Chapter 68: A Game of Cat and Mouse

Despite the best attempts of trees, bees, crystal balls, and whatever “gem eaters” are, you manage to collect a truly huge number of jewels. Berthilda has taken a break from tormenting you, and is dozing in the corner. You approach her, and cough (partly to wake her, but partly because something is still stuck in your throat). She wakes suddenly. “Well… lookie here,” she cackles, “Bentley Bear has gathered up all the gems!” She looks you up and down. “I guess I will have to change you, after all.” She raises her wand, ready to cast a spell. But then she lowers it. “I’ll change you, alright… into my dinner! GRAB THAT BEAR!” A massive tree grabs you by the hands and feet with its powerful limbs and carries you over to a bubbling cauldron, getting ready to drop you into it. You look down into the boiling concoction below, and swallow in fear. But as you do, you feel something in your throat… it’s a pearl! “Don’t drop that bear just yet!” calls Berthilda, readying some kind of spell. You see, on the shelf, Melvin is bouncing around inside his bottle like crazy, and get an idea. You take a deep breath, curl up your bear tongue, and spit the pearl at Melvin’s bottle. It pings off the neck, and the bottle tips over, falling end over end, and crashes onto the cold stone floor.

Melvin comes sailing out of the shattered glass and whirls around the witch, temporarily blinding her. “GO TO THE HOLE!” shouts Melvin, and you see the hole is still there, open on a blue sky, but the tree has a fast hold on you, and you can’t get loose.

“Stupid missile!” calls the witch, and starts shooting energy bolts all over the room, but Melvin is too quick for her. One bolt hits a gem eater, and it turns into a bat. Another hits a stack of books, turning it into a swarm of moths. Then a bolt hits the tree holding you, and you see it change into a little flower! You fall towards the cauldron, but stop yourself from falling in by grabbing the edges, tenting yourself over it with your four paws. Bubbles in the boiling mixture pop and tickle your stomach, and the edges are so hot they are burning your paws. You twist and make a leap away from the cauldron, and you climb onto the table by the hole into the sky. You stick your head out, and see the mad doctor hovering nearby in his orange helicopter.

“JUMP!” shouts Melvin, still whirling around the angry witch.

You want to shout back that you can’t, because you are too big to fit through the hole, but only bear sounds come out. You look around… are there some controls, or something to enlarge the hole? You don’t see anything. The witch’s energy bolts continue to fly every which way, or at least, every witch way: a skeleton gets turned into a pile of sticks, a swarm of bees turns into an ostrich, then a bolt hits you! You see the hole, and everything in the room grow up around you, and now you are quite tiny!

“JUMP!” cries Melvin again, and this time, you do! You leap out of the hole, into the sky, trying not to look down at the ground, which is miles below. The mad doctor has the window of the helicopter open, and you glide into it, landing on the seat next to him, which to you, seems truly enormous. In the next second, you see Melvin come flying out of the hole, and into the helicopter next to you.

“FLY!” he shouts. “She might come after us!” and indeed, you see the furious face of the witch appear in the hole in the sky, and then her wand! Bolts start firing out at you, but the Mad Doctor is already moving the helicopter away as fast as it can go, and fortunately, it doesn’t get turned into anything. Soon, you land on the top of the first building you climbed up.

“Well,” says the Doctor, looking down at you, “We seem to be safe now. And,” he says, beaming with satisfaction, “It turns out I was right! Finding the hole was the solution to your problem! You are no longer a frog!” It is frightening to see his giant red face grinning down at you.

Melvin shakes his head, not that he has a head. “Yeah, technically, but that’s only because the witch changed the player into a bear, and now…” Melvin looks down at you. He looks so big! “…and now, a mouse!”

Are you really a mouse? You look down at your hands, gray furry body, and long tail. You put your tiny mouse hands on your head and let out a long squeak of frustration. Will you ever be back to normal?

“Ha!” laughs the grinning Doctor. “Well, that’s better news than you might think! Frogs I can’t do much with, but I’ve been doing research about how to transform mice into other animals.” He unbuckles his seat belt. “Come down to my lab, and I’ll show you what I’ve been working on.” He scoops you up into a jar (the helicopter is littered with various kinds of containers that seem to be for collecting plant and animal samples) and carries you over to the rooftop entrance to an elevator, which arrives briskly, and starts carrying you down to the basement. You let out another long squeak, wondering why, if this building has an elevator, that the doctor made you climb up it in the first place.

“I’m so glad we found each other,” says Melvin. “When you got carried away by that hole, I was worried I wouldn’t find you again. So the Doc and I started searching the sky. Finally we found that weird cloud, but the witch got me in that bottle the second I got in there! I’d still be there if you didn’t find me! Later, when you can talk again, I wanna hear how a frog got up into the sky!”

The elevator dings, and you are back in the doctor’s basement laboratory. He leads you down a corridor to a room with a sign that says “Sponsored Research.” You wonder who would sponsor someone so clearly insane. “Here we are,” he says with a glint in his eye. In the room you see a large maze, containing four robot cats. “I have found that, given the right nutrients, or, well, technically the right toxins, mice can turn into other animals when they are put under enough stress.” He starts punching some buttons on a large control board, and the cat robots spring to life, moving slowly around the maze. “No, no,” he says to himself, “that won’t do it...” He moves two large switches, which had each been set to “B”, to a more sinister looking “A” setting. The cats get evil gleams in their robot eyes and start patrolling much faster. “There,” he says with satisfaction, “that should be stressful enough.” He sighs. “Too bad it’s the hawk’s day off.” He picks you up by your tail and holds you up by his face. For a second, you are afraid he might open his vast red mouth and swallow you. “Now,” he says, “avoid the cats, and look for the dog bones. When you eat those, after a moment, you might turn into a dog yourself.”

“Wait a minute,” interrupts Melvin. “First, are those bones for dogs, or, well, actual dog bones?”

The doctor furrows his eyebrows. “Some of both, I think. Why do you ask?”

“Never mind. But… they don’t look like bones, they look like the Purina logo.”

“Yes,” says the Doctor proudly. “I proposed to Purina a new poison, I mean, food, that would turn mice into dogs, and they were fascinated by the business possibilities.” He bends down to place you into the maze.

Suddenly, a nasal voice crackles over a loudspeaker. “Doctor? Is that you? Your dental patient is ready for you.” Hearing this, the Doctor grimaces.

“Wait another minute,” says Melvin. “Are you a dentist? I thought you were a doctor?”

“A dentist is a KIND of a doctor,” he says defensively. “Why does it matter to you?”

“It’s just… I never heard of a Mad Dentist,” says Melvin thoughtfully. The doctor ignores this, and makes some final adjustments on the control panel.

“Wait, one more question,” says Melvin. “What good is it to turn the player into a dog? Don’t we need to turn the Player human again?”

The doctor becomes indignant. “Let me make this perfectly clear: Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” With that, he drops you into the maze.

Place the Mousetrap cartridge into your Atari 2600. Set both difficulty switches to a. Play until you get 800 points. Post a link to a video in the comments section of yourself completing the challenge.