Chapter the Tenth: Caffeine Withdrawal
(Before starting this chapter, per the previous set of comments I went back to the greenhouse to wait around and see if I could find any additional ambient events, but unfortunately couldn’t get any of them to fire. Since the source code is public, I’ll take a look at that once we solve the room and share what we missed).
As the previous chapter ended, Nitocris was going to quickly duck back to the east side of town to see if this hefty iron key we picked up unlocked anything interesting, then at long last enter Cragne Manor itself!
Spoiler alert: turns out there’s no such thing as a quick trip in Backwater. We do not get to Cragne Manor itself in this update, and the transcript is the longest one yet. Let’s see if y’all can pinpoint the moment when it all goes wrong!
My best guess is the key unlocks the old church – the key is hefty and iron, the church is squat and stone, seems like a match made in heaven (so to speak). We hop the gold line and:
>unlock door with iron key
That doesn’t seem to fit the lock.
Er, so much for our best guess. Fortunately, that running list of unfinished rooms let me quickly identify some other candidates. There was a rusty metal hatch under the bridge, and this key is rusty as well as hefty…
>unlock hatch with iron key
At first you have some doubts, but with some coaxing, but the key (more or less) fits into the indentation in the hatch.
You give the key a good solid twist to the left, but it squeals to a stop after a quarter-turn, jammed in place.
>push it
You twist and pull with all your might: The key remains unfortunately jammed in place, but you do manage to pry the hatch itself open in the process, exposing the darkness below.
Coffee confirms we can scratch this location off the list – we’re done here. I wonder what’s down the hatch? Maybe a shortcut, or another library book?
>d
The hatch leads to a narrow flight of metal steps. As you twist past the door it swings shut behind you.
You descend the steps until suddenly, there are none, and also no floor. You throw out your arms to catch yourself, but there is nothing to hold. Worse, everything you are carrying slips from your grasp and goes flying, including your waterproof flashlight, which rolls across the hard stone floor and goes dark. Your fall lasts barely a moment however, ending with a painful twist of your ankle in chillingly cold water.
…so yeah, things are going wrong pretty much from the off. What did Nitocris ever do to deserve this?*
* Besides work thousands of slaves to death to build our underground necropolis, sacrifice thousands more to cement a pact with the Great Old Ones, extend our life through blasphemous rituals that demanded far more than just our soul, and marry the guy with the most in-law baggage in the world.
Not having the coffee is a big hit, since now we’re flying blind, but after all we did to get the flashlight working, losing that is what hurts the most.
Oh, and our anniversary watch.
Can’t forget our weird haunted two-faced dolly.
I was getting pretty attached to that grimy rock, too.
We had some cool stuff! But now all we have left is:
>i
You are carrying:
a hovering spark (haunting you)
a trolley pass (being worn)
Ed’s coveralls (being worn)
I’d make a comment about how ditching the spark would have been the one good thing to come out of this, but eh, now that I know he likes books the little guy’s been growing on me.
Darkness
You can’t see a damn thing now. You have the impression of light off to the northwest.
This doesn’t seem so so bad, maybe if we squint we can see more of our surroundings.
>l
Darkness
You can’t see a damn thing now. You have the impression of light off to the northwest.
“You really shouldn’t have come here…” You’re pretty sure you aren’t just hearing voices and that it came from the darkness ahead, but since you can’t see anything, who knows. You can also hear what sounds like the scrabble of many small legs.
>whimper
That verb doesn’t work here, or, at least, not right now, but it might work somewhere later.
This very much does not seem great! Let’s go into the light.
>nw
Tunnel Entrance (Grueslayer)
The ladder leading down the funnel ends here at a brick wall with one or two interesting features. Only a little light shines through the funnel and bathes the surroundings in eerie shadows. The ground seems to be made up of treaded down dirt. A masoned, semi-circular tunnel leads southeast, the walls made up from the same musty red bricks as the wall marking its end. The tunnel is about six feet high and leads into total, ominously silent darkness. Rolled up on the ground in the southwestern corner is a pile of rags.
“Grueslayer” is an appropriate pseudonym for someone who wrote a dark, underground area, but it’s not included in the game’s author list, so their real name must be listed instead. And their IFDB profile just includes a best-games list with a single entry (it’s Zork I – not very helpful, but admittedly on-brand). Maybe we can figure out who it is by process of elimination at the end?
…huh, the way that ladder is described makes me think we were supposed to have come down that way rather than falling down the hatch. The “funnel” could be attached to the weird Navajo-language circle thingy at the town square? That’s roughly where going northeast from the Under the Bridge area would have us end up.
>x ladder
A rickety metal ladder is leading down the funnel, ending on the ground right at the vertical wall to the northwest. The rungs don’t look very stable, but you’ve made it down here without any problems and could probably climb back up without any as well.
…this also seems to presuppose that we came down from above. Have we messed something up? If I wasn’t supposed to fall down the rusty iron hatch, why did they lock it and hide the key clear across town – that’s the adventure-game version of an engraved invitation!
All of a sudden the pile of rags moves! It’s not rags, it’s a human being! When your heartbeat kicks back in you realize it’s a man, probably a hobo, who had curled up for sleep in the corner and moved during sleep. Whew, that was quite a jumpscare. Hopefully this man isn’t dangerous. Or infectious.
I’m sure he’s friendly, but let’s let him sleep a while longer.
>x tunnel
The tunnel leads southeast into saturnine darkness. It seems unwise to go there without a reliable lightsource. And without your husband. Which reminds you why you are here - to find him. Hopefully he’s far away from this gloomy place.
I’m not sure that’s why we’re here, specifically.
>x bricks
Old, reddish-brown bricks form the walls and ceiling of the tunnel leading southeast. They are crumbling at the corners, and the mortar between them has dropped off here and there. The tunnel must be old, much older than the electric wire leading along its angular point, and even that looks antique. It is unclear which purpose the tunnel had when it was built. Maybe smuggling.
That electrical wire is a good sign that there might be a light system down here we could eventually turn back on (X WIRE and similar doesn’t do anything, though).
OK, back to our fellow Morlock:
>x hobo
This place is dry and sheltered from the wind, so a hobo has chosen it as his sleeping place. From what you can see the man is old and in poor health. Badly mending… wounds cover the few spots of skin you can see, his face is red and turgid, and his greasy grey hair is scraggy and hasn’t been cut in ages.
The poor man wears an outsized coat of brownish-greyish colour against the cold. Brown corduroys and aged black leather shoes without laces complete his outfit. He has curled himself up against the southwestern corner and is sound asleep. There appears to be something clenched tightly in his right hand.
>x hand
The hands of the hobo show marks of a life full of deprivation: Deep wrinkles, dirt and scurfy old wounds. His right hand forms a fist, as if he was holding something in it.
No points for guessing we’re gonna need that.
>wake hobo
You hesitantly tug on the hobo’s coat once, but to no avail. Violence is not your thing. Now how could you get this guy to wake up?
>clap
That verb doesn’t work here, or, at least, not right now, but it might work somewhere later.
>sing
That verb doesn’t work here, or, at least, not right now, but it might work somewhere later.
>shake hobo
That verb doesn’t work here, or, at least, not right now, but it might work somewhere later.
>open fist
The man emits a sharp bark and clutches the thing in his hand even tighter. Apparently brute force won’t work here.
>shout
What do you want to shout hello to?
>noho
You can’t see any such thing.
Get your mind off North Hollywood, Nitocris – we’re stuck in Vermont.
>shout at hobo
(to the hobo)
Apart from a twitch of his left eye there is no reaction. The hobo is sound asleep.
Cold water might do it? We head back to the darkness and:
>take water
You scoop up a handful of the cold, slimy water and raise it to your lips.
“STOP!”
You’re generally not one for following the advice of strange voices, but you decide it has the right of this case.
“You really shouldn’t have come here…” You’re pretty sure you aren’t just hearing voices and that it came from the darkness ahead, but since you can’t see anything, who knows. You can also hear what sounds like the scrabble of many small legs.
You know, we got out of here so quickly last time, I wonder what happens if we stick around?
“Far be it for me to complain… so nice to have visitors…” Something is definitely coming closer. Most of it seems to be coming from in front of you off to the left.
“You aren’t trying to leave us, are you? You’ve only just arrived!” The skittering sounds are all around you now, though much of it seems to be above your head. You feel something drop onto your shoulder and almost immediately it starts to burn.
More specks drop onto you, crawling through your hair, down your face and along your arms. Pain blossoms wherever they land, causing you to cry out and shake yourself, desperate to be rid of them. The voice is silent now accept for a dry, self satisfied chuckle.
thisisfine.gif
Blinded by sheer panic, you start running. It doesn’t take long before you come crashing into a wall and fall thrashing to the ground. More of the many-legged creatures fall onto your chest and neck and begin to feed. Unable to rise, you are quickly (though certainly not painlessly) devoured by the swarm. Once your corpse is desiccated and picked clean by the ravenous horde, they depart in search of fresher, tastier meat.
*** You have died ***
Yeah no, we’re gonna undo and take our chances with the hobo, thanks.
…so the water’s a bust. Maybe we can find some smelling salts? Either way, an incorporeal spark, a trolley pass, and a pair of coveralls we swiped from a dead guy don’t give us the tools we’d need to solve this challenge.
Ideally we’d be able to check the coffee to see if we can do more here, but with it sloshing around somewhere in the insect-infested sewers, that’s not an option. Not seeing any other immediately-plausible actions, though, let’s move on.
>u
Basement (Sean M. Shore)
A small wall-mounted sodium lamp bathes this area in a sickly yellow light, and produces a faint buzz that reverberates off the close, mildewed walls. This is an unfinished, spidery basement, damp and dank and one might even say disused, but on further inspection, that may not be the case. Some obviously dangerous wooden stairs ascend grudgingly, and an opening in the floor gives way to the tunnel below.
In one corner is a huge Panasonic TV/VCR combo, probably from about five years ago. Next to it is a stack of VHS tapes. Some discarded clothes litter the floor.
You can also see a mannequin (on which is a gold jacket) and a filthy rug here.
Hey, Sean M. Shore! He wrote 2014’s IFComp winner, Hunger Daemon, which was a Judaism-inflected Cthulhu parody.
Can we grab the lamp and use it to get our stuff back?
>x lamp
This thing has been here for a good fifty years, you’d wager. Normally, a dim, golden glow makes everything and everyone look better. This is not one of those glows.
The wall-mounted sodium lamp is currently switched on.
>take lamp
Honey, you can somehow carry dozens of things around here, but you can’t carry that.
I’m only carrying like three things right now, don’t rub it in.
>listen
The buzzing of the lamp is the sound of a single bee. Owing to the closeness of the walls, it seems to come from everywhere.
A nicely-written detail.
>x stairs
They look terrible, but I guess they’re pretty solid. A tip of the cap to the original contractor.
>x opening
The egress downward to the tunnel.
>x rug
It was a bright tartan pattern, but it is now mostly encrusted with a foul black ichor.
>take it
If you insist. Taken.
I’m sure this will come in handy! …or maybe Nitocris is just pining for her lost inventory.
>x mannequin
It’s a single-piece female model with articulated joints. It’s missing its head; someone has raggedly hacked it away, leaving a rather sharp edge. There’s a single red eye painted on its torso. It’s wearing a gold jacket.
>x eye
A heavy-lidded malevolent eye stares back at you from the mannequin’s torso. Even though it’s just paint, the pupil seems to exert a psychic tug from which you struggle to free yourself. A hollow, faraway voice calls to you for blood. Blood! You find yourself not wanting to disappoint it.
>touch eye
You feel a subtle and unsettling electric current.
Well, that’s not factory-standard! Anyway, as a polite creature of darkness, we’re of course supporters of the blood-for-the-blood-god principle, so let’s see what we can do about this out-of-nowhere and surely very constructive urge.
>x edge
A wickedly sharp piece of plastic juts from the mannequin’s exposed neck. You gingerly run your finger across it and almost cut yourself. If you pushed any harder, you would surely do so. Part of you wants to.
>touch it
You gingerly run your finger across the sharp edge and almost cut yourself. If you pushed any harder, you would surely do so. Part of you wants to.
>push it
The thrill of death washes over you as you run your finger along the sharp edge of the mannequin’s neck and apply some pressure. Blood flows from your tiny wound, dripping onto the mannequin’s stump, trickling down to the blazing eye. The eye closes with a look of satisfaction. When it opens, it is replaced by an oozing, bloody socket, throbbing with eldritch power.
>x socket
It’s a pulsing, oozing orifice with three small holes.
Three holes? …is that what I think it is?
>touch holes
You worry that you might electrocute yourself. Or worse.
I know Vermonters are very environmentally conscious, and I suppose this is technically a renewable energy source, but I feel like someone was thinking a little too far outside the box here.
The TV is the obvious thing to try to plug in, but let’s finish with the mannequin first.
>x jacket
A patch on the left breast reads “Century 21 Real Estate.” There’s dried blood all around the collar.
>take it
Taken.
>wear it
It’s probably a crime in Vermont to impersonate a real estate agent, and the jacket is soaked in the blood of the innocent, but what the hell. You slip it on.
Nah, that should be OK – the impersonation thing, not the blood of the innocent part, YMMV on that. But so long as we’re just calling ourselves a real estate agent we’ll be fine. It’d be a different matter if we presumed to call ourselves a Realtor™, though!
…I’m actually only partially kidding about that. A decade or so back, I worked for an organization that was doing some advocacy around relief policies for homeowners who were underwater on their mortgages due to the banks’ bad actions during the housing bubble. We managed to get the National Association of Realtors™ to sign onto one of our campaigns as one of several dozen supporters, and they were fanatical about insisting that 1) not all real estate agents reached the elite status of Realtor™, 2) anytime you used that word, it had to be upper case and include the ™, even if it was a sentence in the body of a press release. We messed it up once or twice, and they were super, super pissed – I’ve met parents who take their children’s education less seriously.
If you read Lovecraft you’d probably think that like antiquarians or bookstore owners are the craziest profession, but in my experience they’ve got nothing on the folks who gointo real estate sales.
Er, where were we?
>x clothes
You poke at the clothes with your foot. They’re a mix of women’s and men’s, old and young. Many are torn, some are bloodstained, others are fouled with something black and viscous.
>search clothes
You can’t quite steel yourself to do anything more than prod them from a safe distance.
>x vcr
It’s a 29-inch model, perhaps even bigger. It has all the features of a TV and a VCR, including a four-digit counter that tells you where you are on a tape. A single power button controls the whole thing, and the counter has a reset pin you can push. With a tape in, you can PLAY, EJECT, REWIND, or FAST-FORWARD TO (FF TO) a specific spot.
The huge Panasonic TV/VCR combo is currently switched off.
>turn on tv
You press the power button a couple of times, and nothing happens. The power cord is unplugged.
Yup, as suspected.
>plug tv into mannequin
You plug the power cord into the mannequin’s bloody socket. It swallows the entire plug, leaving only the cord emerging from the dummy’s abdomen and snaking toward the TV. The mannequin’s hands and feet twitch with unholy excitement.
I spent some time workshopping a “boob tube” joke here, but couldn’t quite make it land, so please construct an appropriate one as you’re reading along.
>turn on tv
You turn the Panasonic on. A plain blue screen is displayed.
There’s no tape currently in the VCR, but…
>x stack
There’s about a half-dozen tapes, some of them in slipcases, some not, most with peeling labels, none of them fully rewound, and all with the write-protect tabs broken off. They are numbered from 8 to 13. You can refer to them as TAPE 8, TAPE 9, and so forth.
All of the slipcases have the same logo: a stylized tentacle creature in a copper-colored hexagon. Must be some weird local brand you’ve never heard of.
Man, write-protect labels! I wonder how this sequence comes off for younger folks – I think the operating instructions are pretty clear but for a generation that’s only known DVDs this might be tougher than intended!
>x 8
They’re all basically the same, except for the numbers on them. You notice that they are all EP tapes, meaning that in theory they could each be up to six hours long. Which in turn means you have a lot of potential viewing ahead of you unless you’re looking for something specific.
I mean we’re locked underground with a dark sewer full of flesh-eating insects between us and the exit; we’ve got time (and can always snack on the hobo if we get hungry). Movie marathon!
>put 8 in vcr
The tape plays. The footage is grainy and and shaky; it looks to have been transferred to VHS from another medium, perhaps Super-8. There’s a single figure, speaking in front of a blackened altar, somewhere underground. Candles only partly illuminate him, but the face, the voice – you know them. Could it be Peter’s great uncle Josephus Cragne? He chants ecstatically in a mixture of English and something completely unrecognizable, filled with glottal stops and ululations. You watch for a few minutes as the chanting continues, until you can take no more.
The counter now reads 1503.
So after some experimentation, I figure out that you can rewind the tapes to the beginning, and then push the pin on the counter so that zero synchs to the start of the recording. You can just Z your way through to each tape until it ends, but a) this entails a lot of repetition, and b) doesn’t accomplish anything so far as I can tell. I’m guessing that we’ll need to find some time reference elsewhere that we can use to identify a particular timestamp to fast forward to, but in the meantime, here’s what’s on each of the tapes, with all the repetition and Zs omitted:
Tape 8:
The tape plays. You watch for a few minutes as the chanting continues. The figure’s elbows seem to bend the wrong way as he gestures frantically.
The tape plays. You watch for a few minutes as the figure intones: “Uln vulgtlagln ee uh’e vulgtm hlirgh naya uaaahor hrii, kn’a athg wgah’n nnnlw’nafh shuggagl nar’luh r’luh tharanak nw zhro”.
The tape plays. You watch for a few minutes as the chanting continues, until you can take no more.
The tape plays. You watch for a few minutes as the chanting continues, building to a crescendo. Then one word – a name – emerges from the din with an unexpected and nauseating clarity: Vaadignephod.
The tape plays. You watch for a few minutes as a shadow, matching nothing in the video’s foreground, emerges from behind the chanting Josephus, if in fact that is who it is. The shadow dissipates moments later.
The tape plays. You watch for a few minutes as the chanting continues, but it is suddenly interrupted; someone has taped something over this segment. It’s a performance of I’m My Own Grandpa by Willie Nelson.
Tape 9:
The tape plays. On the screen, a mass of wild-eyed cultists are gathered on a beach. They dance and chant in a blasphemous, throbbing din. The camera retreats, revealing a cluster of terrified people chained to a huge stone block. It dawns upon you that you are now standing amidst their clothing. You watch for a moment, but can’t bear to continue, fearful of what you’re about to see.
The tape plays. You watch for a moment, but can’t bear to continue, fearful of what you’re about to see.
Tape 10:
The tape plays. It seems to be damaged. You can hear the occasional shriek or low moan, but the picture alternates between snow and a scrambled image that you can’t make out.
>x image
You can’t see any such thing.
>cross eyes like you do for those magic eye things that are big now, in the 90s
You can’t see any such thing.
On to 11:
The tape plays. The screen is black. Nothing seems to be happening, but then you hear the hiss and crackle of static. The audio on this tape seems to have been transferred from something very old, perhaps a wax cylinder. The screen fills with strange runes or characters that seem to shift every few minutes. A tinny voice recites something in what could be a Native American language.
…A language like Navajo, maybe? I think this is the get, right here.
I try to listen and X RUNES to see if I can learn some Najavo vocabulary this way, but it doesn’t seem to work, and this message just keeps repeating.
Last two – here’s 12:
The tape plays. Someone has recorded several episodes of a show about a blond girl fighting vampires. Some high school students have apparently eaten a live piglet, to the girl’s consternation.
Man that was a gross episode of Buffy.
The tape plays. Someone has recorded several episodes of a show about a blond girl fighting vampires. She seems to be hacking at a giant praying mantis.
The tape plays. Someone has recorded several episodes of a show about a blond girl fighting vampires. The girl and her friends seem to be running around a funeral home.
The tape plays. Someone has recorded several episodes of a show about a blond girl fighting vampires. A bat-faced guy with fruit-punch mouth pushes up against an invisible barrier.
…the rest of these sure seem like they could be from real episodes, to the best of my admittedly-fuzzy recollection.
Lucky 13:
The tape plays. This footage seems to be recent. Wait, more than recent. A middle-aged man appears on the screen, with a wall calendar behind him that reads August 2018. He says, “This room is of course a tip of the cap to the Church Cellar in Anchorhead, which was my favorite piece of interactive fiction long before this project was announced. Many thanks to Jenni and Ryan for conceiving and organizing this madness; to Mike Gentry for giving us an excuse to come together; and to Austin Auclair, Roberto Colnaghi, Chris Conley, Chandler Groover, Llew Mason, Carl Muckenhoupt, Greta Shore, and Petter Sjölund for testing.”
A nice, sincere Easter Egg to close us out!
We’re still no closer to getting out of here or recovering our stuff, though, so I guess we’ll try those stairs next.
(To be continued probably tomorrow?)