Chapter the Twelfth: A Head for Music
When we left off, Nitocris had finally made her way into Cragne Manor and started her investigations, failing to find her husband also failing to find much else of note beyond a nicely-implemented spice rack and a tentacle that bequeathed god-like power. This update, things uh change.
Moving past the interstitial issue mentioned two posts above, we breeze through the Rec Room and head east through its one exit to find ourselves in:
The Music Room (Wade Clarke)
You are in a large modern studio space, not unlike a concert hall but without any seating. Dark, golden-hued wooden paneling lines the floor and walls, imbuing the area with an intimate atmosphere in spite of its size. The walls curve inwards in what appears to be a carefully designed asymmetrical fashion (some kind of acoustic treatment?) and electric-bulbed faux chandeliers fill the place with ruddy light.A doorway leads out of the music room to the west.
Standing against the center of the eastern wall, facing you, is a mahogany podium with four push-buttons on it.
A woman’s voice suddenly makes you jump: “Are you interested in the future? I am. It’s where I’m going.”
You look around, see no-one, but the voice fills the air. Where is it coming from?
“Welcome. I am Francine Cragne, and you are privileged to be able to learn something about me and my work here in the music room. A room that I built, I might add, and a room where only people welcomed by me are allowed. This rules out almost everyone in the old Vermont family from which I spurted and crawled. You got over the threshold, so I know you’re not one of them.”
Glancing back towards the entry, you now perceive a faint symbol on the floor.
The Francine voice continues: “My work is music. At least that’s what I tell people when they ask, because everyone thinks they know something about music. But in the case of any one thing that you think you know about, there are still a million things about that thing that you don’t know, right?”
The voice could be a woman in her twenties or thirties. It’s a little harsh, a little breathy, with a confrontational quality. You suddenly wonder: Is this live or a recording?
“Well, what if the part of something that you didn’t know about was as deep and as dark as a black hole in space?”
- this last bit said in a strangely drawn-out way. You’re already tired of this Francine’s indulgences, but you sense that you’re going to have to keep indulging them if you want to find your husband.
Ah, another friend of the thread! @severedhand wrote Six, a lovely hide-and-seek game with a lot of neat bells and whistles (it came second in the 2011 Comp), and is currently running a Kickstarter for a new installment in the multiauthor Andromeda series of sci-fi games – hopefully y’all who can are already backing it, but if not you should definitely pitch in!
…as to what’s going on in his room, Francine already sounds like a lot, but I’m sure she’ll grow on us.
I’m trying to be better about X ME so I’m not forever cramming them in at the end, so let’s start with that:
>x me
You dressed sensibly for the journey to Cragne Manor because you had no idea what would be in store for you. You remain uncertain about what may be in store for you.The voice says: "You’ve also got a problem with my family, I can tell. Is it to do with your husband? I think we could be be good for each other, you and me. Is why more important than how? No. Here’s how: The crimson button starts and stops my music. The plus button toggles my additive synthesis process. The minus button toggles my subtractive synthesis process. The LFO button toggles my frequency-modulating process.
“Say HELP if you want a reminder of all that later. Say it aloud. I’ll hear you. And no, you won’t need anything from outside this room.”
(You can use these commands for short:
c or crimson = Press crimson
+ or plus = Press plus
- or minus = Press minus
lfo = press LFO)
Oh, OK, Francine is still talking, and even tutorializing! The level of detail on the synthesizer is intimidating. Like, in that band I was in in college, I played drums, less due to an innate sense of rhythm and more because I’m a little tone-deaf. That LFO thing seems especially iffy – weren’t they that band that did that “if you steal my sunshine” song from the turn of the millennium?
…alright, I’m now being informed in fact they’re that bad that did that “I like girls that wear Abercrombie and Fitch” song. This place is already horrifying!
What’d she say about a symbol?
>x symbol
A distorted, oval-shaped spiral symbol is just visible all around the base of the doorway into this room, as if an oily drink had been spilled. Its lines have an indistinct quality that frustrates the eye. You can’t tell what it’s made of, if anything. Your initial passage across it into the room didn’t disturb it.
This is all just saying “there’s something creepy here”, but I like the description.
>x paneling
The music room is definitely well appointed. Unlike some other parts of Cragne Manor.>x dust
You can’t see any such thing.
Checks out.
>x podium
The wood is strong, perfectly fitted and sealed. You find it can’t be moved, though it doesn’t look heavy. On top of the podium are four buttons. No cables or power sources are visible, but this is obviously a device you can operate.
Seems like there’s not much to do except check out our cousin(?)-in-law’s music – Nitocris will try to plaster a neutral look on her face to avoid giving offense, but our expectations are low.
>c
You press the crimson button and it lights up.A slow, pulsing beat begins to play in the room. Each beat is like the thump of a drum and is followed by a thin, hissing sound. You picture a not-real ocean wave receding in the distance.
The podium hums with some kind of energy.
>dance
That verb doesn’t work here, or, at least, not right now, but it might work somewhere later.
I guess the beat’s too slow for that.
>sing
That verb doesn’t work here, or, at least, not right now, but it might work somewhere later.
Okay, okay, Francine isn’t especially interested in collaborators.
…we gotta try that LFO thing first.
>lfo
You press the LFO button and it lights up. The music begins to undulate rhythmically.The air trembles and your surroundings change.
L’oreille
You are in a small, damp-smelling circular chamber flagged in an iridescent sea green. There’s a hole in the ceiling leading into a sloped shaft, and a drainage grille in the floor. The plinking of distant water echoes up through the grille. Some weak bluish light bounces down into the chamber from the shaft. The light catches scratches on the floor.You see a child’s kaleidoscope tube set on a metal stand, like a telescope.
The mahogany podium is here. Somehow it didn’t seem to move at all during… whatever just happened.
Though your surroundings have changed, Francine’s music continues to play as if you were still in the music room.
Woah! We’re in another of those rooms with sub-locations, and this one seems kinda weird and Twin-Peaks-y (l’oreille is French for “the ear”, which is maybe a clue?)
In the transcript, you’ll see that I started pushing buttons at random to see if there were other sub-areas too since this seemed like a spooky one to start with – there are, and flitting through them would be pretty confusing so I’ll skip past that experimentation to just run through each area as I explored it in detail. We start with this much more normal one (I think found by pushing the + button and nothing else):
>+
You press the plus button and it lights up. Some colder, high frequency tones begin to wash over the beats.The air trembles and your surroundings change.
Living Room
You’re in a rather forbidding living room. The chairs and table are all of some incredibly dark wood, the green carpet beneath them even darker. Vertical stripes of a complex red floral pattern on the wallpaper make the high ceiling seem even further away than it must be. A wide window in the west wall admits early afternoon light through its dirty glass, along with a view of nothing but sky and clouds.The room is cold.
There are closed doors to the north and east.
A red telephone is mounted on the wall.
The mahogany podium is here. Somehow it didn’t seem to move at all during… whatever just happened.
Though your surroundings have changed, Francine’s music continues to play as if you were still in the music room.
Okay this isn’t exactly welcoming but it’s much less – well I can’t say exactly what that ear room was, but whatever it was, this has less of it.
After we take stock with an X ME to figure out whether we’re changing or just our surroundings (turns out it’s the latter, we remain our “normal” self through all this), something happens:
The phone begins to ring.
>x phone
It looks pretty vintage. The receiver sits on a hook beside the phone body between calls.The phone’s ringing.
>answer phone
You pick up the phone and offer a tentative, “Hello?”“I knew you’d be there,” says a male voice. “We know you’ve been conjuring up shit even your family doesn’t know about. You’ll need to share that power with us. The first thing that will happen if you don’t is we’ll tell your old man what you’ve been doing. The second thing that will happen is that we will completely fuck you up. Even worse than what you did to David. So pack your shit and come into Burlington tomorrow. Meet me at The Carfax at ten PM. I won’t ask twice.”
The line goes dead.
While we may look like Nitocris as per usual, this seems to indicate when we’re here, we’re actually Francine, or experiencing her memories, or something like that? Anyway, we’re on the outs with our family and we’ve done something terrible to someone named David, I think we can roleplay that.
The Carfax is presumably named after Carfax Abbey, the name of the English estate Dracula purchases in the Stoker novel – so I’m guessing that’s the local Goth club, and I gotta say, the prospect of visiting a Goth club in Burlington, Vermont (population 40k) is a pretty bleak one even before the threatening occult mafia folks start getting into the mix.
I try to hang up the phone, and when that command doesn’t work I write DROP PHONE, only to get this response:
You don’t think it’s a good idea to leave anything here. You don’t know exactly what’s happening, or how it’s happening, or whether you’ll be able to return later.
That’s helpful, means we don’t need to worry about losing stuff.
We take a look at the decor before we wrap up here for now:
>x chairs
All sharp corners and no cushioning, plus they seem to devour light. Meals in this room must be pretty joyless.>x table
The dining table has been varnished to a near-black sheen. It’s an oppressive object.>x window
Bobbing your head about until you find an angle from which you’re able to see through the bleary old panes, you realize why only the sky was visible at first. The room you’re in is high up, so you have to be close to the glass before you can see all the way down to the ground. You recognize the grounds of of Cragne Manor out there.
I wonder if we’ll find this living room later, on the second floor? (I’m guessing not due to the lack of coordination but in-universe maybe there’ve been some renovations since Francine’s day)
Unsurprisingly, we can’t just poke around willy-nilly in the past – at least, I’m assuming we’re in the past:
>n
As you move in that direction, the background music becomes fainter and murkier, as does all sound in the room. You sense that you’re stepping outside some area which is the focus of the music. The further you move away from the focus, the more the music dissolves and the less comfortable you feel. Your physical movements start to become restricted, as if you were wading into a narrowing corridor of thick mud.Each step brings an alarming increase in nauseating sensations and disorientation until, almost sick, you rush back into the focal area. The music returns in full and you experience immediate relief.
Now we hit -, so both that and the + buttons are lit up:
You press the minus button and it lights up. Some kind of dampening effect starts to happen in the music, as if you’d put your fingers in your ears.
The air trembles and your surroundings change.
Club Backstage
You’re in a dark, smoke and sweat-smelling hallway. A concert of churning metal music is going on in a room nearby, a muted version of it reaching you through the walls. Here, the floor and air vibrate in occasional sympathy. This place is barely lit by a procession of cool-looking but unhelpful metal-hooded hanging lightbulbs. The hallway becomes a T-junction at both its north and south ends.Displayed on the wall here are a gig poster, a newspaper clipping, a wanted poster of a woman, a large photograph and a wanted poster of a man.
You see the mahogany podium with the buttons on it.
(Underneath cold and muffled tones, a dull beat plays in the background.)
Let’s check something:
>x gig
Printed on the gig poster in hectic green and black writing that you can barely read is:Coming up at The Carfax!
Blindly In The Mist
Gravespittal
Bread Loaf Mountaineers
Pyramidial Tension
Xavier feat. The Cosmos
Francine CEach of these bands’ logos fights for space on the poster in a cacophony of typefaces.
Yup, as suspected, the Carfax is a club, and now we’re here – though based on the names of the bands I’m not sure it caters to Goths specifically. “Bread Loaf Mountaineers” for example sounds like an indie band made up of English grad students, since Bread Loaf is a famous Vermont writer’s retreat named after a local mountain. Anyway there don’t seem to be any goons immediately about, thank goodness, so we can take in more of our surroundings.
>read clipping
The article reads:BACKWATER MUSICIAN CHARGED OVER BLOODY ASSAULT
(Cassandra Campbell. Backwater Banner, August 26, 1994.)
Local Backwater musician Francine Cragne has been charged with misdemeanor assault after audience members alleged she threw real blood on them at the end of a musical performance.
Miss Cragne, twenty-three years of age and who goes by the stage name Francine C, ended her encore at The Carfax Club on August 19 by emptying the red liquid contents of a vial over front row patrons. Cragne is known for her morbid on-stage theatrics, and the wet patrons assumed they had been sprayed with stage blood. It was only after leaving the club that audience members had the opportunity to properly smell and inspect the fluid. Some claimed it was real blood and returned to the venue to complain. Miss Cragne had already left The Carfax for the night.
“I thought Francine was the bomb before this,” said Burlington resident Robert Aspin, who attended Miss Cragne’s August 19 show. “She does a lot of wild stuff, but I’m grossed out by this. Plus I don’t want AIDS or nothing. I don’t know where that blood came from.”
Backwater Police picked up Miss Cragne the next day at Cragne Manor, her family home in Backwater. When asked by this reporter if she had any comment to make regarding the accusation that she had thrown her own blood on Carfax Club patrons, Cragne replied, “You think I’d throw someone else’s blood on them?”
Miss Cragne was charged on August 20 and released on bail. The Carfax Club’s management have declined to comment on the incident.
Honestly I’m barely paying attention to Francine’s edgelord antics, I’m just continuing to be pumped every time I’m reminded that we correctly figured out that Backwater has its own police force rather than relying on the county sheriff.
>x wanted poster of a woman
The grainy, xeroxed black and white poster says “WANTED: FRANCINE C”. A big-mouthed woman in a ratty dress scowls into the camera, her hair feral, her attitude rock star. Francine Cragne.>x man
(the wanted poster of a man)
This crumpled xerox is an FBI wanted poster for the serial killer Ted Bundy. He went to the chair years ago, as you recall.>x large photo
The foot-long photo shows a laughing woman stepping at an angle towards the camera, as if to go past the photographer. Tight on her stocky body is a dark, satiny but scummy-looking floral dress, artfully torn in a few places or perhaps just worn out. Shoving a great mass of grungy red hair back behind one ear as she leaves, she has an obvious rock star fierceness about her. Her eyes are far apart and narrow, though you can’t see into them in this photo, but her squishy-lipped mouth is flung open in laughter, revealing somewhat wonky and frightening teeth. Her skin is an oily white, her face scarred and with spots.The photo’s background of a plain, cream-colored wall certainly throws this hectic-looking individual into relief.
Comparing this photo to the adjacent wanted poster of the scowling woman, it’s apparent that the woman in the photo is also Francine. In fact the images come from the same time and place. It looks like she posed for a photo to be used on the wanted poster, then broke the pose, started to laugh, stepped off her spot, and was snapped again as she did so.
So Francine definitely has the Innsmouth Look, and sure seems like she’s trying very hard to get back at her parents.
Wonder if we can get a souvenir?
>take gig
The gig poster’s barely attached to the wall by a single piece of rotten tape. As you dither about whether it would be okay for you to tamper with the venue’s display, the poster falls off the wall on its own. You pick it up, still finding yourself glancing around to see if there’s any Scotch tape handy you could use to put it back. There isn’t. It seems the poster is now yours, in spite of your hang-ups about this sort of thing.
Are these really just memories? Us setting an intention to have the poster, and then it falling of its own accord, is a spooky kind of coincidence.
We can’t take anything else here, interestingly enough.
Let’s try one more new location – this is just the minus button:
>push +
You press the plus button. Its light goes out. The high frequency tones fade out of the music.The air trembles and your surroundings change.
Girl’s bedroom
You’re beside the bed at the south end of a long, narrow bedroom with a hardwood floor and dingy wallpaper. Straight away you have a feeling you’re still in Cragne Manor.At the north end of the room is an open window. Shrubbery nudges at the frame, and an early evening sky and stars are visible beyond. The lights are off so the only illumination comes from the early evening glow. A stack of shelves crammed with books and old-fashioned toys sits to the left of the window. A chair and a messy table sporting a reel-to-reel tape recorder are to the right. The bedroom door is directly behind you, to the south. There’s a light switch next to the door.
A pale girl dressed in black satin pajamas hunches cross-legged on the floor by the window. You’d guess she’s around ten years old.
You see the mahogany podium with the buttons on it.
The girl is chanting with her eyes closed, a pained tension playing at the corners of her wide mouth, her right arm upraised to extend two fingers toward the ceiling, her left arm downturned to point two fingers at a piece of paper on the floor in front of her. You notice something dripping from her fingers onto the paper, and though there’s not much light in here, the dark streamers visible against her skin suggest blood.
The girl chants: “Francine, rancine, ancine, en-seen, seen, een, enn, ee, Francine, rancine, ancine, en-seen, seen, een, enn, ee.”
(A steady but dulled beat plays in the background. There’s also a separate high-pitched tone in the air. It feels more present, as if it’s coming out of something in this room.)
Given the repeated detail of the wide mouth, this seems like it’s gotta be a younger version of Francine, though not sure why she’s chanting her own name in whatever conjuring type ritual she’s experimenting with here?
>x girl
She’s a sickly little thing. Her hair is a knotted dark red tangle that evolves into a bunch of corkscrews and rat tails where it falls over her shoulders.
That’s funny – based on what we’ve seen of her later in life, I wouldn’t describe her as “sickly”.
As we’re checking things out, the chanting continues, ultimately coming to a climax:
The girl continues to chant over the paper, the intensity in her young voice increasing:
The girl’s voice is growing hoarse from the repetition of the chant -
As the voice circles itself, the room starts to blur. The music that followed you here from the music room begins to sink away. You feel an intense nausea and headache coming on, and you fall to your knees, trembling.
Just as you’re on the verge of passing out, you realise the girl has stopped chanting. The unbearable sensations recede.
Gathering yourself up, you look to the girl. Her eyes are open, and though she’s flushed from her exertions, she appears calm, even tranquil. She looks down at the paper on the floor. Then she considers her left hand, the bloodied one.
With a single forceful movement she shoves the hand in her mouth and down her throat. She gags and chokes, her face turns red and her body quakes. Then, as if pulling a cork from a bottle, she yanks her hand free and vomits pointedly all over the picture in front of her.
Looking as devastated as a far older woman who’s just given birth, the girl crawls forward through the steaming mess and lifts her paper out of it. Though dripping, it’s still in one piece.
Jesus! Even by the standards of black magic, that was pretty intense, much less for a ten year old to be performing on her own.
>x paper
(the piece of paper)
All you can make out from here is that there’s a drawing on it.Suddenly the girl stands and turns to you. You’d swear she was looking straight at you, except that those widely set eyes of hers are unfocused.
“Are you still there?” she asks in a harsh whisper. “I feel you. I must have called you. I don’t know how, but I trust myself.” The girl’s eyes roll around with a beseeching madness that is upsetting to see in her young face.
I repeat – are we sure these are just memories?
>x recorder
As the tape threads its way through the recorder, it slides over a wire tied around the recording head. The wire is connected to a barely visible triangle (the musical instrument) suspended from the ceiling. The wire seems to vibrate the triangle, a sound which in turn is amplified by the recorder and played back as a constant, high, almost inaudible but still unpleasant tone into the room.The girl darts her head about like a little bird, searching but not finding. It makes you wonder if you’re really here.
She turns away abruptly and begins a new chant: “Thine nine, I am thine, thine nine, return in time.” Muttering a nonsensical stream of similar phrases, she takes her picture over to the window, sits on the floor, folds the picture into a paper plane, stands again and throws the plane out the window. Then she sniffs and rubs her nose on her pajama sleeves.
She turns to face approximately in your direction again. The door to the room is thrown open behind you and the girl cowers. Someone enters the room in a thunderous way. The room floods with light from the doorway as this person seems to tramp into the very space you occupy. Your body jolts and so does the background music.
(press SPACE to continue)
…and that dumps us back to the music room, with the sound off.
That’s a lot to take in. The “return in time” business maybe means the ritual is what’s responsible for us seeing these memories? Or maybe she sent that drawing back in time as a paper airplane (though why would she do that?) And much more concretely, her response to whoever came through that door sure seems to indicate that there’s some non-supernatural abusive stuff happening in this house too. Things are getting dark, and not in a fun-time-y giant psychic squid sort of way.
Let’s try to go back and see what we missed. We start up the music again and push minus again…
Teen girl’s bedroom (in the closet)
You’re in a closet. You smell sex. The closet doors are mostly but not fully closed because they’re broken, sitting off-axis and admitting light through gaps at the top and bottom, and through a few inches between the doors.
Woah, OK. Seems like the same place but a significantly later time.
To your great mortification, you can see two teenagers getting dressed through those few inches. You also recognise that cast-iron bed behind them. The little girl’s room.
A red-headed teenage girl who looks about sixteen pulls a check flannel shirt on over her singlet. She stares at the ceiling as she does so, as if she expects something to appear there. The boy is dragging his jeans on. He has a lot of wild black hair and is the palest person you’ve ever seen.
“It didn’t work,” says the girl.
“Speak for yourself,” says the boy.
Willing yourself to shrink, you hold your body rigid in the closet. That’s when you notice the temperature is plummeting. The closet starts to shake, so does the bed, and suddenly the whole room is subject to a minor earthquake.
“Holy shit! Francine?” says the boy, grabbing the bedhead. Francine looks thrilled, then terrified.
“The circle!” she screams. “You broke the circle! Where’s the chalk? Where’s the fucking chalk? Find it, find it, find it or we’re dead!”
We waste a turn looking around to figure out where the chalk is because this seems important – but for some reason X CHALK has us look at the library-book-obsessed ghost who’s been following us around. And then:
The earthquake intensifies so that there’s nothing more to reality than incredibly violent motion. Everyone screams, the sound merging with the bestial roar of some third party whose black form erupts through the floor of the bedroom. It takes all of you.
*** The End ***
…we undo, cursing teenagers messing around with sex magic rituals they’re not truly in control of (though I’m sure Nitocris has a few similar incidents of her own to look back on).
Maybe let’s check out some of the other locations. We go back to the living room, and something’s changed there:
It’s night time. All is dark out the western window. The chairs and table are as they were the last time you saw them. This room is even colder and more lonely at night.
>>x window
This window was pretty non-communicative in the day. It turns out you can’t see anything through it at night.
It was afternoon before, so maybe this is later? Of course it could be earlier by more than a day. Not going to lie, this is all fairly disorienting, it’s challenging to figure out how all these pieces fit – and we’ve actually only seen the half of it.
Well, slightly less than half – we’ve now explored areas accessible by pressing + (the living room), - (bedroom), and both + and - (club), all with that lfo button un-pressed. There are four more possibilities if we toggle lfo on too (including the orielle area we immediately noped out of).
I start out by trying to press all three buttons, which as we guessed gets us to a brand-new place:
Forestland
You’re in a clearing in a forest and it is night. A freezing wind blows, the tree branches thrashing to form frightening silhouettes. Moonlight shines through a gap in a starless, clouded sky to illuminate the immediate area.Dingy shapes on the ground begin to resolve themselves as your eyes adjust. The shapes are actually a someone. A white-skinned woman dressed all in black, spreadeagled on her back. Where is her head? Squinting into the darkness, you begin to apprehend a great rambling stain where the head should be. This bloodstain rolls outwards, as if someone had upended a can of paint, and suddenly you can smell the sting of all that blood in the air, though it’s tossed about by the wind.
The woman’s sweater has been lifted up to the level of her chest. There are marks on her exposed stomach.
An awful scene of freezing cold misery.
You see the mahogany podium with the buttons on it.
(Strange music plays in the background. Beats, pulses and dissonant high notes move in and out of time. The whole piece ripples up and down in frequency.)
Ah, shit, this seems very bad!
…a pale woman – is that Francine? Without her red head and wide mouth, it’s hard to tell.
>x woman
You want to understand more about what’s happened here, or why, or who this is, but it’s dark and you’re numb and afraid. Your mind feels like it’s retreated under a rock.
Usually I think Nitocris is too hardened against creepy activity to put much stock in responses like this, but in this one case, I could definitely see her being taken aback!
>x stain
There’s no sign of the woman’s head. Just blood everywhere that looks black in this moonlight.>x marks
Written in blood on her stomach is “FUCK YOU”.
Yeah let’s get out of here. We de-select +, so now it’s just - and lfo:
(continued)