Yeah, I just tried playing it online and it opens with you choosing whether you’re a man or woman and then immediately the same for Rume, but it is Rume whichever you choose. 
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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:
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Ha, this is a nice bit of serendipity! I actually got my amateur pilot’s license between undergrad and law school and am a bit of a WWII buff so this will be simple enough to — nope, none of that’s true, I have no ideas oh god we’re gonna die!
Er, ok, trying not to panic - sounds like these are autopilot, cut engine left and right, something mysterious (lower undercarriage? Like landing gear?) and release bombs. The bombs seem pretty released on the west side but I guess not the east; if the engine’s dying we might want to shed weight and not be unbalanced so dumping the ordnance could be a good idea (hopefully we don’t know how to arm the bombs first…). Then maybe cut engine, and hope autopilot can figure out how to fly straight?
(I’m assuming we can’t directly interact with the control column and throttle - if we can we might want to speed up as 290 mph seems relatively slow to me).
Hmm, wonder whether the photo got printed over a puzzle piece? Perhaps we can test whether there’s anything under the ink by trying the @rovarsson special, LICK PINUP.
(There are no animals to sketch this time out, right?)
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Hmmm…
LICK PINUP doesn’t seem like a very Nelsovian thing to do…
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According to Wikipedia, the maximum speed of a B-29 was about 350mph, and the stall speed was just over 100mph, so going 290mph doesn’t seem like it should be our most pressing problem.
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Yeah, that seems like a good plan. My current idea is to CUTENG/L as soon as possible to stop the fire (and the fuel loss), AUT/P to stabilize our flight, go down below and reach our hand into the radioactive mess of wires, pull the safe out of the locker, drop it with REL/B, then LOWER/U to hopefully land this thing.
Of course, White has no idea that it’s the left engine that’s on fire without losing precious time checking, but needing a bit of precognition isn’t unusual in this era. (Graham Nelson derides the practice in his own Craft of Adventure, but he also admits that he hasn’t always obeyed his own commandments.)
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This was the point of the game where I had abandoned any attempt at solving things on my own and was deep into the walkthrough. I have no clue what to do about any of this and am so glad I get to watch someone else figuring it out!
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I agree - this chapter was the hardest one as an overall chapter (rather than an individual puzzle), I think.
I’ll add, though - you’ve been getting through the other chapters impressively smoothly, so maybe you’ll do better than I did.
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Couple thoughts, yeah, cutting the left engine seems like the right move to start with, same with studying the plane and pushing that button in the back of the plane. I’m not sure if releasing bombs is going to do anything because that location seems pretty empty to me. as for what we should do afterwards, I would recommend looking for coordinates somewhere, and then figuring how to use the controls of the plane to direct it to said coordinates.
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Time to experiment!
Restoring back to b3.sav (the save file made immediately after pushing the jigsaw piece), we can start by going northeast and cutting the left engine.
>press cuteng/l
Clunk! The ENG FIRE lamp goes out.[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
And it is no longer on fire! At this point the fuel stops draining quite so quickly, I imagine since it’s no longer burning away.
Then we can put the plane in autopilot.
>press aut/p
Clunk!
Back to the bomb bay, and…
>x hole
Buried amid the wires is a control. You’d hate to have to stick your hand in, though, unless the plane was very steady.>press control
There is an odd flushing sound, as of pumps at work. Gingerly you remove your hand, grateful for the plane’s stability.[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
According to the FULL SCORE, we just did an emergency refuelling. And if we go back to the cockpit, we’re back to 90-something percent fuel. If you’re curious, this is what happens if we don’t turn on the autopilot first:
You reach into the sparking mess of wires, trying to grapple with the control… and brush your hand against a live cable as the plane lurches!
*** You have died ***
This was a well-clued puzzle, though, and I didn’t try this until after solving it.
Now, what can we do up in the cockpit?
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 patchy cloud.
The instrument panel is packed with dials and gauges. The control column faces you, with a throttle beside it.
So we’ve got a handful of buttons (autopilot, cut left engine, cut right engine, lower undercarriage, release bombs), a control stick, and a throttle.
>pull column
You feel the plane rise as you pull the column back.
So pulling it raises the nose.
>push throttle
It won’t move - the autopilot’s controlling your speed.
That makes sense.
>push aut/p
Clunk!>push throttle
You push the throttle in a notch.>push throttle
You push the throttle in a notch.
We’re now going significantly faster. Looks like PUSH THROTTLE makes us go faster. Which means PULL THROTTLE should make us go slower, right? UNDO back to our base speed, and…
>pull throttle
You pull the throttle out a notch.>pull throttle
You pull the throttle out a notch.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 ***
Yep, that does make us go slower. We also crash if we raise the nose too high. Pushing the stick, though, does something I didn’t expect.
>push stick
(the control column left)
The plane bears left.
So we not only have to worry about up and down, but also left and right! The fact that the status line gives our coordinates is suddenly seeming a lot more important.
I’ve made a new save right after stabilizing the plane. At this point our altitude is 25,000 feet, our speed is 240mph, our fuel is at 96%, our bearing is 331°, and our position is (2820, 188). We now have two very important questions.
One, where are we supposed to be going?
And two, how do you land a plane?
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I suspect finding our destination will have something to do with the pinup, and its “unusual printing technique”. Our goals here are to find one puzzle piece and zero animals, as well as solving whatever temporal crisis is happening, but the pinup doesn’t seem stiff enough to be our target.
I also suspect landing will involve going close to the ground, slowing down, and extending the undercarriage, though I have no idea how we’ll get slow enough to not crash. (I am very much not a pilot.)
While trying to figure out anything to do with the pinup, I did discover that Jigsaw has a HINT command, which tells you about features of the parser. Unfortunately, these are features like the word ALL and the ability to separate commands with periods, not what verbs will be useful.
Fortunately, though, Inform’s documentation includes a list of standard verbs. After working through that list, it seems the key is RUB:
>rub pinup
You rub away the filmy surface of the picture, to expose some kind of message!>x pinup
Beneath Ms Durbin’s picture is a message… “Soviet nuclear test detected at distance approx 2700, stay clear”.
Aha! So we have a destination, Would that be coordinates (2700, 0) then? Let’s see if we can hit that.
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Nice work!
Hmm, I’m wondering whether there are orders in the safe? Now that things aren’t quite so urgent, can we look at that more closely? Occurs to me there could be a combination hidden somewhere in the pinup, which could be what the “odd printing” is referring to…
Failing that, we can always try going to 0,0 - might be interesting in it’s own right to figure out what this weird coordinate system has as its origin!
Since we know this is a “ghost plane,” I’m wondering if it’s meant to crash so we just need to clock out (so to speak) when our work here is done.
Speaking of, is there a new bad end if we bail prematurely? We haven’t gotten any sign of Black yet, unless they’re the reason the plane is abandoned and in bad shape.
EDIT: beaten to the punch!
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Nope, I think because we still have time to fix it. The bad endings only seem to happen when we’ve run out of time in the past.
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So our X-coordinate is currently decreasing quickly and our Y-coordinate is increasing slowly. This means that a bearing of 331° is in the negative-X positive-Y quadrant. Which would be…the normal Cartesian system, rotated by 180 degrees?
We want to be negative X, negative Y, to get to (2700, 0). Which means we want to increase our bearing. Let’s see which direction does that.
It seems pushing the stick right increases our bearing. But when we go to a bearing of 26°, then X is increasing slowly, and Y is increasing quickly! So I’ve got something wrong here.
What if I push the stick left? At a bearing of 254°, X is decreasing quickly, and Y is decreasing slowly. But the process of getting to that bearing puts us well past 2700 on the X-axis. I’m not sure if it’s possible to hit (2700, 0)…maybe with a big circle?
These angles give a coordinate system like this:
Which is left-handed, so I suspect the intent is that the angles go clockwise, not counter-clockwise.
This might be obvious to someone who actually uses the term “bearing”, but I am not one of them.
So, we start out at a bearing of 331°, which is north-north-west. We need to go 120 units west and 188 units south, meaning we need to turn southward, without going too far west.
Or maybe our goal isn’t (2700, 0) but (2700, something else). Anyone see any big clues I’ve missed?
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Can the geiger counter help with the bearing by going off faster when we’re in the right direction?
Good thought, but I haven’t seen any reaction from it yet while flying around—it goes off in the West Bomb Bay but stops when you leave, which makes me think its range is pretty small.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure why it goes off in the West Bomb Bay. There’s nothing there that’s obviously radioactive…
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…OK so I wasn’t too far off with LICK PINUP!
Er, yeah – bearings are typically taken with 0 degrees being north, and angle increasing clockwise. Sorry, I could have saved you some math!
Hmm, yeah, this seems pretty speculative to me – we don’t know what the origin point is and distance 2700, as you point out, could be any position on the circle, which would presumably take some time to search (especially if we can’t play warmer-colder with the geiger counter). Really seems to me like we need to break open that safe first, though I admit to being stymied on things to try – do we know whether we’re looking for a combination or a key or what?
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Once the crisis in the plane is resolved, it seems to fly pretty well (we don’t have our fuel rapidly dropping to 0% any more), so maybe we’re meant to fly in a big circle?
I suspect not, though, because the Z-machine doesn’t have trig functions. I imagine there’s a lookup table for the limited range of bearings and speeds we can have, but I’m not sure that could accurately support “fly in a circle at a distance of 2700 from the origin”
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Unfortunately, examining it gets only “You can’t see inside, since it is closed.” The more thorough description comes from 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.
OPEN confirms it’s locked, and UNLOCK says “That doesn’t seem to be something you can unlock.” All in all, the only action that seems to get any results with it is TAKE, which moves it out of the locker and drops it on the floor. (Other things that don’t work: PUSH, PUSH [direction], PULL, MOVE, TURN, HIT, LOOK UNDER.)
I also tried rubbing the pinup again, on a whim. “There’s nothing beneath that.”
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Oi. I am really trying not to say “well, I’m out of ideas, let’s drop the bombs and see what happens”, but things are kind of trending that way (I’m guessing we need to save those for our destination? I’m still not really sure what’s going on here. Since it’s 1954 and we’re in a nuclear-armed bomber, I assume Black has tried to foil the Bikini atomic tests, but the reference to a recent Soviet test is confusing if that’s the case since I don’t think they did any testing anywhere near there).
There’s that mention of a jet engine in each of the bomb bays – can we interact with those at all?
Failing that, we can also see if lowering the undercarriage does anything interesting while in-flight?
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