“Took me less than the time of a medium-length Metallica song to get shot down by alien spacecraft. Again, I didn’t even get far enough into the plot to really know what the plot was, or that there IS one.
I did learn some new terminology, saying you searched thoroughly by saying I searched “from turnip to washcloth.” Is that a thing? Are people generally storing their turnips on one side of the kitchen and the washcloths on the other? I checked the turnip, I checked the washcloth, and I checked everything in between. I mean, I googled this and found nothing. Maybe the writer was trying to coin a new phrase? Maybe it shows up in every book? That would be a nice runner to have going.
Because the amount I got out of this book was perhaps my most pathetic run yet, I decided to see, after my death, what the 20 possible ending were and how many of them at least left me with most of my limbs. So here we go, in order that I flipped to and found them.
1. You are taken as a prisoner of war, of sorts. Although the ending mentions the possibility of reuniting with some buddies and cooking up an escape plan. Bad, but with the promise of future hijinks.
2. You somehow wheel and deal your way to your country’s safety. Right on!
3. Holy shit! You are abuducted by someone and your mind is turned to that of a 3-week old baby! And someone named Haven had his revenge! I should say so. Some kind of babifying ray sounds like good revenge indeed.
4. Heat-seeking rocket blows up your plane after a near miss hitting a mountain.
5. You HIT the mountain.
6. “You, Haven, and the spacecraft merge with the universe” which is a fancy way of saying get done blowed up.
7. Hey, you find your captured buddies and have to get them back home. Good one!
8. “A blast of automatic fire ends your careers.” Wow. That sounds like something a newly-appointed dictator would say to whatever form of government he was dissolving.
9. You capture not one, not two, but THREE fascist chiefs. Double-plus-good ending.
10. Taken hostage/prisoner. This is kind of a common thread in these books. A lot of endings where they don’t blow your head off, but they DO tie you up and put you in the trunk of the car. Or do the spiritual equivalent, at least.
11. You get some kind of intel that will result in winning some kind of war. From Matt and Mimla, who, with that name, are two acoustics and one ampersand away from being an indie rock duo.
12. Wait, again you are a hostage. What the hell? This is the third hostage-taking ending. So when they say 20 possible endings, they mean 19 ways to be taken hostage and one option to crash a plane into a goddamn mountain.
13. You lose comrades, but start in on a long war alive. At least, alive on the outside. *sniff*
14. Shot down by UFO’s. Again. I’m learning that any sort of aircraft travel is a bad choice here.
15. This Haven fellow is with you and you are not sure whether you’re a prisoner or not. I mean, how long will that remain unclear? What kind of ending is that? How do you not ask, “So, am I in a prisoner thing here or what?”
16. Your plane is blown up (!) and you realize you’ll soon be a prisoner or dead. Jesus. This POW thing is really quite pervasive.
17. Haven turns out to be a good guy. See, this is the problem with these books. So IS Haven a good guy, in which case you have never been a prisoner or turned into a mind-baby by his ray, or do your choices turn him bad in a matter of minutes or what? Because if he’s a good guy, then I’m obviously not his prisoner in ending 15 above, and therefore that would be a good ending. But you would never know that without reading all the endings. It’s sort of like…if one of these ended with “it’s all a dream” would that mean that all endings just stopped one sentence too early and all the events before were dreams, or is it just this one instance?
18. You now have to convince everyone to help the “Crystal People.” I don’t know what that means, but I guess it has something to do with methamphetamine.
19. You plane leaves you and you’ll have to survive on your own. This goddamn TREACHEROUS PLANE!
Okay, let’s do some math. Out of a possible 20 endings, 12 are bad, 7 are okay-ish, and one either doesn’t exist or I missed it. But I’m going to assume it involves your own aircraft turning on you.
So it appears that a good ending, though statistically somewhat unlikely, is at least possible to find. What I don’t know is how many paths lead to the good versus the bad endings. For example, maybe each bad ending has 5 separate paths that could take you there whereas each good ending has only one path, so although it looks like a 60/30 split bad/good, there is potential for the odds to be far worse. Someone needs to make a flowchart for one of these. Hmmm…..”