policesquadquest/cases/case-12-the-late-movie/rooms/room6.json

{
  "name": "CH 13 — THE LATE MOVIE: CRATER WOMEN OF VENUS",
  "enter_text": "The cheapest set in the multiverse. Painted craters, a rocket held up with string, and a sky that is a bedsheet. The counter in the corner of everything reads 00:04:11.",
  "music": 5,
  "strokes": [
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 0,
        "y": 0,
        "w": 160,
        "h": 168,
        "color": 7,
        "meaning": "Floor"
      }
    },
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 0,
        "y": 0,
        "w": 160,
        "h": 54,
        "color": 0,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 14,
        "y": 10,
        "w": 2,
        "h": 2,
        "color": 15,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 54,
        "y": 18,
        "w": 2,
        "h": 2,
        "color": 15,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 104,
        "y": 8,
        "w": 2,
        "h": 2,
        "color": 15,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 140,
        "y": 22,
        "w": 2,
        "h": 2,
        "color": 15,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 0,
        "y": 52,
        "w": 160,
        "h": 4,
        "color": 8,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 0,
        "y": 56,
        "w": 160,
        "h": 112,
        "color": 7,
        "meaning": "Floor"
      }
    },
    {
      "Ellipse": {
        "x": 16,
        "y": 92,
        "w": 40,
        "h": 16,
        "color": 8,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Ellipse": {
        "x": 96,
        "y": 104,
        "w": 48,
        "h": 18,
        "color": 8,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Ellipse": {
        "x": 54,
        "y": 130,
        "w": 36,
        "h": 14,
        "color": 8,
        "meaning": "None"
      }
    },
    {
      "Rect": {
        "x": 0,
        "y": 164,
        "w": 160,
        "h": 4,
        "color": 0,
        "meaning": "Wall"
      }
    }
  ],
  "spawn": [
    18,
    150
  ],
  "exits": [
    null,
    null,
    null,
    5
  ],
  "objects": [
    {
      "name": "cardboardrocket",
      "sprite": "cardboardrocket",
      "x": 116,
      "y": 108,
      "look": "The rocket. Cardboard, taped at the seams, leaning about four degrees, with a visible string holding the nose cone up.  It is the least convincing object any of you have ever stood next to, and all three of you love it immediately and without discussion, and none of you says so.",
      "synonyms": "rocket ship cardboard spaceship prop",
      "use_text": "You inspect the rocket, as procedure requires before boarding any vehicle.  Structurally it is a cardboard tube. Aerodynamically it is a cardboard tube. It has, however, been built with real care by somebody with no money at all, and the tape has been applied in neat parallel strips by a person who wanted it to look right.  Your grandfather runs a thumb along the seam and says, 'Somebody tried.' It is, from him, an enormous compliment."
    },
    {
      "name": "moonqueen",
      "sprite": "moonqueen",
      "x": 46,
      "y": 122,
      "look": "The Queen of the Crater Women, in silver lamé and a tall crown, holding a cardboard sceptre.  She rules Venus. The set is a moon. The sky is a bedsheet. Nobody in eleven reels has raised any of this, and she watches you notice all three, one after another, and you can see her decide that she likes you.",
      "synonyms": "queen crater silver crown venus women",
      "use_text": "You ask, respectfully, whether this is Venus or the moon.  She looks at the craters. She looks at the bedsheet. She looks at a boom microphone that has been visible in the top of frame since 1957.  Queen: 'It is whatever the budget was.'  It is the wisest thing anybody says on any channel tonight."
    },
    {
      "name": "tvkid",
      "sprite": "tvkid",
      "x": 84,
      "y": 130,
      "look": "There is a boy on the set who is not in the script.  Nine years old, neat side parting, hands at his sides, smiling without blinking, lit from below by a television that is not there.  He is the one who has been changing the channels. Not the salesman — the salesman only sells the dish. The boy is the audience, and in this house the audience can do anything, and what the audience wants is for nobody to ever leave.",
      "synonyms": "boy child kid audience viewer",
      "kills": true,
      "use_text": "You tell the boy, kindly and clearly, that you are switching the television off now.  The smile does not change. Nothing about his face changes at all.  Boy: 'You can stay and watch with me.'  It is not a threat and it is not a request. It is a channel change, and it takes you with it, and the next thing on is a cartoon, and it does not end."
    },
    {
      "name": "clerkdemon",
      "sprite": "clerkdemon",
      "x": 132,
      "y": 138,
      "look": "Standing at the edge of the crater set with a ring binder is a middle-aged man in a rumpled brown suit with two small horns and a lanyard.  He is not the salesman. He is the salesman's line manager's line manager's problem: a demoted compliance clerk, four hundred years in the department, who processes the contracts nobody reads.  He has your contract. He has been reading it since the cartoon. He looks unwell.",
      "synonyms": "demon clerk binder compliance horns lanyard",
      "points": 10,
      "sets_flag": "signal_up",
      "use_text": "You ask him, professionally, colleague to colleague, to walk you through the terms.  He does. He is enormously relieved to be asked.  Clause 9 gives the instrument twenty-four hours to hold the subscriber. Clause 11 releases the subscriber if the instrument fails to hold him. And Clause 14, added in 1611 and never once invoked, provides that the subscriber may nominate a REPLACEMENT PROGRAMME to occupy the schedule, subject to the replacement being SUPPLIED IN FULL AND IN GOOD ORDER BY THE SUBSCRIBER.  Clerk: 'Nobody has ever supplied anything in good order. In four hundred years. That's why it's still in there.'  He looks at the three of you. He looks at the boxes you are all, without discussing it, already carrying.  Clerk: 'Oh.'  (+15)"
    },
    {
      "name": "moonaerial",
      "sprite": "moonaerial",
      "x": 74,
      "y": 96,
      "look": "The transmitter: poles, wire, and guy ropes, standing on a crater made of painted plaster, broadcasting six hundred and sixty-six channels of other people's stories into a property annex in 2025.  Everything this instrument has ever transmitted, it took from somebody.",
      "synonyms": "aerial transmitter mast wire tower signal",
      "requires_flag": "signal_up",
      "wins": true,
      "points": 25,
      "use_text": "You invoke Clause 14, and you supply the replacement programme in full and in good order, and it is the only thing your family has ever had.  Sixty-seven years of paperwork.  The 1958 pallet goes up the mast first. Ardmore Street, with the latent lifted and logged and burned at 4:15 with a witness. Meridian Street, page nine, where a man sets out that he surveyed the building he emptied and signed the manifest at both ends. The liaison report with the shoe and the dome and the doorway. Form 22-B. Section 14 paragraph nine and the four sentences that prove it wrong. Eleven pages from a records terminal at 3:14 in the morning, submitted, and rated honestly, and never read.  Every word of it true. Every page initialled. In good order.  The instrument accepts delivery — it has to, the clause is its own — and then it has to broadcast it, on all six hundred and sixty-six channels, at once, in full.  And nothing in it is entertainment.  There is no loose cannon. There is no man one day from retirement. There is no twist, no reveal, no rain indoors. There is a man writing down exactly what happened, for sixty-seven years, in a hand that never once wavered, to an audience of nobody.  The boy watches four minutes of it. Then eleven. He stops smiling somewhere in the property log, not because he is frightened, but because he is nine, and it is the first thing he has ever seen that was not made to hold him.  Boy: 'Is this all of it?'  Your grandfather says: 'That is all of it. It is what happened.'  And the boy says, 'Oh,' — the same 'oh' a boy of eight said at a kitchen table in 1958, the same 'oh' your father never said because nobody ever told him — and he turns the television off from the inside.  The set goes. The crater goes. The counter stops at 00:00:19 with the clerk stamping the release, twice, because he wants the second stamp for his file.  And for one frame, in the dark between channels, the three of you are the same man: a fedora and a tan trench coat and a navy suit, half in colour and half in black and white, holding a clipboard.  One frame. Then the annex lights, and the bench, and three chairs, and only one of them occupied — because that is how it has always been, and the other two were always only ever what was written down.  On the bench: one wooden television set, unplugged, screen dead, tagged. One P.L.O.T. Device, cold. One satellite dish, on the roof, aimed at nothing, that Facilities has no record of and never will.  You file it. Nine pages. Every sentence true.  Captain Hocken Jr. signs it on Friday, and — because he is the only one who ever does — he reads it first, all of it, and then he comes and finds you and does not say anything at all, and puts a hand on your shoulder, and that is the review.  ★  (+30)"
    }
  ]
}