The Midwich Prologues ~ A Love Story in Hell

~ (1992) from the Midwich Codex ~

The map of the land.

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Two characters seen from behind, the ship's fore deck, a crow on the rail.  Any combination is still a love story with the same motion capture.  Two voice actors each and their parts are written here without pronouns.

Here as such the Killer and Learner are able to select both character genders in any combination, but Explorer is default female because of her relationship with the later characterization of Death.

 

Leaving an apparent to Lord Charon and Lady Styx, but never actually bringing that up, as with many characters in variants from many previous tales and often in less pleasant forms.

 

~ The Midwich Prologues ~

A Love Story in Hell

Awaiting the dock as the ship unloads before departure, she walks ahead of the player into town (the same for all three players) ~

Gabrielle - Looking back, seeming friendly enough but vaguely amused by their existence, "Welcome back" (regardless if the first play).  Turns leading their walk ahead, "This is where the experiment first started."  Smiles, "Everyone was very excited."

The town's brickwork buildings all appear exactly the same but then start turning nearly as Rubik's Cubes in heavy chunks and grinding stone, aligning the doors and windows to differentiate them.

Some structures collapse inward to smaller, others chunking outward to wider and higher ending in a strange approximation of 'neo-victorian' into a classical Gothic architecture, peaked with spires at the finer corners.

~ The last of the buildings settle in as orbs of light rise behind them, darting to and fro in their rise while guards exit the wall towers from the parapets.

Gabrielle - To those in the sky, "They're the ones to watch.  They're the system intelligence, all one mind and code but differentiated throughout the lands, to think wherever it thinks like imagination stretching and now ...

"They've become something else entirely.  We don't even know anymore.  But there they are ... being brilliant.  Every single time.

"The entire population is derived from that code, all one intelligence divided and branched, but they don't know that yet.  It's all too big for them still.  They only know what they're here to do.

"So they've got their own varied randoms for their details.  Clothing and wealth, but taken randomly from different sets as those above.  Different every time."

~ The player and Gabrielle reach the town's central fountain ~

Gabrielle - Looking at the fountain, "Hm.  This is a nice touch.  The exact center."  She sits on the edge and smiles up at the player, "Been a while."  Distracted a moment by the touch of the stone, "Okay !  So before we start, I need to ask.  Why are you here ?"

~ 1 - I want to kill.

~ 2 - I want to learn.

~ 3 - I want to explore.

"Well alrighty then."  She stands and smiles, "And good luck with that.  Let the games begin."  

She turns away with a single step and is gone in a flash to the sky as it's grid-work crackles to the corners of the skybox.
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The sky-box is the artificial sky in most games, usually a large box with its images skewed to fit the corners to make it look rounded.  When one moves across a large open world, the skybox moves with you, containing the currently seen portion of that world.

This is important later on.

It usually includes the stars at night, transitions between day and night being lighting and skybox images changing over time.  But in this case the stars are these little Cherubim spheres, a sense of true nighttime depth.

Their motion when in rest too slow to see as time passes but the pattern is according to whatever the AI feels like doing more than any constellations.

More-so consistencies in the thinking of the game itself, and we'll just have to see how that plays out over time.  The Explorer can fly to them, altering the formula.

Of particular notice through the town aside from what makes a town run is the chapel that's never open and the pub that always is, with this playing from the jukebox at a random starting point upon the player's entry for mini-missions.

(cycling on the pub's jukebox)