The sight left us speechless, and unwilling to break the eerie silence as we watched destruction fall upon the city. Crankshaft brought us around to his lab, on the outskirts of the city.
A ragtag group of sharkponies had taken shelter there, as the invaders seemed to be concentrating on the city proper. To my great relief, Madame Fog also waited within.
“Just on time,” she said. “I think we should be leaving.”
“I-- We--” I gazed out of a window at the rapid ruin of the city. “I suppose we have no choice.”
Minnow had galloped over to the sharkponies, and was speaking rapidly in the shark language that I could not understand. Crankshaft was standing oddly still, in the center of his workspace.
Minnow rushed back to me. “We’re evacuating,” she said. “You should too. It’s not safe here.”
Crankshaft looked up at us. “Go. I agreed to the deal. You can take the Hippocampus.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I can’t leave my work behind.” He stomped a hoof down. “I have to protect my research. I’m staying here, no matter what.”
“But--”
My mistress silenced me with a hoof to my withers. “Porter. We must go.”
I reluctantly boarded the Hippocampus, and the sharks flanked us as we traveled away out into the open water. Piloting the submersible was relatively simple, but my mind was still on the strange underwater city as we left it behind. I knew the scene would haunt me for many nights to come.
[ENDING E]
Despite the fact that this ending seems superficially similar to many of the others -- if you're cheating and reading the endings out of order -- it conceals something quite remarkable. I don't think a reader can be said to truly understand the attack that drives the second half of the story unless they've made the choices that get them here fairly.
And one of the things that bowls me over about this story is how much it understands the source material of 80 Days. Making the choices to get here requires a willful disregard for what the game tells you your place in it is (a mere butler playing a subsidiary role to the adventurer who employs you), and an embrace of what the game repeatedly shows you your role is:
The protagonist.
Fogg/Fog may drive the trip, but it's Passepartout/Porter Stout who drives the story. The game couldn't me more blatant about this if it tried: he is literally the narrator/author. It forces you to make every choice that unrolls the tale, and only very rarely (in some of the later DLCs incorporated into the game, like the North Pole trip) does it ever hint that the agent of the travel decision was your employer. Because, for the most part, he is completely passive; the choices are your character's. The sense in-game that you're babysitting Fogg is a recurring theme, and in fact it's a hint to what unlocks all of the best content.
Fogg is an albatross. Almost, in some ways, an antagonist -- because almost any encounter in the game is worthy of being the focus of a story of its own, and yet you are doomed to only ever see a tiny piece of it due to the inexorable march of Fogg's deadline. I think the people who played the game as if Fogg was more important than themselves, as if "winning" was more important than the journey, are the ones who found the game shallow. Breaking those chains and thinking of the game as your adventure, making choices that drive the story rather than the trip, lets the story unroll.
And getting to this particular ending follows that philosophy to a T. This isn't Fog's tale. This isn't the story of the characters with whom you interact. This is Stout's story, your story, and it's fitting that reaching the biggest revelations requires two decisions which explicitly treat it as such.
What does shark-talk sound like, I wonder. c.c
7471016
Or you can just hit the first choice every time. :V
7471016 You can also reach it if you Allow Crank to go into the tunnel, and then decide to wait for him.