^ 1 | Details — A single action in detail. About the action rulebooks

Standard actions concerning other people
Giving it to , Showing it to , Waking , Throwing it at , Attacking , Kissing , Answering it that , Telling it about , Asking it about , Asking it for

Answering something that some text (past tense answered it that)

The Standard Rules do not include any systematic way to handle conversation: instead, Inform is set up so that it is as easy as we can make it to write specific rules handling speech in particular games, and so that if no such rules are written then all attempts to communicate are gracefully if not very interestingly rejected.
The topic here can be any double-quoted text, which can itself contain tokens in square brackets: see the documentation on Understanding.
Answering is an action existing so that the player can say something free-form to somebody else. A convention of IF is that a command such as DAPHNE, TAKE MASK is a request to Daphne to perform an action: if the persuasion rules in force mean that she consents, the action 'Daphne taking the mask' does indeed then result. But if the player types DAPHNE, 12375 or DAPHNE, GREAT HEAVENS - or anything else not making sense as a command - the action 'answering Daphne that ...' will be generated.
The name of the action arises because it is also caused by typing, say, ANSWER 12375 when Daphne (say) has asked a question.

Typed commands leading to this action

"answer/say/shout/speak [text] to [someone]" reversed

Rules controlling this action

instead of doing something to the cables

instead of doing something other than examining, talking, answering, looking, waiting, getting off or exiting when the player is on the sofa

report an actor answering something that block answering rule name unlist 1

A "[There] [are] no reply." name set