A Dwarf Stood At The Door

too early. He was still asleep. I tried forcing the game to let time pass. I didn't know where Fog's Bottom or Jacob's House were, so I needed somebody to tell me. By reading my notes from yesterday, I was sure that the Innkeeper was the obvious choice. Innkeepers, like tavern masters, usually had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world.

  > wait

  > To wait, wait.

  Nothing changed.

  I repeated the command nine more times, then went outside onto Xynk's streets. They were still dark. The descriptions still mentioned flickering street lamps. I thought back to what I'd read about Olaf Brandywine and Tim Birch and also about what I knew from my own gaming days. Some games did have day and night cycles, but they were newer games, and even those were rarely persistent. Time only passed when the game was on. On the other hand, I assumed it was possible for Xynk to read the time from the Thinkpad's internal clock and adjust its descriptions accordingly. If so, it wasn't so amazing but it was still a fantastic trick for something made before 1983. The year made me shudder. I didn't want to dwell on the idea of Tim Birch being hacked to bits.

  I left the Thinkpad running and got up to turn on the electric kettle. While the water was heating up, I added two teaspoons of instant coffee to my cup of cold milk and then poured hot water over both, mixing carefully so as not to clank my metal spoon against the cup's porcelain sides.

  I liked instant coffee.

  I took the cup to the balcony, lit a cigarette and smoked it between sips of coffee.

  Birds were starting to wake up and chirp.

  I knew I should get to work on my thesis but I couldn't stop thinking about Xynk. I needed to know who Jacob was, what my newly found key was for and who was sending me those notes. I promised myself that as soon as the Innkeeper appeared, I would ask him for help finding Fog's Bottom, go there, find Jacob, ask him about #FF0000RUM and then turn off the Thinkpad. I didn't have to worry about losing my save apparently, so I would have no excuses. Afterwards, I would survive on caffeine while typing up academic blabla until my mind melted and flowed out of my ears. That's when I'd go to sleep. Happy at having planned out an entire productive day, I put out my cigarette and downed the rest of my coffee.

  The Innkeeper appeared at the front desk just before six a.m.

  > ask innkeeper about jacob

  > "Jacob? There are a hundred Jacobs in XYNK!"

  > ask innkeeper about fog's bottom

  > "FOG'S BOTTOM is a neighbourhood in XYNK. It's seedy but it's the only place to go for certain types of wares, if you know what I mean. And it's only dangerous after dark. To get there, exit THE YAWNING MASK and head SOUTH," the Innkeeper says.

  > ask innkeeper about jacob in fog's bottom

  > "Jacob? There are a hundred Jacobs in XYNK!"

  It had been worth a try.

  I was already well on my way south when my wife's messy head peeked into the kitchen from the hall. "Up already?" she asked, squinting her brown eyes. I lifted my empty cup rather than answering. "Oh, you're working on your thesis." She made a motion with her lips as if chewing a month-old piece of gum, then disappeared into the bathroom. She turned on the overhead fan.

  Technically, I hadn't lied. Plus, I hoped to be working on my thesis soon. I filled the electric kettle to the brim with water and turned it on. Heating, it hissed. I might not buy her love, but I could at least make her a cup of coffee.

  Fog's Bottom was a poorer part of Xynk, but its inhabitants were already getting on with their morning routines and the ones I talked to were friendly, if a little generic. They had a stereotypical, English way of speaking. The fifth one I talked to told me how to get to Jacob's House.

  > JACOB'S HOUSE

  > Like the other houses in FOG'S BOTTOM, it's small and quaint. Garlic hangs in the windows. There's no knocker on the DOOR.

  > knock on door

  > You hear shuffling. A moment later the DOOR opens, revealing the squat figure of a man, JACOB. "What's the big idear?" he asks.

  > introduce yourself to jacob

  > "Uninterested in that. Anything else?"

  > tell jacob about note

  > "Uninterested in that. Anything else?"

  > ask jacob about the hooded rat brotherhood

  > Jacob peers along the street to the left, then along the street to the right, then motions for you to follow him. "Can't talk about that out here. Come in."

  I heard my wife step into the bathtub and turn on the shower.

  Inside, Jacob's House smelled of garlic and looked like a heap of dusty books and bric-a-brac. Sunlight barely filtered in through greasy windows. Music played faintly from a room upstairs. Jacob offered me a seat and black coffee in a tin cup.

  > "You can't talk about things like that in the open," Jacob says. "You don't know who's listening. Now what was it you were saying?"

  I heard the shower shut off, which meant there wasn't time for niceties and curiosity. My questions about the Hooded Rat Brotherhood would have to wait for another day. If my wife saw that I was playing a game instead of working on my thesis, she'd kill me.

  > ask jacob about #FF0000RUM

  > Jacob's ears prick up at the word. His eyes widen into saucers. "You're John Grousewater," he manages to say—before clutching his chest and falling to the floor.

  "I'm going to need you to pick up some stuff from Doreen's for me today," my wife said, walking from the bathroom to our bedroom.

  "Sure thing, hon," I said, thinking, what the hell just happened?

  > ask jacob about #FF0000RUM

  > Doors cannot talk.

  Doors? Had I stumbled upon another glitch?

  > examine jacob

  > JACOB is lying face-up on the floor, twitching slightly. JACOB's face is now a DOOR.

  > open jacob

  > JACOB is locked.

  How obvious. I knew that the key I'd found in the store room would work even before I tried it. If the game was glitching out, it was doing so in an oddly playable way. I inserted the key into Jacob's eye, twisted and his jaws opened to reveal a tooth stairway lined with tongue carpet leading down. I descended.

  > #FF0000RUM

  You are in a red room. The walls are red. The floor is red. The ceiling is red. You hear pounding. You see a BOX.

  My wife, dressed for work, crossed the living room.

  > open box

  > ROOM IN THE YAWNING MASK

  > You are in your room in the Yawning Mask. It's bare and empty, which suits an adventurer like you just fine. In the room, you see a TABLE and a WINDOW. The only DOOR leads WEST into the HALL.

  > A DWARF stands at the DOOR.

  "Honey!"

  I almost had a heart attack. I jumped in my seat, slammed the Thinkpad closed and yanked out the power cord. "What?"

  The Thinkpad stopped humming.

  My wife was staring at me, the palms of her hands planted on the kitchen table, her eyebrows inching into increasingly acute angles. "I said that you need to go to Doreen's and pick up my cross-stich materials. Can you do that for me? Are you at least capable of simple, child-like tasks?"

  "Of course, yeah. Sure."

  She smiled. "I find it offensive as a human being that you might have a Doctorate soon."

  She poured herself a cup of coffee.

  I needed one, too.

  On my way to Doreen's, I stopped by Wayne's and maybe with a little too much excitement explained the situation in Xynk. He listened while I rambled, and then said, "First, chill out. It's just a game. An old fantasy text adventure game with no graphics.  Like completely nerd material. Second, did you say you put a key into some dude's eyeball and his mouth opened and you went inside his throat?"

  "That's right," I said. "There was a room inside him."

  "That's fucked up."

  "It's grotesque and surreal. I'm amazed you can do that in a game from the 1980s, although Zork was pretty weird too."

  Wayne looked down at the floor. "Listen, I'm going to be brutally honest with you. Annie called me and said
that I'm supposed to keep an eye on you to make sure that you're actually doing what you're supposed to be doing. I don't like lying to..."

  "To a woman you've slept with," I said.

  "Yeah."

  "I'm off to Doreen's," I said.

  Wayne thanked me. When I was at the door, he added, "Tell me about that dwarf when you can. I'm surprisingly interested."

  I didn't drive to Doreen's. I drove to the local chain coffee shop, ordered a sickeningly sweet and overpriced mango-flavoured caffeinated drink and booted up the Thinkpad.

  > Welcome back, John Grousewater. Press any key to continue your adventure.

  I pressed Enter.

  > ROOM IN THE YAWNING MASK

  > You are in your room in the Yawning Mask. It's bare and empty, which suits an adventurer like you just fine. In the room, you see a TABLE and a WINDOW. The only DOOR leads WEST into the HALL.

  > The DWARF walks toward you.

  > "You have kept me waiting, John Grousewater," the dwarf says. It's heavily armoured and holding a battle-axe, which it taps three times threateningly against the wooden floor. Then it laughs a hearty laugh. "But that is fine, for I have already been waiting for much, much longer!"

  > The DWARF crosses the room and pats you on elbow. Its shoulder are wide, wider than yours, but its head reaches barely past your stomach. It looks like a tough, gruff child. "Thank you for freeing me, my friend. My name is Dogor the Double Fisted, and I am a Dwarf of the twenty-sixth level, loyal only to Xynk and whose sole mission is to protect the city from the Hooded Rat Brotherhood."

  > ask dogor about note

  > "Of course it was I who sent those to you."

  I wanted to ask how it was possible for Dogor to have sent the notes if he was trapped in a box in #FF0000RUM, but I couldn't figure out the proper parser, so I