Rose is working on making the house taller.  She needs to build John a path to the first gate far above his house. There seems to be some degree of structural knowledge needed here. But this mostly seems like video game logic for structural engineering.  This is to say Rose is a terrible architect.

She is good at squashing imps though. As she again rescuers John from an imp while he’s distracted by the voice in his head. This eventually passes as the Wayward Vagabond goes on to do something else.  

John finally snapped out of fugue state to find himself in the study. He’s surrounded by loot and imp oil, and he has a hat now.  Regardless of everyone trying to pester him, John decides to check out the Punch Designix.  It seems to show that it needs a card.

Meanwhile Dave and Rose are chatting.  Dave is still having some sort of freakout having gone into his brother’s room. Dave had taken too many images of puppet ass overloading his brain. Despite Dave being Rose’s one hope of survival she cannot help but antagonise him.

John discovers that the back of all his cards have a captcha like code on the back of them. He types in the codes of his claw hammer and pogo ride then punches those cards in the Punch Designix. John also attempts to mash a random code and apply it to the shaving cream card as an experiment.  This lowers his potential inventory space and makes the cards unusable. John suspects it will be worth it. He also now finally notices his PDA and his friends trying to reach him. He’s apparently going a little too slowly with that as Rose launches a bathtub through his house. This nearly hit him but also obliterated an imp.

It seems she was making a shortcut to the stair system. John and Rose debated about whether John should just go check out his fathers room. Rose feels it’s bad and could cost too much time. So for now John checks out the contents of the Safe. The Colonels Sassacre’s that fell out may be a first edition. There’s also a Shavers almanack which John mentions he’d like to read when he is old enough to shave.

Most interesting is the old newspaper clippings. John mentions they appear to be “decades old” though the actual date is out of frame, but it appears to be 199X. That’s not too many decades old from when this page was written. They mostly mention meteors causing mass devastation in a suburb but “it’s not a big deal”. This is a huge deal! Has this happened before!? How was John’s father involved and what did he want John to know about it?

One also states   “… Crocker Facility Levelled”.  I mean I guess John’s family would care about that, they do love those cake mixes. Betty Crokers stuff is mostly resigned to dollar stores these days, the mixes are ok but not great. Honestly, for a family that’s so very into baking you figure they’d have just moved to raw ingredients by now.

The note was just congratulating John on being able to lift the safe and becoming a man. It had to combo on the back. That’s a little sad, John seems to have had to grow up faster than anticipated. Also I guess Rose is more of a man then he is, since it was her who lifted the safe.  He does manage to take out another imp accidentally while messing with his inventory. This grants him a level up granting more random stats. These include more Gel Viscosity, and some Man Grit he has climbed the Echeladder to “pesky urchin” .

John also climbs the less metaphorical stairs that Rose built. Apparently from his perspective they are really thin and hard to climb. I assume he is going to his room to lathe. Rose has placed the cards and all the cruxite dowels up there for him.

 But something has climbed up from the depths. Something very big.