Does This Bug You? Does This Bug You?
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Does This Bug You? Does This Bug You?
You finally make your way to Hangar 1138 -- it just figures that you walked into the spaceport at Hangar 3 -- and show your button to the giant furry alien guarding it. He burbles a little, then says "SMELL BAAAAD!"
"Sorry," you say, "but at least I only smell bad on the outside." He snarls at you, but you slip into the ship. You're quickly joined by the smuggler, who introduces you to the rest of his crew: there's a snotty princess, a whiney farmboy, and a senile old man. "Well," you think to yourself, "this is going to be exactly like road trips with my folks growing up." Sure enough, within minutes of take-off the princess is complaining that the farmboy keeps putting his leg on her side of the seat, and the smuggler's threatening to turn the ship around.
If you don't do something to distract yourself, you're going to go crazy. You see that the furry thing has some kind of board game set up, so you could try that. Or you could talk to the old guy, who's currently muttering to himself in a corner. Old people are boring, but crazy people generally aren't, so maybe he'd be entertaining.
You sit down at the table with the furry alien and learn how to play his game. Turns out it's some kind of traditional game of his people, with deep spiritual ramifications and mythological underpinnings. The game's name is unpronounceable by anyone without a muzzle and fangs, but roughly translates to "The Country of Confections."
You sit down to play, and quickly find yourself progressing through the Wooded Area of Hooked Peppermint-flavored Sweets and the Mountain of Sucrose and Gelatin.
The smuggler comes by and sees that you're ahead of the alien, and shakes his head. "Just so you know," he says, "when he loses, he calls the rocks to come crush his opponent. Then he rips off your arm."
"But the game's completely random!" you say. "I'm just pulling colored cards off of this deck and moving where it says to move."
"Well, you'd better figure something out, kid," the smuggler says, shaking his pointer finger in your face. You concentrate on the deck, try to get in touch with the infinite, and will the next card to trap you in the Bog of Molasses.
You manage to force the right card, and lose your next couple of turns. The alien wins, and congratulates you on your mastery of the game. At least, you think that's what he meant -- for the most part, he just sounded like he was gargling a rusty hinge.
You sit down next to the old man. As you try to think of a topic of conversation that would interest him -- perhaps the kids these days and their hippity-hoppity music -- he turns to you and stares with a gaze that seems to look through you to the universe beyond the ship's hull. "The sauce is strong in you," he says.
"The what, now?"
"The sauce. The delicious, mouth-watering, tangy mystical energy that unites us all, from the smallest neutron to the biggest newt."
"So it's a mystical thing?" you ask. "I thought it was measured by these micro-organism that --"
"Shut your whore mouth," the old man snaps. "It's a mystical energy. And it's strong in you. You want to learn how to control it, or am I just sitting here for my health?"
You agree you'd like to learn. The old man hangs a papier-mache orb full of candy from a pulley (what he was doing with that is anyone's guess), then blindfolds you and hands you a stick.
"Now," he says, "reach out with your senses. Feel the sauce all around you, touching everything, permeating all with its flavor. Find the orb and strike it with your stick!"
It takes a while, but you finally master the sauce within you enough to whack the orb open, spilling the candy out.
"You have done well, youngling," the old man says, gnawing on a Daffy Taffy.
Youngling? Huh?
Occurs at Seaside Megalopolis (with 'Smuggler Shot First' Button in the inventory, which is consumed).
References
- The adventure as a whole is clearly a reference to Star Wars: A New Hope.
- The micro-organisms, however, are a reference to the prequel trilogy's controversial midichlorians.
- Hangar 1138 is a bank-shot reference to THX 1138, George Lucas's first feature-length film. The reference's inclusion is likely merited by the number's frequent appearance in Lucas's Star Wars films ("prisoner transfer from cell block 1138," "send Rogues Ten and Eleven to station three-eight," stenciled freighter and robot ID numbers on-screen, etc), though 1138 has become enough of an industry in-joke to appear in a great number of films by other directors.
- The game being played is Candy Land.
- The "calling the rocks to crush his opponent" is a combination of the shaggy-furred Ludo from Labyrinth who could call the rocks, the "rocks fall, everyone dies" meme where a D&D Dungeon Master wipes out the entire party for not playing along, and the "Let the Wookie win" scene from Star Wars.
- Likewise, "SMELL BAAAD" is a reference to Ludo, who uttered the phrase in the Bog of Eternal Stench. Your response references Han's comments about Tauntauns in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
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