Subject: Ja!
Author:
Posted on: 2018-05-10 08:37:00 UTC
Your inventory contains:
-Sauerkraut
-Lederhosen
-A football made entirely of right angles.
-Cookie-flavoured Kuchen
-Cake-flavoured Kekse
-The rules (which must be followed)
-The aforementioned lantern, which sports a label saying Das ist keine Laterne
hS
What've you got?
Department of Geographical Aberrations
-The Queen's House, Greenwich (just below the Royal Observatory in London) seems to have a gravity-distortion field around it that has affected the filming of multiple blockbuster movies. In 2013, the climax of Thor: The Dark World took place there, and that whole movie was stuffed with gravity problems. The massless, inertialess tanker early on was only the start of things!
More recently, the 2016 film Now You See Me 2 tried to use a strobe light to generate the illusion of levitating water drops at the same location - only the distortion field instead actually levitated the drops! It was very clear that the same droplet was being seen in each flash of the strobe. (The uncontrolled environment rules out an ultra high-tech illusion, sadly.)
It is clear that a DOGA investigation is needed, probably with support from the Department of Analytical Science: this geographical anomaly has to be dealt with before it can affect the running of the Observatory, or somehow distort the Prime Meridian.
Oh, wait.
The Department of Misplaced Flora and Fauna
-Cloudberries have been identified as an obvious transplant from a fictional world, likely a fantasy setting, and probably a game of some description. If the name didn't give them away, the fact that they are a vivid golden colour probably should. The fact that they are nearly impossible to cultivate, and thus can only be found growing wild on the misty mountaintops, is pretty much the icing on the cliche cake.
Over to you!
hS
Which just didn't line up with reality. After walking for about half a mile, the path leads into a tunnel, made out of trees so heavily weighed that I have to put my head down a little so I don't hit it. This leads for a couple minutes, and then it just dives deep into the forest. One time, I was walking in a path in the forest, and I came to where I thought Civilization was. I ended up stopping before I hit the street, because I was blocked by a barbed wire fence. After some more walking around the edges, I learned I was in a sneaky government botany facility. Which I was very much not supposed to be in!
Obviously, someone engineer made a mistake with reality-bending trees.
(Also, on a bit of a spook factor note: At night, I hear children laughing and screaming from deep within the forest. Faintly, but most definitely audible.)
I used to go to a school that was some sort of hexagon on the inside of a triangle. It is rumored to have been designed by a prison architect. Every day, I would gather my supplies, walk down a hallway, suddenly arrive at a wing of the school I could have sworn was in the opposite direction, and after minutes of aimless meandering, I would wind up right back where I started. I ended up having to grab hold of a good friend's backpack, with whom I shared the next class, in order to navigate the place - either that or bury my nose in a map and hope for the best.
I am the first one to accuse myself of having no sense of direction, but even my navigationally-gifted friends were not able to consistently arrive in the place they intended to arrive until a year or more had passed. Department of Geographic Aberrations, please send someone to investigate.
there has been and still is a very obvious bat infestation. If you are there at the school pursuing an extracurricular activity during the dark hours, you will probably see one.
Are you sure DOGA is a good choice for this place and not, say, the Catholic church?
considering the place doesn't exist, unless you truly are as fooled by THEM and their agents as I hope you aren't.
Aside from the nonexistence of Bielefeld, there's also the Berg in Berlin, which certain people claim isn't there simply because they can't see it. Clearly we need to send a team in. Does anyone in DOGA speak German?
{Agent Huinesoron: I speak Grelvish.}
What? That's not even slightly... why would you volunteer that information?
hS
I'm starting to wonder if Germany exists at all. I mean, really - I've never been to Germany. I don't know anyone from Germany. I've never met anyone who's gone there, at least, not anyone I'd trust to not be In on It.
I'm starting to question even the idea of sending a team 'in' when, well... who's to say there's any 'in' for them to be 'sent' 'in' 'to'?
But how would I know for sure?!
I've asked DOGA to take a look; they say they've landed in Hausnummer, Einbahnstraße, Ausfahrt, but are unable to confirm that they've actually found Germany.
hS
Hang on, I'm getting another report through... apparently the weather report says 'Wetter', so they're hunting for their umbrellas now...
hS, who did in fact once wonder why all the exits pointed to Ausfahrt...
You may be eaten by an umlaut.
hS
Everyone knows umlauts are afraid of light. :-P
...Ooh! A Zorkmid. I'll pass it off to Tom. He's got quite the collection, as they seem to be leaking into HQ.
Your inventory contains:
-Sauerkraut
-Lederhosen
-A football made entirely of right angles.
-Cookie-flavoured Kuchen
-Cake-flavoured Kekse
-The rules (which must be followed)
-The aforementioned lantern, which sports a label saying Das ist keine Laterne
hS
You are now wearing two pairs of lederhosen. Things are likely to get quite hot for you.
Somewhere in the maze, a mysterious voice speaks. It says: Irgendwo im Labyrinth spricht eine mysteriöse Stimme.
hS
> Take off second lederhosen
> Look for exists
Achievement complete: Follow the rules regarding Fashion.
Looking for exists is, of course, your whole purpose: to confirm the existence or lack thereof of Germany. But now you are heading deeper into the quagmire of philosophy: does the maze exist? Does the voice exist? Do you exist?
You attempt to take solace in the words of Kierkegaard, but he was Danish, and so irrelevant to your mission. Instead, you find yourself trying to find meaning in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche (who was, or claimed to be, German, if there is such a thing as Germany), but you run into a problem: there is no meaning.
You have gained: +1 to nihilism.
((Sooo I guess GermanyQuest is built on the Dungeons and Discourse engine... at least for now.))
hS
If your quest is successful, then you will find that Germany exists. In that case, Nietzsche must also have existed, and as he said, everything is meaningless.
In contrast, if your quest fails, and Germany doesn't exist, your actions will have been futile and, ultimately, meaningless.
There seems little hope of resolving this paradox. The mysterious voice (if it exists) speaks again from elsewhere in the maze (if it exists): Sie haben wenig Hoffnung, dieses Paradox zu lösen.
hS
> Be Mozart.
> Compose opera in German.
> ...
> Profit?
~Neshomeh
If time, and therefore the very concept of youth even exists, of course.
>Attack paradox with footbal
(football of right angles)
The football absorbs the paradox, becoming the football version of an impossible cube. It hurts your eyes to look at it for too long, and trying to wrap your head around its existence is already giving you a headache. Hastily, you shove the impossible cube football into the middling back of your inventory, where you hope it will remain tolerably unobtrusive for the time being.
For a brief moment, as you try to resolve the paradox, your consciousness splits to follow different paths, superimposed on each other. Normally, this waveform of you would collapse to give a single outcome, and you would go on your way none the wiser.
But now you have an impossible cube. If you are a cat in a box, then the impossible cube allows you to be outside the box at the same time. All of your superpositioned actions have occured!
You are Mozart, wealthy composer of opera in the strange language of the mysterious voice. Yet you are simultaneously a child, innocent of all that is going on. Simultaneously, you have a complicated relationship with your mother; but since Freud is Austrian, and since we're doing the Many Worlds thing, your mother is now the also-Austrian Erwin Schrödinger.
In the music of the impossible cube, the Bratwurst maze falls away. The mysterious voice screams, Die mysteriöse Stimme schreit!, and fades into nothing.
Level One Complete
-Location: Einbahnstraße, Ausfahrt, possibly Germany
-Weather: Wetter
-Objective: Determine existence status of Germany
hS
(I totally love this. This is hilarious.
I know a German exchange student at my school, but does she exist? Gasp.)
-Twistey
The internet is full of self-inserts of people interaction on "forums". These self inserts often have improbable descriptions and claim to be far more skilled than they should be. Further investigation is requested.
One: when humanity's own inventions gravitate to the garbage, we have problems.
Two: Cloudberries are a Tundran fruit. Quick, we must check all games set in Tundra settings to find out where it came from!