Part 15: Wherein Love is Found

When we last saw Zanthia, she had failed in her attempt to intimidate the yeti hunters, and in the process gotten herself kidnapped by the real abominable snowman. What terrible, foul plan does the furry beast have in store?



... huh.



Hands off, creep. Well, this is a right pickle. Best get changed out of this yeti costume before this guy gets any crazy ideas.





Hmm. This doesn't look too good.

The yeti speaks a strange, garbled language of his own, which sounds meaningless, but... okay, in order to accurately explain this, we're going to have to listen to some audio clips. Here's the same line as above, as spoken in-game:

Yeti Dialogue 1-A

It should be fairly instantly recognizable what's going on here; that's a voice clip played in reverse. If we reverse that, we get...

Yeti Dialogue 1-B

You've changed your clothes!

The captions are not simply backwards, however, probably because it would be too easy to figure out what the yeti is saying. I'm not sure if there's a pattern here, or what. I'll be putting the actual line in spoiler tags as well as the voice clip whenever the yeti says anything. Now, back to checking out our environment. Mister snowman's got himself a bit of a love cavern going on here. Wine, candles, chocolates, even a hot tub. And... a disco ball, for some reason.

Maybe we can talk some sense into this guy.



Qaflemw? Why? What for?

I'd love to stay and chat, but I'm in a real hurry here.

Njuaru, dujn ku bflo a oasu! Baby, make yourself at home!



Oaqjflcr! It's all yours!

Okay, so the snowman isn't exactly the best conversationalist. But, actually, we can just exit his love shack whenever we want through the entrance in the upper left there.



Aha! I know I can climb out of here!

There is no time to waste!



Nuts. Maybe there's something we can use to help with that. Like, uh... icicles..?



Yep. We need two icicles, but there are plenty to pick from. Kind of makes you question how it's supposed to be able to support Zanthia's weight if she's able to just snap them off like that, but hey... whatever gets us up to the Wheels.



Lm. Lm. Ymt imtjo bajj alo nts al uyu mts! Don't! You'll get hurt! LIMLIMLIM (???)

So, uh. I have no idea what the heck is up with that last part, but that's what he says. The important part is, the yeti has thwarted our attempt at getting the heck out of dodge. I don't know, guys. Maybe if we stare at the problem long enough it'll sort itself out.



Oh, look who finally showed up. Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber are here to save the day, I guess.



Nice job. You couldn't have let that rope stay up there for just a wee moment longer so we could climb out of here? No, of course not. Let's see what they have to say now.



Yep. We're crafty woodsmen alright.

The Snowman is inside that cave. Why don't you go get him?



You two are afraid of him!

So what if we are?

They're just as wimpy as last we saw them.



Sure are.

He's right inside the cave there.

You go in first. We'll wait here.

Really. The Abominable Snowman is right in there!



And just as useless. Still, there is one way they could be of use to us. What we need here is a distraction; something to keep the yeti occupied while we climb our way to freedom. So far he's shown little interest in the hunters, but maybe we can change that...



Sitting on the bar in the snowman's pad is this bottle of cologne.

Smells almost as good as ol' loverboy.



There's some chocolate over here, too...



... and we can pinch some feathers from the pillow on the couch. This beginning to look familiar?



An empty bottle from the drink cabinet rounds out the set. It's time to make another Abominable Snowman potion. I actually think this puzzle is kind of clever in that the solution is a potion you've already used earlier in the game, but which requires different ingredients to make this time around. Potion ingredients in this game work as long as they're "close enough" to what the recipe calls for, so it's a nice way to show that off. Too bad this puzzle comes 1) way near the end of the game, and 2) after you just made the same potion only a few minutes ago. This could've been done so much better with some more clever writing and better spacing between the two puzzles, but it's a neat idea, at least.



Mix the feathers, chocolate (sugar), icicle (snow) and cologne (musk) and voila: potion. Now, we're not pouring this one on ourselves. That would be pretty counterproductive. No, we're putting this baby to a better use.



We don't need any help from you.

I wasn't offering any!



Good thing that yeti is so metropolitan about his preferences. With the trio being busy dealing with each other, the coast is now clear to climb out of here.



We can leave by the same path the hunters used to come here.



Which brings us... here.

Time to give Faun another call...



How is Kyrandia doing?

And what did you do to our roof, you little dipshit?

Big trouble! Everything is disappearing now!



Uh oh. Hang on, Faun... I'm almost up to the Wheels now. I sure hope this plan works... it's all we've got!

What plan? We have no plan! The only plan we had was the one the Hand came up with, and we have no idea where Marko is. We're just going up there now because we have no better place to be.

Hurry!

Okay, with that out of the way, let's check out this house.



I don't know, doesn't look like they serve food in there. Don't you need to get a reservation like months in advance, anyway?



This place is weird, and doesn't look very safe.

Uh oh. The Rainbow Machine looks broken!

Okay. Welcome to one of the most annoying puzzles in the game.

We need to fix the Rainbow Machine. That's the thing with the vines and the seven glass globes over there. On the right, we have a shelf with nine pigeonholes in it, and three levers. Clicking one of the glass globes gives us a clue:

I can't tell what colored liquid was in this orb.

So, the globes are supposed to contain colored liquids. As the name of the room and the number of globes implies, each globe needs to contain one of the seven colors of the rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Where are we going to get colored liquids? Let's try clicking one of those levers over there...



The contents of the pigeonholes change. We can get all sorts of items here by changing the configuration of levers. In total, there are eight pages worth of stuff, and I won't show them all. Most of them are items we've already encountered on our way here. A few of them are new though, like the rainbowstone in the top right corner - you may recognize that one from the first game. Man, if only we'd had this thing earlier. We could have made all kinds of potions with that stuff...

... and that is exactly what the game wants us to do now. I hope you've been paying attention to what the colors our potions are! Once you've figured out a potion you need to make, you then get to fiddle around with the machine trying to hunt down all the ingredients. So let's start with the Abominable Snowman potion we've already made twice now in this update alone, since we know that's yellow.



After several minutes of fiddling, I've located the ingredients and jammed them in the cauldron. There are no empty bottles available, so we'll make one by taking this hot water bottle and having Zanthia swig it. There are several other bottles with various contents, but this is the only one Zanthia will drink. Okay, what next? The Skeptic Serum we made earlier was kind of violet-ish, so let's make that one.



Same procedure as last time. Let's hope the serum version of this potion is good enough. Next up, the Swampsnake potion from the beginning of the game was green.



Four to go. We have a problem, though: the remaining potions in our spellbook are not colored potions. They are things like the Sandwich potion that actually had a little sandwich inside it. With nothing better to do, we'll try making it anyway.



There is no mustard to be found either, so we have to make it by combining radish and vinegar again.



Oddly, the result is just called an "orange potion", with no visible sandwich. It's what we wanted, but the reason why we got this instead of a normal potion is unclear. It does give us good hopes for trying some other potions though.



The flying shoe potion is red, and concocted in a jiffy. You might think the normal Snowman potion would work for the blue potion, but as it turns out, making that one just gives you a snowman in a bottle. The one we need is the Teddy Bear potion.



Six down, one to go. We need to make an indigo potion. However... we're all out of potions to make. Did we miss something? Could the skeptic serum double as indigo, too? Nope. We need to make a potion for which we do not have the recipe. Let this sink in for a while. What the game expects you to do here is grope around for a while until this happens:



See this page with the little gem in the bottom right corner? That's an amethyst. Picking it up - and, remember, we have no reason to do so since it isn't part of any potion we know of - makes Zanthia blurt out a hint.

As I remember, this one is one of the ingredients for an Indigo Potion.

Yeah. One of the ingredients, mind you, and Zanthia won't give you any more hints. Fortunately, the potion only has two ingredients, and the other one is on the same page, but there's still no reason you would really know that, making this puzzle pure trial and bullshit.



The other ingredient is the blueberry.



Well, we have all the potions. Now we need to fill up the globes. We don't know the order, though, and part of me worries that in some version of this game they expected you to use them in the firefly order from way at the beginning of the game. Fortunately, good old R-O-Y-G-B-I-V works fine, beginning from the left.





We fixed the machine, guys! Too bad the puzzle was so boring, tedious, and time-consuming. Whatever. We're nearing the end now. Next time, we're going over the rainbow to whatever lies ahead!