policesquadquest/cases/case-10-plot-device/rooms/room3.json
type-two e95360a1b2 Case Ten: The P.L.O.T. Device (2025) — Drebin Jr, and the owl
Act III, cold-palette EGA. Six rooms, 100 points, verified end-to-end
headlessly at 100/100 with the win firing.

The homage John asked for is a register, not a costume. Nielsen played Drebin Sr
oblivious — the joke was he never noticed. Neeson plays Jr sincere: he notices
everything and means all of it, so his text is written straight and often
genuinely moving, and the comedy is what it turns out to be about. He gives a
Taken speech about his particular set of skills, chief among them paperwork. He
takes four armed robbers in eleven seconds dressed as a schoolgirl with his back
to the actual crime. Cane gets the same sincerity back at him from the wrong
face.

The three-era payoff pays off: the owl sprite is generated monochrome and placed
in a full-colour room, so Frank Drebin Sr is visibly lit by a different decade
than everything around him. The palette rule from DESIGN §2 doing the emotional
work at the climax.

Planned cases 10 and 11 merged into one folder — same film, same cast, no
duplicated sprite set, and the owl payoff lands in the same case as its setup.

Third authoring trap documented: sets_flag fires on use, never on take (points
does both). A takeable item silently failed to set its flag and the gate it fed
never opened; gate on `needs`, which checks inventory, instead.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-25 22:39:00 +10:00

66 lines
4.0 KiB
JSON

{
"name": "Mulholland Drive — Barrier at Mile 4",
"enter_text": "Night. Two hundred feet of nothing on the left. Somebody came off here doing sixty and the tyre marks are wrong.",
"music": 2,
"strokes": [
{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 160, "h": 168, "color": 8, "meaning": "Floor" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 160, "h": 46, "color": 0, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 6, "y": 10, "w": 2, "h": 2, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 30, "y": 6, "w": 2, "h": 2, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 54, "y": 14, "w": 2, "h": 2, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 88, "y": 8, "w": 2, "h": 2, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 118, "y": 16, "w": 2, "h": 2, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 142, "y": 6, "w": 2, "h": 2, "color": 15, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 30, "w": 160, "h": 16, "color": 1, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 8, "y": 34, "w": 4, "h": 4, "color": 14, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 24, "y": 36, "w": 4, "h": 4, "color": 14, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 48, "y": 33, "w": 4, "h": 4, "color": 14, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 96, "y": 37, "w": 4, "h": 4, "color": 14, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 130, "y": 34, "w": 4, "h": 4, "color": 14, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 46, "w": 160, "h": 4, "color": 7, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 50, "w": 160, "h": 118, "color": 8, "meaning": "Floor" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 104, "w": 160, "h": 3, "color": 14, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 62, "w": 160, "h": 3, "color": 7, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 40, "y": 62, "w": 26, "h": 3, "color": 4, "meaning": "None" } },
{ "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 164, "w": 160, "h": 4, "color": 0, "meaning": "Wall" } }
],
"spawn": [18, 140],
"exits": [null, 4, null, 2],
"exit_flags": ["", "knows_logo", "", ""],
"exit_blocked": ["", "You have a matchbook and no idea where it came from. Find out where it came from.", "", ""],
"objects": [
{
"name": "crashcar",
"sprite": "crashcar",
"x": 54,
"y": 92,
"look": "Simon Davenport's car, still where it stopped. Silver, electric, four years old, immaculate service history. A careful man's car.",
"synonyms": "car wreck vehicle saloon barrier",
"use_text": "You go over it properly, which nobody has, because it took the coroner four hours to decide there was nothing to go over. The driver's seat is set for a man about six feet two. Simon Davenport was five feet eight. Somebody drove this car who was not Simon Davenport, and then somebody put Simon Davenport in it.",
"sets_flag": "seat_wrong"
},
{
"name": "matchbook",
"sprite": "matchbook",
"x": 88,
"y": 122,
"look": "A black matchbook, thrown clear, lying twenty feet from the barrier in wet grass. No name on it. Just a logo: a cyan circle, broken at the top.",
"synonyms": "matches book logo cover",
"takeable": true,
"points": 5
},
{
"name": "laptop",
"sprite": "laptop",
"x": 122,
"y": 130,
"look": "Simon's laptop, in the footwell, screen cracked, still running on battery nine days later because a careful man buys the model with the good battery.",
"synonyms": "computer machine notebook screen",
"needs": "matchbook",
"points": 10,
"sets_flag": "knows_logo",
"use_text": "Beth reads over your shoulder. The last thing Simon Davenport did was draft an email he never sent, to a journalist, and the last thing in the draft is a single line: 'It isn't a weapon. It's the opposite of a weapon. It takes away the part of us that argues.' Attached is a photograph of a launch party. On the back wall of the photograph, forty feet high, is a cyan circle, broken at the top. Beth: I know that logo. Everyone knows that logo. That's Cane."
}
]
}