Part 4: Wherein a Potion is Made

Update!



Welcome back to the magical land of Kyrandia, where a giant rat is impeding our progress towards what could be treasure, or could just be two jerkass frogs pulling our leg. The rat-man responded poorly to Zanthia's ham-fisted attempt at diplomacy and won't budge willingly, so we're going to have to find some other way of getting rid of him.



The rat seems to be afraid of snakes, so maybe a Swampsnake Potion will be effective. Most of the ingredients look hella goofy, though. Smell of eggs? "Windy woof?" What the heck is all this crap? At least we've got the onion part sorted, and I bet I know where we can find a lizard.



Technically, crocodiles aren't lizards, but they're both reptiles, so let's just hope whatever mystical force makes alchemy work isn't too concerned with taxonomic details. Now, how do we make this guy surrender his sweet, sweet crocodile tears?



Onions contain enzymes that, when the cells of the onion are ruptured (e.g. by cutting), react with water to create propanethial s-oxide, a sulfuric compound which irritates the eyes and provokes tearing.



Ho hum, another beast.



You can totally make Zanthia drink the crocodile tears, but there's really no reason to and besides, we need it for our Swampsnake Potion. Terrorizing the local wildlife has left us down one onion, though, and we needed that too.



Fortunately, important items respawn in this game, so we can just go back to where we found the onion the first time around and get a new one. Meanwhile, Marko and his weird hand seem to have gone off somewhere. Let's hope he's not been getting into any trouble.

Believe it or not, we actually have all the main ingredients for our potion now. We're almost ready to get mixing. We only need one more thing: the recipe specifies that we need to mix the ingredients in hot water, and our cauldron only contains lukewarm water at the moment.



Trekking all the way back to this side of the swamp again lets us fill one of our spare bottles with hot spring water. Let's just go right ahead and dump it into our cauldron.



Whenever we toss something in the cauldron, it flashes a random color briefly and makes a little noise. We know we need the reptile tears and the onion, so let's throw those in.





The next thing on the list is "smell of eggs". Rotten eggs sure do smell bad, but what exactly causes the foul smell? Answer: hydrogen sulfide. The sulfur rock should be close enough.



Next up is something the spellbook calls "windy woof". Surely, we don't have anything that sounds like it could match that description. What does it even mean? Perhaps we are meant to find a small dog, bring it to the top of a mountain, and somehow harvest the force of its bark? Hold on... bark. Windy?




The item we need for "windy woof" is, of course, the gnarlybark. The game is setting a worrying precedent. That only leaves us with one item: "toadstool". Well, we've got a mushroom, so that ought to work, right?

Actually, the mushroom is wrong and would just mess up the potion if we tried to use it. Given what the game just made us do, the actual answer should come as no surprise.



Naturally, the correct answer is the toad stool from Herb's shack.



The potion turns a vibrant green and a triumphant sound is played, indicating that we have successfully brewed up our first potion.



One batch fills three flasks. We don't really need that many, but there's no harm in carrying extras around. Let's go show that rat what-for.



There are two ways to use our new Swampsnake Potion, but both are equally effective. I'm not really sure why they bothered animating two different but functionally identical solutions to the same problem, but they did. The first way is to use the potion on the rat directly:

I've got a little present for you in this bottle...



Yikes. The other way is to instead drink the potion in front of the rat, which has a slightly different effect.

Check this out...



It smells better in here already. Now to find the lost treasure!

Double yikes. All right, let's go have ourselves some well-deserved treasure!



Music: Treasure Cave (Tindeck)

That's impressive... there must be something in there.

I'm getting Monkey Island flashbacks. By the way, you can get an additional mushroom here. It's sitting in the background right next to Zanthia.



Let's have a look at that giant skull. If there's any treasure in here, it's got to be inside that thing.



He must've been a big boy.

Let's try the teeth, maybe.



Huh. Not pictured: clicking the tooth makes a brief drum snare play.



This one makes a clicking noise. The next tooth glows yet another color and makes a sound like a steel drum or something like it. All the teeth have similar effects; they glow a unique color and play a brief musical note of some kind. In order, the teeth glow green, violet, orange, cyan, red, yellow, and blue. Clearly we have stumbled on a musical pirate skele-puzzle of some kind... but there are no real clues to what we need to do. We can click random teeth until the cows come home, but we wouldn't be any closer to a solution that way. There are too many combinations for us to be able to brute force this one.

Fortunately, there's no need for us to. There's one place in the swamp we haven't visited before now.



It's directly south of the cave.



Weird bugs.

Huh, look at that. Those fireflies are the same colors as the giant teeth. I wonder what'll happen if we click on one.



Curious! The yellow firefly lit up and played the same sound effect that the yellow tooth did. Furthermore, the red firefly lit up immediately after. Perhaps if we click the red one?



You might already see where this is going. The fireflies are a musical game of Simon, with the sequence having been randomly generated when we started the game. Click the first firefly in the sequence, and two first fireflies light up; click those two, and the three first light up, and so forth. There are seven fireflies, all of which are part of the sequence and appear exactly once. After a bit of clicking, the sequence is completed, and...



Cute tune, but inaccessible to the masses.

The fireflies play a little tune for us. Unfortunately, the tune doesn't play correctly in the ScummVM version of the game... nor does it play correctly if you run the original CD-ROM version through DOSBOX. I thought briefly about Frankensteining together the two tunes, but the OPL3 emulators are different between the two versions.

At any rate, solving the firefly puzzle didn't seem to give us anything special. But we know something now that we didn't before: we know the correct order. If we go back to the skull and click its teeth in the same order that we clicked the fireflies in...



... the skull opens, surrendering its sweet, sweet treasure!

Wonderful!

Of course, the chest is locked. What kind of key do you think would open a skull chest?



The skeleton key, of course. Let's collect our loot.



Now I can change lead into gold! All I need now is lead.

Sweet! We're halfway to turning all the world's lead into gold and crashing the global gold market making our way to Morningmist. Anything else in there?



Moldy cheese. Yuck. Now all we need is some lead. Who might have some of that?



Maybe these guys?

Well, you can't have our anchor.
I really need it.
We're staying here until we catch a fish.

Given that this is coming from a pair of dudes sitting in a boat that's constantly on the verge of sinking and who aren't using any bait, that could take a while. If only we could help them along. Really, the bait thing is the big problem. What do Kyrandian fish eat? Blueberries?


We didn't have time to pack a lunch.

I didn't mean for you to eat it, dang it! Let's try giving them something no sane person would eat, like that cheese.



At this point I'll try anything.



You're welcome.

Dork and Dorkier managed to catch a fish at last, and have rowed off into the sunset. Or, rather, and more to our benefit, to the docks we saw earlier in the game. With any luck, we can steal their anchor and turn into gold and be done with this mess! However...



... on the way there, we run into this little spectacle.

What!? I like doing this!

That looks completely intentional.

I've come to help you.
Are you having fun, Marko?
Very funny, Zanthia. I came to help you out.
Thanks, but no thanks.

Yeah, you're being very helpful. Where's your hand, anyway?

Please, Zanthia! Let me help you!

Yeah, sorry, we've got places to be. I'm sure Marko's hand can give him a... well, a finger of some sort, I guess... whenever he decides to show up. Meanwhile, we need to get our ass to Morningmist, and to do that, we need that anchor. The docks should be just to the right of this location.



There's the boat, and there's the anchor, which we'll steal.



As predicted, the anchor is made of lead.

Now all I need to do is turn it to gold.

One slap of that Alchemist's Magnet and...



Presto! It took a lot of work, but we've finally got a piece of gold we can use to pay off Brueth so he'll take us to Morningmist. A chunk of gold this size should be enough for even the greediest of fairies.

We'll ditch Marko, get away from this frog-infested swamp, and finally make some progress. All we need to do is get back to the ferry, which is just a short distance north of our present location and surely still intact and just waiting for us to return so we can set off.





Next time, we'll see what's going on with this asshole and maybe, finally actually go to a new location.