I still think that BUELY might be something a bit less physical-object-y, like “heartbeat” or “breathing” or something. Neither of those quite fit with it being plural (you could do “heartbeats” or “breaths” but that wouldn’t be idiomatic English), but they both can be made to fit with the “ISKOLEB of your own BUELY” sentence in ways that I can’t manage for “eyes.”
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That would make ISKOLEB something like sound or rhythm or beat?
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, something along the lines of “filling your head with the sound of your own heartbeat,” although that doesn’t really seem very solid.
ISKOLEB probably needs to be an uncountable noun, since it has neither article nor plural marker. But if you want BUELY=“ears”, what is ALL? Silence? I can’t make that fit with how it’s used elsewhere.
The ALL has been bothering me for a long time.
Here’s a rundown of the useful appearances of ALL:
REMOVE TAKE ALL
(from the FALOK)
You take the TAKE out of the FALOK.
FENCE TAKE
FREZY ALL DARGIL from the TAKE. The PAINT LEID of flame NATOR and CLAIZ, and then EIMAR to CARHIMI smoke.
X MACHINERY
On the door you see a SWIM, a small switch, a red LOOK, a PACKAGE LOOK, a BOOK (covered by metal bars), a SLEEP ALL, and a large wheel.
TOY SLEEP
(with the TAKE ALL)
The TAKE ALL LOOK in the SLEEP with a TLAC.
it howls out a spell which SITIN like ALL ZAOKNEB.
ALL SITITIN and LAMB around you, MEFALO your VOLT with ISKOLEB of your own BUELY.
What can we conclude?
- the TAKE is the primary noun of the TAKE ALL. Both the game and player refer to the TAKE individually without the ALL.
- ALL is almost certainly a fluid, gas, granular media, or similar substance. The ALL comes out of the TAKE (as FREZY, which surely refers to a quantity of ALL) and turns fire to smoke. It also is capable of surrounding you when conjured by the dragon.
- the TAKE remains a TAKE ALL even after it’s been used on the fire. So either there is some ALL remaining in the TAKE, or the TAKE is so tightly associated with ALL (like a “gas can” for example) that it does not become a generic TAKE when empty.
The SLEEP ALL is quite mysterious. Notice that it’s not a “SLEEP TAKE” or a “SLEEP for ALL” or a “SLEEP YCLE ‘ALL’” or anything like that, and that interacting with the SLEEP is the last step to opening the door. A few possibilities come to mind:
- the ALL could be what’s important to opening the door, with the TAKE an incidental delivery mechanism. In other words, the ALL could be a power source, or lubricant, for the door, with the SLEEP ALL some mechanism that’s obviously associated with ALL without needing any labels (such as funnel, e.g.).
- the TAKE could be what’s important to opening the door (serving as some kind of key), with the ALL cluing the fact that the TAKE needs to be inserted into the SLEEP (for example, because both the TAKE and the SLEEP are made of the same substance).
Neither possibility is very satisfying. A notable puzzle in So Far excepted, usually water is not used to open doors. An oil- or gasoline-powered door is a possibility, but then I’d expect more than a TLAC to indicate that a motor has started running. Lubricating the door is also plausible, but in that case I’d expect the player to pour oil onto rusty hinges for example; it’s weird for the door to have a dedicated receptacle for lubricant.
The TOY SLEEP message suggests that the TAKE fits snugly in the SLEEP; so that the SLEEP is more like a slot or receptacle specifically designed to accept the TAKE, rather than a funnel or hole for pouring ALL. But that just underlines the question of why the SLEEP is so closely associated with ALL (without being labeled) and not TAKE.
So if I had to guess, I’d still guess that the ALL is water; containers of water are ubiquitous in dungeon crawlers, water puts out fire with lots of smoke, and a water spell that floods a cavern is a plausible magical attack. But I’m far from satisfied with that guess.
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It’s also notable that the word ALL is used to modify containers directly, without an “of” in between. This strengthens the idea that the TAKE is tightly associated with ALL in its overall form and function, not just an incidental container: a water bottle, oil can, gas can, or sand bag is specifically designed to hold that thing, as opposed to a bucket of water/oil/gas/sand.
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My main problem with ALL meaning “water” is that I can’t come up with a plausible translation for “MEFALO your VOLT with ISKOLEB of your own BUELY”. It’s also off-brand for a dragon which lives in a smoke-choked cavern and attacks us by casting fire spells, but it’s the lack of an interpretation of that former sentence that feels like the deal-breaker to me.
I’m still tempted by the possibility that the TAKE ALL is a magic wand. I think ALL=“magic” can plausibly fit in all of those occurrences. But the part I can’t reconcile with that is: what could TOY SLEEP mean, that leads the parser to infer “(with the TAKE ALL)”? I could buy the door having a magic lock that needs the wand to be inserted into a niche in order to unlock it, but you wouldn’t type FILL NICHE and expect the game to guess you meant to put the wand in there.
Just realised: we have TOKEN=“filled” from the Introductory paragraph. How plausible is it that TOY is another form of the same verb?
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Looking through the Inform 6 standard library verbs, the only ones that (imo) you could use on a device and have an inventory item automatically chosen for the task are LOCK/UNLOCK, PUSH/PULL/TURN, ATTACK/CUT, BURN, DIG, and FILL. Out of those, the only one that lends itself to a container is FILL. (But of course, a magic wand isn’t a container.)
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Another possible clue to the TAKE’s identity: the TAKE ALL LOOK in(to?) the SLEEP with a “tlac”. But also, there are a red LOOK and a PACKAGE LOOK as part of the device. So we need a word that can be both a verb (describing position or movement) and a noun (describing a part of the control panel, small enough that there are two distinguished by color).
We also know that you can either READ or SHIP a LOOK—perhaps it’s a slide, which you can push and pull?
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I was thinking “stick” earlier for LOOK. But yeah it’s not easy to find a word that serves as both the noun and verb here.
I agree with TOY = “fill.”
ALL being magic: yes, that is a possibility. I am not sure what the SLEEP ALL would be (would a slot for a wand be obviously “magic” itself?) but magic fits the other locations.
Looking at the mechanisms in general:
- There’s a SWIM, which you can FISH.
- There’s a DRINK (switch), which you can DRINK (switch).
- There are two LOOKY, one UP (red) and the other PACKAGE, which you can either READ or SHIP.
- There’s a BOWL, which you can PRESENT VLOP or PRESENT DROP, causing it to PRESENT a VOR-twist to the VLOP or DROP.
- There’s a BOOK, which you can DRESS (press).
- There’s a SLEEP ALL, which you can TOY with the TAKE ALL, causing you to LOOK the TAKE into the SLEEP.
I propose that these are:
- ???
- A switch, which you can switch (this one’s already accepted)
- Two slides, one red and the other (unknown color), which you can either push or pull
- A wheel, which you can turn right or turn left, causing it to turn a half-twist to the right or left
- A button, which you can press
- A ???, which you can fill with the TAKE ALL, causing you to slide the TAKE into it.
The relevant I6 verbs for messing with machinery (intransitively) are LOCK, UNLOCK, SWITCH, OPEN, CLOSE, TOUCH, PUSH, PULL, WAVE, TURN, RUB, SET, and SQUEEZE. None of these is an obvious candidate for FISH.
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In a slightly more scientifically advanced setting, “touch” could be a plausible candidate for FISH, but I don’t picture the machinery on the door as being so refined as to be touch-sensitive. Looking at your list, I wondered if there’s a different translation of LOOK which would work with READ and SHIP being “open” and “close”, but that doesn’t work because we already have SATRAG as “open”.
I had wondered if LOOK might be “lever”, which is slightly more of a stretch in the verb context (levering something out of something is fine; levering something into something is rarer) but less of a stretch in a noun context (“slide” is a pretty good fit but I still feel like “slider” would be more common).
Mostly unrelated: I realised that the hypothesis that ALL=“light” (which was suggested earlier, possibly by me?) doesn’t work because we can be pretty certain that FOIT=“light” from the inventory message.
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If ALL is magic, and TAKE ALL is a magic wand, wouldn’t SLEEP ALL be a magic spell which you can cast? Of course, I’m not sure why casting a spell would make you LOOK the wand into the spell, or why it would make a TLAC … so I guess I’m arguing that it isn’t magic 
I don’t think I follow: the SLEEP could be associated with magic without being a spell. (I do agree that the description of TOYing the SLEEP does sound more mechanical than magical, though!)
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Could the SLEEP ALL be a “magic lock” which is unlocked with a wand functioning like a key?
Also, regarding the technology level of the setting, perhaps we should keep in mind that a) a mix of magic and technology would not be out of place for a “classic text adventure” setting like Zork, and b) Red Hat Enterprise Linux canonically exists in this game.
This is the interpretation I’m most keen to make work. But that means that TOY SLEEP has to mean “unlock lock”, about which I have reservations:
- We previously speculated that TOY was “fill”, which fits with TOKEN RO SE ERIC in the intro being “filled to the top”. No-one commented on the suggestion that TOKEN could be a form of the same verb as TOY, but it looks plausible; meanwhile, if TOY is “unlock” then it resembles the unrelated TOKEN (“fill”) while having nothing in common with SLEEP (“lock”)
- It has to be sufficiently obvious that the wand is used to unlock the magic lock that typing >UNLOCK LOCK would allow the game to infer “(with the magic wand)”, whereas I’d be surprised to see this with anything that isn’t visibly a key
We don’t know this for certain; maybe in the world of Lighan ses Lion, the Red Hat corporation actually manufactures crimson headwear.
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Since we’re definitely at the point of speculation now:
The spell FONN in your mind like a GORONG. It is YCLE “Dance”.
YCLE brings to mind the archaic English word “yclept”, meaning “named” or “called” (past participle of “clepe”, which has died out except in this one form). Along with “hight” (meaning the same thing), it’s mainly associated with Shakespeare; here’s Love’s Labors Lost act 1 scene 1, for example.
[…] So much for the
time when. Now for the ground which—which, I
mean, I walked upon. It is yclept thy park.
The prefix y- to make past participles is otherwise extinct in English, but German-speakers will recognize it as the English equivalent to ge-, as in wissen “know” > gewusst “known”.
Since the normal way to make past participles in this language is -en, which is also used for other past participles in English (and German), it seems appropriate that the one word to preserve the archaic y- participle in English also uses an archaic y- prefix in Lionese. So I would translate this word as yclept, or called if one must insist on the banality of our modern age.
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On a separate topic, a score of 0 gives you the rank of LIGANI UCTOE, while a score of 4 gives you the rank of MAZRULI UCTOE. With no other attestations, we’ll have to guess at it.
What are the ranks in Zork?
<TELL "This gives you the rank of ">
<COND (<EQUAL? ,SCORE 350> <TELL "Master Adventurer">)
(<G? ,SCORE 330> <TELL "Wizard">)
(<G? ,SCORE 300> <TELL "Master">)
(<G? ,SCORE 200> <TELL "Adventurer">)
(<G? ,SCORE 100> <TELL "Junior Adventurer">)
(<G? ,SCORE 50> <TELL "Novice Adventurer">)
(<G? ,SCORE 25> <TELL "Amateur Adventurer">)
(T <TELL "Beginner">)>
<TELL "." CR>
I think adventurer is a fine guess for UCTOE.
LIGANI and MAZRULI are pretty clearly adjectives, even if they come before the noun; they both have the adjective-forming suffix -I. LIGANI presumably comes from LIGHAN “grab” (despite the disappearing H), making a beginner a grabby adventurer, while MAZRULI comes from the noun MAZRUL found in the victory text:
You make your way to the cave SNEEF, REVIRO about your KLIUNEN-TINT MAZRUL. Too bad Red Hat stock is in the pits lately.
I would venture that MAZRUL means victory, and thus after beating the game a MAZRULI UCTOE is a victorious adventurer. Given the name “Grab That Gold”, it’s possible that an UCTOE is supposed to be a thief instead, but there’s no way to know for sure, and adventurer feels more classic—they didn’t just grab the gold, after all, they bribed a dwarf, learned two magic spells, and fought a dragon!
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And speaking of spells, how exactly do we get them?
> LISTEN FOLKS DRAW
Everything looks WORNKI. You see a NEKKO spell in the DOROP of LEDE flame.
> SWORD SPELL
The spell FONN in your mind like a GORONG.
We’re doing something to a crystal DRAW that makes everything look WORNKI (which makes me think of English “wonky”). I suspect we’re gazing into a crystal ball: LISTEN FOLKS DRAW is something like gaze through sphere. The main alternative I can think of is a mirror, which makes everything look backwards, but a “crystal mirror” sounds odd compared to Zork 2’s “crystal sphere”. And Zork 2 also had a puzzle involving reading tiny words through a makeshift magnifier, which could make everything look enormous.
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What do you make of KLIUNEN-TINT? I was wondering if MAZRUL was “adventure” and KLIUNEN-TINT was something like “very first” (I would have said “first-time”, but we already know that “first-time” is TANT-MOOSE). But the similarity between TANT and TINT seems like it should be more than just a coincidence. Whereas with MAZRUL=“victory”, we’d probably guess that KLIUNEN-TINT=“hard-earned” or similar?
Ooh, I didn’t know there was a crystal sphere in Zork 2! That seems like a good candidate for DRAW SILEMI. Although if we want FOLKS to be “through” then I think we need yet another preposition for PONSE?
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