Such Great Heights
You make your way through countless twisting passages and narrow staircases to a place where a wall has collapsed, leaving an Adventurer-sized (and shaped, which is weird) opening to the outside. You step through it, and realize that you must have climbed more stairs than you thought, because you find yourself on a high ledge, perched precariously above a dizzying drop into the forest below.
You've got a few options.
| Sidle along the ledge |
You press yourself against the side of the temple and slowly shuffle along the ledge. After a couple of hours of this, you completely circumnavigate the temple and end up back where you started, but along the way you evidently learned some ancient secret knowledge from all of the face-level carvings you passed.
| You gain ~39-90 ? Enchantedness. |
| Climb down some vines |
First time:
You grab some of the vines on the outside of the temple and begin to climb downwards. Almost immediately, half of the vines snap, sending you swinging wildly out into the air. Then the other half of the vines snap, dropping you straight down toward certain death. Luckily, in between you and certain death there is another bundle of vines, which you catch hold of as you fall. Almost immediately, half of the vines snap, sending you swinging wildly back toward the temple.
You're starting to get sick of these stupid unreliable vines, so you wait until you're swinging directly above a ledge, and drop down onto it. Almost immediately the ledge collapses, sending you tumbling, grumbling, into the temple's interior. They really didn't make any of this stuff to last.
You finally roll to a stop inside a dark, quiet chamber with a variety of Adventurer skeletons scattered around an immense carving of a serpent. The skeletons are all clutching giant jewels that their previous owners apparently pulled out of the statue. You start to collect them, but then you notice a message scrawled in the dust on the floor: "You can have these jewels when you pry them from our cold, dead fingers. Actually, screw that -- you can't even have them then. Buzz off, you jerk."
You decide it'd be more considerate to just pry the one remaining jewel off of the statue -- a big, shiny green one, lodged firmly in the serpent's nose. Then you climb back out of the temple, using a ladder you build from the legbones of those stupid greedy skeletons.
 | You acquire an item: the Nostril of the Serpent |
Subsequent:
No way, not after what happened the last time. You have trusted your last vine.
| Head towards the top of the temple |
First time:
You climb to the summit of the temple, where atop an elaborately-carved altar you see the unmistakable shape of a gnomon. What's a gnomon, you ask? It's the opposite of a yes, mon.
Just kidding. It's the pointy bit of a sundial, or in this case, a moondial.
As an experiment, you grab it and rotate it a few degrees. As you do, the moons suddenly sweep unnaturally across the sky, and you notice a few shooting stars unshooting themselves.
You slowly step away from the gnomon, feeling slightly younger and significantly more weirded out...
 | You gain 3 Adventures. |
For each effect you have or ten random effects you have, whichever is less:
 | You acquire an effect: ... something (duration: 3 Adventures) |
With a Mayam Calendar (resets used symbols):
While everything else is going on, you notice that the rings on the Mayam Calendar in your pack are also spinning wildly.
Subsequent:
You consider going up and messing with the gnomon some more, but you figure it's probably better not to screw around with the fundamental forces of the universe too much. You might get a time headache or something.
- Occurs at The Hidden Temple.
Notes
- When you gain 3 adventures from heading towards the top, you also gain 3 adventures of up to ten effects you currently have (including negative effects, but excluding timers).
- An adventure is not consumed on the second option if you already have collected the Nostril.
- The third choice never costs an adventure; this is important to note for 1-turn effects that might be beneficial in-run, such as Jukebox Hero.
See Also
References
- The scene with the gnomon is a direct reference to events in the 1986 Infocom text adventure game, Trinity.
- The name of the adventure refers to a song of the same name by The Postal Service. The "narrow staircases" in the description are probably a reference to the album Narrow Stairs by the vocalist's other band, Death Cab for Cutie.
