Undercroft — hints

You are in the undercroft you have been excavating, with a vault over it and a lamp burning, in September 1348. Go up the stair. Nobody in this house is going to harm you — they have been expecting a woman like you since 1201.

Because there is an entry about you. read the register in the chapter house — it is on the lectern, and Brother Aldwin will let you.

Four things: read the book, learn how many are going to die, look at the recess in the undercroft wall, and ask somebody what year it is. Then go back down.

ask aldwin about book, ask aldwin about house, ask aldwin about year, ask osbert about plague, ask agnes about book. Agnes is not in the register and has noticed.

Six hundred and twenty years. Same rooms, no roofs. read the register in the site hut and you get MS Aveling 1 with its four gaps listed.

Read the book. The first time you do it in 1968 you will find four lines on folio 31 in a hand of about 1348 that are the words you said out loud in a cloister in July.

No, and the game tells you why in your own voice. You do not know what is in it yet, and you have not done any of the recording.

Read the book and ask Ken about the gaps, then go back down into Trench IV.

Yes. Go up to the chapter house. warn them. It changes nothing and the game will tell you exactly why in a way you cannot argue with, and then it will tell you what is still blank.

Three things. Why the west range comes down; whose names get written; and what goes into the recess.

ask osbert about apart and ask aldwin about apart first — they have been arguing about it for an hour and neither of them can finish the argument. Then warn them to keep the sick apart. (warn them to burn everything the dead have touched is the other reading, and it is also true, and the register will say so instead.)

A lead tube out of the infirmary and a sheet of vellum out of Aldwin’s press. take tube in the infirmary, ask aldwin for vellum in the chapter house, then record the names on the vellum.

You do not know which three live. You know which three are doing the work, and it turns out that is the same thing. The game writes them for you.

Back down in the undercroft, mortar the recess. Agnes mixed the lime for you at eleven at night and did not ask a single question.

No. Type procedure in Trench IV and it will lay out four steps, and the fourth one is not procedure.

draw the recess; photograph the recess (the camera is on a shelf in the site hut — take camera); sample the mortar (finds bags are in the shed — take bags); and a witness.

You are the author of the deposit and the only living person who knows what is in it. That is not a fact, it is a claim. Ask Julia in the site hut — ask julia about witness. She will not ask you why.

open the recess, and open the tube. Three names in pencil on fourteenth-century vellum out of a sealed context, and Julia notices the hand, and says one thing about it, once, ever.

The last entry in the register, in a hand that appears nowhere else in it. Go up to the chapter house.

ask aldwin about hand. He had it in January and lived, which happened to about one in five, and his right hand has been closed since February, and he is the sacrist, and the sacrist writes the register.

ask aldwin about write, then ask aldwin about letters. He will tell you to copy the page three times — not the words, the letters.

copy the letters, three times. Then write the last entry. In 1911 a palaeographer will call the result a competent late-fourteenth-century hand with anomalies, and he will be describing exactly what is wrong with it and will not know it.

Down to the undercroft and out. The stair comes up in October 1968 with your coat wet on a dry night.

Type options in the site hut. publish everything needs all four gaps closed. publish the names, file the report and say nothing are the other three, and none of the four is the right one.

Relight the sanctuary lamp in the church in Act V — in 1968 there is a two-year gap in the soot on that wall, and you have spent four months looking at it. And ask Agnes about the fire, and about the book.