Why This Wasn't a Diamond Necklace

This wouldn't have been written if not for Neo Twiny Jam. So I thank the creators, @manonamora and @red-autumn for that.

I also remember a frivolous argument with a coworker about whether Maupassant's The Diamond Necklace (La Parure) was written by O. Henry or Maupassant. We didn't have gutenberg.org back then.

In Maupassant's story, a woman spends money to get a nice dress and jewels to go to a ball, where everyone comments on her. There are certain clues that, indeed, the necklace is not as valuable as it seems, and she takes a wild guess where it was picked up. (In fact, the box it comes in is different from the store the jewelry is bought from, which may suggest her friend Mme Forestier is a bit of a poseur.)

In this work, a senior waylays a freshman with the prospect of the upperclassmen's lounge/lunchroom. The freshman is wowed more than they should be by the advice and the brazenness of being able to sneak in the (seemingly) forbidden lunchroom-- wowed so much, in fact, they could easily have something stolen from them! Perhaps I should have had the person lose a dollar bill, or have other seniors giving the main character advice and saying you'll go far and stuff like that.

And the advice is self-contradictory! I didn't want to make a plain Twine story, and the main technical thing I did was to have two arrays that were shuffled randomly--but in the same order. So for instance

(a1, b1, c1, d1) and (a2, b2, c2, d2) were the pieces of advice, with a1/a2 contradicting each other. Then something like b1 d1 a1 c1 b2 d2 a2 c2 would be the patterns. Originally I'd hoped to space the advice out and keep trying until everything was 4 or 5 apart, but this was too complex and painful. So I went with having things far apart. These took up most of the jam's word count, and if I do a post-comp release, I may pull them to add some detail. Such as how you may notice the senior never gave you concrete advice of what classes to take.

As for other parallels? The main character labors under the delusion that the advice was absolutely helpful for years, which is not as bad as owing ten years' worth of money from manual labor, but still not so great, until they find out The Truth. They realize they'd been suckered a bit, and the antagonist (so to speak) laughs it off. They just wanted to blow off steam years ago, and the jewels of wisdom were just paste!

Again, parts of this don't meld with the original story, where the person sending the invitation was different from the person loaning the jewels. I forgot this detail. Maybe it's for the better, I didn't copy too much.

I suppose there are other themes. Like poverty being a state of mind and not really questioning how things are, or being grateful for any advice or fun, or feeling good you got sort of a bargain (as Mme. Loisel does bumping the price from 40k francs to 36). Or just having a weight on your back. Fortunately for the protagonist, they are able to brush things off and learn. But I really enjoyed how The Diamond Necklace quickly gave those perceptions of class and lack of mobility and being stuck not questioning things, without driving the message home (e.g. Mme Forestier being socially below the people who gave the invites, but well above Mme Loisel.) And it's fun to wonder about if or how the necklace got stolen.

But one thing that stuck me as amusing was that I was writing a story about people who couldn't admit they lost/forgot something, and I couldn't admit I forgot/lost some of the details to The Diamond Necklace!