Wow, that's a blast from the past. I think it was nine or ten years ago when I finished Journey. How much do you want to bet my short depiction of the Last Battle will be one hundred percent inaccurate?



I do. Natephants never forget. It was back when ancient tribes known as the WSS and the Googies were warring with one another across the message boards. These tribes like all tribes had each their own strange rituals, which included writing silly wotmania stories about their conflicts with the other group. The Googies had a leader known, creatively, as Googie, but Googie was an alt and only those well initiated in the tribe knew its real identity. Googie was ... not me; that's not the reveal. I was a tribal lower chieftan with the WSS.

But I decided the best way to win a war is to play both sides, so I created an alt named Elhaym (a name from a late-90s videogame) and began to establish her on the message board. I made the standard introduction post, interacted with people, pretended to be a bubbly too-self-important not-as-funny-as-she-thinks-she-is female wotmaniac. I did this for a few weeks in preparation, then I had Elhaym join the Googies and begin writing stories on their side, while ngallagher wrote stories on the WSS side.

Eventually the WSS tribal chieftan, a mythical super-heroic figure known only as MGB, revealed to me that he had learned Googie was in reality the wotmaniac Paradox Bain. So I had everything I needed. I had their secret and I had players on both sides of the conflict. I had ngallagher write a series of escalating battle stories that would lead to a big climax, and then I had Elhaym respond to one of those posts with a challege to ngallagher, stating that she would write the next part of his story and post it before he could, showing who was truly the best storyteller. Ngallagher and Elhaym sniped back and forth a little, and then Elhaym posted the next sequence in the story, as she'd promised. Except at the end of it, within the story, she betrayed the Googies and pulled off her mask and cross-dressed clothing to reveal that she had in truth been ngallagher all along. Ngallagher then immediately posted the final part of the story, following off Elhaym's cliffhanger, in which Googie's identity was revealed and the Googies were defeated.

And they were. That was pretty much the end of them on the messageboard, and also kind of the start of the decline and fall of the group era of wotmania. And so one age passes into another, facts become legends, legends fade to myth, you know how the rest of it goes.