Post making contest 2.0

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SpoilerBefore we begin, a quick note; every single room in the 110 octant is displayed in the following orientation:



This should alleviate many of your navigational problems; note also that 683 is shown in two orientations, the first of which is the one shown above and the other is simply the remaining two walls, and this is the only time that a different view occurs.

Right, and now we commence; a fair while ago, on the first level of the mainframe, it was percipiently spotted that an otherwise innocuous chart gave away the coordinates of octant 110's hotspot, 683, which you promptly keyed in:




The green book on the shelf was a riddle book, with five particular riddles bookmarked. Solving the first, with its answer input via the indented tubes on the east wall, dispensed a safe from the opening whose combination was the answer to the second. Inside you found instructions for opening a hatch on the room’s ceiling and cutting the wires within in order to open the red door, which would have otherwise required a RED KEYCARD to open.

Two things in this room remain a mystery; the first is the locked cabinet high up on the north wall. The second, far more intriguing, is the door on the south wall that bears no apparent mechanism for either its unlocking or opening; either side of it are panels in green, frosted glass, behind which are five lightbulbs.

Still, with the red door open, you progressed through:



The mezzanine layer had been glimpsed through the window on its west wall an absolute age ago, and it was up there that you found a HAND MIRROR and a RED NAPKIN sat on the (locked) cabinet. The screen on the wall accepted the answer to the third riddle and activated a panel on the cabinet’s side that required the solution to the fourth – and so the cabinet was no longer locked, allowing you to acquire a few things, most notably some BLACK LIGHTBULBS and a PAPER STRIP. When a black lightbulb was inserted into your reading lamp, it revealed itself to be an ultraviolet bulb; you henceforth shone it into the dingy corner at the bottom of the stairs to reveal a series of dots which, when combined with those in the picture hung on the wall by the door, gave you the combination required to open it and advance northwards:



This room was and still is packed with things of interest; the big blue box accepted the paper strip in the slot on its side (thus answering the fifth and final riddle), bringing to life one of the screens on its body. This screen allows you to access the 110 computer network – once you’d used the information scrawled across the scrap of paper on the plinth to set the three dials below it, that is.

At this point you wandered off to revisit octant 101, so I’ll take a moment to point out what’s still not been dealt with in this room. First, the big blue box (now known to be a rather hefty computer) has a sealed compartment below the paper slot that requires a key, and there’s a panel bolted onto its front that a small spanner would take right off. Then there’s the, ahem, U-Tube; it’s a metal box with a tube inside it, lined with tinfoil, that makes the shape of a U to the effect of leaving two large holes on the top of the box. Above this setup, a protrusion from the ceiling has two metal plates, positioned such that tiny pinholes in their centres line up nicely with the centres of the holes in the bigger box. You’ve discovered that the hand mirror found in the previous room, attached to some lengths of string found elsewhere, fits nicely into the U-Tube with just a smidgen of space between it and the bottom. With your other mirror-on-a-string, you could potentially drop one down each prong…

Anyway, that’s getting ahead of myself. You eventually returned to this room after gallivanting about octant 101, which you’ve now explored as far as you can for the moment. Entering the correct password on the dials got you into the computer:



Your only available option was to click through to 110:



I’ll go into more detail about these menus later on, since for now all you need to know is that selecting an item in CONTROL gained you access to the room to the east:



From a plantpot you retrieved an EMPTY COTTON REEL, you got little of interest from the grate on account of it being blocked on the other side and through the door on the north wall you found an elevator, the exact nature of which I’ll handle later, for reasons. Oh, and the unassailable eastern door, but that's hardly worth mentioning since the elevator proved to be much more interestingo start with, you went up a floor.



The computer here needs to see a keycard in its slot before it’ll operate; your orange card didn’t seem to rouse it. Scarcely dejected, you ventured eastwards:



The panel on the wall has two deep, vertical slots in it and the piece of paper on the floor reads as follows:

794 - UP=normal, DOWN=mirrored in -y-
692 - ON=69z, OFF=89z
882 - LEFT={234}{234}, RIGHT={035}{013}

You got back in the elevator and returned to the original floor – shortly afterwards, you went down one more.



The stair-shaped block is positioned directly under the grating your saw on the floor above; from this side, it’s boarded over with a plank and rusty nails. The toggle switch seems to turn the elevator on and off. The plastic pedestal holds a large plant pot full of soil, with no actual plant in sight. On the west wall, the compartment requires another key and the typewritten note hung below it reads:

What you might not understand is quite how important time is in your current endeavour.

You have all the time in the world. That doesn't mean you can use all of it.

Finally, the door on the southern wall refuses to budge, and so ended your exploration. That left the computer, however, which was relatively untouched. The relevant information, plus the highly related considerations regarding the elevator, are in this next spoiler:

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Spoiler

I'll take each menu in turn, for the sake of organised convenience.

CHAT



Going through the menus in the top right (skipping "Settings", because it was boring)









STORAGE





Now, the files here behaved somewhat differently; selecting .obj files didn't appear to do anything, but what was actually happening was that said .obj file was being run in control.exe, thus dictating what is shown when you look in the CONTROL menu on the "desktop".

CONTROL

pivot.obj



This is the program you first came across, mostly because you chose to look at CONTROl before you looked in STORAGE. Experimentation revealed that you can only have two green arrows at a time, and you cycle through the combinations so; U+R, R+D, D+L or L+U. Having the left arrow (L) green opens the door between the room with the computer and the room with the elevator, and then the other arrow paired with it (either U or D) dictates what floor the elevator can take you to:



In this case, the arrows were L+U, so 3 & 4 were activated and henceforth accessible. Having D+L lights up 2 & 3 - to date, there is no known way of activating either 0 or +, and the blank pentagon where the 1 ought to be is entirely impenetrable.

doors.obj



You can turn either 580, 682 or 990 green. That's it.

reset.obj

I don't think you've actually taken a look at what this program is, but it's not overly intriguing; here, take a gander: