ESCAPE THIS PODCAST Game Master’S Notes
ESCAPE THIS PODCAST Game Master’s Notes
The notes below are a guide for game masters. They contain all required information to run the specified room, including: All room items All puzzles and solutions All correct (and some incorrect) player actions Full room introduction and conclusion Additional notes and tips
Do not read these notes if you intend to play the escape room; there are spoilers everywhere.
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1
Escape the world
Notes
This is the ninth in a ten-part series of connected escape rooms. Not impossible to turn it into a stand-alone experience, though coming up with stand-alone explanations for some of the weird stuff might be tricky. Good luck? Thank you to MagnetusIV, our Patreon donor whose name was given to an NPC – er, well, an NP, at least – in this episode!
Introduction
You and Leilahni push your oars gently through the water in the harbour. It’s an instinct by now: do everything softly and quietly, making sure nobody will spot you. Even though you’ve practically gotten away, there’s no point being complacent. It’s hard to be quiet, though, when you’ve never wanted to ask so many questions. At least Leilahni can answer some of them before you have to. “No, you haven’t been recorded for your whole life. And they don’t broadcast every little, nasty detail. But it is true that everyone was an actor. Well – not your parents, not professionally, but they did do quite a good job keeping the secret from you. But when it came to you getting married…” She sighs. “I suppose it hit me then how wrong this all was. You might have been happy, but it wouldn’t have been real. So I started interfering. Got your boss to take you to an escape room so you could see what the cameras looked like. Put all those Jim Gorton’s coffee triangles everywhere so you could get into the abandoned cinema. Goodness, what I wouldn’t give for a coffee right now. I’m exhausted. Anyway, management didn’t take long to catch on, so they sent the ‘police’ after me. What a mess that was when your chief friend locked you up! Lucky the air vents were easy enough to break into…” It makes sense, yet it doesn’t. Your brain hurts. You’ve never been more exhausted. Maybe all this stress is making you ill. Leilahni’s words fade out and all you can concentrate on is the horizon. The skyline is filled with clouds. Regularly-spaced, similar-sized, unmoving clouds. Hang on. Suddenly the open sea air doesn’t feel quite as open as before. And then… ga-gunk. The bow of your boat bumps into something. Leilahni looks like she doesn’t understand what’s happening. “Was that…?” You look at her. “I don’t think this is a real way out.” The horizon – the rest of the ocean outside of this harbour, diminishing towards the skyline – is a big, painted wall. You press your hands against it. It doesn’t even wobble. “No.” Leilahni’s eyes widen. “I don’t believe it.” 2
“Me neither,” you say. “No, I mean I don’t believe it. I did so much research to get to this point. I know this world inside and out. There is an exit here. From this harbour. We must just not be seeing it.” You both look around. In your immediate area, there are only a few things of any note. Way back down at the south end is the shore, which has a few things protruding from it. First is the underground exit you came sailing out from, another is a short wooden pier. Three fishing rods are currently sitting unmanned there. And also – ugh – there’s a small sewer pipe just above the waterline. Just deeper than where the pier ends are three large, floating buoys, and just beyond them, two boats. One is a tall yacht, the other a small fishing boat. Some distance off to your right you see something huge shadowing the water, which you think looks a lot like the wreck of a pirate ship. That’s kind of cool. And off to your left… gulp. That’s a dorsal fin. Well, maybe it’s just a dolphin playing pretend… ah, no, that’s a shark. No mistaking a shark. Okay. This is okay. You’ve got Leilahni here to help you. “I’m afraid I might not be much help here,” Leilahni says, biting her lip. “I can’t exactly swim or clamber around with my ankle the way it is.” Okay. You can do this alone. No problem.
Observable items
Buoys: There are three enormous, round buoys bobbing in the area. From a distance, you can see that each one has a red, flashing light attached to the top to catch boaters’ attention. Their flashing patterns are a little different from one another: the closest one to you flashes twice in quick succession before pausing and starting again; the next furthest out flashes three times before it pauses; and the one furthest away flashes four times. Must be some specific water signalling thing you don’t understand. Each of the buoys also has big letters painted around its body, which you can only read when you paddle right up close. The double flasher has the word STORM painted on it. The triple flasher says WHITE, and the quadruple flasher says WISPY. Fishing boat: You pull your dinghy up by the side of the fishing boat. It’s easy enough to hop aboard. It’s pretty sparse here: the boat consists of a tiny deck and even smaller roofed section, each with very little to note about them. Attached to the side of the deck is a net that’s been cast down into the water. You peek into the covered area and find an equipment box with a transparent lid. You can see a rather large knife inside. However, the box is locked, and with a rather unusual lock at that: it resembles a set of piano keys, two full octaves. You press a couple of the keys and all the white notes press in, but the black ones seem just for show. Fishing rods: The rods have been left completely unattended, which can’t be responsible. They’re spaced out not quite evenly, and each one has a lure bobbing away on the water. Well, the middle one is on the water at least, floating on the surface; the left and right ones have sunk way down under the water. They don’t have anything biting them, they just happen to sit quite low. 3
Pier: There’s a big sign at the entrance to the walkway that says PIER A-G. Which is strange, because there’s only one pier. It’s made up of solid, wooden planks, which are tightly built together. So much so that you can see a piece of paper that’s slipped through the gap between two of them, and even it isn’t thin enough to slip out again. It’s stuck in there. And of course, sitting on the pier are three fishing rods. [Show pier supplementary image.] Sewer: This isn’t the same kind of sewer pipe you emerged from in your boat. This is the nasty, sludgy, smelly kind. Thankfully it’s small enough that there’s no way you’ll have to climb inside, but you’ll still have to hold your nose and take a good look. Ugh. What you can see is not pleasant. It’s not just the normal grossness – there’s some kind of angry, twitching grey fungus growing all over the place. There are bits and pieces of rubbish that have found their way in here, and the fungus seems particularly attached to that. In fact, right up the back, there’s a particularly interesting object. You can’t make out exactly what it is, but it’s bright yellow and a bit bigger than your hand. Unfortunately, it seems to be the fungus’s favourite thing. Shark: You steer your boat towards the shark, but not too close. Don’t want to attract the attention of its gaping mouth. It’s actually quite easy to avoid, because it’s swimming in a fairly consistent circle. In fact… make that a very consistent circle. Almost like it’s on a set path. Leilahni frowns at it. “Surely they wouldn’t,” she says, but you kind of think ‘they’ have. Whoever runs this place paid for a robotic shark to patrol the water, maybe to frighten you off doing exactly what you’re doing and escaping this way. Well, it doesn’t seem so scary now, does it? Hm. Actually, on second thought, are those sparks coming off it? A patch of its skin near the gills has been scraped off by something, leaving a gash that shows some of the inner mechanics. You can see a large, round gear that’s barely hanging onto its shaft. And the whole beast is giving off alarming amounts of electrical surges. Underground exit: You can’t go very far back into the passage you came from because of the force of the water coming out. That said, you can grab onto the side and look around the very end of it. Hm. On the left side of the concrete wall you spot a circular indent about the size of a saucer, and what looks like a button to the side of it. You reach out and press the button; nothing happens. Fair enough. You turn to look at the right wall, and there’s something written on it! Quite close to the water level, in hasty black ink that you’re surprised has survived, you read three lines: “The beast puffs her chest/A sly tail-flick to distract/A bite, a slash…. Death.” Is that a haiku? Wall: Up close, it seems obvious that this isn’t the real horizon. You feel embarrassed you fell for it as long as you did. As far as you can tell, it stretches on in all directions, blocking you from the real outside world completely. Is this even really seawater you’re floating on? You sigh and give the fake clouds a dirty look. Stupid clouds. They don’t look real at all. They’re in a uniform pattern going all the way up, left and right… not down, though; the wall goes down into the water, and it wouldn’t make much sense for clouds to be under the water, so the pattern seems different down there. [Show wall supplementary image.] Wreck: The wreck looks like a small modern sail ship that was specially designed to look like a centuries-old classic. It’s only a few metres down, but it’s lying with the bow tilted down so you can’t see most of the interesting features. Way down the
4 bottom, you think you spot a hole in the hull wide enough to swim into, but you can’t tell how far inside the ship it goes. Yacht: You don’t need to be on board to know that this yacht is a status symbol of the highest order. Whoever owns it is announcing to the world that they are rich, rich, rich. Its name is emblazoned on the side in the fanciest of fonts: MagnetusIV. The family is so wealthy they clearly own at least four of these things. It’s narrow, yet sleek and tall, so tall you can’t even see over the edge let alone jump on. All you can see way above your head is the mainsail and the side railing, with little hooks studding it at intervals – maybe used for holding up their fishing rods, maybe used for stringing up lights, you can’t say.
Actions
Fishing boat – entering low C, high D and low G on the equipment box: You press the three keys, their notes ring out, and the lock clicks open! The hefty scaling knife greets you. Fishing boat – emptying fish out of the net: You drag the net out of the water and let the contents spill onto the deck. A dozen fish flop out… or, more accurately, half a dozen flop out. The other half clunk out. What the – wait a second. These fish are fake! A prop, like everything else in this stupid world. It’s extra weird, because you can definitely see real fish darting around underwater every so often, and some of them look very similar to these fakes, so the production team went to a lot of effort to make things appear real. Shame they didn’t make them feel real. Half of them are made of thick but soft rubber, and half are made from hard ceramic. You’re lucky none of them broke. Each fish is different, and helpfully, each one has its species labelled in small letters on the side. [Show fish supplementary image.] Fishing boat – using knife to cut the net: Even though the string of the net is quite tough, this knife tears through it like it’s nothing. The net whips free in the wind. [If you did this before emptying fish out, include them falling out of the net and onto the boat.] Pier – using knife to get the wedged paper: Your fingers couldn’t get into that gap, but the tip of the knife surely can. You jam it in and wheedle the paper out, careful not to let it slip and fall into the water. You unscrunch it and take a look. Looks like directions of some sort. [Show pier paper supplementary image.] Sewer – trying to grab fungus-covered object with your bare hands: You reach your hand forward for the yellow thing, but as you get close, the fungus quivers. It’s like it senses the blood coming towards it, like a flea or tick, and it’s trying to reach out for you. Revolted, you pull back. You can’t do this. Sewer – trying to grab fungus-covered object with some item: As you take an item from your scant inventory and hold it out, the fungus twitches slightly. It senses something’s there, though it doesn’t know what it is. But the instant you make contact, it grabs! A cloud of the stuff latches on and seems to be multiplying before your eyes. You withdraw before it’s too late and you lose your precious belongings. The fungus wins this round.
5
Sewer – pouring alcohol from yacht fridge onto fungus: If it’s not fit for drinking, it’s fit for poisoning. You take one of the bottles into the sewer, unscrew the top, and start pouring. As soon as the drops make contact, the grey fungus practically shrieks! It sizzles and squirms and shrinks, shrinks away into the crevices of the pipe, until there’s not a trace of it left behind. What is left behind is the yellow thing it had been coating: a pair of thick rubber gloves. Shark – attempting to touch it with bare hands: You reach out, but your hands don’t get anywhere near the shark’s body before the hairs on your arms, legs and back of neck all stand on end. That thing is packing some serious electricity. And the fact that it’s in the water can’t make things better. Touching it without protection is a bad idea. Shark – touching it with gloves: You’ve heard about rubber insulating against electricity. You’re pretty sure this is how it works, even when copious amounts of water are involved. Keeping the rest of your body firmly in your dinghy, while wearing the gloves you submerge your hands to the wrists. Then you drift them towards the shark. Its jaws are open, its teeth are glinting at you with metallic menace, the sparks are shooting out from its sides… but they don’t zap you. As long as you’re careful, it seems you’re fine. Shark – while wearing gloves, grabbing loose gear: It doesn’t take much effort for you to pull the gear clean off. The shark is still moving, still looking as ready to chomp as ever, but the electrical field around it dies down. It might not kill on contact now. Shark – after removing gear, sticking your arm down its throat: Well, this goes against all your instincts as a human that enjoys being alive. But something compels you. After all, the saying is “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” – it says nothing about sharks. So you wait until the sharkbot completes its next circuit and gets right up near you. When it’s at its closest point, you lunge over the side of the dinghy. Leilahni yells in surprise, but with her bad ankle she can’t do anything to stop you. You throw your arm as deep into the shark’s mouth as you can, feeling the metal teeth lightly scrape your skin. The shark shudders; it wants to keep moving on its track, but your presence has ground it to a halt. You should really get away before you destroy it; a bit of errant electrical sparking might be the least of your problems. And yet… way down the back of its throat, you feel something. Something different from the gears and wirings you expected. You close your fingers around the thing and pull. And when you finally clamber back aboard the dinghy, you open your hand to find that you’ve grabbed a copper-coloured key. Underground exit – sticking shark gear into hole: The gear fits perfectly into the round indent. Once it’s in, you press down on the button, and a flap pops open in the wall! There was a secret compartment here! What sorts of treasures might somebody hide in… oh. It’s a roll of duck tape. Okay. Wall – diving down to look at the underwater part of wall: Can’t be too concerned about getting your clothes wet now. You hop off the side of your dinghy, take a deep breath, and go under. The water’s probably a bit too deep for you to reach the very bottom, but as far as you can tell the wall goes all the way down. That’s not all, though, and what you discover down here opens up a lot of doors – maybe literally. Because what you see is that it’s not a pattern painted onto this part of the wall like the clouds up above; built into the wall are tunnel entrances. All in a line, running 6 left to right, you find eight identical tunnels. They look deep. You surface and tell Leilahni what you found. “Excellent!” she says. “Surely they lead to the real outside. Or at least… surely one of them does. And I shouldn’t like to think what happens if we pick wrong.” Wall – entering a tunnel without oxygen tank: You hold your breath and approach one of the tunnels. It’s wide, definitely not a squeeze, but it feels claustrophobic all the same. There’s a light to show you the way, but it’s red and not all that bright. You see the end of the tunnel… where it opens up into a small, underwater room, with several more tunnels leading out from it in several directions. By this point, you’re running out of air. Now that you’ve seen how much more tunnel there is, you’re certain you can’t make it through in one breath. You hastily turn around and swim back out. You explain to Leilahni what you found, and she says, “Well, that’s a shame, but maybe it’s for the best. There’s no way I’d be able to swim right now, anyway. Maybe there’s something else we can do about it.” Wall – entering a tunnel with oxygen tank but without map: You look at Leilahni questioningly, but she waves you away. “You know what? Having thought about it, it’s more important to get you out of here than me. I’ve been sneaking around for this long, I’m sure I’ll find another way. Go.” So you do. With the taped up tube pumping oxygen from the tank into your mouth, you feel a lot more calm and confident. You swim into one of the tunnels, lit by a dim, red light, and follow it to where it opens up into a new room. Still all underwater, there are several more identical tunnels going off in several directions. Beneath your mask, you swallow. If you don’t know where you’re going, you could get very, very lost. And being lost underwater sounds like a bit of a living nightmare. Wall – with oxygen tank, following map directions and buoy lights bottom left – north-east – east – north – east – east – north – east – south – east – east – north – north [Give these ‘room’ descriptions one at a time as players progress]: The map tells you to start at the bottom left, so you enter the leftmost tunnel. Red light guides you to the end, where it opens up into a small, still submerged room, with three new tunnels coming off it. One in the north wall (straight ahead), one to the north-east diagonal, one east. Obeying the map, you take the north-east. More red light, except this one isn’t steady like the last. This one’s bulb is stuttering, flashing – flicker, flicker, flicker, off. And then you reach a new room, with new tunnels branching off from all main directions, north, south, east, west. Following the image of the clouds, and the words on the buoys, you take the east passage. This one starts flickering, too. Flickerflickerflickerflicker. So you go north. Flickerflicker. East. Flickerflickerflicker. East again. Flickerflickerflickerflicker. North. Flickerflicker. East. Flickerflicker. South. Flickerflickerflickerflicker. East. Flickerflickerflicker. East. Flickerflickerflicker. North. Flickerflickerflickerflicker. There are two that could work for that, but based on the map, you’re pretty sure that going north will lead you to the finish, so that’s the one you go. Your clothes are feeling heavy, your legs tired from kicking your way through, but at least you reach the end of this final tunnel. There’s a ladder leading up, up and out of the water! You climb, exhausted beyond belief, and find that you’re indoors now. And at the top of the ladder, there’s a metal door. On it are written the words, “ACCESS ONLY TO THOSE WHO HAVE TAKEN A BIG RISK.” The door is locked. It needs a key to open. Come on! 7
Wall – after reaching tunnel exit, using shark mouth key to open door: Refer to conclusion! Wreck – diving down to wreck without decongestant: You hop off the side of the dinghy and dive down. But before you reach the interesting parts of the wreck, something happens. Something feels wrong. Your ears pound, and the area around your eyes starts to burn. You try to swim a little further down, but your whole head gives a big warning throb that’s clearly telling you this is a bad idea. You resurface, gasping, clutching your face, trying to find the source of the pain. Leilahni looks over. “What happened?” she asks, her expression twisted with concern. She notices what you’re doing. “Oh, no. I know that look. It’s your sinuses, isn’t it? All the stress you’ve been under, you’ve probably caught a bug and your immune system hasn’t been able to shake it off. You’ll have to be careful – if you’re feeling blocked up, you can’t dive. Your eyes will explode. Or your ears. One of the two, I can’t remember.” Now that she says it, you have been feeling not-so-great today. You assumed it was all emotional, but maybe it isn’t. What a pain! The people watching you can’t have known that would happen. Right? … Right? Wreck – diving down to wreck after taking decongestant: With your sinuses this clear, you feel confident enough to dive down again. Back in the dinghy, you paddle towards the wreck and jump in the water. You dive. You kick your way down, past the battered stern of the old ship and towards the interesting parts right at the bottom. And you feel fine! First, the hole in the side. You peer into it, and see that it leads to a small storeroom, empty except for one device. You grab it and surface to take a look. Well, that could be handy: it’s a small oxygen tank, complete with a breathing tube. As far as you can tell, it’s full. The only problem is the tube has been quite badly damaged in its time underwater, with little lacerations all through it. It’s like someone took a Swiss Army Knife to a straw; there’s no way it can function in this state. Shame. You leave it with Leilahni and take one more dive just in case there’s anything you missed. Heading even closer to the bow, you notice the name on the side, cracked and faded but still legible: Magnetus II. So that’s where one of the earlier versions went. As you reach the very bottom, the very front of the ship that’s poking into the sand, you see that the Magnetus II has a very elaborate figurehead carved into it. It’s quite something, even in its old age: it’s a female figure, distinctly predatory. It has teeth like a shark’s, a body like a lizard’s, eagle talons for claws, and a lion’s tail swishing around behind her. It’s quite fearsome. A good choice for a boat that’s pretending to be a pirate ship. With nothing else helpful that you can see, you return to the surface. Wreck – using tape from underground exit to fix oxygen tube: You rip off some of the tape and stick it over all the holes and tears. When you think you’ve done it as best you can, you stick it under water to check for leaks. Nothing! You’ve completely fixed it. Yacht – using fish net to climb up side of yacht: You toss the net up, and it catches on one of the hooks on the side of the yacht. A couple of experimental tugs – yep, it holds. You begin to climb up. Behind you, Leilahni shakes her head. “You won’t see me doing that. Sorry.” Fair enough. You reach the deck, and ooh, this isn’t just a rich people boat; it’s a party boat. It’s very much set out for a drunken dance night. Of all the decorations and bits and pieces, two things catch your eye: a minifridge and a boombox. First, it doesn’t escape your notice that this minifridge looks old, 8 way older than anything else about the MagnetusIV. Almost antique. It’s locked, but it has the word FOOD labelled on it, which is helpful. The buttons to open it are interesting: they aren’t letters or numbers, but little pictures of animals. You see a leopard, a swan, a fish, a dog, a cricket, a rabbit, a bear, a cow, a gazelle, and a wolf. You press a few, and it looks like you can press four of them before it resets, and order matters. Okay. Now, the boombox… yeah, this is a legit boombox, ready to play, a song already in there. Beside it is a catalogue of music sorted by genre, and they have a lot of genres to choose from. [Show music supplementary image.] Yacht – playing default boombox track: You press play on the boombox, and one of your favourite early 2000s pop songs starts playing. Not blasting, but certainly not quiet. And the bass on this thing! The whole deck is pulsating. It’s so emphatic it changes the pace of your heartbeat. You look over the edge and see little ripples forming on the surface of the water. Down in the dinghy, Leilahni sees you looking, and peeks over the side as well. “Isn’t that something?” she comments. “Your music’s vibrating through the water, and it’s really doing a number on the fish. A lot of them are scared, but there’s one type here that’s coming towards it! Which one is that again? A spinning poppy, I think it is. Little fish. But they seem to love it! I could reach down and scoop one up and it wouldn’t even notice!” Yacht – playing a soft rock song: You open up the collection of soft rock music and pick your favourite. You pop it in the boombox and press play. This one is louder than the pop song, with even more bass, though a slower more mellifluous kind. You stick your head over the edge. Leilahni is doing the same. “Ooo, the spinning poppies didn’t like that. They’ve scattered. It’s deserted n– wait! Another kind’s coming! These… these were in the fishing boat, weren’t they? Decongestant rockeaters! Oh, they’re so close, I could just reach out and…” And she does. She grabs a real life fish out of the ocean. “Whew, that’s quite a smell it has. Giving off some kind of slime as a defence mechanism. Have a look!” And she hurls the fish up at you, and you have to move really quickly to avoid getting hit in the face. You grab for it, but it is indeed so oozy that it slips through your fingers and bounces back down into the water. You still got plenty of the slime, though. You give it a sniff… and it’s like someone has power-cleaned your nostrils. All the passages into and out of your head clear. Even your brain feels like the breeze is hitting it now. Decongestant rockeater, indeed! Yacht – opening fridge with images Insect, Gazelle, Fish, Rabbit as told by the wreck and haiku: You press the buttons in order, and you must activate a spring mechanism because the fridge door swings open. Inside, you find what you might expect for a party boat: alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol. So potent you’re actually alarmed by the fact that somebody might be drinking it. This stuff is definitely more on the clinical, antibacterial side than the kind-of-safe-to-consume side.
Conclusion
The door swings open inward with the weight and gravitas of an entrance to a sacred treasure vault. There’s light coming from the other side – proper, building interior light, not flashing tunnel light. You push the door the whole way open, and… A tremendous roar of a cheering crowd envelopes you.
9
It all happens so fast. You register only flashes of images without really taking them in. A table of food. A banner. Champagne bottles. Faces. Some faces you recognise, some you don’t. Happiness. A few tears. But a lot of happiness. Is that Leilahni over there? But how did she get in? Samantha the sound engineer. Colin from Long Consonantal. Haley from the bakery. Scott and the Kingsolvers. And… you feel a painful pang. Yeah, Blake is here, too. Grinning from ear to ear. Your eyes manage to gain focus on the banner above everyone’s head long enough to read the letters. THAT’S A WRAP! Leilahni is walking towards you. No limp, no mobility issues whatsoever. “Excellent work! I don’t think that could have gone any better.” Her voice is different, crisper, more carefree. “You wouldn’t believe how stuck some people get with that shark! Your numbers have been a bit middling, but I think by the time we’re about midway through airing this season, you’ll shoot right up there.” She claps you on the back and saunters off to join another group. You’re rooted to the spot, but that hardly matters. People approach you, congratulating you, telling you how much they’re going to miss you after today. You’re starting to understand that you’ve been set up even more than you thought at the beginning of all this, but there’s still some fog. Nothing quite makes sense yet. Then Blake is the one who comes up to you. You have an awkward greeting hug – well, awkward on your end. Blake seems perfectly comfortable. “You did so great! The wedding, oh, that is going to blow their minds. We weren’t sure if you’d run right away or if you’d wait until I arrived, but I think you made the right choice. Some people stick around and then get into a huge shouting match, and I don’t know, it just makes everyone come out of it looking like a jerk. Your way was good. Dramatic in the right way.” You’re trying to listen but it’s just not there. You need this spelled out for you in words you can understand. “Blake, I know this has been awful –” “Awful? Are you kidding? I’ve loved every second of it!” “O-okay. But I’m still… so confused. Please, help me here. Explain what I’m missing. It all started when I went to an escape room, I noticed cameras, I found out there was this TV show.” “Life Simulator.” Blake nods. “Or should I say, ‘Long Consonantal and Jim Gorton’s Present Life Simulator’.” “Sure. Whatever. And then I started getting these notes and plastic shapes…” “The blue triangles! They’re going to be promotional items. You know, the kind where if you find one in your chip packet, you win a prize?” “Whatever! And then I got out. I escaped. Didn’t I?” “Mhm.” Blake nods again. “Sure. That’s always how the last season goes. As soon as ratings get a little wobbly, the escape starts, and you make it out into the real world. Happy ending! And it’s amazing how the human mind works, because you really believed you weren’t being recorded anymore, even when the cameras were right in your face. Always the way. Funny, isn’t it?” 10
Right in your… oh, wow. The spy cameras all have flashing red lights. You’ve seen flashing lights all over the place. You were literally surrounded by them while you swam here. But you thought you were free. They weren’t even hiding it from you. No wonder everything was so… convenient yet horribly inconvenient at the same time. You’re feeling a lot of things right now, but somehow, there’s one little thing from that last statement that grabbed you. Made you feel a little insulted. You ask Blake, “What do you mean, my ratings were wobbly?” Blake shrugs. “Happens with all shows eventually. Sometimes it takes one season, sometimes ten. Wrapping up when that happens is better than being cancelled. Oh, don’t worry! The network isn’t firing you. No way, they don’t do that to their stars. You get heaps of compensation for all your hard work, plenty of money, an honorary title at Life Simulator. It’s basically a huge promotion, the kind where you don’t have to do anything anymore, except maybe show up to interviews once or twice when the next season starts.” “Next season,” you repeat. “Well, yeah. You’re done, next one begins.” The conversation peters out after that. You don’t really have much to say. More people come by to hug you or shake your hand, they offer you food and drinks although you can’t stomach a bite. Brian the escape room owner shoots finger guns at you before waving goodbye. Everyone is behaving so normally. Like this was a regular job. Nothing weird about it. No horrible ethical dilemmas. And then someone taps you on the shoulder, and there’s a voice in your ear. “You aren’t taking it well, are you?” You whirl around. The speaker isn’t someone you recognise. But they aren’t smiling like everybody else. “Who are you?” you ask. And they answer: “Well, I suppose, in many ways… I’m you. And I, and a few other ‘you’s, have been hoping you could help us stop all this from happening again.”
GM’s explanation
You’re trying to sail away to freedom, except it turns out the horizon is fake. It’s just one big cloud-painted wall. But if you scope out the underwater part of it, you’ll find several tunnels built down here. They’re all identical, they all lead to further maze- like tunnels. and they’re all completely submerged, so it’s probably not a good idea to go swimming through them without some specialised equipment. Around the place, there are a lot of interesting things that are blocked or locked off. There’s something in the sewer, but a nasty fungus is covering it up. There’s some fishing equipment on the fishing boat, but it’s locked in a box with a musical lock. There’s a paper jammed between boards on the pier, but you can’t pull it out. There’s a fancy yacht, but it’s too tall for you to climb onto. And there’s an undersea wreck, but it’s just low enough that your sinuses go crazy when you try to dive that deep. 11
Let’s start with the fishing equipment. The lock on it resembles a keyboard with two full octaves, but non-functioning flats and sharps. It requires a 3-note password. To figure it out, look at the fishing rods on the pier. Each one is sitting on a particular board, and together, all the boards resemble a keyboard without its flats or sharps. Funny about that, huh? The signage says that this is Pier A-G, indicating that it starts at A and ends at G. So the rods are on boards C, D and G. However, which octaves should they be? Look at the bobbing lures in the water. The C and G lures are deep down in the water, and the D lure is high up on the water’s surface. So for the password you want a low C, a high D, and a low G. Inside the fishing equipment bag you’ll find a good old knife. You’ll need this for two things, but let’s do the easiest one first: between the pier’s boards a piece of paper was jammed, but the knife’s narrow blade can pry it out. It’s a ‘map’ for guiding you through the underwater tunnels, which is great, but we still can’t hold our breath for that long so we’ll have to wait to use that. Let’s look now at the net hanging off the side of the fishing boat. It’s full of fish – wait. They’re all fake! Well, that’s probably not surprising in this world. You can examine these and find that they’ve all got their names written on the side, and they’re all either made of soft rubber or hard ceramic. Cool. We’ll need them soon. Now for getting up onto the tall yacht. There are some hooks all around the top edges, and this net seems strong enough to hold your weight… you’ll need to use your knife to cut it free from the fishing boat and toss it up to the side of the yacht, then you can climb aboard. Once here, you’ll find a fridge – locked, with a bunch of pictures on the lock, and the word FOOD on it. Makes sense. You’ll also find a boombox because this is a big old party boat. There’s a huge music collection, and if you test it out, you’ll find that the vibrations of the loud music affects the real fish in the water in different ways. Some are attracted to the noise, some are repelled. There’s a specific fish you’re going to want to attract: the decongestant rockeater. One of those (a fake one) was in the fishing net, made of rubber. You want this one because it secretes a powerful decongestant, which you desperately need right now. To attract it, you’ll need to pay attention to that fake fish to figure out what sort of music it likes. It’s a rockeater, so rock should be good, and it’s made of soft rubber rather than hard ceramic, so soft rock. Play some soft rock, and you can grab yourself a fish. This means you can now hold your breath and explore the wreck. There’s an oxygen tank! That’ll be handy, although its breathing tube has some holes in it. Might need to fix that. There’s also a very unusual figurehead on the ship of some kind of mythical creature. She looks like a human, but with the teeth of a shark, the talons of an eagle, the body of a lizard, and the tail of a lion. This relates to the mysterious haiku in the tunnel you came through: The beast puffs her chest/A sly tail-flick to distract/A bite, a slash…. Death. This tells you the order you’ll need these body parts: body, tail, teeth, talons. As for what to do with these, it’s actually the password to the fridge. It said FOOD, and it meant that you need to identify the food each body part’s animal eats. The shark eats fish, the eagle eats rabbits, the lizard eats insects, and the lion eats a gazelle. To open the fridge you’ll need to put them in the order Insect, Gazelle, Fish, Rabbit. Inside you’ll find some pungent, potent alcohol. Sweet! This will kill off that gross fungus in the sewer pipe. Once you’ve killed it, you’ll find some thick rubber gloves. With these, you can safely handle the very electrified robotic shark, and can remove 12 the loose gear from its head. This goes in the hole in the tunnel, opening up a secret compartment, in which you’ll find some duck tape. Fix up the breathing tube on the oxygen tank, and you can explore the tunnels! It's a bit of a maze, though. The tunnels all have flashing lights in them, each one flashing a different number of times. The buoys outside tell you how to interpret them: two flashes = STORM, three flashes = WHITE, four flashes = WISPY. These reference the clouds on the painted wall. Your map tells you the first couple of tunnels to follow (start in the bottom left, then go north-east, assuming forward/up is north), then tells you to follow the lights to the end (in the top right corner). So, the first time you have to make this choice, the tunnel lights are flashing three times. Look at the painted clouds; from where you are, there’s a wispy cloud above and below you, a storm cloud to your left, and a white cloud to your right. Three flashes means white, so go down the east tunnel. There’s only one possible correct path to follow until the very last choice: it flashes four times, indicating wispy, but you could either go west or north. Luckily ‘north’ is the finishing spot, so you should figure it’s probably the correct one. Overall, your path should go: Start in the bottom left – go north-east – east – north – east – east – north – east – south – east – east – north – north. Once you’ve reached the exit, there’s just one more door ahead of you. It says, “Access only to those who have taken a big risk.” What’s that referring to? Well, bold players may have already tried this. Once you’ve made the electrified shark safe to handle, stick one arm all the way into its mouth. At the back of its throat, you’ll find the key.
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