The Ancient Buried Pyramid

The Ancient Buried Pyramid (a.k.a. A Small Pyramid) is located in the Desert Beach, and opens up as a part of the level 11 quest, the Quest for the Holy MacGuffin. The Pyramid consists of the sub-zones:

• The Upper Chamber
• The Middle Chamber
• Control Room
• The Lower Chambers

Messages

Before getting the Staff of Ed:

You step inside the small pyramid, to find, just as your father described, a cunningly-carved wooden scale model of Seaside Town. The level of detail is stunning -- if you lived there, you'd be able to see your house from here. By now.

A small socket in the stone floor, at the edge of the model, appears to be where you're supposed to put the Staff of Ed. Supposedly, sunlight will pass through the gem at the top of the staff, and be focused onto a specific location on the model, showing you where the ancient pyramid is buried beneath Seaside Town. Neat.

Guess you'd better commence to getting that staff, then.

After getting the Staff of Ed:

You step inside the small pyramid, to find, just as your father described, a cunningly-carved wooden scale model of Seaside Town. The level of detail is stunning -- if you lived there, you'd be able to see your house from here. By now.

You locate the socket on the floor where the Staff fits, and plug it in. Sunlight streams in through a hole in the wall and hits the Eye of Ed, which focuses the light into a concentrated dot on the model. You move closer to the model to find exactly where the dot, and therefore the buried pyramid, lies, and... sniff, sniff... is that smoke?

Suddenly, the model bursts into flames and is quickly consumed, leaving behind a pile of ash and a large hidden trapdoor. You open the trapdoor to find a flight of stone stairs, which appear to descend into an ancient buried pyramid.

Well, that wasn't quite what you expected.

Notes

• See Quest for the Holy MacGuffin for instructions.
• Players under the Actually Ed the Undying challenge path get access to Your Tomb instead.

References

• "If you lived there, you'd be able to see your house from here. By now." is a reference to the commonly-used sales pitch for apartments and condominiums, "If you lived here, you'd be home by now."
• Plugging the staff in to get sunlight to reveal the location of the the ancient pyramid refers to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones places a staff in a hole above a wooden city so that sunlight can stream through the gem, revealing the burial location of the Ark of the Covenant.
• The fact that the pyramid is mostly buried underground, with just the tip showing, is probably a reference to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, where Robert Langdon, the protagonist, thinks at the end of the book that the small pyramid below La Pyramide Inversée at the Louvre is "just the tip of a giant tomb."
• The mechanics of this zone could be a reference to a similar puzzle in Riven, which involved a 5-sided chamber where two exits were available at any given time.

History

• This zone was revamped on 2nd June 2014. Previously it looked like this: