That’s not good! I just re-downloaded the Chapter 11 save and confirmed it’s working for me. I’m using Gargoyle as well, build 2019.1 which apparently runs Git 1.3.5 (or maybe runs on Git 1.3.5? My understanding of how all the like Git/Glk/etc. stuff fits together is very vague). And I’m using the latest version of Cragne Manor, Release 10/Serial number 181208. But I thought saves were supposed to be relatively portable since they’re snapshots of the virtual machine?
Anyway, hope this helps!
Hm. Seems my Gargoyle is broken then. I’ll see about fixing that.
Chapter the Thirteenth: The Impossible Armoire
In an eventful twelfth chapter, Nitocris plumbed the horror of the music room, got a glimpse of where this all might be headed, reenacted Hunt the Wumpus to give it her version of a happy ending, and got ready to explore the Manor’s second story. Will this luckily-numbered instalment outshine all that?
Well, spoiler alert, not really. But there are some definite highlights, and something unprecedented happens, so read on!
There was only one way out of the top of the stairs, eastward through an archway that’s described as looking “hungry.” I’m sure that won’t be a problem for Nitocris, right?
>e
Upstairs Hall, north end (Jason Love)
Despite all the irregularities of Cragne Manor, the inconsistencies, the unaccountable changes, to say nothing of the disparate and clashing architecture and décor, you have at least attained a certain expectation regarding its hallways: close walls and high ceilings, wreathed in shadow, with the occasional door looming obelisk-like through the gloom. Its architects must have had crooked rulers, as you can never quite make out the end of a hallway until you’ve nearly reached it–and just such a hallway winds away to the south.In this section of the hall, the eastern wall flares out into a wider space resembling a waiting-room; there’s even a little bench against that wall to the south-east. A massive black armoire occupying the wall opposite strikes you as a less deliberate inclusion, if the boards sealing it shut are any indication; perhaps the movers abandoned it here after they couldn’t fit it through the archway to the west. Beyond these minimal furnishings, the hall contains only a pair of imposing doors to the east and to the north; a third doorway between them has been closed off with bricks.
Phew, nothing to worry about.
Jason Love (@jsnlxndrlv) has written a number of games, mostly in the early to mid aughts but I noticed he also released the Exigent Seasons last year, which from the blurb sounds like a fully choice-based game running in Inform, so color me intrigued.
Far more important than any of that, though, he was also the first person other than me to post in this thread. Cheers!
That was a nice opening, lampshading the different takes on the Manor different authors have brought to the table – though honestly I’ve noticed much less of that here than I did out in the town? Maybe “oppressive Lovecraftian mansion like in Anchorhead” creates a more specific idea in folks’ heads.
Anyway this mostly seems like a transitional area, but there are a couple items of immediate interest:
>x doorway
Cragne Manor has endured wars, flooding, blizzards, and any number of lesser catastrophes, but not without its scars. When so much of the house has required constant renovation, the occasional fire barely registers as calamitous. Before your move, Peter read to you about one such blaze which consumed this second-story bathroom in 1978, yet the adjoining rooms suffered almost no damage whatsoever. The family had reportedly spared no expense to repair the damage and restore the bathroom, but the room burned again less than a decade later. It appears that the surviving Cragnes elected to cut their losses this time.
Oh Christ, not another bathroom. Good thing it’s sealed off, though I should probably see if it seems openable.
Before we can do that, though, we hear something:
The manor may have its voices: its creaking and squeaking floorboards, its groaning doors; but you have grown accustomed to the quiet ways it protests your presence. This relative silence is now shattered by the unmistakable sound of a clenched fist pounding at the front door downstairs.
Uh oh, that’s different!
(I’m at first not sure whether this is a global event, or tied to this specific room, but the writing style seems of a piece, with the emphasis on how we’ve gotten used to the Manor, so I’m pretty sure it’s the latter).
Well, let’s keep exploring here. We fruitlessly see if we can open the bricked-up doorway, and while we fritter away our time:
The pounding at the front door continues, louder now. Was the front door even closed when last you saw it?
I’m pretty sure I closed it, yeah, though don’t think I re-locked it.
If someone – or something – is coming in, though, maybe being here, with the stairs as a chokepoint, isn’t a good idea. We try going west, but:
–and just as abruptly as it began, the knocking stops. Silence descends on Cragne Manor once more.
Well. I’m sure nothing will come of that so let’s just resume our explorations:
>x bench
A spindly metal bench against the south-east wall.>sit on bench
You get onto the metal bench.>look under bench
You find nothing of interest.
Yeah, it’s a bench (it even gets dropped from the shortened room description that displays after we’ve been here a few times – nice convenience, that – so I’m pretty sure it’s not important).
There’s just the elephant in the room:
>x armoire
The massive wardrobe is wider than you can reach with your arms extended. Weathered wooden boards have been nailed across the doors in four places.>open armoire
It’s too big, too heavy, and too nailed-shut to mess with right now.>pull boards
It’s too big, too heavy, and too nailed-shut to mess with right now.
Huh, that seems pretty inaccessible. Guess we need to come back with a crowbar.
>x coffee
The swirls in your cup form a turducken. Images of strange hybrids mean that some challenges in your current environment can be defeated with what you already possess, while others will require outside assistance.
Oh! That’s unexpected. Let’s check out the doors to see how they figure:
>x north
(the north door)
Smaller than the east door and finished with green lacquer, although the color has faded irregularly – except in the center, where some gamboling farm-beast has been crudely depicted in white paint. The color would suggest it’s supposed to be a sheep, except the horns (or are they ears?) make that identification doubtful.
Umm, sheep can have horns last I checked, but I doubt Nitocris ever concerned herself much with the details of her subjects’ pastoralism. Anyway we can open this door, it isn’t locked. What about the other one?
>x east
(the east door)
Astonishingly large and assembled of thick oak planks with iron banding and trim; the door glistens redly from a thick coat of shellac. This would almost be more suitable as an exterior door, but in place of a knocker, a Cragne family crest has been set into the wood with iron filigree. The handle is little more than a bent metal prong next to an oversized keyhole.>>x crest
During your engagement, you helped Peter track down a number of Cragne family crests for potential use in wedding livery: the Shattered Mast in Flames, the Moons" Eye upon the Tome, the Cup and Sword and Star–none that you’ve seen shared any resemblance to the crest embossed on this particular door in his ancestral home: a furred cloak girds a shield upon which the trunk of a severed tree impales a rampant lion, which is shown biting its raised leg. A banner beneath the shield reads “LIBERTÉ DE LA GORGE”.
That motto means “freedom of the throat” which is maybe an idiosyncratic way of talking about freedom of speech? Anyway no surprises, this one’s locked and doesn’t open with any of the keys we’ve currently got.
So the likeliest interpretation of what the coffee is saying is that we’ll need a key from outside to open the east door, but we’ve got everything we need to handle this armoire.
I’m a bit out of ideas, though, so I decide to check something I’ve long wondered about the coffee – when it says I have everything I need, does that just refer to my current inventory, or any item I’ve handled? If it’s the former, if Nitocris gets desperate she can “coffee-scum” (sorry) by dropping bits of her copious inventory and repeatedly check out the coffee to narrow down which item is of use in the present scene. So I go back to the upper landing of the stairs to drop all my stuff and try this theory out. I learn a few things:
even if I’m just carrying the coffee when I’m in the hallway, it still thinks I have everything I need so that doesn’t prove things one way or the other;
somewhere along the lines, DROP ALL and TAKE ALL have stopped working – I have to manually drop a bunch of stuff that gets left behind by DROP ALL, and I have to type TAKE ALL twice to get everything back. Inform 7 is kind of creaking under the weight of the game at this point…;
when I do that, the large white clock comes along with me – not sure whether it’s meant to be portable, but now our explorations will periodically be interrupted by a magic cuckoo screaming the time so that’s nice.
Now that I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about this question, I decide to see if I was right about the white key unlocking the crypt in the family plot, and if so, whether I can test the coffee’s behavior on that; turns out that yes, that is the correct key, and X COFFEE does give different answers depending on whether I’ve got the key or dropped it in a different area, so we’ve got that going for us in case of emergency.
None of this is at all helpful for getting us into the armoire, though! There’s gotta be something we can do:
>touch armoire
It’s too big, too heavy, and too nailed-shut to mess with right now.>look under armoire
It’s too big, too heavy, and too nailed-shut to mess with right now.>climb armoire
It’s too big, too heavy, and too nailed-shut to mess with right now.
Are we missing something?
>x boards
The massive wardrobe is wider than you can reach with your arms extended. Weathered wooden boards have been nailed across the doors in four places.>x places
You can’t see any such thing.>x armoire doors
The massive wardrobe is wider than you can reach with your arms extended. Weathered wooden boards have been nailed across the doors in four places.
Argh!
I haven’t spammed our Janus-dolly in a while, but I turn to her now to see if there are any other objects I’m missing. Nothing new turns up, though I do get this advice:
>pull doll
The doll intones: “Shun the sealed armoire!”
…I would love to.
I remember one thing I can accomplish at least:
>x me
You seem no worse for wear, despite everything.
That’s nice for Nitocris, she hasn’t pulled her hair out the way I’ve been doing.
Let’s check the location description again:
A massive black armoire stands incongruously against the north-west wall, slightly at an angle. The boards sealing the armoire doors closed suggest that this particular object of furniture should have been removed prior to your arrival, but it’s far too large to fit through the arch to the west.
Maybe that’s a clue?
>push armoire south
It’s too big, too heavy, and too nailed-shut to mess with right now.
It’s at an angle, huh?
>x angle
You can’t see any such thing.>look under armoire
It’s too big, too heavy, and too nailed-shut to mess with right now.>look behind armoire
You can’t see any such thing.>sit on armoire
It’s too big, too heavy, and too nailed-shut to mess with right now.
ARGH! For those of you who know Inform, it sure seems to me like there’s an “instead of doing anything other than examining to the armoire” rule that’s catching everything I try and redirecting it to that same $%#% response. But of course the rub is that it could be “instead of doing anything other than examining or PUZZLE-SOLVING-ACTIONING to the armoire” and I’d never now.
I have noticed the “right now” as maybe a clue that we need to wait, but I’ve spent a long time bashing away at this and haven’t seen anything changed, and I’ve left and come back several times on my various inventory-juggling errands.
Friends, Nitocris is stumped. So for the first time ever in this thread, we’ll be ignoring the coffee’s dictates and moving on with an unsolved puzzle at our backs.
Jason, not gonna lie, I kind of hate you right now.
(more to come later in the day)
Understandable and appropriate. I don’t think of this as a spoiler, but I’ll hide this text anyway:
The coffee is slightly misleading in this room because while you “have everything you need” to progress, that doesn’t mean you can finish the room as soon as you get to it. More specifically, you should definitely move on to other rooms before coming back to this one.
(Chapter the Thirteenth, continued)
Per our habit, we’ll check out the unlocked door to the north before moving into the southern part of the hallway:
>n
“Oh, we’re all so happy! And it is just about tea time too! Come right in.” Carol turns to face a sock puppet monkey and scolds him, “You just stay in your seat, Young Master Sweetpaws – mother says we will have manners in this house!”Much bustling ensues: sounds of porcelain being laid, clinking of utensils, and the heavy thunk of a chair being put in place.
“Ready! Come in, Naomi”, sings Carol as she ushers you inward.
Perhaps against your better judgement, you follow her.
“Here, let me take that for you,” offers Carol as she accepts the teapot and walks to a table at the center of the room.
You open the north door.
Nursery (Ben Collins-Sussman)
You can see Carol here.[ HINT: you can type “hints” for a hint for this location ]
You would have killed to have this charming room when you were yourself five years old: a fluffy pink and white dotted comforter covers a bed overflowing with stuffed animals. Beside it, a play kitchen replete with pots, pans, and a very realistic looking oven. On the far wall, a large bay window trimmed in lacy curtains matching the bedspread. To the left of the window, a small writing desk and tiny lamp, and nearer to the entrance, a an old-fashioned record player rests on wooden stand.
Your eye is quickly drawn, however, to one discordant item: a framed black and white photo of a bald man smiles down towards the center of the room. The exquisitely carved heavy gilded frame obviously predates photography by centuries, and you are hard pressed to guess how this odd portrait fits into the decor.
In the center of the room, the tea party itself is already underway. Seated on each side of the table in toy chairs are several stuffed animals. Carol stands just opposite you with teapot in hand.
Oh, huh. That note about getting a hint is interesting – we saw a similar note when we came to the Hillside Path where we met Christabell the super-committed LARPer. And now that I think about it, I’m not sure how we know the kid’s name is Carol, but wasn’t that the name of the Cragne that Christabell made friends with, and gave her “mark” to? Christabell told us that she’d grown up and eventually died, though. One additional piece of the puzzle, when I check IFDB I see that Ben Collins-Sussman has written a bunch of games, but most of them (including the Comp-winning Rover’s Day Out) were co-authored with Jack Welch, who of course did the Hillside Path.
The coffee showed us something confusing there, didn’t it?
>x coffee
This is odd. As you watch the clouds in your cup, they form a pair of perfectly shaped hearts that orbit the cup, maintaining a steady distance from each other.You remember that twin objects like this mean you are split between two intricately entangled destinies, and that at any given moment, one of them will be the right place for you to be, but the coffee can’t tell which. Way to drop the ball there, coffee.
Ah, so here’s our explanation – this is like a two-part room, where we’ll need to solve both!
This also must be why that teapot we got from the mudroom was important – before digging in with Carol, let’s undo and check what happens if we try to enter without it:
A blonde kindergartner in a blue dress bars your way northward into a bedroom.
“Hi Naomi. That’s a funny name – are you an immigrant or something? Daddy says immigrants don’t understand plain English and that’s why we hate communists. My name is Carol. Before you come through my door, want to hear a joke?”
“But, there’s no door here”, you complain. As you say that, though, you note that there is a kind of weird shimmering between you and the girl.
“Knock, knock”, says the girl, ignoring your objection.
“Who’s there?” you reluctantly respond.
“Naomi!”
“Naomi, who?” you ask, confused.
“Naomi with a chicken on top!” The little girl giggles uncontrollably. “It’s funny because it has a chicken on top, get it?”
When the girl stops giggling, she somehow ejects you back into the hallway, adding, “We’re so glad you came for the tea party, but aren’t you missing something important?”
Can’t start the tea party without the teapot, makes sense (also, hands up those of you surprised that the Cragnes are Trump voters. Anyone?)
Re-doing what has been undone, we zoom back into the room, and address the issue of highest priority:
>x me
This little weekend getaway with Peter has done you some good. So relaxing.
I can’t blame Nitocris for leaning into the sarcasm at this point in the – day? Night?
Carol glances around the table at her stuffed animals. “I don’t know about any of you, but I sure am getting thirsty. Yes sir, some nice hot tea would really hit the spot, don’t you think so, Sweetpaws? You do? Me too. I wish Naomi would say the magic words and let us get going. What’s that Mister Snortles? Maybe she forgot what to say? I’m sure she remembers that she is supposed to say ‘bottoms-up’ so we can start.”
As in the conversation with Christabell, a lot of the phrases Carol says are bolded, which are things we can ask her about (NB “bottoms-up” is one of these).
Things were a bit of a whirl when we came in, let’s check out our surroundings:
>l
Nursery (Ben Collins-Sussman)
An ideal room for a well-heeled little girl of five. Room furnishings include a bed, a play kitchen, a desk, and a record player. A large bay window occupies most of the external wall, and a large portrait hangs at the foot of the bed. The exit should be to the south, but is currently blocked by a magical mirror that was not there a second ago.A tea party with Carol and a bunch of stuffed animals is in full swing in the middle of the room.
You can see Carol, a scrapbook and a window (closed) here.
Let’s work our way through:
>x bed
A child’s bed of just the right size.Carol sighs, “I’m getting bored – haven’t you done enough talking and poking around the room? Let’s start the tea party – you just have to say ‘bottoms-up’”.
“Carol, why are you so obsessed with tea. Are you sure you’re not British?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Hmm, Carol’s not sure whether she’s British – she is only five, but you’d think that’d be something she’d know.
Wait, I wonder…
>x carol
A pretty young girl, with wavy hair held in place with hair band, penetrating blue eyes, and cherubic cheeks. Her perfectly pressed powder blue dress is cinched at the waist with an oversize bow of matching color, and below it her skirt balloons outward like a parachute. Below that, she wears brilliant white knee socks and polished shoes with small silver buckles.“Yes, Misses Winkelbottom,” nods Carol, “I am sure Naomi knows that she just has to say ‘bottoms-up’ to get the tea party started, but she’s playing her own game now I think, and it’s not fun!”
One sec, Carol, I’m testing a theory – that outfit doesn’t exactly scream 90’s…
>ask carol about christabell
[ HINT: For short, say “a subject” or “t subject” to ASK/TELL about a subject ]“She’s out by those rocks,” says Carol, pointing out the window towards some dark cliffs. “I go out there all the time and we talk and play and do stuff. She taught me to read, you know. Mom and Dad aren’t around and the Cragnes don’t really care about me (mom once said they only took me for the money, because they’re not rich like they used to be), so that’s where I go when the weather isn’t too bad.”
“You know, she’s not alive, right?” You try to say it gently, but feel the girl needs to know.
“Sure, she’s a spirit – don’t call her a ghost because she says that not correct. I mean, gee whiz, at this point, I’m one too. It’s no big deal.”
Yup, she knows Christabell, because of course she does – she must be a LARPer too. Actually, since she’s only five, she’s probably Christabell’s daughter because who else in their right mind would let that lady rare off to a spooky mansion with their kid? Anyway her job in the LARP must be to get this tea party going which is why she’s so impatient.
“Uh oh, Naomi,” say Carol with what you can tell is feigned concern, “Malice the Clown says he’s getting upset that you are holding up the tea party, and he wants to know why you haven’t said the magic words ‘bottoms-up’. He says he wonders if you really want to spend all of eternity in here, and I told him that no, probably you don’t, but he said maybe she does, and I said, well I guess we’ll find out, right?”
I get it, I get it, you’re eager to get this wrapped up so you can go home with mommy. Unfortunately for Carol, Nitocris’s concern for the wellbeing of small children is far, far outweighed by her compulsive need to look at clearly-unimportant furniture:
>x kitchen
The play kitchen is all one piece and attached to a plywood backboard. The centerpiece is a metal stove with four pretend gas burners above an oven door. Some pots and pans poke out of the cabinets above the stove. To one side of the stove is a full size ice box, and an apron hangs on a hook to the other side of the stove.“If you are going to be such a stick in the mud, Malice, will you please help yourself to one of Naomi’s trinkets and drop it into the Maw of Unthinkable Nothingness? Maybe that will make her want to play with us and say the magical word ‘bottoms-up’ so we can all play tea party.”
The toy clown comes to suddenly to life, walks stiffly towards you and plucks a white key out the air and tosses it into a whirling vortex of fire and ash that has opened above the tea table. The vortex folds in on itself and disappears the moment the white key enters it.
It all happens so fast that you are left speechless.
Hey! We needed that, and we stole it fair and square!
She’ll give that right back, right?
>z
Time passes.“If you are going to be such a stick in the mud, Malice, will you please help yourself to one of Naomi’s trinkets and drop it into the Maw of Unthinkable Nothingness? Maybe that will make her want to play with us and say the magical word ‘bottoms-up’ so we can all play tea party.”
The toy clown comes to suddenly to life, walks stiffly towards you and plucks a round white wall clock out the air and tosses it into a whirling vortex of fire and ash that has opened above the tea table. The vortex folds in on itself and disappears the moment the round white wall clock enters it.
It all happens so fast that you are left speechless.
Well, that seems slightly less important, but still I don’t like where this is going, and I definitely don’t like that clown:
>ask carol about malice
“Malice is middle class, so before when he was a she, she was a waitress, but now I think he has a real job and works in a store and sells stuff. Malice lives in a house, but not a big one, and doesn’t have a lot of stuff.”
Aww, Carol’s done her best to memorize what she’s supposed to say about these toys, but she’s clearly gotten it all a bit confused (though kudos to Christabell for teaching Carol about transgender folks).
“If you are going to be such a stick in the mud, Misses Winkelbottom, will you please help yourself to one of Naomi’s trinkets and drop it into the Maw of Unthinkable Nothingness? Maybe that will make her want to play with us and say the magical word ‘bottoms-up’ so we can all play tea party.”
The toy lamb comes to suddenly to life, walks stiffly towards you and plucks an old paperback book (smelling faintly of mildew) out the air and tosses it into a whirling vortex of fire and ash that has opened above the tea table. The vortex folds in on itself and disappears the moment the old paperback book (smelling faintly of mildew) enters it.
It all happens so fast that you are left speechless.
All right, we’ll stop torturing Carol:
>bottoms-up
Carol smiles and a slimy dark-green sac appears in front of you. “Well, here’s your stuff. Fair and square.”As the last syllable rolls off your tongue, you sip the dregs of some delicious warm tea from your cup (English Breakfast, some sugar, a bit of milk).
Looking around the table, the cups set before the toy creatures drain themselves although the creatures themselves do not budge.
At the head of the table, Carol up-ends her cup gracefully and relishes the tea.
As she sets her cup down and sighs with pleasure, a curious thing happens: both you and she glow perceptibly, as does the book over on the desk. It happens so briefly, that you almost miss it.
“Feel any better?” asks Carol.
“Why yes, in fact I do. A brisk cup of tea was just the thing,” you agree.
“You can do the honors for the second cup! See this is fun!” Carol slides great-uncle’s teapot over towards you.
Well this is much more civilized – and Nitocris hadn’t even had any caffeine yet today, the coffee being simultaneously too valuable and too horrible to contemplate drinking.
>x teapot
It looks like there are about two more rounds of tea in the fine china pot.>pour tea
Carol rolls her eyes. “Good grief,” she says. “Don’t you know how to do anything? As Christabell says, it is not about the substance, but the shadow.”
Typical kid, you need to say the right words to play the game.
(I’m a little sad there’s that much of a prompt to ask about Christabell, it was fun to realize the connection)
>ask carol about christabell
“So,” you inquire, “it sounds like we have a mutual friend – Christabell. How did you meet her?”“Oh, Christabell? We met a long time ago – maybe when I was four? And I was playing out in the woods, sharpening sticks or something, and I found a great big pile of railroad tracks. Right out there,” she points out the window towards a range of dark cliffs.
“Yes, I’ve been there.”
“You have? Most people can’t see her, you know. They don’t have the sight, but I do because of my mom. Christabell’s and my mom are cousins or something, so I got the sight. Anyhow, Christabell’s great. She taught me a lot of stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Like reading and how to skin rabbits, but she also taught me special stuff that I had to have the mark for, like the tea party. She wants to teach me more stuff like that, but says I can concentrate enough, but I can too.”
>ask her about mark
“I’ve heard about the ‘mark’ – can you tell me what that is?” you ask.“I can show you.” Carol pirouettes around and pulls down the shoulder of her dress, revealing a small brown mark between the base of her neck and her left shoulder blade. It looks like a birthmark, except that its edges are indistinct and seem to keep shifting, like a living thing. Carol spins back around and takes a bow. “Did you see it?”
“Yes, I think so. But what’s it for?”
“Christabell gave it to me because she said that there’s something she doesn’t trust about these Cragnes, so it would protect me. She also said I needed to do be able to do stuff, but I’m not old enough yet for most of the stuff, so I stopped bugging her about it.”
I have to give this LARP credit, they really go all out with the special effects.
>ask her about tea
“It’s grand-uncle’s teapot. He got it on one of his ocean voyages and he really likes it, so I’m not suppose to touch it, but it’s just perfect for the tea party because it is so fancy. Cristabell tried to show me the party without the tea once but that didn’t make any sense, so I asked if her we could be like mom and have a party and she said that might be more easier, so that’s what we did, and when I want to have a tea party, I always find grand-uncle’s tea pot.”
(The party without the tea idea is interesting – is that meant to be some kind of ritual, which is now being dressed up as Carol’s tea party? Might be worth asking Christabell about that next time we see her)
>ask her about grand-uncle
“He’s really cranky and is always telling me not to touch his stuff and to get off stuff and not too sing too loud.”“Yes,” you say, trying to reign in the conversation, “but does he have a name?”
“I’m sure he does, but I just call him great-uncle. He says that only the Deep Ones should not be named.”
>ask her about mom
“Her name is Joan, but everyone just says Misses Cragne. I don’t see mom hardly at all because she has so many parties to run all the time. I don’t understand why so many; some are called luncheons, and people have lunch and talk, and some are called cocktail parties, and I don’t see the point of that because there isn’t very much to eat and people yell a lot and sometimes a taxi has to come and they need to leave. Mom says all the wives have to have parties, and that is their job, just like the husbands need to go to the office, except for poor families, which don’t have jobs or parties.”
Notice how she talks about her mom is much vaguer and morre generic than Christabell? Another indication the mom is made up and Carol is really Christabell’s kid.
>ask carol about job
“Dad says that he does the math that helps the other men build the boats and he helps them go really far and stay underwater for a long, long time. He is making a new one right now that doesn’t even need gas. Dad says that math is really important because if they make mistakes, the boats can sink. Sometimes the boats sink, but not because of mistakes, and dad says that is the Deep Ones taking their due, and there isn’t much you can do about that, so he just tried to get the math right.”>ask carol about deep ones
“I’ve never seen one, but I guess they are sort of like squid or something, but really huge. I think dad talks to them sometimes.”
Carol’s clearly confusing Deep Ones with Cthulhu! Still, I’m quite impressed with how much of this complex LARP lore she’s been able to retain.
>ask carol about dad
“His name is Hugo, which is a weird name, but dad says it’s not too weird because lots of Cragnes have been named Hugo. He’s the kind of engineer that doesn’t work on trains. He works really hard all the time and helps build boats to keep America safe. Sometimes he works in an office across the river, that’s in New London and sometimes he goes to the dock on our side of the river, where they build the boats. I went there once, but didn’t see much because everything is indoors where you can’t go except the boat and I didn’t see much of the boat because only the top sticks out of the water. That’s the part where you go in and out, so it has to stick out.”>ask carol about cragnes
“This place is full of them. I’m not supposed to wander around the mansion, but whenever I escape from my room and poke around I find new ones – in the fountain, behind the bookcase, under the floorboards, above the attic – it’s like playing hide and seek.”“Which ones in particular?” you ask.
“Oh, they’re all pretty much the same, so I don’t pay attention. The only I really talk to much is grand-uncle.”
See, Christabell would have had like 37 different Cragnes at the ready to trot out if I asked her that – Carol covered this pretty well though, and just give her a couple years and I’m sure she’ll be spewing multi-paragraph infodumps with the best of them.
>ask carol about scrapbook
“I think everyone should have their own scrapbook,” Carol replies. “Don’t you?”Carol leaves through it.
“How do you choose what to paste into it?” you ask.
“I don’t know. Just things. News from here and there. Interesting stuff.” Carol stretches and adds with a yawn, “I’ve just started the scrapbook, so there isn’t much in it yet.”
We’ll check that out in a minute.
>ask carol about new london
“It is sort of a city, but not a big one. Dad’s office is there, and it’s pretty close to our house in Stonington.”>ask carol about stonington
“That’s where mom and dad live. It’s in Connecticut. They live there because it is near where Dad’s job.”
Again, compare to Christabell’s incredible level of detail on the Saugus foundries… just the bare facts.
>ask carol about immigrants
“Dad told me not to talk to any of them because they want to take away the stuff that we have and they are all dirty and criminals. I would never invite any of them to the tea party.”
I hope this is just Carol staying in character, and when the game is over Christabell will take her to see Hamilton or something.
>ask carol about tea party
(the dolls)
“I do just love tea parties!” Carol buzzes. “I invite all my friends, and it’s so grown up!”“Why a tea party?”
“Because we drink tea at it, of course.”
“No, I mean, why did you decide to have a tea party and not some other sort of party, like the kind with balloons.”
“I don’t have any balloons. Besides, when we were trying to do this, Christabell said that a tea party would help us focus and showed me how, and now when I get tired or start to fade, we have a tea party and that sets everything right again. Plus, I really like tea.”
Right, so in the fiction of the LARP the party is meant to keep Carol’s spirit tied to this realm – it’s nice how they’ve made something so easy to run, like drinking tea, feel like I’m doing something significant.
>ask carol about snortles
“Mister Snortles is a busy executive and he makes a lot of money and is very powerful, so people do things for him. He tends to be a bit short-tempered sometimes, but that is only because he doesn’t have a wife to take care of him.”>a winkelbottom
(the toy lamb)
“Misses Winkelbottom lives in a very fancy house and has a lot of luncheons at her house, although she spends some of her afternoons at the country clubs as well. Her closets are full of beautiful dresses and she knows how to dance.”>a sweetpaws
“Daddy showed me some of the monkeys where he works, and I thought they looked sad in their cages since they couldn’t run around because of all the wires. Father said that they are happier than they look and besides the experiments are important and that they’re helping us fight our enemies, so they should be happy. Then he sent me Young Master Sweetpaws, so I could have a monkey of my own.”She pats the sock monkey on his shoulder, “Yes, Sweetpaws, I know that the other monkeys are not happy, but father says they need to suck it up.”
Again, her “dad” is supposed to be a sub designer, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t involve monkey experiments even if you’re making the subs to collude with Deep Ones, so this is another example of Carol getting things a little muddled.
This is most of the conversation topics, so I look around the room again to see if I’ve missed anything – the description is mostly the same, with one small exception you might be able to notice:
You can see the slithering vomit bladder of Katallakh (in which are an old paperback book (smelling faintly of mildew), a round white wall clock and a white key), Carol, a scrapbook and a window (closed) here.
There’s our stuff – yay – but it’s in the slithering vomit bladder of Katallakh – boo.
>x bladder
In the slithering vomit bladder of Katallakh are an old paperback book (smelling faintly of mildew), a round white wall clock and a white key.
Sure, nothing notable about that in need of further description.
>take key and clock and paperback
white key: Taken.round white wall clock: Taken.
old paperback book (smelling faintly of mildew): Taken.
I am pretty sure that mildew is not the strongest smell we need to deal with vis a vis that paperback, at this point.
(this scene continued in a moment)
(Chapter the Thirteenth, continued)
>x animals
Four dolls dutifully attend the tea party, sitting two to a side on tiny chairs. To one side, a stuffed elephant and a monkey, and to the other some sort of clown and a lamb.A ravenous horde of other stuffed animals crowd the edges of the bed silently observing the ceremony.
>x elephant
The leathery elephant’s head is disproportionately large and slumps forward slightly, weighed down by pendulous tusks and a meaty trunk.“I’ve had Mister Snortles as long as I can remember – daddy got him for me when I was just a baby and he had one of his trips to Africa. He has real tusks from a real elephant!”
From his dry, cracking gray hide, you suspect that the rest of Mister Snortles is equally authentic.
Ugh, that’s a dark detail Carol’s made up – elephant poaching is quite awful.
(I am barely resisting the urge to deeply derail this thread with a long list of facts and stories about elephants, who are smart, altruistic, soulful animals that we don’t deserve to share the planet with).
>x lamb
The toy is the threadbare, dirty yellowed remnant of what was once a lamb. It stands rigidly on its chair, bits of its underlying metal wire frame poking through where the fur has been rubbed shiny. It has no mouth, no nose, and only some bits of glue suggest where the eyes must have been.“Misses Winkelbottom, let me introduce our new friend, Naomi. Naomi, Misses Winkelbottom.”
>x clown
Despite his painted smile, the clown’s plastic face conveys a sense of surrender as it stares into an empty tea cup.It is the largest of the stuffed playmates, almost as tall as Carol.
“That’s Malice the Clown,” Carol chirps.
“Malice?” you prompt. “The Clown?”
“Yes, originally I called him Alice, but grand-uncle said he’s a boy clown and thought ‘Malice’ sounded nice.”
Male-Alice, that’s exactly something a kid would come up with. Like, when I was a kid, I had a fuzzy teddy bear, and the way his fur curled around his eyes made him sometimes seem a little sad, so I tried to call him “depressed bear”, but since I was little and I was a little unclear on some words and concepts, instead his name became Repressed Bear.
My wife finds this very amusing and Freudian AF, as the kids say.
>x monkey
The limp and gangly sock puppet wears a baseball cap and an Army-Navy sweater.“Young Master Sweetpaws recently joined us, right Sweetpaws?”The monkey sits there, inert, but Carol continues, “Sometimes he gets up to naughtiness, but he’s always back in the morning, aren’t you, Sweetpaws?”
The monkey stares blankly ahead.
> x portrait
This is clearly a formal portrait of a balding man probably in his sixties. He has an air of authority, but also an avuncular warmth. There is a nameplate at the bottom of the portrait.>a portrait
“I like Ike,” says Carol firmly.“You do?”
"Sure do. That’s what people say, they say, “I like Ike’, he’s the President. They said it so much that he got elected from being a General, so now he’s in charge of everything.”
“Is that President Eisenhower?” You try to remember what years he was in office. Definitely after Lincoln, probably after World War II, and he’s not someone you’ve ever seen on the news, so let’s say Vietnam or before. So that would be what, the fifties? Early sixties? Somewhere in there.
“I think so, that sounds right.”
Nitocris is understandably a little vague about US Presidents, but geez, this is what Christabell has stuck Carol with? She couldn’t be like from a New England Abolitionist family from the 1850s, or Gilded Age socialites?
>a adlai stevenson
Carol says, “That’s an interesting question.”
OK I can’t blame her for not getting super into character now – besides being only five, having to pretend to be a giant Cold-War-Establishment fangirl is pretty lame.
>x window
The large bay window is framed in the same rosewood trim that decorates the rest of this once great mansion.>open it
The window has a complicated child-proof safety lock – on the outside. How very uncharacteristically responsible for the Cragnes.>x desk
A child-size replica colonial roll-top desk with several drawers. The top portion of the desk is open and the writing surface folded down. A spiral-bound book lies on it next to a small lamp with a yellow shade.
Oh right, that scrapbook seemed interesting, it started glowing when we drank the tea.
>x scrapbook
The cover of the spiral-bound book is marked in thick black gothic lettering, “Carol’s Scrapbook”. Little bits of newsprint stick out from the edges of the closed book. The scrapbook glows faintly.>take it
That’s the thing about Rune Books: they like to be where they are and no where else. They are very finicky in that way.>open it
You flip open the scrapbook, with Carol reading along, over your shoulder. In keeping with the cover, the scrapbook contains a number of newspaper clippings, bearing the titles: Shark Attack, Actress Disappears and Body Found.
Fair warning, these are long:
>read shark attack
SHARK ATTACK!A team of oceanographers from the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography in Woods Hole, MA was attacked yesterday by sharks in waters about ten miles southeast of Nantucket Island. Of the four man team, one was killed and one was injured, requiring hospitalization.
The team was deploying a string of experimental sonar buoys along an underwater ridgeline. The captain of the expedition, Frampton Mays, was the first to notice a disturbance in the water surrounding the boat and the rubber raft in tow, where two divers were working. “The seas were rolling calmly, but something was moving around us, in circles. Something big. The water humped up around it, but there was no wake.”
Davis Parks, an electronics engineer from the Sperry Corporation, was with the captain and noticed unusual readings from the devices being put in place, “The first buoy was anchored and we were calibrating it, so I didn’t pay much attention at that point. I thought we had a gain problem because the signal returns were just crazy and the doppler? well, nothing can move that fast, I had to assume one of the guys had snapped and that the assembly was spinning.”
According to coast guard vessels responding to the their distress call, water sprayed up around the raft and then the entire raft disappeared below the foaming surface. Initially, the coast guard reported sighting tentacles reaching out of the water around the raft, but it is now believed that these were the heavy lines that had secured the equipment to the ocean floor recoiling upward with the release of tension.
One diver, who was on the raft at the time, was lost: twenty-six-year-old Travis McMaster of New Port, Rhode Island. Dr. McMaster had recently completed graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was conducting post-doctoral research at Woods Hole.
The other diver, David Tillerson, was nearer to the research vessel when the sharks attacked, and was pulled from the water by the two crew. First aid was performed on the coast guard rescue boat; it is reported that he had a number of large, painful welts on his back. The treating physician commented that these welts were “similar in nature to the sort we see from jellyfish, but much, much larger and deeper.”
Oh, fun! Those of you who’ve played my game Sting know (and have cause to regret) that my family used to do summer vacations on Nantucket, where I learned now to sail, which is why I know “one of the guys had snapped” means that a rope broke, not that somebody went crazy.
The details here are fun, though the city in Rhode Island is Newport, not New Port – otherwise the research is spot-on.
>read actress
A FLASHBULB EXCLUSIVE!Fashion model and star of the silver screen, Hungarian actress Lili Kovács disappeared this afternoon from a private hospital in North Carolina where she was recovering from recent surgery. As previously reported, she had been flown there three days ago after developing what was thought to be acute appendicitis while filming “Two Shots and A Chaser” in Bermuda.
At a cast party Thursday evening, she sudden collapsed, clutching her stomach in pain, and was rushed to a local hospital, where she was given medication and transferred by plane to the U.S. According to guests at the party, the normally svelte starlet appeared to have gained a lot of weight during her week on the vacation island, and some thought that she might have suffered an on set injury because she was walking oddly.
The handsome Wallace Travers, who stars opposite Miss Kovács in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures production, recounted the troubling week that began with the disappearance of the lovely celebrity while they were filming a scene on the beach area behind the posh Venture Casino last Monday. According to Mr. Travers, “She said she was taking a quick dip to cool off, and I thought she would be right back. When we were ready to shoot the next scene, nobody could find her. We checked the trailer, the hotel – everywhere. Then our sound guy, Mike, says there’s something going on in the surf. He had a good view from up on the boom tower, but from the beach everything looked normal. He said some kind of lights were moving around under the water. Some of the locals later told us that’s not too unusual, that algae or whatnot have this faint glow at night, but Mike was really upset and said the lights were huge, the size of city busses, really bright, and moving around incredibly fast. Well, Heinrich called it for the evening, and we let Mike go sober up.”
According to the film’s director, Heinrich Habberstamp, Miss Kovács showed up early the next morning for filming as if nothing had happened. Later that day, she admitted to having no recollection of the prior evening.
The private hospital refused to comment in the interest of privacy, but one of Lili’s visiting relatives gave FLASHBULB the inside scoop: When Lili arrived from the airport, she was burning up with fever and brought immediately to the operating room. As the surgeon made the first cut, the wound tore open of its own accord and a mass of gelatinous balls squirted out. “Maybe ten or fifteen pounds of them, each about the size of an orange. They were pink or red, and some had little cords attached. Nobody knew what they were, but they got as many of them out as they could. They had to leave some of the smaller ones that were more firmly attached. When they tried to cut those out, she started bleeding, so they closed her up.”
No one knows the whereabouts of the starlet or how she could have gotten out of her bed after such major abdominal surgery. More than a few industry wags have suggested that the whole episode was a publicity stunt to build up anticipation for the film.
So that’s horrifying (I’m guessing this is a newish take on how Deep Ones reproduce, but that rapey bit of the Lovecraft canon can stay on the dust heap of history as far as I’m concerned).
>read body
BODY FOUNDPolice investigators report the discovery of a headless torso on the western shore of Block Island and are seeking public assistance in determination of the identify of the deceased.
The headless, limbless corpse was discovered yesterday afternoon by Christopher Smythe, a local resident, who was checking his lobster pots. “It came up slowly on the winch and when it got to the surface, I knew there was a problem. I got everyone under it, and we swung it onto the deck and weren’t sure what to do with it, so we put it on ice and headed back to harbor.”
The body is described as male, caucasian, and likely forty to fifty years old. The Washington County Medical Examiner, Dr. Lewis Ivar, places the time of death somewhere between two and three days prior to discovery. Dr. Ivar commented, “there were two notable findings: first, a series of discolorations, about four inches in diameter and arranged in a line across the back and wrapping around upward under the axilla; secondly, the presence of a tattoo across the chest. The design of the tattoo is unusual, a skull and below it a phrase in French.” The coroner’s office is hopeful that the unique tattoo will aid them in identification of the victim.
…I’m having a hard time coming up with a common thread here other than “weird nautical occurrences” but I’m a big fan of those so am not going to complain.
>a scrapbook
"Carol, is it me, or are there more articles pasted into the scrapbook than earlier?"Carol sounds out each title and looks back at you with a shrug. “Looks the same to me.”
Oh, interesting – maybe if we’d looked before we had tea and it started glowing, there would have been fewer articles? That suggests that if we keep drinking, there might be more…
>bottoms-up
Again, the sweet taste of tea, this time with a dash of oil of bergamot and just a touch of sugar.Odd you think, same teapot, but a different taste. But then you reason that is not any harder to accept than tea distributing itself magically around a table you are sharing with four stuffed animals and a ghost of some sort. Some things are just harder to accept than others.
As you set your cup back down on the table, you observe Carol sneaking a glance at her scrapbook. In that brief instant, both Carol and the book glow slightly, somewhat brighter than they did before. Your own skin pulses briefly with the same glow and you think that afterwards it maintains something of a numinous shine. This is really good tea. You feel great, and the worries of the day are fast disappearing.
“I really liked that one!” pipes Carol.
“We aim to please,” you say, prompting her giggles.
Ah yes, I always enjoy some Earl Grey.
Now when we open the scrapbook, there’s a new article listed: Watery Fate for Convict:
>read fate
It looks like the icy hand of justice caught up to escaped murderer Gustave Dellorto earlier today, when his body was recovered at low tide from the Execution Rocks Lighthouse in the Long Island Sound.Leslie Stovebow, the lighthouse keeper who resides in a small residence at the base of the tower, discovered the body this morning as the tide went out. The body was still clad in the striped uniform of the Sing Sing Prison from which he escaped last night.
Mamaroneck, NY police raced against time to remove the body from where it had become lodged in the boulders before the time came back in, submerging the rocks. They successfully identified the body by confirming the number on the uniform matched that of the escaped killer. It is not clear why Dellorto chose to flee to the island, but police suspect he was hoping to murder the lighthouse keeper and go to ground there until his trail grew cold.
Dellorto was convicted of three cases of first degree murder in the winter of 1951, including one G-man, and was suspected of homicide in seven additional cases. It is believed that his crimes were connected to organized crime. He was sentenced to capital punishment, but pardoned after appeal two years ago by Governor Dewey.
Execution Rocks inherits its name from the colonial period, where legend goes that disobedient slaves were shackled at low tide, and served as examples for others, being left there to slowly drown in the pounding waves. This story is considered apocryphal by most, but today, the lighthouse earned its name.
There’s another bit pasted a bit lower on the page.
CORRIGENDUM
Gustave Dellorto, who escaped from Sing Sing prison earlier this month, was arrested in Detroit, Michigan, yesterday leaving in his wake a fresh series of murders committed during a two-week spree across several states. It was previously reported in error that he had died by drowning in the Long Island Sound, but the body recovered in that incident is now known to be that of Francis Dapper, age 19 of Larchmont, New York, who had been working at the Purdue Island Yacht Club the evening that Gustave escaped. One of the club launches, which had been brought ashore for the winter, was discovered missing later that week. Police believe that it was probably used by Dellorto to reach the Execution Rocks lighthouse, where he abandoned his victim’s body, after swapping clothes to fake his own death in an attempt to evade capture.
Oh man, that lighthouse was like a mile offshore from where I grew up! I’m digging the local color.
(I lived on Long Island until I was 13, then went to high school in New Hampshire which, while not Vermont, is just adjacent – but I’ve lived in California for most of the last 25 years, so oddly there’s a cozy sort of familiarity I’ve been getting from this game).
Before having more tea, an idea occurs:
>take bladder
Taken.
This is a container, right?
>put all in vomit
[snip]
It’s basically a 100% organic backpack, right? Seems fine.
>x record
It is a full size record, black vinyl of course, with a cardboard center, labelled “Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music”. According to the label, it is a 78 rpm album produced by RCA Victor in 1946.>x record player
A wooden turntable with speakers built into the cabinet rests on a folding wooden table. There is a record on the turntable, but the turntable is off.>turn on record player
You snatch at it several times, until your brain registers that it is not there. Alarmingly, when your fingers touch the record player they penetrate the surface. You know it is not the case, but visually, it appears that your has been severed neatly at the surface, the fingers lost somewhere in the interior. Reflexively, you whip your hand back.Carol holds her hands to her face and giggles. “Silly Naomi! You should see the look on your face!”
“That’s not something you can play with,” instructs Carol. “Not worth the trouble.” You can play with my scrapbook, though. I made that real enough because I like to show it off.
They must have just faked this with a hologram or VR or something, a real vintage Perry Como album and turntable would probably be too expensive.
>bottoms-up
That was unexpected. Flowery. Bit of an aftertaste.“Is this Jasmine?”
“It’s Crisp Hand Sew Mom.” Carol struggles with the pronunciation.
“Chrysanthemum?” You offer.
“Yes, that. Grand-uncle’s teapot knows all my favorites.”
Not only are the two of you now glowing enough to cast shadows around the room, but you notice that little sparks of static electricity scintillating at your fingertips. You hold them up, “Carol, is this normal?”
“Oh yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
You do feel wonderful.
The scrapbook pulses with energy.
We take the hint:
>open scrapbook
Carol reads along, over your shoulder. In keeping with the cover, the scrapbook contains a number of newspaper clippings, bearing the titles: Shark Attack, Actress Disappears, Body Found, Watery Fate for Convict and Boat Wreck On Sable Island.
That seems interesting! But before we can read it:
Carol stands up and stretches, lightning arcing from tiny fist to tiny fist about her head.
“Thanks for playing tea party, Aunt Naomi. You played it just the way Christabell taught me. She’d be very proud.”
Before you can react, she waves at you, “I’ve got some things to do now. See you in a bit!”
Suddenly, you find yourself in the hallway.
Oops! Through the magic of UNDO, we can read that last article, though:
>read boat
A 12-man fishing boat, the Miss Step, out of Halifax, was found wrecked yesterday with loss of all hands on Sable Island, a small, isolated island in the Atlantic Ocean, 190 miles southeast of Halifax. The vessel grounded on an sandy bar near the eastern end of the island and by report was discovered yesterday morning by Ronald Lefevre, sub-intendent of the Sable Island Rescue Station. Subsequently, both Mr. Lefevre and Scott McCallister, who was in charge of the two-man Rescue Station, were also lost.The only other inhabitant of the island, Dr. Martha Klein, reported yesterday’s events to the Canadian Coast Guard cutter Hermes by shortwave radio at 10:20 a.m. yesterday morning before herself going missing. The Hermes reached the island within the next two hours, but was unable to launch small landing craft because of gale force squalls. When they did make landfall late that afternoon, there was no evidence of the wreck. The search the island’s three inhabitants was aborted this morning due to further foul weather; additional Coast Guard vessels are en route as we go to press.
The Coast Guard has refused to comment on the matter, but a ham radio operator, Edmund Finister, from Prince Edward Island, gave the following account to the press:
“I sometimes listen to the reports going back and forth between Dr. Klein at the Meteorological Station and the mainland, and I wasn’t expecting anything at that time of day, but I just happened to have the radio on, more or less to keep the shack warm. Then, out of the blue, I hear Dr. Klein, and she normally has kind of a lilting, friendly voice, but I could hear that she was shaken up. I was in the other room, so I only caught the last part of it, but she was speaking almost too calmly, trying to give all the details, but I could tell she was a hair’s breadth from having a breakdown.”
“She’s talking to the sparky on the cutter, and saying that first the one guy, Lefevre came speeding back along the beach in his jeep to get McCallister, because he had discovered the fishing boat on its side up on the sand. They asked Dr. Klein to call it in and they both took off again, even though Lefevre had said that when he had seen it the first time, he had a good look around and there were no survivors.”
“Now, what’s weird is what Lefevre told Klein – while there were no bodies aboard, there were these? things. I only know what she said on the air, that Lefevre had said that there were these fleshy things all over the ship, in different parts of it, down below, up on the deck. They were whitish or translucent, sort of long tubes of the stuff. Heavy, deadweight if you tried to move them. Some were wrapped up in foul weather jackets, and one that Lefevre poked had some coins embedded in it, about halfway up, he said, just a couple inches deep. His best guess was that they were whale fat since they were so oily, but he was just guessing. Also, he said they had kind of a musky smell.”
Maybe this ties into the Deep One eggs?
Anyway we find ourselves back in the hallway. If we try going north again:
>n
Just down the side corridor to the north, you notice a closed door that says “Carol’s Room” and below that, “Napping Kindergartner – DO NOT WAKE!” and finally, at the bottom in smaller letters, “Come back later when awake. Signed, Victor Cragne”.
Is Victor the great-uncle, I wonder?
My experience with young kids is that waking them is usually a bad idea, but maybe just this once…
>open door
There is nothing at all arbitrary about the justice meted out for waking a cranky kindergartner in Crange Mansion.Dungeon
You find yourself in a dungeon, strapped by to a toffee table by candy cane manacles and slathered with delicious honey. A stalactite drips dark chocolate over your belly, luscious rivulets pooling in the small of your back.The ants pour in, their mandibles clacking.
*** EATEN ***
…I will lay odds that Ben Collins-Sussman is a parent.
(to be concluded)
(Chapter the Thirteenth, concluded)
The “come back later” makes me think we’ll need to tag back to Christabell before making any more progress here. In the meantime, the corridor continues south, so we head that way, pausing to shake our fist at that %@$#% intransigent armoire on the way.
Hallway South (Matt Schneider)
The threadbare carpet holds only the vaguest hints of its original hue, and the yellowing wallpaper is crisscrossed with a web of cracks.The hallway feels narrow - no, that’s not right. The hallway is wide enough for two people to pass one another easily. It doesn’t feel narrow: it feels thin. The hallway continues to the north, and there are doors leading to the west, south, and east.
Partway down the hall, a black pen floats a couple feet off the ground, as if resting on a table or desk. It does not, however, appear to be sitting on anything.
Matt Schneider is another author who hasn’t released anything other than this, so this is another cool opportunity to check out a new author! Let’s see what he’s got in store for us besides a spooky pen:
>x carpet
Generations of feet have worn an off-white strip down the hallway that branches into each room. Where the walls meet the floor you can just barely make out hints of the forest-green of the carpet.The hallway fills with a flash of light and shadows flee down the hall. Moments later the clap of thunder causes the entire house to shake and groan.
Eek! At least the thunderstorm mostly waited until I was inside to kick off in earnest.
>x wallpaper
The surface of the wallpaper is covered with small cracks that criss-cross it in a spiderweb-like fashion. They converge halfway down the hall in a small hole, through which you can see a faint, flickering light. The edges of the hole curl back and look like they could be torn further.>x hole
(the hole)
Through the hole you can see a void that seems to glow faintly with a swirling white light. In the distance you can just make out the shapes of words, but you can’t see them clearly enough from here to make sense of them.
Of words? That’s odd.
>look through hole
(the hole)
The paper tears away in thin strips, opening up into a gently glowing, three-foot-wide void that stretches nearly from the floor to the ceiling. You think you can see words in there, but you can’t quite read them from out here.You hear an electronic humming noise coming from the hole in the wallpaper.
It sounds like we’re meant to go in there, but if there are words waiting for us, we might need this pen:
>x pen
A black fountain pen. It looks like the ink is long dried up.>take it
Taken.>x it
A black fountain pen. It looks like the ink is long dried up.
Okay, maybe this won’t be that useful. Let’s go ahead and see what we’re dealing with:
>in
A Liminal Space
Printed name of M2F7 is “Hallway South (Matt Schneider)”.Description of M2F7 is “The threadbare carpet holds only the vagues hints of its original hue, and the yellowing wallpaper is crisscrossed with a web of cracks.[if schneider-wallpaper is schneider-torn] The hole that you tore through the wallpaper emits a gentle light.[end if][If unvisited][paragraph break]The hallway feels narrow[unicode 8212]no, that’s not right. The hallway is wide enough for two people to pass one another easily. It doesn’t feel narrow: it feels thin.[end if] The hallway continues to the north, and there are doors leading to the west, south, and east.”.
The schneider-wallpaper is scenery in M2F7. Understand “wallpaper”, “cracks”, “web”, and “paper” as schneider-wallpaper. Schneider-wallpaper can be schneider-torn or schneider-untorn. schneider-wallpaper is schneider-untorn. The description of schneider-wallpaper is “[if schneider-wallpaper is schneider-untorn]The surface of the wallpaper is covered with small cracks that criss-cross it in a spiderweb-like fashion. They converge halfway down the hall in a small hole, through which you can see a faint, flickering light. The edges of the hole curl back and look like they could be torn further.[else]The wallpaper hangs limply open where you tore it. A soft light pulsates in the void behind the wall.[end if]”. The printed name of schneider-wallpaper is “wallpaper”.
The schneider-desk is a supporter in M2F7. Schneider-desk is scenery. The printed name of schneider-desk is “desk”. Understand “desk” as schneider-desk. The schneider-drawer is a closed, openable, opaque container that is part of schneider-desk. The printed name of schneider-drawer is “drawer”. Understand “drawer” as schneider-drawer.
The schneider-pen is a thing in M2F7. The description of schneider-pen is “A black fountain pen. It looks like the ink is long dried up.” The printed name of schneider-pen is “black fountain pen”. Understand “pen” and “fountain pen” as schneider-pen.
The schneider-typescript is a library-book inside schneider-drawer. Understand “typescript” as schneider-typescript. The printed name of schneider-typescript is “bound typescript”.
Wow, this is a hell of a move. Just, bravo:
For those of y’all who haven’t worked with it – this is Inform 7. What’s happened is we’ve crawled out of the hole in the wallpaper, and now we’re looking back at the hallway and seeing the code that created it (note that the pen is still listed even though we grabbed it and are now carrying it – this is the code-as-compiled, not the code reflecting the current reality). I have seen some fourth-wall breaking gags in my day, but this one takes the cake.
After we’re done marveling at the audacity of the move, we notice that there’s a scenery object described here that wasn’t visible before – as well as an indication of what we’ll find once we explore it. Can we check it out while we’re in the meta-space?
>x desk
They saw it. This was it. But where was it?>open drawer
They couldn’t see any such thing.
Guess we gotta go back to meat-space.
>exit
Hallway South (Matt Schneider)
>x desk
You feel your way down the hall slowly until your hand comes to rest on something. You can’t see the desk, but as you run your hands across it, it appears to be waist-height, wooden, and has a drawer of some kind on the front.
Ha!
(We’re also told that “a sudden sparking noise echoes inside the hole”, but when I check back inside, I don’t notice that anything’s changed)
>open drawer
You open the drawer, revealing a bound typescript.A ghastly spectral cuckoo flies out of the round white wall clock (smelling faintly of mildew) and proclaims, “The time is now six o’clock!” before vanishing into thin air.
I am not at all regretting my decision to tote this clock around!
>x typescript
The book is bound in a cheap, rough, green cloth, with the title 'Pataphysical Approaches to Quantum Superfluids and the name Aster Cragne embossed in gold leaf. The pages appear to have been printed on continuous paper, then separated and gathered together?a dissertation, perhaps? There’s a sticker with a Dewey number stuck to the spine, and on the title page you see the stamp of the insignia of the Backwater Public Library.
Yay, one more off the list!
>read it
(first taking the 'Pataphysical Approaches to Quantum Superfluids)
The book appears to be a scholarly monograph or a dissertation. You try to make sense of it, but the contents are incomprehensible: you struggle with sentences that declare matter-of-factly “the behaviour of cubits in a hasturian environment is well-known, although not often remarked upon”, or propose that “we must now consider the implications of quantum entanglement in non-euclidian dimensions in light of recent discoveries regarding spacetime foam.”
That second sentence I can sorta squint at and pretend makes sense; the first one, not so much (a cubit is a biblical measure of length, so why would it behave any differently from like a centimeter, however odd a Hasturian environment winds up being?)
The chapter entitled “The Vaadignephod Paradox” takes up at least seventy pages, and could well be, from all the subclauses and parenthetical diversions, a single, unbroken sentence. The chapter appears to describe the creation of a new element that, according to the typescript, “exhibits remarkable sub-quantum effects when exposed to nanomolecular compounds” but you can’t determine whether this is a theoretical proposal or the records of an experiment that has already been conducted.
There are notes written in the margins throughout the book both in pencil and in a blue-black ink that’s left acidic yellow burns on the facing pages.
The book concludes with the statement “And so I can only conclude that the holographic paradigm is presently the most compelling explanation for the heretofore discussed processes, effects, and phenomena.” Written in pencil beneath this is the question “Cad faoi an leabhar na rí bhuí?”.
Oh lordy. I’m reasonably conversant in French, and as this thread has demonstrated, I have just enough Latin to get myself into trouble, but Irish? That’s a whole 'nother thing.
My attempts to brute-force translate this via Google get me to “what about a/the book something the bird(maybe “plover”?)” so if any of y’all have any insight, I’m all ears – the “plover” thing makes me think it could be an in-joke (the three magic words, going back to Adventure, are XYZZY, plugh, and plover) but that translation seemed quite tentative.
The well-dressed man’s outline coalesces into form like ice spreading across a pond. Pleased, he watches his hands move, and brushes a bit of frost off of a shoulder. Then he starts and looks away, as if remembering something. His features darken and the air goes cold as he frowns.
With a scowl and a sense of purpose, the well-dressed man fades away. You think you caught a glimpse of brick and ivy, and heard the sound of running water as he disappeared.
Okay, reading that book seems to have hit a threshold! I know I complained about the chill since we picked it up, but now that the ghost is gone I kind of miss him? From that last sentence it sure seems like his disappearance has something to do with that water fountain area, as we guessed – we’ll need to check that out next time we’re in town.
I’m guessing that’s the main puzzle here, but the coffee indicates we’ll need something from elsewhere to complete the room – given the surfeit of doors, I’m guessing one’s locked. The east one is open, but the south one stymies us:
A simple door, made from a rich, dark wood. An oval window takes up the upper third of the door, but is covered in such a thick layer of dust and grime that you can hardly see through it. The small brass knob is surrounded by a circular design of inlaid triangles cut out of deep, reddish-brown cherry wood. You can see the purple flicker of sheet lightning through the filthy window.
None of our keys open the door, so that checks out.
Just in time, I remember something I neglected to do:
> x me
You feel thinner than normal?but not you, just your skin, as if it were stretched across the surface of your body. It doesn’t look taut or stretched, but you feel like you could pierce it with your fingernail.
Because I can’t help myself, I of course spend some time trying to pierce my skin with my fingernail, but thankfully nothing works.
Let’s do one more room before calling it a night:
>w
Study (Ian Holmes)
“Kind people call them sunbeams,” your mother told you, as a child, when you asked about the dust particles catching the light in your living room. Later, you read that much of it was arthropod waste: shredded cobwebs, insect corpses, mites fed on human skin.Barely a sunbeam reaches this study. Dust cakes the desk, drapes, and book-lined shelves like a bug mass grave. More insect bodies litter the carpet in earlier states of decay. The exit is east.
Even now, being in a study makes you feel vaguely guilty. Like an impostor.
Oh, neat – Ian Holmes of course was Bilbo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
(That was actually Ian Holm, once again I’ve got nothing).
>x desk
The desk is clear, except for a framed photograph and a notepad.You do notice a key on the bookshelf. It is probably significant.
No, let me rephrase that; it is the ONLY reason a plebeian like you would stray into this temple of learning. So pick it up and get out of here.
A Rusty Iron Key.
Is it just me, or does the authorial voice seem unnecessarily adversarial?
x photo
It depicts a snake (specifically, an Eastern Ratsnake, according to the caption) in the act of raiding a finches nest. Having strangled a mother finch, its jaws open wide as it loops back around to bite.What, you think finding the key makes you clever? You were obviously meant to find it.
>take photo
Your own memories are scary enough.
We look around again:
>l
Study (Ian Holmes)
Barely a sunbeam reaches this study. Dust cakes the desk, drapes, and book-lined shelves like a bug mass grave. More insect bodies litter the carpet in earlier states of decay. The exit is east.Once, in the Headmaster’s Study… no. Don’t go there.
On the bookshelf is a small rusty iron key.
On the desk are a notepad and a photo.
You think of your parents now, and how much of a disappointment to them you must be.
Really? They died 4,000 years ago, I think if nothing else they’d be impressed we’re still kicking around.
>x notepad
Written on the paper are some mathematical notes that are just beyond your ability to grasp. You think you know what they mean but, as your eyes unfocus, you have trouble recalling even basic stuff. Like Liouville’s Theorem, or the uses of the Wronskian.You are unable to decode mathematics, to solve problems like Werner or Emmy could.
Ah, OK – I am quite confident that Nitocris never had any siblings slash school chums named “Werner” or “Emmy”. Somebody else’s memories – and low self-esteem – must be leaking into this place.
>take notepad
You reach out for the pad, and think twice. Maybe you should try to understand it first. You know, before you steal it.
Reading it again just gets us the same results, though. No big deal, it’s just math!
(I’m sorry, math, I didn’t really mean that)
>x drapes
Hideous… if reminiscent of the drapes your mother chose for your childhood room. (Insisting all the while on her superior taste and wisdom, in that overbearing way she had.)Just gonna keep examining stuff, huh.
That is a fair cop, Unnecessarily Adversarial Narrative Voice.
>x shelves
It’s just a bookshelf. Mahogany or something.On the bookshelf are a snowglobe and a small rusty iron key.
You are so bored.
Again, we’ve been alive – well, we’ve existed – twice as long as it’s been since Christ was born; ennui is de rigueur.
>x snowglobe
Inside the snowglobe is a microscopic world that is exactly like this one in every respect, but tinier in exact proportion. Except your own worth as a human being, which is tinier out of ALL proportion. And it’s already pretty tiny in this world, the original world.So that’s kind of incredible.
This is fine, we haven’t just been a human being for a long long time.
We can’t shake the globe, but we can take it!
>x carpet
Insect corpses are strewn around. Perhaps someone was recently here, spraying a can of insecticide around. Perhaps the insects just breed and die fast enough in here, and decay slow enough, for you to see the bodies before they decay into dust. Anyway, you can see a daddy long-legs or two.You feel close to dying of boredom.
After some more faffing about:
Looking at things in this room is becoming so excruciatingly boring that almost any death would be a sweet despair from the tedium of the experience you, the player, are putting the player character through.
I gotta say, after the room we were just in, these meta fourth-wall-breaking asides feel a bit small-potatoes.
>rusty
A small, rusty iron key.You. Feel. Close. To. Dying. Of. BOREDOM.
>take it
Taken. Now get out of here!
Okay, jeez. Let’s just consult the coffee first, which confirms that we’re thankfully done here. As we do that:
I can’t say this any more clearly. If you keep standing in this room examining things, you will get bored and die of, OK not boredom but despair or something.
Well that just seems like a dare:
>x desk
On the desk are a notepad and a photo.The sense of intense despair and ennui overwhelms you. Time slows, and your heart stops beating.
Some while later, there are new bones on the floor.
*** You die of despair. ***
…I gotta say, I’m not sure I totally get the authorial strategy of “make your room explicitly announce itself as boring”, but we’ve obtained a new key so can’t complain about that.
And that’s our lot! We’ll quit and call it a day.
…except half a second after I do so, I realize that I’ve neglected to save (though thankfully I did capture the transcript or else this update would look very different!) So I need to restore the Chapter 12 save and redo all of this – and try a bunch of additional stuff at the $#%$# armoire while I’m at it, including resetting the time on the clock to all the hours of the day to see if that eventually changes things, which of course it doesn’t, damn this armoire to hell.
You are carrying:
a small rusty iron key
a pair of stone earplugs (smelling faintly of mildew)
a snowglobe
a 'Pataphysical Approaches to Quantum Superfluids
a black fountain pen
a teapot (smelling faintly of mildew)
the slithering vomit bladder of Katallakh (smelling faintly of mildew)
a Carfax gig poster
red-rimmed porcelain plates (smelling faintly of mildew)
Hyper-Gastronomy, Exactness, and String Theory: a Theoretical Subdiscipline of Cooking and Baking by Chef Wheldrake (smelling faintly of mildew)
A Culinary Overview of Superstitions in the Miskaton Valley Region by S. Jarret Zornwharf (smelling faintly of mildew)
Mama Hydra’s Deep Fried Ones (smelling faintly of mildew)
a broken silver amulet
a shard (smelling faintly of mildew)
a note from a seesaw (smelling faintly of mildew)
a newspaper clipping (“Rumors of Decapitations”) (smelling faintly of mildew)
a police report (“Francine Cragne”) (smelling faintly of mildew)
De Zeven Testamenten van de Krijsende Zeeworm (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pinch of saffron (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pinch of garlic
a pinch of turmeric (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pinch of cardamom (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pinch of cinnamon (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pinch of cardamom (smelling faintly of mildew)
a total of two grains of salt (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pinch of pepper (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pinch of snail paste (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pink-bound book
a torn notebook (smelling faintly of mildew)
a thin steel key (smelling faintly of mildew)
a brass nameplate (smelling faintly of mildew)
an Allen key (smelling faintly of mildew)
a metal flask (smelling faintly of mildew)
an old newspaper (smelling faintly of mildew)
a white key
a round white wall clock (smelling faintly of mildew)
an old paperback book (smelling faintly of mildew)
a piece of chalk (smelling faintly of mildew)
the second candle (smelling faintly of mildew)
the first candle (smelling faintly of mildew)
red-rimmed porcelain cups (smelling faintly of mildew)
The Lives of the Roman Emperors (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pewter box (smelling faintly of mildew) (open but empty)
a dull machete (smelling faintly of mildew)
a slip of paper (smelling faintly of mildew)
some rotten flowers (smelling faintly of mildew)
a copper urn (smelling faintly of mildew) (open but empty)
a silver urn (smelling faintly of mildew) (open but empty)
a bronze urn (smelling faintly of mildew) (open but empty)
a key from an urn (smelling faintly of mildew)
some mildewed leather gloves
a gallon jug of white vinegar (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pair of garden shears (smelling faintly of mildew)
a bronze key green from age (smelling faintly of mildew)
a rusty flathead screwdriver (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pair of blue cloth slippers (smelling faintly of mildew)
a trophy for a dog race (smelling faintly of mildew)
a glass shard (smelling faintly of mildew)
a black business card
an aluminum key (smelling faintly of mildew)
a clipboard (smelling faintly of mildew)
some yellowed newspapers (smelling faintly of mildew)
a shard of shattered carapace (smelling faintly of mildew)
a book list (smelling faintly of mildew)
a soggy tome (smelling faintly of mildew)
a long hooked pole (smelling faintly of mildew)
a grimy rock (smelling faintly of mildew)
Peter’s jacket (smelling faintly of mildew)
a backpack features guide (smelling faintly of mildew)
a trolley schedule (smelling faintly of mildew)
a Jansport backpack (open)
a hidden pocket (open but empty)
a key pocket (open but empty)
a book pocket (open but empty)
a side pocket (open but empty)
a trash pocket (closed)
a pamphlet of home listings (smelling faintly of mildew)
a moldy, waterlogged journal (smelling faintly of mildew)
an antique locket (smelling faintly of mildew) (closed)
a cast iron spire (smelling faintly of mildew)
a wad of cash (smelling faintly of mildew)
a repaired page (smelling faintly of mildew)
a waterproof flashlight (smelling faintly of mildew)
a tiny leather journal (smelling faintly of mildew)
a large brass key (smelling faintly of mildew)
a filthy rug (smelling faintly of mildew)
Daniel Baker’s note (smelling faintly of mildew)
the diary of Phyllis Cragne (smelling faintly of mildew)
a postcard of Big Ben (smelling faintly of mildew)
The Modern Girl’s Divination Handbook – Volume Three (smelling faintly of mildew)
a pull-string doll (smelling faintly of mildew)
a label (smelling faintly of mildew)
a giant milkweed leaf (smelling faintly of mildew)
a glass jar containing an insect (smelling faintly of mildew)
a half-full styrofoam coffee cup
a plastic bubble (open but empty)
a familiar gold wristwatch (smelling faintly of mildew)
a brass winding key (smelling faintly of mildew)
a small blue journal (which you know is a journal because it says “Mein Journal” on the front) (smelling faintly of mildew)
a bottle of Pepto-Bismol (smelling faintly of mildew)
a calfskin coat (being worn)
a trolley pass (being worn)
a gold jacket (being worn)
Ed’s coveralls (being worn)
a pair of leather boots
Map:
Main transcript:
Cragne session 13.txt (229.7 KB)
Bonus makeup transcript to actually get a save file:
Cragne session 13a.txt (67.8 KB)
Said save file:
cragne session 13 save.txt (72.3 KB)
I haven’t read the spoiler text, but hopefully it’s clear that “I hate you” thing was jokey! I was actually just thinking to myself that the game hasn’t been too hard, so it’s kind of pleasant to be knocked down a peg and have the chance to think about a puzzle while I’m not playing it for a change! And at this point (spoiler) I’m fairly sure I just need to solve some other rooms and come back later.
No worries and no offense taken!
I see Francine whichever serial killer she was copying has branched out.
There does seem to be a theme of something weird going on underwater causing all these disasters, but I don’t think it’s the original Shadow-Over-Innsmouth Deep Ones, because so many of these mention tentacles (including Carol’s vague memory of them). The actor’s fate also makes me think they reproduce less like Lovecraft’s fears of miscegenation and more like parasitic wasps, implanting their eggs in a host as a source of nourishment for when they hatch. Which is certainly much more horrifying to me than “The Shape of Water is the bad ending for humanity”.
Also, we may want to quarantine the mildewed things somewhere so they don’t infect the rest of our inventory. I’m not sure if it does something bad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a puzzle that requires having no mildew-y things around. The bladder(?) seems like an appropriate place for them.
(Moving on to the hallway…)
Now that is a fourth-wall break! You literally break open the wall to go look at the source code. That’s up there with “most unexpected things in all of Cragne Manor” for me.
I suspect “cubits” there was meant to be “qubits”, as in quantum bits. If Aster Cragne was invoking Hastur in his experiments, his time poring over ancient ritual texts might have led to a slip of the tongue (or of the typewriter as the case may be).
I also have no real proficiency with Irish, but a lot of leaning on Google and Wiktionary (and a bit of passing knowledge of the Cthulhu mythos) gives me “but what about the book of the King in Yellow?”
I’m actually really surprised that the coffee says we’re done with the study. I expected us to have to fight through whatever ghostly memories are trying to make us leave, maybe by learning more about whichever Cragne the memories originally come from.
I definitely think there are some liberties being taken, yeah, which is good, since the body-horror fleshy egg stuff is creepier while simultaneously being less real-world gross than the original “immigrants are polluting our pure Aryan stock” version.
I dunno if you’ve expanded the inventory listing lately, but that ship has well and truly sailed – there are only a few things that have escaped the curse, ironically including the pair of mildewed leather gloves. Here’s hoping that won’t cause issues down the line!
Indeed – a much smaller-scale room than some of the big set pieces ones, of course, but still super clever and memorable!
That’s got to be it – ah well, we can forgive Nitocris for making the mistake, she’d be way more familiar with the unit of measurement!
Ah, I think you’re right – I got confused with some results indicating “feadog bhui” was “golden plover”, and given the very specific history of that bird’s name with IF, it never occurred to me that the Irish word order would be flipped from the English one. The King in Yellow reference definitely holds together better with the rest of what’s in the book, but what a coincidence!
Huh, actually, did Anchorhead have strange tentacled beings beneath the sea? I remember various things happening in and around the sea, but most of the people involved were land-bound humans.
Hmm, I dimly remember a sequence where you need to row out to an atoll and there might be sea monsters there? That might only be in the remake, though, or I might be getting it confused with one of the many, many other Lovecraftian games I’ve played along the way. Anyway they’re not a major feature - despite the seaside location Dunwich Horror is I think by far the biggest influence (the old drunk is probably the major bit inspired by Shadow Over Innsmouth).
I have to say, after this play through is done I’m not sure I’ll be in the market for Lovecraftian horror for a while. Except if someone does a Mountains of Madness riff, I’m always down for polar horror.
Yeah, I’ve never been the biggest Lovecraftian-horror fan (despite having read a whole lot of Lovecraft’s works), but I am tempted to play the new-and-improved Anchorhead after this. Just for contrast, you know?
I’m not familiar a lot with Lovecraft himself, but I definitely like that kind of horror, and I know it existed before Lovecraft (like Algernon’s The Willows); the idea of some kind of slow-creeping unspeakable entity that drives you mad.
I think the update’s worth playing, and it would be an interesting contrast – I’m not sure how much of this comes through in the writeup, but use of time makes Anchorhead feel very different from Cragne Manor even though many of the tropes are the same. Of necessity, time bounces all over the place in Cragne Manor and progression is spatial, not temporal, and the pacing all depends on what individual authors wanted to do, whereas the way Anchorhead progresses day by day, with tension monotonically ratcheting up, has a very different vibe.
Yeah, definitely – there are a bunch of distinct influences on Lovecraft, and many of them are very much worth reading even if you don’t care for the man himself. Algernon Blackwood is definitely up there; I’m partial to Ambrose Bierce, who has some neat ghost stories amongst his other more famous stuff like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and the Devil’s Dictionary (he also straight-up disappeared – no one knows where or how he died!) and Lord Dunsany’s fantasies are I think more compelling than the rather turgid Dreamlands stuff they inspired in Lovecraft. There are also a couple of really great, very out-there Robert Chambers stories that weren’t an influence on Lovecraft directly, but got picked up as part of what’s become the Hastur/King in Yellow portions of the Mythos – though apparently the majority of Chambers’s work is pretty dire.
Anyway to my mind what’s distinctive about Lovecraft is the way he brings a extremist-scientific mindset to the familiar horror tropes – the stories often devolve into gribblies and/or sorcerers eating people, oh no, but when they’re effective it’s because they’re tapping into the fear of our own meaninglessness in the face of a near-infinite cosmos. Plus while his prose is often quite bad (though head and shoulders better than his poetry, ye gods), he’s actually quite good at pacing and parceling out different revelations, especially through an updated version of the epistolary story (which kind of ties into the scientific approach – he lays out the evidence, then leaves space for the hypothesis to develop).
Plus there’s the racism, of course. Can’t forget that.
I am pretty sure that’s a harmless effect someone slipped in, similar to the Vague Chill that affects library books. I can’t imagine Jenni would have let someone knowingly get away with coding any type of Zarfian-cruel game-breaking time-bomb.
We all kind of understood we didn’t want to inadvertently sabotage the player, and had very understandable item quality-control and quarantining protocols.
Has anyone ever tried XYZZYing in every Cragne Manor room? Or do we just not do those kinds of things in Backwater parts?
I don’t know if I’m misremembering or making this up in my head, but didn’t one logo for Anchorhead show a comet with tentacles among the fiery trail? That might have just been some art I saw that fell into my “generic Lovecraftian imagery” head-basket.
Consider also: The King of Shreds and Patches - Details If I remember correctly plays a straighter and more period-legit detective version of Lovecraftian secret societies and “certain texts can reprogram or break your mind”.
Dunno if you’ve been keeping up with recent updates, but it turns out the vague chill isn’t actually a harmless, atmosphere-only effect! I’m actually pretty excited to see where that goes.
You know, I kind of have a weird thing about XYZZY – I am generally in favor of in-jokes, but for whatever reason have always resisted that one – but I should probably get over myself and do a cruise through for it as a bonus update.
Oooh, I like that – the woodcut effect is lovely and very Colonial Gothic.
Oh I love King of Shreds and Patches – the Hastur stuff is my favorite part of the Mythos, and I independently have always been interested in John Dee (well not always, but like the last twenty years – this is a coincidence that will only be meaningful to like two people, but my brain keeps threatening to make something of the fact that Dee’s manor in Mortlake was only a stone’s throw away from where Thomas Cromwell resided at the height of his power some twenty years earlier). Actually I wouldn’t mind a replay of that one of these days…
Chapter the Fourteenth: The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Calamari
Having survived tea with a LARPer, Backwater’s most comprehensive fourth-wall breaking, low self esteem, and an aneurysm-inducing armoire, we rejoin Nitocris as she’s about to complete her exploration of the publicly-accessible portions of Cragne Manor’s second floor. We go east from the southern hallway, and:
Library (Mike Spivey)
This library features dark paneling, polished hardwood floors, and thousands of books. A mahogany desk sits against the one part of the walls not lined with books. Above the desk hangs an ominous-looking painting. An antique wingback chair provides a place for quiet study, while in the center of the room is a reading podium. The only exit is west, back to the hallway.A massive tome sits on the podium.
Hey, it’s Mike Spivey’s room! (tagging him in: @Spike) He’s best known, I think, for his pair of math-themed games, Junior Arithmancer and a Beauty Cold and Austere. Er, I’m a little intimidated now, though – I’m not going to need to know like set theory to solve this room, am I?
>x me
You have a surprisingly strong urge to read something.
As the Brits say: rumbled.
>x desk
This tasteful mahogany desk complements the library nicely. It appears to be locked.
I feel like I should have been keeping a locked-desk count as I’ve been playing – we’ve sort of lost track of the drinking game proposed in earlier instalments of this thread, but that’d be a good one to include.
>x painting
The painting depicts a night scene: a headless man on a rearing black horse, holding a grinning jack-o-lantern under his arm. It appears to be only loosely hanging on the wall.
Sticking with the literary theme, that’s a traditional depiction of Washington Irving’s headless horseman, from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (fun fact which was lost on me when I first read this story as a kid – the ghost is that of a dead Hessian mercenary, one of the German soldiers paid to fill out the British armies during the American revolution, which means there’s a deeper vein of community trauma the haunting is tapping into).
Anyway we’ve been in enough adventure games to know the drill:
>take it
You’re carrying too many things already.
Horrors! Is that… is that an inventory limit we see before us?
We drop a bunch of stuff, then:
>take painting
You take the painting down. Behind it is a safe.
Quelle surprise. I run back to the hallway, ditch the painting, and grab all my stuff back.
>x safe
This small safe is embedded in the wall. It looks like one of those safes where you have to turn the dial to three numbers in succession in order to open the safe. The dial can be set to any number from 1 to 60; it is currently set to 60. The safe is closed.
So probably a library book or info on an Alderman is behind that safe, and we just need to find the combo. The tome is the obvious place to start, but Nitocris didn’t get where she is by being predictable:
>x chair
This elegant chair looks more decorative than functional.>look under chair
You find nothing under the wingback chair.>take it
That’s hardly portable.>sit on chair
You get onto the wingback chair.>feel it
You feel nothing unexpected.
…of course, “where she is” is looking for a missing husband in the creepy middle of nowhere, so perhaps she could stand to be more self-reflective about her choices.
>x books
There are thousands of books here. Most of them are thick, cracked, leather-bound volumes with titles lettered in raised gold leaf. Oddly, though, one section contains several cheap paperbacks.>read books
There are so many books here, you wouldn’t know where to start.
This is very heaven, but I suppose we need to narrow it down:
>x cheap
The paperbacks are all recent science fiction novels. They appear to be part of a series set in the Star Wars universe and are named after locations from that universe: Alderaan, Cloud City, Coruscant, Dagobah, Endor, Hoth, Tatooine 1: Anchorhead, and Tatooine 2: Mos Eisley.
Ha, well played! In a previous life, I was enough of a Star Wars nerd to know that Anchorhead is mentioned a couple of times as another city on Tatooine, and thought the coincidence was funny.
That’s clearly where the action is, but let’s start with one of the others:
>read alderaan
You take Alderaan from the shelf and skim through it. It’s painfully derivative, with poor pacing, and full of annoying characters and cringe-worthy dialogue. With a shudder, you put it back on the bookshelf.Supposedly, though, George Lucas is working on a new Star Wars trilogy that tells the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. You can hardly wait. With Lucas directing, it’s sure to be fantastic!
Ouch. Even 25 years on, that stings.
We get the same response if we check out all the others (though READ BESPIN isn’t a synonym for READ CLOUD CITY – lose a nerd point, Spivey). Finally:
>read anchorhead
(the old paperback book (smelling faintly of mildew))
Someone has hollowed out the pages of this book to make a hiding place for something. Whatever it was, it’s long gone now.
Oops, that’s right, this was the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure one we got from the sewers.
>read tatooine 1
(first taking Tatooine 1: Anchorhead)
You take Tatooine 1: Anchorhead from the bookshelves.You skim some of Tatooine 1: Anchorhead. Unlike Tatooine 2: Mos Eisley, it actually looks pretty good! It has atmosphere, interesting characters, and a compelling story. Definitely worth a read when you have more time.
As you flip through the pages, a small key falls to the floor. It must have been hidden in the book.
…wait, this game has two different books called Anchorhead, and they’ve both been hollowed-out to hold something? Now that is a coincidence.
That key’s gotta be for the desk, right?
>x small key
It probably unlocks the mahogany desk.
Cutting right to the chase:
>unlock desk with small desk key
(first taking the small desk key)
You unlock the mahogany desk.>open drawer
You open the mahogany desk, revealing a scrap of paper.>x scrap
On the scrap of paper is the following:ABRD
585-3-77
It’s in Peter’s handwriting.
Ahem – I was told there’d be no math.
Seriously, I went back and checked the content warning – nope, no math mentioned.
This looks like a combination, but the dial only goes up to 60 so this only gets us so far.
All that’s left to poke at is the tome. After some disambiguation follies we determine what it’s called:
>x random digits
This massive tome is a copy of A Billion Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, by the Rand Corporation.You could read the tome (READ TOME), read a back blurb (READ BACK BLURB), or study a specific page number in the tome (STUDY PAGE 17, for example).
Ah, this seems pretty straightforward, but let’s check out the blurb first to see if this is worth our time:
>read back blurb
All of the back blurbs are for a previous edition of the book, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. They appear to be taken from some new world wide web site named, oddly enough, after a river in Brazil. You pick one of the blurbs at random and read it.Better in the original…
If you like this book, I highly recommend that you read it in the original binary. As with most translations, conversion from binary to decimal frequently causes a loss of information and, unfortunately, it’s the most significant digits that are lost in the conversion.
There are a lot of these if we keep reading the back:
Wait for it…
I don’t want to spoil anything but you will LOVE the twist ending!
Shocked and appalled
Those Deviates were in no way normal. This is a shocking display of what our country as a whole has come to. When I was a kid, all of our Deviates were STANDARD.
I know enough math to laugh at that joke.
A MILLION??
“A Million Random Digits”? HA!
They only used 10, and just kept repeating them in different combinations!
Don’t be fooled!
A fair critique!
Compendium?
For those of us without a two week vacation to devote to this tome, I would like to see a Cliff’s Notes version. Maybe 10,000 random numbers?
Save your time and watch the movie.
Book is okay. Seriously, I would recommend that you just see the movie. It was remarkably true to the book and I thought George Clooney’s performance as the string of digits on page 34 brought something to the story that you just can’t get from the written version.
Predictable
It seemed like about 10% of the time I was able to predict which number was next. It was still better than Life of Pi which, aside from being irrational, included no estimations of Pi at all.
Random? It lists almost 600 integers in numerical order!
I was duped by the title of this book. It is supposed to be about random digits. And at first glance you do see randomness.
But after reading the book a while I started seeing a pattern. I did extensive research to prove my theory. After hours of mathematical modeling I conclusively proved that there is a set of numbers in this book that is not only a pattern, but is outright sequential!
The top corner of each page (left corner on the left side pages, right corner of the right side pages) was a list of sequential numbers from 1 to 628, all in a row. No numbers are skipped. Even the prime numbers are included! At first you don’t notice this because there is only 1 number on each page. But as you advance through the book you notice that the numbers keep advancing by 1 every time you turn the page.
Well that’s just awful!
Not as random as the first edition
This is the second edition of the book. The first edition didn’t sell well because all of the randomly chosen numbers turned out to be exactly the same. The authors argued that a true random number generator could indeed generate a million identical numbers, and the fact that the authors would try to publish something that seemed so un-random proved their intellectual integrity and hence the randomness of their identical numbers. Still, the public rejected the first edition proving that consumers of random numbers are far more interested in the appearance of randomness than in actual randomness. As a consequence, for this second edition the authors carefully selected numbers that readers would be sure to perceive as random. So sadly this book represents yet another example of how striving for marketplace success corrupts the intellectual integrity of authors.
Funny story, I’ve had two different professors riff on this – one a math prof making a similar point about peoples’ intuition about random digits being different from what true randomness looks like as part of a lecture on probability; more interestingly, the second was a tax law prof explaining what auditors look for when trying to figure out if the books have been cooked (because the made-up numbers invented by fraudsters don’t have the amount of repeated digits you’d expect from truly random numbers).
A must read! The author carries you through the tapestry of her soul.
What an amazing book. Stories of love, joy, and pain. This beautiful book gives insight to a life lived, mistakes made, forgiveness, and ultimately love. Love to and for others who are weaving the tapestry of the author’s life. Most importantly, love and forgiveness for herself.
Wait for the audiobook version
While the printed version is good, I recommend waiting for the CD version featuring narration by William Shatner.
I’d hold out for the Christopher Walken version.
Not Really Random
I bought two copies of this book. I find that the first copy perfectly predicts what the numbers will be in the second copy. I feel cheated.
Sloppy
They sure don’t come up with random numbers like they used to. If you look closely, you will note that every tenth digit or so is just a repeat of the last digit and every hundredth or so is a just the same digit repeated three times. How sloppy!
Also, if you stare at it long enough, you can decode something around page 300 about Jodie Foster and J.D. Salinger giving me some sort of instructions. I’m going to stay up another couple nights staring at this to see if I can make out anything further.
I’m sure that ended well.
almost perfect
Such a terrific reference work! But with so many wonderful random digits, it’s a shame they didn’t sort them, to make it easier to find the one you’re looking for.
What a bargain!
Did Rand’s marketing department make a mistake? If you buy this book, you’ll get one million random digits for the ridiculously low price of $64.74. That means each digit only costs 0.00006474 cents, and they throw in the deviates for free!
And that appears to be our lot! Pretty good joke hit-rate there, I’d say.
Before we try to solve the puzzle, let’s see what the book is like:
>read random digits
This massive tome is a copy of A Billion Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, by the Rand Corporation.You begin to read the digits: 10097 32533 76520 13586…
It’s slow going at first. There’s something hypnotic, though, about a continuing but irregular sequence that uses the same few symbols over and over. You read on and on.
Soon the digits are whispering to you, hinting at dark mysteries and forbidden secrets.
Do you wish to continue reading the tome?
>y
You continue reading, page after page after page. The numbers swirl in your mind, producing visions that lurk just beyond your understanding. Slowly, though, you begin to realize that these “random” digits encode the deepest knowledge of the universe: life and love, good and evil, death, immortality. It’s all here.Hours later, you are far from finished with the tome, but there is no need to read further. Everything makes sense now. You see. You know. You understand. You are…
*** You are insane. ***
That’s pretty much how I felt after having to learn epsilon-delta proofs, so this all checks out.
Let’s back up and see if we can read that twist ending:
Oh right, that review said the last page was 628:
>study page 628
You carefully study page 628 of A Billion Random Digits. In the middle of the page you notice a pair of digits circled together: 29.
Huh, was the review wrong and that’s not the last page?
>study page 629
You carefully study page 629 of A Billion Random Digits. In the middle of the page you notice a pair of digits circled together: 60.>study page 999
You carefully study page 999 of A Billion Random Digits. In the middle of the page you notice a pair of digits circled together: 10.
Wait, how many pages are there?
>study page 999999
There aren’t that many pages in A Billion Random Digits.
Whew, but now I’m curious. After a lot of trial and error, we find the end:
>study page 628001
There aren’t that many pages in A Billion Random Digits.>study page 628000
You carefully study page 628000 of A Billion Random Digits. In the middle of the page you notice a pair of digits circled together: 41.
Oh right, the review was for a million random digits, this is a billion (how thin are these pages???)
Er, this is probably enough screwing around. That scrap said:
ABRD
585-3-77
ABRD = A Billion Random Digits, so:
>study 585
You carefully study page 585 of A Billion Random Digits. In the middle of the page you notice a pair of digits circled together: 16.>study 3
You carefully study page 3 of A Billion Random Digits. In the middle of the page you notice a pair of digits circled together: 34.>study 77
You carefully study page 77 of A Billion Random Digits. In the middle of the page you notice a pair of digits circled together: 48.>turn safe to 16
You set the dial to 16.>turn safe to 34
You set the dial to 34.>turn safe to 48
You set the dial to 48, and the small safe gives a loud “CLICK.”
Now I definitely want my money back too, all three of those numbers were even, how could that be random?
>open safe
You open the small safe, revealing Legends of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley.>x legends
The front cover of this book features a stylized spike underneath the title, Legends of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley. A sticker on the spine bears the insignia of the Backwater Public Library.
That spike being a little calling card for the author, I assume!
>take legends
Taken.>read it
Legends of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley is a collection of stories of the supernatural associated with Vermont and eastern New York. The headless horseman in Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow makes an appearance, and there’s an entire chapter on Champ, a sea monster living in Lake Champlain. Spectral manifestations at Fort Ticonderoga, including balls of light, strange mist, and ghost sightings, have their own chapter as well. Perhaps the most amusing bit is the reincarnation of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen as a phantom stallion who races through the streets of Burlington at night.According to the table of contents, the book does contain several pages on paranormal activity in Backwater, with special emphasis on an “eldritch horror” spotted in and near Cragne Manor. Unfortunately, these pages have been torn out.
I believe Champ is a real (“real”) thing, and though I haven’t heard that tradition about Ethan Allen, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a superstition that’s out there too.
Note that the insignia hasn’t been iced-over with frost since our friendly ghost absconded – we should try to track him down before returning this book.
The coffee confirms we’re good – and also, it turns out the coffee’s gotten mildewy just like most of our other possessions, so it’s even more disgusting now – so we head out:
>w
Hallway South (Matt Schneider)
You can see an ominous-looking painting here.>take painting
Taken.
Ha, I wondered if the inventory limit only applied when first grabbing the painting! You better believe we’re taking this with.
(To be continued Tuesday – sorry for the delay but I figured better to get this bit up than hold it for the remainder of the update!)
The Amazon reviews for A Million Random Digits are truly wonderful. When it was described as a “tome” I wondered if it was going to have the same effect as the one in Anchorhead (but predicting that didn’t make it any less satisfying).
…hm, is that a spoiler? I feel like it doesn’t really spoil anything about the game.
