Journal Day 2

I’m starting to get used to this medieval crap. At first it felt like I was a puppeteer and not actually one with my ancestor inside the Animus. After all, I was controlling his actions via a very cleverly devised puppet interface. But like it or not, the more time I spend jumping from roof to roof in Jerusalem or Acre, the more I feel like Altair and I are the same person. You might think that running away from guards into a dead end alley would be the end of me. I’m sure that in real life it would, but in the Animus Altair can run right up the wall, grab the first loose brick and keep climbing. If I’m (or is it Altair?!) fast enough I can actually climb out of the guards sight before they manage to grab some rocks and shake me off the building.

It doesn’t end there however. I was never afraid of heights, but the stuff I do in the Animus borders on insanity. If you ever saw free-runners jump from building to building, often making 20 feet leaps of faith… well, you saw nothing. Climbing on spires has become second nature to me and I’d probably get shot down by a helicopter if I tried reaching the top of a mosque today the way I do it in the Animus. And don’t get me started on how agile Altair is when moving around the streets. When just walking he acts as if he knows what I want him to do – he will never bump into a passerby if I don’t want him to. Actually, if I choose so he’ll carefully push them aside, avoiding rising any kind of attention to himself.

In fact, sometimes he knows too well what I want him to do. You’d think that when running across the rooftops, jumping over alleyways and climbing higher and higher on the buildings I’d need to be constantly telling him what to do. Well, I don’t. As long as I am in free-running mode he’ll do it all himself. He’ll jump, climb, move, duck and pretty much anything else that needs to be done all by himself – the only thing I have control over is the direction. Don’t get me wrong – I prefer this over actually having to move every limb myself, but I sometimes feel almost superhuman because of this. On the other hand, the guards seem equally capable of performing most of the stunts – I actually saw one of the guards jumping after me down from a third story balcony. Call me crazy, but I doubt any police officer nowadays would go so far!