The winner of the poll, with 38% of the vote, is B3: a silver USAF-marked plane. So let’s see where and when this will take us next!
Chapter Ten - The Ghost of the B-29
Crawlway
A tiny tube in a great metal machine, cold and oily, shaking. It turns northeast and southwest (though nothing like as wildly as your stomach).You detect an acrid smell of smoke in the air.
From the looks of it, we’re in a crawlway in a B-29 bomber, at midnight, in 1954. I’m not sure if the midnight is relevant or if it’s just a convenient time to start the scene at. But I suspect this smell of smoke is a bad sign.
> smell
Acrid, ominous.
We also have a nice zeugma here: that’s when a word is used in two contexts at once, with a different meaning in each context. For example, “he took his umbrella and his leave” (with two different meanings of “take”) or “she was in high spirits and a black dress” (with two different meanings of “in”). Usually one of the two is an idiom, like here: “your stomach turns” is an idiomatic usage of “turn”, while “the passage turns” is literal.
This has nothing to do with the actual situation in the game. But as a classics student, I’m not going to turn down a chance to use the word “zeugma”.
Let’s see what we can access from here…
>sw
Fuselage Ring
This, according to white stencilled letters painted on one metal wall, is the Fuselage Ring. A crawlway snakes off north. Hydraulics and cables hang from the irregular walls, and cramped openings lead east and west.You detect an acrid smell of smoke in the air.
A war-time issue Geiger counter has been carelessly dropped on the deck. Not the most welcome of sights.
The heavy equipment locker’s door hangs open.
Uh oh.
>x locker
The rack where the dozen or so parachutes should be is cleaned out, and this enables you to see the cubical safe added at the rear.
I wonder why the crew took all the parachutes?
This is probably fine.
The Geiger counter is portable. The safe is also “portable”, in that it can be taken, but we drop it immediately afterward and it gets a new description when we LOOK:
There’s a (securely locked) safe stamped USAF here. Another stencilled message is vehement that it shouldn’t fall into enemy hands. Yours, perhaps.
We can’t push it between rooms, so it seems the only effect of taking it is to remove it from the locker.
>e
East Side Bomb Bays
An immense bomb bay, enough for ten thousand pounds of bombs to be dumped on the civilian population of your choice.One side-face of an enormous jet engine makes up the far wall.
I do love the dry, sardonic tone that this game takes sometimes.
On the opposite side:
>w
West Side Bomb Bays
A bomb bay the size of a carpet warehouse: and empty, the hatches battened up.One side-face of an enormous jet engine makes up the far wall.
You detect an acrid smell of smoke in the air.
Some explosive, maybe a grenade, must have gone off in one awkward crevice here - a hole exposes a sparking mass of wires, crackling with electricity.
The Geiger counter wakes up to the radioactivity here!
Oh crap.
>x wires
Buried amid the wires is a control. You’d hate to have to stick your hand in, though, unless the plane was very steady.The plane shudders and chokes.
No parachute to escape with. No way to fix the wires without the plane being steadier.
Are we going to need to fly a B-29 bomber by ourselves??
>ne
Ghost Plane
The pilot cabin of a B-29 Superfortress, deserted! A frantic glance round - the hatchway below, the crawlway southwest, the navigator’s chair - gives no indication of what happened to the crew, ten men at least.
The plane is ploughing through thin cloud.
The instrument panel is packed with dials and gauges. The control column faces you, with a throttle beside it.
The ENG FIRE lamp is on.
The FUEL LOW lamp is on.The plane shudders and chokes.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
Hatchway below—maybe that will have something we can use!
>d
Nose Turret
A cramped, but at least still pressurized, glass cage projecting out of the hull of the B-29. You feel exposed, to put it mildly. The hatchway leads back up.
The plane is ploughing through patchy cloud.Taped up out of the way, a good-luck charm, is a pinup of Deanna Durbin.
The plane shudders and chokes.
A pinup? That seems like an incongruous thing to implement—maybe it’s a puzzle piece? Let’s take i—
The plane goes into a sudden, catastrophic spin, losing all purchase on the sky, plunging to earth in a sickening free-fall… The end is mercifully quick.
*** You have died ***
Dead at 12:21 am. So we have 20 moves before the plane crashes. That’s not a lot of time to work with!
Let’s restore and spend a few runs examining everything and figuring out what we have to work with.
>x pinup
Signed by Ms Durbin herself - “Kisses to all the boys out there!” And there’s a generous ration of crosses. There’s something faintly odd about the printing technique, you can’t help thinking.
Hmm. FOLD is recognized but doesn’t do anything, nor does TURN. What would an odd printing technique mean?
Up in the cockpit, we have a few instruments to work with:
The ENG FIRE lamp is on.
The FUEL LOW lamp is on.
Among the buttons and switches: AUT/P CUTENG/L CUTENG/R LOWER/U REL/B
Altitude: 25000ft Speed: 290mph
Fuel: 15% remaining Bearing: 331 degrees
Position: (2815,200)
The FUEL LOW lamp doesn’t turn on until ten moves in. Maybe if we CUTENG/L (cut the left engine, the one that blew up) we can stop the fuel from pouring out?
The status line also shows our altitude, speed, fuel, bearing, and position as long as we’re in the cockpit, which is neat but also intimidating. I have no idea how to interpret these things. Is 290mph dangerously high or dangerously low? What is this position relative to?
I have a few ideas, but I want to hear from you first. What should we do next? Does anyone happen to know how to steady an unmanned and badly damaged B-29 Superfortress before it crashes into the ground at several hundred miles per hour?
b3.sav (6.7 KB)
16.txt (13.0 KB)
For some reason, trizbort.io is not letting me export a usable image of the map. So for now, here’s a screenshot:
