999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors Part #67

Part 67: Library

[Music: Octal Game]

Surprise, there's another puzzle room, out of nowhere, on this path! I guess that explains why Ace and Lotus were still hanging around when we caught up to them.

Anyway, I both love and loathe this room at the same time. It has lots of great optional content, but if I was to include it all we'd be here forever so I'll cut most of it out for now and we'll see it later instead. Also, this room is HUGE and has at least 2 screens that are very nearly visually identical to each other so it's really easy to get lost and confused.

Anyway, unlike every other room which just has the puzzles laid out nice and neat and are kinda obvious... for this one we're given a note.

"Lights to the books!" Huh. What does that mean?

Interesting. Well, intelligence often hides itself in darkness. Have you ever thought about the pages of a book? Each page only sees...what, maybe 2 or 3 minutes of light before the reader is on to the next? They spend the rest of their lives locked in darkness.

That's horrible...

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. Not at all. I live in the darkness, yes. But that has

I can hear the voices hidden in the darkness, you might say.

Part of the reason that this room is so fucking giant is that each section of the library can be examined. And some of them let you further examine every shelf. It... it gets quite tedious, as you might expect.

Of course, we'll look at each of these as an example before moving on for real progress.

You mean you could, like, change bodies with someone?

Well, I guess I wouldn't mind switching bodies with my brother or Junpei too much, but I'd rather die than let Seven switch with me.

What the hell!? Like I'd even want to swap bodies with a little brat like...

...

Sh-Shut up!

(Yeah, well, he wasn't the only one.)

The other three are all interesting in their own right, but two of them also beg one simple question...

Well, I know what telepathy is, but I've never heard of "teletemporation".

Snake, how do you know this?

I can't even pronounce this one...

Who's that? Some famous guy?

It's said to be one of the sources used in

Snake, how do you know THIS?!

Oh. So these are all occult books and stuff.

Does that mean it's about a rabbit that lives on the moon? Rabbits are pretty cute, but what's the moon stuff about?

according to Chinese legend.

Snake, how do you kn- actually, that one makes sense.

Anyway, we could spend the next half hour just clicking stuff to learn neat things from Snake or we could try and leave instead. We're interested in the latter, so we want this section.

That brings us to this shelf. We could look at most of the surrounding shelves, but there's time for that later.

They're all just jibberish...

Switched them around?

Yeah. If we move 'em around, maybe they'll spell something.

Oh. I get it... Yeah. Heck, it's worth a shot.

Like most puzzles in this room, the solution is quite obvious and there's no dialogue for backing out or being wrong. Shame too, because I'd love to see Junpei wigging out about being unable to figure out something like this.

Heh. That was a piece of cake.

Hooray! You did it, Junpei!

I guess that turned out well enough.

So the letters from the titles spell out "OPEN HERE FIND BULB".

Well, we just had to solve a (very simple) puzzle to get this so I'd assume it's gonna be important.

And it's really big, so it'll make a lot of light!

On the next screen across, we're interested in this section now. If you look closely, you can see the books we had to move around on the left. That's another bit of a problem with this room; each screen up here contains half the content of the screen left of it and half the content of the screen right of it. It, uh, it's kinda dumb really.

Much like before, we're only interested in the middle shelf of this section. In this case, though, there's no immediately obvious visual cues that it's the one we're after. It just looks more important by virtue of being the only one we can the see all of.

It looks like it's a children's story about Native Americans...

Hmm... Don't you think a random book like that is kinda suspicious? Maybe you oughta hold on to it.

Hey, Junpei, take a look at this one.

(Native Americans, huh? Maybe it's got some--whoa!)

"L", "R", "K"...?

That...doesn't mean anything. ...Does it?

Like... "curl", or "Carl"...

That's definitely an L, an R and a K all right.

Next screen across, and we're mainly interested in this giant steel plated door for now. We'll take the stairs later though.

(It's pretty impressive. Almost looks like the door to a shrine, or a church, or something.)

(There's another door after it, and then a passageway beyond that. At the end of that passageway is a door with that [Neptune symbol] engraved on it.)

Hurry up. We need to find the key with the mark of Neptune.

Man, it's like Seven and I don't even exist...

The bookcase here is the most important thing on this screen for now.

Much like before, we're interested solely in the shelf in the middle.

The one with the pop-ups.

You think they're part of a series of something? They do have the same binding...

C'mon Junpei, let's see what's in it.

(I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's probably baseball stu--whoa!)

It's got the letters "H", "E", "A","D" popping out of it.

The next screen across, and... despite how very similar to a previous screen this looks, there ARE actually two differences. One of the shelves on the left, and the area in the bottom right. Very easy to overlook, too.

Geez, Snake... Aren't you scared?

Imagine a wall 20 inches wide that runs along the top of a 10-story building. Could you walk along that wall, Junpei?

No way!

Then what about a balance beam in a gymnasium?

Oh, well, that's easy.

Hm. You don't find that strange?

So why is it that a balance beam poses no challenge to you, but the hypothetical 10-story wall does?

...

From time to time, a life in darkness can give you courage.

Yeah, the odd thing is even though the walkway is the same walkway no matter how you look at it that conversation only happens on this screen.

The same with this one, for that matter.

I'll be fine.

Uh...um... That's not what I meant...

Okay, let's do something more useful in this part of the room, shall we?

This shelf's the one we're after. Unlike normal, this one DOES appear to be more relevant at a glance... but then you look at almost every other shelf in the room and realise that the one thing that makes this one relevant applies to all of them too.

I think whoever set this up wanted us to see the cover, not the spine. Let's look at it, okay?

Look, Junpei! I think there's something hidden behind the books!

Huh, it's another lightbulb. Let's take that, then.

Looks like a pretty high-wattage one, too.

That done, we're finished upstairs. Now we can head down to look around the lower level.

On this screen, there's two areas we're particularly interested in. This one first, since it stands out visually.

If you look closely, you can even read these spines without examining the books at all. Also I'm pretty sure the top two are either miswritten or mistranslated. It seems unlikely that they were purposefully gotten very slightly wrong.

Wasn't that a German mathematician? Maybe it's a compilation of his work.

As far as I can tell, there is no German mathematician called "Dadkind." There is, however, one called Richard Dedekind which seems to me like this one was supposed to be.

This book is in German... It looks like it's the complete works of...something.

I've never heard of it...

Much like the one above, I think this is meant to be referring to Gottfried Leibniz.

...Incidentally, until I was looking for the guys these books could be referencing, I'd never heard of either of these people so how Snake knows the first one is another "how do you know that?!" moment.

"Owen" isn't enough to go on. Perhaps it's about the English revolutionary...?

...Yeah, I've got nothing for what this could be either. Owen is far too common a name to be a worthwhile clue. I'd assume given the rest of the section, and the two shelves above, it's meant to be a mathematician of some form but I can't say for sure.

This shelf, however, is notable for not fitting the rest at all.

Sheldrake... Isn't Sheldrake...

Now THIS shelf... this shelf is memorable, all right.

Heavens no. There are many

It's an exciting and rapidly growing field.

Whoa.

The last section we're interested in is this one on the next screen.

And it's this shelf we're after. You'd think it would be the one next to it, but nope.

Somethin' about these things feels kinda nice, you know? Brings back good memories...

No shit, you little brat!

Hey guys, cool it... All right, I think I'm gonna take this picture book with me.

So? What's inside? Well? Aren't you going to open it?

(Pretty sure it's just gonna have pages inside, smarta--whoa!)

(This book has an "S", an "E", a dash, and a number 5 sticking out of it. I might be impressed, if I was 5.)

At least the next thing we're interested in stands out and is super conspicuous.

It's pretty big, but there're only 6 books on it. That seems kinda...weird...

Hey... It looks like there's something on the bottom. I can't really see it, though.. The glass is all foggy.

I can't really see the books from here, but this lock looks like something we could open eventually.

(You know... The kinda lock where you rotate the numbers around until you've got the right ones to open it.)

Guess I might as well give it a shot.

....Ahaha wow, he's not kidding.

Like before, there's nothing we can get from backing out of doing it so let's get this thing open right away.

(I don't know why, but... I don't really feel particularly happy about being praised for that...)

(Whatever. At least the lock's open now.)

Let's see if we can get it open, all right?

Hey, what do ya know? We couldn't see the lightbulb in here until we actually opened it, which means we basically broke into this cabinet purely because it was here.

Pretty high wattage too, unless I miss my guess. This should generate quite a bit of light.

The last thing we're particularly interested in is this thing in the very center of the room.

It's strangely bare in here, and there are lights but they seem awful dim. We have enough lightbulbs to do something about that.