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A pangram is a sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet. The best-known one in English is of course The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, but there are others, and many of them are glorious.

For instance, some time ago I ran into a perfect pangram (ie, a sentence containing every letter exactly once; Wikipedia charmingly uses the term 'an anagram of the alphabet'):

Fjord-bank cwm glyphs vext quiz.

... or 'the runes in the valley beside the fjord irritated the professor'. Assuming you accept 'cwm' as an English word (it's Welsh originally), the archaic spelling of 'vexed', and the use of 'quiz' to mean a professor, it's perfect!

Meanwhile, on the more intelligible side, Kaitlyn recently came across this marvel:

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!

At only 29 letters, it only duplicates a, o, and u, and is of course amazing.

I would be remiss not to mention here the book Ella Minnow Pea, which is pretty much an exploration of 'what if pangrams got out of hand'. I bought it for Kaitlyn a few years back and it's hilarious. ^_^

hS

And what context are we talking about? Do you mean 'people didn't go everywhere in swords just in case they needed them', or 'in battle, swords were not used as primary weapons, in favour of [something?]'?

hS

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

Words, Zing, words...you know some better ones. Use them.

You're ​never really sure, you know? Especially with a character who's been somewhat inactive for a few years, stories-wise. So, yeah, glad to hear it (and no need to be intimidated or whatever: as people go, I'm generally the nice and friendly type).

The puppy sends his thanks. He's...okay, I keep trying to use the wrong language here. Content/satisfied/pleased is roughly what I want here, and that's what he is with the attention. And you should see him when the dog walker comes: although my roommate knows her through friends, she'd never really visited before, so now the dog thinks of her as *his* friend, the one whose sole purpose in coming here is to give him attention and take him for a nice long walk. The only difference between that and how he sees all other visitors is that the walk is guaranteed (and none of the silly two-leggers who live with him will try to take some of the attention for themselves)!

And thanks! If I have even half a draft by the time you've finished all that (assuming you're either in the exam period now or going to be soon), I'll call it a success. My school term is ongoing, so I unfortunately can't go "ooh, summer--time to write!" and have that work out well. Still, I'm writing it in spare bits of time, so it is moving. And thanks for volunteering! The more betas the better, I expect; beyond that generally being a good thing, this is probably going to be long and something I want to really work very well. Think Cale Sèche, except, you know, a non-cowritten mission. I am intending it to have a good deal of character exploration, though, so that's another commonality. Also hopefully interesting to more than just me and the two or so people I've been running my main ideas by so far.

Anyway. Good luck with your exams, and enjoy the trip! It sounds like fun. What kind of things does your chorale sing?

~Z

...around 1900, though they'd apparently existed in​ Britain as early as 1875. The design hasn't changed much since.

Before that, there were the metal bedwarmers with coals in them (had to be taken out before going to bed, as they could cause burns; if you've seen the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the maid puts one at the foot of Elizabeth's bed in...I think it's the night scene after she meets Jack Sparrow). However, in between these two, which I didn't know, there were earthenware ones (hardened clay). They were oblong, with a stopper at one end, and would frequently shatter if dropped.

~Z

PS: all that comes from an article on the history of hot water bottles, which I could probably find again. I got curious two days ago and looked this up.

>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.

> Be Mozart.
> Compose opera in German.
> ...
> Profit?

~Neshomeh

Are you sure DOGA is a good choice for this place and not, say, the Catholic church?

If time, and therefore the very concept of youth even exists, of course.

Longswords, hand-and-a-half swords, and bastard swords are the same thing. A sword with a handle meant for a one-handed grip is more properly called an arming sword.

Tom checked and re-checked his math, scanning frantically through the forms and papers arrayed around him. He’d run the calculations, but if he forgot anything… well, that didn’t bear thinking about. Not now.

He checked the clock again. Seven minutes left. His figures were right. He was good to go. He just had to… what was that?

He stared in shock at the screen of his computer. “Damn program…” he swore under his breath. His heart raced. A crash, now… he restarted the program, fingers racing across the keyboard as he struggled to re-enter all the lost data. “Come on, come on…”

Three minutes left. Two minutes. One minute… Tom pressed the final button, letting out a whoop of sheer, exhausted joy. It was done. Over. He would be okay.

“Tom, what are you doing?”

Tom turned around. Al was poking his head through the doorway, his expression intense, and slightly irritated. Namely, the expression of someone who had just been roused from a wonderfully restful sleep by their incredibly loud flatmate.

“Oh, I was just… saving the world from a horrifying disaster, is all,” said Tom. “Y’know. The usual.”

“So… not what you just said, then.” Al looked over to Tom’s monitor and groaned, for he had seen the website’s logo, and now he knew what Tom had been doing. “Tom, Just do it ahead of time.”

“I always forget,” sighed Tom, huffing defensively. “The point is, it’s done. We’re all safe. For now, anyways…”

Al rolled his eyes, pulling his head out of the room. As he walked down the hall, Tom heard him muttering to himself: “The most dramatic I’ve ever heard someone get about their sodding tax returns."

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

Obvious flaws in this cunning plan:

1) Digital animation – no ink involved.
2) People made of ink don’t exist in Real Life; they shouldn’t be able to survive a Reality Room – no Dip necessary.
3) That’s not how Reality Rooms work. (RemnantShadow is right: unless their canon says otherwise, fictional characters are supposed to be made of flesh and blood, and the Reality Room doesn't change that.)

HG

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

> Take off second lederhosen
> Look for exists

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

(Actually, it took me a while to think of something I figured might be suitable to post. Hopefully this is alright...)

Our fingernails and hair are both made out of keratin—the same substance that forms a rhino's horn.

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