"Rowan's Room" by Rowan Lipkovits

Chapter 1 - Do Not Change Any Of This

[Don't mess with other people's rooms!]

M2F is a region.

M2F4 is a room in M2F.

Door7 is a closed locked scenery door. Door7 is east of M2F2 and west of M2F4. Key7 unlocks door7.

Door15 is a closed scenery door. Door15 is east of M2F4 and west of M2F5.

Key7 is in M2F10.

M2F5 is a room in M2F.

Part 1 - M2F4 Master Bedroom

Naomi Cragne is a woman.

The player is Naomi Cragne.

Printed name of M2F4 is "MASTER BEDROOM (ROWAN LIPKOVITS)".

Description of M2F4 is "Here we have the master bedroom of Cragne Manor, which is by turns contradictorily capacious and cramped.  Though you can't put your finger on it, something about this windowless chamber sucks the very air out of your lungs and puts you on edge.  One would have to be a master indeed to achieve any rest in this offputting room.

Though it is relatively sparsely furnished, it wouldn't be much of a bedoom without a bed -- and there it is, a four-poster tall, dingy, imposing and unsettling.  Next to it is a bedside table, on which resides some torturously elongated lamp -- apparently the dim room's only light source, currently turned off.

To the west is the hallway door through which you first arrived, and to the east there is also a door to what is most likely a walk-in closet."

Before looking in M2F4 for the first time, say "Et voila! "

Understand "hallway door" as Door15 when the location is M2F4.  Understand "closet door" as Door7 when the location is M2F4.

check examining Door15 when player is in M2F4: say "Presented for your consideration a humble door, rectangular and wooden.  You unlocked it, but looking around at this dump, you find yourself wondering whether it was worth the bother." instead;

check examining Door7 when player is in M2F4: say "The closet door is a somewhat less grand affair; you could knock on it but as it is ostensibly a closet that's on the other side, you'd really rather not risk the heart attack resulting from a hypothetical knock back." instead;

[The above isn't perfect. Ideally we'd have description of Door7 is "[if player is in M2F4]M2F4 description[else]M2F5 description[end if]" but that could conflict with the M2F5 writer's description of the door. These check rules keep Door7/Door15's room specific descriptions under control. I hope/think.]

The lip-table is a supporter. The lip-table is in M2F4. The lip-table is fixed in place. The lip-table is scenery. "Is it even possible for a carpenter to perform conventional joinery with water-swollen driftwood?  Alls you know is that while this is clearly a bedside table, the boards it's fashioned from look odd and warped, subtly skewed according to the dictates of some strange non-Euclidian geometry.

It has no drawers, and nothing rests atop it save the similarly attenuated lamp."

Understand "table/nightstand/driftwood" as the lip-table when the location is M2F4.

Instead of looking under the lip-table: say "You find only shadows and splinters, and have no need for either."

Instead of searching the lip-table: say "While it's not impossible that someone might have hidden some secret compartment in this fun-house furniture, you can't even find the nails holding it together.  Is it possible the wood actually was somehow compelled to grow into this shape?  Resting atop the table, of course, remains that Dali lamp."

Instead of smelling the lip-table: say "A faint whiff of resin and sawdust, smells you would expect huffing any piece of carpentry -- these fragrances are, oddly, totally absent here."

The lip-lamp is on the lip-table.  It is fixed in place scenery.  Understand "lamp" as the lip-lamp when the location is M2F4. "If you took a regular table lamp, heated it up with a blowtorch, then held it down with your foot while pulling it up, you might end up with something that looks something like this lamp, the candlestick of the lamp world, rivulets of once-molten metal frozen in place interrupting their trickling down its side.  With freaky design like this, chances are it was imported at great expense from Switzerland.

It must be made of something heavy, for despite its precarious appearance, the lamp sits very firmly upon the bedside table."

The lip-bed is a [n enterable] fixed in place supporter in M2F4. "A bleached bedframe contains a puffy cushion -- somehow integrated with an extruded bonus puff incorporated into the main mass but seemingly serving as a pillow -- topped with a perhaps once-lush but now-threadbare covering of some doubtlessly priceless but underwhelming fabric, tautly tucked in severely along three of the cushion's edges.  Someone may once have slept here, but you can tell they never had a good sleep in it."

The lip-bed is scenery.  Understand "bed" as the lip-bed when the location is M2F4.

Understand "pillow/cushion/mattress/blanket/fabric/frame/covering/four-poster/pillowcase" as the lip-bed when the location is M2F4.

Instead of looking under the lip-bed: say "Let me be the first to assure you: there are no monsters under this bed.  Were it raised a little higher off the floor, you might perhaps shimmy in and assume that role, but at the moment you have better things to do than trap yourself beneath furniture.  If this changes, you can always come  and wait for a chance to grab some ankles."

Instead of doing anything to the lip-lamp the first time: say "Due to the peculiar shape of the bedside lamp and the unusual angle at which the table supports it, you are unable to interact with the lamp without first being in the bed, so in you go!

(sitting on the bed first)

";

    follow the bed sitting rule.

Instead of doing anything to the lip-lamp the second time: say "As fun as our lamp adventure was, we'd rather blunder about in a dim room than repeat it."

Instead of doing anything to the lip-bed the first time, follow the bed sitting rule.

Bed sitting rules is a rulebook.

This is the bed sitting rule:

    move the player to the lip-bed, without printing a room description;

    say "You warily sidle up to the uncomfortable-looking grey bed and briefly perch on its (now confirmed-uncomfortable) edge.  It's a bedroom, the bed is its central, nay defining feature -- why not try out the bed, right?  Worked out OK for Goldilocks, didn't it?  Well, turns out this would have been a bad idea had you thought of doing it instead of momentarily losing agency and having it done on your behalf.   Right in the middle of ... whatever it was you were trying to accomplish anyway, you're hit by an invisible wave that feels like a Mack truck pulling a tractor trailer full of fatigue, you briefly lose consciousness and collapse as a veil of sooty burlap is dragged across your field of vision and a thousand thousand chittering things argue spiritedly at the periphery of your mind."

Instead of doing anything to the lip-bed the second time: say "Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice... I'm not going to allow myself to be transformed into a giant cockroach again."

Pre-bug is a scene. Pre-bug begins when player is in M2F4 for the first turn. Pre-bug ends when the player is on the lip-bed.

A cockroach is a kind of person.  A carapace is a kind of thing. A carapace is part of every cockroach.  Antennae are a kind of thing.  Antennae are part of every cockroach.

Archy is a cockroach.  Archy is on the lip-bed2.

Description of Archy is "Now you are a cockroach.  You have a head, a thorax and an abdomen.  Your wingless carapace glints dully in the dim light of the room, which is just peanuts compared to your three pairs of limbs."

Description of carapace is "Your body is surrounded by a dully reflective exoskeleton.  You've never contemplated what it would be like to exist in this world with your bones on the outside, and now that you're in a position to consider it, the screaming habdads preclude any hypothetical attempts at scientific inquiry."

Understand "thorax/abdomen" as the carapace when the location is M2F4.

Description of antennae is "Like eyebrows, only more so.  On a clear night, you could probably pick up short-wave radio signals with them."

Instead of looking under yourself: say "You don't expect to find much, peering beneath yourself, but as you lift one foot you do spot... there it is, a dim blob of darkness!  You steel yourself for an encounter with some eldrich force before the sad truth washes over you that you have just excitedly rediscovered your own shadow.  Still, this is a valuable preparation for the day ahead, surely not too far now, when you will be confronted with your reflection in a mirror."

Instead of smelling Door7: say "You lean in close, take a whiff and exclaim 'O, door!'  Sadly, no dads are around to appreciate your hilarious joke."

Instead of pushing yourself to west: say "Are you going to let yourself get pushed around?  No way, not even by yourself!  It's the principle of the thing!"

Instead of buying yourself: say "You haven't yet found your price.  (But you're pretty sure you can't afford it.)"

Instead of squeezing a door: say "As much as you would enjoy a tall, fresh glass of freshly-squeezed door juice, you have nothing to catch the precious fluid in."

Instead of closing yourself: say "You shut your mouth and screw your nostrils tight, but since you have no chance at contesting Guybrush Threepwood's record for breath-holding, after a few seconds you ... * "

Instead of eating yourself: say "You lack both the motivation and the flexibility to complete this fantastic feat of contortion."

Instead of touching yourself: say "True as it may be that I don't want anybody else, when I think about you I nonetheless don't typically nip off to a corner of a spooky mansion to rub one out, even if it is a bedroom."

Instead of rubbing yourself: try touching yourself.

Instead of entering yourself: say "There may well be an AIF room somewhere in Cragne Manor, but this is not it."

Instead of pulling yourself: try touching yourself.

Lip-abouting is an action applying to nothing. Understand "about" as lip-abouting when the location is M2F4. Carry out lip-abouting: say "Rowan Lipkovits is better known for engineering a brutal Twine trainwreck than for his private forays into text parser interactive fiction, and it is no coincidence.  Coming into Inform 7 Socratically prepared with the understanding that the only thing he knew is that he knew nothing, he learned over the course of implementing a single sparse room volumes about the newfound nigh-bottomless profundity of his ignorance of which he had previously been unaware.  Compounding his woes, he tragically made the classic strategic blunder of scheduling his involvement with this grand and noble absurd collaboration into direct conflict with organizing a punk accordion music festival.  (Oh, that old cliche!)  Hats off to Baf, matt w. and especially Andrew Schultz, who helped to snatch success from his doomed source code.  Rowan just might manage to bang out another broken IF project sometime before the end of the decade; conversely he might not...  but if you want to see something he manages to release on a monthly basis, you can check out his curated collections of computer artwork vintage and retro both at www.mistigris.org".

[The commentary for M2F4 is "Writing a story is like taking a snapshot, capturing one perfect moment for posterity.  Writing an interactive story is like making a cartoon, where suddenly your perfect images need to interact with each other in satisfying and predictable ways.  The complexity scales, not geometrically, but exponentially.  As a contrarian, I have no choice but to approach creative challenges from the back entrance.  As a game player I'm always that irritating-to-watch person trying to push the furniture and jump out the window 'just to see if it'll let me', and in Inform 7, which Will Let You (providing you can phrase it in the one true way), I have met my match.  If my colleagues here have been puttering around with gentle landscaping, planting flower beds or perhaps installing a pond with a waterwheel, I grimly set to work seeing just how deep a hole I can dig.  Then I find that the answer is: so deep I find I cannot manage to climb out again on my own.  Nothing to do but keep digging, then!  Perhaps I'll break through the other side!  This is just the sort of person you want on board for your group project, right?  He has so many ideas, and will need you to fix them all.

But enough about me, what about this room?  My initial contrarian impulse was to attempt to derail carefully constructed-by-committee mood with a menacing but lighthearted protracted CYOA section, perhaps in the vein of The Ascot.  Unfortunately, I had no idea where to start with implementing such a thing in Inform 7; there are extensions, but our best practices guidelines discouraged their use.  Besides, after 50 Shades of Jilting, my most recent exercise in wrongheadedly working at odds with the strengths of a text parser, I felt that perhaps just this once it might be a lark to go with the flow.  But of course I couldn't just make a room -- it had to have some prestige element, an unexpected veer that just happens to be a colossal pain in the derriere to implement.

Anyhow.  I hope that it behaved as intended.  If it did, I hope that you were at least mildly surprised and amused.  It's tremendously intimidating to be in the room with so many greats of the field: you know you're not going to outcode them, there's no point in even trying; you know you're not going to outwrite them, possibly because they know the value of a round of editing... all you can really count on is the gotcha value of your gonzo idea and hope that your skillZ are up to the task of at least handwaving around it such that some of its potent stink juice remains perceivable in the final product.

The internal name of the cockroach-avatar is archy, named after don marquis' renowned vers libre poet whose soul transmigrated into the body of just such a bug -- the gonzo idea of its time, if you will.  You, dear reader, would be well-advised to locate a volume of the archy and mehitabel poems, at least some of which should be confidently in the public domain.  They have a lot more to say than I do."]

lip-bugbed is a room in M2F.  "The good news is that you are still on the bed.  The bad news is that the you that is on the bed is now, rather than the intrepid human female Naomi Cragne, instead the nauseating cockroach female Naomi Cragne.  Worst of all, while lying down was no problem for human-Naomi, it poses a nigh-existential challenge for cockroach-Naomi, who finds herself unable to right herself.

On the bright side, the one thing you can easily achieve in this awkward position is turning on the lamp and illuminating the room a little."  Printed name of lip-bugbed is "SAMSA WAS HERE (ROWAN LIPKOVITS)".

Instead of going in lip-bugbed: say "Unaccustomed to your slippery carapace and coordinating your six legs, you are unable to right yourself, and you go nowhere."

Instead of exiting in lip-bugbed: say "Unaccustomed to your slippery carapace and coordinating your six legs, you are unable to right yourself, and you go nowhere."

Cur-Bug is a scene. Cur-bug begins when Pre-Bug ends. "When you awaken from troubled dreams, you find yourself transformed in this bed into a horrible vermin."

When Cur-Bug begins: now the player is Archy.

The lip-bed2 is in lip-bugbed.  It is a supporter.  It is fixed in place scenery.  Understand "bed" as the lip-bed2 when the location is lip-bugbed.  Printed name of lip-bed2 is "bed".

The lip-lamp2 is in lip-bugbed.  It is fixed in place scenery.  Understand "lamp" as the lip-lamp2 when the location is lip-bugbed.

Instead of doing something to lip-lamp2: say "(turning on lamp)

At the sound of the lamp's switch, your hitherto unimagined cockroach instincts kick in like an unstoppable force; drawing on some reservoir of limber grace and vigor -- practically racing the lamp's light to the corners of the room, you find yourself instinctively flinging your roachy self off of the bed , making a bee-line for the nearest wall -- which you proceed to scurry up -- and on to the ceiling.  Along the way, the lamp's pull-cord snags on one of your legs, and its inadequate illumination once again fades like the camera bulb in a disposable Polaroid.

It is upside-down on this ceiling where, unbeknownst to you, you inadvertently crawl over a magical pentacle of cancellation that has been wallpapered over.  It quietly works its protective charms on you, but 'protective' is relative, as you find you resume your human form and quickly discover, from your ceiling vantage point, that gravity effects humans differently from cockroaches.

Down you crash, but happily, you don't seem to break anything too mission-critical."; move Naomi Cragne to M2F4, without printing a room description; now the player is Naomi Cragne.

Cur-Bug ends when the player is Naomi Cragne.

[Post-bug is a scene.  Post-bug begins when Cur-Bug ends.  ]

[Post-bug would be just like Pre-bug, only there's no way the player will be moved to touch the bed or the lamp again.]