Adventure Gamers - Forums

>wave g-remover at signs
We reset the device to g. The device buzzes, puzzled. It has tried to create a “anry sins”: evidently “signs” is too tightly bound to its modifiers and can’t be manipulated separately. This is a serious problem in my field of study, incidentally.

>l
High Street
Hustle, bustle, dirt; ugly American chain shops; lots and lots of people. There seems to be a large organized protest in progress: protesters completely cram the sidewalk to the southeast.

A garage has sprung into being between two high-end boutiques. In the garage is a mechanic.

To the west, the street turns into a monumental staircase leading to the old fortified area; a cross street heads southeast towards the main roundabout.

>get mechanic
I don’t suppose the mechanic would care for that.

>se
Unfortunately the sidewalks, which were never very wide to start with, are so blocked by the mass of protesters that it’s impossible to get by. Besides, if we associate with them, we might wind up getting arrested on minor charges anyway. We need some kind of automotive transport.

>ask mechanic about car
“I’m looking for a car,” we say.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. “I fix them. I don’t sell them.”

Old City Walls
Only portions of the old walls still stand, but you can walk along what remains, as though you were defending the place. They’re a meter and a half wide, made of ashlar blocks. On the vertical faces these blocks are still rough, but underfoot they have been worn smooth by the passage of many defenders and (subsequently) tourists. One of the blocks in the wall has even been defaced, some old inscription gouged out.

I used to like to climb around up here when I was a kid. I made believe— oh, you’ll think it’s silly.

Down below in the distance are the docks and the sea, and immediately east of here is an old hexagonal turret.

Something makes you think of my youthful pranks.

>remember my youthful pranks
Oh, I used to play that I was an Atlantean guard defending the battlements against invading redcoats, armed only with a saber and an, uh, an o-removing musket. So they turned into red cats, you see. My mother explained later that letter removal hadn’t ever taken the form of muskets and that I had my chronology wrong. So I do know better.

And my father gave me an even longer and even less interesting lecture about how the British colonial government wasn’t entirely a bad thing and how it didn’t do to be too gleeful about mentally shooting some young soldier who probably didn’t have a choice about being there.

Then we’re back in the present.

>x inscription
To judge by its different shaping and color, the defaced block is something borrowed from an older building to make up the new wall: taken out of a church or a mosque or perhaps even a Roman fortification in some earlier era of the island.

It was once inscribed with a message, but whatever it was, the foreign-language writing has been completely chiseled away so as to be illegible.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the defaced ashlar block with the crosshairs.

>e
Old Hexagonal Turret
Up here we stand on the remains of the old fortifications; this turret offers a view out over the docks, the fish market, and the harbor, which it was designed to protect.

A heavy old depluralizing cannon is aimed out to sea.

>x cannon
Like a conventional cannon it has a mounting to allow the users to turn the gun and change its angle, to hit objects at various ranges.

It is currently unloaded, of course; but time was when this vast weapon was employed to reduce entire fleets to a single ship, and a whole crew of marines to a single man. This tactic was found so effective that the harbor was never successfully taken.

The monocle pings happily as we sight the depluralizing cannon with the crosshairs.

> w
> wave b-remover at defaced block

I haven’t seen it mentioned in the text, but according to the map we should be able to go west again to Hesychius Street.

> w

Pegbiter - 19 March 2021 11:28 AM

The depluralizing cannon could useful against the crowd, but I think that puzzle is to be solved by getting a vehicle (that probably needs to be fixed by the mechanic).

I do believe we’ll be revisiting that cannon later in the game.

>get cannon
That’s fixed in place.

>w

Old City Walls
Only portions of the old walls still stand, but you can walk along what remains, as though you were defending the place. They’re a meter and a half wide, made of ashlar blocks. On the vertical faces these blocks are still rough, but underfoot they have been worn smooth by the passage of many defenders and (subsequently) tourists. One of the blocks in the wall has even been defaced, some old inscription gouged out.

Down below in the distance are the docks and the sea, and immediately east of here is an old hexagonal turret.

>wave b-remover at block
We reset the device to b. The device buzzes, puzzled. It has tried to create a “defaced ashlar lock”: evidently “block” is too tightly bound to its modifiers and can’t be manipulated separately. Or perhaps it just doesn’t have sufficient power to handle the defaced ashlar block.

>d
We can’t see anything interesting in that direction.

We can go north, south to the Monumental Staircase, east to Old Hexagonal Turret, and west from here.

Further up the wall first!

> n