Counterfeit Monkey — 162 of 292

Chapter 2 - Through the ODOR DOOR

Section 1 - Oracle Project

The Oracle Project is a room [north of Wonderland]. It is indoors and forbidden. "This is nothing less than the command cen[ter] for a massive propaganda campaign. [Paintings] of Atlantida and [polling charts] cover the walls, dating back to the second world war and continuing straight through to the present."

Rule for printing the name of the paintings while looking:

say "Paintings".

The Oracle Project contains a long table. The long table is scenery. On the long table is a paperweight. The description of the paperweight is "Blue and white strands are swirled through the heavy, lens-like hunk of clear glass."

Index map with the Oracle Project mapped north of Wonderland.

Some polling charts are scenery in Oracle Project. The description is "Blue lines on the charts record the citizen responses to the concept of Atlantida. They record wartime progress in establishing the concept in the popular imagination, with a spike in 1942, corresponding to a heavy press of propaganda.

After the war, there's a break in the charts until 1951, when tracking resumes. Additional spikes appear at 1968 and 1972.

Each chart also shows a yellow line, which roughly goes down as the blue line goes up. It is labeled 'Power to generate animate abstract.' The yellow line stops at 1982 and no further points are recorded on it."

The inciting fable is on the long table. The description is "It's a short children's tale, with illustrations. A young boy was left an orphan in a certain village. So he went door to door around the village, but none of the families would take him in, all having some excuse: there were too many children already, the house was too small, there was not enough food, the parents were too old for a new child, and so on.[paragraph break]Despondent, the boy was on the verge of giving up when a magician came to town. He went around door to door with the boy a second time, this time asking each household for just one letter. When he was done, he used a powerful machine on the letters in his bag, and transformed them into a LOVING FAMILY"

Some paintings are scenery in Oracle Project. The description is "The paintings are old, 19th-century affairs, and they show Atlantida larger than life, typically wearing blue, with a sort of French academy face and bare feet. The squid is a frequent motif in the background, as it represents inventiveness, strength, and the ability to try many things at once."