An extremely reluctant farmer picks up a hoe
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Nope, it's a fixture and not going anywhere.

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Anything else interesting in the room?

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Not especially? It looks like it was once a place where people sat together and worked on craft projects. There's nothing else that looks plot-relevant.

 

 

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Emily leads Oliver through the rest of the Community Center. As they explore, they find:

- a kitchen;
- a pantry;
- a boiler room;
- the fish tank in the main room;
- a vault; and
- a bulletin board.

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Stuff in the vault?  Anything worth reading on the bulletin board?  Living fish in the tank?  Boiler room set to explode?  Fish tacos in the pantry?

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The vault has a big safe in it, with the door hanging askew on its hinges and nothing inside but rat droppings.

The bulletin board has a few old cards stuck to it, but the ink on them is faded to illegibility.

The fish tank is cracked and dry.

If the boiler room was set to explode, the fuse long since rotted away.

The pantry is empty.

 

This place is bleak.

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Oliver is too fresh from the big city to consciously notice such a small level of bleak.

Was there anything that looked repairable or for that matter modifiable in any obvious way?

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The GLOWING GOLDEN SCROLL with the MYSTERIOUS RUNES was probably the thing to pay attention to.

Nothing else seemed modifiable at all. Everything is just inert, lifeless, dead.

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"Emily, have you got any ideas about how we'd physically or for that matter metaphysically go about repairing this building?  I don't even see how we pry loose a vine."

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"Oh, Oliver, you're looking at this all wrong! This is not a problem to be solved, this is a glorious, mysterious, adventure!"

She giggles and grabs his hand in hers and kisses it.

"We have a clue! We just have to figure it out! And we saw JUNIMOS! I've been waiting all my life for that to happen!"

"I have a good feeling that one thing will lead to another and then another and the vines will take care of themselves along the way."

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He wishes he could reflect her enthusiasm, but doesn't, really, and doesn't want to get into the sort of relationship where he has to pretend about that.  "Hope you're right!  Sebastian would probably be good at figuring out the scroll's code, if it's a real code, not sure if we could get his help without waking him up.  You have any idea how to ask junimos for help, either with this place or the bus?"

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"We could go and look in the hut and see if they're in there, I guess?"

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"...I'll probably be up for a glorious adventure at some point, Emily, I'm just--adjusting, still, and somebody throwing a job at me where I don't know how to get started still feels like maybe something awful happens because I was too stupid to figure it out."

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"Well, do you mind if go and try to talk to them?"

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"Not at all."

He realizes a few moments after he speaks it, that it's a lie, he minds a lot if Emily screws up whatever game this is and condemns him to a Bad End, but he doesn't take the words back or let it show on his face.

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"Great! Let's go!"

Emily grabs Olivers hand and pulls him gently with her back to the main room of the Community Center. She drops his hand, gets to her elbows and knees, and peers in the door of the little leafy hut.

"Hello? Hello in there?"

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There is a cheerful chittering and cheeping from within the hut.

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Oliver doesn't intervene on this yet, he's too busy noticing how much he does not react well to very cheerful people telling you that everything will be fine, probably because they're almost always lying--or rather bullshitting, they don't care whether their words are true or false, which is different--in order to shut you up and make you go along with things.

This is probably not totally germane to Emily and maybe not even to his new version of reality but it would help if he was sure.

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Emily is so entranced by TALKING to JUNIMOS that she completely misses her boyfriend's fairly evident distress!

"Oh my gosh! They're talking to me! I have no idea what they're saying!"

She gets down lower and tries to see what's in there, but it's dark.

"Can you help us clean this place up?"

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There is more cheeping, but nothing emerges from the hut.

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"Can you cheep exactly three times if you understand English and are interested in communicating at all?"

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There is again a response, as though in conversation with the humans, but it's an undifferentiated mess of chittering and there is no three-ness about it.

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"Well, I had plenty of ideas but they sort of required that idea to work first."

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"I wonder if they're hungry. Do you have any food in your backpack? I don't think I have anything."

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"Only if they eat Hay the same as chickens.  The salad stays."

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