Sep 15, 2024
Author's Commentary #198:
Time to talk about Chapter 198: Meadow Hay Mercury.
The climatic showdown of Side Story 3 is here, and there's quite a lot to talk about. First off, the mercury being smeared on the pieces is actually based off a true story where a Russian player smeared mercury from a thermometer on her opponent's pieces. Kugisaki ended up going overboard though and smearing pure mercury on all the pieces, more so on the black due to thinking it would be harder to spot, and that Okisato would be playing as black. However, since Ginji used his DESPER, and there weren't official tournament pairings in effect, he ended up being forced to play as black, meaning he unintentionally got a higher exposure to the mercury than Okisato.
Speaking of which, the mercury poisoning is how I decided to justify Ginji playing lower than his skill level. I was trying to play matches against bots around his elo, but the games ended up going over 50 moves no matter what opening I seemed to play. Thus, I lowered the elo and eventually managed to get this game. I was originally going to have Okisato win with a Bongcloud, but the Meadow Hay worked out much better.
As for Kugisaki, he's essentially been turned into a Mechanical Turk, but still retains his consciousness. For those who don't know, the Mechanical Turk was a famous chess playing automaton built in 1770 and was claimed to be an automaton chess playing machine. In reality, it was secretly controlled from within by a skilled chess player, which is why it was able to beat so many at the time.
The other fun tidbit is that Kugisaki's name, Shin, can translate to "new" in Japanese, however Kugisaki's name actually uses a different kanji for Shin. 新 is the kanji that means "new", thus the joke is that Raymond is essentially calling Kugisaki "New Turk" which is fitting since he's essentially a new Mechanical Turk machine now.
(If I made any mistakes with the translation, feel free to correct me).
As for Ginji, he's likely to face some disciplinary action for being aware of the mercury plot, though it will probably be far less severe than Kugisaki's punishment. Most likely just a fine and week-long ban from playing competitively.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
