» Be the oculoid.
You are now the oculoid.
Up until a little while ago you did not have a name or sense of identity, but have since come to answer to the name Skree. Your mnemnem was knocked out after being attacked by a scary monster who is around here somewhere, and you are not very good with understanding complex concepts. You find it difficult to understand anything that is not heavily derived from or based on an emotional feeling.
You were feeling agitated a short while earlier, but are now feeling rather peaceful.
—
» Smack your tentacles against your robotic companion to try to wake him up.
You briefly aggress your mnemnem. Nope, that’s not going to wake it up. Better think of something else.
—
» Crawl onto the ceiling and fall on AG’s face until AG wakes up.
It doesn’t budge. Maybe it needs more than some smacking around to get up? You’re not much of a roboticist.
—
» Search for help!
You figure you are going to need help on this one. You wonder who is around to consult.
—
» Follow the mustachioed robot to wherever it went.
You were hiding when the monster was out! Which is good because you really don’t want to follow it.
—
» Consider taking ‘mnemnem’ to the place it took the damaged one.
You probably could not move mnemnem if you tried. Maybe you will try to find the smaller monster!
mnemnem took the smaller monster into this room. This room is a bad place. You are scared.
—
» Just go visit the other robot. Mnemnem is more important than the scary room!
» Jeez, man up Skree, the room’s empty, just go to the other robot. Unless you want Mnemnem to die.
All right then. You will risk entering the bad room for the sake of mnemnem. You try and stick close to the wall as you head for the doorway—
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bad room! Bad room! You flee to through the doorway and find yourself…
…Outside!!! It is peaceful out right now. You hope it will stay that way.
This place seems okay.
!!! The little monster! What now?
—
» Poke the monster, see if there’s any reaction
You cautiously approach the little monster. You are always as cautious as you can be.
You tap it on the head a few times.
Waugh!!!!!! It moved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You flee to the ceiling.
The little monster shouts at you.
—
» Wait, and observe it. Does it seem hostile?
You watch it from the ceiling. It continues to shout at you, but not aggressively. It appears to be trying to get your attention.
—
» Fall on its head and commune emotions.
You risk getting closer to it, dropping on its head to try and communicate with it.
You send: help help mnemnem hurt sleep wake up help
You receive a whole lot of confusion as the little monster yells. It is a bit disorienting.
—
» Avoid doing anything that could be interpreted as hostile.
You stay very still and try not to screech at it. It eventually calms down a bit.
You send again: help help mnemnem hurt sleep wake up help
The monster tentatively sends back: mnemnem??????
—
» Tell him that he helped Mnemnem before and that he needs help again.
Unfortunately you are unaware of this fact! Maybe if you were a robot that could view the data on memory chips you would have a little more luck.
—
» Tell him Mnemnem looks like him.
» Emote: “Friend.”
You try to convey that mnemnem looks like it, sort of, and that it is a friend. The little monster seems to react to this!
He sends you some fuzzy images. They are a little confusing. What is this all about??
—
» Bend the broken leg back the right way.
You are fairly certain that it wants you to bend its leg to be straight. You grab hold and pull! The little monster is very loud.
Done! The leg shuffles around on its own a moment which you think is very exciting!!!!! It seems to be trying to stand up.
It stands! Now that it is standing up it is not actually all that little after all.
You follow it down through the bad room into the place where you left mnemnem.
It taps three times on mnemnem’s body.
A panel slides open! Whoooaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!
The monster suddenly falls over backwards and knocks over a chair. There is a loud ZZZZZZZZZZ crackle-y noise and flashing lights!
The monster goes to sleep.
mnemnem wakes up!!!!!!
—
You are now Adventure Guy.
You pick yourself up and take a look around. Skree is very excited to see you. Your hat is off and that broken robot is lying passed out in front of you (…with a fixed leg?). The last thing you remember was Gentleman pummeling you. Your chest feels a little breezy.
There is a whirrrr and a panel in your chest slides shut. Uh.
—
» First things first: retrieve hat.
You pop your hat back on your head. Good to see it didn’t get ‘borrowed’ again. Not that the broken dude had any arms to pick stuff up with anyhow. You wonder exactly what was going on here.
—
» Take Hat Thief back to the medical room, we still haven’t been able to talk to him.
You take this guy back to the medical room (again). It strikes you as rather silly that you’ve both helped each other out a few times now without ever talking. You don’t even know his name!
Interestingly, Skree follows you this time.
—
» Examine broken dude to see if he’s even repairable at all.
He looks… okay. For a guy missing two arms. And a dislocated head. Presumably he got up after recharging, so hopefully he’ll come back on eventually.
Speaking of his dislocated head… You decide that it’s high time this dude got his head put on the right way ‘round. If he can somehow fix his own broken leg, he can handle all this wiring getting shoved back in his frame.
There! Now he just needs some arms and he’s good as new.
—
» Switch the cables back to you for a few moments at the highest power you can take.
You pop one of the wires into your head briefly and feel the surge coming in. Ooh yeah! You’re feeling pretty recharged now.
—
» Play on the piano with Skree.
You play FACADE. Skree wraps himself up in his tentacles and goes to sleep. The little guy must be tuckered right out!
—
» Try forcing the panels in the cremation room open.
You give it your best, but they don’t open. As far as you can tell, they only open when something’s touching the handle. Probably so you don’t accidentally fall in.
—
» Shuffle through the exploded giant oculoid from before and retrieve the broken arm. Bring it back to the forge, melt it down, and forge a new robot arm. Remove wires from random stuff and install it into the arm, installing that into hat thief.
The remaining arm half does not appear to be around anywhere. Perhaps it is in splinters small enough that you can’t see it? Either way you are probably not capable of forging a complex robot arm.
—
» Check in the acid room for footprints burned in to the floor.
Yup. There’s some acidic footprints leading out of the side of the pit and disappearing behind some pipes. They stop after that, however.
—
» Use wires from the headless robot to fix the panel in there.
You grab some wires and kind of just jam them into place. You don’t have a soldering tool, but with some luck this will be enough for one or two uses of the machine. Looks all right. You admire your handiwork.
You give the switch a pull and sewage gunk stops flowing from the pipes. The basin is just as disgusting, though.
—
» Look through the music book for another relatively short song.
You waste some time flipping through all the many pages. Aside from FACADE, it’s full of useless pages-long ballads and shit.
—
» Teach Skree and get him to pull the handle while we look inside?
You head back to the piano room and wake the little guy up. C’mon, buddy, break’s over.
You take him down the ridge and point out the handle. He seems to get the idea.
With Skree hanging on to the handle, you take a look see. Looks like this is above the area behind the mirror all right.
—
» Pull that lever in the locker down.
You wonder why you never pulled it when you came across it first and yank that sucker down. There is some whirr-clunking, as expected. You see no changes in the immediate area, though.
—
» Enter following code: Lightning, Droplet, Sun, Cloud, Eye, Enter.
» Press: The circle with the line, the sun, the rain drop, the cloud, the thunder.
No luck. Guessing this code is not working out very well!
—
» Take sun medallion to the light room, and activate medallion.
It gets all flashy and shiny and stuff. ‘Activation’ or whatever: success!
—
» In the generator room is our fire.
You head towards the generator room to get the fire going but find that the door you opened way back when you woke up is shut again. How totally mysterious and stuff!
—
» We also have the ID card, maybe it will allow us to access something we normally can not?
» Oh yeah, go to that one room with the lockers and use ID card on card swipe thing!!!
You take Dr. Les’ ID card and swipe it in the swipe-y thing. The blast door opens quite promptly! The hall behind it curves away to the side, though you can see light coming from the end.
You follow the hall to… a rather large room. There are a bunch of posts along the single, circular wall, and a giant glowing white orb in the ceiling.
—
» Hold Skree to see if he is familiar with the giant orb.
Nothing from Skree. He is thoroughly uninterested.
—
» There is a tiny hole in place of one of the posts. Check it out.
One of the posts is missing from its… pedestal, or hole, or whatever. Next to it is a small, somewhat familiar-looking hole in the wall. Hm.
» CHARGE BLINDLY INTO THE ORB.
You charge up the ramp and into the large, white, glowing sphere of light.
On the inside it is… very dark. There are some flickers of light showing a mechanical interior, but that’s about all you can make out. You ascend.
You appear to be in some kind of… well, you can’t really say one way or the other, but there appears to be some machinery and contraptions and what not. It’s pretty damn dark, though.
—
» Walk over to the right and examine the machinery/computer.
You head over to examine the console. Skree doesn’t like the feel of the grate flooring and screeches at you from the ramp.
The monitor is just flickering static. There is another small screen that’s been smashed and isn’t readable – something appears to have been thrown right through the screen. Working stuff appears to include a clutch lever pulled to its downwards position, a turn coordinator that’s level with the horizon, an airspeed indicator at 0, some kind of power-monitoring grid, and a keyboard wired in to the working monitor.
—
» Put your VHS tape in the VCR-looking thing below the screen.
You pop the cassette in. There are a few little playback buttons, so you rewind it all the way and then press play.
After a moment, the static begins to clear.
A robot like you is digging in the background. Another walks past the camera, closer. Sound emits from all around you as a voice begins to fade in.
“All right, this is, uh… wait hold on, let’s try that again”
The camera cuts ahead suddenly.
“Ahem. This is Doctor—Rusty! Get outta here, slobberhead! I’m making a—”
The camera jumps ahead a second time.
“Uh… ahem… this is Doctor Preston Alexander Les, on, uh… Oh hell, I’m going to have to start over again—”
“Would you relax? It’s fine, it’s just a video log, we’re not submitting this to a scientific review panel or anything.”
“Right, right, uh… okay, so what you’re seeing right now is our ‘bots – Claire, you’re in the shot!”
“Oh, sorry, Preston, am I ruining your award-winning documentary?”
“Ha ha ha. Listen, when we make the discovery of the century and they want to know how we did it and I say ‘Sorry, my colleague got in the way of every video I took—’”
“‘My colleague?’ You tease.”
“Oh, don’t be like that, you know what—”
“—have a clue. I haven’t seen anything like it.”
“Well, can we get a sample?”
“I’ve tried chipping at the damn things, I can’t even leave a mark!”
“Aw, Mister Big Strong Scientist can’t even dent an itty-bitty rock?”
“…You’re filming this?! Give me my camera!”
“I’d hardly call it a ‘camera,’ this thing’s gotta be at least a hundred years old—”
“It’s an antique, and you’re getting your hands all over it!”
“Take your silly toy then, you big baby—”
“Hey, did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Sounded like thunder.”
“Thunder? Here?”
“Maybe we should get insi—”
“—you up to?”
“Just another journal entry. Not much else to do, unless we make some progress soon.”
“Yeah. Slow going lately.”
“‘Slow going’ is an incorrect term. That would imply we were making any progress at all.”
There is some silence.
“I’m, uh… going to head up to see how the ‘bots are doing on the cabin.”
“Have fun with that.”
The camera lingers before turning and leaving the living room.
“Geez… Somebody hasn’t been getting enough sleep lately…”
“Hm… coming along pretty nicely—”
“—old it still, okay? Steady! Just… okay, just focus it on me, all right?”
“Bloody ‘bot… Right, okay, so this is a little critter… I think Feringus wants to call ‘em oculoids? So this is an oculoid. They just sorta showed up the other day and they’ve finally stopped jumping around long enough for us to get ’em to cooperate. It’s a weird-looking bugger, that’s for sure. So I’m going to see here what it’s visual reaction time is, get a better idea of how that big ol’ eye works. ”
“All right, now hold still, little buddy… I’m just gonna shine this light around your—”
“Skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!”
“Hold your horses little bud—”
“—a pissy little rock, isn’t it.”
“Yeah. Funny, that.”
“Hardly.”
“Well, I mean… how familiar the whole weather system is, you know?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘funny.’”
“All right, it’s not funny, all right? It’s ‘interesting.’ Okay? Interesting.”
“I would accept ‘interesting.’”
There are sounds of rain for a few moments.
“What do you think we should call it?”
“Hardly seems our place to do so.”
“Well, you know, just between us then. What would you call it, I’ll say.”
“I haven’t given much thought to the matter. Something pretentious, I imagine. Possibly in Latin. This awful place deserves no less.”
“Maybe ‘Uter Aquae?’”
“Too comical. ‘Procella,’ perhaps.”
More silence; rain.
“Got a sort of a ring to it, doesn’t—”
“SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!”
“Augh!”
“Les!”
“Grab it, grab it!”
“Got it! It’s out. Are you okay?”
“What the hell just happened?! I didn’t do anything and it just jumped at me—”
“Not just you; it went for me, too. A whole species can’t be classified as bi-polar, can it? And come give me a hand with this thing, you can play with your stupid camera later.”
“It’s not— Regardless, I think that’s the last straw for the ‘intelligent species’ theory.”
“Good. I’ve just about had it with baby-talking these things to calm them d—”
“—did it, Feringus. We did it.”
“We’re not done yet by any stretch, Les. It’s progress, yes, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“But we’ve found it, Feringus. This compound matches all the required parameters! This is our Chemical X! Fourteen months and we’ve finally found it!”
“That may be so, but until we’ve found a way to get substantial quantities of it we’re not done here. There’s still much more work to do.”
“Fine by me. And at least we’ll actually be making progress now. I’m just glad those damn creatures actually ended up being useful for someth—”
The audio fades out permanently as the tape stops playing.
—