And of course, our files for this session:
A save right after entering the Titanic
c1.sav (1.1 KB)
A save after it’s all over, which I’m guessing is a walking dead state
04tmp.sav (1.5 KB)
A full transcript of today’s session
04.txt (38.3 KB)
And a map!
Green is where we start; red is where the time window opens to take us home.
Ah, and if we needed confirmation that we missed something important, footnote c1 isn’t available yet, and c1 is listed as “visited” rather than “solved”. So we haven’t wrecked history, but we may have wrecked our save file: we can’t go back to c1 without drowning immediately.
This is all quite intriguing! And my hat is off to Prof. Nelson for making REARRANGE DECK CHAIRS on the Titanic a necessary step in a game. Some thoughts on avenues for exploration:
Can we set the clock’s timer to a low number and go back to 1999 to see if anything’s changed, both before and after sending the distress call? I’m curious whether altering time always leads to commissars and potato-brandy or if there are other totalitarian futures in store (this might also give us a clue as to what we’re trying to accomplish here…)
Speaking of, if Black told us they’d sorted everything, and they were reading that code-book and emphasized CDQ, perhaps sending that message aligns with their plan and messes with history (since so far it seems like we’re meant to foil their well-meaning plans)? I don’t know enough about the real-life events here to tell whether rescue craft came swiftly to pick up survivors, unfortunately. But could be that, in keeping with the rather grim morality of the Sarajevo segment, we need to ensure there’s more death here rather than less, because that’s all that I can think that would make this a historical turning point (if nothing else, we need to clear the way for Cousin Matthew to become the heir apparent to Downton Abbey!) Perhaps we could keep perusing the code-book in order to see if there’s an all-clear signal we can send? Or engage the wireless officer in conversation to see whether he’s already send a distress signal, if he’s seen Black, or try to hang out in the office as soon as possible and somehow prevent him from raising the warning (perhaps we could dose him with that sketchy-sounding seasickness syrup)?
Alternately, “what is going on that you’ve missed” sort of implies that, well, we’ve missed something in our explorations. Most of the NPCs we’ve encountered seem to be related to puzzles, or are part of an undifferentiated mass of background, save for the heir and heiress in the first class lounges. Perhaps we could try to learn more about what they’re up to and see if ensuring one of them does or doesn’t survive could be important?
Getting to “The Land” is interesting too! It seemed like Black got there using the device, last time – I wonder, is it doing anything different in the last turn or two before the black sphere opens up? And what happens if we don’t bring it along on this jaunt?
Similarly in the futzing-with-stuff front, what happens if we TWIST KD before finding the puzzle piece?
Also:
Yeah, an ensign is a flag – it specifically refers to the flag indicating a vessel’s nationality. That would have presumably already been up, but maybe it’s being used more generally here; could be the captain wants us to raise a flag indicating we’re in distress.
Absolutely. The fact that so far we’ve had to >ASSASSINATE ARCHDUKE FERDINAND and then >REARRANGE DECKCHAIRS puts Jigsaw in the running for the game with the most memorable commands.
Let’s find out what happens if we do nothing!
> z.z.z.z.z.z.z.z (repeated several times)
Once it’s clear there’s no recovery, we can set the clock to 1, and…
You shake your head, confused. Why did the mad American architect Kantor build this monument? Why did the League of Nations ever allow Century Park to be built here in Geneva? Never mind: time to go and get a sachet of MacCoke from the franchise stalls and toast the new millennium.
So a different ending, but I’m not sure what this tells us.
The RMS Carpathia part was real! At least, according to the version I’ve read on Tumblr, which is the only time I’ve heard this story and may well be sensationalized. But Google confirms that the Carpathia did receive the distress signal and come to rescue the survivors from the lifeboats.
Yes, I am very confused why the wireless operator didn’t send out an SOS (or rather a CQD). Historically speaking, he ignored various warning messages about icebergs because he was an employee of the radio company rather than part of the ship’s crew and his job was to clear the backlog of letters from wealthy passengers. But once the ship was going down, surely sending out the distress signal would be his most important job?
Or maybe, since there were two radio sets, he couldn’t send and receive at the same time—he’d sent out a distress call and was now waiting for people to respond, and a second person was needed to keep sending out the signals?
Yep, most of the people mentioned in atmospheric messages don’t actually exist (try to interact with them and “you can’t see any such thing”). The ones that are actual game objects (which we know are a precious commodity in this era!) are Guggenheim, Shutes, the captain, the radioman, the band, and the stewardess.
Historically speaking, it seems Shutes survived and Guggenheim didn’t. But the “Miss Shutes” I can find information on was a 40-year-old governess, not a wealthy young heiress. So maybe this is a different person?
I’m guessing we just die if we don’t think to >SET CLOCK TO 1 fast enough. We do have a second way to get back to the Monument; this just gives us a way to reach the Land as well.
In the process of checking this, I discovered that you can actually see the collision if you’re fast enough to the top deck:
The liner catches a glancing blow with an iceberg appearing to starboard, apparently from nowhere. Out on deck you can hear a quiet scraping sound, no more, though loose powdery ice scatters across the promenades. But the iceberg drifts away into the absolute darkness almost at once.
A couple of months from now, Thomas Hardy will write:
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.In your history, anyway. Can it be that Black has already averted disaster?
Anyway, on to the KD!
> twist kd
You set the threefold arm spinning, but after a brief moment it spins its arms up together, chiming a rough bell twice. The motion then dies away.
Aha! I’m guessing this means “two pieces to find”. So we found one, in the porthole, and haven’t found the other.
Also, a fun fact: the distress signal was officially changed from CQD to SOS in 1906, but CQD was still used for quite a while afterward; the radio operators on the Titanic started by sending CQD over and over, then one commented to the other that they should switch to SOS, since it might be their last chance to try out the new one.
The CQ was originally chosen to mean “important for everyone” because it sounds like the first two syllables of sécurité. Lots of people learned the code via the mnemonic “come quickly, distress”, but that wasn’t the original intent.
(Also, apparently SOS isn’t actually those three letters: it’s • • • – – – • • •, all as one signal, no spaces between them. It just happens to sound like the letters SOS. TIL!)
All right! Another day, another bit of exploration!
I don’t have a solid goal in mind this time, and it sounds like most of y’all don’t either. Which is fair—I’m not really sure what we’re supposed to be doing here!
But there’s another puzzle piece, and some reason why this moment is so important that we haven’t found. And also some NPCs who appear to be conversable but haven’t had anything too interesting to say yet.
So let’s poke at 'em a bit!
Unfortunately, nothing I say seems to work. TELL X ABOUT Y consistently “provokes no reaction”, while ASK X ABOUT Y gets custom responses (Guggenheim: “Who knows, on this floating Limey palace?”) but they’re the same for every topic, nothing useful. I even made sure to see the collision myself, by getting to the boat deck fast enough, but no dice.
I did discover one thing, which was that Shutes’s ouija board is a gray square that she “just knew” had a link to the Astral Plane. So that may be our second puzzle piece. In Nelson’s earlier Curses, there’s an overarching puzzle where anything vaguely long and thin is likely to be a magic staff in disguise; I suspect this game is doing the same with anything gray and square. (Though six inches is very small for an ouija board!)
The wireless operator can’t hear us through the headphones and the headphones aren’t implemented, so I haven’t found any way to get his attention or make him react.
>hit operator
This is no time to distract him!
So I suspect that’s a non-starter.
Well, what else do we have to work with? A jacket and a bottle of seasickness medicine, and that’s about it.
Captain Smith shooed us away when he saw us in uniform, so maybe the disguise is better than I thought—maybe Guggenheim will listen if an officer tells him the ship is sinking?
>tell guggenheim about iceberg
This provokes no reaction.
Or not. Maybe we can pick up some of the ice from the deck and show him?
>get ice
The ice is too cold for comfort.
No dice. And Shutes is similarly unresponsive to the uniform.
What’s left? The band?
>ask band about iceberg
They don’t take requests.
Nope.
Well, I’m stumped. Any ideas for where to go next, or what to do next? I’d thought those NPCs wouldn’t just be for flavor, since they’re taking up precious RAM, but I haven’t found any way to interact with them.
Here’s a transcript, and a new map, since I missed a room last time (in between First Class Entrance and Black’s Cabin):
05.txt (24.0 KB)
Tell me if you have any more ideas!
Does the seance break up over time? If so you could grab the board after. Or maybe you can trigger it by doing something with the medium, like being a ghost or giving something to her?
Oh, true, if Shutes survived then she must have left the séance at some point, right?
Let’s see what happens if we go back after handling everything else. (We do discover that the jacket doesn’t protect us from the wireless operator: he still takes the key and throws us out.)
At 12:31 am, we’ve gotten one piece, picked up the KD, gotten the towel (though I’m not sure we need it), worn the jacket, collected the seasickness medicine, and sent out a distress signal. But the poker game and the séance are still going. Nothing to do now but…wait, I guess?
>z
Time passes.“The air tonight,” remarks Miss Shutes to her companions, “reminds me of the ice-caves of the Eiger. Shall I ever stop shivering!” They simper in concurrence.
Dum de dum.
>z
Time passes.The cardplayers speculate amiably about the size of the iceberg. “Eighty feet above deck, would you say, Colonel?”
Dum de dum.
>z
Time passes.“I say,” says Guggenheim, “d’you think there’s ice up on deck? I could do with a jolt,” and he waves his whisky to a great uproar of laughter.
Dum de dum.
>z
Time passes.
Dum de dum.
>z
Time passes.Guggenheim suddenly seizes you by the braided arm of your uniform jacket. “Look, officer,” he says confidentially and urgently, “I can see how things are going. Bad. This -” he pushes a letter of some kind into your hand - “this letter must, must be delivered, or… I can’t tell you. But you’ll be on one of the boats if anything happens. Dammit, it’s of the utmost importance!”
Wait, what?
Okay, so if we’re in the smoke room in uniform at 12:43, then suddenly things get urgent?
>ask guggenheim about letter
“Say, what kind of an officer are you? I’m sworn to secrecy.”
A new response!
>x letter
A letter marked “Secret and Confidential - Deliver via courier” and sealed up with wax for good measure, addressed to the U.S. Secretary of State.
Sealed, you say?
>save
Ok.>open letter
Consider your honour and duty as a subject of the British Empire!
Oh right, this is still Imperial times. But would a subject of the British Empire really think they have any duty to those upstart American colonies or the gauche noveau riche who inhabit them? If they wanted to be treated with honour, they should have acted with honour, I say! Now bring me my tea!
Well, anyway, the game won’t let us. So I guess we have to just take the letter with us when we get on the lifeboats, and…
Wait. Shit. We’re not getting on the lifeboats.
But, thanks to Wikipedia, we know someone who is!
>show letter to shutes
“Crikey! Hush-hush stuff!”
Yes, exactly!
>give letter to shutes
Her mouth makes a perfect O of astonishment, then her eyes widen and she gasps. “Crikey!” she exclaims. Then she tucks it into the cleavage of her dress, where (astonishingly) it is concealed away. “It’s safe with me.”She scampers away, and the ouija school disbands, theatrically looking round for spies at every corner.
[Your score has just gone up by two points.]
Okay, so this is why the Titanic was a turning point in world history—it would have been so easy for Guggenheim’s letter to get lost. This is why sending the distress signal is enough to avoid wrecking history: Guggenheim gave the letter to another officer, who was rescued by the Carpathia and got it back to the States. But handling things this way means we can also take…
>x board
You can’t see any such thing.>x ouija
You can’t see any such thing.
Huh?
You can see a corner piece here.
Oh, the name changed on us.
>get corner
(putting the elegant key into the canvas rucksack to make room)
Taken.[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
We can also get this!
This one is also six inches on a side, so a very small ouija board. Or maybe they were using this as a planchette, and the board itself was an unrelated gray square object.
Anyway, I think we’re safe now. All we have to do is get in the time window and we’re home free!
>tell guggenheim about shutes
This provokes no reaction.>tell guggenheim about letter
This provokes no reaction.
Stoic as ever.
We make it back to the lounge at 1am, giving us just over an hour to play around. I was going to set the clock back to 59, but we could also just…
>turn off alarm
The latch on the clock is now off.
Now we wait a long time, and…
From inside the rucksack, the ormolu clock makes a rustle-click.
It doesn’t take us away, so we can make it to the Land!
Wait an even longer time, and…
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.You are utterly terrified. There’s only one chance left: the time window!
Run!
>press white button
The cloud of disturbed air condenses into a kind of spherical ink-black ball, large enough to swallow you up whole.
And we’re back inside the sphere. Moving doesn’t actually seem to be what gets us out—rather, we take any two actions and then it drops us in the Land.
Now that we’ve solved this place, we can explore a bit more here, maybe?
>s
Thick Mist
Thick, cloudy mist covers the Land here, suspended in the air like milk in water.
Huh.
Going north from where we enter the Land also drops us in the mist, and we can’t go west. I suspect we’re on the puzzle board—we’re at position c1, on the west edge of the board, and the pieces north and south of us (b1 and d1) haven’t been placed. But c2 has, which is why we can go east, and find the pyramid right at the center of this place.
A bit of experimentation confirms that we can move through the mist, though we can’t see anything, and any path that takes us to the center will bring us back to the Disc Room.
Now, the question—have we wrecked history?
>list
a4 parklands strobed by laser light (solved)
c1 a cocktail in a glass, with tonic and ice (solved)
c2 a horse-drawn state carriage (solved)
No we have not!
>footnote c1
[ Footnote c1: ]The interior layout is simplified from the Midsummer 1911 issue of “The Shipbuilder” magazine, and events and dialogue from the more reliable survivors’ accounts. Most of the stories about the Titanic are myths, from inaccurate press reports and the four films made over the years. The crew and owners behaved honourably throughout, the provision for lifeboats was not as poor as usually said, and there was almost icy calm amongst the passengers not allowed into the boats.
The iceberg was not large and the collision mild: but in those temperatures, the steel hull was only roughly as strong as a tin can.
The S.S. Carpathia arrived after the Titanic went down at 2.20 am, but rescued 711 of the 2206 aboard. Of those who appear in the game, only Miss Shutes and the wireless operator survived. Mr Guggenheim changed into a dinner jacket, “to die a gentleman”. The Captain and the Titanic’s designer refused to try for the lifeboats.
Just before the end, the wireless operator sent the first SOS signal ever heard at sea. The band played ragtime (not hymns) to the end.
That lines up with what I’ve read. So the wireless operator we met must have been the junior one, Harold Bride, because the senior one, Jack Phillips, went down with the ship (sending messages to the very end, even after the electricity had failed).
A few weeks ago I came across this video showing the internal layout of the Titanic, if you don’t feel like poking through The Shipbuilder. The map in Jigsaw is remarkably accurate to the first-class section of the ship—and in the video you can see why there’s the one “southwest” connection when everything else uses cardinal directions!
I’ll make another post later today, looking at our new puzzle pieces and where they might take us. But one last thing first:
>restore
Ok.>set clock to 1
You shorten the time left on the clock.Suddenly you are wrenched out into the time vortex once more, and find yourself back…
For whatever reason, leaving with the letter doesn’t wreck history. I suppose because we still have time to go back and give it to Shutes?
But no, even if we wait until the last minute before leaving, keeping the letter doesn’t wreck history. Only failing to send the distress signal does. I suspect this is a bug. (Also, disappointingly, even if we take the letter to the far future where both Guggenheim and his correspondent are long dead, our “honour” still prevents us from opening it. Anyone have any idea what this letter might have been?)
Side note: Wikipedia tells me that Guggenheim helped his mistress, Léontine Aubart, and her maid, Emma Sägesser, onto the lifeboats before changing into formalwear to “die like a gentleman”. If he sent the letter with us rather than them, he presumably wanted to entrust it to an officer rather than a random passenger, and wouldn’t have been happy with us sending it to Shutes. But it got us two points, and that’s what really matters, right?
Save file and transcript:
05.sav (1.6 KB)
05b.txt (36.5 KB)
No changes to the map this time, thankfully!
Another side note: what happens if, instead of passing on the letter, we just wait for Ms Shutes to be evacuated?
An evacuation has begun of women and children into the lifeboats, which are being lowered one by one from the boat deck. Nobody is taking this very seriously at the moment.
Still, Miss Shutes bustles away to help.
She leaves to help, but the other ladies stick around and keep you from taking the board.
> z
Time passes.Hardly anyone is left now: they have all drowned, left by lifeboat or dived for it.
> get board
Polite but firm, the ladies won’t let you get any closer.
Now that’s some serious dedication!
Now, for our puzzle pieces: the corner piece goes at A1, showing “a growth of mould in a Petri dish”, while the edge piece goes at B1, showing “a moustachioed invalid in bed”. Both the first places I tried, and not requiring any rotation—we’re getting better at this!
Here’s what the grid looks like now:
1 2 3 4
+----------------------------------------------------+
|............. ooooooooooooo|
a |. Mould Park o|
|......o...... oooooo oooooo|
|ooooooooooooo |
b |o Invalid |
|oooooo.oooooo |
|.............oooooo oooooo |
c |. Glass .. Carriage oo |
|.............ooooooooooooo |
| . o |
d | |
| |
+----------------------------------------------------+
Or with color:
Or with the monochrome style:
This style uses reverse-video but not colors, so it should work on older interpreters that don’t support colored text. Or monochrome monitors, for that matter—how prevalent were those in 1995?
Since I’m copying and pasting all the time, I’m going to switch back to the “spartan” ASCII art style: it’s the only one that records properly to the transcript. But I wanted to make sure you had a chance to properly appreciate the elegance of these Z-machine graphics!
As of now, we’re at “26/5/342” (26 points, 5 pieces, 342 moves).
Your score is made up as follows:
11 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 and entering the Land;
5 points for recovering jigsaw pieces;
5 points for playing jigsaw pieces;
3 points for finding sundry items;
2 points for visiting various places;which comes to a total of 26 out of 100, giving you the rank of Investigator.
We’ve now got two new places to go: the mo(u)ld at A1 and the invalid at A2. I have a strong suspicion what A1 is going to be (the discovery of penicillin, though that’s in the 20s so my chronology theory would be disproven), but no idea at all for A2. Which one shall we explore next?
Save file after putting the pieces in place:
05.sav (1.6 KB)
The moustachioed invalid in bed conjures up images of famous, gravely ill poets in Paris, like Heine (but that was in the middle of the 19th century), Wilde, and Proust (the moustache points towards the latter).
(I also half remember the latter from when I played Jigsaw years ago.)
Rare. Color monitors were standard. However:
Not all computers supported the 32-bit color model that we think of as “color displays” today. There were 4-bit (16-color) modes and 8-bit modes and 16-bit modes. I remember testing System’s Twilight with a bunch of different modes, including monochrome – because even though color monitors were standard in 1994, I expected some people to play the game on late-80s monochrome Macs!
And also: you still had the problem of running your Z-code interpreter in a terminal window, especially on Unix machines or over a telnet connection. And color in terminal windows was a shaky proposition. So the interpreter (and game) always needed a fallback for color not being available.
Oh man, lots of progress!
If the League of Nations is still a going concern in 1999, that maybe suggests WWII might not have happened? Gross corporate consolidation to the contrary, this might count as a reasonably positive outcome!
…OK, I’m deeply confused by Black’s plan and how we’re impacting history now. In Sarajevo, this was pretty simple: they tried to alter history for the “better”, and we had to stop them. But this time, their plan seems to have been to make sure a historically-accurate distress call went out, but just laid the groundwork without actually implementing it (I’d think that they meant for us to finish things up, but we got that note specifically saying everything had been fixed). And then their plan had nothing to do with the actual turning point in history? Maybe something they did made wound up preventing the letter from being handed off, so that’s what we’re fixing, and we need to make sure the distress call goes out so Shutes gets picked up? It’s all a bit muddy, though.
I was actually wondering if the presence of the device is needed to open up the portal to the land – not bringing the clock back seems like a recipe for pain, as you say!
Oof, props to Thomas Hardy, but crowbarring in “hue” (how do you grow in hue? Like they kept painting it darker) just so you can rhyme “too” is some kind of crime.
I now know this isn’t the answer, but yeah, reading the previous update, I was going to propose WEAR TOWEL. DRINK SYRUP. Now we’re a ghost swaying with an unearthly gait! (Hey, it mostly worked in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis).
OK I am very curious about what this is meant to be. From some quick Wikipedia research, Guggenheim largely lived in Paris at this time, and appears to have been connected to the family business (largely smelting and refining). He was also Jewish, of course. I…am really struggling to come up with intelligence he’d have access to that led to important U.S. action sufficiently important to keep history from going off tracks – we were in a pretty isolationist mood at this point in time!
(It sounds like this may have just been a plot device to justify a visit to the Titanic – boo hiss if so, I say).
Oh, that’s quite handy! Will be good to keep double-checking that to make sure we haven’t lost track of whether the alarm’s supposed to be on.
Ooh, well spotted!
…I’m guessing we can’t take a close look at the board once we’re back at the monument and see a teeny-tiny Black running around?
Argh, this is going to keep bothering me (risking spoilers, I tried a quick google, but it wasn’t any help).
Maybe that’s a clue? We know it’s for the State Department, but if it’s a diplomatic letter that suggests it was from another state, as well. Given Giggenheim’s background it would almost certainly be France, and some more random googling suggests that in May of 1912, there was a bunch of discussion about the U.K. and France converting the Entente Cordiale into a more formal alliance. So possibly this might be related, since the durability of the Anglo-French alliance certainly played a significant role in making the Great War play out the way it did. Of course, the U.S. interest would be harder to suss out – maybe this was just keeping us informed? Or pushing back against other espionage (given the off-hand reference to “spies”) that would have cast these conversations in a more sinister light and meant we would have been friendlier to the Central Powers? This is all very murky but we can at least take a few stabs in the dark, at least.
I think the two major conjectures about the new pieces are right, though I have to say, as to the latter: I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, but is it really so pivotal a composition to mark a turning point in history? Sorry to keep harping on this, but while it is an influential classic of Modernism and things wouldn’t have come out the same way without him, but you still get Ulysses without Proust, and if you get Ulysses you get Mrs. Dalloway… maybe this is Anglocentric of me and a French player would see far greater literary impact here!
Maybe Black has no idea what they’re doing and are just visiting places they always wanted to fix and/or see as a tourist?
Fair, but remember, they said the device can only get you to turning points, not any random moment.
Good point re Black not really knowing what they’re doing/having an overall agenda, though for the Titanic there was this:
Some of the others might just be tourism, though, in which case I’m not sure what we’ll have to do (just don’t lick the Petri dish in the penicillin one!)
Ah, yes. We need to press the white button to open the portal—if we don’t have the device, we just drown in the frigid waters.
I’m pretty sure it’s just a bug, but the fact that removing the letter from the timeline doesn’t wreck history could mean that it’s not actually important at all! It could get us points for game reasons, not for history reasons, like how shaking Black’s hand is worth a point.
To be fair, Black did say they already fixed it. Maybe there was another impending crisis brewing, but it’s been solved by the time we arrive: Black drugged the senior wireless operator (the one who’s conspicuously absent), ensuring that he goes down with the ship and doesn’t, uh…assassinate Teddy Roosevelt? Do something else history-wrecking?
As a side effect, the junior wireless operator was overwhelmed and couldn’t get the distress signal out properly, so we had to come fix that and ensure that someone else was rescued in order to do something history-preserving. Fortunately, Black left the senior operator’s key in their cabin, where we could reach it.
Honestly, this is the one where I’m most certain about what to do: ensure Fleming notices the moldy petri dish and doesn’t just throw it away! It would be so easy for him to not pick up on it, and then we don’t get antibiotics, and then all sorts of people die who wouldn’t otherwise.
Black might be on our side for this one, or at least not working against us, because it’s hard to imagine removing antibiotics being a positive change to history.
For the invalid (Proust?)…no idea whatsoever.
Oh hey, I can put polls in replies! I didn’t know I could do that!
Where to next?
0 voters
The mo(u)ld in a petri dish (A1) is currently winning, 6 to 4, so that’s where we’ll be going next! The spoiler up above tells us there’s one animal to sketch here, so be on the lookout for it.
>press a1
The piece at a1 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 television footage of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial and then everything begins to change…[Press SPACE to continue.]
Chapter Three - And 1% Luck
Clarence Wing Staircase
A square spiral staircase runs up and down between two floors, opening out here at a landing with a noticeboard. Some way below the windows are nondescript houses and a quiet city street.There are doors at top and bottom of the stairs, both closed.
How does the saying go? 99% hard work and 1% luck? Or maybe in this case, 1% us meddling with the timeline…
>read notice
Miscellaneous circulars and memos are pinned to the board, all typed on the headed notepaper of St Mary’s Hospital School of Medicine, London University. The most recent, still white, notices are dated in August and September 1928.A couple of Irish nurses come through the landing, chattering away. “Hot again today! Who’d have thought it, after we shivered all last week.”
And the device confirms we’re in 1928, at 2:17 pm. I think I guessed this one right!
>d
The lower door is closed.
So we can’t go down. Then let’s try…
>u
The upper door is closed.
Oh right. This game requires you to open doors manually.
>open lower door
You open the lower laboratory door.>d
Asthma Laboratory
A crowded mycological laboratory, full of moulds and the means to grow them: bullocks’ hearts in jars, sterilisers, centrifuges, vats of agar medium. On one wall is a diagram of the lungs, and blackboards full of numbers make frequent reference to Asthma.The main door leads back out east; to the north is a lab assistant’s office.
White mice scurry about in cages along one wall.
Mice, you say?
>x mice
They have paper nests, and water in bowls.>sketch mice
You sketch in a picture of the white mice.
Vitally important.
>n
Office
The small annexe where lab assistants prepare solutions, grow moulds and wash dishes used in the experiments. It is lined with bell jars and demijohns, all neatly labelled in flowing black handwriting. The laboratory lies to the south.One particular bell jar catches your eye: it’s full of spores of mould, and labelled “Penicillium”.
Penicillium, the mold from which penicillin is derived! The name comes from Latin penicillum “paintbrush”, which is the diminutive of peniculus “brush”, which is the diminutive of penis “tail”. The latter word was borrowed into English on its own, but penicillum was also borrowed as “pencil” via French (note that French pinceau still means “paintbrush”). Totally unrelated to “pen”, which comes from the Latin word for “feather” (since quill pens were made out of feathers).
I’m not sure why the fungus is called that. Probably because it makes things fuzzy like a paintbrush?
Ahem. Anyway.
>open bell jar
You lift the lid, begin sneezing convulsively as the spores get into your breathing, and hastily replace it again. No wonder they use this for asthma experiments.
So if we lift the lid, we can infect something with penicillium spores? Interesting.
Let’s check out the other lab. (The staircase now says “There are doors at top and bottom of the stairs, closed and open.” which is a nice bit of procedural text—that’s much more annoying to do pre-I7.)
>u
Fleming’s Laboratory
This laboratory can only be described as untidy. It is a shambles of equipment, notebooks and microscopes. Innumerable test tubes, sealed with swabs of cotton wool, crowd racks which lie on every available shelf. On one wall is a framed certificate.The light is dim, coming from tightly-shut windows over the benches, which face onto arched opaque windows of the terraced houses on the other side of Praed Street.
Scattered over a work-bench are forty or fifty Petri dishes.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
So this is indeed the lab of Sir Alexander Fleming, though I’m not sure if he was “sir” yet at this point. While he was on vacation from his work at Saint Mary’s Hospital, one of his Staphylococcus cultures (the same bacterium that causes MRSA) accidentally got contaminated with penicillium spores. When he was about to throw it away he realized the penicillium seemed to be repelling the bacteria, and thus there must be some substance in the penicillium that killed them—which could be useful in fighting bacterial infections.
After a solid decade of work, he and his colleagues at Oxford managed to isolate enough of this “penicillin” to actually test on animals, and antibiotics were born! Fleming insisted that Florey and Chain at Oxford deserved most of the credit for actually turning penicillin into something useful, but all three of them got the Nobel Prize for “the single greatest victory ever achieved over disease”.
I’m not sure what, if anything, Black has done here—I don’t see any signs of their presence—but infecting some of Fleming’s petri dishes seems like a much more positive contribution to history than assassinating Franz Ferdinand!
>x dishes
On the bench are sealed flat glass dishes about three inches across, filled with agar jelly, a substance made of seaweed used for growing cultures of bacteria. Usually these are just dumped in a lysol bath for a while to kill off anything dangerous inside, and then washed up to be reused. There are so many dishes that the surface of the desk is hardly visible.>get dishes
There are too many dishes, and besides they may contain dangerous pathogens.
And we can’t take just one either (“you can’t see any such thing”).
Alexander Fleming, a tall Scotsman in his late forties, strides confidently in and puts down a suitcase. As you hastily hide behind a cupboard, he looks around for something, fails to find it and leaves again.
Oh no. I think we just wrecked history.
The KD says we have one piece left to find here, so let’s look for it while we brainstorm. I thought we might be able to put something in the bell jar to cover it in spores, then go wave it over the petri dishes, but “that can’t contain things”. There’s some cotton wool mentioned in Fleming’s lab that could be useful for this, but “that’s not something you need to refer to in the course of this game”.
Fleming keeps coming in and out while we ransack his lab, so maybe we have more chances to infect his petri dishes. We can push the suitcase east into the staircase, but not down the stairs. If we try to leave these four rooms, we get a nice little refusal:
>s
It would be all too easy to get lost in the maze of hospital, and anyway you have the feeling that history lies nearby.
So, this is where I’ll leave things for now. Any ideas for how to set history on its proper course? Going back to the Monument doesn’t wreck anything yet, so we might still have time!
Save file (at the start of this place), transcript, and map:
a1.sav (1.7 KB)
06.txt (13.3 KB)
