Even the winged birds and the two-footed and four-footed, o silvery
Dawn, have set forth following your regulations of time, from the ends of heaven—
For, dawning forth with your rays, you illuminate the whole luminous realm.— Rig Veda, I.49 Dawn
I was stalled by, once again, spelling. But in a different way this time! (For my previous antics, see my writeup of Circus.)
You see, I was somehow mentally shelving this game having as a three-letter parser, I think because of the spelling “albotross”; ALB was fine for me mentally, ALBO or ALBOTROSS slightly broke my brain. So I went through what turned out to be correct (KILL) but typed it as KILL ALB and not KILL ALBO (whereupon you must specify throwing the knife).
The manual’s hint specified flying; looking at the dead alb– grr, let’s say, “bird”, the game says it has a hole. Miraculously, probably form playing too many Sierra games, I quickly came up with
LIGHT MATCH
MELT WAX
WITH MATCH
which was sufficient to plug the hole.
THE WING IS NOW SUITABLE FOR FLIGHT.
So just to be clear, we’re toting around a dead bird and using it to fly. Sure? You can then go back to the cold lake and fly your way across, but before showing you the next spot, I should mention this is probably the part closest to the Vedas. The gods can “fly like birds” and get constantly compared to them. In a portion on the Maruts (storm deities):
With your chariots fitted with lightning bolts and with spears, whose wings are horses, accompanied by lovely chants, drive here, o Maruts.
Fly here like birds, with highest refreshment for us, you masters of artifice.
In the literature from this period generally there’s enough references to flying and magical Vimānas (flying palaces or chariots) that modern conspiracy theories have developed around them. The 20th century book Vaimānika Shāstra claims the magic is in reality advanced technology; UFO enthusiasts go on to make claims about ancient astronauts and/or aliens depending on their inclination.
My wondering about a random American in the Midwest picking this as a topic could be resolved by this mythology, as it is one of the most famous pieces of cultural lore to come out of the Vedas. It still easily could be by accident but the moment of grabbing a gigantic bird from the sky and using it to fly did feel just a little bit like a moment of the gods (fly, not glide, we’re launching from ground level).
Across the lake is a narrow island. In the middle a soldier blocks the way.
The soldier has armor so you can’t just use KILL; a quick item roll call:
cup with water, knife, matches, shovel, dead bird, two Vedas, coin
I didn’t have the water before, but while frustrated by the bird I tested TAKE WATER at the lake and it worked. The coin came from looking at one of the Vedas (a bookmark, I suppose) and can be given to the soldier who will take it as a bribe and leave. This is followed by the other end of the island, where you can fly yet again.
No more lake: you’ve landed in a desert, which is fairly empty except for a cactus in the center. I tried various attempts to apply the KNIFE to the cactus before simply attempting a DIG instead.
This leads to an underground chamber and the Yagur Veda.
A bit further is a locked door; the game lets you PICK LOCK and specify you want to use the knife. I appreciate the amount of item re-use this has had.
Then comes the last obstacle, a TOMB ENTRANCE with a zombie and some burning leaves. I didn’t have much to work with but I was still carrying water; pouring it led to the leaves being extinguished and the zombie disappearing with the leaves (??).
Finally the fourth book can be claimed.
The locations for all the Morgan games have generally lacked depth, including this one, although somehow the format of a quasi-mystical challenge made it more playable; I had an easier time than Miner 49’er, certainly, and only got stalled by the bird.
Part of the Yajur Veda, via Wikipedia.
I finally made a breakthrough on the mysterious ASD&D. I was poking about in this catalog which has the RPG Wizard’s Domain mentioned, and the name Thomas Johnson. This ended up being a much better lead than Scott Morgan, and I eventually landed on a timeline page which supposedly has a full story:
A Third-Party software house owned by Tom Johnson and run out of P.O. Box 46 Cottage Grove, MN 55016. The company seems to have surfaced in 1981 and disappeared in 1984, shortly after the 99/4A was abandoned by Texas Instruments. Among the dozen or so BASIC and Extended BASIC educational and entertainment products the company manufactured, perhaps the most remembered were Wizard’s Dominion and Entrapment. Wizard’s Dominion was an extremely popular fantasy adventure type game written by Johnson himself. Entrapment, another Tom Johnson creation, was a Mini Memory assembly language coded game that was so well written Texas Instruments had decided in early 1983 to pick it up and market it. Unfortunately, the big “bailout” of October 28th, 1983 took place first and Entrapment never came to market under the TI banner. It did surface through Tenex Computer Express in 1986 however.
The October date is when the TI-99/4A was discontinued.
There’s no sourcing on the connection and I haven’t been able to unearth anything definitively saying Johnson owned the company, but I’ve found enough products with Johnson’s name attached I’m comfortable saying the paragraph is mostly accurate. Previously I speculated
Still, I get the vibe we’re dealing with a 2 or at most 3 person operation here.
which is right, it’s just there’s really only one person (Johnson) who published Morgan’s work.
Coming up: Windmere Estate, for Apple II.
Renga in Blue 
Good call on the Vimana influence. I would guess that all the von Däniken-derived stuff that was floating around popular culture in the 70s/early 80s (all those “documentaries”, Leonard Nimoy’s In Search of…, etc.) had made an impression on him. The killing of the “albotross” and having it lead you around (in a way), struck me as possibly inspired by Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but with the sequencing, moral message and sheer physical weirdness of it being so at odds with the poem, who really knows.
The best I can come up with on the zombie and the leaves (which seemed so WTF that I had to laugh), is that he took it from the classic Universal Kharis mummy movies. They had some mythology that “tana leaves” were used to animate and sustain the mummy, and also that he was vulnerable to fire. Again, it’s very weirdly implemented (why a zombie?), but the prevalence of the old Universal films on TV at the time, and possibly Morgan’s age (see the “monster kid” phenomenon) makes it seem plausible. There was even an Adventure International TRS-80 Head-On clone around that time, Tunnels of Fahad, that depicts you being chased around a tomb by a mummy while holding a torch and collecting “tanna leaves”.
yeah, I thought Rime of the Ancient Mariner first but that ended up going somewhere entirely different
I could see how “leaves animate the mummy” lead to “destroying the leaves destroy a zombie” via some half-remembered leaps, I’ll take it
Scott Adams’ Pyramid of Doom adventure also had an animate mummy sharing its location with “burning tanna leaves,” the resolution of which mirrors the situation here.
Aha! I haven’t played through the Adams series in years, and completely forgot that one. This is interesting though, because there’s also a blatantly stolen Adams puzzle in Fun House, which I did recognize immediately. It’s obvious those games were Morgan’s main inspiration, so I’m not sure if this was meant as a humorous tribute, or if he was just running short on ideas by the latter half of his own series. Considering that, similar to the TRS-80 before it, the TI99’s whole adventure “ecosystem” was largely based on the Adams games, and anyone buying Morgan’s was almost sure to have played them, I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt and lean towards it being the former.
So just to be clear, we’re toting around a dead bird and using it to fly. Sure?
I know the wingspan of an albatross wouldn’t actually be sufficient to lift a human, but I’m going to picture you dangling from it like a hang-glider anyway (even though you specified “not glide”), rather than it being some kind of magic talisman. (Anyway if you’re not doing that, then carrying around a 10-foot anything seems pretty awkward…)
the game lets you PICK LOCK and specify you want to use the knife.
Fun fact no one asked for: I wanted to write someone doing this in a story once, and researched whether it was actually possible. tl;dr, while not impossible in some cases, generally speaking this does not work.
a.) Is this story available anywhere?
b.) What’d you use instead of a knife?
It’s a Monkey Island fanfic, so I doubt you’d be interested. At first I went ahead and let the character do it anyway (since it is barely possible and Monkey Island is humor and pirate-movie tropes not too concerned with realism), but in the end the scene wound up changed so there wasn’t that lock to pick.
Oh, and so, usually what you want is actual lockpicks of course, but if you have to improvise, then it seems usually you try to shape other thin bits of metal to approximate lockpicks.
Using wax to fix the bird’s wings to fly seems very Icarus.
(I did wonder about ALB last time, figured you had realized it was a three-letter parser and noted that it stopped just before the misspelled part. Sorry for not speaking up!)
I was thinking of Ulysses and the Golden Fleece specifically when I mentioned Sierra (they used a condor, but there’s also an albatross in the game)
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/ulysses-and-the-golden-fleece/?order=ASC
I forgot about that one!
You’re one to talk about typos right before saying “plug the whole!”
the Iron Law of Typos strikes again