And of course, the files:
21c.txt (6.9 KB)
tmp.sav (7.7 KB)
I wonder what specifically makes this hotel room “Eastern”? Is it just that we’re in the Middle East? Or is it important that we’re on the eastern side (of the canal, for example)?
21c.txt (6.9 KB)
tmp.sav (7.7 KB)
3 Likes
Exploring a bit further, I think I found a bug:
>enter window
Faded Landing
The hotel landing was designed to resemble an opulent Parisian staircase of the 1870s, but time, neglect, misunderstanding and poor taste have made the result more like a brothel. At least the bathroom door (northeast) is slightly concealed.At the foot of the off-red stairs, a half-dozen Egyptian soldiers in not much of a uniform are standing around, gesticulating and chattering to each other. There’s enough hostility to make your presence seem ill-advised.
But when I return to the room, the description’s changed!
Remarkably conveniently, a grappling iron has been thrown up to the shutters and hooked over the lip. A rope now leads down out of the window.
Restoring and trying again, it seems there’s no narration of this appearing—it just appears one turn after you open the window, after the mosquito’s been caught.
>get iron
The rope is being held fast at the other end.
Black, is that you?
>d
You drop down off the rope, and land with a jolt on the…Quayside
You’re on a quayside alley, running between the Canal bank and the side of the hotel. The rope hanging from your window tails off eight or nine feet above ground, and it wasn’t a happy descent.A small tarpaulin-roofed barge is moored alongside you, in which a short flight of wooden steps leads below deck.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
I wonder how they were holding the rope? (And where they went?)
>u
Dan Dare could climb up that rope. Even a moderately trained athlete could. Enough said.
We can’t go in any direction from here:
The quayside is busy, even in the early evening, and you don’t want to attract attention.
I wonder where we should be going instead?
>x barge
An inviting means of escape.
A subtle hint indeed.
>enter barge
As you descend the wooden steps, suddenly you’re grabbed from behind, something unpleasantly sharp is jabbed into your ribs and someone hisses “Who the hell are you?”
The whole barge shakes and suddenly jerks. Twenty seconds of extreme embarrassment follow.
Black clearly hasn’t forgotten the handcuffs incident.
Refuge
The tarpaulin-laid interior of the barge, lit by candles, the deck strewn with old blankets and cans of “essence”. A short flight of steps leads steeply up into the evening.Black sits here, facing the wooden steps, shivering (though it isn’t cold).
Black catches sight of the revolting, rancid mess of soap in your hands. Explanation would take too long, and you end up throwing it out into the bilges.
Oh hi Black! Yeah, about that, um…
…er…
…yeah, I’ve got nothing.
>black, sorry
“The soldiers caught me… had to get away…” Black looks more frightened than anyone you’ve ever met before. “If I didn’t rescue you, though… who did?”
Oh. This just got more complicated.
>x black
Black looks scared and weary.
Does it have to be complicated, though?
>hug black
Opportunism, concern or affection? A question Black might be in better condition to consider in the morning.
See, maybe we can—
* – * – * – *
In the middle of the night, a flash fire burns out the barge, killing you and Black almost immediately. The trouble with being killed, of course, is that it gives you so little opportunity to find out what’s really going on.
*** You have died ***
Oh. Or not.
This seems to happen specifically when we try to comfort Black, so we’re not quite on a time limit, per se. We just have to stay alert.
“Oh, I got what I came for, by the way,” Black mumbles in a roundabout kind of way. “The deal. Took some doing - the local hotheads didn’t like it at all, but the older ones signed in the end.” And Black passes you a paper, not without a subdued mood of triumph.
A paper, you say?
It seems to be some kind of signed preliminary agreement to a steady handover of shares in the Suez Canal Company, with limited compensation, in exchange for a slightly longer lease period. Dull legality.
So Black’s arranged a peaceful solution to the Suez crisis. That’s a level of political maneuvering I hadn’t expected from them, given their approach to preventing WWI.
They don’t seem to have anything more to say, and we can’t leave this place:
>u
It seems that the barge cut loose when Black pounced on you, for it’s now drifting downstream in the centre of the canal.
So whatever we do to fix this problem, we need to do it here.
Refuge
The tarpaulin-laid interior of the barge, lit by candles, the deck strewn with old blankets and cans of “essence”. A short flight of steps leads steeply up into the evening.Black sits here, facing the wooden steps, shivering (though it isn’t cold).
Those candles and blankets seem useful for helping Black, but unfortunately they’re not implemented. The cans, however, are.
>x cans
Tucked behind the cans, not quite casually, is a metal strongbox.>x box
(the metal strongbox)
It has rounded edges, is made of a thick grey metal and is about one foot by half by half. Not all that heavy.
Is this Black’s, or was it planted here—perhaps to start the fire?
>open box
(the metal strongbox)
1956 wasn’t the Dark Ages, you know - they knew how to make a solid strong-box all right, and a decent lock.
But this one’s metal! And we can deal with metal!
>put rz-rov on box
The gadget clings to the strongbox, runs briefly and then falls off as the mechanism unlocks itself.Black picks up the gadget, fascinated. “Heavens!” And you just haven’t the heart to insist on having it back, so into Black’s pocket it goes.
Wait, but Black, this is your own gadget, I took it from your parachute back in—
*sigh* fine, I suppose you can have it. Maybe it’ll take your mind off the situation.
If we’d done this before opening the display case back in the Monument, I think we would have made the game unwinnable; as is, it’s probably just a way to make it inaccessible for the endgame.
>open strongbox
You open the metal strongbox, revealing a British passport and a charter document.>x passport
An old black board-bound British passport. While it is, naturally, Property of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and is to be returned to her Secretary of State at the earliest opportunity, it is more specifically the passport of Mr and Mrs J. P. Swithin. Mr Swithin gives his occupation as “engineer”.The photographs are very poor indeed, but bear a passing resemblance to Black and yourself.
>x charter
Congratulations on your honeymoon, by the way. That appears to be the reason for your Suez barge adventure. The two-deck barge, stamped “no cargo”, with no duties to pay, is heading down from Port Faid and aiming, rather ambitiously, for Suez itself.
Awww.
I’m not sure where Port Faid is, but Google tells me Port Said and Port Fuad are at the northernmost tip of the canal, and Suez is of course the south end. “Port Faid” might be an archaic name or a simple conflation of the two.
Black has nothing to say about any of this, unfortunately. We can’t open the cans, but White notes that they might contain water.
If we comfort Black physically (both HUG and KISS work; as is traditional in Inform, those are considered the same action) then the time on the status line jumps to 8:52 am for our death, no matter what time it was before. So that seems to be when the flash fire breaks out. But surely the game doesn’t want us to stay awake and active for over 12 hours’ worth of turns (it’s currently 8:16pm).
Which means there must be something else we can do here. The question is, what?
3 Likes
As a side note, some reviewers have noted that Black and White must have opposite genders, even if the game never confirms what genders those are. I assume this moment is what they’re talking about. But as we saw in the Enigma chapter, both of them can pass for men when appropriately disguised; it seems entirely possible to me that they’re both men or both women, but one or both of them is skilled at cross-dressing when the schemes demand it.
Discussion of Inform’s pronoun-handling in another thread made me wonder how Black is handled in that regard. And the answer is:
>x black
Black looks scared and weary.>pronouns
At the moment, “it” means the small barge, “him” is unset and “her” means the snow leopard.
They simply have no pronouns at all! Neither HIM nor HER (nor IT) can be used to refer to them. I wonder how many people noticed this without explicitly checking the PRONOUNS.
3 Likes
Oh, I ended up solving this one while trying to brute-force nouns. Normally I would wait overnight so people have a chance to contribute, but this doesn’t seem like a puzzle anyone would guess without the game itself to poke at.
Most nouns from the room description don’t work: TARP, TARPAULIN, CANDLE, CANDLES, WATER, BARGE, BLANKET, BLANKETS, and so on are unrecognized. But one of them does.
>x deck
You follow the line of the floorboards in the deck and discover a loose one. Beneath is a long fuse, and it’s burning! There’s no time to pick and choose a reaction, and you grab at the first thing you can to smother the flame.Which is unfortunate, from one point of view, as it’s the negotiated deal that gets charred to ashes in your hands. Black looks on, wordless and aghast, as scared as ever.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Well. That’s not ideal. Let’s change history slightly.
>undo
Refuge
[Previous turn undone.]>put signed in strongbox
(the signed paper in the metal strongbox)
You put the signed paper into the metal strongbox.>close strongbox
You close the metal strongbox.>x deck
You follow the line of the floorboards in the deck and discover a loose one. Beneath is a long fuse, and it’s burning! There’s no time to pick and choose a reaction, and you grab at the first thing you can to smother the flame.Which is unfortunate, from one point of view, as it’s the negotiated deal that gets charred to ashes in your hands. Black looks on, wordless and aghast, as scared as ever.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
The strongbox is still closed, which means the game isn’t checking whether we can take the paper first—it gets burned away no matter what we do.
“So much for the deal,” says Black, tight-lipped. “I suppose certain people would much rather wake up to read in the newspaper about the nice English honeymoon couple, firebombed in the barge they innocently hired, wouldn’t they? Much better copy.”
Unfortunately, I think it’s not just the game mechanics that predestine this outcome. The Egyptian military chased Black to the barge, and (possibly) got us out of our hotel room, then let us head down the canal in peace—knowing that the firebomb would get rid of us and the documents. I suspect that contract would never be honored at this point.
>black, yes
Black is awesomely fed up, and not entirely with people other than you. But then Black is also terrified, and so are you, to be honest.
Well…there may be something we can do about that.
>hug black
Opportunism, concern or affection? A question Black might be in better condition to consider in the morning.* – * – * – *
You are jolted awake by a distant, but unrepeated explosion. It’s a warm morning, and sunlight streams in through the barge’s open hatch.
There’s probably a pun to be made here on “fading to black” but it’s not coming to me.
>black, good morning
Black yawns, coolly, with nothing much to say. Is Black always like this in the morning? you can’t help wondering.
Maybe we’ll get to find out in the endgame.
>x black
Black looks refreshed and wary.
What could they possibly have to be wary about?
Refuge
The tarpaulin-laid interior of the barge looks rather scruffy in the fresh morning light, and not at all cosy. A short flight of steep wooden steps leads up, as you probably remember.Black sits here, looking warily at you. The two of you seem to be having one of those “don’t mention the previous evening” kind of mornings.
The air here suddenly seems disturbed, and a kind of cloud gathers from light winds and currents.
From inside the rucksack, you hear a bell ring.
Perfect timing on the distraction!
>press white button
The cloud of disturbed air condenses into a kind of spherical ink-black ball, large enough to swallow you up whole.All lassitude gone, Black suddenly gets up and (with a half-smile in your direction, which is arguably more than you deserve) strides into the black ball. Rather expertly, since somehow the ball survives intact, which is more than it ever does when you try this.
“Lassitude”, from Latin lassitūdinem, “faintness, weariness”.
Also, I’m sorry, narrator, but I maintain that this one is not our fault. When the military is willing to straight-up kill civilians to avoid this peace agreement, I imagine the agreement isn’t going to be followed in any case.
We can follow Black into the sphere, but they don’t appear with us in the Land. And contrary to my expectations, nothing has changed in the Land either: it seems it is puzzle-less symbolism, a rare thing in the days of tight constraints on objects and text.
Making one more save in the Land, and then we can return to the Monument, and our completed puzzle. Next time: D1, the final piece!
21d.txt (27.5 KB)
tmpland5.sav (7.8 KB)
21.sav (9.2 KB)
Unfortunately, Trizbort is acting up and won’t export the map image properly. I’ll try that again after a reboot.
4 Likes
Oh, and of course, what happens if we leave without disarming the bomb:
You shake your head, confused. Why did the Anglo-Arabian Friendship League endow such a splendidly Islamic monument here? Ah well, time now to wander out to the happy crowds and toast the new millennium with sweet, black coffee.
*** You have wrecked the course of history ***
This one’s not as obviously dystopian as some of the others. But if this Anglo-Arabian Friendship League is the continuation of the British Empire—the Suez crisis having been somewhat of its death knell in the intended history—then its power persisting into the 21st century is certainly less than ideal.
Here’s our FULL score from that ending:
Your score was made up as follows:
36 points for opening the monument, revealing the board, lighting the board, entering the time vortex, meeting Black, triggering off World War One, rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, sending a distress signal, passing on a secret diplomatic letter, ensuring safe passage of the letter, entering the Land, bringing mould to attention, dancing with Black, regaining “Le Temps Retrouve”, scheduling aviation, plugging the heater, impersonating an officer, disposing of the bomb, brushing through, shutting up Black, landing on the Moon, opening the cargo pod, programming Waldo, activating the ALSEP, putting out the engine fire, emergency refuelling, landing a B-29, finding RZ-ROV, rescuing Black, using the Enigma machine, decoding Black’s message, handcuffing Black to the railings, driving the Skoda, tying the barge-rope, paralysing East Berlin’s phones and escaping the Hotel;
16 points for recovering jigsaw pieces;
16 points for playing jigsaw pieces;
11 points for finding sundry items;
16 points for visiting various places;which comes to a total of 95 out of 100, giving you the rank of Grandmaster Puzzler.
I suspect there are five other sundry items to find, which will bring us to 16 points in each of those four categories.
2 Likes
I think it’s fair to call Nasser young! He was President of Egypt at the age of 38. For comparison, JFK was just about to turn 44 when he was inaugurated, and he’s almost always thought of as a “young” President of the USA.
This is an odd vignette, isn’t it? Somehow it stands in Jigsaw as representing the entirety of decolonisation (or, if you prefer, the collapse of Empire, or again, if you prefer this, the rise of new nation states). That’s an awful lot of 20C history to balance on a handful of rooms. I like the Dan Dare comic, though, and the soap puzzle is amusing, or at least its payoff is. The general milieu of dishonesty and casual violence is all very well… but I don’t think I really gave much of a picture of what was going on. Suez didn’t really happen in Egypt at all, but in a house outside Paris where secret deals were done. (Famously, the Prime Minister’s wife remarked that after a while she felt as if the Suez canal ran across her drawing-room carpet.)
Besides: why Suez? Why not Gandhi in 1948? Why not Mandela in 1989?
I suppose it could be said that the scene exists more to advance the Black/White relationship. But this isn’t one of the better histories.
4 Likes
I’m going to pause here for a bit longer, to make sure everyone’s had a chance to catch up before the endgame. (In particular, I know @DeusIrae has been busy, and it seems wrong to move on from the Suez crisis without the person who cares about politics and policy weighing in.)
After that, though, I’m expecting a section chock-full of difficult puzzles before we earn our ending. It’s not as popular nowadays, but ending a game with a “master section” pulling together everything that’s come before was common in this era.
Place your bets now: what are we going to find in D1? We’ve successfully fixed history 14 times now, but without much fanfare—solving a puzzle piece just means the world as we know it doesn’t end. What can the last time period hold that will feel like a suitably climactic finale to all of this?
2 Likes
Ha, I actually just opened this thread in a new tab to try to catch up! I appreciate the pause, will try to get up to speed in a couple days so as not to abuse it - I’m excited I didn’t miss the ending!
2 Likes
No worries, real life comes first; I’ve certainly made everyone on the thread wait while I was busy! It just seems wrong to go past the most political vignette (the one where Black’s grand scheme is to have a peace agreement signed) without you.
1 Like
Is there a footnote for the Suez canal piece? (Or is it me who missed it?)
I’ve been silently following this thread and found it quite entertaining, so thanks for that!
3 Likes
Oops, I missed that! Let me do it now!
[ Footnote d4: ]
On July 26, 1956, Egypt’s President Gamal Nasser occupied the internationally owned Suez Canal (to pay for the Aswan Dam, which the West refused to fund because Nasser was buying arms from Russia). Britain, France (because Nasser funded Algerian extremists) and Israel invaded on October 29th, claiming to fight for the UN. It denounced them, and both Russia and the US demanded withdrawal; on December 22nd, despite having captured most of their objectives, with much bloodshed, they pulled out. Despite military losses Nasser achieved everything he wanted; Britain and France lost all influence in the Middle East (the British government fell, the French Fourth Republic was collapsing anyway), and the USSR crushed the Hungarian uprising while attention was elsewhere.
The most recommendable account by far is Christopher Hampton’s play “White Chameleon”, about growing up as a boy in Alexandria.
The Canal, which cuts about 5000 miles off the distance from Arabia to the West, was blocked by sunken ships in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, but reopened in 1975 and (since 1979) has been open again to all international shipping.
It was briefly blocked again in March 2021, in one of the most absurd news stories of the pandemic era. That’s the most direct interaction I’ve ever had with it, though it’s of course vital for trade across the world.
3 Likes
Took me a bit to catch up, and a bit longer to decide what to think. I have to agree with Dr. Nelson’s take, above – this isn’t one of the more satisfying vignettes. Some of this is down to the politics, which my modern, American eyes looked at rather askance: the milieu is of dishonesty and casual violence, sure, but that mood is set via some Orientalist tropes (lavish but tasteless brothel, incomprehensible and threatening soldiers) that have aged like milk, and seem to set the player’s sympathies against the Egyptians, when – admitting that history has neither good guys nor bad guys most of the time – their cause was overall the more just. Heck, Black’s hard-won peace treaty, with its gradual, compensated stock-transfers, is sort of the decolonial equivalent of all those “abolition” plans that involved paying the enslavers for their “losses”.
(Of course, since it was the British Empire that was ending here, it’s understandable that a British author might inject a stronger vein of ambiguity than seems reasonable to an American reader. And of course a Brit might similarly object to the above by pointing out that they were hardly the only great power to respond to third-world nationalization efforts with violence and coups, as the distance between 1953 in Iran, 1954 in Guatemala, and 1956 in Egypt is nowhere near long enough to insulate America from charges of hypocrisy. And yet!)
The other issue is that the action seems quite disconnected from the import of the historical event, atypically so for the game. Now that I reflect on it, earlier sequences have done a good job of matching the player’s activities to the general import of the scene: at the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, you do some shooting; for the Enigma machine sequence, you dress up in a disguise and crack a code; for the Berlin Wall sequence, you break through the barriers; one could go on. Here, though, the action is a bit confused – wandering around a wrecked hotel, escaping via grappling hook, and passing a night of passion with Black maybe have a Boys Own Adventure vibe to them, albeit with a depressing undertone, that perhaps has some loose thematic links to a curdling dream of Empire, but that’s a pretty loose, post-hoc interpretation.
Having said all that, I’m not immediately coming up with an alternative gameplay hook that would have better mirrored the historical conflicts here at issue; maybe this was just a challenging event to pick, and I should be praising Nelson for taking it on rather than nitpicking why it didn’t quite land! And I’m certainly eager to see where the endgame takes us; there have been substantially more hits than misses so far, in my view.
5 Likes
No, that all seems to me fair comment. I think it’s indeed a weakness of this scene that it implies that White’s point of view is essentially that of an English visitor of the 1950s, prejudices and all, whereas elsewhere in the game there’s a little more detachment. (I mean, I suspect the game’s view on the level of comfort in Alexandrian brothels in 1956 was probably fair comment, but I agree, this is not exactly a sympathetic portrait of a people building a new nation.) In retrospect, Suez was a perplexing incident. If you wanted to hold the canal forever, you were going to have to occupy the country forever, and that was clearly impossible. Within ten years Britain had withdrawn troops from the Far East entirely, not counting Hong Kong and a few islands.
Even at the time, the Americans couldn’t understand why the British and French were doing any of this. I think the Eden government simply thought it was a British concern and about Britain’s rights. It also had a clearly exaggerated view of its own practical power. Britain had, after all, developed the atom bomb, the nuclear reactor, and the computer, climbed Everest, discovered the structure of DNA, and won the Second World War. (You can put asterisks next to a lot of that, but it’s how middle-aged men in Britain, who had been born at a time when the Empire occupied a third of the world, felt. It’s how Americans will feel in the 2040s, when in denial about China’s much greater power.) Early in the crisis, the editor of the Times went to interview Anthony Eden at Downing Street, and came away impressed. “It’s not every day that you invade Egypt,” he said, “even if your name is Anthony.” There were stirring feelings of heroic deeds being done, until of course there weren’t.
That’s really what this scene should have been, set in London. But better would have been not to do Suez at all. With 21st-century eyes, perhaps the camp in Kenya in which Barack Obama’s father was beaten by the British in 1949 would have been a truer picture of what empires had become after the war. Or French Algeria, or the Dutch East Indies.
6 Likes
Yeah, not to pile on, but it did feel like one of the weaker vignettes in a few different ways. To be fair to Black (and Nelson), Black’s plan has generally been shown to be “prevent wars and save lives even if it’ll probably have bad consequences further down the line”, and the continuation of the British Empire in some form is unambiguously a failure state. (Not one of the especially dystopian ones, but given that White is English, it wouldn’t really be for them.)
But the setting didn’t draw me in the same way may of the others did, and the gameplay felt like I was searching for the one specific command that would move the game along (KICK DOOR, OPEN WINDOW), rather than actually figuring anything out. The-player-as-White doesn’t really do anything in this vignette apart from catching the mosquito. We escape because of a mysterious benefactor (apparently not Black?) who is never mentioned again—the actual puzzle is just to open the window. The single command that foils Black’s plan is EXAMINE DECK, which both saves our lives and fixes history without us needing to solve anything.
Now, these complaints are mostly by comparison with the other vignettes, and I realize that not every section of a game can be its best—something has to be worse by comparison for another part to be better. And the game was straining against the object limits already. I just wish that, as the player, I felt like I was doing something in this time period rather than searching for the magic command and then reading along.
Fortunately, though, this is not the note we’re going to end this playthrough on! Even if we put one of the weaker vignettes last in our sequence, D1 always has to come at the very end, giving the author control over the impression the player finally leaves with.
Let us see what that impression will be…
3 Likes
And here we go, the final vignette: 1900, the very beginning of the century.
A reminder of where we are right now:
>list
a1 a growth of mould in a Petri dish (solved)
a2 a 33 r.p.m. vinyl long-playing record (solved)
a3 a wall covered with graffiti (solved)
a4 parklands strobed by laser light (solved)
b1 a moustachioed invalid in bed (solved)
b2 rolling, low sand dunes (solved)
b3 a silver USAF-marked plane (solved)
b4 white folds of snow (solved)
c1 a cocktail in a glass, with tonic and ice (solved)
c2 a horse-drawn state carriage (solved)
c3 a racing steam train (solved)
c4 the full moon in a blue sky (solved)
d1 parklands with wrought iron gates
d2 a lady wearing a crinoline dress (solved)
d3 a Victorian country house (solved)
d4 a shipping barge in a canal (solved)
Now, one last time:
>turn off latch
The latch on the clock is now off.>set clock to 59
The clock starts, silently and slowly, and the jigsaw board pulses with a flickering amber light, warm and erratic as though from an oil lamp.>press d1
The piece at d1 presses in smoothly, like a button, then releases. You are sucked up once again into the time vortex. As you slow down, you briefly make out Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” being broken up by riots in Paris and then everything begins to change…[Press SPACE to continue.]
We’re headed…
Chapter Fifteen - Into the Dark
Park Railings
You stand in a crowd of English revellers in late Victorian dress, who are thronging through the wrought-iron gates (to the north) of a poplar-lined park. The darkness is illuminated partly by the amazing new electric lamps within the railings.An old gatekeeper, in top hat and tails, wearing a curious lead amulet and carrying a music-hall cane, is welcoming the crowd in.
Fifteen, not sixteen, because the first vignette (A4) didn’t get a chapter number. Given how symmetrical everything in this game has been around 16s, I predict the ending (after we solve the final puzzles) will also get its own chapter.
>x gatekeeper
The gatekeeper is an ancient, wiry, white-bearded man. He looks resilient, watchful and faintly familiar, though you can’t possibly have met anywhere else.>gatekeeper, hello
The gatekeeper watches you, perhaps with a gleam of recognition in his eye, perhaps not… but says nothing.
Well, it looks like north is the way to go.
>n
The gatekeeper takes you by the arm, and propels you through a dark side-passage between railings. “You have undone all the damage,” he whispers with the sound of sand running through an hourglass. “But do not forget the Machinery. It must not live.”The passage darkens, cools. Soon you and he are the only things you can see, but you walk on.
The Hinge
You’re standing in a convoluted tangle of clockwork, of cogs and rails, runners and ratchets, cast perfectly on a giant scale from untarnished bronze. Through gaps in the workings, you can see blackness, the perfect ink-black of the Ball.On a grander scale, this delicate machinery lies along the hinge of a giant V. Rising up to the west the path splits into a dizzying array of vast, greyish loops, bunched together here like coils of wire around a transformer.
Angled up on the eastern wedge of the hinge is the ghost-image of a great plain of tesselating squares, divided like farmers’ fields. The path runs up to the central, most radiant square, and you can faintly hear birdsong.
The gatekeeper gazes around, as if revisiting a once-familiar town of his youth. His top hat and cane are gone.
A black Ball, perhaps twice your height in diameter, rolls out of one of the loops, down into this Hinge (where you can only see it because it occludes the bronze workings) and out up to the great plain, settling like a soap-bubble bursting across the surface of water.
[Your score has just gone up by two points.]
Oh!
“Undone all the damage” means fixing Black’s alterations to the timeline, presumably. But now we need to keep them from doing any more, by destroying the time machine itself. We need to ensure that the history we remember is the only one that can happen.
Which, notably, is not the history that Black remembers. Is their timeline going to get erased and replaced by ours? If so, then at least some of their modifications worked—I wonder why those ones are okay but the others aren’t?
It looks like east is either the Land, or the top surface of the jigsaw board itself, and west is…I’m not sure. Let’s try west first.
>w
This is the way you came, all right, but… which loop was the one you’re from? They all look the same, bunched so tightly here.
Huh. Are these loops timelines? Or are they years? Or key events, maybe? Sadly we can’t count them and find out if there are 16 or 100 or infinitely many.
It looks like the way for us to go is…
>e
You strike out upwards from the bevelled hinge, rising for what seems like hours, and the radiance gradually opens out onto a bright, summer’s day, the scent of gardens and the rustle of animals…[Press SPACE to continue.]
Wait, that seems like we won’t be coming back. Rewind rewind rewind!
>undo
The Hinge
[Previous turn undone.]
The gatekeeper’s description hasn’t changed, but his response to conversation has.
>gatekeeper, hello
The gatekeeper brushes that aside. “I’ll answer a few questions, that’s all, then you’re on your own.”
What should we ask him about while we’re here, before we launch into the final vignette proper?
2 Likes
I’m going to pause here to ask the questions, but for starters:
>ask gatekeeper about himself
“Can you keep a secret?” whispers the gatekeeper confidentially. You nod your discretion. “So can I.”
Is this a response or just a default error message?
>ask gatekeeper about gatekeeper
“Can you keep a secret?” whispers the gatekeeper confidentially. You nod your discretion. “So can I.”>ask gatekeeper about aksjhfd
“Can you keep a secret?” whispers the gatekeeper confidentially. You nod your discretion. “So can I.”
So that’s what he says when he has nothing in particular to say about a given topic. What topics will be more fruitful?
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Ask him about Black! About the machine, I suppose. About time itself? We’re getting rather metaphysical if we’re looking at some kind of representation of the time stream. Maybe about some of the individual scenarios?
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Yeah, all of these. Plus ourselves, Century Park, Kaldecki, the ball, the land… maybe show him our sketchbook too?
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Black:
“That wretched student of Kaldecki’s, saw far too much. You wouldn’t want my job: having to kill the innocent to protect the many…” You swallow slightly, thinking of the Archduke slumped in his carriage, the rifle still again in your hands, blood-warm oil thin on your hands.
“I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t kill Black. I stood and watched while the machinery powered up… it’s been wretched, you can’t imagine. And so I formed a plan; the jigsaw pieces, you.”
So “Black” is a name that other people use for them as well.
“Machine” gets nothing but “machinery” does:
“All that hideous machinery! You must destroy it. Must, I say! Or it will all have been for nothing, all history, all life.”
Is it for something right now?
Time:
“Well, you see… the Hinge is where Time and Nature meet, the great loops of the centuries and the fields of nature. I kid myself I understand it, I don’t really. I’m only the Timekeeper.”
So he’s the Timekeeper, not the Gatekeeper. Sadly that word doesn’t prompt a reaction either.
About the jigsaw:
“The jigsaw puzzle? Well. You see, I had to have the damage undone, somehow, once your friend found the board the potential danger was… immense. So the pieces, you see, the sort of thing to snare in somebody with nothing better to do, a bit unambitious, not too bright, not too dim - the kind of person who’d do a jigsaw puzzle at a party.”
You feel rather tired and irritated. “But if you hadn’t made the board in the first place, you wouldn’t have needed me and you wouldn’t have needed the pieces!”
He smiles. “I could say that Time is like that, that there is no before to cause the after… but the board is where the Hinge connects.” He waves a hand up at the fields to the east. “The Hinge has to anchor the loops of Time to the world, somewhere.”
“Couldn’t you at least have buried it somewhere, where nobody could meddle with it?”
“Oh, nothing easier. In orbit around a lifeless star, for instance. But the Hinge also connects life to the world, it must be where there is life. Or rather, vice versa. You see?”
You’re struggling to keep up with all this. “In any case,” the Timekeeper goes on urgently, “everything you’ve achieved will all be for nothing if you don’t destroy the Kaldecki machine!”
I’m not sure this explanation really helps. It might have worked better being simply unexplained as a gameplay conceit. (Also, is this the first time we’re actually given dialogue lines to say?)
I haven’t been able to get reactions to any of the individual scenarios.
Us:
“I expected someone taller, I confess.”
Really?
Century Park:
“No worse than most.”
Kaldecki:
“He was a fool. No, that’s a little harsh. I was the fool, the jigsaw board fell into his hands and he… analysed it. I had to watch from up here as he took it apart, - the forces in it killed him in the end, but God, the experiments he tried first! The Hinge rocked, it nearly tore.”
So the jigsaw pieces were created for our benefit, but the jigsaw board wasn’t. I wonder how it appeared to Kaldecki before the pieces existed?
The Land:
“Well, you see… the Hinge is where Time and Nature meet, the great loops of the centuries and the fields of nature. I kid myself I understand it, I don’t really. I’m only the Timekeeper.”
The ball gets nothing. He’s unimpressed by the sketchbook. I’ve tried various other things, like “coils”, “nature”, and “life”, but no response to any of them.
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Can we ask about TIMEKEEPER now?
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