Gabriel Knight - It's Better Than a Stick in the Eye

Written by Michael

Last time, I had just settled into day 3, by waking up, stumbling out of my studio apartment, and behaving like a caveman in front of my amazingly dedicated employee, Grace.  Now, it’s time to caffeinate and begin our day.

Daily routine items:  First, check with Grace to see if I have any messages.  It seems that Mosely called, inviting me to an interrogation of a suspect.  Also, that Wolfgang Ritter guy called again, claiming to be a relative now, and still wants to talk.  This time, Grace got his number.

Next on the routine:  Read the paper.  It’s now June 20th, there’s no big news items on the front page, but deep inside there’s a lecture Gabe is interested in at Tulane University.  It’s about “African Religions”.  

Say, isn’t Voodoo based largely on African religious practices?  Guess we’d better go.

The horoscope, as usual, isn’t very promising for me: “An evil eye is upon you.  Change course before it’s too late.”

In 1993, I don’t want to think about how much phone calls cost.

I slip back into my apartment, and dial the number, but Gabriel stops me.  “I still don’t know who this guy really is.”  Well, the guy claims to be a relative of mine?  Maybe we could ask Grandma.  But first, we have some more pressing things to do.

From the last post, I planned on going back to the artist in the park, and buying the crocodile mask.  Now, I’ll add some to-do list items of visiting the police, calling Ritter, and attending a lecture.  So, let’s start with the interrogation.

He’s a pretty good investigator if he figured out who stole the badge, right?

Heading to the police station, I again walk right past the useless staff into the back and enter Mosely’s office.  He confronts me right away about having swiped his badge, and I return it.  I hope I don’t need it again, that there’s something I should have done before this, because even if there’s no dead-ends, I don’t want to do the extra work of getting it again.

Our contrition aside, Mosely invites me to watch an interrogation because it will “give you a feel for how I am in action, handling suspects, that sort of thing.”  Remember, he still thinks he’s going to be the star of the book we’re writing.

“You are not alone.  You are really not alone.”

The suspect is a small-time drug dealer named Crash who serves as an informant for pimps and dealers trying to get started in town here.  When Mosely starts to interrogate him however, this time he’s not helpful at all, but rather, he’s really scared that some people will know that he’s talking to the cops.  He gives us nothing, so Mosely throws him back into a holding cell.  He can only be held for 24 hours, though, so he’ll have to be let go tomorrow morning.  I wonder if I’ll have to find something to hold him.

Once the extras leave the room, and it’s just me and Mosely, I talk with him and check up on the topics that may have changed.  I ask about the status of the investigation, and while it’s not going great, he tells me about the info being found out about the victims, “they’re not exactly upstanding citizens.”

That’s probably all I can do here, so I head to the park.

And if you look at it from a different angle, it’s a sailboat.

Actually, it reminds me of either the symbols in Zak McKracken, or the decorations on an Amish barn.

We ask the artist for the completed symbol, and while he’s really creeped out by it for some reason, he finished the job and had it ready for us.  We also think it’s creepy.  Still, we carry on.  I check out the rest of the park, and I come across a fortune teller named Madame Lorelei wearing a snake.

Really, people, wearing animals is cruel.  I’m surprised we haven’t seen any activists throwing paint on these ladies yet.

Reading the sign on her booth, there’s prices for palm readings, crystal ball gazing, and birth charts.  I still plan on spending the $100 I have on a crocodile mask, so I’ll skip that for now.  But as I walk towards the kiosk, she suddenly likes the song the nearby performers are playing, and gets up and starts to dance.  I watch the show, and she thanks the performers when they finish and she sits down again.  

“You are an obsession, you're my obsession; Who do you want me to be to make you sleep with me?”

As I walk through the screen again, this repeats itself.  Guess that’s a subtle hint to do something.  I notice that I get control of my mouse cursor back during the dance, so I try stealing stuff from the booth, which he won’t do.  Did he suddenly develop a moral code?  Hopefully not, we have an adventure game to finish here.

But clicking the look icon on the dancing Madame gives a hint: “Gabriel leers at the dancer, but she seems to want a more overt demonstration of his appreciation.”  Clicking the hand on her brings him closer, and she gets into it, removing her veil as part of a limited strip tease act and using it provocatively.  She forgets to pick it up when she’s done, so I grab it.

Yes, Gabriel is still himself.

Looking at it in my inventory, I’m told it’s covered with lots of tiny little sequins.  The word tiny is a hint to use the magnifying glass, I suspect.

Or she just blew her nose on it.

Looking a little closer, it seems that a chunk of snake scale was passing itself off as a sequin.  Using the tweezers, I extract it.  Using the magnifying glass, I check it out, and it seems it is not a match to the one at the crime scene.

Damn.  We’ve cleared another suspect.

Trying to not go to hell for all eternity, I decide to return the veil to the fortuneteller.  In return for my honest gesture, she does a free palm reading.  She starts to look at my future, with a dark and beautiful woman in it, and a fork in the road of life... 

And then she gets really spooked.  “The blood drains from Madame Lorelei’s face in an instant.  Sweat beads on her upper lip.”  Soon after, she screams, “Oh, God!  Beware! Beware!” and then runs out of the park.  Gabe notices he has that effect on women lately.  Oh well.  We’ve gained a snake scale for our trouble.

Next on my to-do list is to spend that hundred dollars all in one place.  So, I head over to the Dixieland Drug Store and buy a mask.  With the purchase, I get a free bottle of Master Gamblin’ Oil.  According to the poster on the wall, I was supposed to get a choice between this or the Lady Luck Oil, but the clerk seems to think that Gabriel needs little help in that department.  

If only the clerk was playing this game as I am, he’d see Gabriel striking out at every at-bat.

“Why don’t you call me sometime when you’ve got no class?”

So, I head over to the university for that lecture on African religions.  I can’t help but get some Fate of Atlantis  vibes, where I suddenly want to hit some buttons and send a bedsheet ghost onto the stage.

The professor giving the lecture drones on.  First impression: the voice actor was emulating a newsman from a nighttime TV broadcast.  The game decides to tell me that the lecture is being recorded; I guess that’s going to be the extra tape I was wondering about in my first post.

Without transcribing the entire lecture for you (it’s pretty long), I’ll summarize a little.  Voudoun is a blanket term for African tribal religions, which have a common thread of polytheism as opposed to other mainstream religions.  Battles between tribes caused parts of the different offshoots of Voudoun to be adapted and modified by the tribes, causing there to be “innumerable offshoots.”

Definitions:

• Loa = Spirits, and they often are spirits of people important to a tribe’s past, like a highly-regarded warrior or politician.

• Hounfour = Voudoun temple

• Houngan or Bokor = Voudoun Priest

• Mamaloa = Voudoun priestess

• Poteau-mitan = ritual circle in the hounfour  marked by a center pole

• Vévé = Pattern of symbols added to the circle, which identifies the Loa

• Asson = ritual gourd

• Ku-bha-sah = ritual knife, which looks very much like the ones from my dreams

• Fwet kash = ritual whip (...hey, wait, let me go back a post or two... didn’t a message translate to that word?)

• Sekey madoulé = ritual coffin

In Voudoun, the mamaloa is the most powerful figure, and the male bokor is second fiddle.  “Voudoun is a truly matriarchal system.”

Soon after this revelation, I fall asleep, and dream about someone trying to hide me in a sekey madoulé.  I wake up, and the lesson had just ended.

Alone in the lecture hall, I read the bulletin board.

“Unfortunately, it’s weeks away.  By that time, Gabriel will have to have learned on his own!”

None of the messages seem relevant, but they’re fun to read.

A door in the back of the lecture hall leads to the professor’s office.  I ask him about a lot of topics.  

For example, St. John’s Eve is coming up in a few days, on June 23rd.  Want to bet that’s going to be an important day in this game?  He talks about the old practice of ancient sun worshippers rolling a flaming wheel down a hill at sundown in celebration of St. John.  I wonder if we’ll see that.

We learn what “cabrit sans cor’” means.  Literally, the Haitian translation is “a goat without horns”.  But figuratively, it refers to a human sacrifice.

Don’t believe everything you read.

I show him the pattern drawn by the park artist, and he makes a copy to study.  When I tell him that it came from the crime scenes of the Voodoo Murders, he suddenly believes that the newspapers were lying and that there really IS real Voodoo involved.  He says he’ll call when he has more information on the vévé for me.  Just to double check, I also show him the crime scene photo, and it says it reminds him of certain “black Voudoun” practices.

I go back to interrogation mode, and ask about this new topic.  He likens it a parallel to Christianity and Santanism; every religion could be used for either good or bad outcomes.  He tells me of some tribal practices involving necromancy and human sacrifice.

I guess it’s hereditary.

I head over to Grandma’s house next, intending to ask about Wolfgang, but I see an additional topic or two to talk about.  One of them is Heinz Ritter, the name I saw on the paper inside of the clock.  Turns out that was Grandpa!  He changed his name after coming over to the states.  He changed Heinz to Harrison, Ritter to Knight.  All legal and above board.  When Grandma discovered his old passport in a drawer one day, she asked him about it. He wouldn’t talk about his life before America.  “I’m sure it wasn’t trouble with the law.  Your granddad was the best man I ever knew.”

I know I’ve made the reference before. But I’m really getting a Buffy chosen one vibe from this conversation.

I ask my grandmother about Wolfgang, and she’s not sure, but thinks maybe there’s a connection to a brother my grandfather had back in Germany.

I’ve finished most of my personal to-do list for the day, except for calling Wolfgang.  So I’ll pop in and check a bunch of locations before I head back to the bookstore.

In the outer part of town, I check the crime scene again, but see nothing new.  So I head back to the quarter, and visit the cemetery.  I ask the groundskeeper about anything I didn’t ask him before, but no luck.  I head over to my family tomb, to see if my knowledge about Grandpa’s old name changes anything for me, but no luck.  I then go to the back of the cemetery, and run into Malia leaving her family’s crypt.

Only if he plays by these rules.

Gabriel basically throws himself at her, trying to make a soul connection with her, but she shoots him down and leaves in a direction we can’t follow.  I still can’t break into her family crypt, so I wonder when I’ll be stealing her keys.

I visit Magentia Moonbeam again, and ask her about black Voodoo.  Her response?  It’s old, it’s bad, you’re better off not knowing.  That’s about all I get from her.

Then I go to Dr. John’s museum. He claims not to know much about a vévé (“I think they are Haitian”) and won’t bear to entertain a conversation about black Voodoo, claiming he wants no part of it or the people who practice it.  I get a solid vibe of "thou doth protest too much" every time I talk to him.

So, one more stop for my gaming session.  I visit the saloon.  Talking to the barkeeper, he’s not much help with the voodoo stuff, until I ask him about the patrons.  He points out a chess player named Sam who’s currently having a losing streak against a current opponent.  And he happens to be into the voodoo scene, with talking about spells and gris gris all the time.  It seems he used a gris gris to get the girl he would marry, placing the spell bag under her front porch and letting it do its magic.  “Now she’s his wife, poor guy.”  

I try talking to Sam and his opponent, but they’re too engrossed in the game right now.

I’m going to pause here, and again lay out my plans for next time.  I have to call Wolfgang, and also in my inventory is a page torn from a phone book with the local Cazaunoux listings.  I don’t remember Grace giving it to me, but it did answer yesterday’s research request.  I probably clicked past where she gave it to me.  Also, I think I should think about showing the crocodile mask to the university professor, but that can wait until I go back for his results.

Score: 131/342

Session Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

Total Time: 6 hours 0 minutes