Umm, maybe I’m reading too much into your reply, but I get the impression you feel like I’m attacking you somehow by responding to your theory? If that’s so, it’s not the intention. I’m just offering what little evidence I gathered in order to see if we can figure this out.
I have no idea why one of the agents is being abducted, nor what sets it off. I’d sure like to know though.
Oh no, not at all!
I was just saying that I´m ready to throw that thesis (with the idle timer) out of the window, if it has been disproven. I had even let that door open and I was just saying that if that isn´t how that this works (as you have discovered) it might be something else or poor coincidence after all.
No harm done!
Ah, OK… oof!
I find it very important that when I step on people’s toes, it’s intentional. 
Aha! So it´s not how often one of the two agents has been used in total up to that point but who had been used less recently. Makes sense because it of course is impossible that the one you´re using at the moment gets abducted.
Why only after ThimbleCon has been visited?
Is that true? Or maybe it´s generally only after their return to the town?
Hardware store is also puzzling.
I guess @LowLevel is referencing the third line in Ron’s code: the if statement is only true if an agent is not kidnapped and Thimblecon has been visited.
Oh, hm I don´t see any particular reason at first sight.
I wonder how the cutscene timers for Maniac Mansion worked. For Monkey Island 2 they´re very obviously happening each time you got a map piece, but others seem more arbitrary.
“HardwareStore” should be the old name of the vacuum tube shop. The kidnapping doesn’t happen if the player is there.
My hypothesis is that the code that Ron has posted is related to the scene in which one of the agents appears on the coroner’s table. Since one of the characters shown in this scene is Ricki, it makes sense to avoid showing the scene if the player is with Ricki in the vacuum tube shop.
btw: Is Thimblecon in act 2?
I guess they are just timed events. But I remember that @David said somewhere that it was difficult to do the “walk” from Ed’s room to the door.
I see. I didn’t remember Ricky being there. That makes sense.
No, it’s in act 4.
Thimblecon is closed up to chapter 4 (The Will).
I can imagine that, because the abilty to get caught means all the rooms need to be scanned forwards and backwards again. It´s not just that he beams from his room to the door and back into his room(and I guess the time it takes for that also needs to be consisent everytime, I might actually try and stop the time once).
In that case the if statement in line 3 would never be true, because the test in line 2 stops the control flow if the game is not in act 2. In other words: line 3 is only executed if we are in act 2. But as we haven’t Thimblecon in act 2, no agent would be kidnapped …
Or in other words: I don’t understand Ron’s code. 
Maybe I’m erroneously interpreting the usage of visited_thimblecon. I might be wrong to assume that its value is set to TRUE when the player enters ThimbleCon.
It might also be possible that act and chapter are not the same thing.
That’s a good hypothesis.
I thought the same, but Thimblecon in act 2 seems to make no sense at all. AFAIR you can only read the poster about Thimblecon - and that hasn’t much to do with the kidnapping…
Can both agents still be kidnapped in act 4?
I thought the same, but I can’t image what “act” could be else - hm… maybe short for “acting”?
