Questline — Earth · the committee table near the city

The Moon Motion

The committee has voted. It is going to the Moon. You are building the rocket, and the blueprint is a lie

The same bureaucratic committee behind Closing the Quarter — the Committee of Things Which Are Not the Case — has convened at its usual table near the city and voted, unanimously, to relocate to the Moon. Their stated reasoning: gravity here is "objectively excessive," measured, as always, "by falling over." They need someone to actually build and launch the rocket, since their own design parameters were, in their words, "optimised for sedentary decision-making, not physical exertion."

Four sections, one running joke escalated seven times

The committee hands over a binder — the spacecraft requirements, "seventy-three metric tons of committee member mass distribution units" — broken into four fetch tasks, each one funnier than the last:

Hull (15 Scrap Metal) — "quality NOT LAMINATED, purpose KEEPING THE OUTSIDE OUT." Nothing visibly gets built; the committee simply votes to accept the delivery, thank you, and an adjournment for snacks.
Frame (6 Iron Bars) — "purpose RIGIDITY," annotated in the margin: "like the bones, which are big." The "schedule" the committee cites throughout is, the whole time, a laminated drawing of a smiling committee riding inside a rocket.
Propulsion (3 Car Batteries) — the requirement genuinely reads three car batteries, twice-checked. "The propulsion subcommittee has voted that electricity is a liquid, and may therefore be burned." The vote, naturally, was unanimous.
Boarding ramp (8 Planks) — the section with the most margin notes by far, all about load ratings, all underlined twice. "The ramp is where the plan meets the committee" turns out to be the truest sentence the table has produced in years.

The blueprint

Returning to the table with all four sections complete, the rocket is somehow already standing — assembled between sessions, "in the bloated proportions of a thing designed by enthusiasm." Asking to actually see the blueprint gets a crumpled piece of paper handed over: a drawing of a completely normal rocket, no modifications, no cargo bay. "Well," the chairwoman admits. "ChatGPT made it for us." One dialogue option calls it out directly — the drawing shows a smiling committee inside it, which is the entire blueprint — and gets the confession immediately laminated, "so that it cannot be amended."

Loading them in, and shutting the door

Every committee member waddles up the ramp in turn — the Safety and Risk Assessment Coordinator nearly falls off the side and is saved by the handrail he personally specified, which he will consider, privately, the vindication of his career. The last one at the hatch turns and asks whether the player is coming too. Whatever's chosen, the door gets shut and locked, and the launch happens in "catastrophic violence" — shrieking, wobbling, the ground cracking, the ramp instantly historical. Whether they actually arrive anywhere is never stated. The quest's own closing line notes, dryly, that the horizon the rocket vanishes over is "visibly, provably curved" — a small, final jab at the same committee that spent an earlier quest ruling the world flat.

One ending, and physics gets the last word off-screen

Like its sibling quest, this one has no branching outcome — the transcript it was built from only had one road, and the game's own development notes are blunt that "the committee would have voted down a second." Whether the committee actually survives the trip is deliberately left as an unresolved hook for a possible future quest, exactly the way The Parrot Questline's own first part left threads open for its second. The car-battery fuel choice is also a real engineering workaround as much as a joke: the game's actual rocket-fuel item only drops from a creature whose home region isn't guaranteed to exist on every world seed, so requiring it here could have permanently blocked the quest for some players. "The propulsion subcommittee has voted that electricity is a liquid" is the joke and the fix.

The rocket itself is purely a visual prop rather than a real vehicle — built by the same figure system that draws the committee members themselves, and launched only as a scripted animation once the quest completes. It never touches the game's actual space-travel systems, because nobody is really travelling anywhere; the rocket is cargo, not a ride.

Version history

v1311 — added. Built from an operator-supplied transcript, following the same concept-first-then-build process as its sibling committee quest.

Trivia

Completing the quest hands over a laminated nametag reading "GRAVITY ASSESSMENT CHAIRMAN" — the committee's idea of a farewell gift, delivered with the note "a committee never says goodbye. It issues credentials."
Shipped three versions after Closing the Quarter, the same committee's other quest — its own flat-earth ruling from that earlier quest is the target of this one's closing "visibly, provably curved" line. The two are independent quests, playable in either order, and neither requires the other.