Let's Play: Jigsaw

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And as soon as I posted this, inspiration struck.

> search dishes
Glancing through the piles of dishes, you come across one with a (rather revolting) circular pattern of mould.

Ugh. I’m glad the need to SEARCH everything has generally faded with time. We can also LOOK UNDER the bench but only find “plate after plate of yellowish jelly and staphylococci”.

So let’s give this another shot!

>x mould
It seems to have been contaminated by a spore of mould, because a circular colony of mould has grown across the surface of the agar. Interestingly, near the edge of the mould, the bacteria seem to have gone, leaving only a faint ghost image.

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Oh, so we don’t even need to infect the plate ourselves—just draw Fleming’s attention to it? That’s certainly a fairer puzzle, in that it doesn’t require you to know how penicillin was discovered in the first place!

But you still need to know to SEARCH BENCH and find the one dish, so…still not very fair if you don’t know that. Nelson’s games are (in)famous for expecting a certain level of erudition from their players, and while I can translate Latin quotes and know a bit about the history of medicine, I think I’m going to be horribly lost when the puzzles depend on knowing Proust.

Anyway, let’s put it on Fleming’s suitcase where he’ll have to notice it, and…

Fleming comes in again, and you hide once more. His eye is caught by the mouldy dish on top of his suitcase. Tutting with exasperation, he tosses it aside without looking at it, and is about to move the trunk when he thinks of something and wanders back out.

Oh.

Well, what if we…

>push suitcase east

So now it’s in the staircase instead?

Fleming comes along, mildly surprised to find that he accidentally left his suitcase out on the landing. As he begins pushing the trunk into his laboratory, he can’t help noticing the mouldy dish on the top. “That’s funny,” he exclaims, forgetting the trunk and striding away with the dish to show a colleague.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]

The now-famous quotation! In the words of Isaac Asimov, The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny…”

There’s no way I would have gotten that if I hadn’t been shoving the suitcase around in my previous unsuccessful explorations.

This is when the time-window opens, but we still have a puzzle piece to find! Since objects are scarce in this game, a bit of brute force looking for things to interact with reveals one single piece of scenery that’s implemented as its own object:

…On one wall is a framed certificate.

>x certificate
Mounted on a grey board, it certifies Alexander Fleming’s distinguished record as a surgeon in the Great War.

A grey board, you say?

>take certificate
You peel away the certificate, and the grey board it was mounted on falls to the floor. Another jigsaw piece!

Sometimes, brute force really is the answer!

We missed our opportunity to go to the Land, but we do still have the clock, so…

>set clock to 1
You shorten the time left on the clock.

>z
Time passes.

From inside the rucksack, the ormolu clock makes a rustle-click.

Oh right. We turned it off.

>turn on alarm
The latch on the clock is now on.

>set clock to 1
You shorten the time left on the clock.

And now we get taken back to the monument. This piece goes at c3, and lights up with “a racing steam train”.

          1            2            3            4
   +----------------------------------------------------+
   |.............                          ooooooooooooo|
 a |.   Mould                                  Park    o|
   |......o......                          oooooo oooooo|
   |ooooooooooooo                                       |
 b |o  Invalid                                          |
   |oooooo.oooooo                   .                   |
   |.............oooooo oooooo.............             |
 c |.   Glass   .. Carriage  oo   Train   ..            |
   |.............ooooooooooooo.............             |
   |      .            o            .                   |
 d |                                                    |
   |                                                    |
   +----------------------------------------------------+

So now we’ve got another option: Proust or train? I know a lot more about trains than I do about Proust, so my vote’s for that one, but we will have to face b1 eventually.

Before we go, also:

[ Footnote a1: ]

Sir Alexander Fleming deserves some of the credit for discovering penicillin: for untidiness, habitual good observation and enormous luck. A petri dish he left in the lab while on holiday in 1928 became contaminated by spores of penicillium, a mould common in most London gardens. (Fleming’s highly unreliable official biography claims - as he did - that this blew in through the windows, but actually it was due to sloppy conditions at St Mary’s.) The freak combination that year of a cold spell followed by warmth was the only possible way the mould could have killed the bacteria.

In fact, John Tyndall had noticed this property in 1875: but Fleming identified a chemical cause, and investigated. He collected moulds from everything and everyone he met for a while (even in the Chelsea Art Club, of which he was a keen member).

Fleming’s laboratory has been restored and is now open to the public.

Having made the medical breakthrough of the century, he lost interest. He decided it was unstable and useless, inexplicably missed the obvious experiments and largely forgot the matter. Not until 1940 did the brilliant work of Chain and Florey lead to medical triumph. The three men shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.

My understanding is that Fleming did experiment with penicillium for several years and present several papers on it, but wasn’t able to isolate enough penicillin to do specific chemical experiments on it until his collaboration with Chain and Florey. But then again, I’m not a historian.

New transcript and save:
06b.txt (10.8 KB)
06.sav (1.7 KB)

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The famous question: Proust or train?

  • Moustachioed invalid
  • Racing steam train

0 voters

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I vote Proust. :slight_smile: I’ve read In Search of Lost Time, so maybe I can help with any references, although honestly I doubt it’ll be anything too obscure. Probably the madeleine or Vinteuil’s little phrase or something iconic.

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Nice work discovering antibiotics! After the complex timing shenanigans of the Titanic and the downbeat Sarajevo chapter, this one seemed relatively straightforward and feel-good.

Yeah, this is strange! Does mean my assumption that our itinerary was going to be about finding places Black was trying to change history for the better seems to have been wrong, so that list of candidates is seeming increasingly iffy.

Yeah, if I know a game is going to use SEARCH I’m generally OK about it, but I usually don’t default to that unless it’s in the ABOUT text. And then in a long game I sometimes forget about it halfway through.

So you solved the puzzle fortuitously, in other words? How appropriate!

Hmm, interesting! Trying to think of a major 20th Century event involving a fast-moving train – I can think of several 19th Century ones easily enough but this is harder. There was a good amount of significant antitrust legislation championed by Teddy Roosevelt that took aim at the big railroads, but that doesn’t seem the kind of thing that’s easily IFable (or likely to loom large on Graham Nelson’s radar screen).

Ditto!

Yeah given we’ve got REARRANGE DECK CHAIRS and ASSASSINATE FRANZ FERDINAND, it feels like we’ve gotta be headed to TASTE MADELEINE (or at least GIVE MADELEINE TO PROUST).

EDIT: this is another one where I’ll be fronting, I read Swann’s Way like 20 years ago, and then I was going to make 2021 the Summer of Finally Finishing In Search of Lost Time, but instead it was the Summer of Frantically Getting Ready to Have a Baby. So glad kaemi is here to keep us on track!

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Well, the score is currently 2 to 2, so here’s a little hint of what a2 will involve. This is how far I’ve gotten before getting stuck.

Chapter Four - Temps Perdu

Rue Hamelin
A quiet, narrow and gloomy Parisian street, running south downhill to the Seine and north uphill to the Avenue Kleber. It is the dead of night, though the air is warm. Despite the seedy look, the brass name-plates on the door belong to the minor nobility.

Inexplicably, your attention is drawn to the closed door of number 44.

From that title, I think this will indeed be Proust. The device says we’re in 1922.

>x 44
You can’t see any such thing.

>x door
You see nothing special about the street door.

>open door
You open the street door.

>in

44, Rue Hamelin
A dark, high-ceilinged entrance foyer, adding to the seedy atmosphere of gloom. A broad staircase is barred by locked doors, but there is a metal cage-lift shaft. On one side is a glass window to the concierge’s office, which is dark and silent. A door to the west leads out to the street.

The cage lift stands open at this floor.

A handsome uniformed boy politely does not stare at you.

>u
The staircase is inaccessible.

>enter lift
You get into the cage lift.

>boy, up
The lift boy looks humbly about him, taking no notice, but somehow ignoring you in an exceedingly obsequious fashion.

>u
The lift machinery is complicated, which is no doubt why the management has provided an attendant boy.

Kaemi, Mike, how are you feeling about this one? I know practically nothing about…well, any of this.

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Is there anything to do outside in the streets of Paris, or is the elevator-cage the only way to go?

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Good thought! We can go north to “Avenue Kleber” or south to “The Seine”, both with items to take, and going further from “Avenue Kleber” brings us to “a warren of twisty little Parisian streets, all alike”.

Which means I’m going to need to give this more thought before throwing the puzzles back to you lot.

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There’s a bit about a boy operating a lift in the Balbec hotel who doesn’t speak in Volume 2 I think. This evening I’ll try to go back and look, if you’re still stuck by then.

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Hmm, well, 1922 puts us at Proust’s death – he isn’t just going through one of his regular bouts of (perhaps hypochondriac?) illness. The last couple volumes of A La Recherche… were published posthumously, based on his various notes and such. So maybe the task here is to preserve those materials?

Puzzle-wise, maybe BOY, OPERATE/PUSH MACHINERY might work? We could try to engage him in conversation, too. I also wonder whether there’s anything to be seen in the concierge office window.

EDIT:

Zut alors!

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Update: My sister says she’s never read Proust, but knows some basic things about his work for quiz bowl purposes: according to a famous quip, you’ve reached middle age when you accept that you’re never going to read In Search of Lost Time. The main cues she’d look for in quiz bowl are involuntary remembrances, a tea-soaked madeline, “Swann’s Way”, and Reynaldo Hahn (Proust’s lover). Which probably won’t be much help here—I’ll be relying on you all even more!

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If I’m going to be relying on you for the puzzles, though, we’ll need some information about what’s going on. So let’s explore a bit! The KD tells us there are two pieces to be found here, and my notes say there are no new animals to sketch.

Chapter Four - Temps Perdu

Rue Hamelin
A quiet, narrow and gloomy Parisian street, running south downhill to the Seine and north uphill to the Avenue Kleber. It is the dead of night, though the air is warm. Despite the seedy look, the brass name-plates on the door belong to the minor nobility.

Inexplicably, your attention is drawn to the closed door of number 44.

Here’s our starting point. We can go north or south from here.

>s

The Seine
Paris in the spring time… the blossom scent on the trees, the last strollers along the banks to the west and in the Trocadero across the river, the great skeletal A of the Eiffel Tower… You inhale the scents of night, and sneeze with hay fever.

A small coin lies among the fallen blossom.

Maybe we can tip the lift attendant with this?

>get coin
You sneeze convulsively as you stoop for the coin, but with great physical dexterity recover your footing just in time. The coin remains mockingly in view.

>s
You are overcome with asthmatic coughing, and find that you’ve made no progress.

This happens for most directions, except:

>w

Maison du The
In other words, a rather dark and gloomy tea-shop beside the river, to which none of the lustre of Paris has attached. The river bank runs east.

A tall grandfather clock stands immobile behind the counter.

In one corner is a bowl of jasmine tea nobody seems to have noticed.

Tea for dipping madelines in, perhaps? The staff stops us from taking it, but we could probably do a surreptitious cake-dipping without them noticing. The clock has stopped, but the staff also won’t let us meddle with it.

Let’s go back to the Rue Hamelin, and…

>n

Avenue Kleber
This is one of the avenues meeting at the Arc de Triomphe, and at this time of night carriages still hurtle down the cobbles, their sprung wheels sparking off the stone, horses steaming in the warm air.

A slightly damp “Le Figaro” lies in the gutter, occasionally puffed up by wind.

>get figaro
Taken.

>read it
“Le Figaro” for May 18th, 1922. In the studied, literary style of French newspapers, it carries critiques of Poincare’s hard-line policy on German reparations, and there is a frisson of excitement over the serialisation of the latest volume of “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu”.

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, huh? People sure seem to like that one.

Any direction (except south) from here takes us to…

Paris by Night
You are in a warren of twisty little Parisian streets, all alike, which strike out in all directions.

An ageing aristocrat, with rouged cheeks, hurries by on some disreputable business to the northeast.

And any direction from here either takes us back to the Avenue Kleber, or deeper into the “warren”.

Every description here mentions someone hurrying in a specific direction, though:

An ageing aristocrat, with rouged cheeks, hurries by on some disreputable business to the west.

A carriage swings into view, and you just glimpse a dark lady within, talking to someone who looks suspiciously familiar - Black? - before it pulls through to the southwest.

A little band of girls in Breton jerseys skips by, playing some complicated game and chattering about Racine, before chasing each other away northwest.

Which seems to be emphasizing that direction. If we follow them, we eventually reach…

>w

Paris by Night
You are in a warren of twisty little Parisian streets, all alike, which strike out in all directions.

A green flask of absinthe sits abandoned on a doorstep.

This room is different! Even though the streets “strike out in all directions”, we’ll occasionally get “You can’t go that way.” messages. But random wandering eventually takes us back to the Avenue Kleber, absinthe in hand.

Back to the Rue Hamelin, and…

>e

44, Rue Hamelin
A dark, high-ceilinged entrance foyer, adding to the seedy atmosphere of gloom. A broad staircase is barred by locked doors, but there is a metal cage-lift shaft. On one side is a glass window to the concierge’s office, which is dark and silent. A door to the west leads out to the street.

The cage lift stands open at this floor.

A handsome uniformed boy politely does not stare at you.

Only the lift and the attendant seem to be implemented:

>x window
That’s not something you need to refer to in the course of this game.

So I suspect we need to get that coin to pay the attendant with, and the process may involve dipping a madeline in some tea, and/or driving the staff away so we can fiddle with the clock. What we do next is up to you!

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I recommend drinking the beverage.Being in Paris during the roaring twenties you should try the real stuff.

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The little band is a reference to Albertine and her friends, one of whom writes a fictitious letter from Sophocles to Racine. The suspicious aristocrat is a reference to Baron de Charlus. Both are probably throwaway references that won’t show up in the puzzles.

I’ll post the lift-boy scenes later, but I would be surprised if they were actually instrumental in solving the puzzle. I imagine you probably can solve it just IFing around.

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I admit, I’m not actually sure what absinthe tastes like—my one and only memory of it is extremely blurry thanks to drinking way too much and having a horribly embarrassing meltdown in front of my then-partners. Since then I’ve stayed away from the stuff.

But I am very curious what’s different about “the real stuff”. Did it actually make people hallucinate, or was that just an exaggeration by the prohibitionists?

>drink absinthe
You sway dizzily under the impact. No wonder it’s banned these days. As you blink open your eyes, you’re startled to find yourself…

Hallucinating
A hazy, purple vision of a fashionable soiree, where ladies sweep by in jewelled dresses and gentlemen stand puffing cigars, their top hats resting by their feet. A few musicians are ploughing through Debussy’s string quartet, and the walls contain sculpture and impressionist paintings, so it must be very avant-garde.

Black is also here, wearing that mocking smile, standing elegantly by the side of the Louis XIV dance floor.

Open this in another tab to get in the right mood.

Oh hello there!

>black, hello
Your tongue is furred up.

You look just ravishing tonight!

>x black
You can’t help feeling there’s something more chic to do instead.

I can tell you firsthand that absinthe does not make you especially good at dancing, but we might as well give it a shot. Maybe a Louis XIV dance floor will be more helpful than a gay club.

>dance with black
You sway woozily around the dance floor, only just able to stand and held up mainly by Black. Although it’s obvious to you how your brilliant conversation sparkles, somehow you suspect that Black doesn’t see it that way.

One particularly thorough lurch later, the purple haze returns…

Avenue Kleber
This is one of the avenues meeting at the Arc de Triomphe, and at this time of night carriages still hurtle down the cobbles, their sprung wheels sparking off the stone, horses steaming in the warm air.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]

Yeah, that sounds about right. Except with a bit more hysterical crying and screaming and scaring everyone else.

Sorry, Black.

We don’t have anything new in our inventory, as far as I can tell, and I’m not sure if anything changed here. We still can’t take the coin, the staff is still watching the tea shop, and we are still frustratingly madeline-less. But we do have a new map!

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I looked up this address, for folks who know Paris – it’s about halfway between the Arc de Triomphe and the Trocadero Gardens (which are of course right across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower).

(Speaking of, I am resisting the urge to try to TAKE THE TOWER).

Hmm, are the blossoms implemented as an object? I wonder whether we can try to push them aside (though my best guess would be that we would put a handkerchief over our face or something).

This seems right to me. That clock sure is suspicious, though – I wonder if it might conceal one of our puzzle pieces?

Ah, very cool!

IIRC, there were various prohibitions on manufacturing absinthe that meant it wasn’t easily available in the U.S. until the late 90s; I had some college friends who counted hallucinogens among their hobbies, and they were excited to try some, but were disappointed when upon experimentation and research, it turned out that yeah, this appears to have just been kids-these-days propaganda. I tried a little once, but remember it as tasting like an herbal sort of liqueur, sorta like Chartreuse; maybe a little strong but nothing too overwhelming.

Yup, checks out with my memory of when the deregulation happened!

Hmm, wonder if that’s helpful or a just-for-the-experience sort of thing. Is any of the ballroom scenery examinable?

Actually, would you mind posting the inventory? I’ve kind of lost track of what we’ve got. Like, do we still have the absinthe, or the empty bottle? Other than that, given the importance of scent and taste to Proust, I wonder if we should be SMELLING more stuff? The floral aroma of the tea might fortify us against the blossoms, perhaps, or smelling them directly might set off a sneezing fit where we kick the coin away (actually, can we just kick the coin away?)

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Disappointing, frankly:

>smell tea
You smell nothing unexpected.

>taste tea
You taste nothing unexpected.

>e

The Seine
Paris in the spring time… the blossom scent on the trees, the last strollers along the banks to the west and in the Trocadero across the river, the great skeletal A of the Eiffel Tower… You inhale the scents of night, and sneeze with hay fever.

>smell blossoms
You can’t see any such thing.

>smell blossom
You can’t see any such thing.

>smell
You smell nothing unexpected.

>taste
What do you want to taste?

>kick coin
Violence isn’t the answer to this one.

No, violence is only the answer in 1914 it seems!

>take tower
You can’t see any such thing.

I’m going to try to reproduce the formatting here, since the forum gets rid of initial spaces.

>i
You are carrying:

a franc coin
Le Figaro
a Sixth Officer’s jacket (being worn)
a White Star Line scribbled-on towel
Black’s Kaldecki detector
a second note from Black
a canvas rucksack (which is open)

a first aid box (which is closed)
the 1911 Boy’s Book of the Sea
a curious device
the Victorian ormolu clock
Emily’s sketch book
a charcoal pencil
two keys:

a elegant key
a tagged key

a folded note
a white party ticket

a sparkler (providing light)

Wait, what? A franc coin? When did we get that??

Huh, apparently we managed to pick it up after the absinthe, and I didn’t recognize it at the time:

>get coin
You stoop down for the coin, still swaying unevenly on your feet after the absinthe, then collapse forward all over the pavement. At least you manage to salvage the coin if not your dignity.

Well then!

>give coin to boy
The lift boy takes the coin with a sly grin and steps into the lift. You feel so overcome with lachrymose gratitude that you give him a hug - no doubt absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.

Fortunately he is too professional to take any notice.

Puzzle solved!

>boy, up
The boy whistles the Marseillaise cheerfully as the lift gracefully ascends a floor.

First Floor Landing (in the cage lift)
A carpeted landing, bare and uninteresting.

A handsome uniformed boy politely does not stare at you.

Oh. Wait.

Which floor did Proust live on? This building has nine floors!

Sigh. I guess it’s time for some more brute force. The eighth floor has a puzzle piece lying on the ground (which we nab), and the fifth has a door that’s ajar. None of the others have anything we can interact with.

>e

Fifth Floor Flat
A claustrophobic apartment, almost bare of furniture, but piled with heaps of paper, typescripts, manuscripts, cuttings from newspapers, scribbled notes and old coffee bowls. There is a brass fur-topped bed beside a bamboo table, and a single electric ring surrounded by milk-stains. The windows are jammed shut and the air is almost fetid.

A party invitation is propped up beside the electric ring.

A grey square tea tray is perched on the coffee table, amongst the debris.

A stale madeleine completes the shambles.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]

This seems very straightforward. Are we done here already?

>get tray
(putting the second note from Black into the canvas rucksack to make room)
As you pull at it, manuscripts riffle through the air, floating side to side: corrections and extensions have been glued onto proofs, handwritten notes abound, and the text of what is to become the most influential novel of the twentieth century is all over the place, curled into “paperoles”, falling around the furniture, coming to rest.

Interestingly, the tea tray turns out to have been an edge jigsaw piece.

Oh, and by the way, the windows burst open, so that before you managed to shut them again a crucial passage escaped into the night air.

Of course not. We also have to take the piece again now to actually get it, and we can grab an invitation and a madeleine too:

A handwritten card invitation to a party, in flowing French, full of the names of great French families. There seems to be some reference to a supper party at which M. Proust (to whom the invitation is addressed) is to meet Stravinsky, Diaghilev and James Joyce.

A madeleine is a small rich shell-shaped cake, probably named after Madeleine Paulmier, the 19th century French cook.

And now I suppose we’ll have to go track down that manuscript and make sure Proust’s last writings aren’t lost to time.

Before I close out this session, I’d like to go dip that madeleine in some tea.

>eat madeleine
You nibble at a corner of the madeleine, but it is both stale and dry.

>dip madeleine in tea
You dip the madeleine into the tea, in good French fashion.

>eat madeleine
The first taste of the madeleine dipped in tea instantly transports you back, in a flood of involuntary memory, to…

Your First School
You are seven or eight years old, and you have squirreled yourself away to a secret corridor behind the hall to see the Clock. The ceiling is far above, the windows are too high for you, the aroma of school dinners drifts in from the kitchens.

The Clock stands before you, huge and lustrous. The pendulum is still: surrounding it, lead counter-weights hang like fir-cones. It is as if the school day will never end, and no bell will sound.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]

Oh my!

>push pendulum
You reach up, doubtfully, afraid to touch, but that doesn’t quite seem right, and the Clock stares impassively down at you.

>pull weight
You reach up, doubtfully, afraid to touch, but that doesn’t quite seem right, and the Clock stares impassively down at you.

Hmm. This seems like a good place to leave off again. What does this all mean, and what should we do here?

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I have to say, I really appreciate you doing this; k love Graham Nelson games but jigsaw always gives me decision paralysis and I resort to a walkthrough right away. I never went to the land before the endgame or used the device or anything. It’s like seeing a whole new part of the game. Thanks so much!

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Hah, I will count this as a win, since I did solve the puzzle, albeit by the one suggestion that I didn’t think would solve the puzzle! (I guess my theory that we could get the coin if we were somehow impaired wasn’t completely off?)

Boo hiss.

Yeah I’m in serious (citation needed) mode here – again, this is maybe a blinkered perspective but it’s hard for me to think of a single passage in the last couple volumes of A La Recherche that’s so influential that history would change for its lack. Leaving aside my point last time that Modernism and radical subjectivity was a whole thing that didn’t depend just on Proust to be expressed and influential, as someone who’s read a fair number of the big 20th Century novels and some literary criticism, I’ve seen a fair bit derived from or mentioning the early episodes but the back half of the novel is pretty rarely invoked these days. Curious if @kaemi has a candidate for what this could be, though (I wonder if we’ll be able to read the passage once we – hopefully – find it again).

Oh, okay! I dimly remember Marcel being bored at school in Swann’s Way, but likewise curious whether this is riffing off a particular incident. Seems like you’re on the right track to get the pendulum moving since seems like time is stopped until then… Do we have our inventory here? And can we OPEN the clock or LOOK BEHIND it or anything like that to see if there’s a winding-key to get it going?

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This one I can’t fault him for because I would absolutely make that joke.

Yeah, I’d written a snarky little bit about how I didn’t think one passage from the unpublished-during-his-lifetime writings would save history, but maybe I just didn’t have the right level of education to play this part—but it came off a lot more mean-spirited than the rest of this thread so I cut it.

It is interesting seeing the mix of turning points here; so far we’ve had a political flashpoint, a scientific breakthrough, and now it sounds like an artistic movement, plus whatever was going on on the Titanic. But Nelson does seem to esteem Proust a lot more than anyone else I’ve spoken to about it.

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I looked up the book because I haven’t read it (I like fantasy/horror/sci fi/mystery more than literature) and apparently the last three books were published post Mortem and were incompletely edited anyway. Wikipedia said that one draft of the seventh book was found after it was published and he had shortened it by 150 pages.

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