Transcript - The Recorder's Office

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THE RECORDER'S OFFICE
the first twenty minutes

[ about the game ] [ transcript ] [ hints ] [ how I built it ]

This is the opening of the game, played straight through by me, with Release 2. My commands are in green after the > prompt. Everything else is the game talking. It spoils the first puzzle, but only the first one, and the first one is mostly there to teach you how to read an index.

THE RECORDER'S OFFICE
An interactive night in the county records
Copyright (c) 1999 by Mickey Walker. Release 2.
Type ABOUT for credits.

You wake up all at once, the way you do on a train, not knowing for a second where you are. Then the smell tells you: old paper, radiator dust, mimeograph ink. The deed vault. And it is dark.

Deed Vault
Steel shelves run back into the dark, row after row, every one of them packed with tall books bound in green canvas, their spines lettered in gold that has mostly worn away. The air is cool and still and smells like a library that has been closed for a war. The only light comes from the open vault door to the south, a tall gray rectangle. The wooden stool you fell asleep on stands in the aisle.

>STAND UP
You get up off the stool. Your left foot is asleep, and it lets you know.

>S
Recording Room
The big room at the heart of the County Records Building is mostly shadow at this hour. Streetlight comes in through the tall front windows and lies across the long oak counter in bars. Against the east wall stand the indexes: two long rows of enormous ledgers on slanted shelves, grantors on the left, grantees on the right. An electric clock over the counter hums to itself. The vault is north. The recorder's private office is west, and a door with a pebbled glass panel, marked FILM ROOM, is closed to the east. Beyond the counter are the front doors.

On the counter you see a visitors' register and a brass bell.

>X CLOCK
A plain electric clock with a red second hand that sweeps around without a sound. It says 9:44. Eleven hours and sixteen minutes until the sale.

>READ REGISTER
Anyone who asks to see a book signs in here first, with the date and the book number. Mrs. Bevis is particular about that. The last entry on the page, in heavy black ink, says:

  Thurs. 3/22 4:40 PM J. Morrow Bk. 214

Yesterday afternoon, twenty minutes before closing. You don't know what's in Book 214 yet. You have a feeling you're about to.

>RING BELL
Ding. The sound goes up into the high ceiling and doesn't come back down. Somewhere below you, very faintly, a radio is playing a polka.

>PULL FRONT DOOR
Chained, from the outside. The night man chains the front and leaves by the back, you remember. Not that you were planning to leave.

>XYZZY
You whisper the word into the dark. Nothing happens. Somewhere upstairs a radiator knocks twice, as if in sympathy.

>LOOK UP COLQUITT IN GRANTEE INDEX
You haul down the volume for C and let it fall open on the slanted shelf with a sound like a door shutting. Your finger runs down the column. Colley. Colpitts. Colquitt.

  COLQUITT, Walter fr. MINGO, Norman W.D. Feb. 3, 1911 Bk. 214 Pg. 77

There it is. Recorded and indexed fifty-one years ago, in the round, careful hand of a clerk who is surely dead by now. All you have to do is go and get it.

[Your score has just gone up by two points.]

>N
Deed Vault
The books stand in their rows, waiting. The stool is in the aisle.

>GET BOOK 214
The books run in order, and it doesn't take long. You find 214 at the end of the fourth row at about the height of your chin and work it out from between its neighbors. It weighs about as much as a sack of flour.

>OPEN IT
You lay the book across the stool and open it near the middle.

>TURN TO PAGE 77
Page 73. Page 74.

Pages 75 through 78 are gone. Not torn out. Cut, close to the binding, with something very sharp. Four clean stubs stand up from the gutter of the book like a row of teeth.

You sit down on the floor of the vault.

>X STUBS
Whoever did this knew what he was doing. The cuts are straight and even from top to bottom, and there isn't a nick on page 74 or page 79. A razor blade, you'd guess, and a steady hand, and maybe a little practice.

>S
Recording Room
The clock over the counter says 9:55.

>LOOK UNDER COUNTER
Under the counter, where the clerks keep their feet, there is a wire wastebasket.

>SEARCH WASTEBASKET
Pencil shavings, a crumpled sheet of carbon paper, an apple core going brown. And at the bottom, under everything, a single-edged razor blade, new and bright, and a paper cigar band, red and gold.

>TAKE BLADE AND BAND
razor blade: Carefully. Taken.
cigar band: Taken.

>SMELL BAND
Cigar. A good one, by the smell, which is to say an expensive one. Nobody who works in this building smokes cigars. Mrs. Bevis would not allow it.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]

>LISTEN
The clock hums. The radiators tick. Far below, the polka ends, and a man's voice reads the farm prices, and then another polka starts. Someone down there is keeping time with a broom.

>X VAULT DOOR
The vault door is a foot thick, painted the color of a battleship, with a wheel in the middle like a ship's. It stands open all day and most nights. Mrs. Bevis says the front doors and the night man are lock enough, and tonight you are grateful for her opinion. Beside the door, at eye level, someone has screwed a small brass plaque into the plaster.

>READ PLAQUE
  THE RECORDS OF THIS OFFICE
  WERE MICROFILMED FOR SAFEKEEPING
  IN THE YEAR 1958
  BOOKS 1 THROUGH 300

You read it twice.

Then you turn and look across the dark room at the door marked FILM ROOM.

[Your score has just gone up by two points.]

>SCORE
In 21 moves, you have scored 5 of a possible 25 points. It is 10:02 P.M.

>

That's where I'll stop. The Film Room door is locked, the machine inside it has a problem, and there's a man in the basement with a radio and a broom who knows more than he lets on. If you want to know the rest, play it. If you get stuck, there's always the hints page.

A note for the curious: XYZZY is the magic word from the very first adventure game, back in the 1970s, and every game since has had to decide what to do when somebody types it. I decided the radiator should feel bad for you.

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Last updated September 17, 1999