The Second Reformation
Q. Benson
[written in 2022, c. 12 years later than everything else on these pages]
When I was about fifteen, I hit on the idea for the Great Novel of my adolescence, which took the form of various iterations in my mind over the coming years. It was going to be about disestablishment and bisexuality, afaik, and about running away from things to start a new life on multiple occasions. There were characters who had oddly Latinate names for no identifiable reason; there was a teenager who fell in (unrequited) love with her older, married cousin; there was a part that was set in the Scottish highlands, vicars who were secret agents of some kind, idk, all normal stuff. I vaguely took inspiration from real life, but none of these things ever happened to me, not even falling in love with my cousin (very boring of me, I know).
I wrote pages of notes for this over a period of some years, and at some point wrote an entire introduction, which is long gone; the only written portion I still have is this excerpt I wrote when I was twenty (and if this writing style hasn’t got Me At Twenty all over it … cripes …)
Clara shook Lea’s hand,
and Lea was surprised at the firmness of the gesture, and, indeed, the fact that it was done at all – handshakes were exchanged by adults, and this made her feel a little more like one.
Clara’s car was small and red and spotless. Lea’s occasional glances towards the driver’s seat afforded her the sight of a crisply executed gear change or a firm rotation of the steering wheel, although she spent most of the time with her eyes fixed on the hem of her own dress, which, depending on how she held herself, covered or exposed her knees. Wearing dresses was not a habit of hers.
Anyway, the one semi-complete thing I did actually produce in this ’verse was an interactive fiction that I called The Second Reformation, which was the original title of the main project. When I was fifteen or sixteen I came across Inform 7 and created this fairly vanilla IF in which the protagonist has to find her way around a cathedral collecting bullets for her pistol before using said pistol to shoot at various “Reformers” in possibly the most poorly implemented game mechanic of all time. The version that remains on my hard drive is in a playable state, surprisingly, but judging by the comments in the source that say things like “TO DO: change the ‘romantic’ plot here”, sixteen-year-old me was clearly planning to work more on it. I think the extremely banal reason that I didn’t was that I got a new computer and didn’t bother downloading Inform onto it.
Inform provides an excellent export function, so following a couple of tweaks to update to the latest Inform syntax and make the pacing/scene changes a little bit less messed up, I have now uploaded the entirety of Whatever This Is to my website, at https://tre.praze.net/sr – it’s playable in the browser. If you’d like to enjoy the aforementioned terrible game mechanics, obscure liturgical references, and an extremely veiled lesbian romance plot … er, there it is, I guess.
How to play
If you know anything about IF this will be laughably simple; if you don’t, there are really only a handful of commands that I actually bothered implementing here. Type the names of the compass directions (or just their initials) to move around, up and down if there are stairs, i to see what you’re carrying, x [thing] to examine something, take [thing] to take it. Other commands that come up in this one are buy, eat, wear and that’s really pretty much it apart from a couple of things that are explained in-game. Once the battle scene starts (spoilers!!) and antagonists appear you are supposed to shoot them; the idea is that you type shoot here but actually most commands can be used to stand in for that (due again to the terrible game mechanics).
It’s x pistol to see how many bullets you’re carrying, which isn’t at all obvious. The game ends after facing six people in battle. There are actually five very slightly different endings! I played through it today to test and won first time, but I guess I just remember it from 2010, so who knows if the difficulty balance is anywhere near sensible.