Chapter the Fifteenth: I Need a Drink
When we left off, Nitocris was about to leave the Manor to solve some puzzles back in town, but got sucked into the surprisingly-large (and surprisingly homage-y) basement instead. This time we – are still going to mostly be in the basement.
(Incidentally, I think I’ve said before that I grew up in the northeast but have lived in California for 20-odd years, and you know one thing I miss? Basements. We have garages instead, and they’re strictly worse).
We were in the pantry, and there was an unexplored exit there, so let’s pop our head in to see if there’s much to do:
>e
Workroom (Andrew Plotkin)
(First-time visitors should type ABOUT!)
You have entered a circular chamber, walled in the same decaying brickwork which runs all through the manor’s basement. The only exit is west.
This might once have been a private altar room or chapel. Now it seems to have been repurposed as a ritual workroom. Oddly-angled runes are carved around the perimeter of the floor.
A majestic filing cabinet stands in one corner, stuffed to overflowing with antique journals. Next to it is a full-length, badly fogged mirror.
A large disk, half black and half white, is mounted on the south wall.
Oh man, we found the @zarf room! This is exciting – among the many, many games of his that I’ve really enjoyed, Hadean Lands is probably my favorite bit of puzzle-y IF. And given the flag to check the custom ABOUT text, it seems like we’re in for something substantial. But first:
>x me
You are hassled, frazzled, and extremely tired of being in this claustrophobic basement.
No way, I’m bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!
>about
This room is a standalone puzzle. It does not require objects or clues from elsewhere in the game. Some special commands that work here:
CONSULT CABINET ABOUT ITEM: Search the filing cabinet.
LOOK UP ITEM, READ ABOUT ITEM: Shortcuts for the above.
RECALL ITEM: Recall information about a specific item.
RECALL: Show a list of all the information and magic you have learned.
Huh, the RECALL stuff is actually sort of Hadean Lands-y, and sounds like we will be doing some magic.
>recall
You have learned no magic… yet.
Yay, we’re learning magic!
Let’s check out the decor:
>x mirror
The mirror is mounted in a rather crude frame of wrought iron. The glass is in poor condition, pitted and fogged.
What’s this? When you touch the frame, something comes loose from behind it and flutters to the floor. It seems to be some kind of delivery note.
Huh, we’ll come back to that.
>x disk
Upon closer examination, the circle is actually a sphere – or a hemisphere, anyway, mounted high on one wall. The sphere itself is painted white, but an array of jointed black bands covers one side, leaving it half-and-half.
A wooden ring is mounted at the bottom edge of the sphere. It looks movable; you could push or pull it.
>push ring
(the lunar sphere)
You push the ring to the left. The black bands which cover half the sphere extend, leaving the surface mostly black, with just one white edge.
Aha! This must be a representation of the moon, now in the crescent phase. Very clever.
Intriguing. We can shift it to any phase of the moon: from new to full, with crescent, half, and gibbous in between.
(I love the word “gibbous”, including the fact that it’s cognate with “gibbet”).
>x cabinet
The cabinet is a genuine brass-bound mahogany antique. It must once have graced the office of some elegant insurance company. Now it is stained with damp and decay. Drawers sprawl open, spilling journals and papers in disorderly array.
>open it
You’ll have to search for something specific in this mess.
>look up cragne
The cabinet contains occult research, you slowly realize. The notes of your ancestors, untold generations’ worth, collected by the heroic effort of whoever set up this place. The latest dates you can find are from the 1920s; the earliest are lost in unfamiliar languages and rotting ink. Sadly, the meticulous zeal of the collector was matched only by his (her?) blithering disregard for organization.
(looking that up in the file cabinet)
There are any number of Cragnes, Cranes, Krahnes, Crakhnes, and so on in the mess. You’ll need to search for a more specific name.
…we must be still nursing a psychic hangover from the cold room. We’re not a Cragne by blood, for god’s sake! Stop making Nitocris’s pure love for Peter into a weird Luke and Leia thing!
>look up peter
The journals only date to the 1920s, so Peter is not mentioned.
>look up me
The journals only date to the 1920s, so you are not mentioned.
I’m 4,000 years old, come on!
(We don’t find mention of any of the other Cragnes we’ve met so far, of course)
We try to grab the note, but we’re once again running into the inventory limit, so duck back to the pantry to stash our stuff before heading back into the work room to read it:
“Delivery: for Anax Cragne – one mirror, iron frame – shipped from St Croix via Boston – May of 1919.” Then in smaller letters on the back: “The item has been delivered as it was deposited. The condition of the glass is none of our doing. Warranted by the hand of: Ladoro Feraud.”
Hmm, that seems like a distinctive name:
>look up ladoro
You scavenge through the disorderly pile, and are rewarded with success!
Ladoro Feraud was a student of the arcane arts whom Anax Cragne met in the South Seas. The one journal you find in his handwriting is terse, but mentions something about a Word of Enlightenment, which can be used in rituals to seek wisdom and discern truth.
Anax’s marginal notes spell out the word: KHION. You wrap your tongue around the harsh phonemes until you feel sure of them.
Words used in rituals, huh?
>look up anax
You root through the mass of papers, and are rewarded with success!
Anax Cragne seems to have been a late dabbler in magic. Many of the journals in the filing cabinet have his signature inside the flyleaf, or his crabbed annotations in the margin, or both.
His great triumph, you gather, was the discovery of the ritual bound – the runes which surround this room – and the words of Sealing and Unsealing which empower them. By speaking the Sealing Word IA, you alter this space so that magic becomes a possibility, rather than a fanciful dream. Even more importantly, the Unsealing Word ZOK ends the ritual, banishing all otherwordly influences.
IA and ZOK. You study the syllables – Anax was a stickler for pronounciation – and turn the words over on your tongue. Yes. You can say these.
A Sealing Word? How come nobody told me there was a mini-Hadean Lands in Cragne Manor? Okay, there are differences, but it seems like the main method of progression is going to be reciting various magical words in order to perform rituals to find new documents to inform us about new rituals, which is pretty much the Hadean Lands gameplay loop. Oh, and for those who’ve played HL, maybe that phase-changeable moon is like allowing us to set a planetary influence?
This is enough to get us started:
>say ia
You speak the Word of Sealing. It echoes through the room, louder than you intended.
A faint grey light flickers within the runes, starting at your feet and then running around the perimeter of the room. Color seems to leach from the air as the glow brightens. Silence replaces it, filling the room… waiting for you to continue.
Yeah, this is behaving as the standard “start ritual” signal.
>say khion
You intone the Word of Enlightenment. The world takes on a peculiar, hollow clarity. Every brick is edged with infinite precision; every crack wants to show you its secrets.
Something about the filing cabinet draws your attention.
>x cabinet
The cabinet is a genuine brass-bound mahogany antique. It must once have graced the office of some elegant insurance company. Now it is stained with damp and decay. Drawers sprawl open, spilling journals and papers in disorderly array.
You have located two interesting items:
Anax Cragne
Ladoro Feraud
Your eyes are drawn to the back of the cabinet. Is that a bit of paper poking out from behind one of the drawers? You can’t reach it, but you can just make out the name “Francois Crane” on the paper’s edge.
>say zok
You speak the Word of Unsealing. The runes flare with grey light and then fade. The sense of pressing silence fades with them, leaving the room feeling dim and mundane once again.
Easy-peasy!
>look up francois
You search through the mess of journals, and are rewarded!
Francois Crane spent his life searching for the Gates of Slumber, which lead to the Dreamlands. “Seek the Temple of the Flame, and beneath a Blood Moon speak the Unnameable Name…” (Francois certainly did like capital letters.) He died in 1835 without ever reaching his goal. In his search, however, he uncovered the Word of Winter: IRNATH, which speaks of cold, clarity, precision, sterility, and focus.
You memorize the word. It sits in your mind like an icy prism.
Well that’s a lot of information we don’t have any context for yet, but we know what to do with a new incantation!
>speak ia
…
>speak irnath
You chant the Word of Winter. A chill comes into the atmosphere, like an icy breeze that does not stir the air.
The fogged mirror slowly turns as clear as ice.
>x mirror
The glass does not reflect you, or the room. You are peering into an infinite starless depth. Somewhere in the distance, shadows might outline the shape of a face, peering back… or not? You cannot make it out clearly.
Hmm, that’s not too helpful! Fortunately, our only other incantation helps us perceive more keenly, so this isn’t too hard to figure out:
>speak khion
…
>x mirror
The glass does not reflect you, or the room. You are peering into an infinite starless depth. Far in the distance, a face forms… an epicene face, wrinkled and shriveled; but its dark eyes blaze with fierce gnosis.
The eyes lock with yours.
“You dare!” The words burn in your brain, although there is no whisper of sound. “I achieved this plane in order to study the secrets of cosmic order, not to be disturbed by blundering novices from…” (the eyes squint) “…Vermont!? No! I forbid you. Let your scrying glass be sealed, in the name of Gretel Aschar!”
The face is whipped from your sight, leaving the glass clear and empty.
She seems nice.
(“Epicene” means androgynous, “gnosis” is knowledge, both from the Greek).
We ZOK on out of the ritual and look up Gretel (in fact we need to do it in this order – during a ritual we’re so concentrated on the magic we can’t go paging through the cabinet).
Gretel Aschar was a Viennese witch, or seeress, who lived in the late 1700s. She was skilled in dreaming projection, but aspired to penetrate the illusion of Dream into the deeper truth beneath. She vanished in 1795 – whether due to death or success, no one knows.
The next page in the journal has nothing to do with Gretel. It describes the Word of Invocation: ULNUR, which brings forth voices from outside the world. A footnote adds, “Combine with Morovor’s Word of Summer?” But there is no indication of what that might be.
You memorize the Word of Invocation, anyhow.
Hmm, more about the Dreamlands, though this word seems more about calling things into this world rather than letting us journey outward.
We’ve started to get enough info that I try out the RECALL command:
>recall
You have learned the following incantations:
IA, the Word of Sealing
ZOK, the Word of Unsealing
KHION, the Word of Enlightenment
IRNATH, the Word of Winter
ULNUR, the Word of Invocation
You have researched the following names: Anax Cragne, Ladoro Feraud, Francois Crane and Gretel Aschar.
You have come across one additional name, not yet researched: Morovor Krahne.
This gives me pause for a minute, then I realize that that reference to “Morovor’s Word of Summer” can be looked up directly:
Morovor Krahne (1752-1801) was a distant cousin of the family who studied astronomy. Or perhaps astrology, as his notes have nothing but contempt for the “modern” science of telescopes and Newton. He was obsessed with the relationship between the stars, the seasons, and the cycles of history. Ultimately he destroyed his health dragging menhirs around a Scottish moor, attempting to construct an astronomical stone circle which could predict, or invoke, the End of Days.
Almost incidentally he perfected the modern forms of the Seasonal Names. Of the four, only one survives in this fragmentary journal: MALETH, the Word of Summer, which bespeaks heat, haze, fertility, verdancy, and riot.
You memorize the word. It sits in your mind like a roiling thundercloud.
Poor Morovor – even if you can’t get the traditional magically-strong Frenchman, you should at least use a wheelbarrow when hauling around menhirs.
(I fear that’s a dated reference, but there are only so many ways to riff off of menhirs. Actually, that reminds me that I do have one menhir-related anecdote. I went to a boarding high school, and we had intermittent dorm meetings where our dorm head, a reasonably-intimidating wrestling coach as well as a teacher of Russian, would make various announcements and tell us to knock off various kinds of mischief. One time early in my freshman year, said dorm head started paging through the giant dictionary that was for some reason in our common room, to kill some time before the meeting was scheduled to begin. “Boys, the beauty of the English language is that on every page in this dictionary, there’ll be a word that none of us know what it means,” he said (or something to that effect). He peered down: “here’s one: menhir. Nobody knows what that means!”)
(“They’re standing stones, especially in the north of France,” piped up pipsqueak me from the side of the room. I felt like a stone-cold badass, and this felt like revealing I knew this because of a comic book would ruin the moment).
Er, right, with that we’ve hacked together enough for another ritual!
>ia
…
>speak maleth
You chant the Word of Summer. A thick warmth creeps into the air around you. Sweat breaks on your skin.
>speak ulnur
You incant the Word of Invocation. The silence around you takes on an attentive quality; something besides you is listening.
You feel something invisible crawling across your body, and the gaze of a green presence. It studies you, and everything around you, with dispassion; what to nurture, what to prune.
A faint but piercing-sweet scent drifts past you. It seems to emanate from the direction of the filing cabinet.
>smell
An intense orchid scent drifts from the filing cabinet.
The tiniest green shoot has crawled up the side of the cabinet. Its tip blooms into a minute, perfect orchid, which breathes its scent out into the room. The bloom curls over the edge of a journal which bears the name “Margreth Cragne”.
We’re getting in the zone now:
>look up margreth
You root through the disorderly pile, and are rewarded!
Margreth Cragne studied visionary meditation in this very basement in the late 1880s. She wrote of the art of scrying a spirit who does not want to be observed. “Bring forth an ice-covered mirror under the full moon. Speak the Word of Enlightenment; then polish the glass with your hand. Then wait until the moon is new and allow the ice to melt. Your will shall penetrate the glass and reveal that which you seek.”
Here we go, now we’ve got a ritual that involves the sphere. It’s already set to full moon, so let’s get started:
>ia
…
>irnath
You chant the Word of Winter. A chill comes into the atmosphere, like an icy breeze that does not stir the air.
The fogged mirror slowly turns as clear as ice.
Hmm, that’s not really “frost-covered” but maybe it’s close enough? I don’t see how we can make it any colder.
>>speak khion
…
>polish mirror
The glass is so cold that it burns your skin.
The moon doesn’t change phase on its own, of course, so rather than wait, we take a more active hand and push four times:
…
>push moon
(the lunar sphere)
You push the ring. The black bands extend, completely covering the lunar sphere; it now shows a new moon.
Just need to melt the ice – er, well there isn’t ice, but just warming up the room will maybe work?
>speak maleth
You chant the Word of Summer. The icy chill fades from the air.
Fog roils behind the mirror glass. It spreads, leaving the mirror clouded, as it was when you first arrived.
>x mirror
You peer into the mirror. Its clouding now appears vastly more intricate – a fractal web of microfractures spread across the surface of the glass. Sadly, it is as opaque as ever.
That seems singularly unhelpful. Did we jump the gun? I go back and try the ritual again, this time adding a dozen or so Z’s after polishing the mirror to see if the moon does shift over time, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
We don’t have a clear line of investigation in front of us, so we do what all good wizards do: screw around with powers far beyond our ken! Somewhere in the course of chanting and pushing the moon around at random, we hit on the combination of speaking ULNUR (the invocation word) while the moon is new and IRNATH is exerting a wintry influence (I think we have KHION running too):
>speak ulnur
You incant the Word of Invocation. The silence around you takes on an attentive quality; something besides you is listening.
A painful prickling runs along your skin. You sense a chill presence in the air, something looking towards you from far away. Its attention is a faded intimation of those undiscovered realms that await the soul beyond this world. Even so, its gaze burns.
If you look more closely at the spirit, you might learn more.
>x spirit
You cannot see the spirit, but you attempt to capture its focus with your gaze.
You are struck by a hideous pain behind your eyes. It mutes, after a moment, to pressure and an icy chill.
There is sentience in the focus, an awareness that nearly overwhelms you. Somewhere something is shrieking; the not-sound scrapes along the thin edge of reality. But you can make out its intent. A name: Kteh Nyare.
Yay, we’re unstuck!
>look up kteh
You scavenge through the mass of papers, and are rewarded!
Kteh Nyare was a scribe, or priest, or tutelary god – stories disagree – in the legendary Lost Dynasty of Egypt. The rulers in this period sojourned deep into forbidden arts, raising the Old Kingdom to unrivaled sovereignty. When they fell, their ruin was so terrible that their names and deeds have been entirely erased from history.
It was Kteh Nyare who first committed arcane Names to papyrus for study. Modern occultists use newer alphabets, but Kteh Nyare’s hieroglyphics were an exacting and precise system of writing.
You study the description of the hieroglyphics. They clarify your understanding of the Words you have learned. By speaking with greater precision, you realize, you can amplify most of those Words – repeating the Word to intensify its effect.
Er, yes, those terrible Lost Dynasty Pharaohs, who delved deep into forbidden arts – darn them, they were so smart, and good looking, and…
All right, maybe we should have been paying closer attention that one time Kteh Nyare burst into our tomb bubbling over with his discovery, but honestly, Nitocris had so many staff, and given the generally-low aggregate level of sanity they could get overenthusiastic upon finding a new bit of lint in their belly button, it was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. But yes, this doubling-up of seasonal influences is ringing a bell, and is probably how we get a frost-covered mirror.
We get the moon back to full, say IA to start the process, do a first IRNATH, then:
>g
You chant the Word of Winter. The chill deepens to a numbing, aching wave of cold.
A coarse layer of frost grows over the surface of the mirror, leaving it opaque.
Boom!
>polish mirror
The glass is so cold that it burns your skin.
Oh wait, we jumped the gun. We undo, since we need to say KHION first, then do the polishing:
>polish mirror
You place your hand against the frosted glass. The cold burns through skin and nerve, but slowly, a pearly glow begins to shine through the ice. When you pull your hand away, the glow remains.
Ah, even better. Aftter that it’s just some quick shifting of the moon to make it new, then:
>speak maleth
You chant the Word of Summer. The stabbing cold around you lessens.
The frost sublimes from the surface of the mirror, leaving it clear as ice and filled with a pearly glow.
Great! The ritual says our will can penetrate the glass – does that mean we’ll be able to pin down the grumpy Gretel we found in it before, when we invoked the word of invocation?
>speak ulnur
You incant the Word of Invocation. The silence around you takes on an attentive quality; something besides you is listening.
With a startling crack, the mirror-glass splinters! A wave of agonizing cold rolls through the room. The fractured glass blazes with a pearly brilliance which strikes through your body.
You try to pull away, but your muscles do not respond. You feel ice crystals growing in your flesh, and then you can feel nothing.
*** You have shattered ***
No wait, we found Kteh with ULNUR, Gretel was just waiting in the glass:
>x mirror
You peer into the glass…
You see a shifting field of geometry, all illuminated by pearly light. Within it, Gretel Aschar’s decrepit face slowly comes back into focus. Her wrinkles twist into a scowl of utter disgust.
“Fine. Fine. You seek the way to the Gates of Slumber? Find the writings of my student Ersebet. A fool, she was, but she knew more than a little of the ways of Dream.” A glare of unutterable contempt. “And she knew, for a wonder, how to leave an old woman alone.”
The geometric light seems to turn inside out, and the face is once again gone from your sight.
Great! We ZOK, then:
>look up ersebet
You root through the disorderly pile, and are rewarded!
Ersebet Cranyi was, as the old woman said, a student in the Viennese cultic circle at the end of the 1700s. After the group schismed in 1795, Ersebet travelled to America and attempted to barter visionary secrets with the indigenous shamans of the New World. They, by all accounts, wanted nothing to do with her, and she spent her remaining days poring over fragmentary manuscripts in a Boston garret.
Her one creditable discovery was the Trance Word, VULLE, which allows the ritualist to project his or her awareness into a visionary realm. This is not the true Dreamlands, but a space within the practitioner’s own mind, shaped by the symbology of their perceptions. The visionary state is thus merely a foundation from which greater rituals may be enacted.
Ah, OK, this seems like it’s getting us closer – we’re kind of exploring at random but there was some kind of reference to the Dreamlands earlier, so that’s probably our goal? VULLE won’t get us all the way there, but definitely progress.
(Continued hopefully later tonight!)
