Library (The Barracks)
You sneak into the bandits' library, which is unexpected just by its very existence, and find it to be as well-appointed as any you might find in a fancy gentleman's club (the kind with actual gentlemen, not the kind with poles on the dance floor). Plush carpets, plusher armchairs, tall bookshelves stocked with expensive-looking leather-bound volumes... there's even a little table with an exquisite ivory chess set on it. When you start using words like 'exquisite', you know it's a fancy place.
All in all, it's really nice in here, and definitely incongruous to what the outside of the fort looks like, with its broken bottles and bullet holes. Maybe it's like putting duct tape on the frame of a really nice bicycle, so no one will bother to steal it. Or maybe having good taste in furnishings is frowned on in bandit society? You begin to wonder if they have to hide all the nice furniture and pin nudie calendars on the walls when the bandit regional manager comes for a visit.
| Search the bookshelves |
You walk down the length of the bookshelves, looking at the authors on display: Balzac, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Joyce; the collected works of Shakespeare and Sophocles; treatises by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Descartes... Then there's a shelf of books on theoretical physics and chaos theory. The lightest fare you can find is a shelf of novels by G. K. Chesterton, Alexandre Dumas, and Haruki Murikami[sic]. Man, what's with these guys?
either:
You search the bookshelves for a while, but don't find any keys, and none of the books look particularly exciting to you. Grumbling, you decide to search somewhere else.
or:
You carefully search the area, but don't manage to find a key to Lopez's hacienda. You do find a clue, however, which strikes you as oddly out of place considering how fastidiously tidy these bandits seem to be. Hmm.
or:
As you're searching the bookcases, a bandit walks up and returns a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses (in the original Latin) to the shelves. The two of you look at each other in surprise for a moment.
| Fight! |
or:
You search the shelves pretty thoroughly, but don't find any keys. Driven by the need to steal something -- I mean, that's what you do -- you pick an expensive-looking book, basically at random.
 | You acquire an item: heavy leather-bound tome |
or:
After a more thorough search of the shelves, you spot a shiny brass key lying next to a three-volume set of Dante's Divina Commedia in the original Italian.
 | You acquire an item: hacienda key |
| Search the chairs |
The room houses a collection of extremely comfortable-looking overstuffed leather armchairs, each with a matching hassock and a reading lamp standing beside it. You sit in one experimentally, and find it so comfortable that it's a wonder anyone could read more than a few pages this way before falling asleep.
A few minutes go by before you realize you really should get on with searching for those keys. After a few more minutes, you think that you really definitely need to get back to searching before someone comes in and finds you here. A few more minutes pass before you finally manage, grudgingly, to get back on your feet.
either:
You start looking under the cushions of the chairs -- you don't find any keys, but you do find quite a lot of loose change, which adds up to a pretty large handful of meat.
Yeah, no, I don't know how that works.
 | You gain 155-218 Meat. |
or: (after previously finding meat here)
You search under all the cushions of the chairs, but don't find anything new. Phooey.
or:
You start looking under all the chair cushions, only to be interrupted when a bandit sitting on one of them objects.
| Fight! |
or:
You start searching the chairs, and soon find a key underneath one of the cushions. Must've fallen out of a bandit's pocket.
| You acquire an item: hacienda key |
or:
You carefully search the area, but don't manage to find a key to Lopez's hacienda. You do find a a clue, however, which strikes you as oddly out of place considering how fastidiously tidy these bandits seem to be. Hmm.
or:
You search under all the cushions of the chairs, but don't find anything new. Phooey.
| Examine the chess set |
A table in the corner of the room supports a finely-detailed hand-carved ebony and ivory chess set. The white pieces seem to be famous historical adventurers -- you think the king must be Boris, and the queen appears to be Jarlsberg, which is something Jarlsberg probably wouldn't have been very happy about. The black figures are various monsters, with Knob goblins as the pawns, and the Naughty Sorceress as the queen. The king is a sort of vague swirly demonic-looking thing that you don't recognize.
Someone has left a book entitled "Chess Problems of the Grand-Masters" on one of the chairs. It's bookmarked to a page describing a very complicated zugzwang situation, which you can't really make heads or tails of because you can never remember how the little horses are supposed to move.
You carefully search the area, but don't manage to find a key to Lopez's hacienda. You do find a clue, however, which strikes you as oddly out of place considering how fastidiously tidy these bandits seem to be. Hmm.
or:
You don't see any keys here, and there's nothing you want to steal. Humph.
or:
You don't find any keys here, sadly. And although you are a thief, you just can't bring yourself to steal one of the chesspieces -- breaking up the set would be terribly rude. You make do with stealing the bookmark out of the chess problems book. Now they won't know what page they were on! Ha ha! Take that, bandits!
 | You acquire an item: leather bookmark |
or:
As you're inspecting the table, a bandit walks up beside you and says "Checkmate, gringo."
| Fight! |
or:
Over to the side of the board where the captured pieces have been set, you find a tiny Bonerdagon guarding a shiny brass key, which you steal after knocking the Bonerdagon over with your finger. It's very satisfying.
| You acquire an item: hacienda key |
| Sneak out of the fort |
Quietly as the shadow of a very quiet thing (like maybe a snake or a giraffe), you sneak back out of the bandits' barracks.
Occurs in The Barracks as a choice of Hallway Right
