Another option might be “fumes”. “Toxic fumes” sounds right to me, but “fumes around” is a little less persuasive.
1 Like
I don’t have a better suggestion right now, but this smacks of something we’re missing to me: why put that word in the text (from the author’s perspective) if it’s mostly meaningless and doesn’t regret to anything one would actually be likely to find one a stock certificate?
(I don’t suppose there’s any way to find out easily what text would have appeared on a genuine Red Hat stock certificate issued circa 2000? We know that Zarf had some, after all.)
Do you think that LEID and LEDE are separate words, or is the variation in spelling an error? If NEID is “thin”, that makes SEAT LEID “thick flame” which isn’t a terribly common collocation. And LEID is also used as a verb, which would be “thicken”?
Not on an actual stock certificate, but in an old-school text adventure, “Congratulations!” on a treasure wouldn’t feel at all out of place.
1 Like
LEID and LEDE could well be different—as far as I can see the flame is described as LEDE until the Dance spell is cast, and LEID appears several times in the description of the spell’s effects and then is used to describe the flame a couple times after, and it does seem like something changed as a result of the spell. But are they related, or if not, is there some reason for the words to be so similar? That I don’t really have ideas about.
1 Like
Yeah, I’m not sure either.
We know from the ending library message that “ZAO GU-KOUNAM” must be “Do you want” or “Would you like” or something isomorphic. I’m fine with “Congratulations!” on the stock certificate, but I don’t really see any great fit.
Do you think that LEID and LEDE are separate words, or is the variation in spelling an error? If NEID is “thin”, that makes SEAT LEID “thick flame” which isn’t a terribly common collocation. And LEID is also used as a verb, which would be “thicken”?
I think NEID is either “thin” or a closely-related word; the player is trying to (verb?) the smoke around and it isn’t working.
LEID for “thick” is strange, agreed. If I were being very fanciful I might imagine the fire congealing somehow as a result of the magic spell, allowing our sword to cut or poke it successfully.
EDIT: Incidentally,
Your sword SPOIGH PONSE the LEID flame with a SNUVV THERE.
I’m mighty tempted to link POSE and PONSE as an antonym pair. In which case, our sword is SPOIGHing off of the flames somehow, for what it’s worth.
1 Like
I proposed PONSE=“off” a few hundred posts ago but the suggestion at the time was that “through” would be better. Now we think that “through” might be FOLKS, though, I’m not sure where that leaves us. It doesn’t make sense that a sword would bounce off the flames … could we be wrong about SEAT?
Tbh, I don’t think I’m really sold on the “wall of flame” idea. It seems like that section has been pretty stuck for a prolonged period, and the “wall of flame” interpretation has not been that conducive to decoding the rest of the surrounding context.
1 Like
Setting aside the wall sequence entirely:
The CORSET’s wounds RUBUC SEAT, the LERUL that we spread on our weapon starts SEATing when it hits the CORSET, and the CORSET casts a SEATI spell.
Can we think of anything other than fire that fits these three instances? Fire-adjacent substances like steam or smoke would work. At a stretch, maybe also SEAT/SEATO/SEATI = “light/glowing/bright”?
The SEATI spell is more of a shatter effect than immolation; is there a better adjective than “fiery” here?
2 Likes
‘Smoke’ would be appealing if we didn’t think that TURN = ‘smoke’. Setting the wall aside, I had a few half-thoughts about these three - but honestly nothing that works in more than one place.
EDIT: And we have (presumably) FOIT = “light”.
Now, another word I’m interested in at the moment is COURNE. There’s not that many words that could describe the bars, and TRIV/DEXINI are not found elsewhere, which complicates that.
lift/raise/lower/move/slide/shift/retract/release? But not ‘open’ or ‘swing’. Loose/loosen?
1 Like
ZAO COURNE E TRIV DEXINI = “You loose a swift blow” or similar? I could believe that. Although “the bars loosen” is less compelling than “the bars retract”. “You raise a swift assault” works from a linguistic point of view, but the tone is a little more elliptical than most of the other game text.
1 Like
“Release a mighty blow” also sounds possible to my ear.
This is another case where I’d be curious what a statistical language model puts in the blank.
1 Like
Here’s something I noticed a couple of days ago and hadn’t got round to posting, which might potentially unlock some progress if anyone can spot an appropriate word.
We currently have TOKEN=“filled” from the introduction (the treasure-caves are “TOKEN to the ERIC” with various valuables. Presumably, the base form of this verb is TOKE=“fill”. Given the language’s love of vowel changes to signify related or antonymous words, what does this suggest for TAKE?
2 Likes
I think that’s more evidence for the TAKE ALL being a container of ALL (i.e., something which can be TOKEd).
So, we have a tension here. TAKE is probably related to TOKE (“fill”), and there is plenty of contextual evidence in the transcript for the TAKE ALL being some sort of container.
On the other hand, SLEEP is probably related to SLE (“key”), and there is plenty of contextual evidence in the transcript for the SLEEP ALL being some sort of lock.
So what the heck is going on when we try to >TOY SLEEP and the parser infers “(with the TAKE ALL)”? What verb can you use on a lock/keyhole where the obvious indirect object is some sort of container? And can we find a workable translation for ALL which gels with both of the aforementioned as well?
2 Likes
>FENCE TAKE
Frezy all dargil out of the take. The paint leid of flame nator and claiz, and then eimar to carhimi smoke.
There’s got to be something here that tells us more about TAKE. I don’t necessarily think TAKE and TOKE are related- surely TAKE would be a verbal form, and TAKEN the adjective or participle?
I don’t want to get too far into totally hypothetical cleartext, but let’s just imagine for a moment that FENCE TAKE = ‘wave wand’. Then ‘ALL’ is some sort of attribute of the wand, the magic it apparently produces in the passage above, and the keyhole. If the TAKE ALL was a container, I think this makes less sense, because it would imply that ALL describes the container, whatever is contained in it and removed by FENCE TAKE, and the keyhole.
Do we have colors left? Is ALL just a color? Colored wand, colored magic fire, colored keyhole?
I’m still partial to the “water bottle” interpretation: water can pour out of a water bottle and turn fire into smoke, a water gauge could be part of strange machinery, and FILL GAUGE could easily assume the water bottle as the source. That feels a lot more plausible to me than UNLOCK KEYHOLE assuming a magic wand as the key, or something emerging from a magic key. (It does require reinterpreting some other things, though.)
Plus, both Adventure and Zork feature a water bottle as part of the initial supplies.
2 Likes
Granted, but we probably have ‘fill’ elsewhere and TOY appears only here.
We do, but it’s a hapax that could just as well be “loaded to the top” or “packed to the top” instead of “filled”. The fact that TOY infers a second noun doesn’t leave a lot of options for what it could be—I only really see (UN)LOCK, (UN)TIE, and FILL.
2 Likes
A water gauge is not unreasonable, but what bothers me is the way that the response is phrased:
The TAKE ALL LOOK in the SLEEP with a “tlac.”
Inferring “with the water bottle” from a “fill gauge” command makes sense, but then I would expect something like “You pour some water into the gauge”? The above response instead sounds a lot like it’s the mechanical interlocking of the TAKE into the SLEEP that’s important, and not the transfer of liquid.
3 Likes
Yes, the TAKE ALL remains a TAKE ALL after being FENCEd, and then the TAKE ALL as a whole is implied to interact with the SLEEP ALL - with the curious presence of LOOK, which also describes the red and green things on the machine. Slide?