Silly question about 'ask about [something]'

There must be a way to do this, but I’ve scoured the manual and I can’t for the life of me find it. It’s probably right under my nose.

I’m using Conversational Defaults by Eric Eve, and I want to say:

Default ask response for Jack: say "'Jack, what do you know about <<topic>>,' I ask him.[paragraph break]Jack shakes his head. 'Never heard of that, sorry.'"

where I put <> I’ve tried all sorts of things to reference the [something] that the player is asking about, but nothing seems to work.
[the noun] gives me ‘Jack’.
[the second noun] gives me ‘nothing’.
And everything else I’ve tried gives me an error.

I believe you need “[the topic understood]”. Does that work?

Ahh, that worked. Thanks :smiley:

No problem. :slight_smile:

“noun” and “second noun” must always be objects in the world, and a piece of text is not an object in the world. When you need text, “the topic understood” is generally what you need. Here is a relevant part of the manual about the “understood” grammar in general: inform7.com/learn/man/ex267.html.