by the front door · the whole street, in the sun · every edge inked
The street, drawn like a cel
Cel Street
The whole street built in three dimensions under a summer sky, every edge inked and every shadow a flat second colour, and you walking down it.
An animation cel is one painted sheet of a cartoon: flat colour inside an inked line, and the light in two steps, lit and shadow, with nothing in between. Cel Street is the whole street built that way, in WebGL. Every shop on its ground floors is the front page’s own door, read when you open this page and wearing that door’s own colours and lettering, and pressing it takes you into its room. Halfway down, the garden gate stands in a wall between two shops, and past the last building the lots lie behind a fence, each with a gate in its own colours. It stands by the front door beside Paper Street, which walks the same street in card.
The street could not be read just now, so there is nothing to build. The street itself is here.
The doors on the street
The shops in the order they stand, the garden gate and the lots among them. Each one is a link. Moving to it stands you in front of it on the street above, and following it goes in.
How to walk it
- Arrow keys, or W, A, S and D, walk you ahead, back and across the road while the street has the keyboard. The buttons under the street do the same, by pressing or by holding.
- Q and E turn you left and right, R and F look up and down, and X faces ahead again, and C climbs you up over the roofs, to look down on the solar panels, and back down. Dragging across the street looks round too; on a touch screen a sideways drag turns and the page still scrolls under your thumb.
- Pressing a building walks you to its door, and so does moving to its name in the list of doors. Enter goes in. At a door marked Walk into, you walk into the room itself, and Escape, Back or Back out onto the street brings you out where you were.
- Steps or gliding. In steps, every press jumps you a couple of paces, or turns you a twelfth of the way round, with nothing moving in between. Gliding walks you smoothly for as long as you hold a key or a button. Gentle starts in steps and Regular and MAX start gliding; the switch changes it for this visit, and nothing remembers which you chose.
- Nothing moves by itself. The street is drawn when you move and then left alone, at every setting of the dial: no cloud drifts, no wire sways, and nothing on it flashes.
Walking into a room
Some doors open onto their room here, built the same way, in that room’s own colours and never Cel Street’s. Somewhere inside is the room’s own page, standing in the room as itself: walk up to it and read it, scroll it and press things on it as the page, or press Enter there to go into it with the keyboard. Rooms are built one at a time, each its own world, starting with Pink Pony Club, Club Chronic, the Jungle Room and the Zine Table.
What it is made of
The light is a summer afternoon’s, from high up and to one side, and it comes in two steps: a thing is lit or it is in shadow, and its shadow side takes the blue of the sky. Every solid thing is inked round its edge. The shops are the street’s own doors on the ground floors of apartment blocks, each sign lettered in its door’s own face and each awning in its door’s own stripes, and the garden gate and the lots’ gates wear their own colours too; everything above and round them is Cel Street’s. Only the part of the street near you is drawn, so the whole of it walks as lightly as one stretch would. Every roof carries solar panels tipped toward the sun, and the wires between the poles are many and tangled, the way they are on a real street with no plan behind its wiring.
It is drawn with three.js, by the three.js authors, under the MIT licence; the copy here is served from this site, so nothing on this page reaches anywhere else.
What it keeps
Nothing. Opening the page reads the front page, once. Where you walked is not written down anywhere, and nothing here is counted.
Job marker — a solar panel in its frame, inked round its edge, lying on the pavement
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: A spare solar panel
Before the code: Cel Street says the light on an animation cel comes in how many steps? One word or a number.
Hint 1
It is in the paragraph right under the page's name.
Hint 2
Lit, and in shadow.
Last hint
Fewer than three, more than one.
Give me the answer
The answer is Two. On a cel a thing is lit or it is in shadow, with nothing in between: two flat steps of light inside an inked line. Cel Street is built that way.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: TWOTONE
That is the one.
On a cel a thing is lit or it is in shadow, with nothing in between: two flat steps of light inside an inked line. Cel Street is built that way.
Quest code: TWOTONE