After the events in the
Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, the
Avatar is visited by a strange red-haired woman who gives a book to him and his friend
Dr. Spector. The book will be written by Spector himself, and explains how to use the Orb of the Moons to travel through time. Following instructions, the duo ends up in the Victorian Era, where
Percival Lowell has set up a
space cannon that will launch some volunteers to
Mars. Through an act of sabotage, the cannon is fired during the 1893
World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with several dozen famous people and leaders of the time on board. A second cannon is prepared to find and recover the people in the first, who are stranded on Mars. It turns out that Mars had an extensive civilization based on plants. Most monsters the player encounters are so-called "plantimals", such as the Jumping Bean and the Planther. Mars has cities and canals, although the civilization is in ruins, so the player's first tasks are restoring the world power station, and melting enough of the polar caps (with a solar lens) to fill the canals. Some of the people appear to have gone insane after using a device called the Dream Machine. What in fact happened was that, after massive soil poisoning, the original Martians had gone into a sort of alternate dimension called "dreamspace" to preserve themselves. Those people using the Dream Machine found themselves trapped in dreamspace, while the Martians took over their bodies. A large part of the game is spent visiting various people's nightmares and clearing them up. Eventually, robotic bodies can be created for the Martians, since their plantamal bodies will not grow. After a showdown with the evil Raxachk, who caused the
soil pollution in the first place, all Victorians can once more go home. ==Reception==