The Longing-ist Playthrough: Day 21 – 21/01/22 – 347 Days, 10 Hours, 20 Minutes and 22 Seconds to go…

Due to a day spent catching up with friends who I’d planned to see before Christmas but couldn’t due to a COVID scare, Day 21’s write up is a little late. Carrying straight on under here is Day 22 as well, since I have both sessions ‘in the bank’. I had a discovery on Day 21 that was both entirely unexpected, and sadly, a little fruitless, but it went to show me how easily I could have overlooked something in my explorations.

Monty began the session asleep on the floor of the [moss room]; I asked him to wander down this way so that I might have a good scour through the kingdom in the hopes of finding the piece of wood that I was stil missing to make the bed. Something was gnawing at me, suggesting that it should already be within my grasp, but I couldn’t figure out what.

After scooping up a couple of pieces of moss, I had Monty travel east and into the caverns between the [moss room] and the [crystal pool]. There was a warren of stairways on that side of the kingdom and I thought that if I’d missed something anywhere, that that was the most likely place. I remember getting a little confused when I checked the area out on Day 1 so it was probably the best place to start.

Monty and I wandered around for a few minutes, picking up any coal that had become dislodged from the ceiling as we went. Paying no real heed to where we were going to start with, I asked Monty to go through a doorway and my jaw hit the floor… Where the hell is this?! I’ve never seen this room before! 😯

The little Shade emerged in the centre of a room that looked like some kind of study hall! There were crystal windows at either end and a lecturn stood in front of each one – it looked like it was set up to allow good light for reading by. There were stairs in the room too – leading up and around the back of the room, it seemed. What a find! How did I miss this place? On the left lecturn there was an open book and a piece of paper on the ground just in front of it. Snatching up both, I asked Monty to head up the stairs and see where they led.

It seemed that I hadn’t missed one room, but two! The stairs led Monty to another room that was much like the last, only flipped around – they were mirror images of one another. This time there was a single of paper standing on the lecturn; I asked Monty to grab it and then exited through the doorway. Monty emerged in between another two doorways – one seemed to lead to an adjoining hallway heading east, and the other was flanked by pink stone pillars, perhaps signifying its importance… This might be the breakthrough I’ve been waiting for! Monty stepped through the doorway and…

Are you actually kidding me?!

He emerged in the centre door of the [crystal crossroads]! The first room in the kingdom! It seems that, in my haste to explore the fringes of the kingdom that I had entirely missed a pair of doorways right at the heart of the domain! How in the world have I managed that? But… It began to dawn on me that I had never seen either of those rooms on the [map of the kingdom]! Were they there and I missed them, or did they not appear because I hadn’t yet visited them? Keen to find out, I sent Monty to the map right away!

When he arrived, I gave him enough time to study the map so that the camera would pan out and show me the whole of the kingdom. Well, that settles it! Nowhere to be found! The two [study rooms] were not on the map anywhere! I could see the doorways leading to them, but the room themselves were entirely missing!

What a huge development! While I had thought so for a while, this confirms that there are unmapped rooms in the kingdom and who knows how many there might be!

I spent the next period of the session wandering the kingdom with Monty, screenshot-map in hand – I wasn’t going to let missing obvious rooms become a habit. I annotated on my map which doorways linked together to make sure that there weren’t anymore areas I’d missed, and, so far so good. With about a quarter of the kingdom to go… Including the rats nest down by the [Halls of Eternity] 😒… I was running out of time for the evening.

I set Monty off on a walk up to the [tall ledge] in the [mushroom mines]. It’s been a couple of days since I planted the green mushroom; I was hoping that by the time I play tomorrow Monty would greet me standing alongside a huge mushroom… Let’s how how that trampolining works out for you, Monty!

Continue reading: Day 22