Companions of Xanth – Crewel Lye: A Caustic Yarn

By Ilmari

Scorching desert, and all directions lead just to the same place. After a few futile attempts, Nada, my companion, identified the place as Void, one of the elemental regions in the northern Xanth. Despite what the name says, it’s not empty, but more like illusory – there’s nothing real there, but you can use the illusions as if they were real.

What was that? Did I see a door appearing and vanishing? I talked to Nada and she didn’t believe I saw anything. Talking to her enough, with sentences that indicated me believing in the door, made it reappear as solid.

I took the door out and we appeared in the region of Earth. It seemed as featureless as the Void, except there was a barrow with a real wooden door, but it could not be opened. I moved to another room and found a spring, with the demon Metria, one of my potential companions, suggesting I take a swim in it.

Well, why not

What do you know, it was a love spring, and the demon lured me further into the desert – the end

I restored and refused to have anything to do with the love spring. After a few failed attempts to deceive me, Metria got bored and opened up the barrow for me.

Great, a maze. I took a few moves, and then the lights turned out.

Or then not

But these won't help me that much

I found Nada, who said that all this activity had made her thirsty and suggested taking a drink from that spring we saw earlier. But wasn’t that a love spring?

If you insist…

I think this wasn’t a good move

Definitely not a good move

Monk Quest IX: To Control Your Urges

Restoring again, I now waited a bit, and when Metria finally got bored, she revealed her disguise. In an act of mercy, she left me a homing device: the higher the number, the closer to real Nada I should have been. I think it didn’t really work, since the numbers didn’t really match (probably just another trick of Metria). Instead, I was forced to map more of the maze.

Luckily the game has a mapping feature so that I didn’t have to do it all manually

I managed to find several things of interest:

• A mirror that let me see another vision of my opponent, Kim

That bubble floating in the air over their heads...

...is a daydream. I wish mine could be so easily fulfilled

• A stone plaque with some indentations. I can spell the name Mack, but nothing else
• A room with a metal switch on the wall. Flipping the switch revealed another switch and flipping that revealed another and so forth. If I accidentally flipped a wrong, earlier switch (and boy was that easy to do, when the wall was full of dozens of switches), the wall returned to the position where that switch had just appeared. Finally, flipping a switch did not produce any new switches, but melted that switch into a metal plate. After that, flipping any of the switches had the same effect and doing that for the final time made all the metal plates vanish, revealing a big button. Pressing the button opened up a staircase to the lair where Nada was held.

The first time we really see Nada in her naga form

Nada was very conscious about her state and didn’t want me to look at her. In practice, saying anything hinting that I might have even peeked at her led to a game over.

Nada suggested I would try to work with the manacles, but I first checked the funguslike thing on the wall. Nada told me that it was blue agony moss that eats right through everything it touches, except glass. Of course, I tried eating it, and after a couple of turns, it had eaten through my stomach.

After another restore, I heard someone speak. It was one of the manacles. A few lines of dialogue later, I had managed to convince them to release Nada. With that problem solved, I asked Nada what to do next, and she suggested I should go look for a new exit in the maze. Great.

Going further, I found some new things:

• A pestle
• A pad that teleported me to a new section of the maze
• A mortar
• A door that was ajar. I’ve heard that pun many times before. Thus, when the door that was ajar could not be opened – and that kind of door I simply do not adore (see game, I can do bad puns too) – I knew I could just take it and find out it was all along a jar.

Behind the ex-door I found an ironwood tree blocking my passage. Nada suggested that now that I had a jar I could collect some of that moss from her cell, because it was caustic. That meant a lot of backtracking in the featureless, boring maze. There was only one thing to do to express my emotions at that moment:

Really game,
It’s a real shame,
If you make me go the way I came,
I can tell you won’t get much fame,
I’ll declare you to be lame.

Bad puns, bad poems – when the game goes so wild as to threaten you with more maze, you have to reach for the big guns.

You couldn’t even open it up for me?

With the ironwood tree gone, I had left the Earth region behind me and was now in the region of Fire.

Fireman and hot dog. Get it?

The dog kept growling at me, whenever I tried to interact with the fireman. Now, I remembered that a new dialogue option with Nada had appeared, once we had entered the Fire region.

Bun, hot dog, you get the thrift.

When I asked her, Nada put her hair in a bun and gave it to me. The bun itself didn’t have much effect on the hot dog, but I had something to spice it up even more.

Mustard!

With the dog out of the way, I could finally talk with the fireman.

Seems like I’ve heard of this Mack before

No way. That plaque was down there in the maze that we've already left behind

I ignored Nada’s advice and went further down the cave. An impenetrable firewall prevented my journey further, but I did find a piece of charcoal. Alright, maze it is then. But before that…

I once a played a game from the Legend,
That shoved its player to a dead end,
With the developers lazy,
They just made it too mazy,
Game disks I finally bludgeoned.

Bad limericks, my last line of defence.

After a lot of repetitive clicking

Another recipe

Alright, I had “flour” (flower), but where could I find some firewater?

Oh, from this dude

I mixed the flower and the hooch in the mortar with the pestle, and a piece of dough formed. I still had to bake the cracker.

This is the place to do it

Seeing my firecracker, the fireman got scared and melted in the lava. Someone didn’t like this.

It’s a firearm, get it?

This was just a pointless diversion, since the “heater” also returned to the lava pool, when I mentioned my firecracker. With no more obstacles in my way, I went and threw the cracker at the firewall.

I'm a hacker with a cracker

The way out of the Fire region

And we’ve reached the elemental region of Water

Boy, I've been playing long! I’m beginning to get hungry, so it’s time to leave these elementary puzzles and go alimentary…

Yeah, I’ll see myself out. Until the next post!

Session time: 4 h 15 min
Total time: 9 h 45 min