Adventure Gamers - Forums

Karlok - 29 March 2021 06:50 AM

the C-remover is not being used on Andra, but on the chair in which she’s seated — a common method of inanimating people whose names aren’t otherwise vulnerable

And then we turn into hair together with the chair, because we’re in it? Like when we were in the car when we turned it into some chard again?

Luhr28 - 29 March 2021 06:53 AM

I suppose in this universe a chair that works like that isn’t that unusual./quote]

It’s not the chair. If we are in or on an object that is changed, any object, we change with it. We’ve already seen that several times in the game.

EDIT: And now Timovieman beat me to it.

     

Butter my buns and call me a biscuit! - Agent A

Pegbiter, no we can’t take the objects with us.

Wonderland
The ridiculous décor continues, now so extreme that I cannot even put a name to the things around us. They might as well be extrusions from a nightmare by Dali, or by Dr. Seuss. Offices are accessed by hatchways that seem to have come from submarines, or through passages resembling the sphincter of a great whale, or up ladders decorated with human teeth.

An open archway leads to storage space east of here.

Hanging in the air at the north end of the hallway is an odor.

>rub gel on odor
I can’t actually touch the odor, seeing as it is, in fact, just a vapor in the air, a dispersion of molecules dispersed through the rest of the local atmosphere.

>e

Equipment Archive
The ceiling is mirrored, perhaps to make it harder for anyone to sneak around without being noticed among the shelves.

The equipment shelves here display an assortment of obsolete, broken, foreign, or otherwise unusual letter tools. There are an accent flipper, an umlaut punch, a Catalan punt volat needle, some broken components, and some lamb granulates on the equipment shelves.

The functional area continues to the south, and the hallway is west.

Catalan punt volat needle? Lamb granulates???





The game already was absurd, now it’s getting weird.

>get all
umlaut punch: I take the umlaut punch.
Catalan punt volat needle: I pick up the Catalan punt volat needle.
broken components: I take the broken components.
lamb granulates: I pick up the lamb granulates.

>x accent flipper
Not an Atlantean product at all, but a machine built by the state-subsidized French company Aigu. Its sole purpose is to convert accents or remove them entirely, not a function that much applies to English words. In form, it looks like a very small spatula connected by wire to a substantial battery pack.

You’ve heard of the congrès / congres scandal. One of these was responsible.

>get it
I take the accent flipper.

The accent flipper is far too large for me to carry, and falls onto the floor.

>x umlaut punch
A very heavy, solid object manufactured in Stuttgart. A wire basket holds the item to be punched; two sharp metal tines descend into the basket at the moment of use.

The monocle pings happily as I sight the umlaut punch with the crosshairs.

>x catalan punt volat needle
An infinitely delicate tool designed to slip between two Ls. It has no application in English.

The monocle pings happily as I sight the Catalan punt volat needle with the crosshairs.

>x broken components
A heap of parts from old machines: cranks, gears, buttons with letters and numbers on them, delicate hoops of silver wire, knobs from which all the markers have worn away.

The monocle pings happily as I sight the broken components with the crosshairs.

>x lamb granulates
They’re tiny brown beads used to make lamb-stock gravy. Perhaps they’re left-over military rations of some kind.

There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the lamb granulates is a faint, greenish image of some anagram bullets.

PS: The Catalan punt volat does exist.

>put gel on lamb granulates
I dip out a pea-sized quantity of gel and rub it gently onto the lamb granulates. With an audible SPLORT, the lamb granulates become some anagram bullets. Heavy, high-impact stuff. Anagramming requires a great deal of force to break the linguistic cohesion of the word or phrase being modified. On the other hand, it’s the one process that is routinely effective even on adjective-adhering nouns.

>s

Display Reloading Room
This area is more or less empty. Hazard tape marks off an area of the floor to indicate that I shouldn’t stand there.

A black and white tv monitor is embedded in the wall. 

There is a small black push-button on the wall.

>x monitor
It is showing images of the Tools Exhibit upstairs, one of the few parts of the Bureau open to the public. A businessman with a soft-sided laptop bag is gazing curiously at the anagramming gun.

>x tape
It’s striped yellow and red, and describes an area on the floor. Come to that, there’s an area in the ceiling immediately above the hazard tape that looks separate from the rest of the ceiling.

The monocle pings happily as I sight the hazard tape with the crosshairs.

>x black push-button
It is unlabeled.

The monocle pings happily as I sight the small black push-button with the crosshairs.

We have never visited the public area of the Bureau. Can’t be helped.

Karlok - 29 March 2021 08:04 AM

We have never visited the public area of the Bureau. Can’t be helped.

Can we go there now? Or is this a dead end?

Now that we have anagram bullets, we kinda need the anagramming gun there…

But first:

> push button

We can’t not.



Edit: Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! We can use the anagramming gun to shoot the odor and turn it into a door!!!

TimovieMan - 29 March 2021 08:10 AM

Karlok - 29 March 2021 08:04 AM

We have never visited the public area of the Bureau. Can’t be helped.

Can we go there now? Or is this a dead end?

You know we can’t go back! Nah, Emily doesn’t do dead ends.

>press it
A heavy clunk sounds. On the tv monitor, I see the display case black out.

Then there is a groaning of moving metal, and part of the ceiling lowers. This is, apparently, how displays are swapped out for the tools exhibit upstairs: the display platform is lowering to our level, providing access. This brings the Model T, the Etymological Reversing Chamber, and the anagramming gun down into the room.

>x model T
The Regency-era T-remover is clumsy-looking and too big to lift, thanks to the coal boiler required to power it. It still bears the maker’s mark of one S. Meretzky.

The monocle pings happily as I sight the Model T with the crosshairs.

>x chamber
It looks like an iron lung — a large sealed chamber with extensive machinery surrounding it. It is able to make words run back to their linguistic roots: ape into apa, pearl to perle, and so on.

The machine is of little popular use and is principally applied by scholars under controlled circumstances.

Despite newspaper articles breathlessly proclaiming that the ERC will be able to produce the “God language” — mankind’s original tongue — in practice even the more modest research goal of rediscovering the vocabulary of proto-Indo-European would require prohibitive amounts of power. As one moves further and further from forms that are familiar to modern speakers, the reification effort required increases exponentially.

>x gun
Anagramming guns are illegal now, of course, because of their desperately unpredictable behavior. This one is a huge heavy thing, though not quite an artillery piece, because of the colossal amounts of power required and all the stabilizers needed to try to collapse the letters back down to a single phrase.

The monocle pings happily as I sight the anagramming gun with the crosshairs.

Something makes you think of Brock’s comment about anagramming.

>remember brock’s comment
Galley
You and Brock were sitting at the galley table, Scrabble tiles in front of you. “This is what I admire about you,” he said, touching your foot with his. “Most kids raised by fundamentalist parents wind up the same way themselves, or they go off the deep end the other way. You just… rearranged the tiles you’d been dealt.”

More than he realized, in fact, now that you’ve added my tiles to yours.

Then we’re back in the present.

Nice of Emily to pay hommage to Steve Meretzky.