You can’t extend your air supply by performing the aura jade ritual in the medical bound (and refilling before leaving the medical wing) either, since that ritual specifically requires usage of the nave. This appears to be the case so that both bubbles are necessary to beat the game.
Every way I can think of to open the chancel and birdhouse at the same time requires either two air or two orichalcum, so I’m stumped.
Oh, to be clear, I wasn’t disappointed in the game not allowing it! Just bog standard Aha-I’ve-got-it-oh-no-wait-I-don’t disappointment.
I haven’t seen anybody post it, so I’m going to dump my notes on where all of the rituals and formulas are here.
The purpose of this is for us to help other people on the real hint thread. That’s why I didn’t bother including ingredients; you can just “recall” objects to figure out where they are, but if you don’t remember where the Great Marriage is, you can’t use recall to remember where it is to give somebody a clue.
If you’re reading this, but you haven’t beaten the game, what on earth are you doing here? Clues like these will be way too spoilerific. You’ll ruin your dinner reading this. Hell, this game is dessert. You’ll ruin your dessert reading this.
[spoiler]TUTORIAL
Basic tarnish, Secondary Alchemy Lab, sheet on table
Lesser, Secondary Alchemy Lab, sheet on table
Redoubled tarnish, Crawlspace Bend
Categorical, Crawlspace Bend
Universal, Materials store
Fungicide, Mechanica Lab, cabinet
Antipathy, Mechanica Lab, cabinet
Crawlway Access Combination, Mechanica Lab, cabinet
Calcinate, Chymic Lab
Entension, Chymic Lab
Culmination, Chymic Lab
Hermetic, Chymic Lab
TUTORIAL 2
Oculus, Lab Hall Southwest
Fire resistance, Library
Councerbalance, Library
Resonant, Library
Anodyne, Opticks Annex
Percalcination, Opticks Annex
Purity, Opticks Annex, spark
Minor Animus, Opticks Annex, spark
Crystalline, Opticks Lab, spark
Dispersal Brush, Storage Nook, spark
AFTER FIRE DOOR, WITHOUT SOLVING PUZZLES
Music theory, East Side Hallway, spark
Celestial, Exoscaphe
Anaphylaxis, Under Ward
Ka, Study Room, spark
Lens, Study Room
Breath, Study Room
Gold, Junior Quarters
Aura invisibility, Master Rector’s Quarters, spark
Aura impermeability, Master Rector’s Quarters
Isomorphic, Master Rector’s Quarters
Idempotent, Master Rector’s Quarters
Phlegmatic, Chasm, At Bridge, spark
Periodic, Cracks, spark
SOLVING PUZZLES
Aura Imitation with Jade, Burning Hall East
Chi Binding, Burning Hall East
Sublime spirit, Observatory Alcove, South
Viridigris, Observatory Alcove, South
Phlogistical Catalysis, Observatory Alcove, South
Prophylactic Scalpel, Medical Workroom
Major Animus, Medical Workroom
Lodestone of Centrality, Medical Wing Hallway, cabinet
Mithraic Sealing, Medical Wing Hallway, cabinet
Aura Imitation with Quartz, Medical Wing Hallway, cabinet
Glass Permeability, Junior Cabinet
Metal Attractor, Exoscaphe, cabinet
Clock tincture, Exoscaphe, cabinet
Shamash, Exoscaphe, cabinet
Mediate and relative anima, deck suite cabinet
Lead increase, deck suite cabinet
Electrum phlogistication and substitution, high tower
Great marriage, high tower cabinet
Marcher’s sealing, high tower cabinet
Bamuriatic, deep stacks.
Asymmetric, symmetric, deep stacks
Perfect mud, deep stacks spark
Gaian precipitate, deep stacks coral paper
Granite Solvent, storage nook cabinet
Fire devourer, storage nook cabinet
Greater Phlogistical Saturation, storage nook cabinet
Yang oil, dressing room
Name of tortoise, exoscaphe bay
Emulgence, Bottom of Shaft (under Paper Garden), slab
AFTER MARRIAGE
Vacuum, nave crawl way spark
Dracon Invocation, nave fresh sheet after awakening a dragon
First alien glyph, Hadean land, at wreck
Radix, marks lab hall northwest
Alien fluid resonator switch, marks grand stair bottom
Caudex, marks dead end passage off cracks
Dragon Fulcrum, antechamber
Grendel Sealing, chancel
Perfect Diamond, exoscaphe dome
Nave crawlway debris item, strange airlock
Third alien glyph, strange airlock
Aither resistance, nave crawlway debris item
Wreck debris indicator, ruined chamber, North of strange airlock
Fourth alien glyph, ruined chamber
Calyx, Hadean land, at wreck, wreck debris indicator
Intensional Ballast, completed dragon, spark[/spoiler]
Using the metal attractor ritual would use up the zafranum and thus block synthesis of the ballast in any case.
I am positive that N.'s explanations are unreliable, at least with regard to Captain Hart. N admits no idea as to why the Captain is sleeping with Powes, e.g.
There are more than four epilogue texts, at least 8 and maybe more if the exact order of dragons is entirely significant. I received this “negative” text, having not done the ballast.
The Captain always has an affair with a paramour, however, just as Ctesc is trying to acquire knowledge (with somebody’s assistance), Anderes is trying to sell reagents (with an untrustworthy accomplice), and Powes is trying to frame somebody.
There seem to be at least two variables, maybe three:
I’m not exactly sure of the relation of dragon order to the movements of the characters or if the potentially 12 orders each vary the ending.
Here are the previous four epilogue texts. The character that does not reach a dragon due to the restoration affects who is mentioned, with the POV depending on that. Note that the motivation is linked to who is MENTIONED: if Ctesc is mentioned, the motive is knowledge. If Powes is mentioned, the motive is revenge. If Hart is mentioned, the motive is love. If Anderes is mentioned, the motive is greed. This strikes me as extremely important. Whoever the epilogue narrator is, they are being seen as through the eyes of the mentioned character as having the same motive.
So could the narrator possibly be indeterminate out of any of the remaining three, since the target character would be inclined to assign his/her motivations to all three other characters? If so, the text wouldn’t vary even if the lover/partner/accomplice varies among the three remaining characters. Ctesc was Captain Hart’s lover in my game, but I couldn’t find a way to confirm this from the epilogue text.
Since info is incomplete, this is as far as I’ve gotten. Since “hint” explicitly points to the board, I wouldn’t put it past Zarf to rely on information sharing so individuals don’t have to replay significant chunks of the game 8 or more times to put everything together.
And here’s Ctesc in the Aithery:
Better reasons?
One last question: who is the rector???
The game starts with this:
You smell copal incense, machine oil, rosemary, alcohol, and blood. Creaking, bending steel
beams… no, that’s not an odor. Why did you think the bulkheads were crumpling in on you?
What would that even smell like?
Seems to me you have a memory of the epilogue, but it’s slipping away from you like a dream.
Then partway through the game you discover this:
“It is now clear that the ritual must be performed in the Chancel. I had hoped – foolishly – that
the Nave bound was sufficient; but my attempts there have provoked no reaction from the Retort
at all. I suppose that, in attempting to reanimate the dragons, I am in a sense re-enacting the
marcher’s original investment. I must therefore maximize the sympathy with the Chancel rituals.
“I am not sure whether I can break through the security strictures, but I will have to try. If I fail,
then – whoever finds this – you will have to try harder…”
So someone has been trying to save the ship before you.
I’m of the mindset that the PC is a homonculus created by the narrator in the epilogue. The homonculus can be reborn again and again, keeping his memories even though the ship resets. The Great Marriage created you. And then YOU perform the Great Marriage to create another sort of homonculus, who revives the dragons? And then the final Great Marriages works, and so you… vanish?
Ugh, that’s doesn’t quite add up.
Maybe this:
The crash happens. Everyone dies. But the character in the epilogue is somehow thrown into a dream state where he sees a shadow of the Retort. Everything – the whole game — is a shadow/dream version of the Retort. That’s why there’s no bodes. The alien markings — I don’t know how to explain them. The two ships have somehow spilled over to each other in this dream/echo space?
In the dream space, you learn and figure out alchemy.
Then you wake up, with the seeds of this knowledge deep in you, ready for the REAL person to use?
Infinite recursion… almost makes sense. The player spends the game on abstract copy layer N of the Retort, learning enough alchemy to activate and empower a single dragon. During this process, the homunculus at layer N creates a homunculus at layer N+1 (during the first Marriage) which does the exact same thing as the player at layer N: activates and empowers a single dragon.
Presumably the dragon at the end of the second Great Marriage in layer N is stronger than the one at layer N+1, and so forth, so that when the first homunculus finishes their task, the dragon will be strong enough to repair the ship.
But I don’t see how the NPCs fit into this, or the alien ship.
The PC is a homonculus. (The oculus and lens pointed at “myself” show that pretty conclusively.) But since the epilogue is actually a prologue, we have no idea what happened to the PC homonculus after performing the Great Marriage in the Chancel.
And we have no idea what was happening on the ship prior to the prologue/epilogue, because there is quite literally no fact of the matter. Fix the dragons in a different order and the back story changes; even the epilogue changes as a result.
So Hadean Lands has a variable back story, and no ending. Arguably, it doesn’t even have a plot.
If you insist on trying to unify these into one plot, I think you’d have to say something like, “this story has multiple parallel worlds.” (Or layered worlds, but it doesn’t matter what you call them.) Recall the “facts” about soul mirroring and transition echo, which seem to imply that copies of you get made when you travel through the aither, so there are N echoes of the Captain having an affair with N-1 echoes of the other crewmates.
But don’t overthink this. There’s no explanation of the soul echoes in the game, and none is needed, because this game doesn’t need a plot. Whatever plot we have is just an excuse to solve puzzles.
Aw, well-spotted. I missed this in my hoovering. Did you try any other combinations of alive dragons with and without ballast?
I’m not quite understanding how this corresponds to “Your perspective shifts” – what do you mean?
I’ve been playing with this idea a bit – that one of the three named characters is the epilogue character, and that who it is changes depending on which dragon is alive. I think it just about works, but I’m sceptical, mainly because “Your cleaning work in the alchemy lab” implies that the epilogue character is just a lowly swabbie. Still, it’s possible.
The other options for who the epilogue character are, I think:
I’m fairly sure order doesn’t change character movement: I think each character is associated with a different dragon, and goes to that dragon when it is consumed by the original dragon. Also, I think it’s not about “order” but just which dragon is alive, a fact which can be changed by use of the antisymmetric subsumption. The associations are, I think:
Syndesis: Capt. (Ashe?) Hart
Baros: Lt. Michael Powes
Pneuma: Lt. Jana Anderes
Aistheta: Ens. Sydney Ctesc
Interesting. Is it possible that the reason each character ends up with a dragon is that each character is actually trying to revive a dragon?
I suspect just a bit player, like the Sergeant. But what makes you ask?
I agree to some extent, yet zarf has gone to quite a bit of trouble to code up npcs that behave in complicated ways in response to dragon ordering, etc. I’m not quite willing to believe there is no coherent underlying narrative.
I quite like this. One clarification: each iteration doesn’t empower a new dragon; rather, it causes one dragon to consume another. At any time, there is only one dragon alive and functioning, and the others are either incapacitated or consumed. I also don’t think this makes the dragon stronger: “The composite will be unstable, but may suffice to rig the marcher to a safe berth”, says the subsumption text. Similarly, we’re not truly trying to make a dragon really strong, but just get the ships systems up and running enough to get out of wherever we’ve crashed: as the status report adds, “Marcher transit in this state is risky”. So if we succeed, what’s happening in the end is that we’re transporting a severely damaged marcher to a berth.
The NPCs are probably “transitory echo vibrations”, I think. The tricky question is, why are they preserved and no-one else is? (Other than for plot design reasons.) Is it because whatever makes the mirror-marcher happen wants to preserve the information (or misleading information) of what caused the crash? Or that the process preserves crucial information like that? Or just coincidence?
I’m inclined to see the alien presence as benign rather than malign – there’s no evidence, I don’t think, that the black marks are doing anything bad to the ship; on the contrary, all the interactions of the PC with the alien presence help things along. I’m inclined to agree with the earlier poster who suggested that the crash was in some way a crash with an alien vessel (causing both wrecks), and would add that I think the alien presence on the marcher might be trying to help the PC along.
The things that change are:
The varying shadow texts are mutually exclusive: N reports a different conclusion about who the Captain is having an affair with, and there are other variations. The varying dragon texts may be mutually exclusive – the Captain thinks about meeting a different person, and we assume it’s who she’s having an affair with, though she may have non-sex-related reasons for seeing anyone as there’s so much conspiring going on. The varying epilogue texts are not mutually exclusive: they could simply be showing different aspects of what the epilogue character did in the run-up to the crash.
So the only back story that definitively varies across plays is N’s reports. It doesn’t take alternate realities to explain that: just N being unreliable, though either malice or mistake. Even if the NPC echoes are mutually exclusive, that also doesn’t take alternate realities: it could be a side effect of whatever the marcher-mirroring process is (assuming that’s what’s going on), or deliberately planted false memories.
“Don’t overthink this” is certainly any players prerogative, but no-one’s imperative! Providing the opportunity to have fun overthinking it is surely authorial intention, or else there’d be no reason for providing such delicious detail.
A different question is whether Zarf does have a single coherent explanation in mind, as an author, and a different question again is whether, if so, he’s made that deducible by the player. Neither of those has to be the case. Which is part of the fun. As I said up top, there’s a wonderful asymmetry between plot and puzzle: while you always know satisfyingly whether or not you’ve solved puzzles, you don’t necessarily get to know whether you’ve “solved” the plot by coming up with a single coherent explanation. And even if you do come up with that explanation, there’s no-one (assuming Zarf keeps his cool; I hope so) to give you a little reward sound for doing so. And that’s thematically very rich. In a way, it doesn’t matter whether Zarf has a deducible coherent explanation in mind or not: the result is the same, which is a bunch of obsessive players spinning a bunch of bizarre and wonderful theories about what just happened.
I’ll grant that the player may not be a simple ensign, but I’m really unconvinced by the idea that you’re a homunculus.
Two things: ‘without volition… cannot act or move on its own’ doesn’t sound like us.
Also: “The scribble is gone.” The scribbly cat-dog-deer thing that you guide to a dragon at the start of Chapter 2 is the homunculus, pretty clearly.
That said, in a story with time travel built in I don’t think you’re going to be able to come to a satisfying conclusion about “what exactly happened.” There are more variables than there equations, so to speak.
I tend towards the camp that a single playthrough is its own universe, so to speak. That as you awake one dragon and not another, you bring the marcher into a world where one character or another is in different juxtapose.
One thing I did discover very late: have you tried
recall xyzzy
recall gnusto
One weird disjoint: while it seems likely that the epilogue character is one of the four crewmembers, the ending refers to “an apprentice.” On the other hand, ‘look at me’ (without aids) implies that the main character is an Ensign. (Not, I suppose, that an ensign couldn’t be an apprentice…)
That’s a really nice find! Given the definition of homunculus, my thought has always been that the PC is an apprentice somehow reanimated by a homunculus, the same way the homunculus can reanimate a dragon.
Interesting: an Ensign is usually a commission, while a Sergeant is usually an NCO, am I right? And yet the Sergeant is training the apprentice. But then there aren’t usually Sergeants in a Navy, which we’re in. So this is all screwy, which is fine.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the epilogue character isn’t one of the names NPCs, because of the reference to lab-cleaning at the start of it – which is also what the PC is doing. And I just checked the very, very beginning, and the brass cleaning instructions are addressed to Ensign Forsyth – the same Ens. J Forsyth who is named on the feelie, map, presumably. So I’m going with the theory that Forsyth is the character in the Epilogue, and some mirrored, echoed or homunculus’d version of Forsyth is the PC. Which makes six main parts in total: Hart, Anderes, Powes, Ctesc, Forsyth and N.
This is a totally valid interpretation thus far, but just to note: it’s not just a question of which dragon you pick first collapsing the waveform, so to speak, but of being able to leap across alternate universes, because of the ability to switch which dragon is alive mid-game.
All the main texts of speculative alchemical theory again:
Some extrapolations from all this theory:
And this is where I start fumbling. The first Great Marriage somehow transforms alien markings into a homunculus. Joining a homunculus to a broken dragon reanimates that dragon (in another marriage?) The ship is full of soul echoes – vibrations in the soul-aither. Outside, there is alien aither, and who knows what vibrations in that might produce. Soul echos are produced during spheric transition. A faulty transition, or just a transition through alien aither (1), or a combination of both, could make really wild things happen. If the Great Marriage is a recursive marrying of spirit-of-spirit to structur-of-spirit, infinite recursion seems like something that might happen, or that might be risked. And… er… well… um…
“But our theory of the phenomenon remains maddeningly incomplete.”
And shall, I suspect, deliberately, I suspect, remain so. Because everything that is happening to the marcher is on the very speculative edge of alchemical understanding. If the greatest theorists of alchemy don’t yet know what’s going on with all this, no wonder we’re not able to quite work it out.
Again, a series of speculative metaphors about puzzles, plots, authorship, readership, incompleteness/paradox/interpretation (Gödel/Escher/Barthes) now obtains…
RAZZAFRAZZIN PLAYERS RAZZAFRAZZIN ART
Naw, this is fun. I appreciate everybody thinking out loud like this.
(Where’s Jacek to say that it’s all flim-flam?)
I’ll use “target character” [TC] to refer to the character mentioned in the epilogue text.
When you examine the frozen characters, you get two contrasting descriptions alternating with “Your perspective shifts,” one more sympathetic than the other. And in the case of Captain Hart, this loosely corresponds with the two ending texts:
Because of the EC being portrayed via the TC’s motivation, I wonder if the two perspectives actually reflect the TC’s conflicting feelings about his/her own motivations. Hart is torn between love and duty, Powes between justice and anger, Ctesc between knowledge and hubris, Anderes between…okay, well, I don’t know what Anderes’ positive motive is. Maybe the “positive” ending text for Anderes (which I don’t think we have here) would be more revealing.
Even if the EC isn’t one of the three named characters, some variable does “select” a character to be the ostensible EC: who Hart is having the affair with, who Ctesc’s accomplice is, etc. For the TC, one of the other three characters is more important than the others due to the TC’s overriding motive (love for Hart, etc.), but the choice of who that ostensible EC is isn’t determined by the choice of restored dragon. Do we know what the selector is? I assumed it was the dragon order but have not confirmed this.
It’s possible N is even wrong about the fact of who the ostensible EC is, but this seems inelegant–everything is neatly tied back to 4 dragons, 4 characters, 4 motives, etc., and so it seems ugly to break that symmetry. That doesn’t mean that the EC is one of the four (this actually seems unlikely because the ostensible EC is in a dragon room like the other two), just that the EC is strongly associated with one of the four, rather than with N or or someone else.
ps–99% sure Zarf will never, ever give a word of explanation about this stuff, so don’t wait up.