A program started automatically when the CD was inserted. Jet jumped off the bed and up onto Adrian's desk, as if he really wanted to watch the screen too. The installation process apparently began without asking for permission or anything. Oh well, it wasn't as if Adrian had planned to insert the CD just to say no to the program, anyways.
A few minutes passed, during which Adrian contemplated searching for a walkthrough online. He did so and found only one. Had only one other person played this game?
"CHESS walkthrough
The simulation game that can destroy the world"
Pfft, what. The signature said -AS, two simple letters. Nah, Adrian decided against using the walkthrough because he was generally against walkthroughs. He clicked the document down. The challenge should be his alone! If a chess game could be anything other than a bore. When installation was finished, a black screen came up with a few white words.
Pick your personal color and press ENTER
> _
"Uh..." This wasn't really what Adrian had had in mind. Maybe you could play chess with other colors than black or white? He typed in 'green' for no particular reason. It wasn't his favorite color or anything, it was a rather random thing. The same instant he had pressed enter though, he regretted it. Maybe it would be really important, like what if he grew tired of green really quick? It was a pretty dull color. He shouldn't do things as rashly! Maybe he should have picked orange instead? Or blue? One could never go wrong with blue!
Press ENTER to begin your personal adventure which the whole universe depends on_
"Haha, sure," Adrian said. "Way to make chess more dramatic." He pressed the enter key.
The screen went completely black for a second. One of the windows in Adrian's room was open and a breeze came in, making some Marvel posters on the wall behind the superhero shelves flutter. Then, a new view appeared on the computer screen. It looked like a view from The Sims, where you look down on a house from a leaned angle above. The graphics weren't the best; it was a bit cartooney with not a lot of colors, and somewhat pixelated.
In the middle of a screen was what looked like a boy, sitting in front of a computer in his room. Adrian moved around with the controls for a moment, learning to zoom and turn the camera and stuff. With the cursor keys, he could make the boy on the screen get up and walk around. And then he clicked a toy on the floor with the mouse cursor. It turned out that he could pick it up. When he did though, a black text box with new green text came up in a corner of the screen.
Welcome to CHESS. This is the ENTRY PHASE. To pass and enter the real game, you have to perform some tasks within the set time limit. If you fail, you will die_
"Oh boy, poor guy in the game," Adrian mumbled and patted Jet absentmindedly while he waited for what came next and made the boy on the screen trip on a skateboard that happened to be laying in the middle of the floor. A pixely skateboard, but still clearly recognizable. "I hope you get several lives, you're gonna need it!"
Task 1
> Equip something to act as your inventory
Time limit: 1 minute_
Inventory? What, like a bag? Adrian looked at the screen. It wasn't really easy to see what things were in the cartooney room. If he would have an inventory himself, he would probably have picked his
superhero shoulder bag. The time was ticking down while Adrian just made the boy walk around and do nothing. 45 seconds left. Hang on, wasn't there a bag laying on the bed on the screen? A messenger bag, if his eyes didn't fool him. Yeah, that could work!
Adrian picked the bag up with the cursor and dropped it on the boy. Blinking text came up above the boy's head, saying:
INVENTORY ACQUIRED!!
"Piece of cake!" Adrian smiled and rubbed Jet behind his ears.
Task 2
> Equip something to act as your weapon
Time limit: 50 seconds_
"Uh, weapon. What kid keeps weapon in their room?" Adrian raised an eyebrow and made the boy walk out of his room. It didn't seem like he was wearing the bag he had just given him, but if he pressed "I", the inventory came up. It was empty now, of course. Just for fun, Adrian made the boy walk up to a dirty sock on the floor and pick it up. Hahaha. He had just guessed it was dirty since all boys pretty much keep dirty socks on their floor, but the name of the item in the inventory was even labeled DIRTY SOCK.
Time left: 42 seconds. Funnily enough, this kid's home reminded him of his own. There was a living room and several other bedrooms on the top floor. Walking down the staircase, the boy arrived in a hallway much alike his own too. But then again, Adrian lived in one of hundred almost identical houses nearby.
Time left: 36 seconds. Maybe he could give the boy some scissors or something? Or a shoehorn. He laughed at the possibilities.
Time left: 27 seconds. Hm, maybe... Adrian glanced back onto his own room. Mjölnir stood, dusty, in the corner. Maybe this kid kept action toys in his room as well? That was too good an opportunity to pass up on. He moved him back upstairs and into the room.
Time left: 12 seconds. An airplane was looming above Adrian's house, making a strangely screeching noise come closer and closer. Stupid airplanes, didn't they realize that they were disturbing everyone? If people could just go by train or walk everywhere they wanted, life would be better.
Time left: 5 seconds. There was indeed an action toy standing in the corner. Adrian put a finger into one of his ears to shut out some of the noise from the airplane while he clicked the toy on the screen and dropped it onto the pixelated boy in the last moment.
An explosion was heard outside. Adrian jumped in his chair and Jet jumped down from the desk. "What was that?"
He rushed to the open window and looked outside. No crashed airplane or car or anything. But a neighbor who stood in the middle of the street looking like she had just seen a ghost. Very strange. Pondering the possible and impossible reasons for the noise, he slowly got back into his seat again, just in time to see the words
HAMMERKIND ALLOCATED!! stop flashing above the boy's head.
Hammerkind. So the toy had been a hammer, just like the hammer in Adrian's room. An eerie feeling suddenly prickled at him and he turned to look at Mjölnir. It still stood there, as dusty as ever. Maybe... Maybe there were just more kids than he thought who liked superheroes?
Task 3
> Deploy the PROTOTRUDER
Time limit: 40 seconds_
Now Adrian was sort of perplexed. What on earth was a prototruder? And how would he deploy one? He moved the cursor to different things in the boy's room but found nothing with that label. Then he moved the cursor to touch the top of the screen. Suddenly, another control box dropped down, beside the one in the top left corner that was always there to let him zoom and handle view controls, and the black box in the upper right corner where time counted down.
Time left: 25 seconds. Oh yeah, one of the buttons in the drop down menu at the top of the screen was labeled DEPLOY. Hovering above it let another menu drop down with a strange machine in it. PROTOTRUDER. Yeah, ok. Adrian clicked it and placed it down in the middle of the boy's room, just nearly squashing the skateboard laying there, with 13 seconds left.
Adrian thought he heard a thud from somewhere in the house, and spun his head around. The door to his room was open, just as he had left it. "Jet?" he called out. But the bunny had placed itself on top of his bed again, chewing on the remains of the CHESS package once more. "Drava? Lina?"
PROTOTRUDER DEPLOYED!! flashed above the boy's head.
"This game is so strange. What does time limits have to do with chess?" Adrian mumbled, mostly to hear his own voice. Something about all this made him feel more and more uneasy.
The prototruder on the screen blinked and the lid on the tube moved as if it wanted to get off. Adrian, having played enough games in his life to know when something was interactive, moved the boy to the machine and made him interact with it, turning the handle to make the lid come off.
Something escaped the tube and circled around the pixly room for a moment before coming to a stop, hovering in the air in front of the boy. It blinked in a really annoying way that made Adrian worry about getting epilepsy.
The flashing words now were:
KERNELSPRITE RELEASED!! In the corner of his eye, Adrian felt like if something was flashing in real life too. But turning around, he once again heard or saw nothing. He didn't like this. This was... He couldn't explain it. Just strange. Yet, he didn't want to stop. He was compelled to finish and see what happened when the time limits grew shorter and shorter.
Task 4
> Deploy the ALCHEMITER
Time limit: 35 seconds_
"Okay, okay..." Adrian said to himself, remembering how to deploy stuff now. A new machine was in the deploy menu. But it wouldn't fit in the boy's bedroom. He had to place it in the hallway downstairs, with a good 24 seconds to go.
ALCHEMITER DEPLOYED!!
Some noise was heard outside. People were talking loudly in the street, or screaming even. What? Adrian almost didn't want to walk up to the window now. But of course he had to see what the neighbor earlier had maybe been looking ghostlike at.
Cars were taking off. People were running away from their houses. Adrian just dropped his jaw. What... Why? What was this all of a sudden? Then he saw that some were pointing up towards the sky, and looked there as well.
Flaming rocks. Meteors. Nightmare. There were space rocks falling from the sky, clearly heading towards Brisbane at an eerily slow pace. As if gravity didn't affect them as much as it should. Or... Adrian didn't know a lot about these things, he just knew that this was terrible. This was like a bad apocalypse movie. He felt nauseus.
Surreal.
The computer beeped at him and Jet had jumped up onto the desk again and were beeping as well. No, not beeping. But squeaking, more like.
"I can't... play the game now, I have to... There's..."
Surreal.
Task 5
> Create the PORTAL
Time limit: 30 seconds
HINT: To survive, perform all the tasks before time runs out_
Adrian stared at the words on the screen. He heard an explosion outside. Maybe a meteor had hit a house. It felt weird to think those words, even. His body was as good as numb.
To survive, perform all the tasks before time runs out.
Time left: 27 seconds.
"What if... The game is behind all this?" Yeah, that felt even more weird to say. Yet, it didn't feel as surreal to think of that as to think of meteors just randomly striking Earth. After all, Adrian wasn't the one to not be open to strange explanations and scenarios. That was everyday snack for him. But now he was put to the test.
"Oh god, oh god, oh god," he mumbled over and over as he rushed back to the computer screen and took action.
Create the portal? There was no new machine to deploy so he probably had to... Do something with those already existing. He made the boy interact with the prototruder and it wanted him to use an item on it. The only item in the inventory was the DIRTY SOCK. In no game Adrian had played would a dirty sock be an important portal item. But maybe... The kernelsprite flashed right beside the boy. Adrian didn't hesitate and made the boy put it in his inventory. It worked! Next, he used it on the prototruder. The machine wobbled and from the tube at the top sprung a green thingy.
TOTEMATERIAL PRODUCED!! Time left: 18 seconds.
"Okay, okay, okay," Adrian chanted just because he felt better if he didn't keep quiet and listened to to the commotion outside. Chaos, was maybe a better word. "Now what, now what?"
The other machine, of course. He made the boy run downstairs with the blue thingy and up to the alchemiter. A screeching and booming noise grew louder over Adrian's house as the clock ticked down below 10 seconds. It was the game. It was all the game.
"NOW WHAT!?!?"
The alchemiter had two platforms. One large one that took up most of the space. One small one, with... Something looking like a mechanical arm sitting near it. Adrian took a chance with the few seconds he had left. The boy took out the totematerial from his inventory and used it on the small platform. Time left: 2 seconds.
Words blinked.
PORTAL CREATED!! At the same moment, a huge boom was heard outside of Adrian's house, making him scream and put his hands over his ears. Jet merely twitched.
Outside the windows of his room, he could see flaming pieces of rock fly down, still as eerily slowly, and miss his house but instead crashing into other people's gardens or houses. So... It was true. The game controlled the meteors. If you finished the tasks on time, the meteor heading for your home would explode and spare you. But the time limits were getting shorter. Adrian found himself breathing faster.
Was he the only one receiving this game? The text had said... It had said "
you have been chosen to participate in CHESS, a feat that will be accredited to very few individuals." What if there were more people who received this game and tried to play it? What if they wouldn't know what to do, and the meteor would strike them! He had to do something. He had to... He had to get this out on the internet somehow!
On the screen, the boy pressed a button on the machine and the mechanical arm on the alchemiter stretched out and scanned the totematerial. When it had finished, something began appearing above the larger platform. A light, flickering at first but then growing. A blue light. It did look like a portal from some game, growing from the size of a pea.
Adrian nodded as he watched this. A portal. Where the boy could escape. Not that there were meteors above
his house. But then again... Hang on... Their houses looked the same. Exactly. They had even both featured Mjölnir and the superhero messenger bag. And when he squinted... wasn't there a black bunny sitting on top of the boy's bed?
"Oh my god."
Surreal.
Task 6
> Prototype the KERNELSPRITE
Time limit: 20 seconds_
Prototype. To Adrian, that word meant a physical thing, a test subject, something that was new and not truly tested out yet. An alarm was heard outside, likely Brisbane that had sounded a big cityspanning alarm. Also, firetrucks and police cars could be heard, and people screaming.
How would one prototype a blinking sprite in a game? The kernelsprite had apparently freed itself from the prototruder and followed the boy downstairs. Now it blinked eagerly next to him. Maybe Adrian could do like with the inventory and weaponkind before. Just drop something on the sprite. But what?
13 seconds left. Soon, the booming noise would be heard again, from the meteor closing in on him below 10 seconds. Adrian panicked and picked up a potted plant with large leaves and tossed it onto the kernelsprite. The screen blinked in white and then the kernelsprite had changed forms. It was still blinking irritatingly, but it pretty much had the shape of a plant, jumping on the pot like a single foot.
KERNELSPRITE PROTOTYPED!! Another earsmashing explosion told him that his house had just been saved from the biggest meteor so far. This was strengthened when he saw the house next to his get crushed by a slow falling but car sized piece of flaming rock in the next second. Hot air from the impact blew in through Adrian's open window. But he was so focused on the game and determined that it was the root of all this, that he didn't move from his spot in front of the desk.
So that was what it meant! The kernelsprite tried to say something to the boy, but the sound that came out was just weird noise and a chat bubble on the screen was illegible. What if he tried prototyping it again with something a little more intelligent than a plant? Quickly, before the next time limit came up on screen.
The boy moved upstairs and found the bunny on the bed. Adrian threw a glance back at Jet, who looked back. For once without chewing slowly on something and somehow actually seeming like he looked back into Adrian's eyes. Then he clicked the bunny in the game and put it into the plantsprite, which had followed the boy upstairs.
Another white screen for a split second, and then another changed shape. A white, black and greenish blinking thing with a bunny's head, branches with leaves for arms, and a tail reminiscent of a cartoon genie.
Jet's ears stood straight up all of a sudden. He looked like he had been struck by lightning. Adrian wondered what he had just done. It was just a game, right? He hadn't harmed his bunny, right? But the meteors...
The most earsplitting noise yet reached him. He had missed the next black screen in the top right corner.
Task 7
> ENTER
Time left: 8 seconds_
There was no question as to what that meant. Adrian's heart had never beat so fast in his life. He made the boy almost leap downstairs and reach the alchemiter. Just above the big platform gleamed a now fully grown green portal, big enough for a man to step through without bending down.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Adrian found himself mumbling as he felt the air getting hot from the flaming space rock closing in above his house, and steered the boy on the screen to jump through the portal.
--
Natural disaster. Meteor shower hitting Brisbane without warning. As if they had appeared from thin air just outside the atmosphere, not picked up by satellites or anything. The city was tragically devastated and a few districts completely wiped out by rocks and flame.
But there were more teenagers who had received the game of CHESS in mail that day. Australia was in an early time zone. When the other receivers would wake up and find their own game in the mail, their regions would be next.
If these players would do a search on the internet before playing the game, searching for things like "CHESS computer game" or "CHESS meteors" or the likes, they would find a short walkthrough. Strangely enough, it seemed to have been written and uploaded
several hours before the Brisbane disaster...
CHESS walkthrough
The simulation game that can destroy the world
Or at least I guess it can, if it works the same for you as it did for me. I began playing it and I passed the entry phase. I am alone here now, but my SPRITE tells me that there will be more soon. So I guess some of you will make it through alive? Anyways, I'll be brief, because I'm not sure where I am and I think there is something moving outside my house.
Task 1: click a bag or basket or pouch or I don't know, whatever. And just drop it onto your character. I don't think the actual size matters, my INVENTORY seems bottomless so far. Kind of abstract, like a game INVENTORY really.
Task 2: whatever you drop onto your character now, it WILL BECOME A WEAPON. Give them a rug and their weapon will be RUGKIND. Oh, and you'll never be able to use other kinds of weapon. Not for a while at least.
Task 3: put the PROTOTRUDER close to the ALCHEMITER. You won't regret it.
Task 4: really, at least don't put them on different floors or something. Near. By.
Task 5: I swear the game is meant to kill most of the players. This task was just... I don't even know how I figured it out. You are supposed to put the KERNELSPRITE in your INVENTORY and then USE it on the PROTOTRUDER. Take the TOTEMATERIAL that appears and put it on the ALCHEMITER and activate it.
Task 6: I'm really not sure how this worked, but you have to drop things onto your KERNELSPRITE. I put my pet in and now he can talk so I think that's a smart thing to do. I managed to throw 2 things in but the game seemed content with only one, and I kind of had to rush a lot to not miss the last timer so maybe it's better to just put 1 thing in.
Task 7: just jump or you'll die. I can still access the internet so I've read the news. Apparently this last meteor was much bigger than the others and completely wiped my house out. Or at least it should have, but I think my house, me and the SPRITE teleported to somewhere else. The CHESS screen on my computer just says that I have ENTERED the game.
I hope you'll survive and end up where I am soon, because I'm starting to really freak out. Ok, it's not that I'm afraid or anything but yes really I feel like I want to throw up.
Remember, the meteors are controlled by the game. And, um, the house on the screen is your house. Your real home, in game format. And the character you are controlling, well, it's actually yourself. Maybe I should have written this at the top of this walkthrough, in case you didn't read it all before you started performing the tasks. But anyways, maybe you would have been more stressed up then. I don't know. I don't know anything.
- AS