Let's Play: Counterfeit Monkey

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Gosh lately I’ve been missing 2022 – a feeling, I suspect, that might be broadly relatable. But while, pace Jay Gatsby, you can’t repeat the past, and “having to pay attention to a drug-addicted Nazi with a breeding fetish” is a genie that’s not going back in the bottle anytime soon, at least there’s one thing I can do. Because if you cast your mind back those halcyon days, maybe not the best thing but at least one thing that was going on was that I was doing a Let’s Play of a massive Inform 7 classic with the initials CM.

So yeah, let’s do this!

I’ve shared before that I first got into IF in the early aughts, largely drifted away during the teens, and then came back in a big way five years ago, so despite having a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of the years 2002-07 and 2020-24, the teens are a massive blind spot for me. I was still sufficiently connected to the scene to be dimly aware of Counterfeit Monkey when it came out, and seem to recall giving it an initial poke that didn’t last much beyond the first couple areas, but I’ve forgotten all the details. And then when I plugged back in, Counterfeit Monkey’s reputation as the single best piece of IF ever felt sufficiently intimidating that while I downloaded it sometime in 2021, I never got around to booting it up.

Another factor, to be honest, is that I often find myself floundering when I play Emily Short’s games. I’m always incredibly impressed by the level of craft and the precision of the prose on offer, but all that combined with a certain sense of restraint that often cuts through the narrative voices she deploys can feel like a mismatch with my preferred, completionist-yet-louche playstyle. I like to lawnmower through games, poking at everything there is to poke, but I also don’t like to take notes and am typically rather distractible. This worked well for Cragne Manor’s cabinet of curiosities: each room was mostly self-contained, and the hint system made it easy to know where to go next. Plus the multiple authors meant that for every finely-filigreed room constructed with near-fractal detail, there was another with a couple pieces of scenery, a simple puzzle, and no second-order nouns. But with Short’s games – well, you can see how I can get overwhelmed.

So as with my run at Cragne Manor, this thread is also an attempt to create a support and accountability structure for myself; having all my transcripts filed, and the constraint of only taking things a couple locations at a time, should hopefully make it all feel more manageable. And if y’all get some enjoyment along the way, well, that’s a happy side effect.

I’ve got an initial play session already done, which might wind up being sufficient fodder for one or two posts, so let’s get started!

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Chapter I - Tutoria

So what exactly are we getting into here?

Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.

Since then, Atlantis has been the world’s greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.

Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.

Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that’s spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you’ve ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.

Good luck getting off the island.

So yes, this is a whole game built around wordplay. As with so much in parser IF, it’s a subgenre launched by Infocom, the twin pioneers being the hit-and-miss minigame jumble of Nord and Bert and the justly-celebrated t-remover puzzle from Leather Goddesses of Phobos (I’ll get back to the blurb in a bit, but that depluralizer gag feels like a missed opportunity for a t-remover homage, since that would have made the fleet flee). I’ve played and enjoyed a couple of the big entries, like Letters from Home, a cryptic crossword in IF form, and Ad Verbum, which is more or less Nord and Bert but good. I feel like it’s become a bit less popular in recent years, possibly because Counterfeit Monkey feels like it occupies the field, though the massive asterisk here is Andrew Schultz, as a large portion of his prodigious output focuses on wordplay.

While there are a variety of different approaches, the unifying principle here tends to be that progress depends on solving puzzles that turn not on medium-dry-goods object manipulation, but on playing with words – beyond pulling letters out of them, there’s reversing them, alliterating them, shortening them from the front or the back… It’s a natural fit for the parser format, leveraging the you-can-type-anything magic of the interface; heck, it’s pretty clearly a more natural fit than the Zork-like adventuring framework that wound up predominating.

Anyway, what’s the blurb telling us? Well, first that letter-removal will indeed play a key role in the puzzle-solving, though we get a tease of other mechanics too (letter inserters and diminutive affixer seem clear enough – let’s turn a filet mignon into a filet mignonette! – though we’ll see what exactly a “word synthesizer” does). Second, we’re a spy, which is its own robust IF subgenre, and another good match for the look-and-steal-everything default mode of parser interaction. Third, that this Atlantis speaks English but isn’t British, having won its independence soon after Waterloo (presumably they relied on the Navy to protect them from Napoleon, but then took advantage of war-weariness and demobilization to break free of the monarchial lash). History-nerd that I am, I’ll be keeping an eye out for more hints about this backstory!

Enough throat-clearing, let’s get into it, and we get a short dialogue before the title drop:

Can you hear me? >> yes

(Just so we’re clear, that “>>” is a real prompt, that “yes” was my response).

Good, you’re conscious. We’re conscious. I’ve heard urban legends about synthesis going wrong, one half person getting lost.

Erm, OK, guess we’re learning more about what “word synthesis” actually entails!

Do you remember our name?

>no

To review, we’re Alexandra now. I was Alex, before the synthesis. You were…

I can recognize a pattern!

>andra

…yes! Okay. We’re both here, neither of us lost our minds in the synthesis process. As far as I can tell, the operation was a success. We’re meant to be one person now, unrecognizable to anyone who knew us before.

I would say that if the goal is to be unrecognizable, using “Alexandra” as our new name won’t exactly throw people looking for Alex and Andra off the scent as much as would be ideal, but since it seems like nominative determinism is the law of the land here, we might not have had much choice in the matter.

Counterfeit Monkey
A Removal by Emily Short
Release 11 / Serial number 230220 / Inform 7 build 6M62 (I6/v6.41 lib 6/12N)

Let’s try to get a look around. I haven’t been able to run our body without your help, but maybe now you’re awake, it’ll work better.

To get a look around, type LOOK and press return. If you do not want help getting started, type TUTORIAL OFF.

A title drop and a map drop all at once! As to the latter, there are obviously a lot of intriguing places laid out here – not least the ominous O of the bureau the blurb warned us about – but I’ll hold off on commenting on the names until we get to the locus in quo. One nice convenience is that the map is dynamic – the little @ marks where we are, and the compass rose marks potential exits, with unvisited ones blue and ones we’ve already gone to showing up in white. This definitely helps manage the agoraphobia I sometimes feel playing Short’s games!

One other interface note that’s not obvious from the transcript: in addition to the location and score, the status bar has been updated to show the time of day (noon – per the blurb, guess we need to escape by dusk ) and “Goals: 1”, indicating that we’ve currently got one goal (stay tuned for details on that).

I left the tutorial messages up through this play session, but didn’t always follow them to the letter, because that’s the kind of bold rebel I am, man. Here, though, looking about does seem like a good idea, though the keen-eyed among you will have already sussed out that we’re in the back alley:

Back Alley
This isn’t much, is it? Just the back sides of a couple of buildings, some peeling yellow paint, and not even much by way of windows to look in through. I think the place where we had the procedure done is just a block or two away, but I’ve already lost the door. I imagine they change it.

This alley runs north to the open street, towards the town square. That’s the way we’ll want to go first.

You can find out more if you LOOK AT THE YELLOW BUILDINGS (or shorten it to L YELLOW BUILDINGS).

Nothing too exciting here in terms of scenery – though I did experience a brief stab of terror at the idea that I’d need to retrain my muscle memory to L everything in sight, rather than Xing; happily, in the event both work – but we are getting a sense of how the narrative voice is going to work: everything appears to be spoken by Alex, so I suppose “I” is him, “you” is us/Andra, and “we” is us/Alexandra. This suggests that the two people retain their distinct identities in the synthesis, and Andra is in charge of directing action while Alex handles perception? There are various psychological theories we could try to map this onto, but probably best to hold our horses on that front for a while until we get a clearer sense of how this all plays out.

On a more inconsequential note, when I noticed the status bar stuff mentioned above, I wrote a comment to myself (since that’s often how I flag stuff I want to talk about in an LP), and this happened:

>* says “noon” in the status line – also “Goals 1,” interestingly

(Adverbs are almost never necessary. Retrying that as "* says noon in status line – also goals 1, ".)

So that’s a fun bit of newbie-friendly action processing.

Anyway, back to this unprepossessing environment, there’s really only the one bit of scenery that the tutorial is pushing us towards checking out:

>x yellow

The buildings are no doubt due for renovation, but haven’t received it yet. There are no windows facing this way.

You have a fleeting thought of how we got here.

[MEMORIES will list your currently active memories]
There are other things around here that you can look at too, if you like. You can check out other things in your surroundings, or LOOK AT ME to see yourself.

We are definitely going to check ourselves out since the status of our physical body is currently an interesting question, but let’s investigation this MEMORIES system first:

>memories

Currently on your mind is how we got here.

[REMEMBER any memory to review it.]

So it’s a semi-interactive flashback system – really just making sure you don’t get overwhelmed with walls of text, I suppose. The cued syntax works a breeze:

>remember how we got here

Cluttered Industrial Room
The synthesizer was right at the center of the room, and we were inside it. An unshaven man in a blue jumper was prodding us with his foot. “Wake up! Wake up!”

But we couldn’t move, even though you were half-conscious. So he panicked. We’d paid him to let us recover in comfort, but he wasn’t about to risk having a corpse on his hands, even an unidentified one. He picked us up and dumped our body in the Back Alley and left.

Then we’re back in the present.

Thing one, I’m not so sure that having an unidentified vs. an identified corpse laying about the place when the filth come calling makes that much difference in terms of how much trouble you’re going to be in, and thing two, the pronoun-details here seem worth calling out: “we” couldn’t move, confirming that that pretty much means our body, and “you”/Andra was half-conscious but unable to make said body move. Since this is a post-synthesis memory, the narrative voice is presumably still Alex, so perhaps that indicates he was aware of what was going on and that’s why we can remember things so clearly?

Speaking of bodies:

>x me

This body is more you than me ? well, it would be, since we came out a girl. Still, I feel a bit odd inspecting us too closely. It feels like invading your privacy.

Feel free to look around some more. When you’re ready to move on from here, try NORTH.

Oh blarg, transcript formatting issues rear their heads – that ? should be an em-dash. I’ll try to correct this stuff moving forward as I see it.

On the substance, this is more grist for the idea that Alex is our perceptual faculties and Andra is the active side of things. It does seem like the physical piece of the amalgamation is smoother than the personality one.

While musing on this, I also thought it was kinda funny that the female character’s name is “Andra” – I get you need that to make “Alexandra” work, but “andros” is Greek for man, so there’s a bit of confusion here.

After X ME, we check our inventory, as is traditional:

>i

You insisted that we bring almost nothing into the synthesis room, so the criminal who was performing the synthesis couldn’t rob us. I had hoped there was more honor among thieves, but you said no, there isn’t.

We are equipped with your R-remover – an essential we mustn’t part with.

So Andra was also a bit more street-smart and Alex, good to know. More importantly, looks like we’re starting out with one key bit of kit! I’m sure the tutorial will get to its use in time, but I can’t wait:

>x remover

It is a blunt-nosed plastic device, about the size of a laser pointer, that can be waved at things to remove excess Rs. It is not very powerful, and often fails against large items. On the other hand, it has a wide range of action: it can be set to any letter we choose.

These are, if not exactly cheap, hardly unknown in Atlantis.

It’s not just an R-remover if we can set it to anything we want, so I decide to adopt a more appropriate name:

>set remover to x

You flick our thumb over the small knob: we now have an X-remover.

Back to the scenery, or lack thereof, I stumble across the game’s implementation of numbered disambiguation:

>x buildings

Which do you mean, the 1) yellow buildings or the 2) beige buildings?

>2

A little more beige than the buildings facing them, but just as shabby and free of windows.

>x windows

The buildings are no doubt due for renovation, but haven’t received it yet. There are no windows facing this way.

>x paint

In this climate, of course, yellow paint lettering is quickly ruined by the sun.

That would imply “this climate” is pretty hot and bright; since we’re on Atlantis, presumably we’re in the Atlantic so potentially we’re near (or in fact are on) the Azores?

Anyway, it seems like we’ve exhausted this place and the tutorial has kept nagging us to go north, so let’s do that:

Sigil Street
The buildings here are two and three stories, with shops at ground level and elderly apartments above. The shops are closed for the holiday: a typographer’s office, tourist boutiques of colorful skirts and ethnic bodices (rarely if ever worn by natives) and t-shirts covered with font designs.

Passing by the reflective window we catch the sight of our single blended body, and it creeps me out.

A narrow alley runs between buildings to the south, while the street continues east.

Now we’re in a new area, there are new things to see. Try LOOK AT THE SHOPS or L SHOPS.

Alex, unsurprisingly, is feeling some body dysphoria; I suspect that’s mostly a prompt to get the player to X ME. I tried, and what do you know, the description’s updated:

>x me

I don’t think anything about us looks out of place. We are female, though a little taller and leaner than average, and with slightly boyish facial features. It’s nothing that would attract attention, though.

OK, so our body does appear to have shifted somewhat Alex-ward from an Andra baseline. It’s hard not to read into that last aside about attracting attention – as spies on the lam, of course we’re focused on that, but I wonder whether how Atlantean society views use of this gestalt technology when it’s not being put to specifically skullduggerous ends?

Let’s check out the shops:

>x shops

We peruse the offerings: colorful skirts, font t-shirts, ethnic bodices, and a mourning dress.

I gather from your thoughts that you actually like some of the skirts, but I’d prefer that we skip the cross-dressing for now. Our synthesized body may be female but I’m still getting used to that.

Sometimes the things we examine have parts that we might also want to look at. That mourning dress, for instance.

Umm, Alex buddy, we’re a gestalt entity of ambiguous gender, albeit one who’s largely female-presenting – that you think wearing a skirt is “cross-dressing” says you might not be keeping up with events. Though I’m actually not sure what we’re currently wearing? Attempts to discover that through X CLOTHES and commands of that ilk are not successful, so I see if we can check that out via our reflection:

>x window

I have not gotten used to what we look like since we were synthesized into a single female body. The face that looks back is deeply scary. It’s not me. And it’s not you either. It’s more like one of those computer composites you can have done to envision future offspring: if you and I were to have a somewhat androgynous daughter she might look like this.

But I am uncomfortable sharing a body, and uncomfortable looking into a mirror and seeing something other than my own face looking out.

You seem calmer about it: perhaps you’ve just had more time to reflect, or perhaps somehow you’re filtering those emotions out for me. But I think we’ll both be happier when we’re split back into our own respective bodies.

Yeah, Alex isn’t having a great time. Good to know that this isn’t irreversible, though!

Anyway, the tutorial wants us to learn about second-order nouns, i.e. ones not mentioned in the top-level location description, so we’ll take the bait:

>x dress

A black vintage gown trimmed with much lace and dripping with jet beads.

There’s more we can do than just looking around. To check what you’re holding at the moment, try typing INVENTORY, or I for short.

Ah, I see what you’re getting at, but we’ll finish looking around before we start messing things up:

>x office

The office advertises custom fonts and symbols, though it is very unlikely that anyone decides to have a custom font made simply because they happened to catch a notice in a shop window. In honor of the holiday, there is also a display poster showing the form of the humble comma as it manifests itself in a variety of popular fonts.

That’s right, the blurb mentioned a holiday? Commas seem to be involved?

>x shirts

They feature more “serif” puns than anyone needs in a lifetime.

So that’s like, one?

>x bodices

Closed with ribbons and laces, to be worn over frilly white shirts.

>x skirts

Suitable for wearing while doing the local traditional dances, which are slightly Spanish.

Huh, maybe the Azores weren’t a bad guess – sounds like some British colonists might have taken Atlantis over from some Spanish-speakers back in the day?

Let’s make some (well, a very small amount of) mischief:

>set remover to u

You flick our thumb over the small knob: we now have a U-remover.

That letter-remover is going to be very important as we try to escape here. To test it out, try WAVE U-REMOVER AT MOURNING DRESS.

Don’t mind if we do!

>wave it at dress

In fact, to make life easier, we don’t even have to SET the letter-remover every time we use it. We can just type (say) WAVE P-REMOVER AT PRAM (or REMOVE P FROM PRAM), and the remover will automatically set itself to P.

Oh, that’s much smoother syntax, will use that moving forward.

Now, let’s see what happened as a result…

\There is a flash of crimson light, and the mourning dress turns into a morning dress. An outfit of striped trousers and fancy coat, such as men sometimes wear to fancy weddings in the morning.

Or Solicitors-General wear to Supreme Court oral arguments (this is the one context in which I’ve encountered morning suits; I don’t think they cut much of a profile in contemporary American life).

[Your score has gone up by one point.]

Something we did has just raised our score! We must be on the right track. To find out what exactly we did right, type SCORE.

>score

You have earned 1 point:
1 point for using the letter-remover

You have not yet removed a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, or z from anything.

So looks like we’ve got points coming in for solving puzzles (no indication of what the maximum will be), and then a just-for-fun list helping us find a place to knock out every letter of the alphabet – I assume it’s possible to do so, otherwise this tracker feels like it’d just be trolling.

Speaking of trying to remove letters for fun, I have an idea:

>remove n from window

We smoothly, and almost without thinking about it, reset your device to be an N-remover. The reflective window flickers and there is a brief image of a reflective widow in its place, but a legal override kicks in: an N-remover is hardware-crippled to prevent generating any living creature.

Phooey. Still, I suppose that’s a plausible-enough rationale for restricting a feature that would open up all sorts of mechanical and philosophical cans of worms. Perhaps the game will throw us a sop:

>remove h from shops

The letter-remover finds no h in the tourist boutiques.

Ah, here’s another strategy to limit the possibility-space-explosion: more ornate “proper” names for things.

I continue experimenting in entirely innocent fashion:

>remove r from shirts

We reset the device to r. No doubt this would be a cogent statement about the commercialization of the body, if it weren’t for the fact that T-SHIT doesn’t describe anything anyone with a functional colon has ever heard of.

Well played, Ms. Short, well played.

I find the final (so far) major limitation on the remover as I try to conjure up a poser:

>remove t from poster

We reset the device to t. The device buzzes, puzzled. It has tried to create a “ypographer’s office”: evidently “office” is too tightly bound to its modifiers and can’t be manipulated separately. This is a serious problem in my field of study, incidentally. Or perhaps it just doesn’t have sufficient power to handle the typographer’s office.

So yeah, some objects appear to be more or less fenced-off from the letter-removal system by having additional words appended to them, such that it’s much harder to create a plausible mutation – I can’t make “skits” because the skirts are actually “colorful skirts” or “bodies” because the bodices are “ethnic bodices”, for example.

Confusingly, I also can’t make my self an elf:

>remove s from self

We reset the device to s. The letter-remover finds no s in ourselves.

An indication that the printed name of an object doesn’t always match its “real name”, perhaps? Or just wonkiness specific to the player/yourself object? Eventually I might check out the source code to see if I can figure out what’s going on here.

I’m a little disappointed, but it’s hard to begrudge the game limitations like this off the critical path.

[Continued]

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Oh, excellent! I’m greatly looking forward to this.

I believe the letter-remover is looking for an S in “Alexandra”, since that’s what you’re actually called—as a noun, rather than a pronoun. Inform just tries very hard to always use pronouns rather than nouns for the player character if the story is in first or second person. (In third person it uses nouns freely.)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

[Chapter I, continued]

We go east, which triggers a tutorial message about how the map works, but I already went over that. We wind up at:

Ampersand Bend
A bend in the street, which runs west and north. This district combines the old and the new: a small museum in an ancient stone building to the east, a shiny real estate office south. The window of the museum is currently displaying one of its exhibits, a codex.

A temporary barrier blocks this empty street from the busy fair to the north, though there is a door that could be opened with the correct code. From here the gaiety and excitement of the holiday are fairly loud.

Navigating with compass directions works, but we can also type GO TO… to travel to a named place. GO TO BACK ALLEY will take us back where we started, for instance.

CM is definitely starting us out easy; that location description is all we’ll need to solve the first real puzzle of the game, though of course we won’t be cutting to the chase – Alexandra is a lingerer (bad trait in a spy, I blame Alex).

I am calling right now that I will never use the fast travel system – it’ s a thoughtful player convenience, but I find those things turn me around and it’s easier to just blast through the compass directions, especially with the always-visible map.

Typically my MO is to start a new location by Xing everything in sight, but I feel like we’re being invited to start with another of our sense:

>listen

The sounds from the north suggest a holiday fair in full swing: children laughing and shouting, people selling food and drinks, various fairground machinery, tinny music.

I move to touch next to confirm that the blocked-off exits are actually blocked off, and learn a key bit of lore:

>e

The museum is closed on Serial Comma Day. We can go north through the temporary barrier (closed) and west to Sigil Street from here.

Hold up hold up hold up, we’re celebrating the ^%@$% Oxford Comma at this festival??? LET ME AT IT!

>n

The temporary barrier is locked. We’d need to set the code-lock to the right number.

Oh blarg. OK, now I am properly motivated. Let’s do this!

>x barrier

It’s a high metal fence, supported by sturdy poles. It’s designed to contain the chaos a little, and keep people who have come in for the Fair from wandering off down the side streets and causing trouble in unpoliced areas of town. It has a code-lock that opens the inset door.

>x museum

One of several small museums around the older part of the island, celebrating the discovery of Atlantean language tools and the development of its modern society.

This particular museum is housed in a stone building. Parts of the old medieval city wall are still visible in the foundations.

All that can be seen of the exhibits is the external display window. On the other side of the protective tinted glass is a codex.

More hints of backstory – Atlantis’s current infrastructure appears to go back to at least the medieval era. Wonder if that was the Spaniards or someone else? The indication that the discovery of language-modification technology (is it “discovery” as in “invention” or “discovery” as in “dug up remnants of ancient technology”?) helped kick off “modern” society maybe means it happened sometime in the 17th century, which would be consistent with weapons-grade deployments of said tech early in the 19th.

Before we get back to that codex, let’s check out the more recent side of the Bend’s old & new dyad:

>x office

Advertisements in the window describe the offerings around town, from a studio apartment (looks like a fixer-upper) in Deep Street for $823,000 to a house near the university for $2.5M. Prices for villas in the northwestern part of town are all listed just as “Available on Inquiry.”

I can tell you find all that shockingly overpriced, but trust me: land is scarce on this island and there are a lot of people who want to own it, not just locals but international corporations.

Alex, I live in Southern California, I’ve seen real estate listings that would turn your hair white. Er, if you still had hair (sorry!)

This does help us put a socioeconomic overlay on the map – unsurprisingly, coastal areas seem to be the most expensive.

>x codex

A manuscript of Atlantean origin from the 16th century. It records a series of slightly mad visions of what the world would be like if the “composition of letters” could be systematically exchanged.

At that time, the name-driven nature of the universe was not yet understood, but some consciousness of it wiggled towards the surface like a breaking tooth. The lunatics were first to notice.

I’ve visited this museum before and seen the inside, by the way. Many of the pages are filled with what we would now consider rather elementary rebus puzzles.

Ah, so that indicates the technology was in fact invented rather than recovered, and our speculations on the timing seem spot-on. But seems like an important artifact! Shame we’ll have to despoil it:

>remove x from codex

We reset the device to x. There is a mad-scientist cackle, and the codex turns into a code. A bit of paper on which is written “305.”

Er, hopefully we (or someone) will be able to fix that. And hopefully the remover knew which code we were trying for, here – or is it the case that “305” is some kind of Platonic-ideal code from which all other codes are merely shadowed deviations?

We can’t remove the evidence of our latest crime, alas:

>take code

The display window is, unsurprisingly, not open to reach into.

Maybe we can at least obfuscate what we were up to?

>remove e from code

We reset the device to e. There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the code turns into a cod. There’s about twelve pounds of fish-and-chips-in-waiting here ? it’s actually materialized as fillets rather than the fish itself, which is some indication of how Atlanteans think about cod, when they can get it. Overfishing, you know.

Several things:

• I pity the poor docent who opens the museum tomorrow morning.
• OK, so if I’m reading this right the letter-removal magic runs on a version of consensual reality? Like, whatever most Atlanteans picture when they think of a word is what the remover creates? Is that because there’s something special about Atlantis, or because there’s a local paradigm so whoever’s close to the magic shapes its ultimate form? How exactly are differences aggregated across individuals in order to arrive at that “most”? We’ll need to keep an eye on this – speaking as a veteran of the Mage: the Ascension wars, these metaphysics get complex.
• Hmm, there’s not a lot of cod in places where it’s bright and sunny, from my limited knowledge of fisheries – seems like we might be farther north than I thought.

Anyway, we’ve thrown them off the scent now, so let’s open the gate before we forget the code:

>x lock

The kind of lock that can be set to a three-digit code, assuming one knows what the code is.

>set lock to code

If only the code were written down somewhere nearby.

So much for the shortcut:

>set lock to 305

We set the wheels of the code-lock to 305.

Click! The barrier door unlocks.

>open door

We open the temporary barrier.

We’re in! Friends, once we hit the fair proper, we’re going to do the worm, boogie, and shake. But before we do, going north gives us three points and triggers an update to our goals:

I’m glad to see you’re feeling ready to face the wider world. Here’s what we think we need to do:
Get my backpack from the cinema
Retrieve your remaining possessions from locker at hostel
Meet your colleague Slango at Counterfeit Monkey

[To go over our current goals, type GOALS at any time.]

Sub-objectives and a title-drop make this seem like a good place to end the update; the tutorial hasn’t formally ended but it feels like the training wheels are starting to come off.

(Over the last three years, my LPing skills have atrophied, since I forgot to check the score and inventory at this point, which is how I typically closed my updates; I’ll be sure to do that next time!)

Next on the thread: members, severed and otherwise.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

If you examine the cod after opening the gate, I think it tells you about its fate once the museum staff returns. (At least it does if it’s still a code.)

As far as consensus reality, I think it’s something along those lines. Linguists argue a lot about what it means for a word to mean something, but as far as I can tell, Counterfeit Monkey takes the Wittgensteinian position that meaning is usage: a word means what people use it to mean. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Well, if I asked “do you want a sandwich” and then gave you a hot dog, how would you react?

This is important because it means you can’t say “I define the word ‘rass’ to mean ‘helicopter’ and turn the grass into one to escape”—if nobody else calls that a “rass”, then that trick won’t work. I think it’s also a local effect, which is why you can’t turn grass into gras: this is Anglophone Atlantis, after all. But that would also be true if it was specifically Atlantis that had this effect; maybe you can’t make gras even if you take a letter-remover to France? I’m not sure on that one.

(An alternate position that I might expect a game like this to take is that words and concepts are inextricably linked at a deeper level than the human mind, and the word for a thing is that thing, even if humans don’t know it yet. That’s how a lot of Jewish mystical traditions work, for example. But Emily Short is a linguist, and it shows!)

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

Yeah, they actually have a conversation later about consensus reality later which is one of the reasons I was impressed with the game. I don’t know if that still holds up, but the letter thing is still scarily impressive, so…

[jwalrus (Adam Biltcliffe)]

@Draconis

I think it’s also a local effect, which is why you can’t turn grass into gras: this is Anglophone Atlantis, after all.

This is touched on in what I believe was the first ever public teaser for Counterfeit Monkey back in 2010: Public service announcement from the Bureau of Orthography

(Thanks to @JoshGrams for helping me to track this down!)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

…well, my hopes of getting this thread off to a quick start were somewhat undermined by everyone else in my household coming down with COVID the day after my first post. Happily folks are on the mend so I’m hoping to get the second real update done in the next day or two. In the meantime:

@Draconis

I believe the letter-remover is looking for an S in “Alexandra”, since that’s what you’re actually called—as a noun, rather than a pronoun.

Yeah, that makes sense – does make me wonder what happens if I try to remove X from ourselves…

> remove x from me

We smoothly, and almost without thinking about it, reset your device to be an X-remover. The device buzzes, puzzled. It is unable to create anything recognizable called “aleandra”.

Confirmed! Unfortunately I can’t think of anything else we can contort “Alexandra” into.

@Draconis

If you examine the cod after opening the gate, I think it tells you about its fate once the museum staff returns. (At least it does if it’s still a code.)

Hmm, just checked and there’s no other message like that as to the cod, and restarting it and leaving it as a code, I’m not seeing anything changed when I open the door, so maybe there’s a later trigger? Alas, I can’t actually get a glob of restoration gel onto the cod through the window, so it’ll be hard to go back and check.

[quote=“Daniel Stelzer, post:5, topic:73762, username:Draconis”]
as far as I can tell, Counterfeit Monkey takes the Wittgensteinian position that meaning is usage: a word means what people use it to mean… An alternate position that I might expect a game like this to take is that words and concepts are inextricably linked at a deeper level than the human mind, and the word for a thing is that thing, even if humans don’t know it yet. That’s how a lot of Jewish mystical traditions work, for example.[/quote]

Yeah, to go back to White Wolf games, I feel like CM is staking out a Mage: the Ascension framework, but you could 100% do a version of the game that’s Mage: the Awakening, where there is a language that reflects true reality of things (there it comes from Atlantis, but here I think the idea would have to be is that Atlantis is a special place and whatever language its residents speak are privileged).

I am very sad that the 2003-vintage forum where my old gaming group hashed out the finer details of Ascension’s metaphysics has long vanished from the internet, because I remember getting super deep into these questions and I would love to subject y’all to those deep thoughts – I remember having a pretty worked out theory of local paradigms that would speak to the question of everyone speaking a different language in France even if it’s not that far geographically.

@Draconis

But Emily Short is a linguist, and it shows!

Wow, somehow I did not know that, but it does it make perfect sense.

@jwalrus

Public service announcement from the Bureau of Orthography

Thanks for finding this! Of course the pre-releasing advertising focused on cats, Short knows the IF audience.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@DeusIrae

Hmm, just checked and there’s no other message like that as to the cod, and restarting it and leaving it as a code, I’m not seeing anything changed when I open the door, so maybe there’s a later trigger? Alas, I can’t actually get a glob of restoration gel onto the cod through the window, so it’ll be hard to go back and check.

Hm, I may be misremembering. I thought there was a message saying not to feel too bad about it; the museum staff will restore it as soon as the holiday is over.

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

Chapter II - Ear Retrieval

When we left off, we’d taken our first new steps into a brave new world of orthographic-modification and holidays based on punctuations. The game, recognizing that we’re starting to get our legs under us, took the opportunity to drop some new goals on us as we walked into the park where Serial Comma Day is being celebrated. Here’s a quick recap of them, from the end of the last update:

Get my backpack from the cinema
Retrieve your remaining possessions from locker at hostel
Meet your colleague Slango at Counterfeit Monkey

As another reminder, “my backpack” suggests that was Alex’s, “your remaining possessions” means that’s Andra’s stuff. The map indicates that the cinema and hostel are right next to this park, so hopefully we can cross those off the list rather expeditiously; the Monkey shows up a fair distance to the northeast, next to the docks, so based on its name and location sounds like it’s a sailor’s dive, and it might be a minute before we get there.

Fair
Today is Serial Comma Day, one of the biggest holidays on the island, and a time when half the police force is off duty while the other half is over-extended. The perfect day to make an escape. The square at the center of town is therefore crowded with people, and there’s an overpowering smell of artificial butter and spun sugar.

We are surrounded by kiosks for spell-offs, face-painting, a wheel to spin for prizes, and other activities best for small children or the very easily amused.

The Fair continues with a selection of carnival games to the west, and with open park to the north and east.

[Your score has gone up by three points and is now four.]

You can pick things up when you see them, like this: TAKE THE WHEEL.

Alex continues to be a bit of a buzzkill. Come on, what do you have against fun?

I am constitutionally inclined to resist tutorial prompts, so let’s mess around a bit first:

>smell

It smells like candy and popcorn, with a note of booze and another note of sweaty crowd.

Well I’m certainly glad we didn’t stop at the top notes of that particular odor.

>x kiosks

They’re the usual tacky affairs of brightly painted fiberboard and cheap prizes. I don’t see any likely to help us today, however.

>x wheel

It’s the sort of game where you spin the wheel for a prize. No one seems to be manning or using it any more, though; perhaps the supply of prizes has run out.

>spin wheel

We give the wheel a strong spin. The pointer lands on BLUE RASPBERRY LOLLIPOP. Sadly, no one is around to award this prize (which is probably why we were allowed to spin it without having some sort of ticket first).

Repeat spins indicate we also missed out on winning a FREE POSTCARD, SET OF PAINT, HOT AIR, STUFFED DONKEY (Eeyore?), and the clear standout, STUFFED OCTOPUS.

This seems an odd thing for us to try to stuff down our pants, but even I can only put off the tutorial so long:

>take wheel

Well done. Now you’ll get a message to tell you whether you succeeded in picking up something:

We pick up the wheel.

The wheel is far too large for us to carry, and falls onto the ground.

Well that went about as expected. Maybe we can make some modifications to make this more man-portable?

>remove l from wheel

We reset the device to l. The device buzzes, puzzled. It is unable to create anything recognizable called “whee”.

Aww, we’re at a carnival, come on.

>remove w from wheel

We reset the device to w. We wave the W-remover at the wheel and produce a heel, severed (because after all it would be beyond the parameters of the change to generate the person whose body part it is). It is only moderately gory, and most locals get used to seeing this kind of thing as a prank from six-year-olds every halloween. Still, it might startle a tourist.

Good lord, collective-unconscious-of-all-Atlanteans or whoever’s in charge of these transformations, what’s wrong with you – I meant like a shoe!

But what’s done is done:

>take heel

We take the heel. Calloused and leathery, a gruesome souvenir of years of unhappy shoe-wearing.

Our first real inventory item that isn’t a lexical tool – I’m sure it’ll have a multiplicity of uses. Like say we were starving to death:

>eat heel

The heel wouldn’t agree with us even if we were feeling better.

This does raise the question of whether eating a human body-part conjured more or less ex nihilo counts as cannibalism. I really hope we get to see some of the moral philosophy of Anglophone Atlantis before we’re done here!

(I’m also very curious about the agricultural system – there are a lot of potential hacks here beyond the alternative fish-generation scheme we just uncovered in the previous update. Turning a pile of old coats into heaps of oats is only the tip of the iceberg!)

Anyway, why stop here!

>remove h from heel

We reset the device to h. With a distinct whiff of a sort of oily, fishy tang, the heel turns into an eel. Manifested dead, because out of its proper element, the eel nonetheless gleams with silver and stripes.

>x eel

Manifested dead, because out of its proper element, the eel nonetheless gleams with silver and stripes.

Wait, it’s only dead because it’s not being manifested in water? So if we submerged the heel first, we’d have one raw and wriggling? But I thought we learned when we tried to make widows that the removers can’t make living creatures at all! If I come across an aquarium later this is definitely something to continue messing around.

I think we’re just about done here, though, let’s check out the rest of the fair:

>w

Midway
Here in front of the pharmacy in the southwestern corner of the town square, various contests have been set up – a strong-man hammering contest, a contest to see who can burst the most balloons using a styrofoam dart-plane, and so on.

I assume you’ve noticed, though, the word-balance, which comes up as high as our hip. On the right pan is an apple and on the left a pear.

Beside the word-balance is a barker in a blue suit, the same regulation blue used by the Bureau of Orthography. The barker is also holding a tube.

“One tube of restoration gel goes to the first person who can unbalance the word-balance!” cries the barker, glance sweeping the crowd.

I’d like to ask what the gel is worth, ask whether the game is rigged, or ask whether anyone ever wins.

[Type TOPICS to repeat current conversation topics and suggest new ones.]

Ah, there’s our tutorial for how the conversation system will go – much like memories, there’ll be suggested prompts, though we’ll see whether we can chat about stuff not on the list. More importantly, that gel sounds very helpful if we ever need to undo overzealous letter-removal.

>x barker

He is dapper in his suit, as though he might belong to an especially vivid barber-shop quartet.

>x gel

We can’t get a good look at the tube from this position, but it definitely appears to be authentic restoration gel – valuable stuff, I recall you saying. (Or were you just trying to impress me?)

I know we’re just getting to know these characters, but I have a very hard time imagining Andra trying to impress Alex.

Anyway my immediate idea for obtaining the gel is a bit macabre, so let’s fool around and see if a better one comes in the interim:

>x hammer

It’s one of those contests where you have to hammer something so that something else flies up and rings a bell. I don’t have time for that kind of silly macho display.

Case in point. We’ve got better things to worry about than the way the jocks bullied you in high school!

>x balloons

All stapled in place and ready to be attacked.

>x plane

Ridiculous little styrofoam gliders with dart-noses. No use to us, anyway.

As a spy on the lam, I feel like flying daggers would have all sorts of potential uses in our present situation, but sigh, guess we’ll let them go this time (we’re told they’re hardly portable if we try to take 'em. Also, thinking a set of plans might be handy, I tried to e-remove them, only to learn that they’ve got extra strong-modifiers – if you can come up with a valid modification to “styrofoam dart-plane” you’re a better orthomancer than I).

>x pharmacy

There’s not much to see, as a shade has been pulled down behind the glass front. I can tell you what’s back there, though, if you care: the usual assortment of shampoo and razors and analgesics and burn creams; candy, and also toothpaste; and a costly selection of homeopathic remedies in matching brown bottles.

On to what we’re meant to be doing here:

>x balance

The beam is balanced. On the right pan is an apple and on the left a pear.

>x apple

Red-cheeked and rosy.

>x pear

Handsome and green.

Seems straightforward enough, but let’s chat with the barker to make sure we understand the ground rules:

>ask barker about balance

“I know this kind of game,” we say, in our most jaded voice. “The scale is probably nailed in place so that it can’t tip.” One or two of the crowd standing nearby seem impressed by this line of argument. A small boy whispers to his sister to ask whether that could be true.

“Nonsense,” says the barker angrily. To demonstrate the point, he pushes down on the left pan, and the scales tip and sway. He soon restores them to balance, though.

“And don’t think that will count for you,” he adds. “You have to put them out of balance yourself. No surrogates, substitutes, or alternatives allowed.”

The sun gleams off the shiny balance pans.

“Step up and try your hand at the fabulous word-balance!” calls the barker appealingly.

We could ask what the gel is worth or ask whether anyone ever wins.

>ask barker about gel

“Is the gel very valuable?” we ask. “Is it new, and in good condition? Is the entire tube present?”

“Yes, of course, and absolutely,” he says, making a gesture as though to show us the gel, but actually not letting us catch more than the label.

The bell of the hammering contest clangs.

“Put the beam out of alignment and win a fabulous prize!” says the barker, holding up a tube.

We could ask whether anyone ever wins.

>ask barker whether anyone wins

“Does anyone ever win?” we ask.

“No one has won today,” he says, which is not an answer.

Attempts to go off-piste and ask him about himself, the holiday, serial commas, Atlantis, the Bureau of Orthography, etc. are all rebuffed, so I guess dialogue mostly will stick to the recommended topics. Anyway, inspiration has failed to strike, so we’re stuck with my first thought – I apologize:

>remove p from pear

We reset the device to p. We wave the P-remover at the pear and produce an ear, severed.

There is a disgusted gasp from the spectators. The word-balance tilts slowly but inexorably.

The barker looks astonished and displeased, except for a fraction of a second when he just noticeably winks. With exaggerated bad grace hands us some restoration gel. “There’s your prize. And now this contest is over.”

He stalks away.

[Your score has gone up by three points and is now seven.]

I’m the best there is at what I do, and what I do isn’t pretty.

(Also, I think CM is still being updated, right? “With exaggerated bad grace hands us some restoration gel.” is missing a “he”).

Anyway, score! Alas, as we predicted in our cynicism, this is a bit of a booby-prize:

>x gel

Unfortunately, there’s hardly any gel remaining in the tube.

Well, better than nothing, I suppose. And the game has no purpose now, so we can help ourselves to some bonus loot, such as it is:

>take apple

We take the apple.

>take ear

We take the ear. Severed. It’s not a nice thing to look at.

Our work here is done, so we continue our widdershins exploration of the park:

>n

Church Forecourt
This corner of the park, in the lee of the church, has been left free of kiosks and booths. Contrary to the usual rules of cathedral layout, the New Church is oriented toward the north, so we are standing by the flank of the building, though there is an entrance on this side.

South and east lead to more of the park; there is a small cinema (where I left my pack) to the north, and the entrance to the New Church is west.

Hmm – yes, properly speaking cathedrals are supposed to face east, as I recall. I wonder if the divergence here reflects a doctrinal schism, or some peculiar requirement of town planning in this part of Atlantis?

>x church

It manages to be austere without seeming in the least modern: the walls are white and the windows clear, but the proportions, the texture of the plaster, the irregular leading between the panes of glass, all come of the age of handmade things.

So here’s confirmation that word-magic does have large-scale uses, as this sure implies that building materials are produced via letter-manipulation – though if conjured-up items are usually created idiosyncrasy-free, I’m curious why the heel had callouses. Anyway, if theorists were working out practical applications of name-magic in the 17th and 18th centuries, as we speculated, this church would presumably have been finished a bit before that – given its overall Protestant vibe, though, perhaps not much before.

>e

Park Center
This is a handsome expanse of grass, shaped like a rectangle with rounds cut from the corners, bounded by railings along the north side. There are no stalls and no barkers here, but small children are running around an impressive marble fountain.

I gather from the direction of your thoughts that you dislike small children, so I’ll restrain myself from trying to communicate with them.

And here’s an unpleasant personality trait for Andra – I guess it was her turn. I suppose spies aren’t usually ones for the family life.

>x grass

Deep green and velvety.

>x railings

Painted railings separate the Park and surrounding pedestrian areas from the private property to the north. Some lipstick advertisements have been hung over the railings.

>x ads

Over the image of a pouting, lipsticked female, it says: IN EVERY TEMPTRESS THERE IS AN EMPRESS – MAKE YOURSELF UP TO A T! It’s selling Temptress Brand cosmetics, apparently.

That’s one path to political power, I suppose, though feels like if this is literally possible, the supply for empresses would quickly outstrip the demand.

>x fountain

It depicts some horses rising out of the waves, with trident-bearing gods on their backs, and some nymphs overseeing the whole operation. Probably 17th-century, to judge by the excessive number of writhing sculpted figures.

The fountain celebrates - if that’s the right word - the conquest of this island by the Dutch in 1607, it having been a Spanish possession for about 140 years before that.

In spite of this the fountain bears not a word of any foreign language, the original Latin or vernacular inscriptions having been long since renovated away.

Ah, more backstory – so we were right about the Spanish era, but there was also a hitherto-unsuspected Dutch settlement, too. The conquest coming in 1607 would suggest it was part of the long war of independence the Dutch waged against their Hapsburg overseers, so that checks out, and also suggests they were the ones who build the cathedral. The Spanish era coming earlier is also reasonable – that’s the Golden Age of Exploration slash Colonial Exploitation. This also means that 16th-Century codex we messed with was likely written by a Spaniard, if not itself in Spanish (a fair bit of scholarship was still in Latin rather than the vernacular, I believe, in that era).

Part of me wonders whether we’re going to eventually get a letter-swapper that’ll let us turn this fountain into a mountain.

Not much else here, so let’s keep going.

>se

Heritage Corner
This patch of the town square has been paved over in octagonal bricks and is commonly used for displays of traditional dancing: over-50 women in home-made embroidered aprons, skipping arm-in-arm and jumping over broomsticks.

No, there aren’t any here now. But trust me. It’s an unforgettable sight.

Under a bit of shelter in the corner, a diorama table shows scenes from local history, rotated out each week. This week’s diorama represents the first sitting of the Committee for the New Orthodox Orthography.

The park continues to the north and west; to the east is a backpackers’ hostel where you’ve stayed recently and where you stowed the rest of your important possessions.

Hmm, from the tour-guide style narration, sounds like Alex might be a native, with Andra less familiar with the folk customs of Atlantis? This dance sure seems like a relic of the Dutch period.

>x diorama

The patriotic scene is set against the backdrop of the Bureau’s buildings ca. 1895, where the committee first met, but the historians have included a bit of the building exterior to show that the meetings were conducted under army guard. The writing of dictionaries has not always been bloodless.

The members and the army are movable, but the rest of the scenery appears to have been hot-glued in place.

Huh, if Anglophone Atlantis had been independent since 1822, but had some kind of refounding moment towards the end of the century, that suggests that there was a fair bit of turmoil (maybe a civil war or revolution?)) over the course of the 19th Century.

>x members

Mostly men and a few women, sternly dressed and with solemn expressions.

>remove b from members

We reset the device to b. The device buzzes, puzzled. It is unable to create anything recognizable called “memers”.

The residents of Atlantis can count themselves lucky they don’t have social media yet, I guess.

Okay, I gotta:

>x army

A collection of soldier figurines in blue uniforms.

>remove y from army

We reset the device to y. We wave the Y-remover at the army and produce an arm, severed.

>take arm

We get the arm. A girl’s arm, by the look of it, amputated neatly at the shoulder joint. The fingernails are painted shell-pink.

WHAT THE DAMN HELL. I am now half-anticipating that there’s going to be a puzzle where we need to assemble a synthetic person, Frankenstein-style, from the various limbs, organs, etc. we’re pulling out of the ether willy-nilly.

We take the members too – I suspect at some point we’ll get a device that lets us crop words, letting us get embers out of them (with our current kit, getting rid of the initial m would also get rid of the second, leaving us with ebers).

I try going north from here, but Alex refuses to leave the park until we get our stuff back, so I guess we need to start accomplishing our goals now. Hostel first!

[Continued]

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

>e

Hostel
I take it this is where you stayed from the time you got to town until our operation. I would have expected that someone with your credentials would have been able to afford something better: The Fleur d’Or, maybe? But maybe you thought this was lower-profile. At least it’s clean and doesn’t smell funny.

The desk attendant is sort of eying us. She doesn’t recognize you – us – but that’s a good thing, I think.

Discarded in one corner is Guidebook to Anglophone Atlantis.

There’s a spiral staircase that leads up to the dormitory rooms.

Hmm, yeah, the lack of privacy of a hostel seems like an awkward fit for a spy. From the map, the Fleur d’Or is over to the southeast, near the university – maybe the target of our operation was over that way, and we wanted some distance?

As promised:

>smell

We smell nothing unexpected.

More interestingly:

>x attendant

She’s dressed in a kind of casual-hippy way: nose ring, poofy blouse that doesn’t fit quite right.

>x ring

It’s silver and reasonably discreet.

>x blouse

White cotton with little ribbons on it. I hate that kind of frilly nonsense.

Look, I don’t want to be too judgey here, but I’m beginning to feel like Alex might have a tiiiiiiny misogynistic streak. And I say that partially to justify this actually-quite-mean bit of attempted mischief:

>remove b from blouse

We reset the device to b. The blouse flickers and there is a brief image of a louse in its place, but a legal override kicks in: a B-remover is hardware-crippled to prevent generating any living creature.

Probably for the best.

For some reason, this futile action made this notification ping:

Achievement accomplished: Finished tutorial mode!

I don’t think I’d been getting tutorial prompts for a while, so I’m a bit mystified about what the trigger was, but hey, we got an achievement! (Also, cool, there are achievements. I suspect there’s one for removing every letter of the alphabet…)

Let’s check out the guidebook:

>x book

A much-thumbed and several years out-of-date guidebook to this immediate area. The cover is tomato-red but the pages are crinkly and beige: it appears that someone has spilled coffee on it.

There’s too much here to take in in a quick read, but we could look up specific topics if we wanted to read more.

Once we grab it, we start looking up locations:

>look up park

The fountain is listed as one of the attractions of the old town park: the design and execution of the sculpture credited to one M. Antoinne, and was apparently his final work before he faced a firing squad for his use of an irregular surname. (This was during one of the more blood-soaked episodes of standardization, evidently.)

Yeah, I’m definitely getting even stronger “fountain’s gonna turn into a mountain” vibes here.

We’ll look up the other places we’ve been, though hold off on unvisited areas for now:

>look up sigil

The entry on Sigil Street proclaims it an excellent place for those seeking to commission their own fonts or indulge in other typographical expenses.

>look up church

The guidebook devotes two and a half pages to the splendors of the New Church, located on the western edge of the town square. It particularly admires the clean lines of the architecture, the solidly constructed pews, and the austere decoration; in fact, the more you read, the more the guide seems to be rhapsodizing about what the builders left out, instead of what they put in. The guide also recommends a visit to the church gift shop, which apparently supports assorted worthy causes, such as, for instance, buying a new roof for the structure and paying a custodial staff.

Wonder if we’ll get to see the Old Church, or if it used to be where the New one is.

>look up ampersand

Ampersand Bend is notable to the guidebook chiefly for the presence of a fine museum. A little less fine now that we’ve been past, perhaps.

Hmm, wonder what it says about the machine?

>look up museum

A museum of linguistic instruments open to the public is to be found on the grounds of the Fleur d’Or hotel.

Oops, wrong museum, but I suspect we’ll be yoinking some of those.

>look up hostel

Mysteriously, the entry for the hostel itself, which ought to contain ratings of its cleanliness, safety, and reliability, has been obliterated with a black marker.

Ha!

>look up cinema

The Guidebook lists the cinema at the north end of the town park as the best place to see films “correctly and legally dubbed”.

Despite our best efforts, I can’t find a way to look up the back alley – guess it really was an anonymous, functional space.

Time to chat up the attendant; I run into a weird thing where typing ASK ATTENDANT ABOUT ROOM gets an error, but doing so after TALK TO ATTENDANT works, so dunno what’s going on with that.

>talk to attendant

We greet the desk attendant.

“Yeah, I see you,” she says.

I’d like to ask whether we can keep the guidebook.

>ask whether we can keep the guidebook

“Hey, does this guidebook belong to the hostel, or can I keep it?”

“Sure, whatever,” she says. “People take and leave stuff all the time. It’s no big deal.”

>ask her about room

“Are there free beds for the evening?”

“Sure,” she says. “You can go up and claim whichever free one you like. The hostel won’t really fill up until this evening.”

>ask her about herself

“Do you like this job?”

She looks taken aback. “It’s a living,” she says. “I mean, sort of. And the management doesn’t really listen to what I tell them. And sometimes people are really loud. Or jerky. But my parents really really realllly wanted me to stay in school so I kind of stopped wanting to, if that makes sense. I don’t know, maybe I’ll go back later.”

You apparently have a strong urge to sympathize on the topic of parents. I don’t.
I’m inclined to sympathize on the topic of parents.

Ah, this is clearer now that I’m pasting in the transcript – looks like there’s a missing line break setting off that final sentence from the paragraph above, so that indicates it’s a topic suggestion, rather than Alex saying contradictory things one after another.

>ask her about parents

“Parents can be that way,” you say, with sudden vehemence. “They work on you like you’re a project, like they’re raising a show dog or something. It took me a long time to figure out that while I was with my parents I wasn’t ever going to even know what I wanted, who I wanted to be. So you got away from that, good for you.”

And good for her skipping her education when it would have been paid for, and going into an unfulfilling job that doesn’t earn enough to live on, right? Seems a little askew to me, but hey.

“I don’t think my parents were that bad,” she says, with a taken-aback little laugh.

OK so Andra has some ~backstory~ that we’ll eventually be getting into, I’m sure. That was awkward, so maybe let’s just see ourselves out.

>u

Dormitory Room
Painted off-white, with hard wood floors under many layers of protective gloss coating: there are no surfaces in this room that would take a stain. Four dorm beds are lined up against the wall.

The locker you identify as your own sits near one of the beds, still locked with its dial lock.

A girl of about 19 is standing in the middle of the room, looking around as though she can’t quite believe where she landed or what she’s doing here. She is carrying a heavy pack and wearing a pink t-shirt.

“Hey,” says the girl. “Do you think this place is safe?” she asks conspiratorially.

I must look blank, because she goes on, “I saw this documentary once, right, about a serial killer who went from youth hostel to youth hostel, grooming girls and killing them. And then he’d chop up the bodies and put the body parts into the lockers. And no one would find out until he’d gone away again.”

Nothing like that has happened around here, but she seems to get a charge out of scaring herself with this story.

I’d like to ask for privacy.

Ah, so there’s our stuff, but yeah, this girl doesn’t seem like someone we want witnessing our dark deeds, for her sake as much as our own.

>x girl

She is just the sort of tourist who most annoys the locals, but actually I find her type a little endearing: she may not be very sophisticated yet, but she wants to expand her horizons, and that’s more than you can say for most of the friends she probably left back at home.

Hey, Alex has a rare kind word for someone, that’s a nice change of pace.

>ask her about herself

The backpacking girl doesn’t seem interested in talking about herself.

“Do you like this place so far?”

We could approve of Atlantis or ask for privacy.

Possibly my response to this question was biased by playing the game under the Trump administration:

>no

“There are a lot of things to say about the government,” we reply cautiously.

“Like what?”

“It’s better not to say them out loud.”

“If you can’t say something nice, it’s better not to say anything at all,” the girl responds. “I hate gossip especially when people won’t give hard details. That’s how this girl Stacy at my school got totally ostracized for supposedly doing something slutty only no one knew what it was.”

I want to follow up on Stacy, but that’s not a valid conversation topic, apparently. The girl makes her own conversational gambit while I flail, though:

“So when did you get to Anglophone Atlantis, anyway? How long have you been here?”

We want to lie about visiting or ask for privacy.

>truth

That’s not a verb I recognize.

We are a spy, so fair enough I suppose.

>lie

“Just a few days. I wanted a little time to see the place, before it got all crazy for Serial Comma Day,” you lie smoothly.

“Oh, yeah, that was smart,” she says. “I am really not ready for this at all.”

With a grunt, she shrugs off her pack and puts it on the ground near one of the beds. “Have you tried talking to the desk girl downstairs? I mean for more than two seconds? She is a total witch that starts with B, know what I mean? Like, she looked at me like I was completely an idiot, right, and, like, what does she expect? Of course I don’t know my way around, I just got here.”

We could agree about the attendant or ask for privacy.

>agree

“I’ve seen more impressive customer service,” you say.

“You’d think they’d be a little nicer if they want repeat customers,” she grumps. I decide not to point out that the hostel is by far the cheapest lodging place on the island, is probably run on subsidies to make it possible for foreign students to visit at all, and never suffers from any lack of custom.

She eyes the beds thoughtfully, punches each of the mattresses in turn, and then climbs into the one she’s selected. “Wish I hadn’t remembered that serial killer thing,” the girl remarks, half to herself. “Now it’s going to keep me up later. Picturing someone with a saw hacking me up.”

There’s a heavy tread on the stairs, and the desk attendant puts her head in. “Just so you two know, you’re not actually supposed to be hanging out a lot up here during the day. It’s for night use really. I’m not going to do anything today, but it’s kind of against the rules, for future reference.”

She turns around and goes back down. The backpacking girl sticks her tongue out at the departing back.

Let’s check out the rest of the room before continuing this conversation:

>x pack

The flag of Canada is sewn on the back.

Huh, she seems a little mean to be Canadian, but what do I know.

>x locker

A standard metal locker for travelers to leave their valuable possessions in when they go out – or while they sleep, since one’s bunkmates are not always to be trusted. It is of the kind that requires the traveler to bring his own lock, and in fact someone (such as yourself) has put a lock on this one.

>x lock

It’s curious, now you look at it: it’s a combination lock with a dial face, but no one has bothered putting any numerals onto the dial.

You are reminded of making your lock.

Oh, another memory, nice!

>remember making lock

Galley
You were going through the galley cupboards on the yacht. “If you’re looking for coffee, Slango forgot to resupply,” Brock said, descending the galley staircase in a wet Speedo.

“No, the first-letter razor,” you replied, holding up a portable clock. “I need a lock that responds to restoration gel but nothing else.”

“Ah.” Brock toweled his hair. “It’s in my bunk, sorry. Want to come look for it?”

You smiled – a give-away smile. “Wish I could, but we’re on a deadline. Go put some pants on. And bring me the razor.”

Then we’re back in the present.

Ah, so we will be getting embers out of those members. And speaking of members, sure seems like this “Brock” was hot to trot with Andra. The “Slango” we’re supposed to meet with at the Monkey appears to have been part of our crew, too. No indication yet that Alex was on the team, though.

Anyway we didn’t really need that prompt to solve the obvious puzzle:

>put gel on lock

There isn’t enough gel remaining in the little tube for use.

Oh, bugger. My attempt to regroup is interrupted by the conversational topic listing obtruding itself again, though:

My response would be to ask whether she is really from Canada or ask for privacy.

Sure, why not:

>ask her about canada

“So,” we say, nodding at the pack. “Are you really Canadian?”

“Uh, no. I come from Ohio. But don’t tell anyone that. My mom thought this would be safer in case of terrorists. She’s also worried about serial killers but there’s not much I can do about that.”

She watches us with interest. “I hope this place has good souvenirs. I got this great snowglobe at the Vatican, right, that has the Pope inside saying, like, a blessing.”

We could admire the snowglobe or ask for privacy.

Amusingly, I think this must be an artifact of the Bush-era period when we were ashamed to travel internationally as Americans. Plus ca change and all that.

>admire snowglobe

“I bet your friends back home are going to love that.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Though I have to keep my souvenir buying light because there isn’t that much room in my pack.”

I’m inclined to ask for privacy.

>ask her about pack

“What do you think of this?” we ask, pointing to the heavy pack.

The backpacking girl shakes her head.

We could ask for privacy.

Well, if she’s looking for souvenirs:

>show arm to girl

“Here, have a look at this,” we say.

The backpacking girl obviously might faint. After a moment to regain her composure, she flees the vicinity.

Now that I’m looking at the transcript, I realize that all that guff about serial killers was a gentle hint that waving around one of our growing collection of severed body-parts would get us where we need to go, but honestly, when I was playing I didn’t pick up on that and just thought it would be amusing! Possibly there’s a more direct prompt if you ever get around to asking for privacy, or maybe there’s even an alternate solution that doesn’t leave a traumatized backpacker convinced she’s met the Atlantis Chainsaw Massacre-r.

Well, we’ve got the place to ourselves now, might as well finish looking around and then get our stuff:

>x beds

At this time of day, since everyone is checked out, the beds are all stripped down to bare mattress. Linens may be rented at the front desk – but we’re not staying here tonight, so there’s no need to experience the thinning sheets and the pilled woolen blankets. Your memory is enough for both of us.

You have a fleeting thought of how it started with Brock.

Oh, so Brock’s expectations might have had a reasonable basis, huh?

>remember brock

Brock’s Stateroom
It was early morning, almost a year ago now. A dim light came through the portholes. A four-thousand dollar mink blanket covered your hip.

You sat up and started fishing around beside the bed, in the dove-grey shadows, for your bra.

Brock put a hand on your thigh. It seems you woke him.

“That wasn’t your first time,” he said.

“No.” You were still feeling for the underpants and the shirt, not looking at him.

“Well. You’re made of human after all.” Brock stretched, grinned. “After breakfast I’ll clear you some drawer space.”

“This was a one-night event,” you said. “You’re familiar with the concept.”

He got very still. Then he got out of bed. Without looking at you, he got his trunks out of his drawer. “I’m going for a swim.”

Then we’re back in the present.

My main takeaway here is spying is very lucrative, and also sleeping under dead mink seems incredibly gross, hopefully that was made out of letter-substitution from a sink or something.

Since the backpacker is gone:

>open pack

We open the heavy pack, revealing an assortment of very short shorts, a broomstick skirt, flip-flops, bikini bottoms, various t-shirts, an anorak, a fat guidebook to Europe, a cheap camera, and a box of tampons.

Note the profusion of adjectives here – I couldn’t come up with any viable shenanigans, despite harboring the faintest glimmer of hope that “ox of tampons” was implemented. Guess Atlanteans aren’t into Dada sculpture.

>x shorts

It’s a good thing the weather here is really as warm as popularly imagined.

>x skirt

It is the sort of skirt made of thin fabric that twists up into a tight tube, and is supposed to be interestingly crinkly when worn.

>x flip-flops

The sole of each flip-flop is decorated with the image of Snoopy.

>x bottoms

The tops are not in evidence, at least as far as casual inspection reveals.

>x t-shirts

There’s not a one without a logo of some kind.

>x anorak

It might be meant to counter the effect of all the shorts.
>x europe

The spine is cracked at many points and the pages folded over for future reference.

>x camera

It is a flimsy device in rose-pink, with a very small lens.

>x tampons

Let’s not. This is awkward enough already.

Alex, I really need you to stop being so weird about women’s bodies given that you’re in one.

(Trying to take any of this stuff says “the girl may be a bit foolish, but she doesn’t deserve to be robbed on the first day of her trip,” which I can’t argue with).

Back to the locker – we really need some of that gel:

>squeeze tube

We squeeze vigorously, but nothing comes out.

>x tube

The tube claims to be full of restoration gel, but said gel has mostly gone. If only it had been a larger container to start with.

Ah, I see what you’re getting at.

>remove e from tube

We reset the device to e. There is a distinct spearmint flavor, and the tube turns into a tub. Now a handsome, giant-sized tub with RESTORATION GEL prominently emblazoned on the front.

>x tub

Now a handsome, giant-sized tub with RESTORATION GEL prominently emblazoned on the front.

>open it

\We open the tub, revealing some restoration gel.

>x gel

The tub contains a clear, sticky gel that restores objects to their original state, before any letter changing. This is a valuable item in your line of work.

Does what you’d think it would, and seems quite handy indeed! I’m assuming since the tub is so big, we don’t need to worry about running out.

>put gel on dial

We dip out a pea-sized quantity of gel and rub it gently onto the lock. With an audible SPLORT, the lock becomes a clock and falls to the floor. It appears to be one of those archetypal alarm clocks that crows at sunrise and generally makes a nuisance of itself. It shows the time to be about ten to eleven.

I’m starting to understand how you got into all the places you got into. Not that I judge you or your line of work, of course.

[Your score has gone up by one point and is now eight.]

It really takes some of the romance out of the thing to learn that the sound of word-magic is SPLORT, but can’t argue with what works.

Let’s grab the clock in case we need it later (we can’t make a cock, the game luckily assuming we meant a living one rather than adding an NC-17 item to our collection of organs), then check out the locker:

>open locker

Now that the lock has been removed, the locker swings easily open, revealing a roll, a letter, and some plans.

[Your score has gone up by three points and is now eleven.]

>x roll

Now that is more like it: you’ve got us a tidy little stash of euros here.

Huh, Atlantis is in the EU? My governance questions get deeper.

>take it

We pick up the roll.

>x it

Some day you will have to tell me a little bit about the tricks of the trade – how you fenced stuff, you know? Or perhaps you won’t tell me. Maybe it would be better not. At any rate, this money is useful, so I won’t ask too many questions.

>x plans

The plans are rolled up and stuck shut with a label that reads “PROPERTY OF DENTAL CONSONANTS LIMITED – UNAUTHORIZED USE ILLEGAL”. They’re just a set of prints from the main computer design, of course, but still extremely informative: to the right engineer, they might reveal the secret of T-insertion for replication by other companies. These are what you and Brock were originally contracted to lift from the island, at a fee in the multiple millions.

Ah, here’s the score – guess we got them from the Bureau of Orthography and that’s why they’re after us? And interesting to note that Slango apparently wasn’t dealt into the fee…

(I take the plans, but I can’t open them or unroll them or otherwise check them out in any more detail – guess we’re not as interested in the technical details of our industrial espionage).

Last but not least:

>x letter

It’s a letter from your brother, printed off anonymously from an untraceable email account that you accessed in town. Nothing that could be followed back to Slango and the yacht.

Sis,

I’m keeping your wire transfer funds. I want to try for Stanford.

I’d say thank you except that, one, you didn’t get it legally (I saw this documentary about teen prostitutes – if that’s where it came from then EW) and, two, honestly? You owe for what you put us through after you ran away. Mom and Dad were humiliated that you turned into the prodigal daughter. Your face got on milk cartons. Pastor Hughes GAVE A SERMON ABOUT IT.

Mom spent all that time coaching you through spelling practice, you know she doesn’t enjoy getting up at 4 AM, right? You totally threw that in their faces.

If you want to come home sometime, fine, but don’t come to just see me. If you want to see me you have to see Mom and Dad too.

Nate.

Here’s more of that backstory and our parental issues, huh? At least we have enough of a sense of guilt to be sending money home after we ghosted everybody, seems like.

Well, that’s the goal to get Andra’s stuff down – time to head to the other side of the park and see about Alex’s gear.

[continued]

[bkirwi (Ben Kirwin)]

Excited for this!

@DeusIrae

quickly outsrip the demand

Looks like the T-remover went a little haywire on this one…

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@DeusIrae

That’s one path to political power, I suppose, though feels like if this is literally possible, the supply for empresses would quickly outstrip the demand.

Just a saying, I imagine; an EMPRESS would run afoul of the “no living beings” law.

@DeusIrae

This also means that 16th-Century codex we messed with was likely written by a Spaniard, if not itself in Spanish (a fair bit of scholarship was still in Latin rather than the vernacular, I believe, in that era).

Very much so—off the top of my head, Gauss was doing his math in Latin into the 1800s.

@DeusIrae

The residents of Atlantis can count themselves lucky they don’t have social media yet, I guess.

I can’t imagine the Bureau of Orthography would allow anything of the sort. Just think of all the misspellings! Without a standardized writing system, how is any of their letter-manipulation technology supposed to function?

I’ll refrain from my usual lecture, but when I’m teaching anything involving writing I always spend a couple days at the start of a semester emphasizing that writing is fundamentally not the same as language. We tend to think of them as one and the same nowadays, but the vast majority of languages were never written down; writing is a technology that needs to be specifically introduced and taught, while you have to go to horrific lengths to prevent humans from using language, even without any specific teaching.

And this means that writing can be controlled by the authorities in a way that language fundamentally can’t.

@DeusIrae

And I say that partially to justify this actually-quite-mean bit of attempted mischief:

I suppose the woman should count herself lucky that she’s wearing a blouse instead of a shirt!

@DeusIrae

Alex, I really need you to stop being so weird about women’s bodies given that you’re in one.

Honestly, I feel like that’s a valid reason for him to be more weird about it. Dealing with dysphoria when you can’t even fully control your own body has to be awful.

@DeusIrae

Does what you’d think it would, and seems quite handy indeed! I’m assuming since the tub is so big, we don’t need to worry about running out.

It also, fortunately, doesn’t restore itself back into a tube! I asked the author about this back when I first played it, and she said there’s a special coating on the inside to protect the tub.

@DeusIrae

we can’t make a cock, the game luckily assuming we meant a living one rather than adding an NC-17 item to our collection of organs

Well, you do have some MEMBERS…

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

[Chapter II, continued]

Our next goal is in the cinema, but let’s do a bit of sightseeing first.

New Church
Not a Gothic cathedral from the era when the church was wealthy and secure, but a gallant Neo-classical response to the turmoil of the 18th century, when the power of language was just beginning to be evident, and instead of an immutable cosmology, we suddenly had observer-consensus reality. What is the need or use of God, if it turns out that He gave all the power of creation to Adam when He let him name the animals?

An inscription above the altar, picked out in gold paint, reads Ἐν
ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος…

My mother volunteers here: I think I should warn you. She is not quite religious, but believes in the cultural value of the building, and in having some sort of place where people can go for spiritual respite. She also, I suspect, likes having those great gold letters, defiantly foreign and arcane in the heart of the old city.

There are side exits both east and west; and a gift shop occupies the narthex at the south end.

(If we were playing the Mage: the Ascension drinking game, “observer-consensual reality” would be worth a bunch of points).

Ooh, a narthex! One of my all-time favorite church-architectural features (@HanonO wrote the narthex in the Cragne Manor church, it’s a standout!) And also a hint of background from Alex; his mom seems cool.

We got the denomination of the church right, but not its precise era; no word-magic for at least part of the 18th century means that Atlantis must have declared independence soon after developing its unique tools, which I suppose isn’t a surprise.

Another surprise is that the Greek characters actually display correctly here, since they mostly render as question marks in Gargoyle! Still can’t read it, though, so let’s check it out more closely:

>x inscription

It means, In the Beginning was the Word.

A patchy attempt to make theology align with scientific and linguistic reality, but it still has power. And despite the Bureau’s depredations of foreign language writings everywhere else, they have never quite had the nerve to deface this.

That’s the beginning of the Gospel of John, which brought some exciting Neo-Platonism to early Christianity and launched a hundred heresies, many of them incorporating language-based kabbalistic elements per @Draconis’s note above – definitely an apt thing to put in Anglophone Atlantis’s cathedral!

While the Bureau of Orthography might quail to mess with such an important part of the city’s cultural heritage, though, I have no such qualms:

>remove rho from inscription

We can’t see any such thing on the inscription.

Phoeey.

Fitting the overall Puritan theme, there’s not much other decoration here:

>x altar

It is simple and bare of cloth or flowers.

We’ll check out the garden:

>w

Church Garden
One might expect a graveyard, but burial inside the city walls has been forbidden for sanitation reasons since well before the New Church was built. Instead, there is a small meditation garden, which was once designed as an intricate knotwork of shrubs.

The knotwork has since grown into a thicket.

Ooh, my puzzle-sense is tingling:

>x thicket

Densely-grown: the church hasn’t been able to afford a real groundskeeper for some time.

We can surely help them out with that:

>remove h from thicket

We reset the device to h. The thicket abruptly shrivels and flattens itself, and in its place a ticket flutters to earth.

>take ticket

We pick up the ticket. It reads ADMIT ONE in large black letters.

And I’m guessing that’s our way into the cinema!

Now that we’re done seeing to our physical exigencies, this seems an appropriate place to tend to the spiritual ones too:

>meditate

I’m not bringing you on a tandem ride through my psyche. Sorry.

Ah well. Let’s exit through the gift shop:

>Cathedral Gift Shop
This area used to be a sort of antechamber where the priests and choir might gather for processions into the church, but it has now been done over for retail purposes. This is one of several schemes to make the New Church pay for its own upkeep: a problem is that people somehow feel everything associated with a church ought to be free, including lunchtime concerts, potluck suppers, and Thursday-night lecture series.

The elderly man in charge of the gift shop nods at us as we come in.

A long line of dusty tomes are lined up on one of the shelves, marked “free for taking”. None are missing.

We want to ask what is worth seeing in the New Church.

Alex, isn’t your mom a docent? You can just tell me what’s worth seeing here.

Quite a lot of picturesque scenery here, in contrast from the nave:

>x man

He has one of those withered-apple faces more frequent in old women, but there is no doubt from the shape of his nose and the slight stubble that he is in fact male.

>x tomes

Looking at one gives a sense of all. Extremely dusty, learned, and virtuous, such that I almost fall asleep just looking at it. It’s nothing so ribald as the Bible, or even a hymnal or order of service: it appears rather to be a selection of sermons of the 18th century, from a period when it was considered somehow exciting to sit through a three-hour discourse on theology.

Oooh, let me at 'em!

>take tome

We reach for one of the volumes, then stop, indecisive. They really do seem to be a set, and I can’t bring myself to break it up.

Is that the real reason, Alex?

Let’s chat up the clerk:

>ask man about church

“So tell me, what should I be looking for in the New Church?” we ask.

“Other than God?” he asks dryly.

Hm – the volunteers aren’t very well trained, are they? I was expecting something about the points of architectural interest.

For a change, this guy responds to dialogue topics other than the suggested ones:

>ask him about god

“Are you a believer?” we ask.

“Some of the time. The rest of the time I just wish I were.” He flattens his hands on the surface of the counter. They are veiny, with coarse thick nails. Some reflection about the end of life, or the perspective of old age, seems inevitable. But he says: “You choose to believe or not. There’s no such thing as absolute proof. So then the question is, do you want to believe in God? And, if so, what kind of God do you want to believe in? You go from there.”

We could ask what sort of God he believes in or ask why he is here.

Sadly, ASK MAN ABOUT EXISTENTIALISM doesn’t work, so we’ll return to the prompts.

>ask him about god

“What sort of God do you believe in, then?” we ask. This isn’t exactly how I expected this conversation to go, but no doubt you have some reason of your own for chatting with random strangers about their deeply held beliefs while we are supposed to be fleeing the country.

“Today?” He shrugs his cardigan-clad shoulders. “I figure he’s a good enough type but he’s a little tired of humans. Who wouldn’t be? It might be that he’s working on a new project and he’s gotten distracted from us.”

My response would be to ask what new project that might be.

>ask him about project

“What kind of new project?”

“If I knew, I’d be the almighty, wouldn’t I?” He looks at us thoughtfully and I almost have the feeling he knows something I don’t want him to know. “You should keep moving. Don’t waste time,” he says.

>ask him about himself

What would you like to do: ask why he is here, ask whether he approves of government, or ask why he isn’t at the celebration?

Wow, this guy is more deeply implemented than any other NPC we’ve met so far, despite appearing completely incidental. That’s a curious fact…

>ask him why he is here

“If you aren’t interested in this place, why do you volunteer here?” we ask.

His left eyelid twitches. “The Rosehip woman,” he says, after a moment. “She’s a looker.”

I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: someone expressing attraction to my mother; that person being a good thirty years her senior; or the use of the phrase “she’s a looker”, which even this old character probably got from a movie.

I’m inclined to remind the gift shop volunteer that Mrs. Rosehip is married.

Alex being uncomfortable that his mom is hot is both completely predictable and completely hilarious to me.

>remind him rosehip is married

“My mother?” we begin, before you catch me.

Sorry about that!

“-- always tells me it is unwise to chase after married women,” we finish lamely.

He shakes with laughter. “Bless you,” he says. “I’m not chasing after anyone! At my age, you just like a bit of good scenery. You’re not hard on the eyes yourself, you know.”

>blush

That’s not a verb I recognize.

…let’s find some less-charged topic of conversation.

>ask him about government

“Do you approve of the present government of the island?”

His eyes narrow sharply. “That’s not a question we get asked a lot around here,” he comments. “It’s a little like being asked whether you approve of the plumbing in your house, or the brake lines on your car. If it ever broke, you’d know, but the rest of the time you just don’t give it much consideration. Underappreciated folks, our orthographers, but they work hard and they make things run smoothly, and barring the odd popular referendum we don’t have to waste nearly as much time on arguing politics as folks in most countries.”

Huh, interesting – sounds like the Bureau members aren’t directly elected, but major questions of policy are put to a popular vote? Tell me more!

>ask him about referendum

That doesn’t seem to be a topic of conversation at the moment.

Wait, that’s not how I should have asked:

>ask him about referendums

That doesn’t seem to be a topic of conversation at the moment.

Got it wrong again!

>ask him about referenda

That doesn’t seem to be a topic of conversation at the moment.

Too bad.

>ask him about celebration

“I’m surprised you’re in here and not outside enjoying the festivities,” we comment.

“The prizes and the candy are for kiddies,” he says. “The part I like best’s what comes later. The fireworks. They’re always first rate.”

I’d like to ask how to see the fireworks.

>ask him about fireworks

“Really? I wouldn’t want to miss that. How do we see the fireworks display?”

“It’s after dark,” he says, “naturally. But you’ll be able to see it from anywhere around, not to worry. They fire the blasts off over the water but you can see them from miles off.”

Over the water? The same water we’re going to be sailing over as we make our escape? I sense a possible finale set-piece.

That’s about where the conversation peters out; he doesn’t have anything to say about the various vendables, nor the tomes – which reminds me, time for the Mad Organ Collector to strike again:

>remove m from tomes

We reset the device to m. We wave the M-remover at the tomes and produce some toes, severed.

“You broke it, you buy it,” says the volunteer. “Though the tomes were free. But please at least take your mess away with you when you leave.”

>take toes

We take the toes. It looks like a set of toes raggedly cut off with a bread knife. They weren’t, of course.

Our work here is done. Cinema next (and last for this update)!

Cinema Lobby
This is a small, one-screen theater. The seats are not comfortable and the screen is not large. The projector is old. The management is lazy. No food is served.

On two occasions, the film I was watching burst into flames while it was being shown.

Despite these handicaps, it maintains an active and interested clientele simply by virtue of content: a wide variety of foreign films that, though meticulously dubbed into flawless California-accented English, nonetheless carry that slight tang of the forbidden.

Evidently the next showing is not for a little while yet, because there are no patrons in sight.

“Ticket,” says the ticket-taker automatically.

I’ve only seen one film burst into flame while I was watching it – it was Apocalypse Now Redux, and it went up just as Martin Sheen was rising out of the muck and The End started kicking in on the soundtrack, which was such a shockingly appropriate thing to happen that for a second I thought it was an intentional po-mo special effect (it wasn’t, and that was the only print in Southern California, so I’ve never seen the last half hour of that movie). Now that movies are all digital, I suspect I’ll never meet, let alone beat, Alex’s record.

>x taker

Not one of this country’s best and brightest, but he seems good-natured.

>talk to taker

We return the greeting.

>ask taker about movie

What would you like to discuss: 1) what the movie is or 2) when the movie starts?

>1

“What’s playing, anyway?”

“It’s a special showing of ‘Red.’”

At first I thought this was Reds, but on rereading it seems like it’s more likely the last installment in Kieślowski’s Colors trilogy? The usher here can’t enlighten us, sadly:

>ask him about red

That doesn’t seem to be a topic of conversation at the moment.

Guess they don’t pay him for his opinions.

>ask him when movie starts

“When does the movie start?” we ask.

“Oh, um… not until this evening.”

Probably for the best, if we need to be rooting around under the seats to find our stuff!

>show ticket to taker
(the ticket to the ticket-taker)

“Here, have a ticket,” we say.

The ticket-taker frowns slightly as he takes the ticket. He turns it over front and back; looks at us in confusion; looks at the ticket again. Then he goes to the phone and makes a call.

I’m nervous. It’s evident that he’s talking to his manager. He doesn’t take his eyes off us for a moment. He puts his hand over the mouth of the receiver so that we can’t hear the whole conversation clearly, but the gist is still obvious: “…be fake… but… a TRICKET maybe? or, like, a STICKET? …oh, all right.”

Finally he hangs up.

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” he says. “Your ticket looks a little different from our usual ones, but I guess the printing has been changed.”

He tears the ticket briskly into confetti, destroying all evidence of our crime, and points off to the west. “The screening room is that way. Thank you and enjoy the show. It’s not for a while, though.”

Phew! Though given the prevalence of word-manipulation magic I feel like counterfeit-detection measures on Anglophone Atlantis could probably stand an upgrade.

>w

Screening Room
“Red” has not started yet, and is probably not destined to start for some time; at any rate, the screen is blank and no audience has yet assembled.

My backpack is stowed under a seat in the third row from the back. I figured that it would be undisturbed there for a couple of hours, in the dark and out of sight, and if anyone found it they would probably turn it in to Lost and Found. But it is a big relief to find it still there.

The backpack contains a flash drive and a monocle.

We can go north and east to the Cinema Lobby from here.

…this does not seem like the best way to stash a backpack for later retrieval, but we’ve already established that Alex’s tradecraft is none of the best.

>x screen

The screen is empty: nothing is yet being shown. It is also very very small by modern cinema standards.

…it’s a while until the movie, right? So probably nobody will mind if we do this:

>remove n from screen

We reset the device to n. There is a mad-scientist cackle, and the screen turns into some scree. The scree is a sloping pile of small and mid-sized stones, most of them roughly broken off. They look like the result of a rockfall rather than of, say, long erosion by water.

Not the ideal projection surface now, but I’m sure they have some gel on hand!

(Entertainingly, if we type LOOK again, the description still says the screen is blank).

Anyway, on to what we’re here for:

>x backpack

Mine: a little bit worn, but capacious. It doesn’t have any identifying marks on it, and I thought a brand-new bag would look more suspicious. It’s closed.

In the backpack are a flash drive and a monocle.

>take it

We pick up the backpack.

[Your score has gone up by three points and is now fourteen.]

>wear it

We put on the backpack.

Another goal down! Alex’s loot isn’t as immediately enticing as Andra’s was, unless you’re a New Yorker Magazine cosplayer, but hopefully it’s still worthwhile:

>x monocle

This is no mere fashion accessory. It is the very top grade of authentication scope, designed for people who have to use them all day, and normally available only to employees of the Bureau of Orthography. If we look through the monocle at something, we can see its true nature, regardless of spelling changes.

You like that? I thought you might be impressed. My father got it for me. “For research,” he said, but I think he knew I just coveted them. At any rate, you’re not the only one with equipment.

So yeah, this is the kind of thing they should be using to prevent shenanigans, though from the description I guess they’re expensive enough that random ticket-takers wouldn’t be trusted with one (speaking of, this is yet more confirmation that Alex’s family is fancy. How did he wind up getting tangled up with a girl like Andra?)

>wear it

Everything turns computer-monitor green when viewed through our right eye. And staring fixedly at anything will turn up its authenticity status.

So this question of the Bureau’s ability to detect changes wreaked by magic, it occurs to me, has a very salient and obvious application to our present situation:

>look through monocle at myself

The monocle fails to make any sound or response at all, but no green image forms revealing the true nature of ourselves.

That’s reassuring – the change made to us might not be easily picked up the Bureau, it sounds like. At least so long as this thing is working, let’s test it out on something else:

>x scree

The scree is a sloping pile of small and mid-sized stones, most of them roughly broken off. They look like the result of a rockfall rather than of, say, long erosion by water.

There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the scree is a faint, greenish image of a screen.

OK, it’s doing what it’s supposed to. I suspect there’ll be some puzzles involving this, so will need to remember to monocle-ize any suspicious objects to see if they can be restored.

What about Thing Two?

>x drive

This is it: all my notes; the syllable-and word-generating programs from which I built my language vocabulary; the lexicon and pronunciation guide and grammatical descriptions.

And then there’s the research to support the product: citations; copies of journal articles and scans from books; contact information for people in the outside world I think could help me.

It’s everything I’ve been working on for the last three years.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the flash drive with the crosshairs.

Hmm, that’s a lot of description to talk around what the “product” actually is. Some exciting new discovery in orthomancy? Sounds like it hasn’t been shared with the authorities, and if Alex has been thinking about “outside” people I wonder whether he’s planning on defecting.

One more place to check out before we’re done with this segment:

>n

Projection Booth
The booth is small and lined with grey carpet. It smells faintly of hot dogs.

A jotter is propped up next to the projector.

>smell

The ghost of hot dog and relish lingers in the air. It’s mildly nauseating.

>x projector

It’s an old-fashioned film projector, with a spot to hold a reel of film. The lens points at the screen.

>x jotter

It’s a little spiral-bound notebook, the kind reporters in old movies carry. It’s full of notes: running times of movies. Numbers of people in the audience. Who clapped during potentially subversive scenes. Who arrived in a group of more than three.

On the jotter is written “Red: audience 14. FM couple. MM couple. M in raincoat. FFFFF group. F. MF. M.”

The monocle pings happily as we sight the jotter with the crosshairs.

Gross – and I’m not talking about the odor. We’re definitely getting a flavor of what kind of government this is.

We’ll yoink the jotter; our letter-remover can’t turn it into an otter, of course, since that would make it alive, but once we get one of those first-letter razors we’re gonna wrangle ourselves an adorable otter sidekick.

This seems like a good stopping point. Score:

> score
You have earned 14 points:
1 point for using the letter-remover
3 points for passing through the temporary barrier
3 points for winning the gel
1 point for using the gel
3 points for opening the locker
3 points for retrieving the backpack

You have not yet removed a, b, c, d, f, g, i, j, k, l, o, q, r, s, t, v, or z from anything.

The achievements you have accomplished so far include:
Finished tutorial mode

Inventory:

We are equipped with the following essentials: a backpack, a flash drive, your J-remover, a monocle, some plans, a roll, and a tub of restoration gel.

We are also carrying an apple, an arm, a clock, an ear, Guidebook to Anglophone Atlantis, a heel, a jotter, a letter, some members, and some toes.

The flash drive is in the backpack, which is gaping wide open so everyone can see what’s inside.

We are wearing the monocle and the backpack.

(Oops, guess we should close that backpack before we go much further!)

Map:

Transcript:
CM session 2 transcript.txt (84.4 KB)

Next time: bar-hopping!

[Angstsmurf (Petter Sjölund)]

@DeusIrae

(Also, I think CM is still being updated, right? “With exaggerated bad grace hands us some restoration gel.” is missing a “he”).

Fixed at the Github repository.

@DeusIrae

Not the ideal projection surface now, but I’m sure they have some gel on hand!

(Entertainingly, if we type LOOK again, the description still says the screen is blank).

This is entirely my fault. Creating the scree used to kill the player, but I foolishly changed this (in order to make it possible to see the custom responses to things like climbing and digging the scree) without considering the consequences. This has now been fixed.

[Joey]

The ever expanding body part collection is an early indication of one of the neat aspects to CM: many of the puzzles can be solved in multiple ways. I think the arm is the canonical item to scare the backpacker (it looks like a girl’s arm), but the ear, heel, and toes all work. Moreover, the very profusion of parts may well be meant to clue you (quantity is its own quality, after all). “Oh it’s strange I’m carrying around all these bodyparts like some kind of serial killer oh… oh!”

I think the tutorial ends there because you’ve solved the first significant puzzle of the game— the game figures if you’ve got to that point you have the wherewithal to get along with the rest of the game.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@DeusIrae

What is the need or use of God, if it turns out that He gave all the power of creation to Adam when He let him name the animals?

Straying far from the topic here, but I mentioned that various types of Jewish mysticism focus a lot on language—there are several that do in fact say that G-d gave humanity enormous power over the world through the medium of language, but also warned us not to abuse this power or He’ll get mad. There’s a bit in Numbers 20 where the Hebrews are starving in the desert, and Moses speaks to a rock to make water flow from it; but G-d isn’t happy with how he did it, and decrees that Moses will never make it to the promised land as a result.

Several of these mystical traditions interpret that passage to mean that Moses had been given secret knowledge of how to shape the world through language, which he was able to use without G-d’s permission—and if modern humans can gain this knowledge, they can use it too. So you get grimoires like the Sword of Moses (Ħarba de-Moshe, also known as the Sepher ha-Razim, the “Book of Secrets”) which has a list of hundreds and hundreds of secret names, and then instructions on how to use subsets of these names for magic:

For a spirit that moves in the body, write on a magzab^[1] from TWBR until MNGYNWN. For a spirit that causes inflammation, write from MGNYNWN until HYDRSṬʔ. For a spirit in the whole body, write from HYDRSṬʔ until Hʔ BŠMHT. For a demon, write from Hʔ BŠMHT until YʔWYHW.

Christianity, sadly, never really got into language as a mystical tool to the extent that Judaism and Islam did, because Christians can’t avoid dealing with translations—Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the Gospels are first recorded in Greek—so you can’t really build a tradition around analyzing the exact words of God in esoteric ways. You need to start with an assumption that either translation is a divinely inspired act, or the important parts of the meaning can survive translation, or both, for the Gospels to be any use at all. But still, “in the beginning was the Word…”

(The bit I can’t quite find a way to shoehorn in here is how mainstream Islam forbids any graphical depiction of God or the Prophets, so they got really into turning writing into religious art. Square Kufic is my favorite: it’s a particular way of turning Arabic writing into a geometric design that feels like a puzzle in the best way.)

@DeusIrae

>remove rho from inscription

We can’t see any such thing on the inscription.

There’s some code in the game to handle “wave ρ-remover at inscription” (it says the dial only has the 26 English letters on it), but Inform’s current parser really doesn’t like Unicode, so whether you can actually trigger this code depends on the interpreter.

@DeusIrae

We reach for one of the volumes, then stop, indecisive. They really do seem to be a set, and I can’t bring myself to break it up.

Would turning the TOMES into a single portable TOME count as breaking up the set, I wonder? (Or, well, I guess a TOE, now?)

@DeusIrae

Hmm, that’s a lot of description to talk around what the “product” actually is. Some exciting new discovery in orthomancy? Sounds like it hasn’t been shared with the authorities, and if Alex has been thinking about “outside” people I wonder whether he’s planning on defecting.

Syllable- and word-generating programs, a lexicon and pronunciation guide, “my” language? Sounds like a conlang to me! Conlangers tend to be a bit overly idealistic about a new language bringing about world peace (Blissymbolics, Esperanto, Volapük, Interlingua, Lojban…), but maybe if an Atlantean is doing it…

---

1. Some type of amulet—details unclear. ↩︎

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

@Draconis

Honestly, I feel like that’s a valid reason for him to be more weird about it. Dealing with dysphoria when you can’t even fully control your own body has to be awful.

That’s entirely fair, though I feel like most of his judgments are externally-facing, like the way he talks dismissively about stereotypically-“girly” clothing; I suppose that could be external projection of some internal dysphoria, but honestly he mostly just seems immature (I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still a teenager).

@Draconis

It also, fortunately, doesn’t restore itself back into a tube! I asked the author about this back when I first played it, and she said there’s a special coating on the inside to protect the tub.

Oh, funny, I hadn’t thought of that but it makes perfect sense! And in fact when I check:

> put gel on tub

There is restoration gel all over the inside of the tub already, so I guess it has some kind of restoration gel-resistant coating.

@Angstsmurf

This has now been fixed.

Awesome, thanks! It also hadn’t occurred to me that you could die in CM, so this is a good warning moving forward.

@Joey

The ever expanding body part collection is an early indication of one of the neat aspects to CM: many of the puzzles can be solved in multiple ways.

Yeah, it definitely feels like there’s a lot of possibility-space already, and things do keep opening up as I go! For folks who’ve played before, please feel free to share alternate solutions as I work through the game.

@Joey

I think the tutorial ends there because you’ve solved the first significant puzzle of the game— the game figures if you’ve got to that point you have the wherewithal to get along with the rest of the game.

Oddly, it didn’t end when I scared the tourist away; the “tutorial completed” message popped while I was still downstairs, noodling around with the attendant and the guidebook. Honestly I was expecting the codex/code puzzle to be the stopping point, but I wonder whether it got delayed because I never got around to typing in the GO TO command, and then eventually just threw in the towel once it became clear I wasn’t going to do that.

@Draconis

Straying far from the topic here, but I mentioned that various types of Jewish mysticism focus a lot on language

Yup – the original wordplay puzzle isn’t the t-remover, it’s destroying the Golem of Prague by changing emet (truth) to met (death). As you say, my understanding is most of the Christian occult traditions dealing with names either piggyback on Hebrew, or invent/“discover” a new language like Enochian.

@Draconis

Would turning the TOMES into a single portable TOME count as breaking up the set, I wonder? (Or, well, I guess a TOE, now?)

Ah, this does work!

> remove s from tomes

We run our thumb over the dial, setting the device to an S-remover. There is a distinct spearmint flavor, and the tomes turn into a tome. Extremely dusty, learned, and virtuous, such that I almost fall asleep just looking at it. It’s nothing so ribald as the Bible, or even a hymnal or order of service: it appears rather to be a selection of sermons of the 18th century, from a period when it was considered somehow exciting to sit through a three-hour discourse on theology.

> take it
We get the tome.

We can turn it to a single toe, now, which has a different description that’s an even more direct hint to the puzzle:

It is only moderately gory, and most locals get used to seeing this kind of thing as a prank from six-year-olds every halloween. Still, it might startle a tourist.

@Draconis

Syllable- and word-generating programs, a lexicon and pronunciation guide, “my” language? Sounds like a conlang to me!

I wondered about that – a conlag would presumably start out fairly ineffectual, since in a consensual-reality world numbers are power. But defining a paradigm from the ground up could restructure society in a fundamental way – as we’ll see in the next chapter, it sure seems like there are specific economic supply chains structured around specific English word-transformations, so closing those off and opening up new ones could be incredibly impactful. But defining the new language is the easy part, in some ways – evangelism is the really hard part, so curious whether that’s part of what’s going on…

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@DeusIrae

Awesome, thanks! It also hadn’t occurred to me that you could die in CM, so this is a good warning moving forward.

You sort of can, but it’s not actually a game over. Try to make it happen and see—this is a very merciful game, and the intent is you never need to save except to leave and come back later. (My favorite way is to remove W from a WALL.)

This game is big enough that it actually overloaded the default UNDO handling on some interpreters, so it eventually led to a special new UNDO implementation that saves the intermediate versions to disk instead of to RAM to avoid interpreter limits. But the death implementation is also separate from that, so that even if you run out of disk space for UNDO storage, you don’t get a permanent game over from dying.

@DeusIrae

But defining the new language is the easy part, in some ways – evangelism is the really hard part, so curious whether that’s part of what’s going on…

That would also explain why the Bureau of Orthography is so authoritarian about language. It’s not just their culture, it’s their whole economy that’s at stake!

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

It only just occurred to me that Yoon Ha Lee has written a whole series of books with exactly this premise, except that it’s the national calendar rather than the national language. Heretical calendars get suppressed with military force.