The smoke portrait · Velstraven

An optional room of chapter 2. When you walk in, the room card reads: Window glare washes out the memorial silhouette on the pale wall.

Narrated walkthrough

The smoke portrait from its entrance — The smoke portrait: how to solve it

Getting there

Chapter 2, optional, second upper floor. It opens off the east side of the warmth-seeking vine's conservatory (R04), so you can reach it only once the court's enclosure gate is up. It gates nothing.

What is wrong

"Window glare washes out the memorial silhouette on the pale wall." A patterned stone screen stands in a narrow, steady beam that throws its silhouette on the wall, and a high window floods the same wall with broad light. The Shutter's card: "The shutter stands open; the high window's broad light floods the pale wall."

What you can work

Shutter: The shutter of the high window whose broad light washes over the pale wall.
Hood: A soot-darkened ventilation hood whose flue crosses the high window's light, clear of the narrow beam.
Screen: The patterned stone screen in the narrow beam that casts the silhouette.
Observation: A viewing recess facing the pale wall.

Solution

A nudge

Closing the high window removes the broad competing light. The narrow beam through the screen is untouched, so the silhouette now shows clearly on the wall.

The full solution

Handle the Shutter (or cast Orient on it) to close it.
Closing the high window removes the broad competing light. The narrow beam through the screen is untouched, so the silhouette now shows clearly on the wall.
What you see: "The shutter changes the competing window light." Shutter card: "The shutter is closed across the high window."
Go to the Observation recess and Handle it.
The silhouette counts as seen only from the recess that faces the wall.
What you see: "The real screen's projected silhouette is visible from the recess." Then "The smoke portrait settled."

Other ways that work

Obscuring veil (Wind + Fire + Growth) on the Hood: "Contained smoke attenuates the competing window inside its flue." The flue crosses the window light and not the narrow beam, so the glare dims and the image stays. Then Handle the Observation.

Watch for

Do not veil the Screen: "Smoke across the patterned beam obscures the image too." The recess then refuses ("The silhouette remains washed out or obscured.") until you dismiss that veil (middle mouse; pad B / Circle on the Screen).
A veil on the recess hides the wall only from you: "the glare on the wall is untouched."
Cleanse surface on the Hood only scrubs soot; the window's light is as bright as before.
The Reading lamp (Handle it, or Heat it) and the Reading shutter (Handle or Orient it) stand in every room. They only light the room to read by and work none of its fittings.

If it goes wrong

This room has no failed state. To put it back as you found it, hold R for one second (pad: Start, then Restart from autosave); that reloads the autosave made when you entered the room.

Achievements here

A Portrait in Smoke: Optional: solve the smoke portrait.

Spells used

Orient, Obscuring veil.