Excellent point. Like I said above, I didn’t really think of the two “agonists” (excellent word) as having any gender inclinations one way or another, so I guess I thought of them as… um, “thems”, the same way you’d do so with a non-binary person. Or in other words, they didn’t seem any “more gendered” than the protagonists of the games I listed, so I guess I lumped them in the same category. Of course, it’s all up to interpretation, and whatever you and Black are, it obviously doesn’t matter at all between you two.
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EXAMINE BLACK: “Black is looking rather fed up with the world, and most particularly you.”
BLACK, HELLO: “I don’t want to talk to you, thanks.”
GREET BLACK: “Your handshake is politely declined.”
GIVE SKETCHBOOK TO BLACK: “No, thanks.”
SHOW SKETCHBOOK TO BLACK: “Black is unimpressed.”
ASK BLACK ABOUT SKETCHBOOK: “What does it matter now? The Kaldecki equipment’s all dead.”
KISS/HUG BLACK: “Black stops you with the deadliest of looks.”
HIT/KICK/BREAK/ATTACK BLACK: “Black strides away, disgusted.” (I think this actually makes the game unwinnable. I haven’t been able to re-find them.)
TASTE BLACK: “You taste nothing unexpected.”
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Looking at a disassembly of the relevant code, you cannot actually trigger that ending for a1. I think this was unintentional - finding the mouldy dish sets events as having reached the crux, and there is a paragraph about the consequences of doing so.
However, the variable that stores which piece you’ve wreaked history in uses zero for when you haven’t broken history and the number of the piece otherwise. The piece numbers also run from zero, so when it stores the number of a1 (zero) into the variable, it does not change the value and the wrecked course of history goes undetected.
The unreachable paragraph for failing a1 is:
You shake your head, confused, and sneeze. You seem to have caught the deadly flu epidemic which has raged uncontrolled across Europe for much of the last decade. But at least the crowd outside are muffled up warm against the night breeze, and you feel more hopeful out amongst them, toasting the new millennium with a hot lemon juice.
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I wonder if I spent as long reading through this thread as I did playing this game, once, a century ago… What an excellent time!
When the game was new, I made it as far as the Wright brothers—the mandolin puzzle sunk me, apparently!. Such joy to revisit it today.
Thinking through its themes elsewhere, I came upon the realization that “two mutually antagonistic, color-coded timeline meddlers—in love!” has resurfaced in the culture more recently with the excellent 2019 novel This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
I can note that Gladstone is an IF author himself, but shall otherwise decline suggest how directly the romance of White and Black might have influenced the saga of Red and Blue…
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