text: [Themes: modern, serious, true story]
  
  You and your buddy Ben gather your cheap spelunking gear from the corner of his basement where you keep it and hoist it up the narrow steps to his living room.
  
  His mom is sitting there the same as when you'd come in, still in her bathrobe, a green terry cloth robe Ben said his dad gave her, that's how old it is. You head through the room without saying anything since she never responds when you do anyway, not so much as a "hi there" even though you've been her son's best friend since the two of you dominated the kindergarten playground together. It gives you the creeps to see Ben try to talk to her. He's never tried to do what the rest of us would do if our mothers were walking, breathing vegetables like her. We'd have lost it long ago, taken her by the shoulders, slapped her, told her to fucking snap out of it. But not Ben. He lingers behind you, and you know he is bending down to kiss her on the cheek.
  
  What do you do next?
  
  > This family stuff isn't your business. Pause and wait for Ben.
  "Bye Mom," you hear him say as the screen door closes behind you. He might get a nod from her but that's it, a nod without looking up, her eyes spaceylike from her pills, watching TV with the sound all the way down, as usual.
  
  You wait on the porch under the oversized black POW/MIA flag, which rolls in crazy arcs from the October wind. One of these days you'll get around to telling Ben he should take the flag down. It's a dark omen and makes the whole house look like somebody just died when in reality, Ben's father went MIA more than twenty years ago.
  
  > meet up with Rick
  You and Ben wait for Rick to pull up in his rusted-out Cavalier. They'll probably make you drive as usual, seeing as how they're all jealous of your sea-green Chevy Nova. Black vinyl seats, a beautiful, flawless paint job that you applied yourself, a car with curves like Kelly Siegel, you always say; she's a girl who goes to your high school.
  
  Rick pulls up, foul black stuff coming out of his tail pipe. "You guys want to help me with this exhaust problem this weekend?" he asks.[Themes: modern, humor]
  
  You are out early one Monday morning, making your rounds on your orange postie bike. Ripping it up, downhill on Castingham Street, disaster strikes! One of the bags full of letters falls off the side of your bike, sending paper everywhere. This is not the only problem - your bike is now unbalanced, and is starting to wobble!
  
  [Author's Note: In this adventure you play Postie, the adventurous postman from Perth who finds himself on a wild adventure.Unlike in the US, Australian postmen are lazy, and therefore ride around on dirtbikes painted red and stamped with the Australia Post logo. Honda CC-100's, or something.It's possible to visit every continent in the game, although possibly not in one shot.It's based on a story my friends and I made up one morning walking to school - a postman zipped past us at large speeds, and we pictured what would happen if he swerved to the left and used the kerb as a ramp. After many wild adventures, and by the time we were passing through the goalposts on the oval, he was in the Andes.]
  
  > swerve to the left
  You swerve to the left, several cars braking sharply to avoid you, and drive straight into the kerb. At such high speeds it serves as a ramp and sends you high into the air, over a fence.
  Scrunching your eyes up and waiting for impact, you are surprised and relieved to bounce off a children's trampoline - even higher into the air. This time you don't come down at all, becoming tangled in the support ropes of a weather balloon. There is no way to steer the balloon and it's to high to jump, so there seems to be nothing to do but switch off the engine and wait.
  
  Eight lonely hours pass. After a fitful sleep, you awake in the afternoon to find that you are sailing over Uluru, or Ayers Rock as it is better known - the huge red rock in the middle of Australia. You are only a few metres above the ground, and so you hasten to struggle free of the weather ballon's ropes, knowing this may be the last chance you get. You manage to cut yourself and your postie bike free, and fall down the slope of Uluru.
  
  It's rather steep, and you find it incredibly difficult to control your bike - in fact, you develop a bad case of speed wobbles before stacking it, flipping into the air and landing in a kangaroo's pouch. The giant rat promtply bounds away, taking you with it.
  It jumps all through the night and early into the morning, before dying of exhaustion in the middle of a rough dirt road. You crawl out of the pouch and are looking around when you notice a Jeep zooming down the road towards you, kicking up a huge cloud of dust!
  
  > run as fast as you can in the opposite direction
  You sprint off as fast as you can, as fast as your postie boots will take you down the red, dusty outback road.
  
  "Oi mate!", laughs a drunken yahoo in the passenger seat of the Jeep, "try f***cking outrunning this!"
  
  He throws a half-full beer can at the back of your head, which spills its contents down your back. You grit your teeth and keep running, somehow staying ahead of a 4-wheel drive with a V8 engine.
  
  All of a sudden you find yourself running up a tree, vertically. Not paying attention to what you were doing, you accidentally ran off a road and sprinted up a tree, launching yourself into the sky.
  
  At such high speed, you actually fly into space.
  
  > Floating in space
  You are hurtling out of Earth's orbit! If you don't find something to grab onto quick, you'll wind up in deep space!
  
  Fortunately, the FOXTEL sattelite happens to be orbiting directly above Earth, and you grab hold if it.
  
  You've solved your immediate problem. But you're still running out of oxygen.
  
  Wait! What's that huge mysterious saucer-shaped thing cruising towards you?
  
  > impale yourself on a spike sticking out of the sattelite
  You die. What else did you expect?