Previously on Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy: Nancy Drew goes to high school! Aaaand promptly gets saddled with doing everyone’s homework for them.
So we finished our duties at the snack shop, and we’ve gotten a key for our efforts. Intriguing stuff! However, before we get into that, let’s finish up our first quest. We got roped into doing Rachel’s web design project for her, so we’ve needed to get photos of all the valedictorian candidates.
We’ve taken everyone’s picture, but we need a photo of one of the girls who went home. Leela has it, and she’s holding it hostage so we’ll play a game of Scram with her. For fuck’s sake, Leela! I bet this is why her boyfriend broke up with her. He probably tried to ask her to that dance and she was like, “You’ll have to beat me at air hockey first!” and he just went for Izzy because it was easier.
Look at her face after she successfully forces us to play Scram with her. THAT FACE HAS KILLED BEFORE.
Anyway, Scram is pretty easy, but it takes forever. It’s like darts, but instead one player tries to knock off high-scoring parts of the board, then the other player tries to score, then you switch. So in the first round, we’re not playing for points; we’re trying to hit high-scoring areas so Leela won’t get any points for hitting them. Then we switch and Leela tries to block off high-scoring areas while we try to get points. Then we see who got more points, so basically it’s two games in one. IT TAKES FOREVER.
Despite being a pain, it’s easier and less tipped in the computer’s favor than air hockey, so we win on the first try. Leela forks over the photo of Mel’s roomie, Megan, and we take a picture of it. Because this super-rich school doesn’t have a scanner.
“Feel like playing again?” No! Never again! But hey, since we’ve bested Leela at a game of skill, let’s ask her some more questions that are very pertinent to our case and will help us solve the mystery. Like, “Why aren’t you and Mel friends anymore?” Leela says that they grew apart when Mel started hating on school spirit and listening to Lacuna Coil or whatever. “She’s not a bad person but…we just don’t get each other anymore, that’s all.” Aw. Also, she has no idea what happened to the Black Cat book. Okay, then. It’s been real, Leela!
Down the hall from where Leela’s standing, we find a storage closet. Nancy Drew has never met a door she hasn’t wanted to open, so we go busting right in to see if we can find clues among the cleaning supplies. And we do! There’s some random key just hanging around, waiting to be picked up by us.
The last person whose photo we need is Rachel’s. Off we go, and then we’ll be done with her homework, right? (…right?)
Rachel’s design is so weird. Her nose is so red! What’s up with that?
Corine and Leela told us that Rachel is a massive flake and kind of a space cadet; and sure enough, she doesn’t remember who we are. We have to remind her of our name and what we’re doing. Do you not realize you’re in the presence of greatness, Rachel? We take her picture, and we can also ask her about the Black Cat. Rachel shrugs that she hasn’t gotten any notes, so she doesn’t really give a shit. Helpful! She asks us to upload the photos onto the website for her, and then we’ll hopefully be free from her clutches forever.
Since we’re up here, let’s say hi to Mel and talk shit about everyone with her. Let’s start with Izzy. Mel snarks that Izzy is a total plastic and there’s no way she’s smart enough to be a valedictorian candidate. Okay, what about Leela? Mel says that she and Leela used to be friends, a long time ago, but now Leela’s a jock and you know jocks and goths don’t sit at the same lunch table. We ask who Mel thinks the Black Cat is, and she’s like, “I don’t do conversations about the Black Cat, remember?…it’s totally Izzy.” Heh. Her reasoning is that Izzy doesn’t have the brains to be valedictorian, so the only way she’s getting into Harvard is by eliminating the competition. Hmm.
Mel doesn’t know where the missing Black Cat book is either. “I’ve never been much into Edgar. He’s a little over the top, even for me.” Heh. I bet she’s more of a Brontë girl.
We know now that Corine is pretty much the go-to person for guilt-free nosing around everyone’s personal lives, so let’s pop in to say hi. We ask her about Leela, and she notes that Leela is insanely competitive. Uh, Nancy, we don’t need Corine to tell us that. She pretty much made us beat her at a game just for the privilege of talking to her. “Some really competitive people cheat. Does she?” Nancy asks. Hee! What kind of shit-stirring question is that? Corine’s response to that is to imply that Leela is faking her wrist injury — if she were the Black Cat, and Corine’s totally not saying that she is, she could be faking the injury to make it look like she’s one of the BC’s victims. Hmm.
Finally, does Corine know what happened to the Black Cat book? “Why?” she asks. “Are you an Edgar Allan Poe fan?” If we answer in the affirmative, she’ll chirp that she totally is too. Suspicious! I choose to just note that we want extra credit for finding it, and Corine says she doesn’t know where it is. We ask if it went missing before or after students started getting the Black Cat notes, and Corine tells us that it was before. “I see what you’re getting at…[The book] was called The Black Cat, wasn’t it. That’s kinda freaky.”
YEAH, IT KINDA IS, CORINE. I SEE YOU ACTING LIKE YOU NEVER NOTICED THAT BEFORE.
Corine notes that if someone stole it, they must not have wanted anyone to know that they needed it. Indeed.
Goddamn there are lot of conversation options here. Okay, so we also want to get into the Special Collections cabinet, where the Moore book that Mel’s sampler references is. Corine has the key, but she won’t give it to us unless we do her homework for her. Ohhhh my Goddddd.
So we have to like…take the 2D pictures and match them to the 3D models. Whatever, this is BS. I’ll do it later.
Let’s call Mel’s ex-roommate, Megan. She’s pretty nice and forthcoming with information; she tells us that she got two Black Cat notes, and the night after the second one arrived, she got an allergic reaction from eating dinner. She thinks maybe it’s a coincidence: “And even if someone did put something in my food, I’m still here. It’s not like they were trying to kill me or something.” I wouldn’t be so sure, Megan!
She tells us that all of her classmates knew about her allergies, so that doesn’t narrow down our suspect list at all. Thanks for nothing, Megan! If she had to guess, though, she would say Izzy is the Black Cat, because she hates her the mostest. So everyone’s leaning towards Izzy, huh? That means she totally isn’t the Black Cat, because that is how these games roll.
For some reason, we can ask Megan to email us her picture, even though we already got it from Leela. Megan doesn’t have a scanner, so she suggests we ask Leela. Which…we…already did. Okay, whatever.
We have everyone’s picture, so now we have to upload them to the school website. Sweet freedom!
It’s been real, Rachel, so thanks for pawning your homework onto us — oh, no, wait, now she wants us to lay the photos out on the website. This is starting to sound an awful lot like doing the design bit of the project for her. Fuck’s sake, Rachel, you can’t drag six pictures around a webpage? She tells us to report back to her once we’re finished, “’cause I’ll probably have something else for you to do.”
DAMMIT, RACHEL! The worst part is that she kind of admits she’s a fuckup and offers to owe Nancy a favor in the future and Nancy just chirps, “Don’t worry about it! It’ll be nice just having you as a friend!” No! After all this work, I want Rachel to be in our debt, nervously anticipating the day we make her pay us back!
Sigh. Okay, since we’re here, let’s get Corine’s homework out of the way first. There’s a bunch of 2D pictures representing the sides of the 3D objects, so you just have to match the proper sides to the objects. It’s a little difficult, and annoying because you have to keep giving it back to Corine for her to tell you if it’s done right, but it’s not mind-blowingly frustrating, so whatever. In return, she gives us the key to the special collections cabinet, and tells us not to take any of the books out of the library. You can’t tell me what to do, Corine!
Can we report all these lazy-ass cheaters to the RA? Help me, Paige, my new classmates are extorting labor from me 🙁
“YOU MAY NOT COME IN. JUST LEAVE.” Oh. Okay.
On our way to wherever the hell I was going, we get another text message. Man, we’re so popular in this game. I get like, one text message a week in real life. Usually from my mother. Should I be admitting this? Anyway, apparently Mel’s been busted for plagiarism. Uh, if it’s midterm break, why is anyone grading her papers?
Wow, Mel is not happy about this. The character design in this game is a bit odd; Corine and Rachel (and Izzy, to a lesser extent) look fairly normal, Rachel’s Rudolph-esque nose aside, but Leela and Mel have these big ol’ almond-shaped bug eyes that make all their facial expressions look crazy.
Anyway, Mel clutches her pearls at the very thought of cheating all, “I may be a rebel, but I would never compromise my academic integrity!” Mel’s such a poser. Real goffz don’t give a shit about failing out of school. She tells us that her art history teacher matched her paper with something on “Paper Trail.” Oh snap! Is that a poorly disguised Turnitin.com? THE MEMORIES. Nancy notes that Mel’s already received a second note from the Black Cat, and offers to help clear her name. Mel says that she’s been locked out of the computer system because she apparently used her Internet powers for evil, so it’s up to us to go onto Paper Trail and figure out what happened. I mean, this is actual sleuthing and not doing Mel’s homework for her, so I’m down. Mel tells us that she doesn’t remember the IP address of whoever posted the paper, but she does remember that none of the numbers repeated.
So this is a puzzle, and I’m gonna be honest, I still don’t really understand it. As far as I can tell, it’s just guessing which numbers come from which column and making sure none of them have the same number. Anyway, we enter 69.57.284.103, and we find out that the paper was posted by “Jacob Pryce.” The same Jacob that Izzy and Leela are fighting over? Plus, Nancy will note that the date that the paper was posted is after the date Mel turned it in.
Since we’re here, let’s do Rachel’s stupid web project for her. We’re supposed to lay out all the girls’ pictures according to the puzzle above. A few of the hints are things that we haven’t been flat-out told, just implied (i.e. Izzy never says she’s a psych student, but she mentions writing a psych paper and calls Mel a psychopath), but overall, it’s pretty easy. Are you happy now, Rachel? Have we appeased your ever-growing hunger for academic labor?
Let’s also look at that book in the special collections. It’s called The Story of Four by Madeline Moore, and it’s about the four founders of Hogwarts Waverly. We open to a page about Rita Hallowell, who apparently was a total Edgar Allan Poe fangirl. Coincidence? I think not! Rita is the teacher Izzy mentioned to us earlier, whose black cat is rumored to haunt the campus.
There’s a picture of Rita in the book, posing next to one of stone blocks outside of the school. Nancy’s like, “That stone is different from the one that’s here today!” Whoa, a 150-year-old stone has been replaced? SUSPICIOUS!
We go back to Mel to tell her the good news, and she wants to know who framed her so she can cut someone. Nancy hesitantly suggests that Izzy was involved. Man, Izzy is not choosing her battles wisely. She has Leela and Mel after her? I mean, if I were to pick anyone in that class to fight, it would probably be Rachel, because I bet I could snap her like a twig.
As a thanks for our help, Mel gives us an old newspaper article about Waverly. Thanks, I guess.
Aaaand Rachel has yet more work for us. Okay, I actually like Rachel’s character for the most part — she’s nice, there’s a good twist with her coming up, and when I’m actually playing the game, I like how her chores give me an excuse to explore the grounds and talk to everyone. Writing it out, however, is making me realize that every conversation with her starts and ends with her asking us to do her homework. My God, Rachel.
So we’ve basically done the student section of the website for her, and now she wants us to take more pictures of Waverly landmarks. The only picture that we might not be able to get is a photo of Rita Hallowell and her cat, Usher. Is that the cat who haunts the grounds? Does it creep out of the trees at night and scare students by yelling YEAH? Rachel notes that the picture hasn’t been seen in years, so it’s cool if we don’t find it. If we do, though, it might be the coup that gets her back in the running for valedictorian. I feel like we shouldn’t be rewarding Rachel’s laziness by finding that photo for her, but since we’re Nancy Drew, we’re probably going to trip over it the second we go outside.
We have to get a picture of the trophy from “Waverly’s 1st academic win.” The newspaper article that Mel gave us says that Waverly’s first win was at the Odyssey championship. So that’s all that newspaper article was good for.
So Izzy, how about that plagiarism charge? Izzy says that Mel probably framed herself, because that’s what goths do. We point out that Jacob happens to be Izzy’s boyfriend — I guess there’s only one Jacob in the entire boys’ school — and she snips that up until like half an hour ago, Jacob was Leela’s boyfriend. HMMM.
You’ve got some explaining to do, Leela! She immediately pins the blame on Izzy; when we point out that Izzy and Jacob only got together in like the last post, she snaps that they’ve probably been sneaking around for months. Fair enough.
We ask Leela if she’s here on a scholarship, and she confirms. It’s an athletic scholarship, so even though Leela has to keep her grades up, she doesn’t necessarily have to be valedictorian, right? “It’d be okay with the school, but it sure wouldn’t be okay with me,” she snarls. Oh! Kay! Leela wants to win at all the things, including the valedictorian candidacy. But would she cheat? Is she on academic steroids? Just kidding, we don’t get to ask her that. We ask what would happen if she got injured — like, more injured than she is now — and she tells us that her scholarship would probably be revoked if she couldn’t play for the rest of the year. So then not only would she not be valedictorian, but she wouldn’t even be able to graduate. That seems pretty harsh. Waverly is intense, man.
Holy God we finally get to see the outside world. IT’S BEEN SO LONG. We go looking for the cornerstone on the side of the building, and it…looks the same? Am I going crazy?
IT LOOKS IDENTICAL! I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!
Well, whatever, let’s investigate the allegedly different stone. It has a hole in the center of the square tile, which…okay, I just looked at the walkthrough and apparently the old stone did not have this hole, which is the gigantic and totally obvious difference between the two. So anyway, we now have a puzzle, where we have to rearrange the pieces of the tile to close up the hole.
It’s not too difficult, although I don’t think the designers accounted for the fact that I don’t have a PC and was playing this on Bootcamp. Don’t you ever think about me, Her Interactive? My needs? You have to right-click on the pieces to rotate them, and not having a dedicated right-click function on my computer dragged this puzzle out for a million years longer than it should’ve been.
Anyway, the stone will open up and we’ll see a journal and a star-shaped token. A squirrel will promptly run up and steal the token from us. What the fuck! Izzy, you’d better rethink your defense of this squirrel. There’s only room for one klepto at this school, and it’s Nancy Drew. We see the squirrel run up a nearby tree, and Nancy will note that it must have a nest up there. We’ll come back to this.
Meanwhile, we now have Rita Hallowell’s journal, which is our guidebook to finishing the game. This is like, the third game in a row to do that thing where we trip over a journal from a long-gone mastermind, explaining the puzzles they’ve left behind to get to their treasure. People seem generally split on whether or not the journals are helpful and fun, or if they’re cop-outs to actually figuring out the mystery trail on your own. Personally, I think that story-wise, they’re incredibly stupid, and actually throw a wrench into the mystery (if Nancy has the master journal of plot and puzzles, how does the villain know what to do?), buuut I hate puzzles so I appreciate having this book to tell me where to go.
We flip through the book, and Rita lays out the following puzzles for us:
- Something to do with the piano in the foyer and musical notes on the lamps
- Something to do with a celebratory dinner and the utensil cabinet near the library
- Something about a raven
On the last page of the journal, Rita fangirls Edgar Allan Poe some more and writes that it’s totally cool that she never became a writer and now her dream is dead, because Edgar’s so awesome that she can just read his writing. What? That’s sad.
We have to kill a few more minutes before the day ends, so we keep walking around the school, and we come across this cellar door. It’s locked, but the key from the storage closet will open it right up.
Spooky! We can poke around the cellar a bit; we find a box of books with dorky titles and punny author names. The one we’re supposed to look at is called America: Land of Adventure and basically just lists all the states, grouped by geographic region, and finishes up with a map. We’re supposed to put together a map of the US a little later on, so I’m guessing this is supposed to help us with that? It seems unnecessary. I’m pretty sure if you go through the American school system and don’t have the states memorized by the age of 9, your citizenship will be revoked.
We also find this wall full of star-shaped holes. They certainly look like that token that squirrel jacked from us, don’t they? We’ll have to come back when we’ve found the token.
That’s it for the cellar, and night falls. Except not really, it’s like 5 in the afternoon and everyone’s still awake. Let’s get down to solving these puzzles. I mean, we’re supposed to be figuring out which one of the girls is threatening her classmates, but whatever. Edgar Allan Poe mysteries it is!
I’m never a fan of the historical side-stories that always end up getting mixed in with Nancy’s cases, but at least they’re usually integrated better than this. Anyway, the first puzzle involves the piano in the foyer and the keys on the lampshades. I don’t 100% understand it yet, so let’s move on. The second one involves the dinner menu and utensils in the display cabinet, and we can see that the menu was borrowed by Leela. UUUUGH. Is there a third option, and is that option death? No? Sigh, okay.
Like I said, it’s not actually night yet — we’ll have to set our alarm to midnight or so when we want to poke around in the dark. Thus, Leela is still around, so let’s go talk to her.
Leela still has the menu, but she won’t give it up unless we beat her at a game. AAAAAHHHH. Like I said earlier, Scram is easier to win, but it takes forever, so let’s just try our luck at air hockey.
Oh thank God, I win on our first try. Leela forks over the menu, and we don’t have anything else to talk to her about. Peace out, Leela!
The music puzzle references things like “bass” and “coloratura”, and the dining puzzle has something to do with etiquette. Nancy, being a culture deprived heathen, doesn’t know about any of these things, so we’ll have to check out the pertinent books from the library. Unfortunately, they’re both gone: Mel has the book on music theory, and Rachel has the one on dining etiquette. Ah, fuck. What else can Rachel make us do? Are we going to have to sit her AP exams for her?
Let’s go to Mel first. She has the music book, but she’ll only give it to us if we go to the snack shop and get her some milk and a cookie. “I have a certain image to maintain,” she explains. Yeah, if she were a real goth, she’d be eating Count Chocula.
So we go back to do snack shop duty again and listen to all the girls lust over Mr. Harris some more. I bet he’s some basic-looking white dude in his thirties, possibly with a beard. I say this because I had a couple of teachers like that that all the girls had minor crushes on, solely because we had been locked in a building for 4 years without any boys our own age.
We bring Mel her milk and cookie, and she forks over the music book. We just have to get the other book from Rachel, and we’ll be good on both of our puzzles.
Up next: We run around collecting tokens, and that’s pretty much it. The actual mystery part of this game is pretty short; once the introductions and initial chores are done, we pretty much just landslide our way to the ending. But first, we have to do everyone’s homework for them again.
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