The Longing-ist Playthrough: Day 15 – 15/01/22 – 361 Days, 15 Hours, 30 Minutes and 22 Seconds to go…

It’s starting to become clear that the ‘short sessions’ with Monty are actually becoming the norm, and that I need to be content with what time I can spend on The Longing between work, family commitments and reviews. Day 15 was a pretty comfortable one, with Monty spending most of his time at home, aside from a little stroll into the kingdom to stretch his legs.

“I see something growing on the ceiling. Maybe I will find a good spot to cultivate mushrooms down here.”

Monty

We started the session with this observation from Monty, who had begun to carve out a further small tunnel running off the right side of the bedroom, where the familiar purple glitter of mushrooms could be seen on the ceiling. It looks like more digging was in order to fully carve out the space required, but with much of the exploration done for the time being, it makes sense for Monty to stay at home and start to finalise things a little. He was actually so deep into the wall that I couldn’t see his body, or even his beady yellow eyes, and I wondered just how much farther he might be able to dig.

I was excited to check out all of the new books we’d gathered yesterday, but wanted to get some horn practice in first, before I headed out and forgot. I’m beginning to lose a bit of faith in Monty ever mastering the horn, with today’s practice session simply consisting of three long notes, six high notes and six low notes… You’re going nowhere even slower than normal here, pal….

As Monty passed the drawing table, I noticed the lump of sulphur on the desk and remembered we now had all of the colours! Time for a doodle! The first thing I wanted to do was look at the potential opens for pictures using all five colours, and my, oh my, were they telling… 😳

The top row contained pictures titled Stay, Or, and Leave. Stay looked like an abstract field of coloured shapes with a black void scribbled in the middle of the page. Peering out of the void were Monty’s characteristic yellow eyes, topped by a golden crown. Or was simply the abstract coloured shapes on their own, but Leave showed the shapes again, but with the upper portion of the page whited out, as if by a bright light, and a small, large-headed black figure moving off into the distance. Wow. That is not exactly subtle, eh? Stay and become King, or leave and enjoy the world? Power, or freedom?

The middle row was titled Night, Versus, Day. The Night picture showed a crescent moon, dripping with blood that was collecting into a crimson river that flowed into the foreground. Yeesh – scary stuff. Versus showed both the sun and moon in the sky, opposite one another, with a winding grey path snaking from the foreground and into the distance. Day showed a beautiful, gleaming sun in the sky above a blue river that reflected it’s light as it ran down a valley. The dark really is dark, but I’ve seen nothing to hint at anything particularly sinister happening down here…

The bottom row of pictures were titled Time I, Time II and Time III – each showed an hourglass with a different amount of sand left. Time I showed Monty sat in the top half of the timer, atop a small mound of sand; Time II had Monty in the bottom half, seemingly drowning in the sand still pouring on top of him, and Time III showed the sand having entirely run out, and the bottom of the timer was broken, spilling sand onto the floor. Monty was nowhere to be seen in the last one… This is gives me the heeby-jeebies…

Hoping for something more lighthearted to do, I checked and found that Monty was able to paint louse pictures in both yellow and blue, meaning that we’d then have a full set of five in the house. (I thought that blue was unavailable last time I checked, but maybe I was trying to use two colours by accident..) Once the two new lice pictures were done, I hung them on the wall in line with the others and the series was complete. 😊 Not my choice of subject matter, but whatever makes you happy, little man.

Then it was finally time to sit down and cast an eye over the books we’d found during our foray into [the library]. The selection was pretty vast and contained a back catalogue of all the essential classics: Illiad, The Raven, Aesop’s Fables, and on the last page of the menu, one of my all-time favourites, The Time Machine! I LOVE The Time Machine! That’s definitely your next read, buddy. Hopefully you don’t get any ideas, reading about those Morlocks though…

Not wanting to read just yet, and not knowing where to go, I made my first use of the ‘walk to a random place’ button in the menu. Content with a stroll into the kingdom, Monty set off, wandering his way through tunnels and doorways until he stopped at the [Map of the Kingdom]. Was this truly a random place, or has Monty brought me here as a prompt about something? I thought about things for a minute but having only checked over the map yesterday, I was sure that there wasn’t anything I needed to do here.

I bid Monty head over to the blocked library door in the hopes of getting a further Disappointment so that we could pay off The Face for an answer, but having claimed this one before, we stayed at a total of six. Next on the agenda was the [treasure room]… It was about the only thing we hadn’t done using the mattock, and I had a feeling it would take some time – a perfect place to end the session and leave Monty to work until tomorrow.

But when we arrived at the [treasure room] something strange happened… the game wouldn’t give me the option to try and break the crystal glass! Now, I know I’ve overlooked or imagined some things here before, but I KNOW that I’ve seen that prompt before, and I just couldn’t get it to appear! 🤔 (I even restarted the game, in case it was a glitch, to no avail.) Part bamboozled and part annoyed, I decided that we’d head home and continue the hard labour in the mushroom tunnel instead.

A few long minutes later Monty walked through the door of [our room] and got back to work digging beneath the living room, slowly but surely exposing more mushrooms on the ceiling as he went. Who knows how far you can go here buddy – I’ll come back and find out how you’re getting on soon.

** Now, I had planned on finishing my play time there, but accidentally left my Switch turned on. When I came back to find it, Monty had finished digging to the right, having hit granite, but suggested that he might be able to go deeper still a little off the left… There was a lone purple mushroom on the floor, which I had Monty pick and replant, before I shuffled him to the left, just above where I could make out the outline of a stair beneath the current floor. Happy to begin digging again, I set Monty going and actually turned off the Switch this time 😅📴

Continue reading: Day 16