Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Back already! (Continued from my previous posts on Thissala.)

From a 1981 brochure for the Data General Dasher terminal.

Well. Rob pointed out I still missed a chunk of content, but I still would have made it an addendum or a comment on my last post, except then I found a puzzle that both of us had missed, and here I am. Many of the lingering puzzles could be “this isn’t coded yet” territory, but the nature of the puzzle I found is such that it feels highly likely there’s a way through.

Let’s do that missing chunk first, and then the new puzzle. Last time I mentioned a section with a “dedication”.

Caldera (west)
You are in the great caldera of the minor mountain. There is a trail leading up the western slope of the caldera. Set in the ground is a 5 foot monument of marble in the shape of a man. From the sculpture eminates an outstandingly beautiful sound, unlike any other known to humans. The tone, pitch, and volume change constantly, but the rate of change appears to be dependant to your proximity to it. Engraved in the front of the sculpture is a dedication.

READ DEDICATION
It is with great sorrow, that here, at this location, on the twenty-fifth day of July, in the nineteenth hundred and eightieth year, we dedicate this sculpture in appreciation of a departed contributor to this endeavor. Swept away by the lure of self enrichment through further education with the eventual goal of making big bucks, he has left us.

We shall miss you Big Jim.

Though you are gone in being, the Thai will always remain

What I missed — because I interpreted the “trail” as the one I just entered in on — is that there is a new exit going up.

Acme of the minor mountain
You have reached the very top of the minor mountain. The visibility is very bad due to a dense cloud mass directly in front of you. The cloud obstructs your vision north, up and down.
There is a stake deeply imbedded in the ground here.

The stake is highly suggestive of typing a rope, and indeed TIE ROPE TO STAKE finally works! And then when I tried to climb the rope down it killed me and sent me down to Riverworld again. Sigh.

Did you know there was a real time strategy game based on Riverworld from 1998?

The game is fishing for you to DROP ROPE before going down (even though you’d be holding on to the rope to go down, right?) This allows going into a cloud section:

The white ramp
You are standing on a narrow white ramp joining the ledge on minor mountain and the clouds interior. The ramp is unlike anything you have ever seen. It is translucent and obviously very thin, but it can support your weight without the slightest sign of strain. Through the ramp you can see the ground many feet below.

N
A little gnome stops you on the bridge. After staring at you for a couple of seconds, he grows angry and curses you, waves his arms and suddenly there is a flash of bright light and when the smoke clears you find yourself in …

In the small room
You are in a small room with one window and a ventilation shaft in the opposite wall. The wall of the room are made from stone, and by looking through the window, it is obvious that you are somewhere in minor mountain, looking out on a field. The window has vertical bars obstructing passage, and the ventilation shaft has a crosswork grate covering it.
There is a small pile of bread pieces in the corner.

Thus begins a small escape section. Wait a beat (generally by trying to look at stuff and having nouns fail to get recognized) and a bird will appear at the window. Feed it the bread, and it will eat it, then fly off and bring you back a key.

There is a flurry of sound at the window. The multicolored bird has returned, but now he is aglow with light and the colors of his wings appears to change constantly. He lets out a noble cry and from his beak drops a brass key. The bird cries once more and disappears up towards the sun, circling higher and higher. He will be your friend and aide for evermore.

You can go up and unlock a grating, finding an exit out a ventilation shaft.

On the bed
You are standing on top of the small bed. Directly in front of you is a ventilation shaft embedded in the cold, gray stone wall.
Against the wall is a closed metal grating.

UNLOCK GRATING
There is a quiet click from within the lock on the grate as the brass key slowly turns

OPEN GRATING
The grating is now open.

ENTER GRATING
In the ventilation shaft
You are crawling through a well lit ventilation shift. The walls are made of aluminum. To the northeast there appears to be a junction in the shafts, while to the southwest you can see the end of the shaft, and a grey wall outside.

This is a small maze, and despite your items being zapped away by the gnome when you got imprisoned, leaving only the brass key, it still isn’t terribly hard to map.

Unfortunately, it also has the common attribute of some other portions of Thissala version 0.60 which it doesn’t seem to have any overall purpose. There are no treasures: you get captured, you get out. You can repeat trying to go up the white ramp but you just get caught again (and the bread/bird sequence appears again). Of the mainframe games I’ve seen with some in-progress aspects, the author usually nestles a treasure somewhere whenever they make a new area; that’s an easy way to make it “useful”! Maybe the working idea here was a little different because of the meta-plot, but there’s still clearly intended treasures to gather as well.

Just in case there was something useful from the brass key, I went around the map trying to stick it in various things, including the post box I spoke of ages ago. The box doesn’t even recognize being unlocked as something that makes sense, despite it being described as locked.

Inside the Old Post Office
You are standing inside of the old post office. Against one wall is a counter. This is was at one time a very busy post office (according to local lore) but now it is deserted. All of the postboxes have been destroyed except for one, which has a set of buttons on the front with a large brass faceplate around them, and a hinge on the left side.
The post office box is securly closed.

UNLOCK BOX WITH KEY
You cannot unlock the box.

By now I’d been obsessively trying to find recognized nouns, and I idly tried PUSH FACEPLATE, which resulted in “You cannot push it.” Not … “I don’t understand the word” … but … “cannot push”! Hmm! (Possibly you’ve hung out with me long enough you’re nodding along, but keep in mind how remarkable it is to realize a major clue from a slight change in parser message.)

READ FACEPLATE is the key.

!!! Due to the nature of already putting a “reset” button and a full ASCII screen, it seems highly unlikely the authors left this puzzle as a stub. It’s still possible whatever clue is meant to hint on a key combination was supposed to be placed and never was, but my intuition is telling me this puzzle can be solved.

PUSH “2”
Click.

PUSH “6”
Click.

PUSH “8”
Click.

PUSH “0”
Click.

PUSH “4”
Click.

PUSH “3”
Click.

Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the kind of code where there’s a sound when you’ve gotten the right number of key presses (even if they’re wrong) so I don’t know what length of sequence we’re looking for. Still, this is the closest this game has had to a Ferret-esque puzzle where people can chip in suggestions. For the record, I already tried 1979 (from the dime), the date from the memorial, and various ways of turning GLUCMAN LOCK COMPANY (and the special way it is written) into numbers. I will take suggestions in the comments.

In the meantime, my next post will be on a different game, even if somehow we progress here, and that progress leads to more progress; we’ll leave the action in the comments for now, but assuming we get somewhere, I will return to Thissala in a future post.