—Under what circumstances would you like to meet this person?

Brockmeier: Scene: James Agee steps out of a cab in front of The Nation's offices at Broadway and Fulton. He takes the elevator to the eleventh floor (he would never consider climbing the stairs). It is Friday evening, and most of the magazine's personnel have already finished their work and gone home for the night. Agee himself is only stopping by to pick up his jacket, which he has left draped over the arm of his chair. He walks down the corridor—it is so quiet that he can hear his shoelaces brushing the carpet—and opens the door of his office. Inside he finds me waiting with a laptop computer and a stack of DVDs.

Crosley: While standing on the street and looking into the window of Cartier. I would spot his reflection in the window as he approached. And then he would say something like: “I can get it for you wholesale.”

Gee: Since this is a game about history, of course I'd like to travel back in time to meet her. Lady Mary wrote a vivid series of letters about the years she spent in Turkey, which include a description of a visit to a Turkish bath, and the splendid meals and receptions that she was part of at the Royal Palace in Istanbul. I'd like to follow her around at those events, not just to see a historical period that has disappeared, but to see the Ottoman Empire in its full splendor too.

Hunt: I’d go back to 1893. We’d have a big dinner at the newly opened Waldorf Hotel, when it was where the Empire State Building is now. His friends Mark Twain, John Muir, Robert and Katharine Johnson would all be there. We’d eat oysters that had been pulled from New York Harbor. After dinner we’d walk slowly through 1893 Manhattan, down to Tesla’s laboratory for a show of the wonders he’d been working on—wireless transmission of energy and information, oscillating resonance, flying machines, lightning.

Pritchard: 1) I would like to be whatever bed Queen Elizabeth I tossed and turned her pale, lithesome, virginal self upon in Netley Abbey, turned grand house belonging to the Earl of Hertford, on August 13th, 1560, when she stayed the night during one of her “royal progresses.” To be the straw and silk-embroidered linen beneath England’s most fretful power, unable to find rest in this or any woodland sanctuary, to be that one fortunate cushion privy to a night of fierce, warring “Queenes Maiestees” thought! 2) I would like to be that fatal stone, arch keystone of the chapel’s East window, which fell upon the eminent Southampton builder William Taylor’s eighteenth century head as he attempted to tear down a part of the Abbey which he had purchased for materials—after he had dreamed of this very stone, of its role in his death. Oh, to be the instrument, the gruesome stone which did Fate’s bidding! 3) I would like to be that gorgeously fleshed woman, masked, but otherwise naked, an eighteenth century reveler on a midsummer’s eve, seduced and seducing in the moonlit, owl-infested Abbey ruins, counted the very next day, in Southampton, among the minor aristocracy, wondrously bejeweled, daintily dressed, demure as a nun, aloof.