Of course! And by the way, I think I had a 2 in Lost in a Jurassic Dream. =P
I reread the whole story (and most my others) before I made this. Unfortunately, you only got a single mention at the end of the story, alongside z-whales.
It took us till Friday that week to find a way out. Only seven users made it, Mateo and many others falling on the wayside. They still got healthy dumps of XP, though. Our group was only the six hundred fifty-fourth to make it out, which is low, in case you were wondering.
People were wondering what had happened to me. After two weeks straight of surprise appearances on the leaderboards, they practically expected me to top it again.
Nope. I may be a speedy little bricker now, but that didn’t mean I figured out we had to dig our way into a separate section of the maze, and from there do some walltop-hopping tills we found a griever boss which wasn’t so bad, but then we had to race down a tunnel that was literally full of the monsters.
To say the least, that was not the way they escaped in the books, or movies.
I sat down to pixel search the images that night after a rousing game of soccer. There was a still a crowd of die-hards outside kicking the ball around, despite the fact it was nearing midnight now.
They were idiots.
Then again, I wasn’t exactly planning to hit the sack anytime soon, so maybe I was the stupid one. Oh well, tomorrow was Saturday. I still wasn’t working again yet (no more rent to pay, and my steakhouse was making just enough to pay for meals), so I could sleep straight through the ugly morning hours if I felt so inclined.
I started with the first images, and started going over them in a grid pattern, dissecting them with a weary sigh.
At first there was nothing of interest at all. Bricks, I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Just, something. Something to prove the fact that the coders never made a level too hard, never left the little guy out.
I got progressively more sleepy and sloppy as the night went on, but I slogged through the pics nonetheless.
There was a sign on the wall, some familiar graffiti. Definitely South American style. It was an arrow, with an inscription above it. I copied the letters over, and searched for a translation. Nothing. It wasn’t English, Spanish, or pidgin Japanese. I tried all the coder’s native tongues. Nothing.
I went back and stared harder at it. And then I felt like slapping myself. It was spelt backwards.
The words spelled out “in case of zombie invasion, pull lever.”
The arrow was pointing at a small red lever in the wall.
I screamed something vaguely resembling eureka, and bounced impatiently in my seat through the game’s loading screen. It took longer to fill out the team than when this had been the current challenge, but after about twenty seconds it dropped us in.
A few people on the chat instantly screamed my name in all caps.
I ignored them, and headed for the spot. Nothing. It was simply not there.
How had I gotten a pic of a non-existent element?
Had it been coded back out since that night I had done some mad screenshotting during a match, with zombies pouring in around me?
I sighed, and prepared to turn around smash my normal nine zombies.
I was in the back of the defenses, trying to get in hits over my allies’ shoulders. Soon I was frontline, though, as gamers fell. No wonder it took longer to get together a team now. It was so darn depressing, facing this flood.
After taking down a few, I tried backing out. My health was just about depleted. My last fellow gamer went down as I ran before the horde.
And there it was. The switch.
It spawned after the zombies attacked. You couldn’t pull it till after zombies arrived. Past the point when anybody would be looking for it.
I promptly got mowed under.
I didn’t join another group. It was late, and I felt like hitting this on fresh charge. Make this memorable. Anyways, I wanted to do it with the Jurassic gang, and there was only a few floating around right now.
I reread the whole story (and most my others) before I made this. Unfortunately, you only got a single mention at the end of the story, alongside z-whales.
Huh. =P
Yeah, I had a lot of characters in that story, I think I was afraid to add any more at that point.