Act II of MS Paint Adventures is now starting. Act I, it turns out, was mainly just prologue and introduction to the game mechanics, so if you were reading it before but got bored and stopped, or if you haven’t been reading it at all, this would be a good place to pick it up, it looks like. (Click through.)

A brief recap: Zoosmell Pooplord John Egbert (internet handle: ectoBiologist) likes paranormal lore, amateur magic and pranks, and terrible movies. His father likes to bake cakes, and collects fanciful harlequins.

John’s friend Flighty Broad Rose Lalonde (handle: tentacleTherapist) likes obscure literature, creative writing, and all things Cthuloid. Her mother has so far only been seen eerily silhouetted in a flash of lightning, but she is apparently into gin and derision. And paintings of elegant wizards.

Our two main characters have extremely cumbersome inventory systems (referred to as a SYLLADEX), based on various data structures such as ‘stack’, ‘queue’, and ‘tree’. They also have a STRIFE SPECIBUS, which indicates their preferred style of weapon. Rose’s is unknown; John has aligned his (apparently permanently) to hammers.

The main plot seems to revolve around the beta release of a new video game called SBURB. Rose has installed the server application, and John the client, which allows Rose to see and manipulate objects in John’s house via a video game cursor-and-menu interface. Once this was discovered, there followed the installation of (and messing around with) several complicated machines that seem to have something to do with card-based alchemy. Also, Rose accidentally destroyed John’s bathroom.

Eventually, a flaming meteor was spotted hurtling toward John’s house. One of the alchemy machines gave a rather short countdown of the time before impact. After some brief flailing around by John and Rose, the meteor has, apparently, struck. Act I closed on the image of a fiery mushroom cloud, and the author posted the above image in the Speculation thread on the MSPA forums.

And that’s the story so far.