Part 6: A Fish Out of the Sea

Part 6: A Fish Out of the Sea

Last time we failed to create a Lodestone of Purity, because our contaminating fiery odors interfered with the lunar environment we had set within the gestalt. Several readers came up with the solution to this: we need to add additional lunar elements to the ritual space. The easiest way to do this would be with the silver coin, but it is also possible to use the rod of moon-metal for this purpose.

And that, in turn, raised a question: if you can just put a chunk of moon-metal on a gestalt shelf, why bother with adjustable bounds? That raises a question we can test right now, though. Why bother with the ginger? We've got a Pyrics lab next door. Can we put, say, a burning piece of wood on the gestalt shelf and then remove the contamination by taking it off, or letting it burn down?

Our new resonant oculus suggests an optimization even to that:


Wood is intrinsically fiery. That makes setting up the ritual quite easy, because we can just put the rotor, the coin or moon-metal, and the cedar on the shelf.


... but it doesn't work. Let's try it again with the ginger.


This, I think, gives us our answer. Different rituals have different requirements for what will count as an appropriate influence. This ritual requires a lunar environment but isn't picky about how it gets it. The contamination, however, it is finicky about and it only works if it's an aroma. We haven't discovered any rituals that require a specific kind of bound, but the adjustable bound presumably would permit those to be executed more efficiently.

They're probably pretty rare, though, since the only bound we've found that requires this is off of the Mechanica lab. This sort of suggests that the wire is created and immediately used each time, and there isn't a stock set of bounds to choose between. Overall the gestalt shelf will be our first resort if we can at all help it.

Also, we now have a Lodestone of Purity. We should try it out. Next door there's a horrific pile of wrecked glassware that was once some kind of elemental earth-based calibration mechanism. Can this lodestone find it for us?


Very nice! This thing is precious—according to the note we found here, this is the only shard of elemental earth on the entire Retort—and we don't know what we're going to run into. Let's leave it in the Opticks Annex for now.

While we're there, I take some time to point the oculus at various items we have handy.

• The rotor has a moonlit night (lunar), snowy day (arctic), windy day (exhilarant), sunny day (solar), and a rainbow (spiritual).
  
• The peppermint is also arctic, so this is the general ice element, it seems.
  
• All woods are fiery.
  
• The fire door key is orderly.
  
• The steel bolt "acquires a colorful fringe when viewed through the oculus, but its symbolic associations are not strong enough to visualize clearly." That's the "not significant" message.
  

Time to start exploring the rest of the ship. Last time we made it to the Airlock and the Medical Wing before turning back. Now, let us press on, into the heart of the marcher:


I'm sure it is popular on those long journeys through the Higher Spheres.

Will those weird black marks respond to science?


That's interesting. If they were just soot or something they wouldn't have symbolic resonance. These marks have purpose, but their purpose is as unguessable as the shapes themselves. But they're definitely not just marks. They're a script, and a script referring to things beyond our ken.

What else is here?


Anyone feeling like taking bets on whether we'll ever be venturing here?

I thought not.

The vote last time ended up with us going down first, so I'll start heading towards the staircase. We'll look around as we go.


This place is pretty! It's also chock full of symbolism.





Perhaps. But the Lower Reaches await us. Let's continue.


Another crewman. This seems like as good a time as any for some self-reflection. There's been a certain amount of speculation in the thread about the nature of this "Ensign Forsyth." We're some lowly swabbie, but we've been cruising around, mastering alchemical rituals in moments, committing results to a flawless memory, and just generally being so sharp that we'd put your average fantasy wizard to shame. This, despite the fact that it took us months of diligent practice to learn the five formulae we started the game with.

More damningly, we remember spending months idly studying the Hermetic Sealing as a distraction from boring lectures, but we could not recall or use it until we studied it after the crash.

Experimental control:


Independent variable:


What are we, now? Has something made us more than human?


This message hasn't changed since the start of the game. But it's just gotten a tinge that wasn't there a dozen commands ago.

Our existential crisis has been happening in front of "the Birdhouse." What do alchemists need with birds?


Apparently by "bird" we mean "dragon." We're awfully casual about that, though perhaps this is also why we were reluctant to leave the relative sanity of the East Wing.

Before we go down the stairs, let's check out that other hallway.


The thread voted to go through any barriers we encountered with obvious solutions. Fire we can deal with. Let's brew a potion of fire resistance. In fact, let's brew two potions, so that if we spend too much time on the other end of the hall we can get back.


You know, normally it's great that you help out like this, but that's a little too helpful. Let's stash it somewhere and try again.




Okay, we'll do it by hand.


The what


We might as well call this the Infocom Memorial Object Limitation Theorem. Most games in the Zork tradition don't really let you actually create or destroy objects in the game world—instead, unique items are move into and out of the gameworld and kept in some kind of "off-stage" area when they don't exist. (For those of you used to modern object-oriented programming systems, objects in an IF game world tend to be completely unique, so each 'class' has exactly one instance, and it's created at program start and never destroyed.)

So, no multiple fire resistance potions. We'll just have to act fast, or, failing that, hope there's an entrance to the Void on the other side. Back to the burning hall, and...





Oh hey. This looks like just what we'd need to get past the Birdhouse security. Unfortunately for us, the only part of this ritual we know how to get is burning wood.

That's all we can do here. Let's go back to the Grand Staircase and head down.


Note the shift in tone here. Normally, when the marcher has been discussed, we've been talking about it like it's a ship. But both Riesenzweig's Inscription and this discussion of this room are treating it like it's some kind of house.


Perhaps that's because in the East Wing, when you went down, you wrapped around. But here, when you go down, you plunge into tunnels carved from the living rock.

Marchers.

There's another one of those sparks. It's being insistent; let's check it out.


That gets filed in our journal as a fact: "The Periodic Table of Stone." Furthermore, now when I use the >PLACES command it will list every room that we have not checked for sparks. Right now that's basically everywhere; I'll do a sweep later.

This room is a maze, though not much of one. Trying to go in basically any direction gives up this:


With one obvious exception.


The dragon Baros! Perhaps that's the dragon that lives in the Birdhouse. Apparently he provides our gravity. On the other hand, it's also a reasonable possibility that the dragon Baros lives in the Barosy.

Baros is not doing well, though, it seems, because gravity is on the fritz. That sounds like an excellent time to go wandering over a narrow bridge over a terrifying chasm in the middle of a starship.


Okay, maybe not.


Hm. We have an Alchemy File seal, so we'll need to find a Venture File seal to get in here. Lt. Powes was identified as part of the "Aithery File." With that, I think I have some idea of what the Retort was doing.


I think this is an exploration vessel. Alchemy File does basic research and produces the reagents needed to operate the Marcher. Aithery actually does the operation; they take the marcher through the Aether. And the Venture File is the away teams; they go on the adventures once the Retort has rigged into strange lands.

I don't really have any evidence for this beyond the fact that we seem to be running extensive classrooms inside of the marcher and that there has been no sign so far of any kind of military or even commercial purpose aboard.

And with this flagrant disregard for regulations, I think it's time to wrap up this update. Next Time: From the Chasm to the High Tower, and perhaps this time we'll find the keys to some of these new locks.