In addition to trying to steal the history of medicine, Carmen has also attempted to plunder the concept of language, which would plunge the world into total chaos. The 1997 computer game “Carmen Sandiego: Word Detective” saw Carmen invent a device known as the Babble-On Machine, which instantly turns language into unintelligible gibberish. Carmen’s ultimate goal in “Word Detective” is to render the world illiterate, with only the player character, Agent 13, able to stop her by reversing the machine’s effects.
By the time “Word Detective” was released, the Carmen Sandiego franchise was already veering into more outlandish premises, completely abandoning narrative logic in favor of paper-thin plots to accommodate the educational content presented. Having said all that, the idea of Carmen stealing the concept of language itself just doesn’t make any sense: If Carmen got into a life of crime for the professional challenge, eliminating language to make pulling off thefts easier directly contradicts this motivation.