Recently I've been checking the flowcharts of the Vulcanverse books. It's a task like painting the Forth Bridge, as with more than 6000 sections and close on three-quarters of a million words I suspect there's always going to be one more bug lurking in the thickets and hidden from notice by Titivillus.
Recently I came across a big one -- though luckily (can you hear my sigh of relief?) it's not a bug that affects anything important. In The Wild Woods it turns out there are a few orphaned sections involving travelling in your sleep from one of the other regions of the Vulcanverse -- most likely Hades, as The Houses of the Dead was Jamie's other book in the series. It looks like there was meant to be an encounter somewhere with a priest of Hermes who waited till the player was asleep to send them to Arcadia. Evidently you could encounter the priest more than once as there are three different outcomes from The Wild Woods section 821.
821
[three tickboxes]
Put a tick in a box. If two boxes are now ticked ► 59 immediately. If all three boxes are now ticked, ► 492 immediately. If only one box is ticked, read on.
Hermes has sent you across the world in your sleep. You wake with a start. You find yourself trapped in a kind of box, one side of which is made of glass, the other sides of a strange material you have never seen before. Staring down at you are two enormous figures – one a grey bearded oldish man with a wild look in his eyes, clearly tinged with madness, the other a red-haired woman, pale skinned and lean. They wear curious clothes of browns, blacks and greys that barely cover their bodies, with trousers in the Scythian style and white shoes tied up with string. The man holds an odd black device of some kind in one hand.
‘What… what is it?’ says the woman.
‘I dunno – I think we’ve been hacked,’ says the man.
And then suddenly you wake up – again. Thankfully it was just a fevered dream, no doubt of the gods. But which ones?
Anyway, you look around. You have arrived in Arcadia, the land of eternal summer. A warm haze washes through the air, birds and insects chirrup and whirr in the trees. But this is the Vulcanverse... what horrors lie hidden in this verdant paradise?
Nearby, you can see the pillared portico of a great palace, jutting up over the treeline. ► 686
686
You have come to the near centre of Arcadia, following the Arcady Trail, a dusty pathway through the wild and rampant greenery that leads to the Palace, set in a deep valley, flanked by impassable towering cliffs to east and west. To the north is the great lake that is the source of the river Ladon. From here you can go:
South-west on the Trail ► 455
South on the Trail ► 728
North to the Lake ► 37
To the Summer Palace ► 10
59
The priest of Hermes has sent you off to Arcadia in your sleep once more. This time you wake up with a start to find yourself in a warm, wooded glade – and a hooded figure is rummaging through your back pack!
With a strangled cry of rage, you stagger to your feet, still groggy from your journey, and the figure gives a squeaking yelp, as of a young woman. She dashes away into the woods. Her hood falls back, revealing a mop of bright red hair but you are unable to see her face before she is gone.
Quickly you check your gear – you have not lost any items but you been robbed of up to 50 pyr. Cross it off.
Cursing your luck, you look around. Once again you have arrived in some woodland close to the Summer Palace of Arcadia. ► 686
492
Hermes has sent you in your sleep to Arcadia once again. You wake with a start, fearful of thieves, bizarre visions or some other catastrophe but nothing untoward occurs. You find yourself in quiet, sun-dappled woodland, warm and cosy… but you know that won’t last for long.
Nearby, you can see the pillared portico of the Summer Palace, rising up above the trees. ► 686
Jamie can't remember writing these sections or how they were meant to fit in with the rest of the books. Obviously it was a rapid-transit system back to the Summer Palace, and it was probably intended to lead from one of the other books because it seems like the player is surprised to wake up in Arcadia. There are three sections in The Houses of the Dead that he left blank (92, 415 and 702) so were those earmarked as the lead-in to the sections above, but Jamie forgot to write them?
That theory doesn't hold water, though, as Jamie wrote The Houses of the Dead first. He surely wouldn't have written a sequence for The Wild Woods that followed on from something that he forgot to put in the earlier book. So presumably the rapid-transit must have been from elsewhere in Arcadia -- not so useful in gameplay terms as a Hulk-like leap across the whole Vulcanverse, but it does fit in with the statue of Hermes next to a dried-up drinking fountain at section 85 in The Wild Woods. The theme of the book is restoration, so it makes sense that the player is supposed to make the water flow again and those teleports back to the Summer Palace were intended to tie in with that quest somehow.
With Christmas coming up (and yes, I'm sorry to be mentioning it while we're still in November) what could be a more perfect gift than a gorgeous full-colour hardcover Vulcanverse book? If you were thinking the same thing, we have a special offer just for FL blog readers: a copy of The Wild Woods at half price available here. But hurry. The offer is limited to the first fifty customers and expires on Christmas Eve. And just one order per person, please, to make it fair for everybody.
