What Happened to Agent Small? was a marvel of narrative complexity and surreal imagery, and as such was an almost complete failure. Despite its current reputation within a small cabal of dubious enthusiasts, it was outshone in its own time by later Karvina successes such as Gargantua, Guest at the Table of Heaven, and of course, Killswitch.

The game was a classic espionage scenario: Agent Small has disappeared, and Agent Thin, an indistinct avatar with a black hat and yellow trousers, descends into a strange country called Assumption in search of his partner. His weapon is a deck of red playing cards: each card dealt temporarily morphs into a weapon–the three of hearts is a small red pistol, the Jack of Spades a crossbow, etc. Each of these vanish within a short time frame. Thus only fifty-two weapons are available for the duration of the game, and if used too soon, leave Thin helpless long before the finale. He is pursued by the enemy agents Thomas A. Wilson and Thomas F. Wilson, (there appears to have been no translation issue, these were intentionally American names), desperately loyal lovers famous for having slit the President of Assumption’s throat with the edge of a palm leaf taken from an office topiary.

The object of the game was to acquire three scarlet diamonds before the Wilsons could–the jewels were necessary to a machine run by Agent Mire, the main antagonist, who sought to create a small, Earth-bound sun which would obliterate the world’s need for coal, and destroy several cities in the process. Agent Small had been on the same mission when she disappeared. Interestingly enough, however, the diamonds are never forthcoming at the conclusion of the levels, much like the princesses in the more popular Mario franchise. Agent Thin opens chest after chest to find them empty, unlocks door after door to find cobwebs and shadows. No message of encouragement, no friendly text to urge the player on.

Fully half of the game is spent in the Castle Hereupon, a complicated maze in which Agent Thin is repeatedly lost, battered, and tortured. At several points he is actually killed–there is no way to avoid this–and resurrected in the basement of the castle, first by a sad and helpless servant with a shock of pixellated blue hair, and subsequently by previous incarnations of himself. By the time he reaches Agent Mire, even the best players are on their third Thin Construct.

The final battle consists of a calm and ordered sniper hit (the King of Clubs becomes a rifle) on Agent Mire while he sits at an impossibly broad desk penning his autobiography, somewhat anti-climactic in the scheme of things, and the rescue of Agent Small, who had been kept in a medicine cabinet with her face pressed to the glass. Upon releasing her, she slowly opens her mouth to reveal the three red diamonds embedded in her jaw in place of the three teeth.

The game has an extraordinary amount of sexual content for its era, the Wilsons being very likely the first openly homosexual relationship in a video game narrative, and the long history of Thin and Small relayed in a series of textual cut scenes as the two leave the Castle. Apparently married and divorced twice, the doomed couple walk through the Castle grounds, which are littered with coal and machinery, returning to their world and their employers little better than they began.

Much has been made of the fact that it is a Thin Construct, and not Thin himself, who leaves the Castle with his partner. No comment can be made, as Karvina in its nascent stage may or may not have prefigured its later brilliance, may or may not have distastefully presented an infinite procession of avatars of avatars, may or may not have meant anything at all by it, and to speculate on such a matter shows a diseased mind.

The game, at any rate, was an utter catastrophe for the infant corporation. It is surprising that they recovered at all. Records indicate that a total of seventy-two copies were sold, and of those, sixty-one are now the property of the archives. The game was far below the standards of Karvina and is beneath the notice of any genuine player. It has been recommended by all high-level personnel that it be left to rot in dry storage. Its current occult popularity is entirely spurious and its acolytes to be pitied.

[[Archive Group: Pantry. Lockwords: Karvina Corporation, Alternate Distribution Streams, Orpheus Scenarios, Memory Storage, Index Librorum Prohibitorum
. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.21, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

What can be positively asserted is this:

On November 12th, 1931 in Marseilles, Godelieve presented her husband with a birthday gift consisting of 165 illustrated cards, something like a complex Tarot, but without divinatory intent. They were a young couple, pregnant with their first child, and Mrs. Lenentine, a gifted artist, had spent the bulk of their engagement in the creation of these cards, which are painted in sepia colors, with a style both elegant and grotesque. Their names were domestic, inventive, archetypal: The Starveling, the Leaning Cabinet, the Stove-Door.

By all accounts, Godelieve was an anti-social and aggressively introverted woman, warm only to her husband Bastien and her daughter, whom she was carrying when she set the cards on their kitchen table, wrapped in a woolen cloth. Besides the cards was a small box full of chess queens from a variety of different sets. Through the next four decades, Godelieve and Bastien played a constantly evolving game with the cards and the variegated queens, the rules of which are all the more perplexing for their shifting, mutable nature.

Cyrille Lenentine, insensate spectator of this first shuffling, halting game, was truculent until her death on the subject of the actual rules. It is the current theory that each player chose a pair of queens and attempted, through the laying of card upon card in a massive spiral, to construct a story by which one might become the other. Cards could be played by opponents, it is assumed, against one another, halting or skewing the spiral-path. Thus if Godelieve began with a simple ebony queen and an ornate silver-crowned monarch, she might lay the Gargantua upon the Accountant’s Heartsease upon the Poor Lecheress and so on, to create a plausible path of no less than 66 cards, though some schools speculate that the number was greater even than that. It took hours to play, even days, and the tales that resulted were written in a large leather book and set aside with the family Bible.

For her birthday in 1932, Bastien presented his wife with a box of sea-pebbles in vivid shades of blue and green, and a new rule: a pebble placed upon a card inverted its meaning exactly, so that the Starveling became the Satiated, and so forth. Thus it became a tradition between the two to present each other with new rules and cards upon each holiday, and the complexity of their play exploded into a private language, as dizzying and vast as any arcane dialect.

When Cyrille reached the age of eight, she reports, her mother very solemnly took what was by then a large and heavy carved box out of the closet and opened it with all the ritual of Mass, removing the cards, the queens, the pebbles, the book–and by this time, also the rings, the dice, the pens, and the kings. They had had to purchase a new and enormous table to incorporate the ever-widening spirals of cards, and Cyrille learned wide-eyed the private past-time of her parents, and saw that there was a card for Godelieve, and one for Bastien, and a very new one with Cyrille written along the bottom edge. When she was twelve, the youngest Lenentine was allowed to create her first rule, which was, she reluctantly recorded, that the winner of the Christmas game could change any of the other rules they wished. The world of the Lenentine house was circumscribed entirely by the secret game, each birthday, each New Year punctuated by its forced evolution, every passing year, every passing snow and summer running parallel to baroque queens with mysterious intent traveling up and down their roads of cards.

It is here that Cyrille ceased her Virgilian guidance, and would lead no one further into the world of her mother’s game. “I cannot do it,” she wrote, “it would be like telling you what she looked like naked. It is ours, our own, and does not belong to you.”

Yet she willed to a local museum the carved box which by her own advanced age was over flowing, for she played solitary games long past her mother’s death and her father’s, the tables of her house growing steadily larger until they took up entire rooms. The ledgers which contained the complete record of their decades of intimate, secret play, however, were cremated with her, clutched in her dead and folded arms.

She had no children of her own. She taught no one else the game. Like the tables, the museums which acquired the Lenentine cards in batches and lots grew greater and greater, until they reached their current home, reassembled and whole.

Archivists by the dozen have played with the cards, with the queens, with the pebbles. They have constructed elaborate systems full of rules and sub-rules, structures of card and object and tale, but they cannot be sure that anything they play approaches the Lenentine practices. Still they play on, for the beauty of the objects contained in that old carved box, and because, they say, they cannot know if they stumble upon the real game, or have already done so, and so every game they play is plausibly the original, and, in the end and forever, they have faith.

[[Archive Group: Pantry. Lockwords: Memory Storage, Autobiographical Interface, User Corruption, Tether Systems, Lost Methodologies, Alternate Distribution Streams, Ludic Language Systems. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.21, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]

From what documentation survives it can be gleaned that she was born in 1950, the child of two engineers, possessed of a twin brother, Viljami, with whom she was extremely close. They were brilliant children, even prodigies, and inseparable until her marriage at the age of twenty-three. Viljami died in an airplane crash over the North Sea in 1974, and Irja’s husband Evgeniy left her four years later and returned to then-Soviet Estonia, where his family kept cattle and encouraged his second marriage to a woman whose name has been lost. It would seem that Pentintytär did not leave her house after 1980, and Torvald Leppo, 11 years of age, discovered her body while making his ailing father’s morning rounds, delivering her milk. He was nearly catatonic for weeks afterward, unable to speak, while the house was boarded up and a search for next of kin commenced. No amount of milk and brandy seemed to soften the child, until his father went to bathe his boy and found Torvald’s bed empty.

Torvald could not leave the house alone. He had returned night after night to the place that Irja Pentintytär had built for herself. For the house contained no furniture or belongings which might have comforted a young woman grieving the loss of her marriage and her brother–a few dresses hung in her closet, one pair of shoes sat neatly by the door. The rest of the rooms were crowded with standing game machines, a closely packed arcade not unlike a labyrinth. Even before Irja’s body had been collected, Torvald had pushed a 1 markka piece into the only machine which seemed to have a coin-slot, painted with flowing brown letters that read: Herkkusieni!

The game was simple: a sprite with angular red braids labeled above the score as SISKO collects pixelated mushrooms in a forest until she has enough to fill her basket. She has a small pig to help her dig and offer zen-like, porcine, barely translatable advice such as: Do not kiss the tree stump with enthusiasm. The mushrooms slowly increase in size and vary in color until Sisko must chase after behemoth fungi bigger than her basket and herself, expanding beyond the edges of the screen. Behind her as she seeks floats a second red-headed sprite labeled VEIKKO, a silent boy whose feet do not touch the ground, and who does nothing throughout the game but watch Sisko with her mushrooms and her pig, a constant, if impotent, companion.

Torvald completed Herkkuseini! on his second night at the Pentintytär house. As the Sisko-sprite disappeared into a gargantuan mushroom, his markka piece hurtled from the rear of the machine through a slender pneumatic tube and into a second game, and the Leppo boy hurtled after it, eager to play, eager to follow deeper into the things whose creation had consumed Pentintytär’s final years. His coin had deposited itself in Keskenään kotona Aho, in which Veikko from the previous game travels through a series of green meadows, beset with small beetles and strawberry-monsters, sparrows with oversized talons and fawns with enormous ears, all of which he fights with a wooden sword and the braided Sisko floating behind him, silent, observing. From this Torvald’s markka hurtled into Kalastaa ja Toivottu, a fishing game where Torvald held a pole in his hands much like other arcade-players held plastic guns, and caught oblong pink pike from a bright blue pond, choosing with each catch a reward of points, gold, or wishes, which he wrote into the wish-screen like high-score initials, only to watch them vanish into blackness and not return. I wish my father’s cows gave more milk. I wish I had a red bicycle. I wish these games would not end.

Kicking his feet in the water was red-haired Veikko, though he caught no fish of his own.

Torvald played through the house for weeks. He did not always understand the games, which always starred the same two sprites, alternating in agency, but never separate: in Eksynyt Morsian Sisko fought her way through the cupolas of the Kremlin only to wed the final enemy in a bizarre cut scene, a black, boxy man with red shoes. Her opposite number watched, in approval or disapproval his primitively animated face made it impossible to tell. A flight simulator called Mielipaha flew over an endless ocean; in Keskenään kotona Ankea the two sprites walked together through a long grey wasteland in search of a crown of squarish roses. The coin sped through each machine as Torvald completed the game–and finally, while his father was discovering an empty bed, the markka settled into a sleek black game which frightened him, a game in which there was no Sisko, only the boy, wandering in a black field, lost, without enemies or reward. In later years Torvald would swear that the beeps and echoes of the game sounded like a woman weeping. The words Viljami kotona Alamaailma were scratched in small white letters on the side of the game, as if with the edge of a fork or a key.

After nearly twelve hours of play, an admirable marathon for a child of Torvald’s age, but through no efforts of his own, Sisko with her red-braids appeared in the northwest corner of the screen, holding out her arms to her counterpart, her Veikko. Torvald moved his avatar towards her with his heart in his throat, and the two figures merged, flooding the black screen with blue light.

Torvald’s coin clattered out of the machine, a neat, star-shaped hole punched through its middle. Herkkusieni! would not accept it again, and before he could earn another markka, the Leppo boy’s father collected him with much anger and relief, and the house was firmly locked, while the child wept and bit his mother and screamed to be let back in.

Torvald would wear his markka on a chain around his neck for the rest of his life. He visited Irja’s grave often, laying faded markka coins on the grass.

In 1998, he managed to purchase the last of the Pentintytär Arcade from a reticent collector in Tallinn, and had the set installed in his Helsinki home. When the last tube was in place, he sat naked in their center with a small gun in his hands, calling out Irja’s name into the labyrinth, over and over.

[[Archive Group: Pantry. Lockwords: Memory Storage, Autobiographical Interface, User Corruption, Single Use Systems, Directional Control, Alternate Distribution Streams. Last Accessed 9.001.6.7.20, UIN# (47)663.5-9]]