^ 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

Asking something about some text (past tense asked it about)

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.
Asking is an action existing only to catch commands like ASK STEPHEN ABOUT PENELOPE. Customarily in IF, such a command is shorthand which the player accepts as a conventional form: it means 'engage Mary in conversation and try to find out what she might know about'. It's understood as a convention of the genre that Mary should not be expected to respond in cases where there is no reason to suppose that she has anything relevant to pass on - ASK JANE ABOUT RICE PUDDING, for instance, need not conjure up a recipe even if Jane is a 19th-century servant and therefore almost certainly knows one.

Typed commands leading to this action

"ask [someone] about [text]"

Rules controlling this action

report an actor asking something about block asking rule
name
unlist 1

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