Chapter 54: A Cross to Bear

Suddenly, you wake up, in a cold sweat, lying on the floor in a dark house. Peek is standing over you. You start and scramble back in the corner, like a frightened animal. Melvin is similarly freaked out, and is somehow dripping cold, sweaty pixels on the floor.

Peek looks at you in amazement. “You did it. You stopped the bad man!”

“Peek,” you cry, “what was that?”

He looks at the floor. “It was just a memory. I put it in your dream.”

“Did all that really happen?”

Peek looks at you. “The bad man really came, and hurt all my friends, and took them away. But not me, I hid, even after he killed me.” Unsettlingly, you realize you can see through Peek’s ghostly body. He looks you in the eyes. “In your dream you saved everybody! Do you think you can save them for real?”

“How can I save them, Peek? Aren’t you all… ghosts?”

Peek looks down again. “Yes… we’re all ghosts.” He looks at you angrily. “But we’re not supposed to be here! Ghosts aren’t supposed to stay! But the bad man makes us stay!”

Peek is terrifying when he is angry, but you try to stay calm. “How does he make you stay, Peek?”

“He took all my friends to his evil house, and he uses magic to trap them inside.” Peek closes his eyes, and makes the face of a proud child, “But not me! I’m too good a hider! I stayed here, in the good house! He came back to find me a few times, but he never did!”

“So… how does his magic keep you here, Peek?” you ask, hoping he doesn’t get angry. Instead, Peek gets sad. “It doesn’t. I could go.” He starts to cry. “But I don’t want to leave my friends! And my teacher! They are all trapped in his bad house! I want to save them, but...” he shouts, now, through his tears. “I don’t know how!”

“Do you know where the bad house is, Peek?”

He wipes his tears. “Yes. I know. It’s in Spirit Bay. But it has a magic lock, and I can’t get in.”

Melvin pipes up. “Is there a key, Peek?”

Peek looks down. “The man says there is. Once, when I tried to get in to help my friends, he almost caught me. He said that no one can get in because he gave the key to Dracula. He says that no one can defeat Dracula, so no one can get in. I tried to go to Dracula’s house once. It was really scary. Dracula almost got me. I talked to a rainbow ghost there who said there were magic crosses that could stop Dracula, but I don’t know where they are.” He looks at you, hope in his eyes. “But in your dream, you stopped the bad man, over and over again! You saved my friends! Maybe you can get the crosses, and get the master key from Dracula! Will you do it?”

“Magic crosses? Defeat Dracula?” Melvin says incredulously. “Kid, I don’t know where…”

You cut him off. “We’ll do it, Peek. We’ll find a way to stop the bad man, and save your friends. You’re a good friend, Peek. We’ll do it for you,” you look meaningfully at Melvin, “and for the Queen.” Melvin gets quiet, seeming to remember the reason you are here in the first place.

Peek gets excited and starts jumping around. “You can do it!” he shouts, “I know you can! Just remember what the rainbow ghost said: The only way to stop evil is with the power of the cross.”

“Okay, Peek, we’ll go find those crosses.” You shake his cold, ghostly hand, and stride out of the house into the darkness. You are walking across the field purposefully, toward the forest. You look back, and see Peek in the window, watching you leave. As you watch, he fades back into the darkness of the house.

“Where are we going?” asks Melvin. 

You stop and sit down in the cold, dark grass. “I have no idea.”

“You have no idea?” says Melvin, exasperated. “Then where are we going?”

You bury your head in your hands. “I have no idea. All I know is that somehow we’re supposed to ‘stop evil with the power of the cross.’”

“Well, that’s just great,” says Melvin. “We don’t know where we are going, or how to get there, or what crosses that weird ghost kid is even talking about. I can’t take much more of this haunted stuff. Let’s just head back to town, and play some pinball, and maybe things will work themselves out.”

Just then, you hear a roaring sound above you. You look up, and two strange looking spaceships are hovering overhead, maybe two hundred feet up. They are blue cubes, with strange yellow… propellers, maybe? sticking out on either side. A beam of light shines down on you both, and a voice, amplified by a crackling electrical system comes from one of the ships. “Are you ze Player?”

You look at Melvin, who puts up his non-existent hands in an “I don’t know what this is” gesture.

You stand up, shielding your eyes against the light from the ship and call up, “Yes…”

The voice continues. “Would you like to stop evil with the power of the cross?”

You and Melvin look at each other with raised eyebrows, not that Melvin has eyebrows. “Yes we would!” you call.

“Great! Come on up!” Suddenly, the light gets brighter, and you feel your whole body painfully crackling with electricity, and everything goes white.

The whiteness fades, and eventually, so does the pain of a million electric shocks. As your eyes adjust, you find yourself sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship, with controls for some sort of laser cannon in front of you. Everything here is blue, except for buttons and controls, which are bright yellow. You see through the forward window that you are hurtling through space, and that the other blue cube ship is flying right next to you. Suddenly, a comm screen crackles on, and you see an intense looking man in dreadlocks and rainbow war paint wearing some kind of tribal garb.

“Achh, Player, you are there!”

You and Melvin glance at each other. “Yes,” you say, “I’m here. Though I didn’t think I’d survive that… electro-beam, or whatever.”

“Ha! Our Spectraport! The proud teleport of the warriors of Spectra! You must feel great honor!”

Melvin says, “All we felt was great pain! And I think my eyebrows are gone,” not that he has any eyebrows.

“Ya! The Spectraport is not for the weak! But you are here now.” He adjusts a flight lever, and you see, on the screen, his controls are a mirror of yours. “So! You are ready to use the power of the cross to fight evil, ya?”

“We, uh, are ready to go to Dracula’s castle, and get the key he guards, if you have the magic crosses to fight him, if that’s what you mean,” you say, hoping to clarify the situation.

“Castle? No, no, we fly to planet Tsoris! We will use the power of the cross to destroy Mechanolds!”

You and Melvin look at each other. “Do you mean Mechanoids?” asks Melvin.

The rainbow painted warrior on the screen shakes his head. “No, no… Mechanolds, you know. Morpuls.”

You both stare at him blankly.

“Come on,” he says, “Morpuls! The greatest enemy of Spectra! You know, Gupoids, Flashers, Parasoids, Nastroids... you know, right?”

“Look,” you say, “you asked if we wanted to use the power of the cross to destroy evil. That’s what we want to do. We need magic crosses so we can stop Dracula. We… didn’t plan on going into deep space.”

The warrior looks upset. “What is Dracula? We go to fight Morpuls for the honor of Spectra! Our ships have the Spectron, yes? It is our secret weapon against the Morpuls! A holographic dual laser blaster zat will connect our ships and destroy the Morpuls in a cross fire! Nothing can survive the power of the cross force!”

You put your head in your hand. “We don’t know anything about that. Why are you even fighting the Morpuls?”

The warrior seems affronted. “They are our greatest enemy! The time we all are waiting for has come! Thanks to our brave warriors, the invasion of the planet Spectra is over! We fly to planet Tzoris to avenge our honor!”

Melvin seems as upset as you are. “How did you even find us? Why would you come all the way to Earth to drag us into this?”

He adjusts more flight controls. “I heard about you from that Phaser Patrol woman… Jennifer. I needed a battle partner, but she says she is too busy now as Administrator, but that you could win any battle. So, I came to get you.”

You look at Melvin. “I guess our reputation precedes us.” You look back at the screen. “Wait, why do you need anyone? You are a warrior, yes? Why do you need to recruit us?”

“Because I have Spectron! Spectra tradition says that warriors who have Spectron must find an ally to fly together, and fire the cross laser! I choose you as my ally to avenge Spectra!”

“Hm,” you say, looking at the controls. “These look pretty simple. Left and right, and fire.” You try firing, and bright white beam connects your two ships.

“Careful!” says the warrior. “Fire it too much, and it will overheat!”

“Who made this?” asks Melvin. “The Terrans?”

“Now,” says the warrior, “we are almost to Tzoris. We must make a decision. For battle, we can have our ships move together, firing laser in straight line, or in opposite directions, firing laser in a diagonal line. You, as ally, must choose.”

You visualize what this means. “Isn’t straight better? We can cover the whole battlefield that way. If we shoot diagonally, we can’t even reach half the enemies. I mean… who would want that?”

“Diagonal is traditional Spectra battle technique.”

“But… it’s… a terrible idea.”

“Is tradition!” he shouts.

Melvin shouts back. “You said Spectra tradition is that the ally gets to choose. So, we will choose, not you!”

The warrior smiles. “Ha ha! I knew you would be good warriors! He looks out his front window. “We are here at planet Tzoris! Prepare for battle! Avenge Spectra!” Your ships automatically fly into mirror formation, just as the mothership flies up from the surface of the planet. You get ready to fire at it. The warrior calls out, “Don’t shoot! The Mothership is indestructible! Only the Mechanolds it releases can be destrovied!”

“Destrovied?” asks Melvin.

“Wait…” you say. “If the Mothership is indestructible, why not use that as the attack ship?”

The warrior intones gravely, “It is not the Morpul way.”

You look at the weird yellow mothership, and then you look at Melvin. “We’re a long way from a haunted house.”

Melvin climbs into the laser chamber. “You just man that Spectron, and keep us from becoming ghosts!”

Place the Cross Force cartridge into your Atari 2600. Choose either game select 1 or 2, and set the difficulty switches to b. Play until you score 30,000 points. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.