The Castle Doctrine Forums

Well, here we go. Harris has lost his head, but found some nice paintings in the process. It would be a shame if something were to happen to them...
By the way, the series isn't over just yet. There will be an epilogue, plus the full Harris house breakdown is here (clicky!) if you want to know more about the place that the least sane art collector in Las Cruces lived.

Part 5: Fried

Excerpt from a notebook titled "even MORE fuckers are out to GET ME", written by Christopher Alvin Harris on 4/4/14:
Herbert: another clock? I'll just cut through your cheap traps. You think your clock will keep your money safe? Brit's didn't, and he didn't use cheap fucking electric floors! Walls are thin too, I'll just smash my way in. Nobody will stand in my way.

Police Report: 4-4-14, Report of Major Robbery
Robert Troy Herbert was robbed for $60,000 and 12 paintings by Christopher Alvin Harris. The robbery was performed by force; Harris used cutting tools to break through any walls between him and Mr. Herbert's vault. Multiple animals were drugged in the process, but no people were injured; both Herbert's wife and son were unscathed.
Again, first responders arrived too late by slightly over 16 minutes. It is my personal advice that that the police stop waiting 20 minutes before showing up to crime scenes.
Note: the author of this particular police report was fired the next day for "stupid comments".

Testimony: Robert Troy Herbert
"I was waiting for him ever since I robbed 2 houses myself in the past 24 hours; it was karma. My ego prevented me from upgrading my house, even though I did have a layout prepared that would have costed me $30K and fundamentally change the route to the safe. I just didn't want to reset my kill count, so I dumped all my cash in tools that he's probably relishing. At least I still have my wife and son, and they'll always be there for me."

Excerpt "even MORE fuckers are out to GET ME":
Herbert: another clock? I'll just cut through your cheap traps. You think your clock will keep your money safe? Brit's didn't, and he didn't use cheap fucking electric floors! Walls are thin too, I'll just smash my way in. Nobody will stand in my way.
You still have a wife?! Goddamn it, now I need to kill her! Why must you make this so hard on me? I'm the real victim here, forced to kill all these innocent families. I have to waste so much money doing this!
Oh, well. Time to die, Mrs Harris!
*a heart drawn in Harris's own blood follows on the next page.*

Testimony: Robert Troy Herbert
"Why? Why did he do this do me? He already took my money, why kill her?"

Police Report: 4-4-14, Report of Murder
The wife of Robert Troy Herbert was shot by Christopher Alvin Harris. Harris also took all the money that she was holding for himself. Herbert's son was unharmed.

4/6/14 - I only have one big target left: Buckley. I need that third Sarsaparilla painting, and those two other ones. If Buckley would just DIE like so many of the OTHERS, I could just buy his art, but nooooooooo. He has to wait for me to come take it! Well, you know what, Buckley? I WILL! Say your prayers, Buckley, because the wrecking crew is coming! Your art will be mine, and all your money too! You will fear my name: CHRISTOPHER ALVIN HARRIS!

Obituary, from the Las Cruces Times
Christopher Alvin Harris passed away on April 6th, 8:17 AM, in the house of Ronald William Buckley, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The cause of death was an overdose of electric floor. Harris was an art lover all his life, ever since he began painting at the young age of 4. In grade school, he pursued his dreams of becoming an artist, and in college ended up getting a degree in Art History from Florida Atlantic University. Harris was a curator at many art museums, eventually ending up at the prestigious Getty in Los Angeles. After fleeing from accusations of art theft, Harris moved to Las Cruces, where he quickly become assimilated into the lifestyle; like most of our other citizens, he became a widower, a complete lunatic, and had incurable kleptomania. His crimes were numerous, but he always took pride in one thing: he only killed three women and two children while staying in Las Cruces. That, he claimed, was revenge enough for Traci and his children.

Thus ends the story of Christopher Alvin Harris: the man, the artist, the legend.

The plan right now is to rob Mitchell, then use that money to rob Vasquez and Scott. So watch out...

Edit: Plan's changed. Hopefully I won't have to worry about Scott ever again.

Edit 2: To explain that tape to a probably very confused Vasquez, I completely forgot I had brought more than one ladder, or any explosives, because I had initially planned on bringing no explosives and just 1 ladder. So that's why I went around wrecking things for no reason: I though I was trapped and wanted to get rid of tools so you wouldn't get them. When I looked and saw that I had a ladder, I was very, very glad.
By the way, guessing your dance/combo thing was pure, crazy luck, but I also knew that it was only a 3 bit lock, then assumed you didn't go for the 1,3 combo, and assumed that the dance was hooked up to the lock in the way it actually turned out to be. By that logic, my odds weren't actually too low, and anyways, I had enough explosives to bypass it anyways (even though I forgot I had them at the time ).

Sorry to see you go, cullman. You were a great player, and it always sucks when we lost one of our greats.

The only point I'd like to make is that I singlehandedly destroyed over $400k this weekend; I robbed every house with over $50k but Mitchell, and used up all of the money on tools, deaths, or intentional suicides. So I think that a problem is the amount of money that can leave the economy is far, far greater than the amount that can enter it.

It's not actually that hard. The combination is set by pairs of buttons that have to be hit - i.e. you set which buttons comes first for every set of two buttons that have to be pressed in the combination. To set which button comes first in a pair, one button (let's call it A) has to be connected to a bit storage unit, with the other button (B) connected to a Voltage Triggered Inverted Switch along the wire connecting A to the bit storage unit. The bit storage unit is then attached to your main power line just like a regular button in a combination lock, following these rules:
If you want A to be pressed before B, attach the bit storage unit with a Voltage Triggered Switch.
If you want B to be pressed before A, attach the bit storage unit with a Voltage Triggered Inverted Switch.

The big size constraint are the bit storage units; those are the smallest possible bit storage units in the game, and they take up five tiles each. For every possible pair of pressed buttons, you need one, so if you want a lock where 6 buttons have to be pressed, you need 15 individual bit storage units, plus all the wiring to route every button to the proper one. So unless somebody comes up with a way to compare the orders of multiple buttons at once, without having a bit storage unit for every pair, I don' think this lock'll get much smaller.

I wasn't worried for two reasons:
1. People will usually try guessing a solution before cutting. If their guessed solution worked, why cut at all? They'll just ignore the interdependency entirely, and assume that the cat they saw lived as well. If they thought it died because they saw it before entering a combo with the final button included, they could just come back and do so, and then they would be sure the cat lived - even if it didn't.
2. See the dog above the sticky switch on the cat path? In the process of cutting to the trapdoor, he'll see you and close the powered door. (I think he's too far away to drug, but I'm not sure.) Also, you forgot in you tool approximation that the trapdoor there is closed - for a pure brute force solution, you'd need 4 ladders, a brick, 2 guns, 2 meat, an explosive, a blowtorch, 17 saws, and lot of luck. You could also trade the explosive + blowtorch combo for a crowbar. Some of that can of course be removed if you have the entrance scouted out, but it still costs a hell of a lot of money, and that's knowing everything that's ahead of you.

I would guess that the house would fall to somebody going along the path, and breaking what was in their way, before it would fall to what seems like a needless and pricey cutting of walls.

I would suggest dying as Scott.

I was scouting you, so you may be referring to me. I liked your place, but I could pretty easily tell that it was a sight-trap at first. The next part was just Chihuahua surfing, up to the bit with the doors, where I died. I doubt I would have gotten past the magic dances, though.

They're back at auction. For the past few days, I've just been relieving people of their paintings, then suiciding.

Got Miller!

And Miller: if you're reading this, don't ever make your combo lock combo be 2,4. It's one of the easiest to guess!

I nearly got Miller tool-less (I think. I may or may not have chosen the right final path...) after a lot of scouting over multiple days and a lucky guess on his (very easy-to-guess) 4-bit lock.
I died to one of those dog commit gate setups which you have to go and turn on first before you get the dog.

And Cyclene, yes, when I do two sets of chain robberies, I just idle in the house of the account I'm not robbing with and occasionally press arrow keys so I don't time out.

I'd be very happy with an open source build, because I use both Mac and Linux. It really won't make much of a difference security wise, but would make us end-users happier.