Recap #2: The Inventor’s Apprentice

A few weeks ago, I made a post recapping the events that occurred in the first pick-your-path book, Stowaway: Adventures at Sea. This book went into great detail describing the islands that surround Club Penguin, but this week we’ll be looking a little closer to home. The second pick-your-path book, The Inventor’s Apprentice, sticks to just Club Penguin Island to showcase some of Gary’s less famous inventions. Of course it goes without saying, but this post will contain major spoilers for the book. If you can read it first, I would recommend doing so. Otherwise, read on…

Like Stowaway, The Inventor’s Apprentice contains three main adventures, though two out of three of the adventures are first padded by the prologue of another adventure. Each adventure follows you testing and experimenting with a different one of Gary’s gadgets: one adventure allows you to test the Time Machine 3000, a second allows you to test a rocket-powered surfboard, and the last one allows you to test the Size-a-Tron 3000.

The story begins with you receiving a postcard from Gary congratulating you on winning the Club Penguin Invention Contest. This contest encouraged penguins to design an invention that would amp up one of the games on Club Penguin to make it more extreme. You created plans for a freeze ray (which would allow the player to create patches of ice ahead of themselves in Sled Racing) and won the prize of a twenty-four hour apprenticeship with Gary. At the specified time, Gary then sends you a second postcard with the riddle “You’ll find my workshop at the bottom of a hill, in a place where sports fans can get their fill.”

You follow the riddle to the Sport Shop where Gary (with round glasses are so thick, you can’t even see his eyes behind them) meets you and commends you on your enthusiasm and passion saying that they’re the trademarks of any good inventor. He then explains that Aunt Arctic suggested that he get an apprentice when he mentioned to her that there’s no shortage of work to be done or contraptions to invent. He thought it was such a good idea that he wished he had thought of it himself.

Here’s where the adventure branches for the first time. You can either interrupt Gary as he begins to give you a tour of his workshop to show him your freeze ray (as you actually created a working prototype after sending him the plans), or you can wait for him to finish. While the other two adventures stem from waiting for Gary to finish, we’ll take a look at the time-travelling adventure first which is initiated when you interrupt Gary.

In your excitement, you accidentally open your bag upside down and your freeze ray clatters to the ground, shoots out an icy beam, and freezes Gary. He’s now ice cold, and looks just like an ice sculpture. To unfreeze him, you can switch the yellow and green wires and blast him again (this time with a red beam), but if you switch the wrong wires the ray breaks forcing you to use more unconventional methods.

These include melting the ice layer off using the fireplace in the Ski Lodge (which leaves him cold and soggy and forces him to cut the apprenticeship short in order to investigate the effects that the freeze ray has had on him), or by ordering a “coffee to go” from the Coffee Shop and pouring it into Gary’s frozen mouth (as advised by Aunt Arctic after you approach her at her igloo). Interestingly, this path mentions that Aunt Arctic’s igloo is filled with puffles of every colour even though it has previously been stated that she only owns five: ElenorMae, Agent, Cornelius, Scone and Herbert.

If you manage to unfreeze Gary with your ray, you can continue on to the main adventure: Gary would like your help testing the Time Machine 3000, an invention he’s been working on for quite some time but never been able to test with anything alive before. The machine is described as a tall metal box with a curtain covering the opening, like one of those booths at a train station that you enter to get your photo taken, with the interior walls lined with twisted tubes filled with neon-coloured liquid. Gary programmes your coordinates and destination in with a wireless control panel, but leaves it up to you to bring the machine back using a lever on the roof.

Gary gives you the choice of whether you want to travel to past or the future, and then the time travelling begins. The machine begins to shake and the liquid in the tubes begins to swish and swirl, before glowing brightly. Then, the glowing neon liquid begins to spiral around the tiny booth, making you dizzy. Your ears begin to buzz faintly, and a strange tunnel of dim light opens up right in front of you, out of nowhere. You then get sucked into the tunnel and arrive in your new destination, still inside the machine.

If you choose to travel to the future, Gary only sends you forwards 23 hours, so all that’s changed is that you now have a hungry puffle and your apprenticeship is over. You do get a certificate reading “Official Inventor’s Apprenticeship”, though.

If you choose to travel to the past, Gary sends you on a more interesting mission: To recover the green notebook containing his plans that he lost at the Coffee Shop during the Winter Luau (2006). Upon arriving in the past it’s easy to get caught up in the festivities, but this doesn’t end well.

The best idea is just to head straight for the Coffee Shop, in which case you’ll find Gary’s notebook, but also run into him on your way back to the Time Machine 3000. This makes things a bit confusing as you’re supposed to give the notebook to future Gary, so you can run away (and trip over, dropping the notebook into an icy puddle and ruining the notes inside) or show Gary the time machine and hope that he knows what to do (shown below).

Upon returning to the future, Gary appreciates you returning his notebook, and finds that he suddenly remembers meeting you that day. He also extends your apprenticeship so you can work on the invention planned in the notebook, making this one of the best endings in the book.

But what happens if you don’t freeze Gary in the first place? If you choose to show him your gadget later? Gary starts to give you a tour of the back of the Sports Shop, showing you his desk covered in papers and coffee stains and explaining that it usually takes him several weeks to plan an invention, but he’s quickly interrupted by a call from the Pizza Parlor saying that the Pizzatron 3000 has broken, leaving you with the choice of going with Gary (embarking on the rocket-powered surfboard adventure), or staying behind to peek at some of his top secret inventions (embarking on the Size-a-Tron 3000 adventure).

The most sensible thing to do is to go with Gary to the Pizza Parlor and help him fix the machine. Gary gives you the task of readjusting the levers on the gearbox, which are currently all pushed in. Two levers need to be pulled out, either the green ones or the red ones. While most readers just take a random guess here and hope for the best, this question is actually testing your Club Penguin knowledge; the starting position of the levers is given on the old Pizzatron 3000 start screen.

Pulling the wrong levers out results in the conveyor belt chugging along at superspeed (once Gary clears a stray piece of seaweed from the motor), shooting “tomato sauce” and hot sauce out of their containers, and sending the other condiments flying through the air. Gary isn’t mad, saying that it was his own fault for not telling you which speed it needed to be set to, as the speed can be custom-calibrated (meaning the conveyor belt moves at different speeds which can be controlled by the penguin operating it).

He then invites you to take a seat and share a pizza, saying that when he was younger he made similar mistakes (one time he was working on a snow cone flavouring machine and ended up smelling like raspberries for a month—all because he didn’t correctly tighten the valve for the output tubing!). He also mentions that he’d like your ideas on preventing the prototype sled from falling apart every time he takes it out for a test run.

If you correctly place the levers, Gary orders his favourite pizza (he likes it with extra cheese and anchovies), and you take it back to the Sport Shop. Gary then reveals to you his Top Secret prototype: the rocket-powered surfboard. This white board looks pretty normal except for the two small rockets on the back, which are attached to some kind of fuel tank with a switch on top.

After explaining that he’s always been fascinated with the science behind surfing, Gary gives you the task of testing it while keeping the invention top secret, so you meet the jetpack penguin from Catchin’ Waves outside and take off for the Cove. The first time the penguin drops you into the water, you don’t turn the engines on fast enough and wipe out. Your friend then approaches you on the shore and asks if she can help you test the gadget (a bad idea as the board isn’t made to support that kind of weight). If you make the sensible decision and turn her down, you go shooting across the waves until the splashing water puts out the rocket fire, bringing you to a stop (you will need some kind of shield to prevent that from happening).

If you try and fix the surfboard yourself in order to impress Gary, you successfully solve the problem by positioning a pail on the back. Unfortunately, you get a bit carried away and surf out until you run out of fuel, and can no longer see Club Penguin.

If you instead take the board back to Gary, he takes out a box containing two clear plastic shields: a lightweight one and a heatproof one. The heatproof shield is a success; turning on the engines before the penguin drops you, you find yourself able to do flips far more easily (although regular tricks are a little tricky). With the success, Gary asks if you would be willing to be his official prototype tester (Another of the best endings in the book). Unfortunately, the lightweight shield doesn’t fare as well. The plastic melts, causing the rocket flames to be put out just before a massive wave hits you, mangling the board.

To embark on the third adventure, you have to choose not to go with Gary to the Pizza Parlor. This adventure gets into things pretty much immediately, giving you the option to either looking underneath the blue tarp, or inside Gary’s Room. Entering Gary’s Room ends the path immediately as the door is alarmed, resulting in a beeping siren and red flashing lights as soon as you turn the handle. Then, in a surprising turn of events that contradicts every single other path, Gary opens the door from the other side and turns off the alarms from a button on the wall, revealing that he faked the call from the Pizza Parlor to see how you would act if left alone and if he could trust you.

To avoid violating Gary’s trust, it’s better to look under the tarp and find the Size-a-Tron 3000. This is a big metal box with an arm attached to the front and some kind of tube extending from the arm. The Size-a-Tron contains five buttons that each (with the exception of the triangle-shaped button) cause the arm to turn towards you and blast you with some effect.

If you choose not to fiddle with the machine more, but to find Gary instead, you embark on a 10 page long adventure that only gives you one opportunity to make a choice: at the Snow Forts you need to choose whether you hitch a ride on the green penguin, who takes you straight to the Pizza Parlor where you can help Gary fix the Pizzatron 3000 by reconnecting a loose wire deep inside the machine, or on the purple penguin who goes into an empty room and teleports away with their spy phone, leaving you behind. To make matters worse, a red puffle then hops towards you with its mouth wide open, leaving you hoping that they’re vegetarians.

With that, we conclude the final chapter in the Inventor’s Apprentice. I noticed that this book was a lot more reliant on luck than common sense than the last one, asking you to pick at random which wires to switch, which buttons to press and, for most people, which levers to pull quite often. The book is also a bit more straightforward than the last one, with most incorrect paths being cut off after just one mistake, rather than branching out more. You can see this evidently in the complete map of the book below. Be aware that I covered the paths in the opposite order that they’re presented in below, so try not to get confused!

But that’s just about everything of interest in the second club penguin pick-your-path book. If you have any questions or would like some more specific details or quotes, feel free to leave a comment below, and until next time,