policesquadquest/cases/case-11-what-he-wrote/rooms/room3.json
type-two 104cedbc2f Case Eleven: What He Wrote — the grandfather arc closes the loop
Nine cases playable, all lint clean, all verified end-to-end.

A records-modernisation project puts sixty-seven years of paper through a
scanner, and Frank Drebin Jr becomes the first person ever to read one of his
grandfather's reports. Page nine of the Meridian Street file sets out the
survey, the recommendation, the transfer and both signatures, in the same flat
careful voice as everything else. He put it all in. He put all of it in. Page
ten is the property schedule, because there was never going to be an
explanation — to the man who typed it there was nothing there to explain.

The palette drifts backwards through the case: room 0 is Act III cold blue, the
basement is nearly all grey, the last rooms are 1958 monochrome, and every 1958
prop is generated mono so it reads as lit by a different decade — the owl trick
from Case Ten extended across a whole case. Ninety-one-year-old Stanley
Kowalczyk, the rookie from Act Zero, is the only warm-coloured thing in it,
because he is the last living link and he has had his commendation on a wall for
sixty-seven years, next to a note telling a night clerk to be at his sister's.

Under the third floorboard at 1114 Delaware: nineteen tins, 1939 to 1958, every
one full, not one ever opened, with an inventory on top in a flat careful hand
headed PROPERTY — NOT YET SUBMITTED. He never spent any of it. It was never for
anything.

Jr does the only thing a Drebin can do with a true fact. Eleven pages, every
sentence true, submitted at 3:14 in the morning — and the portal thanks him and
asks him to rate his experience with the records modernisation portal today. He
rates it honestly, because he is constitutionally incapable of anything else,
and leaves a four-hundred-word comment, and nobody reads it. The cycle is the
punchline and the punchline is the tragedy.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-25 23:54:11 +10:00

179 lines
5.5 KiB
JSON

{
"name": "1114 Delaware Avenue",
"enter_text": "The house is still there. It sold in 1974 and again in 1991 and it is empty now with a board on the door.",
"music": 2,
"strokes": [
{
"Rect": {
"x": 0,
"y": 0,
"w": 160,
"h": 168,
"color": 8,
"meaning": "Floor"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 0,
"y": 0,
"w": 160,
"h": 44,
"color": 0,
"meaning": "None"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 0,
"y": 44,
"w": 160,
"h": 3,
"color": 7,
"meaning": "None"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 0,
"y": 47,
"w": 160,
"h": 121,
"color": 8,
"meaning": "Floor"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 10,
"y": 8,
"w": 2,
"h": 2,
"color": 15,
"meaning": "None"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 42,
"y": 14,
"w": 2,
"h": 2,
"color": 15,
"meaning": "None"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 96,
"y": 6,
"w": 2,
"h": 2,
"color": 15,
"meaning": "None"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 134,
"y": 18,
"w": 2,
"h": 2,
"color": 15,
"meaning": "None"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 0,
"y": 96,
"w": 160,
"h": 2,
"color": 0,
"meaning": "None"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 0,
"y": 130,
"w": 160,
"h": 1,
"color": 7,
"meaning": "None"
}
},
{
"Rect": {
"x": 0,
"y": 164,
"w": 160,
"h": 4,
"color": 0,
"meaning": "Wall"
}
}
],
"spawn": [
20,
150
],
"exits": [
null,
4,
null,
2
],
"exit_flags": [
"",
"found_box",
"",
""
],
"exit_blocked": [
"",
"Third board from the wall. He told a boy at a kitchen table and the boy did not understand what he was being told.",
"",
""
],
"objects": [
{
"name": "oldhouse",
"sprite": "oldhouse",
"x": 78,
"y": 92,
"look": "1114 Delaware Avenue. Single storey, porch, small yard. Your father grew up in this house and never brought you to it once. There is a lockbox on the door with a realtor's code and the realtor gave you the code on the telephone in under a minute because you said you were with Police Squad, which is true, and because you sounded like a man who meant it, which you were.",
"synonyms": "house home building door realtor",
"use_text": "You let yourself in. It is empty and it smells of nothing and the light through the boards falls in bars across a floor your father learned to walk on."
},
{
"name": "porchlight",
"sprite": "porchlight",
"x": 42,
"y": 100,
"look": "The porch light. Somebody has kept the power on at this address for fifty-one years — a standing order at the utility, paid quarterly, out of an account that has been in credit since 1974. Your father set it up the week his father died. He never mentioned it. He paid it every quarter of his life and it is still paid, because it came out of the estate, and the estate is you.",
"synonyms": "light lamp porch bulb",
"use_text": "You have been paying for this light for fourteen years without knowing what it was for. It is on. It has been on the whole time."
},
{
"name": "coopruin",
"sprite": "coopruin",
"x": 132,
"y": 138,
"look": "In the yard, collapsed into the weeds, the frame of a homemade chicken coop. Somebody built it well. It has been down for forty years and the joints are still square.",
"synonyms": "coop chickens yard frame wreck weeds",
"use_text": "You crouch in the weeds and look at the joinery. He built this in 1951 and he carried a hen on a bus to a police station every few weeks for seven years and put it on a Captain's desk, and in seven years not one police officer in that building ever asked him why, and so he never had occasion to say, and so nobody ever knew, and the only crime of his career that anybody ever noticed was never once called a crime. There is no file. There was never a file."
},
{
"name": "floorboard",
"sprite": "floorboard",
"x": 76,
"y": 142,
"look": "The front room. Third board from the wall. It comes up without a tool, because it has been coming up without a tool since 1939, because a man lifted it every Friday of his working life.",
"synonyms": "board floor plank third",
"points": 20,
"sets_flag": "found_box",
"use_text": "You lift the third board. There are nineteen tins under this house. Nineteen, in rows, the oldest at the back, the dates scratched into the lids with a nail, 1939 to 1958. Every one of them is full. Not one of them has been opened since it was closed. He never spent it. He never spent any of it. There is nineteen years of the best and most patient criminal work this city ever had under a floorboard in an empty house, and it has been sitting here for sixty-seven years being worth precisely nothing to anybody, because it was never for anything. On top of the nineteenth tin, folded once, is a sheet of departmental paper. It is an inventory. It lists all nineteen tins, with dates and amounts, in a flat careful hand, correct to the dollar, headed: PROPERTY — NOT YET SUBMITTED. (+20)"
}
]
}