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xyzzysqrlLast time on Nancy Drew Versus Will Scarlet, we helped Henrik work through some of his missing memories and discovered some very interesting revelations. I have no idea what to make of these, so we'd better follow up on them.
So Henrik stole the jade carving of King Pacal himself for some reason, possibly involving protecting it. Does he have a valid reason, or was he double-dipping the cinnabar and having hallucinations? All we have from him is a key. Let's get back to the museum and start going through his things.
Last time we found a card for the Chaco Canyon Cultural Center on Henrik's desk, but no one answered when I phoned. I decide to try again but the work phone has voice mail which turns out to be from Joanna. The board of directors has barred her from the museum, and she begs Nancy to call Frank Rose and get things sorted. After a few considering minutes, I do.
"Nancy!" he exclaims. "I was JUST about to call you! Are you psychic?"
"Actually I have been brushing up on my mind-reading." Nancy modestly replies.
"...I'm really glad I have you on my side." Franklin muses, genuinely sounding rattled.
Anyway he wants to apologize for the fiasco with the museum, but Nancy assures him that in all her years (80+ at least, although she doesn't say that) she's never once found a "mystery-free zone". Franklin's attention turns to Joanna -- who is in the doghouse. Time after time she's gambled money and reputation on wild goose chases, and this is the latest one. The Pacal carving, stolen? What if she wants the insurance money? What if it's the black market?
No, the only thing to do, the board agrees, is temporarily put Nancy in charge. She's officially curator in charge of the museum for this coming exhibit -- oh, and Franklin wants her to catch the thief red-handed. Ha! Red-handed! It's a joke, Nancy! But being curator isn't a joke at all. If she actually catches the thief and clears Joanna, Joanna can have her job back! Good luck!
"But I don't know HOW to--" Nancy says to a dial tone.
Hooboy. Okay, well... back to calling Chaco Canyon. Now that we know we're the only ones in the museum, all that dark empty space seems a lot more threatening. Plus it's long distance. Nancy pops back to her hotel to dial out. (For some reason you can't call from work.) She promptly begins quizzing the director on the thefts there. Red handprint. Uh-huh. Mercuric Sulfide paste. Right. Any idea what a red handprint means?
"Don't walk?" the director suggests. "Don't GO there? Or as my fifteen year old would say, 'Talk to the hand'?"
"...no I don't think so." Nancy replies.
Of the pieces stolen, the most important to the museum was a jade piece. (Ding!) It had a glyph on it no-one could translate, until they hired a wonder-translator. What was his name? Henrik van der Hume.
Oh Henrik, this looks very bad for you. There's another familiar name in the conversation: The jade piece came to the museum via one Taylor Sinclair, and was stolen only a few days after Henrik's employment at the center ceased. "We were all so depressed after the police left we went to the office and ate the rest of Henrik's farewell cake."
Nancy angles for a photo of the stolen jade, but they sent their only print to the insurance company. With that, it's time to hang up.
The evidence so far paints a certain picture, but not all the linework is brushed in yet. I've got some strong ideas about exactly what's going on, but I'm keeping them to myself in case I'm right.
Meanwhile, we can now access the curator's office. Let's get in there and explore... let's see. Ah-ha, documents for the Pacal carving. Let's see if anything fishy...
...holy sheezus, look at that PRICE.
After some more searching and poking, I locate another key, but that's it. I can't find anything suspicious in Joanna's office, and frankly I am honestly suspecting that there's nothing suspicious there to find. Into the back of the museum it is, where I use the key from Henrik to open up his desk. Inside is a 100MB zip disk (hey kids, remember those?), some of Henrik's translation notes notes (which Nancy grabs to pin to the board)...
...and an ornate-looking notebook with some INTERESTING WRITING inside.
Smugglers. It's finally smugglers. Took us six and a half games to get there, but... smugglers.
So to bring it back to my earlier theory, I'm predicting that Henrik tried to get out of this smuggling ring, possibly one run by Taylor Sinclair, and that's when Sinclair threw him down the stairs. Unfortunately, Henrik had developed some kind of protective fixation on this particular piece of jade or something about King Pacal and hidden it before Taylor could steal it.
Let's do some follow up work on those lines and see if I'm right.
Step 1: Go back to the hotel. Put the zip disk in Nancy's PC. Needs a password... I got nothing. Set alarm and sleep until visiting hours at the hospital.
Step 2: Sadly, Henrik is asleep. Pin the page from his notes to his board.
Step 3: ...let's avoid Sinclair for a while. Visit Alejandro. Ask him about the Nahuatl word for "snake". Funny thing, he just can't remember! You know what might jog his memory, though? Seeing the documents on that Pacal carving so he can see if they're authentic! He's suspected for years they aren't, but Joanna would never let him see them. Yep, that'll ring a few bells! And since Joanna's not in her office, Nancy can bring them to him!
...subtle, Ali.
...say, how does he know that Joanna's not in her office? Oh, because he's the one who called in the anonymous tip that she might have something to do with the theft.
*sigh* Well then. I feel like I'm just JUGGLING scumbags here, but it beats the hell out of squinting at corkboards for fifteen hours. Plus Alejandro arguably has the purest intentions out of anyone involved here, particularly if these documents ARE falsified somehow. I'm in.
Step 4: Bring documents to Alejandro. It'll be the first step towards legally repatriating the artwork, wherever it shows up again! He abruptly becomes fluent in Nahuatl once more. The Nahuatl word for snake is "coatl".
Step 5: Check in at the hospital. Henrik got to work translating all those notes, and apparently among them was his password, which is a glyph that turns out to mean "STONE".
Henrik assures me this is connected to the plot at the museum. The Whisperer was a scribe -- he can't recall her name -- who wrote a very unflattering version of Pacal's ascent to the throne which contained "facts he deemed to be untrue". Pacal claimed he was a king by Divine Right. The scribe claimed, among other things, that he was king only because his high-status parents pulled some strings.
His response was to have her thrown into a tomb, a prison of stone, from which her spirit could never escape, so she would never enter the afterlife. He proceeded to build himself up as hard as he could, ordering art and writings about his greatness.
but it's really about ethics in game journ
Nevermind it's been done.
At first I don't understand how this relates to the so-called plot at the museum. Nancy does, of course. A prison of stone, recently come to the Beech Hill museum...
The monolith. The Whisperer's body and her writings, the ones that shed the arguable truth on the reign of King Pacal, are sealed inside the monolith. Henrik urges Nancy not to tell ANYONE about this, and then leans back to recover from his headache.
So OKAY but... wouldn't the value of that carving go UP when he was revealed to be a huge asshole of a king? People LOVE asshole kings. I dunno.
Back to the hotel and we open up Henrik's zip drive with the password "Stone", which is the glyph it pops up when we try to access the files.
There's a STACK of info in the files, and I THINK I screenshotted everything useful. Unfortunately, right after doing so the game crashed. It's been doing that a lot on me, and I'm a little nervous. I replayed up to this point, but I don't feel like continuing tonight. So I'll sort through the pile of information below and make a call about what to do next time I play.
Below is just that infodump for my sake. See you next time!
Sorry about the abrupt stop. Hopefully we're close to the end!
So Henrik stole the jade carving of King Pacal himself for some reason, possibly involving protecting it. Does he have a valid reason, or was he double-dipping the cinnabar and having hallucinations? All we have from him is a key. Let's get back to the museum and start going through his things.
Last time we found a card for the Chaco Canyon Cultural Center on Henrik's desk, but no one answered when I phoned. I decide to try again but the work phone has voice mail which turns out to be from Joanna. The board of directors has barred her from the museum, and she begs Nancy to call Frank Rose and get things sorted. After a few considering minutes, I do.
"Nancy!" he exclaims. "I was JUST about to call you! Are you psychic?"
"Actually I have been brushing up on my mind-reading." Nancy modestly replies.
"...I'm really glad I have you on my side." Franklin muses, genuinely sounding rattled.
Anyway he wants to apologize for the fiasco with the museum, but Nancy assures him that in all her years (80+ at least, although she doesn't say that) she's never once found a "mystery-free zone". Franklin's attention turns to Joanna -- who is in the doghouse. Time after time she's gambled money and reputation on wild goose chases, and this is the latest one. The Pacal carving, stolen? What if she wants the insurance money? What if it's the black market?
No, the only thing to do, the board agrees, is temporarily put Nancy in charge. She's officially curator in charge of the museum for this coming exhibit -- oh, and Franklin wants her to catch the thief red-handed. Ha! Red-handed! It's a joke, Nancy! But being curator isn't a joke at all. If she actually catches the thief and clears Joanna, Joanna can have her job back! Good luck!
"But I don't know HOW to--" Nancy says to a dial tone.
Hooboy. Okay, well... back to calling Chaco Canyon. Now that we know we're the only ones in the museum, all that dark empty space seems a lot more threatening. Plus it's long distance. Nancy pops back to her hotel to dial out. (For some reason you can't call from work.) She promptly begins quizzing the director on the thefts there. Red handprint. Uh-huh. Mercuric Sulfide paste. Right. Any idea what a red handprint means?
"Don't walk?" the director suggests. "Don't GO there? Or as my fifteen year old would say, 'Talk to the hand'?"
"...no I don't think so." Nancy replies.
Of the pieces stolen, the most important to the museum was a jade piece. (Ding!) It had a glyph on it no-one could translate, until they hired a wonder-translator. What was his name? Henrik van der Hume.
Oh Henrik, this looks very bad for you. There's another familiar name in the conversation: The jade piece came to the museum via one Taylor Sinclair, and was stolen only a few days after Henrik's employment at the center ceased. "We were all so depressed after the police left we went to the office and ate the rest of Henrik's farewell cake."
Nancy angles for a photo of the stolen jade, but they sent their only print to the insurance company. With that, it's time to hang up.
The evidence so far paints a certain picture, but not all the linework is brushed in yet. I've got some strong ideas about exactly what's going on, but I'm keeping them to myself in case I'm right.
Meanwhile, we can now access the curator's office. Let's get in there and explore... let's see. Ah-ha, documents for the Pacal carving. Let's see if anything fishy...
...holy sheezus, look at that PRICE.
After some more searching and poking, I locate another key, but that's it. I can't find anything suspicious in Joanna's office, and frankly I am honestly suspecting that there's nothing suspicious there to find. Into the back of the museum it is, where I use the key from Henrik to open up his desk. Inside is a 100MB zip disk (hey kids, remember those?), some of Henrik's translation notes notes (which Nancy grabs to pin to the board)...
...and an ornate-looking notebook with some INTERESTING WRITING inside.
Smugglers. It's finally smugglers. Took us six and a half games to get there, but... smugglers.
So to bring it back to my earlier theory, I'm predicting that Henrik tried to get out of this smuggling ring, possibly one run by Taylor Sinclair, and that's when Sinclair threw him down the stairs. Unfortunately, Henrik had developed some kind of protective fixation on this particular piece of jade or something about King Pacal and hidden it before Taylor could steal it.
Let's do some follow up work on those lines and see if I'm right.
Step 1: Go back to the hotel. Put the zip disk in Nancy's PC. Needs a password... I got nothing. Set alarm and sleep until visiting hours at the hospital.
Step 2: Sadly, Henrik is asleep. Pin the page from his notes to his board.
Step 3: ...let's avoid Sinclair for a while. Visit Alejandro. Ask him about the Nahuatl word for "snake". Funny thing, he just can't remember! You know what might jog his memory, though? Seeing the documents on that Pacal carving so he can see if they're authentic! He's suspected for years they aren't, but Joanna would never let him see them. Yep, that'll ring a few bells! And since Joanna's not in her office, Nancy can bring them to him!
...subtle, Ali.
...say, how does he know that Joanna's not in her office? Oh, because he's the one who called in the anonymous tip that she might have something to do with the theft.
*sigh* Well then. I feel like I'm just JUGGLING scumbags here, but it beats the hell out of squinting at corkboards for fifteen hours. Plus Alejandro arguably has the purest intentions out of anyone involved here, particularly if these documents ARE falsified somehow. I'm in.
Step 4: Bring documents to Alejandro. It'll be the first step towards legally repatriating the artwork, wherever it shows up again! He abruptly becomes fluent in Nahuatl once more. The Nahuatl word for snake is "coatl".
Step 5: Check in at the hospital. Henrik got to work translating all those notes, and apparently among them was his password, which is a glyph that turns out to mean "STONE".
Henrik assures me this is connected to the plot at the museum. The Whisperer was a scribe -- he can't recall her name -- who wrote a very unflattering version of Pacal's ascent to the throne which contained "facts he deemed to be untrue". Pacal claimed he was a king by Divine Right. The scribe claimed, among other things, that he was king only because his high-status parents pulled some strings.
His response was to have her thrown into a tomb, a prison of stone, from which her spirit could never escape, so she would never enter the afterlife. He proceeded to build himself up as hard as he could, ordering art and writings about his greatness.
Nevermind it's been done.
At first I don't understand how this relates to the so-called plot at the museum. Nancy does, of course. A prison of stone, recently come to the Beech Hill museum...
The monolith. The Whisperer's body and her writings, the ones that shed the arguable truth on the reign of King Pacal, are sealed inside the monolith. Henrik urges Nancy not to tell ANYONE about this, and then leans back to recover from his headache.
So OKAY but... wouldn't the value of that carving go UP when he was revealed to be a huge asshole of a king? People LOVE asshole kings. I dunno.
Back to the hotel and we open up Henrik's zip drive with the password "Stone", which is the glyph it pops up when we try to access the files.
There's a STACK of info in the files, and I THINK I screenshotted everything useful. Unfortunately, right after doing so the game crashed. It's been doing that a lot on me, and I'm a little nervous. I replayed up to this point, but I don't feel like continuing tonight. So I'll sort through the pile of information below and make a call about what to do next time I play.
Below is just that infodump for my sake. See you next time!
Sorry about the abrupt stop. Hopefully we're close to the end!
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