Rebel Without a Pause Key (Part 2: Free Love)

Last time we left our revolutionary, Alec Furious, alone in his homeless shelter, making plans and hanging up his neat Che Guevara poster. Let's have a look at our wide-eyed Trotskyite.

That noise you hear? It's Capitalism's knees quaking, for it has seen its nemesis' face. He's got a level 1 assault rifle skill, and he's not afraid to use it.

But while one man in the right place, at the right time, can change the world, our movement needs more than relying on providence. It needs to (well) be a movement. We have no money. We have no equipment. We have no members. Looking through the options, you can set any of your members to get up to a task on a daily basis - fund raising, selling (hash, presumably) brownies, trying to steal cars, causing disruptions, whatever. Also, you can arrange your troops into squads to head off to different locales. Some are clearly mainly for raids to steal stuff and strike against the man in all his forms. But other places look more like suitable locales to recruit likely minds to the cause. Finding one in the University district, Alec Furious heads off, knowing that a hard rain is coming to these streets and he is that rain.

Right now? It's time - it's time! - to... go to the Broccoli Rainbow Vegan Co-op. I figure if they're Vegans, they're probably easier to convince to my ill-considered mission due to malnutrition or similar.

(Don't worry, Vegan readers. I'm speaking from personal experience. Several of my girlfriends were Vegan, and I put down their terrible choice in men down to a lack of Bacon. No well-fed woman would think "You know - Games Journalists are HOT", I'm sure.)

Anyway, this is what the Vegan bar looks like.

Note all the options below of actions I can use to destroy capitalism. The map is in the bottom right, which you move around (Though you can call up an automap and similar to work out which way the spectre is going to sweep across the area). Anyway - what I end up doing is wandering around the room, looking at people. It's mainly students, hippies and teenagers, who sound ideally impressionable to be warped to my demented anarcho-syndicalist creed.

So, I decide to start by actually being it serious. Which works passably well.

But that seems a little Naomi Klein-dour for my tastes. Instead, I resort to using my famous charm.

That's not sleaze, by the way. That's a direct quote from Kropotkin. I bet you feel stupid now. Anyway, you can see which sympathies each person has, based upon the colour of their names. So seeing a red conservative on the way out, I figure I may as well kidnap someone for a little of the old indoctrination too.

So, I go home and set one of the newly recruited people into beating the Kidnap victim, after deciding during her education she would become known as Sho-Sho-Shodan (I forget why. It was probably a metaphor. It usually is), I head out for my many dates, prepared to sluttily lure them all into the acts of sexual perversion and/or minor terrorism.

Problem.

Man, what are the chances?

Anyway, everyone's set to work beating on kidnapped victims and selling brownies, while Alec Furious returns to that hotbed of activism (and, if he's feeling slutty, just plain hotbeddery), the Vegan bar. Furious walks in and up to the first bunch of radicals and casually opens up with his AK-47 at them.

The inevitable march of history hit a slight hitch, as instead of pressing "T" for talk I pressed "F" for Fight! Thinking that walking up to hippies and putting a 7.62mm through their head may not be the best way to forward the liberal agenda, I run. Alec stumbles to the door, being beaten upon by the surprisingly power-fists of enraged hippies. He didn't even manage to blow one apart, presumably due to that aforementioned level 1 rifle skill. Alec Furious always considered the AK-47 more of a fashionable left-wing accessory rather than a weapon of war.

At least we got in the paper. The revolution thrives on the oxygen of publicity.

Sadly, Alec Furious can now only thrive on the oxygen provided to him by the mask attached to his face. Yes, his beating was enough to send our glorious leader to the hospital. On the second day of our campaign, our leader has been sent to the hospital for two months. Bloody hippies.

After scanning the assorted no-hopers he recruited, one member seems slightly less rubbish than the rest. While everyone carries on the important business of kidnap-victim beating and brownie-selling, the rechristened Alecina Furious steps forth to continues the holy duty.

I figure a change of scenery may be a good idea, and we should take the struggle right into the heart of the corrupt world order. So I head off to a Gentleman's Club. Alecina Furious' passably high Charisma (Which roughly translates as "Looks pretty hot in a Beret and combat trousers", at least in my head) makes me think she can turn some of the powerful men to our cause.

It doesn't go exactly that well. Within seconds people are looking at her suspiciously in her street clothes and a general alarm is called when they realise she's part of the Liberal Crime Squad. To quote Lenin: Oh Noes!

She runs for the door, pulling her knife to gut a Judge. It doesn't quite go down as we expected either.

So, in three days of its existence the Liberal Crime Squad has managed to lose two leaders: one incapacitated for months and the other deciding that labouring under the yoke of corporate oppression isn't that bad at all. This never happened to Baader Meinhoff.

At least we got in the paper again.