Novel Full Chapter 1946 Four Sides
Chapter 1946: Chapter 1946 Four Sides
— Lily —
The orb stick turned out to be the big key to cracking the puzzle box. Completing the correct sequence shown on the ceiling would open up the corresponding side of the box based on what colour you started with. They each had a small puzzle inside of them, and would reward you with some little trinket. What you did with that was different in each case.
The red door had one of those button puzzles where you needed to ensure the entire board was lit up, and pressing the button turned it on, or off, along with doing the same to all of the buttons directly next to it. This was of course, made more complicated by the random assortment of buttons that were already lit up across the board meaning you couldn’t figure out the basic pattern and then repeat it… to an extent anyway.
Really, the main difficulty for the red challenge was actually pressing the buttons. They were all miniscule and it was clearly a challenge that had been designed, tested, and then shrunk down massively to fit in the box. It ended up being easier for Lily to press the buttons with thin tendrils of shadow because even Hedera’s fingers were too big to avoid pressing an extra button or two, and her fingers weren’t exactly chunky.
The reward for beating the red task was a little red gem and they had no idea what to do with it so instead moved onto the green challenge. It was similar in some ways. It was a puzzle with a bunch of switches you could flick on and off along with a few lights at the top of the puzzle. You had to light them all up green to finish it… but it wasn’t exactly clear what the different switches changed.
Just as an example, flicking the first switch turned on the second light, the second switch didn’t seem to do anything but flicking the third switch turned off the second light, and turned on the first one. There was probably some trick to the switchboard you were meant to work out after a deal of trial and error… but there were only eight switches and they only had two positions each. It was easier to just flick them on and off randomly until they got the correct solution. No idea why it worked, but it did so they took their prize and moved on.
The prize for the green puzzle was not the green gem they’d expected, it was a small metal rod. At first glance it might fit into that spot from the start… but it was a rectangular cuboid instead of the cylinder they needed so off to the table it went and onto the Blue puzzle. This one was one of those liquid puzzles where you had to get a certain amount of liquid into a container, and you had three containers to do it with.
Wasn’t very hard. Lily knew some people found that sort of thing nearly impossible but it was pretty simple math, and if you understood how the sizes worked it was really easy to even everything out. In this case, they had a one, a three and a seven unit set of beakers with the goal being to get to five units in the seven tall beaker. Lily was honestly more curious about how the puzzle box was able to know when to add more water to the first beaker but she had no idea how to figure that out.
Their reward for finishing the blue puzzle? A teardrop shaped gem. The final puzzle they needed to do was the yellow puzzle… and they had no idea what it wanted them to do at first glance. They were in fact, so confused that the pair completely ignored it after opening it originally. It should’ve been the second puzzle the pair attempted if they did them as they opened, but after not understanding what the heck was being asked of them… they moved on.
It was a good thing they did, because what they were missing was the reward for finishing the blue and red tasks. It still wasn’t immediately obvious what to do, the yellow ’puzzle’ was a landscape picture with a river running through the middle and a sun in the corner. You couldn’t do anything to it. It didn’t react to anything you touched. It simply was.
They had to work out, mostly through a lot of poking, that if you pressed the red gem up against the sun it got sucked up into the picture and the sun started to move a bit. With that accidentally discovered pressing the blue gem into the river was an easy guess… thought it was a little harder than that. When they first tried to press it into the river nothing happened. It wasn’t absorbing the gem at all.
They started to try them gem in other places, tried lifting up the box and checking there, glanced at the ceiling for options. Tried looking through the various other challenges to look for a spot for the gem… but what they actually needed to do was place the gem up against the start of the river. Not the middle, not the end, specifically right at the mouth of the river at the back of the picture.
Still no reward though. So now they were left with the tiny cube, a slot for a cylindrical thing they didn’t have yet, the rod to open the various puzzles, another square rod and no clue what they were meant to do. In the end, they spent way too long poking around the painting. It was ten minutes of both Lily and Hedera trying to make it react in any way to them… but in truth what they needed to do was inset the rod they had into the area ABOVE the blue puzzle.
It took them twenty minutes to find it, but it turns out there was a small section between the top of the box and the puzzle itself and you could slip the rod into it. Once you did, the little stands with the liquid fell away into the bottom of the box and a tree dropped down. That obviously went into the yellow part of the box.
Nice landscape aside… placing the tree still didn’t give them the reward. Luckily the two had been conditioned to poke at everything afterwards and this time, the tree could be poked to shake it. Multiple pokes and the reward dropped down! It was a giant key. Hedera took it and tried to use it on the base. Didn’t work. A second test, this time on the top of the box. Still didn’t work. Sighing, the two put it to the side to deal with later… where it came into contact with the rod and sphere combo, causing the orb on the end to light up.
A tap with the rod, and the top open up and inside was one last puzzle. It was actually a bit funny. Inside was another puzzle, one of the metal ones where you had to untangle everything… and they had their answer. In the middle of that mess was a cylinder that looked to be perfectly sized for that little hole they found at the beginning. Sure it had a few holes in it but that hopefully wouldn’t matter.
Untwisting everything was the name of the game at that point. Lily took charge of this one mostly because she could hold it aloft with her shadows while keeping them thin. This let the pair see every angle without any real obstructions to start unwinding the whole thing. The interconnected metal bits were a pain, but once they figured out where to start it wasn’t too bad. See, the main rod had a bunch of holes, that had other bits and bobs going through it. To unhook those you had to start elsewhere… but once you finished with each obstruction you could move onto the next pretty obviously.
All that was left was to place the rod into that little gap and they were done!
— Kat —
Kat had gotten sick of what she was doing and decided to do something that might count as cheating after about half an hour of failed attempts to free herself. It might be cheating… but what Kat did was transform into water while leaving her ’hand’ inside the box and stretching the rest of her watery body around to the back of the box where she could push the water inside. The lock wasn’t enchanted at all, and she was able to manipulate the water in such a way as to push the pins up. Turning the lock was a lot harder, but Kat managed that too.
When the box snapped open, Kat reformed as if she hadn’t been messing with the lock and waited for something to happen. It took a full five seconds for anything to change, and Kat had honestly been a bit worried she was going to be ’called out’ once again but instead of that the door opened up and she was able to move on. FINALLY.