It's a Fixer-Upper
You step through a door and find yourself standing in the base of a gloomy stone tower. To clarify: most of the house is pretty gloomy, but this tower is particularly gloomy. Wind howls through holes in the crumbling masonry, making the torches flicker and cast eerie shadows around you. A rickety wooden staircase -- really just planks jutting from the curved wall -- climbs unsteadily toward a trapdoor in the ceiling, and a plain wooden door opens into a small study that occupies most of the ground floor.
| Enter the study |
You step into the study, which is furnished with mouldering bookshelves, a tattered sofa, and a rickety old writing-desk (which incidentally reminds you of something, but you can't remember what or why). Like all good adventurers, you immediately head toward the desk to see if there's anything in the drawers, but are interrupted by a tapping at the window lattice.
You pause for a moment, trying to think of a rhyme for "lattice", but before you can come up with anything decent, the shutters fly open and a huge black bird launches itself at your face.
raven  -- (edit metadata)
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| Climb to the second floor |
You climb to the second floor of the tower, and discover someone lying in bed, and a man sitting in a chair next to them, scribbling in a notebook. He looks up as you enter, and puts a finger to his lips.
"Please be quiet," he whispers, "I'm conducting an important experiment."
"What sort of experiment?" you whisper back.
"I've been developing a technique of hypnosis that allows a dying person to report on their experiences as they die. It's been tricky. The first one didn't say anything at all for seven months, and then oozed all over my best bed-linens. The second one was more forthcoming, but he went to Hey Deze, and let me tell you, it wasn't a pleasant travelogue. I still wake up screaming, most nights."
"And this guy?"
"This guy lived a pretty decent life. Liked kids, donated to charity, and so on. I think maybe I've got a winner here."
Just then, the man in the bed starts to moan. "Light... a white light..." You hang around for a while to hear what he has to say. It turns out Heaven is pretty dull -- like a strip mall made entirely out of cotton balls. Still though, it's a fairly mystical experience.
| You gain 35-150 Enchantedness. |
| Climb to the belfry |
You carefully climb the creaking wooden stairs to the top of the tower, where a massive iron bell hangs in the shadows of the rafters. You spot a rope hanging down from it, and a little voice by your shoulder says "You know you want to. It'll be awesome." You grab the rope and haul on it with all your weight.
CLONG.
Two things happen: firstly, your head comes completely unglued, and secondly, the air fills up entirely with bats from one edge of your vision to the other, like an M.C. Escher print, but with more guano.
Your head spins as you are buffeted by hundreds of bat wings, and little by little their piercing cries become audible as your deafness clears. Strangely enough, you can almost understand their shrieking... it's basically "Eeeee! Eeeee! Surprise! Alarm! Eeeee!", but that's better than you ever understood them before.
You have to lie on the floor for a pretty long while before your head stops spinning, but frankly, your head needed the rest.
 | You gain 40−49 hit points. |
 | You gain 40−49 Mana Points. |
 | You acquire an effect: Bats in the Belfry (duration: 5 Adventures) |
Occurs in The Mouldering Mansion.
References
- These adventures refer to several of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, such as The Raven and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.
- The "rickety old writing-desk" should remind you of the scene in Alice in Wonderland wherein the Mad Hatter asks Alice the supposedly answer-less riddle, "How is a raven like a writing-desk?"
- Poe's The Raven uses an unusual rhyme scheme, incorporating mid-line rhymes in the first, third, and fourth lines of each verse. The word "lattice" appears at the end of a third line, and is rhymed with "that is" in the middle of the line, and "thereat is" in the middle of the next.
- M. C. Escher was a woodcut and print artist who became particularly famous for depictions of impossible architecture and his series of space-filling "Symmetry" works, including this tesselation.
- The bats' exclamations of "Eeeee! Eeeee! Surprise! Alarm! Eeeee!" are likely a reference to a scene from the 1975 comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which Sir Bedevere exclaims at the appearance of a monster and then has to explain that his exclamation was "in surprise and alarm!"
