Once you’re away from the Palace area, you have no trouble getting the heavy chest open. The gold pieces it contains should go a long way toward covering your travel expenses.
The gold riyals, converted into hard currency, make a very nice addition to your bank balance.
So do the silver dinars.
The silver dinars, converted into hard currency, make a nice addition to your bank balance.
Your local fabric store doesn’t carry anything approaching the quality of the silk you helped yourself to, so you decide to keep it.
You can’t think of any immediate use for the silk, but one of your women friends likes to make her own clothes, and expresses her appreciation in a suitable form.
The red and green things in the necklace turn out to be rubies and emeralds. Don’t feel too stupid about this; most people wouldn’t recognize unfaceted gemstones. Your local jeweler, on the other hand, does.
Zainab’s pearl earrings are every bit as valuable as you expected. Your jeweler says he’s never seen natural pearls of this size and quality.
You decide to keep the wine flagon, though it would probably bring a good price.
The chess set is, as you’d suspected, worth A LOT. Since neither your own nor Jake’s rating ever got into four digits, you sell it to a collector.
You use the carpet for one last flight, saving cabfare to the airport. It doesn’t work at home, but makes a handsome addition to your living-room decor.
You have the added satisfaction of knowing that, unlike most other hand-knotted carpets in the world, this one wasn’t made by child slave labor. Doesn’t that feel good?
Shoot. You left the carpet behind.
You keep the bottle as a souvenir.
You never did find a use for it. Wonder what you missed?
It was fun having a genie at your beck and call, but you can’t escape the nagging feeling that you wasted its destructive power.
You’re in a quake of terror as you go through Customs with a pack full of uncut diamonds… but it’s worth it.
Drat. What DID you do with those diamonds?
The lamp makes another nice souvenir. It even works, though it’s a bit smelly.
But you’re still wondering what the genie could have given you if you’d known what to ask for.
In a way, you regret trading in the lamp.
The new one just doesn’t have the same sentimental value, so you end up selling it to an antique dealer for a handsome sum.
You’re also left wondering if you traded away something that could have been of great use to you.
You make some effort to learn to play the flute, but it makes your mouth hurt (all flutes do this) so in the end you give up and sell it to a dealer in rare musical instruments.
The ring doesn’t have any particular resale value, so you keep it, dreaming occasionally of using it on your boss.
(You know in your heart that it wouldn’t work.)
Whoops! You never did make that delivery.
The shoes turn out to fit Jake very nicely.
You eat up the sweets. Mmm-mm.
But next time you’ll get it right, won’t you?
Much later, you find yourself at the airport waiting for an indefinitely delayed flight. Feeling peckish, you rummage in your pack for the source of that tantalizing odor…
That pastry would have dribbled honey all over everything. Good thing you found it.
You share the roasted bird with Jake. It wouldn’t have kept much longer.
The chickpeas are just the thing to keep you going for another few hours.
The cloak of obscurity, whose express purpose is to make women invisible to men, has no effect outside its original cultural domain. It ends up at the bottom of Jake’s closet, nibbled by his gerbil.
Thanks to the members of the FutureBasic newsgroup for both specific pointers and general support.
You feel a little bad about not even bothering to ask what Zainab wanted. Maybe next time…
Drat. You never did give Zainab those clothes.
You’ve still got that bunch of keys to the men’s wing. Heh, heh.
Shoot. You’ve left your sword behind. Next time you’ll have to think of something else.
Time for the credits.
Thanks to Fred for alpha testing.
Thanks to Alex, Cathy, Eddie, Jon, Joslin and Tyler for beta testing.
Thanks to Emanuel Schikaneder for the magic flute, Mark Twain for the description of the hookah, and all the storytellers whose works have come down to us as the Book of A Thousand Nights and One Night.
That’s it, unless you want to go back and REPEAT this whole scroll.
Enjoy your coffee.
Nope, this is it. End of the line.
You can win.
You can lose.
And, in the end, you can quit the game.
Yes, that’s exactly what you’re doing.
You’ve left that a bit late, haven’t you?
PATRON: “Hey, cut the racket!”
It would have served you right if I’d transported you somewhere.
Sit back, relax, enjoy your coffee.
Overdue thanks to my high-school drafting teacher, Eric Stromberg, for teaching me everything I know—and probably a good deal more that I’ve forgotten—about two-point perspective.
