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itsbenedict · 4 months ago

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From the beginning | Previously | Coin standings | 4/18 | 3/3

You enter the CURVE HOUSE, which turns out to not actually be there. Instead, you realize you can USE VOUCHER to get food- and you're in dire need of sustenance. The hallucinations are starting to get dire- the lower your hunger, the more wildly inadvisable options like EMOTIONAL PETER or A HOTTEST VADER will occur to you, like annoying television ads. Beware THIS UNRIGHTEOUS TV!

Problem is, you're pretty sure this Siren's Arraignment place is one of the two ghost ships out at sea, which is a ways (3 ways, specifically) away. If you tried going on foot and swimming, you'd starve to death the instant you got there.

Luckily- and Adea has a number of questions about DIGITAL ANTHROPOMORPHISM that Walter is not equipped to answer- you are both bird people, somehow. And since you're all the way up in the steampunk spires, you have some height you can use to glide to your destination without exerting yourselves too much.

You find, conveniently, a big sign at the back of one of the two ghost ships reading STACK OVÉRFLOW CAFÉ VOLTWORKS, which saves you a lot of perilous searching around while surrounded by ghosts.

Problem is: the café is infested with ghosts.

That, and... to use a voucher, you need to kind of, hand it to café staff? And order stuff? But you're trapped in a deserted otherworld where no one except the two of you and miscellaneous incomprehensible glitch-monsters appears to exist. This voucher might be of some use in the real world, but... uh. You're not sure how to spend it, here.

...There are shelves behind the bar covered in bottles of various drinks, though. And... a few golden butterflies, drifting throughout the room. What should you do? Apart from the FILIAL TWINS and NETTLE SPECIMEN, many mirages present themselves to your hunger-addled minds (many of them unhelpful or unsafe):

The cheeriest goth whose sox you once tried to steal is holding a celebration of the things those socks go up to: a GOTH THIGHS FEST, appreciated by the truly cultured.

There's a bunch of silverware you could steal and use to eat something, but it's SHEATHED SILVER, which could be hard to remove and use.

You just flew in from the steampunk spires, and boy are your arms tired! Not a joke. Because you're birds. You're tired and there's some FORMAL PERCHES set aside for you to rest on. Fancy!

There was a lightningbolt on the Café Voltworks sign outside, but ELECTRIC BOLT LEFT US, and it seems to have disappeared. Where'd it go?

Adea, Walter's partner and friend and overall pal, seems to be on one knee to recuperate from the flight. Since HAWK PAL KNELT, why not the dove pal?

Some of the ghosts are swordfish who're swinging their noses at each other, like martial arts weapons. Should you join in on their NOSE KARATE GAMES?

Hey, there's some food! It's just one single nacho, but it's prepackaged and unopened, so the SEALED NACHO is probably still good. You could split it, maybe?

Continued

#lost in hearts #back from funeral and mostly recovered from being sick and back in the saddle #careful with this one! lot of bad options here #since you're starving and all.

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catadrome · 4 months ago

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STACK OVÉRFLOW? Perhaps we are looking for a VOLTWORKS CAFÉ? (The secret which was alluded to earlier seems to be that this is related to Datasouls, and some web browsing brings brought us to doc7torcoolhaxx.com, which doesn't exist anymore (save for wayback machine snapshots), but thanks to @sym-metric the relevant anagrams have been found already.)

Anyway, our options:

RETURN THE GEARS (we ought to do this eventually, I think, but it might not be safe to right now.)

PATCH YOURSELF UP (there were consequences last time and may be again.)

SHED YOUR DAMAGE? (or perhaps damage your shed, but I don't see any sheds. this seems safer than stealing more gears, and might give us some wiggle room health-wise to finally put that gear back...but there's a clearer option, I think)

DEFRAGMENT HARD DISK (this is how you heal yourself in datasouls, right? let's please do this!)

INSTALL WIFI (this seems maybe more likely to have useful files than most locations, but I would like the monster to quit chasing us first)

INSPECT ELEMENT (I suppose this is how we use the DEVELOPER TOOLS.)

From the beginning | Previously | Coin standings | 5/18 | 2/7

Nice.

Thanks to the kindness of strangers, the butterflies deliver to the two of you some useful freebies from the Coin shop:

The MER-MYSTIC provides 12 orders of BEAT USER. The two of you divide them such that you're as close to equally sated as possible- around 10/11. After filling up, neither of you seem mentally impaired by the hunger, but you know it's only a matter of time before that changes. You still need to FULLY ROBE LILY FILL YOUR BELLY somewhere, though you've got a little wiggle room before it becomes necessary.

To that end, A DEMOCRAT purchases you A COUCH FÉVER a CAFÉ VOUCHER, which appears to be for the STACK OVÉRFLOW- a prestigious juice bar that advertises a recent relocation to a place called "the Siren's Arraignment". You're not sure where that is, but you can keep your eye out for it- the voucher is good for 20 hunger's worth of drinks and meals.

You also receive the OLD TROOP SLEEVE DEVELOPER TOOLS, a lightweight gauntlet that sometimes provides the wearer with a +1 HAK bonus. Huh? Or, no, it's... got a hidden needle that allows you to extract a data sample from something and peek at its properties under the hood, allowing you to find weaknesses in bugs and structures.

The BILATERAL SIZINGS SIGNAL STABILIZER is a consumable item that allows you to stabilize an anomaly and automatically DEFEAT THEIR UNTURN one time. A label on the back informs you that it can even be used on memories!

You don't have much time to consider what to do with all this- the monster is hot on your heels! According to the NO FEWER FARMERS FREEFORM ANSWER response, the play seems to be to loop around this thing through the fairy forest and get to the steampunk spires, so you hotfoot it out of there after chowing down on your rations.

Passing through the fairy forest, Walter notices it's changed somewhat since he was last there. The clouds from the cloudscape hills seem to have descended upon it, enshrouding it in fog. It's difficult to navigate, but luckily Adea knows the park's layout like the back of her hand, even in this fanciful and distorted form. She leads you through and up the stairs to the city heights, now a labyrinth of steampunk spires.

You survey the area, to see if there's anything useful here. As usual, it's a little hard to tell if any of this is of use:

There's a patch of soil with a sign declaring that beneath it is every mistake you've ever made, and offering a shovel for you to UNEARTH REGRETS. Is this really a good idea...?

The PURPOSEFUL YACHT is still here, if you want to set sail and scavenge the area for more spare parts to patch yourself up- you're pretty low on health, but there could be consequences.

The GAMED HOUSE-YARD still hasn't replaced its turf with real grass. Seems like they've been getting away with dodging HOA regs for a while.

The high-quality rips whose GRAND DAD THEME: FRISK is easy enough to figure out... still seem to be playing from who knows where.

The FILIAL TWINS have followed you once again, eager to dig up some more files for you to peruse for information and potentially decrypt to earn Coin.

There's a NETTLE SPECIMEN that seems to have grown somehow amidst the whirling machinery. It's got stinging barbs on its leaves, and might be painful to touch.

#lost in hearts

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