I’m honestly surprised that the fourth option didn’t win, given that both playthroughs I’ve seen of this game picked it, but that’s democracy in action.
We’ll see what that does when we return to Ricki’s shop probably a few updates from now.
While we’re here though, there’s a dialog “puzzle” we can solve to get the tube for the burned out fire hydrant.
She’ll ask us for the make and model number of the tube. As far as I know, this is not random - the model number is always WC-67.
Thankfully, Reyes doesn’t need to find a way to pay for it, since Ricki puts it on the town’s account.
With that, we can unlock the other half of the town of Thimbleweed Park. From here, we’re going to do a hard-mode only puzzle that we don’t have to do right now (on my first playthrough, I didn’t know about this until after I’d done almost everything else in town) but that we should totally do because it unlocks fast travel.
I did the next part a little out of order, but the first place I wound up going is the post office, which is just past Ricki’s shop.
The bum from the intro is here, but we can’t really do much with him right now.
The post office has a roll of sticky tape that would be just perfect for our incomplete fingerprinting kit! Unfortunately, the postal worker is kind of a jerk and will only let a federal employee take any.
By the way, I have no idea what that box in the foreground is referencing. It’s not a Maniac Mansion thing as far as I know.
Now that we have some tape, we can start on the next leg of our journey.
One thing that can be a little confusing is that all of the roads leading out of the town proper are labelled the same. If we had tried to, say, go left on the road that took us into town, Reyes would refuse. This road, however, is different. We’ll just go down here and…
Wait, what? Is this another one of those weird broken TV cutscenes like when we first walked into town?
: “Yes sir.”
: “Yes sir, it is quite annoying.”
: “No sir.”
: “Yes sir.”
: “Yes sir, permanently.”
: “Yes sir, violently.”
: “No sir.”
: “Yes sir.”
: “Yes, wrestling was quite good tonight.”
: “Goodbye, sir.”
When we come to, Reyes is standing outside the tow’s convienience store. We would need to come here anyway for a different item, so we might as well grab it while we’re here. See the bathroom sign on the left?
We can go in there, and it leads us into this totally not threatening dark room with a pair of glowing red eyes in the corner, not unlike those of the shadowy figure that killed Boris in the intro.
Fortunately, there’s a light switch near the door that reveals it to be a poorly-placed air conditioner. Reyes won’t touch most of the stuff in here..
Except this roll of toilet paper, which we’ll take some of.
Now, let’s head into the Quickie Pal. There’s a sign behind the clerk’s head that we can’t read entirely. Let’s move him over a bit so we can see it.
People from some US states (or who are not from the US) might not recognize this, so I’ll explain briefly.
One of the sort of “vogue” bills for state legislatures in the early 1980s were so-called “bottle bills” that introduced a convoluted system where customers pay a 5-cent deposit on canned and bottled drinks, which they can get back by handing the empty bottles back to the store that sold them. In practice, they’re pretty awkward since all stores are supposed to take back bottles but very few actually do (especially bodegas and other small, family-owned grocery stores) since it takes a lot of time and money to make that work.
Anyway, we can look at the map rack to find out..
If we were on casual mode, the maps would be there, but since we’re on hard mode, we need to take a few extra steps. The first one is returning this bottle.
And that’s the one item we actually need to get a map down. Let’s head out of the Quickie Pal, and..
Two buildings down from the post office is the office for the local newspaper.. which also happens to be home to the only remaining map of Thimbleweed county.
Unfortunately, the editor won’t let us touch her map. This is really the first point at which we’ll need to use both Ray and Reyes to solve a puzzle - and remember, this is hard-mode only.
She also really does not like Reyes touching her police scanner and.. hey, haven’t we seen one of these before?
Every time we try to touch her scanner, the editor will tell us what she’s waiting to hear on it. Some of these can be pretty funny - on the test run I did for this, she wanted to hear about “A man on the east side of town doing nothing in particular”. Sounds a lot like the newspaper I used to work for.
Thankfully, I left Ray right here before I did this. If we were to send Reyes over here to do this, the editor would be back before he is able to return to the newspaper building and grab the map.
Just like with the hydrant tube, we have to do a short dialogue puzzle here.
Now, given Monkey Island logic, you would think that Reyes could simply take the map while she’s gone and book it - but if we do this, the editor immediately walks back in.
Instead, we have to grab the map off the wall…
Bring it to the copier on the other side of the room, and then insert the nickel we got for returning the bottle. This makes a color copy of the map.
At this point, we could just leave the map where it is and walk out, causing the editor to take her map back but not the copy.. but since we’ve already committed the perfect crime, we might as well not leave any evidence.
Unfortunately, we can’t actually USE our map until we show it to the sheriff, who convieniently happens to be hiding in the bushes if you attempt to leave town by going past the Quickie Pal.
: “You can’t just go bumbling around the county without a map!”
: “You might get lost.. and there is a killer-reno on the loose.”
: “Well, that looks legit-a-reno.”
: “Odd.. I thought I…”
: “Well… I guess the law is the law…”
That last sentence is actually key. While doing this sequence unlocks the ability to leave town for both Ray and Reyes, fast travel is only accessible by using the map from the inventory. This means that Ray (and any other characters we may or may not encounter in, say, the next update) will need to head to the Quickie Pal to pick up a map before we do much of anything with them.
This is what the map screen looks like. From here, we can fast travel to any location inside or outside of town. We still have plenty of business in town, but this cuts down on travel time by quite a bit.
Next update, we’ll get a hot lead on the killer and meet a new character or two.