Act III

Major Characters

• Junebug

• Donald

• Doolittle’s Ghost

• Ezra & Julian

• Shannon

• Lysette

• Carrington

• Lula

Themes

• Lateness

• Regret

• Escapism

• Debt

Locations

Complex (camera movement or multiple joined scenes)

• Hall of the Mountain King

• “Xanadu” (computer simulation in HOTMK)

• Hard Times Distillery

Simple

• Lysette’s kitchen

• The Lower Depths

• A Tree (minimal & stagelike tree by the side of a country road, based on the set of “Waiting for Godot”)

Repeated

• Doctor Truman’s kitchen

• Equus Oils

• Bureau

Main Narrative Summary

Act III opens with a conversation between Conway & Lysette in Lysette’s kitchen, a space modeled after Dr. Truman’s kitchen. This is the first part of a four-part conversation in which the player controls both Conway and Lysette’s responses, such that the only non-player-selected text to appear in the conversation is stage directions. The conversation overall is a loose parallel/counterpoint to the conversation between Mary and Warren in “Death of the Hired Man,” with inverted allusions to suggest that Conway is playing both Warren’s role and Silas’s. The first part in the conversation sees Conway and Lysette sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and discussing a hummingbird feeder (which once belonged to Lysette’s son, Charlie) and a bag of sugar sitting on the table.

At the close of this conversation, Conway awakes in Dr. Truman’s kitchen. His leg has been fixed, but it now has a weird color-cycled glow effect. The terms of the bill are bizarre and hostile, and involve working off the debt in some unspecified way at the Consolidated Power Company. Dr. Truman is portrayed as just a messenger, not the perpetrator. Depending on choices made earlier in the game, the player has a few options for how Conway relates to the surgery: Conway can feel detached from his leg (“this isn’t my leg; you replaced it”), he can feel liberated by the surgery, or he can feel betrayed by the terms of the bill and regret getting the surgery (...more options?).

The scene transitions from the doctor’s office to the exterior of the museum (Julian having flown the players back) for a short conversation. Ben, Bob & Emily are standing outside the museum, debating whether or not to go in — their behavior much like they do in the basement in Act I, ignoring Conway’s attempts to engage them. The party decides to take one of several steps next, with options depending on past player choices.

After driving for a while toward their decided-upon destination, the truck breaks down by a large tree on a country road. Shannon calls a towing service on her cell phone, and the party waits for them to arrive. The rest of the scene is in loose parallel/counterpoint to Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” A few conversations are available, either by talking directly to characters or by looking at things in the scene (the tree, the moon, the road, the truck, some discarded boots).

Junebug arrives with her submissive partner and synth accompaniment Johnny, also a robot (or is it more interesting / weirder if he’s human?). She teases him, but an aura of kindness pervades their interactions. Junebug and Johnny are on their way to The Lower Depths to perform for money, but they’re running extremely late. Junebug can repair the truck, with Shannon’s help, so Conway and Shannon offer to drive Junebug and Johnny to The Lower Depths. In conversation, they also reveal to Junebug that they’re looking for a way back to the Zero, to return to the Bureau and deliver the address change data to Lula. Junebug hints that she knows a way.

Cut back to part two of Conway’s conversation with Lysette. Conway and Lysette stand closer to the kitchen window, looking out at a tree in the yard.

The characters arrive at The Lower Depths. The door is still locked, but Junebug busts it open and they enter. The bar is empty except for the proprietor, Harry. The characters who were present at the bar in the intermission game are gone, leaving behind only their shoes and eyeglasses. Though there are no customers, Harry agrees to allow Junebug to perform for Conway, Shannon, Ezra and the hound.

After Junebug’s performance, Harry reveals that he doesn’t have any money left in the till, having just paid for a whiskey delivery. All he can offer is an IOU. Junebug bargains that Harry also allow her and her companions access to the Zero. Harry professes ignorance, but Junebug cajoles him into revealing that his basement connects to the Zero for whiskey deliveries. There’s a lift in the loading dock that can lower the truck down.

After entering the caves, the party finds themselves at the Hall of the Mountain King. The cavernous space is lined with the traces of what must have once been an impressive computer system. A few graduate students, now old and weak, huddle for warmth around a small pile of burning electronics. Donald sits on the stone floor next to the only working computer in the room, the PDP-1. Donald smokes a pipe packed with the opiate bioluminescent moss from the caves, which he offers the player.

He explains that the computer is running a videogame he and a few collaborators devised a few decades ago, called “Xanadu.” Some time ago, the game started to decay and mutate. He devoted his entire attention to repairing and maintaining it, but it’s been a downhill battle. Donald offers to let the party play “Xanadu.”

“Xanadu” is a text adventure which tells the decades-old story of Lula, Joseph and Donald discovering the caves and the Zero, though with a great deal of distortion through the decay of the software and Donald’s own tweaking, editorializing, and fantastic injections. A large portion of the dialog is also glitched out beyond legibility (some kind of illegible glitch text shader? or just using weird unicode characters/garbage txt?). The player controls a young Donald, indirectly, through dialog representing a conversation happening within the party about what move should be made next. After playing for a while, the game ends abruptly and awkwardly at a point in the story at which Donald's sanctuary is being threatened by ghostly figures.

Outside of the game, the party asks Donald about these ghostly figures. Donald warns them not to pry, but eventually relents and tells them that the ghostly figures came from somewhere nearby, that he’s been siphoning resources from them and hiding from them for years, and that he suspects they are responsible for the game’s decay and many of his other woes. They’ve walled up the tunnels he used to find them, except for one. Donald shows the party how to access the tunnel (maybe it’s behind a cluster of wires or a false wall?), which leads them to Hard Times.

Cut back to part three of Conway’s conversation with Lysette. Conway and Lysette are trying to figure out how to use a badly broken old computer on the countertop to look up some information about their deliveries for the day.

Hard Times is a former church converted into a distillery. It is a multi-scene area made up of a few smaller scenes: exterior (graveyard/entrance), main room (fermentation tanks, still, pouring bourbon into caskets, etc), and Doolittle’s office.

The party emerges from a mausoleum in the distillery’s exterior. Conway and Shannon will enter the distillery, while Junebug and Ezra keep watch outside. Conway and Shannon enter the distillery doors. Junebug and Ezra have a relatively long conversation, after which Conway and Shannon re-appear. Shannon is upset, Conway is a bit despondent, but they say they’ve got what they need to repair Donald’s game. Both are reluctant to talk about what happened in the distillery. The party returns underground through the mausoleum.

When speaking with Donald back in the cave, the player is given a choice as to what solution Conway & Shannon found in the distillery.

NOTE: not sure what these options could be, but some ideas: the ghosts suggest that Donald run the computer without electricity, the ghosts return a missing audio component they’d stolen from the computer to discourage Donald, the ghosts suggest that Donald stop smoking the moss and focus on fixing the bugs with a clear head, the ghosts suggest that the player smoke some of the moss before playing the game so that it makes sense.

Having repaired the game, Donald asks the party to try playing it again, to see if it seems more coherent now. The player re-enters the game mode, and plays through the same set of events as the first game sequence but without glitches, which yields a different read on the game, revealing a very specific story about the love triangle between Joseph, Donald, and Lula, and how it fell apart.

When the game ends, this time not crashing but concluding more naturally at the moment Donald, Joseph and Lula are arguing about leaving the caves. This conclusion exactly matches the “cheat” segment from “Limits & Demonstrations.”

After exiting the game, the player finds that Lula has arrived. Lula and Donald have a brief conversation. Lula tells the party that the Bureau doesn’t really have access to data-processing services, and she’d planned to have Donald analyze the data. Donald agrees, and says he’ll fax the results back to the Bureau. Lula suggests that the party meet her back at the Bureau when they’re ready to proceed. Shannon insists on driving.

The player can navigate the Zero now, potentially returning to the storage facility if that’s where Carrington’s play is being staged, or just discovering new vignettes using the radio before traveling to the Bureau.

When the party enters the Bureau, cut back to part four of Conway’s conversation with Lysette. Conway and Lysette are sitting at the kitchen table again, looking at a road map to come up with an efficient route for the day’s deliveries.

The party returns to the Bureau. They speak with Lula, who says that she’s received the coordinates of the definitive Dogwood Drive address. She suggests they travel by river, and that a boat will arrive shortly downstairs.

As the party waits for the boat, they push Conway & Shannon to reveal what happened at the distillery.

Cut back to the distillery interior. Conway and Shannon are caught up in a short guided tour of the facilities. They sneak away upstairs and find the office, where they meet Doolittle’s Ghost. Through a conversation with Doolittle, he agrees to re-establish the power link to the Hall of the Mountain King. He offers Conway a drink, and offers to front him on the cost. Shannon protests, but Conway accepts the drink (with no input from the player). This repeats for a few more drinks, which the player is unable to make Conway resist. While they drink, they discuss the peculiar history of the distillery and its relationship with debt. Conway gradually discovers that by accepting Doolittle’s offer to front him the cost of a drink, he’s incurred a drinking debt that will have to be paid off somehow. Doolittle plans to trade in Conway’s debt to him in order to pay off his own debt to the distillery, freeing him after decades of working there. This conversation should reflect the conversation with Dr. Truman near the beginning of the game, again painting Doolittle not as a perpetrator but as another person caught up in a bizarre system of debt.

The player’s earlier decision about the solution to Donald’s videogame problem is re-enacted in the distillery sequence.

Act III ends back at the bureau, the characters standing in silence as the boat approaches (signaled audibly, with a foghorn).

Scene outlines

Xanadu

Xanadu is closely related to Lula’s “Overdubbed Nam June Paik installation…” but from Donald’s perspective, and with the injection of some fantastic elements. The player plays through it twice: first in a shortened glitch mode, and second in a full-length restored mode.

The game is played like a hybrid graphic/text adventure (maybe like Mystery House for the Apple II — there’s a graphical representation of the scene and then a parser at the bottom of the screen), but in first-person view. The player interacts indirectly by guiding a conversation between Conway, Shannon, Junebug, and Ezra about what to type in next.

The game is divided up into three primary sections, separated by “maze” sections, to make up 5 regions in total:

1. Forest outside caves

2. Lost in the forest

3. Original research site

4. Maze of twisty passages

5. Hall of the Mountain King

The game begins in the woods outside the caves. Donald, Joseph, and Lula explore the forest, carrying computer equipment on their backs and talking about their project.

They get lost in the forest for a while, then end up at the cave entrance, which leads them to a small debris-filled room, where they set up the computer system.

Ghosts appear in the room. Joseph and Lula flee. Donald picks up the computer equipment and heads deeper into the caves.

Donald navigates a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Donald finds himself in the Hall of the Mountain King. He sets up the computers again, and the game enters a simplified turn-based simulation game: building the software, growing moss on the computers, and hiring/firing graduate students to help maintain the computers and stave off decay. Inevitably, things begin to decline (the decay rate exceeds the player’s ability to maintain the system). After a few turns of decline, everything is in ruins. Lula walks into the scene, and the game exits (to reveal Lula having just walked into the room in reality).

Overworld

Vignettes

• Drive-in movie theatre (visual)

Overworld Design notes

• We’ll bypass the Julian overworld interface in this act, and not reintroduce it until act 5. That way it stays kind of rarified. Also part of the fun of the Julian overworld in act 2 was revisiting spots from act 1 but from a different perspective (overhead). So we’ll have more new stuff like that present in act 5 after introducing new overworld locations/vignettes in act 3.

• Shannon repairs the radio in the truck. We can add some kind of radio tuning interface to the highway overworld map, with a few fictional stations that are maybe 3–5 minute loops? We can also add some overworld vignettes that can only be discovered sonically, by tuning to dead air and driving around listening for weird signals that appear as you get close to a vignette. Maybe there’s a different set of stations underground, or it’s all static but you can find underworld vignettes in a similar way. There’s a separate set of stations for the Underworld vs. Overworld – the Underworld stations are more about speech instead of music.

• Julian circles around the truck on the overworld above-ground. After meeting Junebug and Johnny, their motorcycle follows the truck on the overworld.

Side Quests

James Beckwourth Carrington’s Play

Conway meets Carrington at Equus Oils, the mine entrance, or the storage facility. They discuss the staging and set design of the show in the context of the space, and through a roundabout conversation about set design and aesthetics determine to leave the space untouched for the performance. Carrington complains about the unreliability of his actors, foreshadowing act 5 in which none of the actors show up and Conway & his companions have to perform the play.

Equus Oils

If the player returns to Equus Oils, they can talk with Joseph about their experience on the Zero. Joseph will open up a bit about his own connection to the Zero. While the player was away, Joseph’s niece stopped by and installed some games on his computer, which Conway and his companions can play.

Game ideas:

• A crude version of “Mars Needs Whiskey” in the style of the classic “Lemonade Stand” game on the Apple II.

• A chatbot like Eliza

• NCAA basketball game

• A light aircraft flight simulator

Music notes