Adventure Gamers - Forums

Pegbiter - 22 March 2021 08:33 AM

Karlok: Your current lack of an avatar reflects the fact that you’re currently playing a text adventure, am I right?

No. I removed my avatar and sig some time ago.

It’s a pity we can’t use the rifle to poke those bushes near the beach with. I still haven’t found a way to look behind them. And you people are catching up on me.

Karlok - 22 March 2021 08:25 AM

Do you want to know what happens if you hang around too long? Of course you do.

Thanks for the effort in giving us the most out of this game!

And for the Grand Inquisitor reference?

Pegbiter - 22 March 2021 08:51 AM

Sorry, I’m apparently a bit inattentive. I thought you used to change it to whatever you were playing.

I did. Maybe I will again one day.

TimovieMan - 22 March 2021 08:56 AM

Karlok - 22 March 2021 08:25 AM

Do you want to know what happens if you hang around too long? Of course you do.

Thanks for the effort in giving us the most out of this game!

And for the Grand Inquisitor reference?

Want some rye? Of course you do. That’s from Return to Zork, I think.

>e

Tall Street (jammed into the car)
We are jammed into the car with our knees almost at our chin, looking out through the bulbous little windshield. The motor is growling like a housecat with pneumonia.

Tall Street is very quiet. No celebrations have reached this far, and neither is there any business today; so it has an air of dull abandonment. At the east end the street bends to go around an old park rarely visited.

To the south is the important blue rotunda of the Bureau of Orthography. The street runs west towards the busy roundabout.

The car is making an unpleasant raspy growl.

PS: It’s now late afternoon.

>e
Since there’s no way by road, we’ll have to leave the car here. It is a moment’s work to find a parking spot. We switch the ignition off.

We open the door of the car.

We climb out of the car.

Abandoned Park
In contrast with the parks in the more savory parts of town, this is a bit of patchy grass where local dogs occasionally come out to do their business. A granite war memorial is fixed at the center, which is why tourist maps optimistically call the place Monument Green. But the memorial is only moderately monumental and the grass hardly green at all.

We step on a twig before we back away again.

It is a place that might have been developed long ago; only it is known that there are remains of Roman settlement here, and there is a risk that digging out the foundations would turn up some of those ruins, exposing a large number of Latin-language objects to the light of day. To prevent this catastrophe the whole area has been placed off limits to development.

We can go southeast and west to Tall Street from here.

>x memorial
It’s a curious thing: it stands taller than a person and yet seems almost embarrassed and self-effacing. The lettering is cut quite small, and the names thereon are tightly spaced. Since 1829 there have been only thirty-five officially sanctioned surnames on the island, which means that, for reasons of space, the names have been truncated to numbers, and the result is a list that looks almost like a table of Biblical quotations: John 31, Mark 12, Paul 29.

The reason for all this compactness is that the memorial is dedicated to the dead of all wars. Deaths from the War of Secession and the Civil Dispute of Standardization, losses from islanders volunteering in the French Foreign Legion, and the hefty cost of World Wars I and II, all are crammed into the upper left corner, leaving room for a long and bloody future.

On the war memorial is a poppy.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the war memorial with the crosshairs.

>x poppy
Not a real, fresh poppy, but a construct of bright red fabric with a black heart.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the poppy with the crosshairs.

>get it
We get the poppy.

>x twig
Nine or ten inches long, very thin and somewhat flexible. There are no leaves left on it.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the twig with the crosshairs.

>get twig
We get the twig.

>wave t-remover at twig
We reset the device to t. With a distinct whiff of the faintest whiff of shampoo, the twig turns into a wig. A surprisingly realistic wig, cut to about the shoulder. It looks like our hair, but a good bit longer.

There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the wig is a faint, greenish image of a twig.

>se

Bus Station
A currently-desolate depot from which buses run seasonally to Maiana, the island’s other major town. The old station building is a low, rectilinear edifice from the 60s, all pebbled concrete and sheet glass, but it’s shut, leaving accessible only a series of empty bus bays and a wall-mounted schedule. The public convenience to the east is the only thing open, while the area to the northwest is open parkland.

A dove flutters from one surface to another, occasionally stopping to stare at us.

A shed, rather ramshackle and unlikely, sits on the pavement, where it ought to be in the way of incoming buses.

Something makes you think of leaving your family for the last time.

>remember leaving your family
Bus Stop
Your suitcase was next to your leg. It was nearly three in the morning. There were thirty more minutes before the bus would take you to San Francisco. Your mother would have warned you not to be in a place like that alone so late at night, but it didn’t feel, then, like anything that could happen to you would be worse than your mother’s behavior and her anger.

Then we’re back in the present.

>x schedule
The schedule is an intricate affair, and the deciphering of the various letter-codes and footnotes was actually a subject of study in my grade school. The buses run every sixty-two minutes during daylight in the winter, every forty-three minutes in summer, with every third bus running as an express without stops if the passengers of this bus do not vote otherwise.

During the run of the school year there is an extra inbound bus in the morning and outward in the afternoon; contrariwise the bus is on half-schedule Sundays and holidays, except major patriotic holidays when there is no bus at all.

Like today.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the wall-mounted schedule with the crosshairs.

>x dove
It is pure white, probably a refugee from a group released at a wedding. People do occasionally get married on Serial Comma Day.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the dove with the crosshairs.

>x shed
Sheds like this are typically cheap and very very temporary housing for the homeless. The policy of the Bureau is that no one is allowed to beg, and punishments for begging and homelessness are often quite stiff, so there is nothing in the way of an established shelter on the island and little recourse for those who might need it.

There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the shed is a faint, greenish image of a shred.

>e

Public Convenience
There are just the two toilet stalls and a couple of sinks, but the place has been kept up reasonably well, if one doesn’t count the graffiti.

A soap dispenser hangs beside the mirror.

About knee-height in one of the stalls is a hole that runs right through the wall between the men’s and women’s restrooms. It’s here that you and Brock and Slango usually leave things for one another.

A faint smell of lavender lingers in the air.

>x toilets
You can’t use multiple objects with that verb.

>x toilet
It’s pretty clean.

>x sinks
The sinks are nothing special. Clean enough, I suppose.

>x soap
It’s the kind where a squeeze will dispense new soap into the sink.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the soap dispenser with the crosshairs.

>x mirror
It’s gleaming and shiny and very clean and I don’t want to look in it.

The mirror is real enough, and the monocle pings approvingly.

But laid over the reflection we can see the two of us as we used to look: you a little shorter than our current body, me taller and male and needing a shave. I’m not sure whether it makes me feel better or worse to see us like that.

>x hole
It’s too small to get a good look through, really, and usually cluttered with junk.

In the hole in the wall is some ash.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the hole in the wall with the crosshairs.

>x ash
It’s fine grey-white powder, and a fair quantity of it: too much to have come from a cigarette or two.

The monocle fails to make any sound or response at all, but no green image forms revealing the true nature of the ash.

>get ash
The ash is not the kind of thing we can just pick up and carry away.

I’m having problems with restoring the most recent saves. Don’t know what’s wrong, maybe I’ve saved too many times for an online game? Anyway, I’ll have to replay stuff. In the meantime, here’s Atlantida. I found 3 Counterfeit posters, will post the others later. I seem to remember Emily’s sister made them, but I can’t find the relevant site or post anymore.