's student way back in the day, and was working on a recipe for a potion that might save him.
He finds himself in the Chancel, where rooms are connected across a magnificent gulf by a four-pronged stone walkway lit by torches of blue fire. The cavern which the walkway spans is too tall, too deep, too huge to exist under the castle - and yet it does. At the far end is a small room containing a pedestal for an Orb, and a passageway blocked by searing blue lightning. No doubt that is the way to the Inner Sanctum.
In a second room is a document written by Alexander, talking in despairing tones about the shattering of Agrippa's Orb. Apparently Alexander needed it for a Final Ritual which would let him see his love again - a love he's been able to communicate with, judging by one flashback or hallucination or whatever you want to call it. It seems he's been pursuing this goal, prolonging his life, for centuries.
There are several horrible altars with occult symbols carved into them, including the signs of the Zodiac and so on. Surprise surprise, they're covered in blood. And depending on how much attention you've been paying, you may or may not be surprised that he finds a page of his own diary here, detailing how he's practicing diligently with the torture implements and how he's grateful God sent the baron these monstrous criminals "as they will serve as the instruments of my salvation".
When Daniel goes back out onto the walkway, Alexander speaks to him again, and the first thing he observes is guilt. It's all the excuse he needs to launch into a short speech about the reason Daniel sucks: "Blame yourself. You started this. You sent me that letter asking for help and this is how you repay me? How dare you?"
Daniel continues on, fixing various mechanical things in various none-too-pleasant (but tiled for easy hosing down!) cells - then Alexander speaks to him again, and apologises, because now he cannot let Daniel go any further. Not like that's unnerving or anything.
...Let's be honest here, it's less unnerving than the full-on all-senses hallucination flashback to one of the warding rituals. (There isn't much time.) An empty sacrificial slab holds, as suddenly as blinking, a man, stripped and tied and with a bag over his head. (The blood wards are failing.) There's an ornate knife beside him; he picks it up. (Paint the man, cut the lines.) The criminal's chest is crossed with snakelike designs; they seem to glow faintly. (Paint the man, cut the lines.) As he raises the knife, the scene fades to blindness, but he's not released from it until even the echoes of the man's screams are silent.
When he all but runs out of the room, he hallucinates the man's corpse hung by the neck from the ceiling, and can probably be forgiven for wigging out a bit.
He busies himself going about collecting the pieces of the broken orb, as well as certain items which he can use to free Agrippa. His quest takes him through all of the most, uh, interesting torture rooms, and his flashbacks and hallucinations only get worse. There's the hollow bronze bull, and the traitor who was locked into it while Daniel lit a fire underneath. There's the huge metal spike that the arsonist was lowered onto while he pleaded and protested his innocence. There's the... no, you probably don't want to hear this on the offchance that you need to eat or sleep later on.
God, no wonder Daniel was desperate to forget this stuff.
Agrippa begs Daniel to take him with him - or, well, to take his head. See, the potion Weyer invented lets Agrippa's head be removed without killing him. So Daniel bums around looking for swag, and while he's found all the Orb pieces and found all the ingredients he doesn't have a moment to combine them before three or four of Alexander's servants rush towards him, too suddenly to hide, too quickly to outrun. They slash at him. He falls down dead.
...Or not quite dead. He wakes up somewhere dark and cold and his blurring vision resolves itself into a dungeon cell. The inside of a dungeon cell. The inside of a locked dungeon cell - oh shit.
Alexander is kind enough to inform Daniel that he's not sure what to do with him, which I'm sure is a huge relief except for the part where it's not. "I hold no grudge against you, Daniel. We are so very much the same, you and I." The baron tells Daniel that he has another chance to prove himself: to stay in the cell and defeat the Shadow when it comes to claim him. Daniel is having none of that, and breaks out of the cell by levering out some loose stones in the ancient, crumbling wall.
He's hallucinating hardcore by now, with doors blasting out and corpses appearing and who knows what else. Maybe he overdosed on the Amnesia drink and it screwed him up a bit. He's probably also hallucinating the way the hall is suddenly shaking and roaring around him -
Oh no, wait, that's just the Shadow come to murder him.
Wait, what?
He runs. Runs like hell. And just about stays ahead of it, but only just. And his reward when he outruns it is a horrible all-senses flashback, perhaps even worse than the one of the ritual: he remembers the attack on the farm.
He finds himself in the same area he was in before, except now the Shadow has torn it apart, and rubble lies in dusty piles amongst pulsing, creeping tumours. He's able to complete Agrippa's potion and retrieve his head, and hurries to the Inner Sanctum's entrance with the Orb's shards in hand.
They cleave together just as perfectly as the others did back in London, and the light of the passageway clashes with the light of this Orb until both have burnt themselves away.
He runs inside as the Shadow shrieks and rattles the stones around him, and finds himself in a kind of temple, though it's like no Christian temple he's ever seen: it has more in common with the sacrificial chambers he's explored, with its bloodstained altars and huge painted pentagrams. Spilling some of his own blood on one of the altars calms the screaming of the Shadow, for a few moments more. Cutting out even more and daubing it onto the two pentagrams turns out to be the only thing that'll open the heavy stone door at the room's other end. Well, doorhandles hadn't been invented yet, so sometimes a baron has to get creative, y'know?
Down a broad, trembling corridor is the Orb Chamber itself, the innermost part of the Inner Sanctum, where he finds Baron Alexander. Or would find him, if we weren't plucking the poor lad out of the castle and into the mansion. (Presumably Agrippa's head won't be coming with him, since it isn't Agrippa I'm apping.) Alexander is performing a final ritual, using the power of Daniel's orb to open a gateway back into another world - one that Weyer was from, one that Agrippa wants to go to, and one that Alexander's been trying for centuries to return to. That... explains a lot, actually.
And here we have the ever-popular multiple endings! Daniel could simply wait, and allow the portal to open and Alexander to go through it; he can't enter it himself because he's tainted by the Shadow, so in this scenario it gobbles him up shortly afterwards. Or he could wait for the portal to open and throw Agrippa's head through it; he dies, Alexander dies, but Agrippa petitions Weyer to have mercy on Daniel. Or Daniel could pull down the rickety pillars directing the Orb's power to the centre of the room, which ruins the ritual, killing Alexander - but the Shadow accepts Alexander's death as a final tribute, perhaps because he's not human, perhaps because he was trying to use the Orb, perhaps for some other crazy reason that makes sense to vengeful tumoury curses. In this scenario, it leaves Daniel alive, and he escapes the castle, convinced that he has redeemed himself.
This Daniel? Leaning towards the first option. He's figured a lot out by now, none of it very flattering to the idea that he's the poor saint forced into bad works and Alexander the devil entirely responsible. Besides, he doesn't know that he'll survive the third option. But he hasn't decided yet. Some variation of that idea is still a lifeline of sorts.
Guess he won't get to find out which he'd choose. Cue Wonderland!
Abilites/Special Powers: He knows and can perform the rites to keep a Guardian of the Orb at bay, or to banish it. Now let's take a moment to appreciate how useful that knowledge will be in Wonderland.
As for non-supernatural abilities? Any you can fairly expect a well-off lad of the early 19th century to have (and he was certainly well-off if he could go jetting off to Africa and Prussia). He'd have a few languages; definitely Latin, since Latin labels are all translated for the player in subtitles, indicating that he reads the language. Once again, so very useful in Wonderland.
Also I'll take this opportunity to mention that he does indeed hallucinate sometimes, and that I'll be making those easy to distinguish by reporting them in this colour font.
Third-Person Sample: All right, Daniel will grant that the parasol is useful. The African sun is hotter than he'd imagined possible back in London - scorching, unforgiving - but while it makes moving a chore it at least isn't cooking him alive.
If it's not his imagination, Herbert looks rather smug about the whole thing.
"You see, Daniel? The benefits far outweigh the no doubt terrible shame. And beside that, you look fine."
Daniel privately doubts that he looks anything close to fine, red-faced, sweating through his clothes and carrying a lady's sun umbrella just above his head. He doesn't try to argue, though. It's thanks to Herbert that he's here, on this historic dig site in an exotic country, and he doesn't want to seem ungrateful.
"I suppose."
That said, it's difficult to feel overly enthused with the sun razing the ground, and the workers turning up little as yet but dust and rocks. But the tomb's location is documented, and he has faith in Herbert's archaeological skills. They'll find it. It's only a matter of time. And when they do, he'll be one of the first to set foot inside for centuries - a real adventure, just like Hazel said.
First-Person Sample: [ If you look on your screens just about... now, you'll see the hall comms pick up a young man peering out of a doorway in a state of high alert. He looks like he's dressed for Renn Faire: Zombie Outbreak Edition, what with the waistcoat and baggy shirtsleeves, and the cravat that's been repurposed to bandage a gash on one arm. There are multiple slashes on the heels of his palms, leaving them bloody, and his trousers are scummy as though he's been wading through something none too clean.
When we say 'high alert', we mean that he looks absolutely freaking terrified. It happens when you're dodging monsters and Shadow and God knows what else, and just got pranked by a room that was totally featureless before arranging itself into the stone-walled pentagram-floored castle room you were expecting. Even better? He didn't even walk through a door to get there. It just appeared around him. That's happened before, but that time it resulted in his getting chased by a horrible water monster, so familiarity doesn't exactly equal reassurance here.
Head is pounding and hands are shaking, and there are screams of pain in the distance, and at his feet large cockroaches skitter and hiss. He keeps his lantern extinguished at his side - at least it's light here, everywhere else is so dark - and edges out of the doorway, breathing quick. ]
Name: Caz
LJ:
cazrolimeE-Mail: hobbitesque-at-gmail-dot-com
IM: rianofski
Character Name: Daniel
Series: Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Timeline: The final sacrifical chamber, right before the confrontation with Alexander.
Canon Resource Link: Amnesia is an indie game and doesn't have its own wiki yet*, but here's its Wikipedia page and its page on TV Tropes.
*Except now it does: Daniel's page
Character Background: When we're first introduced to Daniel, he's staggering around a castle in the dark, struggling to remember his own name. But don't feel too sorry for him until you know what else he's forgotten.
To bring everyone up to speed, we need to back up a little. To the tune of three months, in fact. In May of 1839, Daniel was involved in an archaeological dig in Algeria, North Africa. It's not specified what position he held, but he did have enough clout to order around a team of men (though the expedition was led by a Professor Herbert of the British Museum). He probably should have had one of them take the first steps into the tomb they uncovered, especially since one particular chamber looked suspiciously ancient even compared to the 4th century architecture around it. But glory comes before safety measures and Daniel strode right into the chamber, only to find himself trapped inside when the great slab door fell down.
He freaked out for a while, but then after he'd all but collapsed he realised that the darkness of the tomb had been split by beams of enchanting blue light. He followed them to their shining source and put his hands around it, and straight away his mind was assaulted by visions of "spiralling towers, endless deserts, and impossible geometry".
The next thing he was aware of was the sound of grating stone; he was rescued, and in his hands was a stone orb, shattered into pieces.
Professor Herbert insisted that Daniel go home to London, in case he took a turn for the worse and endangered the dig. He had family in London, and though his terms with his parents might be charitably described as distant, he was very close to his sister Hazel. Back in Mayfair, more than a month later, Daniel was going through his belongings when he stumbled upon his diary of the expediton and the remains of the Orb, wrapped in a cloth. Oddly enough, the shards didn't even begin to fit together. Wondering if he'd imagined the whole thing, Daniel began observing the shards, and noticed something even odder: they seemed to change a little in shape and colour every time he looked at them.
Surely it was an optical illusion. But no, when he took careful measurements, his suspicion was confirmed: the shards were shifting.
He was understandably a bit freaked out, and consulted a prominent geologist called Sir William Smith. Not long afterwards, Smith was killed, and Daniel received word of Herbert's expedition being attacked by something unknown. Daniel began suffering horrible nightmares of a voice from the abyss, calling to him. Almost obsessively he tried to reconstruct the Orb; at last, the knowledge of how to fit the pieces together came to him as if whispered, and he found that once in place they joined seamlessly with no need for adhesive.
Daniel's level of freaked-outness was getting pretty high by now; he borrowed (read: snuck into his office and took) Herbert's book of contacts and made touch with them regarding the nature of what they'd been digging, hoping for some answers, any answers. He also spoke to Professor Taylor at the London Museum, asking him about Orbs; before long Taylor, too, was dead. Even Daniel's doctor died, and the way he describes it makes it sound like he found the body: torn into pieces and scattered about, the skin boiled off. Things were all sort of going downhill.
But then a letter arrived from a baron in the Kingdom of Prussia. Daniel had gotten many replies from Herbert's contacts by then, all of them varying degrees of useless, but this one was different. It didn't pontificate about artefacts or mock him for old-fashioned superstition. It simply said:
I know. I can protect you. Come to Brennenburg castle.
Alexander.
Daniel didn't know what to make of it, but it was enough to make him track down the castle and travel there. He was desperate to stop the - the curse or creature or whatever horrible thing it was - both for his sake and for the sake of the innocent men who'd died. He writes in his diary that he blamed himself for the deaths.
Brennenburg Castle and its baron impressed him very much: the castle for its majesty and mystery, and Alexander himself as a gracious gentleman, very much a Renaissance man. He actually felt safe, if only for an evening. In his diary he mentions Alexander's "strange servants", but doesn't comment on any horrible deformities, so perhaps they were more human-looking when he arrived or kept their injuries hidden. He does call them "a quiet lot", which would be an odd way of putting it if he was aware that their jaws were sewn to their chests.
Daniel's nightmares by this point were so severe that he could only sleep with the help of sedatives. Alexander heard his screams in the night, and must have realised how close the Shadow really was. Wait, what Shadow was this? Well, he sat Daniel down right there and explained that Orbs are massively powerful, and if the one who finds it cannot best it, its shadow will follow behind him like a sluggish beast, killing anyone and anything in its path until it has reclaimed the Orb.
Welp.
Daniel's suggestion was to throw the Orb away, but no: Alexander said that he would still be a part of the Shadow's path to it, and would therefore still die. Daniel's only chance was to banish the Shadow for good with certain rituals which, luckily, Alexander knew.
How come Alexander knows so much about Orbs? How come he's putting himself on the line to help Daniel? That's for him to know and you to worry about.
Daniel seems a little reluctant, in his diaries, to embrace "what I can only describe as magic". But he sucks it up and admits that he expected to have to deal with the supernatural, seeing as the supernatural has pretty much been forced upon him already. Over the next few days, Alexander took Daniel on tours of his many scientific workshops, he prepared for the rituals they would need to perform, and the two of them drew up plans to brace the ancient castle against the arrival of the Shadow.
Nearly a week after Daniel's arrival at Brennenburg, Alexander took him to the Inner Sanctum and unleashed a little of the Orb's power with a ritual meant to channel its power into them. It was the first time Daniel had seen what the Orb - or as he now calls it his Orb - could really do beyond making a nuisance of itself.
It burst into a blue, fiery light, filling the entire space of the Inner Sanctum with its glow. The experience was a repeat of what he'd seen and felt back in that creepy ancient tomb: "a mad whirlpool of impressions", weird visions and memories too alien to make sense of. He was terrified and fascinated in tandem, and would have stepped forward to take the Orb had Alexander not put a hand on his shoulder to hold him back.
Sadly, all this was relevant to the Shadow's interests, and its giant meat tumours started bursting through the walls and staining the blue light red - until Alexander covered the Orb with a cloth, ending the ritual. Apparently that was a sign that they'd run out of time.
The very next day, Alexander prepared the first warding ritual. Daniel was by now actively wondering just what the baron had to gain from helping him, because c'mon, you don't put yourself in the path of a deadly vengeful scourge out of idle curiosity. But if he planned to ask, it's a fairly sure thing that what happened next was big enough to blow the notion out of his mind.
See, here's the thing. The Shadow is all about slaying all those in its way. So to keep it at bay? It's a simple deal. Throw it someone else to distract it. A life for a life.
Better still, because Daniel was the fool who'd inadvertantly claimed the Orb, it was Daniel who'd have to wield the knife.
Alexander told him that as a baron, it was his responsibility to hold and punish criminals in his dungeons. Alexander offered him a man - a murderer, he said. And Daniel, desperate by this point, was worryingly quick to trust him on that. It wasn't the easiest choice, but if he could save his own life, and the life of the guy who was saving him, if he could do that by killing a criminal who anyway was condemned to death -
He went through with the ceremony (paint the man, cut the lines) and then afterwards (watch the blood spill) spent a good while freaking out (let it come) at himself and the whole situation. Alexander made all the arrangements, he wrote, Alexander said it had to be done. What else could he do? What else could he do?
The ritual which would get rid of the Shadow once and for all would take some time to prepare. Until then, the warding ritual had to be repeated, day after day. But they were all criminals, murderers and thieves, it was justified, it was justified.
And then Alexander began to teach Daniel to extract vitae. They'd need it, he said, in the final ritual. He could point to it with an accuracy that was preternatural. It was found in agonised blood. He showed Daniel the rack and the wheel, the bronze cow and the iron maiden.
Sometimes they protested that they didn't do anything. But that's exactly what a criminal would say, isn't it?
They needed more prisoners for the final banishment ritual. In mid-August, Alexander and Daniel, now quite the little apprentice, rode out in Alexander's coach to a small settlement where they kidnapped a dairy farmer, his wife and their two children. Out of desperation and desensitisation, and a ruthlessness that he'd only recently realised he possessed, Daniel went along with this rather unsavoury plan completely until one of the young girls escaped. He ended up chasing and killing her. It was not pretty. It was not something he wanted to consider himself doing.
It threw everything into question. How could he have done this? Were the criminals he'd killed, tortured, even criminals at all? How much could his own murderous life possibly be worth?
Not that much.
I'd like to be able to say that he accepted full responsibility for his actions, but he's a bit of a dickface so instead he blamed everything on Alexander. But he refused to take part in any more rituals, and since those had been his only hope, he basically gave up on the idea of saving his own life. Instead, he became determined to pay penance and redeem himself by killing Alexander and thus ending all the torture and stuff that went down in this castle of doom.
Not that he told Alexander this. The accounts blur a bit. According to Daniel's diary, Alexander left him high and dry to face the Shadow alone; according to Alexander, Daniel declared that he'd face it himself. Either way, Daniel vanished off Alexander's radar, because there was another part to his plan. He couldn't or wouldn't deal any more with the memories of having killed, the memories of having tormented, the memories of all the people who'd died either by his hand or by the Shadow's claw. And so he'd stolen a dose of the Amnesia potion sometimes fed to prisoners when the torture failed to produce vitae.
Just in case the drink was super effective, Daniel wrote a short letter to himself. It explained what was going on in the vaguest possible terms: he was hunted by a Shadow, he was doomed, he had to kill Alexander and redeem himself. Just the basic, vital stuff he'd need to know in order to carry out that task. Then he chugged the Amnesia drink and was catapulted into that introductory cutscene that was mentioned so long ago you've probably forgotten about it by now.
Though he meant to only destroy the memories of his crimes, the way he's staggering about saying "My name is... is... I am Daniel" kind of implies that he's having trouble hanging on to anything at all. He goes wandering through corridors, wobbling alarmingly, before he recovers his wits well enough to get his bearings. Memoryless, all he can do is wander the creaky, creepy castle corridors in a state of some confusion.
Castle Brennenburg is quite literally falling to pieces: huge pillars lie where they have fallen, banisters and staircases have crumbled, furniture lies broken and strewn about. The place was already in pretty poor nick, but the outright destruction is the fault of the Shadow, which is already close on Daniel's heels. He follows a trail of improbable rose petals, through dusty corridors filled with lamps blown out by eldritch winds and doors that fling themselves mysteriously open. And here it behooves the narration to mention that Daniel suffers from a rare and tragic complaint known only as a Sanity Meter. That is, his level of sanity will rise and fall depending on how many frightening things he has endured and whether he's been particularly successful in his endeavours lately. The short version: the more monsters he's been stalked by, the more likely he is to hear cockroaches skittering in the walls.
Anyhow, before very long Daniel has located (a) a useful oil lamp and (b) the letter to himself, from himself, which he left behind in his confusion. Armed with... not very much knowledge at all, what choice was open to him but to carry out its instruction to kill Alexander? (Well, several options including "not kill Alexander" and the ever-popular "look for an exit", if you want to be picky about it. But who can a man trust if not his mysterious amnesia-potion-quaffing past self?)
So Daniel sets off on his long journey to the Inner Sanctum, where the letter promises Alexander will be. He seems to be trapped in one wing of the castle, until he finds a lever which causes a bookcase to swing out, permitting him a route to the Entrance Hall.
It turns out that the Amnesia drink is an imperfect potion. As he walks through the crumbling Hall, Daniel experiences a flashback: he remembers a conversation between himself and a man with a resonant voice. The man - whom he calls Alexander - is leading him through the castle, telling him the way to the Inner Sanctum. They sound like they were on perfectly good terms, but who's amnesiac!Daniel to judge?
Downstairs is something disturbing: his path is blocked and choked with what looks for all the world like stretched meat. It's tough and pliant, and resists all attempts to break it. Either it's a sign of eldritch horror, or some butcher really needs to rethink his display.
A woman's screams for mercy lead Daniel down a corridor, but he loses the sound and finds himself uncomfortably close to another corridor that, swear to God, is breathing at him. That's so not the direction encouraged by a sane mind, so he retreats - only to run right into a grille in the floor, several feet beneath which is water that snarls and splashes. Daniel then blunders into a laboratory, where he finds evidence that Alexander was attempting to alchemically produce vitae, though sadly for all those prisoners, all he succeeded in inventing was a cleaning solution. A cleaning solution that happens to provoke a violent reaction in organisms.
Sounds like a useful thing to have when you need to get past a giant flesh blob.
While he searches for the ingredients, Daniel learns just where the meat is coming from: as he tries to open a door, the very stones of the castle warp and groan, and that same red flesh grows out of the door like a tumour. Suddenly, that door gets a lot less inviting. Speaking of creepy things, the growling and moaning Daniel hears as he explores is a little disconcerting, too. And the grand piano playing? Hey, maybe demon monsters like a little light music of an evening.
Now, Alexander wasn't the only one leaving notes around. Pages from Daniel's diary are scattered about as though someone used it to throw a confetti party, and thus he's able to learn about his own past: the dig under Professor Hubert, the Orb, the deaths that followed him. Piece by piece, using the notes he finds and the audio (and sometimes even visual) flashbacks he's still having, he starts to remind himself.
No doubt deeply, deeply weirded out, Daniel presses forward, advancing through doors both secret and regular-flavour, and hiding in wardrobes when footsteps get too close. There are written accounts galore; for instance in a glass case, as though they were so amusing that Alexander just had to display them, are pages from a book about cool rumours that travellers in the area should totally check out. Some guy called Agrippa who visited and later denied it; grotesque quasi-humans who steal livestock; and the Baron, immortal! Who could imagine such things!
I won't go through every note and every flashback, but suffice it to say that the Baron does not have great stores of the milk of human kindness. Heck, it gets increasingly evident that he isn't even human, and that he progressed quickly from alchemy to dogs to people in his quest for a supply of vitae. Oh, and he locked some guys in a cellar and fed them poisoned wine that made their bones grow out through their skin. Nice bloke.
By the way, the castle is still growing splattery, pulsing tumours. Tumors which invisibly slash at Daniel as though cutting him with blades. Don't fret, it's just his friendly neighbourhood Shadow, following him no matter where he goes.
Daniel concocts the solution, chucks it on the meat blockade and ventures forth once more, into the Distillery and thence to the Archives, where - oh shit all that water wasn't there a second ago, and oh shit the walls are suddenly covered in stretched-out tumours, and oh shit there's something snarling and splashing and coming towards him very fast -
Yes, the Shadow has decided to add "shallow water" to the list of neuroses that Daniel is going to have to explain to a shrink later on. For now, all he can do is jump from crate to crate when he can, wade really really quickly when he can't, and throw human limbs far away into the water to distract it. Why are there human limbs lying around down here? You seem to have forgotten whose castle this is. How is Daniel not a gibbering wreck at this point? It's a close thing. It's a very close thing.
Gee, seems like the only thing that could be worse would be, say, something loud and horrible chasing him down flooded corridors too fast for him to look back at it or even pause for a second.
Just as an academic example, you understand.
After this harrowing chase scene, Daniel finds himself in the back hall, a soothingly-lit and quiet place where he finds a fountain shaped like a baby's face on a giant rearing centipede with two carved legs sticking out of the pool at the bottom as though a woman drowned in there. You know, calming zen kinda stuff.
In a room off this hall is something awesome, something you hardly even see anywhere: Alexander of Brennenburg has a freaking passenger lift. A genuine ascending room - how neat is that? Admittedly, it's more broken than Daniel usually likes them, but he can fix that up quicksmart as soon as he's hunted down the mechanisms and worked out what's gone wrong. Because he's a mechanic suddenly I guess.
Whilst he searches for the relevant equipment, and then for the spare rods and cogwheels and so on which will fix it, Daniel runs across such delights as stuffed dogs which died to further Alexander's quest for vitae, and a cupboard full of human skulls. He also has his first really close brush with one of those strange servants of Alexander's; let's just say that they're not on the friendliest terms with him, and that hiding in wardrobes is something he's just going to have to get used to.
Remember that woman who was screaming earlier? Down in Storage, her sobs can be heard, though any attempts to locate her are fruitless. Perhaps she's just a mirage, a relative of the insectlike skittering and the grinding often in Daniel's ears.
I wasn't exaggerating when I told you the castle was falling down; Daniel has to mix an explosive and blast away the results of a cave-in before he can proceed. And in the unnaturally dark room beyond it becomes evident that, yeah, the woman's voice probably wasn't real, because all of a sudden Daniel is having a series of loud and disturbing audio flashbacks to -
Oh hell, that's the girl he killed. That's the actual moment of her death, heard out of time and out of context and leaving him to wonder just why the hell he's hearing murder in the first person.
He'll work it out.
When he returns to it, the lovely calming back hall is choked with massive tumours and its fountain now spits blood instead of water. Also there's a corpse in it out of nowhere. So in summary, not such a calming place any more. On the bright side, despite having been chased hither and thither by horrible monsters with their jowels stapled to their shoulders, Daniel manages to fix the elevator and begins his triumphant ride downstairs!
Except that it's hard to be triumphant when wood and plaster walls are suddenly sickly with the Shadow's stretched flesh, and when there's a thick, infinitely nasty snapping sound somewhere above your head.
Interesting fact: it was not until 1853, fourteen years after Daniel's misadventures, that inventor Elisha Otis would demonstrate an elevator with a safety device to keep it from falling in case of a cable breaking.
The ascending room plummets.
They must be near the bottom of the shaft already, because Daniel survives the drop with only some cuts and scrapes and a whole lot of dizzy feelings. It's all up in the air whether this is a good thing, though, because now he's in the castle dungeons, and you know the cliche of horrid dark dank dripping dungeons full of dragging footsteps and the odd distant shriek? Cliche is the farthest thing from your mind when you're actually walking around in one of those places.
The wandering monsters that are Alexander's servants have stepped up their efforts to find the poor chap. They can walk quietly when they want to. There are quite a few close scrapes. And as he moves around, Daniel is still being assaulted by memories - only now they're getting darker, taking a cue from his recollection of the girl's murder. He hears himself bursting into a cell and demanding to know where an escaped prisoner went, and then chasing her through the stone hallways. And that's before he even reaches the torture chambers, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
A tunnel, dug by that selfsame prisoner, gives him access to the lower part of the dungeons. There he finds a kitchen full of rotting pig carcasses, and a barrel of bright green acid, which funnily enough is just what he needs to get a padlocked door open.
Daniel finds himself descending into the sewers, which can be used as passageways except for the fact that they're (a) flooded and (b) full of poisonous fungi (aren't flashbacks useful for warning you about these things?). If he wants to get to the Inner Sanctum, he's first going to have to drain the water, and then he'll need some way of protecting himself from the poison. Like an antidote, or a protective mask or something.
Sadly, Alexander now becomes aware of Daniel's presence. He sounds sort of confused more than anything else, as if he can't quite grasp why Daniel's running around his castle pulling levers and things, but the possibility's always there that he is bluffing. Daniel has heard his voice before in the dungeons, saying things to the effect of "he escaped? Where is he now?", but that has a pretty much even chance of being (a) actually Alexander or (b) our dear protagonist taking a short trip off the rails.
Anyhow, Daniel has a grand old time splashing about in the gigantic stone cisterns, turning the wheels which will drain the sewer and lowering bridges to let him access more wheels to drain the sewer more. Part of this involved visiting the morgue, which is always a fun holiday destination, especially when there are dragging bloodstains on the floor, pentagrams on the walls and a whole host of bodies ranging from skeleton to fresh corpse to choose from!
Alexander chimes in to be creepy at his erstwhile apprentice: "I hear you breathing, Daniel. Do you hear me? Have you changed your mind?" It's not explained exactly how Daniel can hear him; there are pipes in the castle which channel screams and sobs from the torture rooms to the prison cells, but why they'd lead from the Inner Sanctum to the Morgue is anyone's guess. Though it's fairly heavily hinted by now that the baron isn't human, so perhaps he has his own ways of making himself heard.
Daniel finds a note in the Morgue, detailing the fact that Alexander had found an antidote to the poisonous fungi down in the sewers! Or, well... let's put it in his words:
The vaccine enabling my men to work in the fungi ridden sewer is a definite success ... note that an injection of vaccinated blood will work as a shield long enough to pass the sewers without any risk of infection.
So now Daniel has to protect himself from a poison using a vaccine that will stay useful for a limited timespan and then stop working (sort of like an antibiotic). Fucking medicine, how does it work?
The best part, the absolute best part, is that Daniel has to get that vaccinated blood from a day-old corpse lying on a slab. By drilling a hole in its skull and then sticking tubes in, and jabbing himself with the result. Pretty much immediately a shuffling servant comes bursting in, all freaky and jowly, its limbs not so much supported as replaced with rusty medical braces. One can only assume that it wants to ask Daniel what the hell he thinks he's doing sticking himself with strange blood without even checking out its blood type or anything, but its good advice goes unheeded as Daniel runs away, terribly fast.
He's drained the sewers now... well, at least enough to travel through them. They're still drippy and flooded and miserable, and we all remember what happened the first time Daniel had to wade through creepy water. Even worse than the potential water monster is the very definite presence of those damn servants of Alexander, even down here.
And speaking of Alexander, he's still communicating: "Turn around at once! You are carrying the Shadow with you!" Needless to say Daniel doesn't turn around, because uh, hello, he has a mission to complete here and it involves Alexander's head on a stick.
But the journals he's found, and the things he's heard... he's starting to have trouble placing all the blame at Alexander's door. Especially since he now finds a diary mentioning his own very first murder at that very first warding ritual, only ten days ago.
You remember we mentioned Agrippa perhaps visiting at one point? There's been evidence lying around that he did indeed visit the castle, that he somehow betrayed Alexander by keeping him from passing through a gate, and that Alexander saved him from death but not from being paralysed. And what should be down this staircase but a corpse, starved and malformed with a gaping wound of a mouth, hanging upright from many chains - which raises its head suddenly and introduces itself as Agrippa.
Jeez, even the friendly characters seem hellbent on giving Daniel nightmares.
He's fond of his Biblical references, rambling for a while about Daniel in the lions' den and great Babylon falling. Then he tells Daniel that it's kinda bad news that Alexander has an Orb again, since the Inner Sanctum is then basically impenetrable unless Daniel has another with which to best it. There was another in the castle, which Alexander took from Agrippa, but it was broken a long time ago.
Hey, I wonder if the pieces might still be scattered around somewhere?
By golly and gosh, so they are! "Apparently he uses them for torture now," says Agrippa. "They practically leak madness, which is quite useful I understand."
So off Daniel trots into the torture wing to retrieve them, pausing only to promise to bring back to Agrippa anything he finds regarding a man named Johann Weyer. Weyer was Agrippa's student way back in the day, and was working on a recipe for a potion that might save him.
He finds himself in the Chancel, where rooms are connected across a magnificent gulf by a four-pronged stone walkway lit by torches of blue fire. The cavern which the walkway spans is too tall, too deep, too huge to exist under the castle - and yet it does. At the far end is a small room containing a pedestal for an Orb, and a passageway blocked by searing blue lightning. No doubt that is the way to the Inner Sanctum.
In a second room is a document written by Alexander, talking in despairing tones about the shattering of Agrippa's Orb. Apparently Alexander needed it for a Final Ritual which would let him see his love again - a love he's been able to communicate with, judging by one flashback or hallucination or whatever you want to call it. It seems he's been pursuing this goal, prolonging his life, for centuries.
There are several horrible altars with occult symbols carved into them, including the signs of the Zodiac and so on. Surprise surprise, they're covered in blood. And depending on how much attention you've been paying, you may or may not be surprised that he finds a page of his own diary here, detailing how he's practicing diligently with the torture implements and how he's grateful God sent the baron these monstrous criminals "as they will serve as the instruments of my salvation".
When Daniel goes back out onto the walkway, Alexander speaks to him again, and the first thing he observes is guilt. It's all the excuse he needs to launch into a short speech about the reason Daniel sucks: "Blame yourself. You started this. You sent me that letter asking for help and this is how you repay me? How dare you?"
Daniel continues on, fixing various mechanical things in various none-too-pleasant (but tiled for easy hosing down!) cells - then Alexander speaks to him again, and apologises, because now he cannot let Daniel go any further. Not like that's unnerving or anything.
...Let's be honest here, it's less unnerving than the full-on all-senses hallucination flashback to one of the warding rituals. (There isn't much time.) An empty sacrificial slab holds, as suddenly as blinking, a man, stripped and tied and with a bag over his head. (The blood wards are failing.) There's an ornate knife beside him; he picks it up. (Paint the man, cut the lines.) The criminal's chest is crossed with snakelike designs; they seem to glow faintly. (Paint the man, cut the lines.) As he raises the knife, the scene fades to blindness, but he's not released from it until even the echoes of the man's screams are silent.
When he all but runs out of the room, he hallucinates the man's corpse hung by the neck from the ceiling, and can probably be forgiven for wigging out a bit.
He busies himself going about collecting the pieces of the broken orb, as well as certain items which he can use to free Agrippa. His quest takes him through all of the most, uh, interesting torture rooms, and his flashbacks and hallucinations only get worse. There's the hollow bronze bull, and the traitor who was locked into it while Daniel lit a fire underneath. There's the huge metal spike that the arsonist was lowered onto while he pleaded and protested his innocence. There's the... no, you probably don't want to hear this on the offchance that you need to eat or sleep later on.
God, no wonder Daniel was desperate to forget this stuff.
Agrippa begs Daniel to take him with him - or, well, to take his head. See, the potion Weyer invented lets Agrippa's head be removed without killing him. So Daniel bums around looking for swag, and while he's found all the Orb pieces and found all the ingredients he doesn't have a moment to combine them before three or four of Alexander's servants rush towards him, too suddenly to hide, too quickly to outrun. They slash at him. He falls down dead.
...Or not quite dead. He wakes up somewhere dark and cold and his blurring vision resolves itself into a dungeon cell. The inside of a dungeon cell. The inside of a locked dungeon cell - oh shit.
Alexander is kind enough to inform Daniel that he's not sure what to do with him, which I'm sure is a huge relief except for the part where it's not. "I hold no grudge against you, Daniel. We are so very much the same, you and I." The baron tells Daniel that he has another chance to prove himself: to stay in the cell and defeat the Shadow when it comes to claim him. Daniel is having none of that, and breaks out of the cell by levering out some loose stones in the ancient, crumbling wall.
He's hallucinating hardcore by now, with doors blasting out and corpses appearing and who knows what else. Maybe he overdosed on the Amnesia drink and it screwed him up a bit. He's probably also hallucinating the way the hall is suddenly shaking and roaring around him -
Oh no, wait, that's just the Shadow come to murder him.
Wait, what?
He runs. Runs like hell. And just about stays ahead of it, but only just. And his reward when he outruns it is a horrible all-senses flashback, perhaps even worse than the one of the ritual: he remembers the attack on the farm.
He finds himself in the same area he was in before, except now the Shadow has torn it apart, and rubble lies in dusty piles amongst pulsing, creeping tumours. He's able to complete Agrippa's potion and retrieve his head, and hurries to the Inner Sanctum's entrance with the Orb's shards in hand.
They cleave together just as perfectly as the others did back in London, and the light of the passageway clashes with the light of this Orb until both have burnt themselves away.
He runs inside as the Shadow shrieks and rattles the stones around him, and finds himself in a kind of temple, though it's like no Christian temple he's ever seen: it has more in common with the sacrificial chambers he's explored, with its bloodstained altars and huge painted pentagrams. Spilling some of his own blood on one of the altars calms the screaming of the Shadow, for a few moments more. Cutting out even more and daubing it onto the two pentagrams turns out to be the only thing that'll open the heavy stone door at the room's other end. Well, doorhandles hadn't been invented yet, so sometimes a baron has to get creative, y'know?
Down a broad, trembling corridor is the Orb Chamber itself, the innermost part of the Inner Sanctum, where he finds Baron Alexander. Or would find him, if we weren't plucking the poor lad out of the castle and into the mansion. (Presumably Agrippa's head won't be coming with him, since it isn't Agrippa I'm apping.) Alexander is performing a final ritual, using the power of Daniel's orb to open a gateway back into another world - one that Weyer was from, one that Agrippa wants to go to, and one that Alexander's been trying for centuries to return to. That... explains a lot, actually.
And here we have the ever-popular multiple endings! Daniel could simply wait, and allow the portal to open and Alexander to go through it; he can't enter it himself because he's tainted by the Shadow, so in this scenario it gobbles him up shortly afterwards. Or he could wait for the portal to open and throw Agrippa's head through it; he dies, Alexander dies, but Agrippa petitions Weyer to have mercy on Daniel. Or Daniel could pull down the rickety pillars directing the Orb's power to the centre of the room, which ruins the ritual, killing Alexander - but the Shadow accepts Alexander's death as a final tribute, perhaps because he's not human, perhaps because he was trying to use the Orb, perhaps for some other crazy reason that makes sense to vengeful tumoury curses. In this scenario, it leaves Daniel alive, and he escapes the castle, convinced that he has redeemed himself.
This Daniel? Leaning towards the first option. He's figured a lot out by now, none of it very flattering to the idea that he's the poor saint forced into bad works and Alexander the devil entirely responsible. Besides, he doesn't know that he'll survive the third option. But he hasn't decided yet. Some variation of that idea is still a lifeline of sorts.
Guess he won't get to find out which he'd choose. Cue Wonderland!
Abilites/Special Powers: He knows and can perform the rites to keep a Guardian of the Orb at bay, or to banish it. Now let's take a moment to appreciate how useful that knowledge will be in Wonderland.
As for non-supernatural abilities? Any you can fairly expect a well-off lad of the early 19th century to have (and he was certainly well-off if he could go jetting off to Africa and Prussia). He'd have a few languages; definitely Latin, since Latin labels are all translated for the player in subtitles, indicating that he reads the language. Once again, so very useful in Wonderland.
Also I'll take this opportunity to mention that he does indeed hallucinate sometimes, and that I'll be making those easy to distinguish by reporting them in this colour font.
Third-Person Sample: All right, Daniel will grant that the parasol is useful. The African sun is hotter than he'd imagined possible back in London - scorching, unforgiving - but while it makes moving a chore it at least isn't cooking him alive.
If it's not his imagination, Herbert looks rather smug about the whole thing.
"You see, Daniel? The benefits far outweigh the no doubt terrible shame. And beside that, you look fine."
Daniel privately doubts that he looks anything close to fine, red-faced, sweating through his clothes and carrying a lady's sun umbrella just above his head. He doesn't try to argue, though. It's thanks to Herbert that he's here, on this historic dig site in an exotic country, and he doesn't want to seem ungrateful.
"I suppose."
That said, it's difficult to feel overly enthused with the sun razing the ground, and the workers turning up little as yet but dust and rocks. But the tomb's location is documented, and he has faith in Herbert's archaeological skills. They'll find it. It's only a matter of time. And when they do, he'll be one of the first to set foot inside for centuries - a real adventure, just like Hazel said.
First-Person Sample: [ If you look on your screens just about... now, you'll see the hall comms pick up a young man peering out of a doorway in a state of high alert. He looks like he's dressed for Renn Faire: Zombie Outbreak Edition, what with the waistcoat and baggy shirtsleeves, and the cravat that's been repurposed to bandage a gash on one arm. There are multiple slashes on the heels of his palms, leaving them bloody, and his trousers are scummy as though he's been wading through something none too clean.
When we say 'high alert', we mean that he looks absolutely freaking terrified. It happens when you're dodging monsters and Shadow and God knows what else, and just got pranked by a room that was totally featureless before arranging itself into the stone-walled pentagram-floored castle room you were expecting. Even better? He didn't even walk through a door to get there. It just appeared around him. That's happened before, but that time it resulted in his getting chased by a horrible water monster, so familiarity doesn't exactly equal reassurance here.
Head is pounding and hands are shaking, and there are screams of pain in the distance, and at his feet large cockroaches skitter and hiss. He keeps his lantern extinguished at his side - at least it's light here, everywhere else is so dark - and edges out of the doorway, breathing quick. ]