Pathologic: Day Eleven, in which the Haruspicus falls into a trap, discovering that his dilemma connects two incompatible truths

(or, in which Kevin learns that he really needs to stop making assumptions)

The morning of the eleventh day has come.

Infected in the past 24 hours: 334 people
Died in the past 24 hours: 621 people
Gone missing: 127 people
Number of dead total: 6831 people
Number of infected: 570 people

Tomorrow everything will be over

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Welcome to "Martha Stewart Living," Pathologic edition. Up next, we prepare a lovely quiche made
from spider eggs that hatch inside your mouth.

"Tomorrow everything will be over." Ominous words, but I can't help but feel relief when I read them. By now I, the player, have spent at least 40 hours in this hellhole of a town, struggling not to let the game wear me down. I have teetered on the brink of irrational frustration with it more than once. And I have been at the controls as my character has done the unthinkable. I've killed the guilty and the innocent. I've dragged myself in threadbare clothing through neighborhoods buzzing with the Plague. Frankly, I am exhausted. If one of Ice Pick Lodge's goals was to evoke in me a physical and emotional response analogous to what my in-game avatar is feeling, they have succeeded with flying colors. No other game has ever made me feel this hopeless.

I am determined to save this town, no matter the cost. The Haruspicus does not compromise. Yet the Bachelor, with his talk of wiping the town off the map, is not crazy. He too has witnessed the Sand Plague's devastation. Whether tomorrow brings salvation or annihilation, it will be a mercy.

The town is in the final stages of collapse, with the Sand Plague saturating every district. Even the thin veneer of civilization has fallen away. Food and medicine prices are astronomical; starving citizens on the street beg me for money, but I literally have none to give them. The infected seem to sense that society is crumbling and now attack other people with abandon, often in groups. Near the theater I witness a soldier running from a pack of infected. They chase him down and overwhelm him. Military discipline is breaking down—everywhere I see soldiers breaking ranks and fleeing from their guard posts. General Blok has finally lost control of his army.

... which means I get treated to the following sight when I arrive at the Bone Pillar to save the bull that was there yesterday.

Nothing but a blackened hunk of charcoal remains of it. I can't believe my eyes. Do these imbeciles have any idea how much panacea I could have made from that bull's blood? The nearest disinfector, impassive in his haz-mat suit, tells me to take it up with a low-ranking officer called "Captain Patroclus," who commands a mutinous band of soldiers that has taken control of the military's armory near the trainyards. Patroclus, in turn, says that he was only following orders to destroy whatever possible vectors of infection he found. Whose orders? I ask. Not the General's, surely. No, Patroclus says. The Bachelor gave the instructions.

Of course he would. Seething, I confront him about it, only to hear the same old routine about the importance of the Polyhedron. Apparently the Kains have convinced him that Simon Kain is not even dead but has transferred his soul into the Polyhedron. At best, this is superstition—I've seen the body, and he looked pretty dead to me. At worst—given my epiphany from last night—this is an abomination against nature. The Bachelor won't budge, though. The panacea doesn't seem to matter anymore to him. The Polyhedron is our only hope, he says.

Sure, whatever. I leave him with his microscope and misconceptions and strike out to pay my daily doctor's visits.

More Executors have appeared around town, holding vigil over ill Adherents. Fortunately, they are all the Bachelor's and Devotress's, not mine, but I still feel responsible for them. They are people, after all, and deserve to live. For the past two days I've been giving them antibiotics to keep them alive, making the rounds every day. With time running out, my supplies getting short, and my fatigue increasing, I decide to start healing some of them outright. I don't want to spend any of my precious panaceas in case I need them for some dire emergency on the final day, but I do have a couple of medicinal powders made by the town's children. Even the Executors seems shocked when I propose giving doses to the Adherents. It will destroy the patient, they warn. The medicine will burn the Plague right out of their veins, but it will take some of the veins along with it.

I shrug. Petr Stamatin, the Polyhedron's creator, should count himself lucky to make it out of this epidemic as a cripple. I feel a small stab of pity as I dose him with the powder, but only a small one.

While making my rounds, I begin hearing rumors surrounding Elder Oyun and the trial he has planned for me. First I receive a letter from the Devotress, who calls me to the cemetery to meet with her. She warns me that the Elder is going to try to kill me with this final task. Honestly, this doesn't seem like such a big deal to me; he's practically killed me with the last two trials too. The Devotress seems to think this time will be different, though, and she offers to help me out—in return for a favor on the final day. I immediately turn down her offer. Whatever favor she might want from me, I think, it can't be anything good. She accepts my refusal coolly, making me wonder briefly if I should not have been so hasty.

After this, I call on Young Vlad to make sure he's not bleeding from his eyes or something. He seems agitated to hear that I'm meeting with Elder Oyun later. He says I should be careful. After all, Oyun is the one who murdered my father.

Wait, what? I thought he died of the Plague! Young Vlad just shakes his head and tells me to ask the Elder myself. Then he, too, advises me to watch my back during the third task.

Back in the Abattoir, Elder Oyun tells me that it's time to enter "the belly of Suok"—that is, descend into the depths of the earth—and indicates the deep pit outside his personal chamber. Once I know the secrets of the earth, I will ascend to the status of hierophant within the Order. Despite my simmering anger at the Elder, I have to admit that I'm madly curious to discover what happens down there. On Day Five I saw some crazy things just by climbing down a 15-foot-deep well. What's going on in the darkness beneath the Abattoir?

Here I must apologize to you, faithful readers. Because I never find out.

Seriously, doesn't anyone in this town know what a rope is?

Apparently my paranoia in refusing the Devotress's assistance screwed me over. I die instantly when I jump down the hole, and no amount of creative thinking can reveal an alternate path. The belly of Suok, the strange place where the living earth feeds on the Order's sacrificial blood, will be a mystery to me forever.

Suddenly enraged, I return to the Elder's chamber. I'm sick of his arrogance and his murderously impossible quests. This guy has been a thorn in my side for long enough. It's time for a reckoning. You are responsible for my father's death, I tell him. Explain yourself.

Oyun doesn't try to lie. He admits to killing Isidor Burakh, having stabbed him to death with the sharpened horn of a bull. He's not sorry, either. Isidor Burakh was colluding with the Kains in their Polyhedron project, trying to pour old blood into new veins. He was betraying the Order. Oyun says he would do it again without hesitation. I coldly tell him to put up his fists and prepare to die, but a small grain of misgiving has settled into the back of my mind. My father was involved with the Polyhedron, too? Why?

The scene suddenly changes, and I find myself in a part of the Abattoir I've never seen before. In the center of the room is a bull, and torches line the walls. My weapons have vanished, leaving me with only my fists to defend myself. Then the Elder storms into the chamber, and the fight is on.

He looks pretty intimidating, what with his sheer size and the bull's-head helm, but I'm surprised to find that he's not terribly challenging. Maybe I shouldn't be: after all, I've spent the last week and a half scrabbling to survive among infected citizens, lunatics, and murderers in the world beyond the Abattoir's doors. Compared to that ordeal, it's practically therapeutic to vent a little righteous rage on a single target. It's the first time in this game that I've faced a straightforward videogame trope: the one-on-one boss battle.

The Elder, with his long reach and crushing strength, beats me down a few times, but I eventually succeed in exacting my revenge. I have to admit, it feels pretty good. I ignore the new entry in my diary that says that the Elder's death is "a disproportionate sacrifice." By now I've killed dozens of people in this town, with fists, guns, and knives. One more hardly seems to matter at this point, especially considering the sorts of things of which the Elder is guilty.

I spend the rest of the day running minor errands for Kapella, who is solidifying alliances with the other children in preparation for their forging of a new society birthed from the ashes. On a whim I check in with Ospina (one of the Devotress's Adherents) to make sure she hasn't fallen ill. When she hears that I've eliminated Elder Oyun, she hails me as the new Elder of the Abattoir. "I, Us-Pae-Nah, bend my knee to you," she says, apparently using her real name for the first time. I have finally come into my birthright as the head of the Order of Bulls. I have blood on my hands, but perhaps that is fitting. In that moment I feel unabashedly victorious.

My sense of triumph wears off as night falls. Brewing up the last of my panacea in my father's old laboratory, I remember what Oyun told me about Isidor Burakh's complicity in the creation of the Polyhedron. Where once I was so sure of my path, I now have a seed of doubt. Even my father seems to have been convinced of the Polyhedron's importance. How could he do that, though, with the knowledge of what it does? Were the Kains manipulating him in their pursuit of "utopia"? Was the Elder lying to me? Or did my father—the most respected member in the Order—know something that I don't?

Pathologic: Day One, by the end of which the Bachelor will have to begin his fight with a truly undefeatable foe

Look at me, all burdened-for-the-universe like.

So by the time I get to town, Simon Kain is dead. The town doctor, the unnaturally-old Isidor Burakh, is likewise missing, and I’m charged to investigate the murder. I spend most of the day scurrying around the town trying to find out what happened from any of the town’s three squabbling families—the self-righteous Kains in the West, the Saburov family in the Northeast, and the corrupt Olgimskiy house in the center. Being self-righteous myself, I play the Kains’ errand-boy most of the time.

Most of the evidence points to Isidor’s son, Artemiy, so I spend most of my time following his trail, occasionally getting sidetracked by nonsense stories about cannibalesses from the steppes and mind-numbing fetch quests. The investigation serves mostly to acquaint me with the three heads of proletariat and their numerous lackeys.

My primary enemy today is boredom. The chief puzzle: finding the best way through the city streets to accomplish each goal on time. This is not the Pathologic I’ve been told I would find. Or perhaps it is. The chief faults are here—slow combat, a maddening walking speed, boxy motion, and yes—the translation here is definitely more Russian than English.

All the same, the ambient music sets quite a tone, and the graphical limitations work in service of the game’s aesthetic rather than against it. Also present is the meta-narrative: I’m greeted by the executor and tragedian when I leave the gate, and they’ve put on a play in the theatre about me and my friends. The dialogue, though poorly translated, yields widely different results depending on what I say,

Some of the tasks seem pointless—during my search for the murderer, I stumble upon one waifish wench whose living room floor has a dead man who shambled in, took three gasping breaths, and inconveniently expired. After a bit of thought, I figure I’ll help the poor girl and hire the undertakers at the graveyard to dispose of the body, no questions asked. These undertakers, in turn, demand a high sum, which I am reluctant to pay, but do. Afterwards I’m sent onward, still clueless, fingering the ring of wench’s grandmother in my pocket.

After hours of long trekking, it finally becomes obvious that Simon Kain and Isidor Burakh’s murderer is not the dreaded she-cannibal, but the Sand Plague. Flush with my revelation, I warn Burakh’s old pupil Rubin before he exhumes the body and hurry back to George Kain to find him predictably skeptical. Moreover, he won’t allow me to examine the body myself, so I have to leave it to Rubin, who looks like anything but a legitimate doctor.

My reputation is at the max—everyone respects me, everyone loves me. In fact, I am regularly awarded a small stipend in the form of currency or little heirlooms. It’s too easy. Though it’s my understanding that the town around me will soon be transformed into a miasmic hell, I can’t help but wish that someone would try to shoot me, or that some plague-ridden housewife would run at me screaming. My wish is granted, of course, around midnight, when all the knife-wielding murderers come out to stalk the town. My first introduction with one of these ruffians comes as a surprise—I round the corner and there he is, grinning. I backpedal, all the while seeing him raise his arms to fling a small razor, which connects with grim accuracy, killing me instantly. Is this the true face of Pathologic?