The Tillamore Tales 2 Yep, I can't think of any more things to add to the first file yet, so I have decided to write down some of the stray ideas I've got for later chap- ters. The ideas for part 2 (3T2) started with the title, which is "The Fat Lady Sings". To start with the title character, the fat lady is a famous opera singer by the name of Margaret (Maggie) Pye, though most people in the (show) business call her Thieving Mag Pye because she has a tendency to steal the show. (Actually I thought up the nickname as an excuse for using music from The Thieving Magpie in the intro...) (Talking of music, I have tried setting words to the ouverture, but didn't get further than "This is the song of the Thieving Mag Pye She's quite a lady, she's not a hag - I think she is one you would like to meet She - is - the - best She's going to sweep you all right off your feet So she is the one I would like you to meet (tam ta ram) This is the song of a young detective he's a polite one and he doesn't use invective (?) --- Now you may remember our friend Tillamore with whom you have had an adventure before We hope that you liked him and want an encore..." Well, enough of that... We won't need a song with words until the game is released on CD anyway! :-)) Okay, you say, so what has this celebrity got to do with Marystead, why does she have to sing, and how are you going to make an exciting game about it? Well, it all starts one day when William gets an even more famous cli- ent than Ebenezer Harfold - the mayor! He is of Scandinavian descent, and his name is Ness (Mayo Ness - get it?) [It gets worse - his housekeeper is a woman called Jones, who everyone calls Ma (Ma Jones, altså - another Norwegian pun!)]. He opens the conversation with asking William what he knows (?) about the autumn festival, which gives the young detective the opportunity to show off his knowledge and inform the player. Each year the cultural population of Marystead arranges (?) a great cul- ture festival in the autumn (which is why it's called an autumn festival, see? :-)). The mayor is chairman of the festival committee, and as usual they have a problem: Money. Even though the festival is a popular event, it has never managed to break even, so the whole things depends on support from the Culture Ministery (or whatever it's called in Britain). This year the festival needs more support than before to survive, and to make a good impression the mayor has invited the Culture Minister to the opening con- cert, and to make sure he likes what he hears he has also invited the min- ister's favourite singer - Maggie Pye. So far all is well. Unfortunately this is also an election year - the el- ection is scheduled for a few weeks after the festival, and Ness has got a new opponent this year: A ruthless woman called Polly Ticker (sounds like "politiker", which is Norwegian for politician. No, I think Ticker is a better name that Tician... (A bit more subtle too, at least to a non- Norwegian!)). It is generally believed that she will do anything to win the election, and now Ness is afraid that she will try to get at him through the festival. If he should fail to pull the necessary check out of the minister's sleeve, he will lose not only face, but probably the election as well. It all depends on whether of not The Fat Lady Sings... If Ticker somehow should manage to sabotage Pye's performance, the minister will not be impressed, and it will be the end of both the festival and Ness' career! Of course playing bodyguard (or rather voiceguard) for a singer does not make a very interesting game full of puzzles, so we need something more. One idea that got edited out of 3T1 may find a place here. The original idea was that William needs to get into a house while the owner isn't home. Let's say it is Ticker's house and that he must search it to find evidence of her plot against the mayor. The problem is that the house is guarded by a well-trained guard dog that William must find a way to get rid of - and not too permanently; to cover his tracks the dog must be alive and kicking when the owner returns. An obvious way of doing this is to find a way to anaesthetize (?) the dog. Fortunately William's nearest neighbour (except for Shirley) is a doctor (who was probably away on vacation in part 1) - Magnus suggested calling him J. Kyle and also got the rather weird idea that he is both a vet and an MD. That, however, does not mean it's easy to get into his office - it is guarded by a zealous receptionist who won't let anyone in without an appointment. A little sidetrack concerning the receptionist: The first time William comes into the waiting room, she is busy filing her nails - and I don't mean she is performing manicure on herself! She collects nails as in "hammer and nails", and keeps them all neatly filed (as in file cabinet) in a little box on her desk. (maybe she's related to the palm reader? By the way, another idea along the same lines and a possible relative of the two previous is a "bill collector" who doesn't make a living of getting people to pay their bills - he collects bird bills as a hobby! If he also collects (information about) people called Bill, "Bill" Tillamore is going to be a welcome guest for a change!) Back to the doctor's office, the first thing William must do is to sit down and look through some magazines until the receptionist is ready to talk to him. In one of the medical periodicals he finds an ad for a new an- aesthetic called "Sleeping Beauty" (Magnus' idea I think) which according to the ad is both smell- and tasteless and can be administered both by in- jection and orally (in food or drink) - as well as by inhalation, though it only works a few minutes that way. The interesting thing is that the ad has a coupon that a doctor can use to get a free sample of the new drug - or rather, it had a coupon! It has been cut out, and not long ago. This new drug is just what William needs for the dog, and it looks like Kyle has some of it! But how to get him to part with it...? Well, first of all there is the question of getting to see him! The receptionist informs William that he needs to get an appointment to see the doctor, but when he wants to get one she informs him that the books are full for several weeks ahead, so he can't see the doctor until after the autumn festival (which of course will be too late because he needs to uncover the alleged plot before that!). How to get around that? Well, as I said the doctor is also a vet (which was rather pointless until I came up with this idea), and if William has a sick animal he can get an appointment much sooner! However, the problem is not just to get an animal, because even then he will have to wait a week or two. The problem is to find an animal the receptionist is afraid of - then he can get an appointment (almost) immediately by "threatening" to come back every day while he's waiting to see if someone has cancelled an appointment. (He may also sug- gets leaving the animal there while taking care of some other errands while he's waiting.) [This may be a job suitable for Flour (see part 1b).] [Also see further notes below.] [A little joke swiped from "Beetle Bailey": When William demands to "see" the doctor, the receptionist takes him outside and lets him look at the doctor through the window!] [Sidetrack from the sidetrack: I toyed with the idea of including a foot- note in that scene saying something like "Joke by Mort Walker", and similar notes in other places where ideas are taken from others, but it would probably be better to put them in the closing credits. Which led to the idea of making the end credits "programmable" so that they only list what the player has actually seen during the session. I.e. if the player lets William demand to see the doctor, leading to the scene above, the credits will list " gag by Mort Walker", if not it won't be there. And only if William does go to the barber will one of the credits read "Fireman rushing in from the pouring rain courtesy of Lennon/ McCartney".] Okay, we are inside! Now William must find a way to mention the new drug he has read about, and express his (alleged) doubts about its smell-less- ness (?). The doctor finds the sample bottle and lets William have a brief whiff (just enough to make him woozy and convince him about the smell). [Later addition: While reading through this I got the idea to indicate the drug's effect on William by quickly fading the palette from normal to "crazy" and back. A simple but impressive (?) effect that can be done in just a handful of bytes at least on an Amiga. ("Only Amiga makes it pos- sible!") :-) William must then claim that it does smell of something to make the doctor try it long enough to knock him out. Before the doctor wakes up again, William must now secure the Sleeping Beauty bottle, pour a suitable quantity into another bottle (which he must have brought with him, which is not as easy as it seems - remember the bottle fairy?), fill up the bottle with water so the doctor won't notice anything is missing (fortu- nately the liquid is quite clear) and memorize the instructions on the label. Before he can send Ticker's dog to Dreamland there is still one little problem to solve. According to the instructions he just memorized, Sleeping Beauty can put an animal out for as short or long as you like, but the re- quired dosage depends on the patient's weight. So now he must find out how much Ticker's watchdog weighs... This leads to another chain of events that originates with one of Magnus' old ideas. A couple of weeks before the autumn festival it's time for an- other annual (?) event: The Doghouse Contest. This year it's a bit special - there's a rumour that Ticker is looking for someone to build a special doghouse for her watchdog, and to make sure she gets the best doghouse builder in town, she is going to wait and see who wins the contest. You guessed it - winning the contest is exactly what William must do to 1) get into Ticker's house and 2) get close to her dog and get an excuse for discussing its weight. This could be a more or less interesting subgame, the outcome of which decides what happens next: If the player does a good job of building a doghouse, William wins hands down. If he does poorly, it's actually more fun because that means he must find a way to cheat! The interesting thing about this contest is that the finalists are judged by a dog, so to manipulate this four-legged judge William must finds a smell that the dog either finds attractive or repulsive, and impregnate either his own or the contestants' house(s) with it. Use your imagination - it wouldn't hurt to have several alternatives here! [Another possibility would be to douse the inside of William's house with Sleeping Beauty; this would give the impression that the dog likes the house so much he doesn't want to leave! (Remember it only works a few minutes this way...) {This would of course require William to get the drug before the contest. Talk about long term planning...}] Okay, so William has gained entry to Ticker's place - unfortunately Tick- er and her dog are there too. Here we have an opportunity for many strange lines as William does his best to bluff his way through the encounter with- out Ticker getting too suspicious! The one thing he must do here is to ask what the dog weighs, and explain that he needs that information to plan the floor surface - if it's made for a much bigger or smaller dog it will be uncomfortable. However, he also learns a few other things about the dog: It is always out in the garden when Ticker is away, and she is not afraid of would-be burglars trying to drug it (as William is planning to do!) be- cause it has been trained to only eat what it finds in its bowl - twenty yards from the garden wall! Well, once William has found out when Ticker leaves her house and when she comes back, the first step is to calculate exactly how much Sleeping Beauty it takes to put Rover into Dreamland just long enough for William to get into the house and out again after doing what he came for, but not long enough for Ticker to come home and find the dog sleeping! The next step is to get that exact quantity into the dog... Inhalation is out - as we have seen the drug only works for a few minutes that way, and it's hard to tell exactly how long because the dosage is impossible to determine. Injection? This isn't "Daktari", you know! So it looks like the only way to get things done is to get the appropriate dose of Sleeping Beauty across twenty yards of lawn into the food bowl... It isn't that hard to figure out once you've got the right clues. Remem- ber when Argyle Pirate showed off his catapult skills in part one? He could do it! The problem may lie in persuading him... After getting some chunks of the dog's favourite meat (another piece of information volunteered by its owner! Maybe in connection with the special food training: "He wouldn't eat anything found outside the bowl, even if it was --- which is his favourite food!") [To further complicate things it could be a rare expensive food that normally isn't available in Marystead, so William may have to steal some from Ticker's house, intercept the postman bringing a parcel or something] and injecting each with the appro- priate dose of Sleeping Beauty - he needs a syringe for this, which he can either steal from the doctor or borrow from a diabetic or a drug addict! (Maybe I have found a place for Juan Husami in the plot?) - William climbs a tree on the right side (the correct one, that is, not the opposite of left!) of the house and helps Argyle get high enough for a clear view of the patio where the food bowl is standing. Here the player has two options: He may just let Argyle do his thing and hit the bullseye with his first shot, or he may let William borrow the ca- tapult, which starts a subgame in which the player must try to hit the bowl with a rather unaerodynamic piece of raw meat. (I would have let Argyle do it if you ask me! :-)) If he hits once before running out of ammo, all is well, but if he misses with his penultimate shot Argyle will take over, muttering something about not coming all this way just for the view. The rest is easy: William waits for the dog to go to sleep, climbs the wall, gets into the house and finds what he's looking for [Must be something really important to have to go to all this trouble just to get it], and gets safely out again before the dog starts stirring. (If it took more than one shot to hit the bowl, he must remember to remove the uneaten pieces that didn't hit! [both to cover his tracks and because if he leaves any drugged meat around the dog may eat another piece when it wakes up and then go to sleep again...] [Uhm, of course the dog wouldn't eat anything not lying in the bowl, so forget that last part.]) And that's all I have thought out for this game so far, except for a pun which is not one of my best: When Ness tells William that Ticker will "stop at nothing" to "dethrone" him, William remarks that then she can't take the express - it doesn't stop at Nottingham! -------------------------- [Later addition] I recently remembered a wordplay I mentioned to Magnus once, and expanded it a bit into a newspaper heading and start of an art- icle about ms. Pye returning from the United States, where she according to the writer stole a bit more than just the show: "TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF THE THIEVING MAGPIE. (After being) cheered in Bronx and clapped in Irons, re- nowned singer Maggie Pye, known and loved as the Thieving Magpie, returned from the States with a cargo of stolen hearts." [Still later] I just heard "Are you lonesome tonight" (serious version) on the local radio and got an idea for Morley's lonely hart (who, as you may remember, is really a Dear Watson pun) which I later edited out and put into part one. I also got reminded of a joke this replaced, so maybe we could use some of them in this part? The old joke is an "elementary" joke rather than a "Dear Watson" one, I left it out of part one because I thought using both would be a bit of overkill. It's very simple: One of the servants (or other people) Wiliam meets is one Ellie Mentary. Or her last name could be Ellie M. Entree (possible M'Entree), in which case she should be either a cook (preparing entrees - main courses - for dinner) or some kind of guard (overlooking the entrees - arrivals - at some place or another) (Maybe her last name could be Entry?). Or a new idea I just got: The culture festival could take place in a big hall or something with entrances identified by letters, in which case some- thing could happen by the L-M entry. (Right, an entrance would not need two letters to identify it, but it could be the entrance to sections L and M. The trouble is of course that if you group the letters in pairs from the start of the alphabet L goes with K and M with N! Of course there could be an entry serving one section only...) ----------------------------------- More lose ideas. Doctor Kyle will treat almost any kind of animal or bird - except for ducks! The reason is pretty obvious when you think about it - he does not like being called QUACK! The set-up for this joke could be that while William is sitting in the waiting room the receptionist answers the phone and says something like "I'm sorry, but he does not treat ducks!" and then William can ask her why not... At some random point in the distant past of this plot (well, the first plot actually) William needed a lockpick (perhaps to get into Ticker's house?), and Magnus had come up with some boring way of providing one, when I got a different idea: William needs a skeleton key! One of the artists had drawn the doctor's office with a skeleton in the corner, and I got the idea that when William searches the skeleton he finds a key on it - which, of course, can't be anything but a skeleton key! I also got an idea about putting the skeleton in a closet... [Later addition: the closet is closed, and when William opens it and sees the skeleton he says something like "Well, what do you know! The good doctor has a skeleton in the closet!"] Back to the doghouse bit. I once got the idea that before he can build a doghouse, William needs to get some tools and materials. He buys these in a shop run by a retired American football player who has named his shop after his favourite position - it's called Quarterback Tools! (QT is actually an Amiga utility program...) And he doesn't have to put together a detailed list of what he needs either, because the ex-quarterback has put together a kit specially for participants in the contest. According to the label it contains everything you need of tools and materials - "Just add creativi- ty!" And finally (for today anyway!) back to Dr. Kyle. This scene is supposed to take place on a hot day, so it probably won't fit into the autumn sce- nario at all, but just to put it somewhere: It is, as I just said, a hot day, and the good doctor drinks gallons of a popular soft drink while he examines a bitch. Finally, after a last look in the refrigerator, he turns to the dog's owner and announces: "Your doggy's gonna have a puppy - and we're running out of Coke!" (Speedy Gonzales... why don't you come home...) ------------------------------------- Still later addition (Where will it end? (A complete game, I hope...)) Getting an appointment with Dr. Kyle may be a job for Flour as suggested, and I thought up some details. When the receptionist tells William he and Flour have to come back later, our hero can either accept it or ask (as I said before) if he can leave the "skunk" in the waiting room because (as I didn't say before) he has some other places to go that he doesn't want to smell up. When the rec asks if the skunk is easily scared or what's wrong with it or whatever, William answers that it has an overactive stench gland! [This line, which is what makes the rec let him see the doctor immediately, may be buried under several layers of dialog in a kind of verbal labyrinth.] When he finally meets the doctor, he only takes a moment to identify Flour as a painted cat, and then William must explain that he's just there for a checkup, and he lied about the "skunk" simply because he didn't want to wait. Another little detail about Ticker is that Norwegian players may get a hint about her (lack of) honesty by learning that the first name of her sister (and assistant) is Bess. ("Bess Ticker" sounds like "bestikker", which is Norwegian for "bribes" - the verb, not the noun. [Bess Ticker bestikker politiker Polly Ticker...] More dog pun (?) ideas. It doesn't take long after entering Ticker's man- sion before William discovers that she hates Disney and everything related to him. (Some subtle hint like his picture being used for a dartboard or something.) Our hero only takes a few seconds to realise that he'd better not mention the American or anyone working for him, which becomes a bit tricky when he realises that the dog's name is Carl. When discussing the dog's guard duties he asks something like "what does he do when he spots a burglar?". Ticker answers that "he barks", and William answers "I see. And what do you do when.. eh...", glances at the dartboard, looks at the player and says "I'm not going to say it!". He then thinks for a few seconds and finds a different way of finishing his question without mentioning Carl Barks (which may be an anachronism; AFAIK Barks didn't start working for Disney until the 40s.) The response could be conditional: If the player took the time to examine the dartboard on his way in, William knows about Ticker's hatred for Disney and his ilk, if not William does say Carl Barks and gets thrown out, and this is either an instant lose situation, or William will have to make a long detour to make up for his blunder. (Another alternative would be to set up the dialog choices so that the player has a chance to get the infor- mation he needs before starting to discuss the dog's duties. Ticker no longer wants him to build a doghouse, but he got the information he needs.) (This could actually be a way of getting out of having to build another doghouse - after all the player just wants to get information about the dog...) Later: After examining the dartboard William will say to himself some- thing like "I'd better not mention Walt Disney in her presence. (pause) Or..." He then proceeds to list several of Disney's artists etc. with a short interval between each, with Barks coming as number four or five. The player may interrupt his ponderings at any time, and the following dialog depends on whether or not William was given time to think of Carl Barks. This originated as a simpler joke which some people may like better. William sees a barking dog, and if the player wants him to examine it, he will first make the observation that it barks a lot, then walk over for a closer look and find (from reading on its collar) that the dog's name is Carl. He'll then straighten up and say something like "His name is Carl. He barks. Hmm..." and then either "Carl Barks!" or "I'm not going to say it!" ----------------------------