The clan were pretty pissed at divisible right then, but h0nk heard him out. Divisible told us that the game had spawned a headcrab in the hotel room, and they'd broken eye contact with the corpse in the attempt to take it out. They also said, in no uncertain terms, that they wasn't going to spend a minute longer staring at a dismembered cartoon corpse so that some people on the internet could run around a maze of deathtraps.
This was a fair call, and divisible ended up leaving with our best wishes. Divisible got into WoW instead and picked up some new pronouns somewhere along the path. (Sorry about the older posts, by the way, I will go back and fix them when I can.) We still speak from time to time.
Our next plan was to have one of us watching the corpse and one of us protecting them from divisible's headcrab, while the rest of the clan tackled the labyrinth.
All of a sudden, though, it turned out that remarkably few members of the clan were willing to volunteer. In the end, I stepped forward, and Jersey99 stayed to take out the headcrab when it showed up.
Keeping your screen focused on a scene of gore, even cartoon gore, is harder than it looks. I didn't want to miss what the rest of the clan were up to, but there was something about that terrifying wide-eyed grin that kept drawing my eye away from the blow-by-blow report in chat. Still, I knew at this point that it was this or disappoint a group of people who made up, at that point, almost my entire circle of friends.
Jersey99 and I were ready for the headcrab, but it never came. It was just a sound effect, designed to panic whoever was watching the corpse into breaking eye-contact and killing their teammates. I found this reassuring, at first. It meant that we didn't need to waste an extra body on keeping the room safe, and that I didn't need to rely on anybody else watching my back. Then I realised that it would mean I was alone in the room with this thing, listening to the battle report coming in like the helpless general in some bad sci-fi movie.
And things did get bad. Outside of the hotel corridors, the map really stops pulling its punches. The pure puzzles stop, and the players have to jump from moving platform to moving platform, often while their teammates defend them from attack by multiple enemies. Whoever the designer was, they must have been years ahead of their time: you can encounter gameplay tricks in TRAINING.bsp that it would take Blizzard some time to develop and polish to a shine for the elaborate raid bosses of WoW.
The real battle is in the hotel room, though, and it is purely psychological. It turns out that the headcrab screech is the first, and crudest, of a number of tricks that the hotel room will play in order to get you to break eye-contact. I think the mapmaker tried it out first as a test, and when he realised how well it worked, let loose every cruel trick that he could imagine. The first thing to happen after the screech is that the lights in the room will dim, and go out, leaving you alone in the dark with a disembodied corpse.
The first instinct in this situation is to turn on your flashlight, at which point you discover that it has moved. Only slightly, and it's still in pieces, but by this point you've been staring at it for a good ten minutes. You know that thing like the back of your hand, which is a disturbing realisation in and of itself.
But you know that it is just a character model, of course, so you continue to watch it. Just you, the corpse, and a flashlight, alone in a darkened room, as your friends are picked off one by one somewhere else.
Sooner or later, though, your flashlight is going to run out of battery: a feature carried over from Half-life, and one which the designer seems to have anticipated.
Because just as your flashlight gives up for good, plunging you into darkness, you see it starting to get to its feet.
