Recap: Part 3

An unknown length of time passes. I'm sure Silven had many riveting adventures without us.

We pick up the story again as Silven boards the Noclip - an airship he has secretly built to reach the moon, which appears to be a new (and heavily-advertised) area to explore. The Mooncerer (who else?), a powerful sorcerer, lives there and is plotting revenge on the world that rejected him.

Whilst ascending, Silven explains to an angry Olgred that in his previous adventures he has been doing his best to subvert expectations of him and reject his true destiny with the mice and Three Toes Tavern by killing Zolar and sparing Warlord Wallace. Olgred is not convinced his master isn't completely crazy. He does however tell Silven that business is going well, and that the civil war is dying down thanks to brain-rotting viral content on Silverlink's instant messaging systems.

The pair arrive at the moon and Silven is frustrated and bored by the fact that the Mooncerer lacks imagination - everything he has created here is just a knockoff moon-version of things that exist back home. Silven has used his research into the fabric of existence to ensure his ship can pass straight through solid surfaces, and he dives right through the roof of the Mooncerer's fortress to give him a piece of his mind. The feared sorcerer is just a whiny little 'misunderstood' boy, after all.

With the Mooncerer told he must go back home and pull himself together, Silven reveals why he came to the moon - to obtain a new footrest for his collection. He despairs at what he is doing with his life, and rightly so.

Back in his office, Silven is greeted by Lord Treken, the general of the king's army. Treken has decided to declare war on Silven's companies. He claims that despite Silverlink's loyalty to the crown, it is growing too powerful and self-governing for the king's liking. Silven discusses the issue with his inner circle. They are worried that if the king discovers the secret workers in Limetop manufacturing infinite goods using the Doll Sequence, chaos will reign. However, it's not looking good for reinforcements - the plague, caused by The Glitch, is decimating the population of Oldeburgh, and the Fellowship of the Glitch are blaming Silverlink and have turned against it.

Luckily, Sir Meow-a-lot Mousecatcher, head of security, inspires the room with a well-placed meow. Ulf, the accountant, breaks apart Silven's new footrest for its four legs, recognising that anything at all from a new area, even a stool leg, must of course be more powerful than even the best weapons from Oldeburgh. Silven, Olgred, Simitest the head engineer, and Dasat the mercenary are inspired to become the four generals to lead their armies against Treken's.

In the early parts of the war, strongholds change hands back and forth between the opposing sides every day, until an AI fault is dicovered that leads to the slaughter of any invading force. Sieges become impossible; the armies must face each other on the open field in a final battle.

The two forces clash. Silven's troops have experience and the discovery that they can't be hurt while sitting down to their advantage. Treken's force has the sheer numbers. The battle turns tides several times, but Silverlink is gaining the advantage when Treken's forces suddenly pull back. They have allied themselves with a very curious army made up of dozens of types of monsters and evil-doers who are all a bit pissed off that a brave adventurer hasn't come to fight them yet. Death seems inevitable for Silven and his friends, until their enemies start talking. There's a wizard who believes he has met Silven before when he hasn't, a Fellowship traitor who has no valid explanation as to the king's actions to take out Silven, and the Terrorknights, who seem to have been forgotten about altogether. Silven's logic causes a huge chasm in the ground to open up and swallow most of his foes - a plot hole. This, combined with the fact that some of Silven's men can now be inexplicably be upgraded to side-switching machine-gunners, wins the battle, and war, for Silven.

The land is safe at last. In the aftermath, Silven refounds the lost gnome civilisation by finally singing with his sword, makes some less-than-inspiring speeches, and drinks plenty of alcoholic beverages. But he is rather uneasy about how he could wipe out an army by pointing out a few logic flaws. He's even more uneasy when some palace guards show up to take him to his coronation as king - apparently the old king never existed and he was always supposed to be striving to be crowned.

He suspects a plot to put him back on track with his original destiny, and summons his generals to assassinate him at the coronation if anything suspicious should surface. On the way, Silven realises he doesn't have a bloody clue what to do as king, but luckily he doesn't need to know, because it turns out his decisions boil down to boring two-way choices all based around upgrading his fighting abilities. What a disappointment.

More time passes. King Silven abandons his court mid-wittering and turns it into a museum. His rule is going pretty well for someone so clueless. Yet there is a new problem - a huge city in the south called Ostenwal, which he'd never heard of before, still claims loyalty to the old king (if he ever existed) and refuses to reunite. Silven and his entourage request an audience with its council and travel to the city. Despite a few embarassments regarding the name of their new 'royal republic', Silven puts forward a strong case for reunification, but Vilgrin, Ostenwal's leader, is having none of it. A messenger announces the old king and the enormous armies of the neighbouring kingdoms are invading Newburg. The city begins to riot, and the Glitch gets in on the festivities by way of a giant chicken decimating Silven's guards. Silven brings in the big guns, and Herbie Sootroller finally convinces Vilgrin to join the republic by way of sharing turnip and carrot crops to craft slightly less boring recipes. Silven and Herbie try to escape the city but have cursed themselves to stay by explaining their new battle fast-travel in advance. Dasat, injured in the fighting, appears to announce the borders are overrun and the situation looks grim.

Silven begins to realise that he may never be destined for victory the way he wants, despite all his work to make it happen. Nevertheless, he prepares for battle, before Ulf announces the world would tear apart if he witnessed so many troops in one battle, and that he'll have to leave the fighting to automated odds. With Ostenwal's forces, they have a 43% chance of success. Silven has no choice but to accept and go to sleep.

Newburg beats the odds and wins this second war. However, Dasat the mercenary is lost. The plague has got to his wounds and his hand has been replaced by a chicken's head. He begs Silven to end his life, but Silven has him carted off to the Fellowship instead. It is a decision that haunts him from that point on.

There is another problem. Though the allied armies of the outsiders are defeated, a champion has forced his way through the defences of Ostenwal for Silven's head. The burly warrior, named The Bloodthirsty, speaks a strange language, and Silven notices something different about him - he's another being who seems more 'aware' like himself. This champion has been sent on a quest to rid Newburg of the boredom and stagnation caused by Silven's meddlings. He reveals that he has been helped by the Modders - even stranger beings that can alter reality itself. They have already set Fireline's demons free and destroyed Silven's old headquarters of Overwall.

Silven sets about fighting off the Bloodthirsty - alone of course. The Bloodthirsty has many tricks up his sleeve, using strange irregularities such as shooting through doors to his advantage. After almost defeating Silven, the warrior is finally overcome by his own uncertainty and Silven's memory of a super-move he has been saving for an emergency throughout his reign of peace.

As The Bloodthirsty sinks to his knees, the Modders speak directly to Silven, warning him that he cannot claim victory. If he does,they tell him, everything he knows will be destroyed. If he accepts defeat, at least his legacy will live on. However, Silven considers all the improvements he has made for his peoples' lives and ignores their words, killing the Bloodthirsty once and for all.

The hooded figures of the Modders fall, revealing that they were disguised mice all along. Silven is enraged to see them disturbing his affairs again and manages to crush one underfoot. The remaining mice start complaining amongst themselves, talking of how boring this 'server' is and announcing that they are preparing to leave. However, one of the mice, named Darkgurl5, decides to give Silven one last chance, imploring him to do something interesting for once.

As the mice disappear, Silven is struck by a sudden thought - a memory of the strange cancelling poison effects from the spiders in Snake Hill Outpost so long ago. After distractedly making arrangements for the recovery of the royal republic, he visits Desert Marsh to announce this oddity to Professor Grennel.

To his amazement, the information works and he is allowed into Grennel's study. The Professor finally tells him of his research into the way the world works. Silven is the fulcrum - a main entity about which the world turns. His friends and major enemies are centrepieces - characters with limited freedom, bound to the fulcrum, who can help or hinder him according to their relationship. To Silven's horror, the rest of his subjects are mere pawns, who merely act human when he is around. To the majority of the population, his work in Fireline and Silverlink is utterly meaningless.

Silven is almost overcome with dismay. He feels his life as he remembers it has been pointless, and that as fulcrum everything has been destined as he sees fit because he just needs to wish for something to happen. Grennel, however, corrects him on that - the Elsenberg purpose principle has been sorely misunderstood by Silven. Objectives have still been set by higher powers, and Silven only decides how events unfold. Silven isn't as powerful as he once thought.

Grennel has invited an old friend/enemy, Brother Whateverborn, to help explain and suggest the next steps. Whateverborn suspects that the mice are representations of the outside forces that created and control the world for their own entertainment. Silven finally grasps his meaning - he is in a game.

Whateverborn explains that, from the mice's point of view, the simulation has gone badly wrong. They gave the fulcrum and centrepieces too much freedom, and this has caused Silven and his friends to stray from the intended main quest beginning in the Three Toes Tavern. Some tried to get the game back on course by attempting to block Silven's access to Grennel's research - one has erased the memory that would allow Silven to converse with the wayward scholar, and the memory was only brought back when Silven elimated that mouse from play.

On the other hand, Silven's actions have intrigued some of the other observers. They have attempted to incorporate his new systems such as fast travel and instant messaging into the game by promoting pawns to centrepieces; however they have gone too far and messed with too many rules they don't understand. This has resulted in the rise of the Glitch despite the Fellowship's best efforts... and Silven is to blame.

While the Glitch is out of control, there is perhaps an even more urgent issue that Silven could still do something about. Most of the mice are finding Silven's misadventures dreadfully boring and are leaving the server. As a last-ditch attempt to bring back some fun, the observers created a new fulcrum- the Bloodthirsty - to eliminate Silven. Now that the warrior is dead, most are giving up this simulation as a bad job and leaving, threatening the future of the server. At any second, Silven's universe may just cease to exist... unless he can do something to convince the mice to keep it running.

Grennel suggests an alarming possibility - starting the Three Toes quest that the mice wanted all along. Whateverborn adds another option - there is a dark presence hidden within the tavern, presumably some big villain to be revealed at the start of the quest. If Silven can kill it, there is a chance that he can end this quest prematurely and go on to new and better things. There is also a chance that path will end the world for good, but Silven wants to try anyway.

To access the villain, Silven needs to glitch his way through the corner of a room. Seeing as he idiotically decided not to be a mage at the start of the game, he must buy a 'charge stick' which will propel him through the wall after being applied to his buttocks. The catch? The merchant only accepts Gems, the real-world DLC currency of the observers. Whateverborn has been tapping into the mice's communications and thinks he can get a password for Darkgurl4's source of income, to fund the purchase of the charge stick.

Whateverborn sacrifices himself to upload Silven to the vessel of the player's job - a humanoid robot in a supermarket. Silven, or Crystal as his coworkers know him as, struggles to blend in - it turns out the real world works in different ways, and smashing up crates of stock won't get him his Gems any time soon. Luckily, the sexism of the future lets him off the hook even after causing damage to an intimate area of his colleague's body.

Silven eventually begins to understand he needs to get through his shift to be paid and begins the arduous, mind-numbing task of working the delivery. However, he is spurred on by a conversation with one of Crystal's friends about the games they play together. Despite calling a certain fulcrum an uninspiring dick, Jez reveals that Scenario 66 has a procedurally generated set of quests which would allow Silven to live on forever... as long as the server stays afloat.

The supermarket opens. The chaos that follows is worse than any battle Silven has ever been in. After listening to the dronings of Saz about management drugging the staff, he is called to the front lines, where he wades through hordes of irate customers in search of a solution. It turns out Silven isn't too bad for a fantasy RPG AI, and wins the gratitude of his colleagues by... well, reading a pizza box.

Inspired by the teamwork of his new friends, Silven decides to use his robotic body to burst into the managers' office, tear open the safe and save his fellows from being drugged. It turns out, however, that consequences are not quite so black and white in the real world as in his game, and he succeeds in getting Crystal fired, the company shut down and the other staff being laid off in the process.

Though no-one remembers he ever existed, Whateverborn makes sure Crystal's last pay is spent on Gems for Silven's charge stick. After resisting the cheerful adverts of the overly-irksome DLC merchant and buying the goods, he stops off at Silverlink Stuff HQ to collect Olgred for help at the Three Toes Tavern. However, Olgred fails to grasp the urgency of Silven's mission over his own preocupations with running the republic, and Silven storms off in frustration to find Professor Grennel instead.

Now that Silven knows where it is, the Three Toes Tavern has magically appeared along the Old Cobble Road. His fast-travel seems to have been disabled by the observers for extra drama, so he and Grennel set off on foot. Silven has been cheered by his miserable experiences in the real world, recognising that his own designs are worth saving after all.

Silven's proximity to the main quest has triggered the unlocking of random encounters along his journey. There are fair maidens requiring recruitment, fast-food couriers with no memories and a whole host of babbling peasants all suddenly in need of help. The mob chases the pair down the road, and they take shelter in a woodland clearing. Unfortunately, they encounter Melton Pressley, the leader of a faction of warriors dedicated to defending the weak. Melton immediately promotes the stunned Silven to leader of the group before assigning him an unwanted random quest. There is a strange, frustrating power here, because Silven cannot say no, and quickly falls under Melton's spell.

Despite his reservations, Grennel saves his master from a lifetime of repetitive slaughter by carrying him away to another addictive distraction - a collectible card game player just down the road. When he's got Silven hooked on cards instead of Melton's quests, he convinces the king to go off down the road in search of shinies. Further on, Silven comes to his senses, and isn't too pleased to remember his real mission and the danger he is in.

They hurry off to the one place Silven has strived to avoid - the Three Toes Tavern. Silven briefly stops to pluck a much-needed sword from an amphibious master of riddles before entering.

It is nightime in the inn - a clear foreshadowing of the excitement to follow. The start of the quest is equally clear - a man sat waiting for Silven at a table. But Silven avoids him, and is successfully propelled into the mysterious room by a much-needed pain in the backside. There is something dark, huge and nasty in the far corner... and it opens its eyes. No sneaky option now!

It's all a bit of an anti-climax really, because the monster is only level 20 and quickly falls to Silven's blade. It was only supposed to be the start of the quest after all.

The real danger lies back in the main room of the tavern. Baron Melaxis the Fifth is furious that Silven has robbed him of the chance to train him up before betraying him and feeding him to his pet, like all the cool villains do. He rebrands himself as The End, and tries to get rid of the troublesome pair by teleporting them to another dimension. Here, Silven takes a chance on the fact that the game observers probably want to watch a monotonous elemental platforming adventure even less than he wants to take part in it. He calls out the lazy desgn and the mice teleport him back to the tavern.

The End takes a valuable moment to change into his werewolf costume and engages Silven and Grennel in mortal combat. After a few awkward pauses for The End to summon his minions, Silven gains the upper hand by finding his foe's shield shards and breaking through his defences. When he kills him, he sees his plan to save the game is working as the remaining mice come out of their hiding places to see what happens next.

What happens next, however, is not of the mice's design. One of The End's goblin minions just will not go down, no matter what Silven does to stop it. Off it trots towards the village of Thornyhedge, just one little goblin, yet seemingly invincible all the same. And one invincible goblin can do a whole lot of damage...