I examined my hand-drawn map, looking for any route I hadn't yet taken (especially one that might lead to the other mattock). But I didn't see any.
I decided to revisit the mines. It was a maze of twisty passages, all alike, so I might have overlooked something there.
I saw my friend the spider, sitting on her web.
She stared back at me, raising one of her eight little arms in a hesitant greeting. The "Visit Friend" option appeared, so I thought, why not? I sat next to her on the web. She stepped back in alarm. But before I could say "Just thought I'd come by and 'hang' with you," which I thought was a pretty clever pun, the web collapsed beneath us. We fell to the ground below. She was not pleased.
She walked away from me. I carefully followed, wondering where she was going. She stopped beneath another ledge and starting building a new web there.
Intriguing. When the web is finished, I may be able to climb it (much more carefully this time) to reach the ledge and find something new.
I had now collected 100 coal pieces during my wanderings, so I visited the Face to buy some information.
When I showed him the coal, he looked sideways at the end of the tunnel and said, "Set it down over there." While I did so, he muttered to himself, "Should be enough to power the new Death Star." I decided not to ask what he meant by that. I instead asked, "What will happen if I leave the cave?"
He cleared his throat and said, "If you set foot outside, the kingdom will crumble and be forgotten forever. There won't be a way back. But this is the tragedy of being: each triumph may be a veiled defeat. And for each defeat, there is a hidden triumph, lingering in the dark."
He sagely closed his eyes and fell silent. "That's it?" I protested. "That's all I get for a hundred coal?"
Frowning at my lack of gratitude, he said "You get your black ass outta here."
I returned to my apartment and noticed that the game clock was running at 3x speed. For every real-time second, three would tick away in the game. I stepped back out of the apartment and watched the game clock return to normal 1x speed. I went back inside and it went back to 3x speed. Ah, so something about the apartment was causing the game's chrono-wonkiness. Was it the crystal sitting atop my bookcase? I went to the waterfalls where I had extracted the crystal. No, the time was 1x speed there, so the crystal itself wasn't causing the problem.
And the problem started long before I had brought that crystal home. The in-game clock and real-world time had marched in lockstep for the first few weeks of play. After that, the game clock started getting ahead. Maybe it's not so much the crystal itself but all the stuff I've been bringing back. The rug, the bary sax, maybe even the books. The more homey I made my crib, the faster time passed.
But that only happened while I chilled in my crib. Outside of my crib, the passage of time was normal. Maybe the time acceleration is meant to bring the game to an earlier conclusion. Until I have a better understanding of what's going on, I'll sleep outside.
