Part 20: The Center of the Universe

Part 20: The Center of the Universe

Last time, we repurposed one of our first rituals to become an "intensional ballast"—some kind of emergency power source for a malfunctioning marcher. Syndesis suggested we put it below the Birdhouse, and when we were there, the pin acquired a hazy glow.


When we leave...


...so location does matter, as opposed to just letting it pass through.

With the intensional ballast and the fourth alien glyph, we really have everything we need to perform the Great Marriage properly in the Chancel. Let's get to work.


First, our basic toolkit.


But we've been forgetting to do something, pretty much since the first dragon was repaired.


This is an excellent point.


And, indeed:


With that crucial task done, we may now proceed with the original plan. First the ballast:


Then the fulcrum:


Wait, no, not then the fulcrum, we need that phlogisticated gold rod still to light our electrum and create the fire-devourer! Once we've done that, then we can create the gold amalgam wire and thus the dragon fulcrum.


At this point, I do something a little odd:


From here on out—at least until I create the Dragon Fulcrum and thus will never again need to leave the Retort—I don't want to be carrying around anything that might be destroyed when the autosolver decides that what we need is a dose of hard vacuum.

Anyway, creating the fire devourer should free up the gold rod for use in our dragon fulcrum.


... or not. We could >UNDO here and force it to use the gold rod instead by doing the ritual by hand, but we don't really need to do that. Gold is not the only metal with which mercury will spontaneously react.


All right. Is the autosolver smart enough to use our new amalgam rod?


No. However, it is apparently smart enough to not attempt to draw the gold rod into wire while it is alight with elemental fire.


This is both a necessary and a mean trick. We've never created the white amalgam wire before, so the autosolver doesn't know about it. But not only does it not know about it, it does not permit the parser to know that the item can possibly exist. It was technically possible to do this in Inform 6, but it was extremely difficult to do so and could require manually extending the standard libraries. In Inform 7, conditional acknowledgement of the existence of words and phrases is trivial and available at the lowest level. This allows commands like >REMEMBER FORMULA to ask "which do you mean" with the automatic parser disambiguation message and list exactly and only those formulae that you have already learned and encountered. (As we saw back in Update 11, XYZZY and PLUGH are treated by the game as being special formulae in their own right. The game turns out to have special logic to exclude them from the disambiguator lists.)

At any rate, we'll need to set up the white amalgam wire by hand.


Now that the environment is prepared, maybe now we're OK?


Okay, fine. We'll just do the whole thing again by hand.


And now create the fulcrum by hand for the final time. If we need to do it again, it should remember that we used lead and since nothing we know how to do consumes lead, we should be fine.


All right. Now to collect the things we need to perform the Great Marriage in the Chancel.

From the mundane...


... to the more exotic.


We've done so much at this point that the parser has to make sure that it doesn't need to remind us that we haven't consumed the elemental fire on the gold yet.


This is where we dropped all our stuff, before, so we wouldn't lose anything to vacuum. Now that we've created the fulcrum, we don't need to worry about that any more.


After this, we collect the elemental water, earth and the two bubbles of elemental air the same way we did in Update 18, and also create the Perfect Diamond so it will be ready when we need to create the obsidian solvent. Back in update 18, this is where we could just enter the command >GO TO CHANCEL, but we've got to place the fulcrum and the ballast first.

And here we hit a nasty puzzle that only shows up if Syndesis is the final dragon. You may recall that we were to place the ballast in the Birdhouse Crawlspace. However, getting to that crawlspace requires opening the aura-locked door, and we can't actually do that with the resources we have to spare:

• Using the aura invisibility inscription, like we normally do, uses up our last unit of elemental fire.
  
• Using the traditional aura impersonation inscription uses up our only unit of elemental water.
  
• Using the newer aura impersonation inscription uses up a unit of elemental air that we cannot spare—we need one unit to defeat the Chancel's strictures already, and one for the Great Marriage.
  

Those first two also end up requiring the use of orichalcum, which we had to consume to sneak past the angry vortex guarding the supply of elemental air.

To solve this puzzle, we have to notice the behavior of the intensional ballast. It starts glowing when it's in the right place, and stops when it leaves. This is pretty close to what we'd seen with Dragon Fulcrums. When we brought a fulcrum into a dragon's lair, the fulcrum began to glow, and it would do this even if the dragon that should be there was dead or absent.

If we explore the Retort with ballast in hand, we find that it behaves similarly, in places near but not at each dragon's lair:

• The Barosy Crevice, just next to the Barosy, gives our pin its glow as well.
  
• The flooded walkway under the Observatory also does this. This is presumably Aistheta's.
  
• Lastly, it gains a glow not far from Pneuma but only when swimming in the garden's artifical lake. We don't need to dive, like we do for the Observatory, either.
  

Baros was second on the dragon priority vote, so we'll place the fulcrum and ballast where Baros would have wanted it.


The most interesting thing about this final puzzle is not that it is unique to Syndesis but that it was accidental. In a hint thread on a different forum, Plotkin appeared and commented on the situation after the players had resolved it in the manner we just did above:


And so it has been left, and so here we are working around it.

That "minor theme" of symmetry-breaking is also most certainly there; go back to update 17 and look at my outlining of the puzzle structure and you'll notice that the various dragons do similar things when you fix them, but that there's also some minor variation across them and then one enormous outlier. But which dragon is the "enormous outlier" ends up changing depending on which thing you're tracking at that time.

The time for theory, however, is over. It is time for practice. We are finally ready.


Here we are—the center of the universe. And we know what to do.


Something was different. Where are we? Given the shift in tense, when and who are we?


... are we in fact still Forsyth?


Given the reference to the cleaning work in the alchemy lab, we are probably still Forsyth, and based on the rest of it, apparently we were the person that the Captain was involved with. This is the final working-out of the relationship between the dragon revival order and the situation that was happening on the Retort. Each plotter has somebody else associated with them—Hart is in love with someone, Powes is plotting revenge on someone, Ctesc and Anderes each have an accomplice—and whichever dragon is the final active dragon determines which character Forsyth is associated with.

Beyond that, the message varies slightly depending on whether we were looking upon that character fondly or harshly. Had we most recently looked upon the Captain disapprovingly when performing the Marriage, this message would instead be:


At any rate, we know what needs to be done.


Alas. We'll never be able to show off our pristine, shiny calipers after all.


There was only one thing our whirling mind could recall in the chaos.


And with that, we have ended where we must—at the end, which is also the beginning, which is in the future.

My personal theory about this is that the bulk of the game took place with us as a homunculus animating the frozen body of Forsyth in a series of transition echoes. Every time we altered something major about our situation—performing a marriage, or repairing or subsuming a dragon—we actually were transferring to a different echo. This is why we picked up alchemy so fast—we're farther from the material world so the ideas are absorbed rapidly—and it's also why the Blinovny Limitation exists. When we perform alchemy as a being in the Higher Spheres, we're not just creating a fire-devourer potion. We are creating the Platonic ideal of one, and so there can't be multiples of it. The fractures we kept running into that weren't part of Syndesis' failure were simply the points where the echo ended.

Meanwhile, the reason those echoes were alive in the first place is because some external force is trying to recover the Retort after its disaster. Either the Navy determined a transition failed, or the aliens (whose writing is more prevalent here at the end, mind you) are doing their best to help us resolve things. By performing a repair and placing an intensional ballast in the Higher Spheres, the terrestrial Forsyth will hopefully have their work amplified or improved. Perhaps the dragons—or at least Baros—will be in better shape than they otherwise would.

Part of my evidence for this is that the intensional ballast is, strictly speaking, optional. If we don't place it, the final reply is significantly more uncertain:

Only our last half-dozen moves actually had any physical effect, but it's not like everything that came before didn't matter. The ephemerality of success is a theme that's not uncommon for Plotkin's games, but here, at least, we are at least assured:

We have made a difference.