Good afternoon! Forgive me if this question is either obvious or has already been asked, but I’m a little stumped.
In the IF I’m working on on Inform 7, I’ve reached a particular scenario where the player is a bit of a matchmaker between chaarcters called Jeremy and Felicity. Felicity is not very openly fond of Jeremy, who asks the player to deliver a bouquet of wilting, unimpressive flowers to her. However through a series of other events, the player discovers that Felicity has a weakness for red roses. After finding red roses, the idea is to replace the boring flowers in the bouquet with the red roses, at which point Felicity drops an object needed to continue. This is fine, but it’s when it comes to the actually giving of the bouquet that I have trouble. This is what I have:
Instead of giving the bouquet to Felicity:
if the bunch of roses is in the bouquet,
say "Felicity looks at the beautiful roses for a moment in shock, but nevertheless takes them and holds them to her chest uncertainly, looking at you curiously.[paragraph break]Excited, Aisha leaps up at her mistress, trying to sniff the flowers, but in the process knocks a silver object out of Felicity's handbag. The woman, preoccupied by her canine friend, seems not to notice.";
move the bouquet to Felicity;
now the handbag is open;
move the silver object to the tearoom;
if the yellow flowers are in the bouquet,
say "You hold out the flowers to Felicity. She looks at them distastefully, glances at the label, and turns away.";
if there is nothing in the bouquet,
say "Felicity looks at the empty mess of crêpe in confusion, sighs angrily, and turns back to the window."
The problem is that even if the bouquet’s contents are unsatisfactory, it moves to Felicity and (although the text describing the silver object being dropped isn’t shown) the handbag opens and the silver object moves to the tearoom all the same.
I could avoid this by, on the other ‘if’ branches, commanding the silver object to return to the handbag and the handbag to close, but that seems unnecessarily long-winded. Is there a more efficient way of doing this?
Thank you in advance!