Chapter 5: Chapter 5: The Crystals

Jason didn’t enter the tunnel completely alone.  The winter wolf stayed by his side, limping slightly.  As a shaman, Jason felt he probably had some healing abilities, but he didn’t know how to cast a spell.  He still had a problem pulling his inventory screen down successfully every time.  He tried not to worry about that and cleared his mind to be fully ready for what lay ahead.

The tunnel was short, and within a minute, he saw a faint light ahead and entered a small cave about twice the size of the basement where his body lay.  Off to his right was a sloping metal rack built into the rock wall displaying a collection of glowing gems, which provided the only light in the room.  On his left, a ring of six pedestals that looked like empty bird baths stood at hip height.  They formed a circle about twenty feet in diameter with a seventh pedestal in the middle, twice the girth of any of the others.

Jason only regarded each of these features momentarily, focusing instead on the wizard standing before him.  He would have been tall if it weren’t that Jason’s seven-foot height looked down on him dramatically.  He wore a dark blue hooded robe that seemed almost black in the dim light, but Jason’s keen orc eyes picked out several darker patterns in the fabric that let him know it was a deep navy. Two numbers floated above the Wizard’s head: a large number 50, and a smaller 800.

“Welcome  . . . Orc Shaman, to your final trial.  Choose six gems.  Place them on the pedestals.  Your answer either earns you the reward or defines your time in my dungeon.”

“What?  No rhyme?”  Jason didn’t know if testing this mage with sarcasm was wise, but he also wanted to know how flexible the dialog interface was.

“There is no time for frivolity.”

“What is the dungeon?” Jason could see images behind the wizard, but they were too frightening for him to stare at long.

“I will not answer your questions.  Forcing me to do so will result in automatic failure, and you will be punished.  You have 36 minutes.”

Jason wondered how he was supposed to force the wizard to do anything.  If Jason had to guess, the numbers over the wizard’s head were basic stats to let you know how to interact with him.  If his level was 50, which made sense, Jason didn’t think he would be powerful enough to make him do anything.  But maybe there were game tricks he didn’t know about.

What concerned him more was the dungeon.  He had a hard time looking at it but knew if he had to solve this puzzle with his back to the frightful images, he better figure out what they were.  Jason walked toward the wizard, playing a little game of chicken but deciding he was the one who should veer out of the way first.  The back wall of the room made him dizzy.  Now that he was closer, he could see images of other player characters.  The “dungeon” looked like it had no depth to it, running the width of the room, but it had over a dozen people in it.  They were stacked like baseball cards along the wall, each one infinitely thin, but when looking at them face-on, they seemed as real as any other 3D image he had seen in this realm.

What disturbed him more than this 2-dimensional prison was the looks on each of their faces.  A wide collection of races and skin colors were present: dwarves, elves, humans, light skin, and dark skin, but they all had the same horrified expression as if they knew they were imprisoned and were desperately trying to find their way out.  Their eyes kept darting about as if they were looking at things over Jason’s shoulder, but they never focused on anything for long.

He remembered that the person who had tried this puzzle before him said he was trapped in some simple mirror maze.  Nothing looked simple about what these people were going through.  Each one also had a number above their head.  From a distance, Jason had assumed it was the same as the wizard, but they only had one, and they differed significantly from each other.  Several had numbers between 20 and 40, a few had numbers in the 100’s while one of the characters had a 4-digit value floating above her.  Jason looked into her eyes and nearly shriveled in terror.

She was a female elf and likely would have been quite beautiful, but her face was contorted in a gruesome expression, her eyes moving about faster than a hummingbird’s wings.  Beside him, the wolf growled at the elf.  “Will these people be released if I solve the puzzle?” Jason asked, finding new motivation.

“You have 33 minutes left,” the mage responded in a monotone.

Thirty-three minutes?  He hadn’t been staring at these miserable souls for three whole minutes, had he?  “How long have I been here?”

“You have 32 minutes left.”

Jason zipped his lips after that.  The mage said he wouldn’t answer any of his questions.  Instead, he only told him how much time he had left, penalizing him a minute each time he asked.  Jason was about to turn away when another character popped into the dungeon.  He was much livelier, screaming and waving his fists inside his 2-dimensional jail.  Jason couldn’t hear him but watched as he slowly settled down, and his head followed some invisible path like he was watching Speedy Gonzalez playing racquetball against himself.  Soon he settled into a rhythm, no longer moving his head, but his eyes still fluttered about.  He had the number 10,001 above his head.

Jason did turn now and promised not to look back.  He started with the gems.  There were six rows of six stones, totaling 36.  Each type of rock was represented in six odd shapes.  He identified an emerald, ruby, diamond, sapphire, onyx, and pearl.  Each stone was depicted as a sphere, a coin, a short cylinder, a triangular pyramid, a triangular tube, and a cube.  Jason picked up the ruby pyramid, thinking it would make a tremendous 4-sided dice.  There were no markings on it, and each side was perfectly smooth, but the gem was enchanting inside.

Jason assumed he would need one of each color and one of each shape, but how should he match them up?  Only the spherical pearl looked like it should, and seeing a diamond in a cube shape looked especially weird.  He picked up the stone in question, which must have been about 15 carats and worth almost half a million dollars if it were real.  With the ruby in the other hand, it looked like he was holding two dice.

They are all dice!

Of course.  The sphere only had one side.  A coin is basically a 2-sided dice.  The cylinder had three sides.  The pyramid and cube were obvious, leaving only the 5-sided triangular-shaped tube that looked like a stubby Toblerone package.  Each stone had a value of 1 through 6.  But which color was assigned to which value?  Was it as simple as the levels you needed to play through to get here?  Counting this final stage, there was six total.

Gracie had said the first stage was a forest, so Jason grabbed the green, emerald sphere.  Next came the lake, and Jason took the pearl coin.  The lava and fire stage had to be the ruby.  And this level was clearly the black onyx.  That left climbing the cliff wall and the snowy mountaintop.  He was left with the blue sapphire and the clear diamond.  The sapphire could represent a clear blue sky, but it had been nighttime.  The diamond could be ice, but Jason had actually been in that fifth level, and it had been all snow.  All the animals were white, and there weren’t any icicles to be seen.

When the paladin had been climbing the cliff, he was battling the air as much as the birds, and wind is transparent no matter what time of day.  Jason grabbed the diamond pyramid.  That left him with the sapphire for the snow, which was obviously wrong.  He had initially assigned the pearl to the water level, but the lake was probably blue, and the white pearl matched much better with the snow.  Jason swapped the pearl coin for a sapphire one and grabbed the 5-sided pearl instead.

He felt confident about his logic and moved over to the pedestals.

“Your guess is finalized when each of the six pedestals has a gemstone,” the wizard advised, answering Jason’s question before he asked it.  A good thing too, or the mage probably would have just deducted another minute.

This was a math problem, not a sudoku.  Placing these gems, valued at one through six, created a mathematical equation that equaled . . . it had to be 50.  And if you got it wrong . . . he hazarded a glance over at the prison with the torture victims, each with a number over their head.  If you got it wrong, your answer defined the time in the dungeon.  Were those hours or days?  Jason didn’t want to think about it.  He just had to get this right.

He knew immediately that there had to be a way to multiply these numbers to get anywhere near 50.  The numbers summed together were only 21.  Jason took some time to really examine the pedestals.  Dirt and grim coated them, but he could see intricate patterns on most.  One looked like a tree with vines climbing the outside.  Jason wanted to think that would hold the green gem, but that seemed too easy.  Another looked like a Roman column.  Another was a skinny pole with birds carved in the air flying around it.  The simplest one looked like a stick with a ball on the bottom.

Beside him, Jason heard the wolf growl.  It was looking at one of the pedestals where the stem appeared to be a bunch of woodland creatures climbing on top of each other to reach the dish above.  Those were all probably prey for the large canine, and the wolf walked toward it and started pawing at the dirty floor of the cavern.

As the large paws wiped away the grime, Jason looked at the cobblestones under his feet for the first time.  It was hard to see the pattern through the dirt and dust, but he could tell it wasn’t uniform.  Jason approached a pair of pedestals and started scrubbing the floor between them.  After a few seconds, he revealed a single stone set in the floor that was slightly lighter than the others in the shape of a plus sign.

“Good job, uh . . . Snowy,” he said, wondering if he should give the wolf a name or if it even had one.  Was it a boy or a girl?  A quick check gave Jason the answer.  “Good girl.  Now can you help me clean the floor around all of these?”

The wolf looked curiously at her master and seemed to understand as Jason worked to clear the space between two more.  Soon the two of them had revealed three more clear mathematical symbols.  In total, there were two pluses and two minuses.  In his mind, he gave each dish a letter and then arranged them in a line.

A + B + C - D E - F

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Even though the pedestals were laid out in a circle, if they were an equation, there would be a start and finish, so it made sense that there was no symbol between F and A, but there needed to be one between D and E unless that was just supposed to be a two-digit number.  If he put the four in D and the five in E and treated them like 45, that could work.  That method might get him to 50, but he would never be able to get a three-digit number, to say nothing of the five-digit answer the most recent victim got.  There had to be something more.

Getting to his knees, Jason wanted to examine the sides of the bowls more closely but instantly saw something else.  The pedestals weren’t all the same height.  E and F were raised slightly.  They were raised.  They were an exponent.  That’s why there was no symbol between D and E.  Jason stayed on his knees a while longer, still not liking it.  The equation was too messy. It needed a better way to determine the order of operation.

Looking at the bottom of the pedestals where the columns met the square bases, Jason saw that despite the variety of the stem designs, they were always perfectly circular where they met the base.  He got a hunch and began cleaning off the beveled transitions and found that on each one, half of the circle was a piece of shiny brass, while the other half was made of the same stone as the rest of the pedestal.  The brass made perfect “C” shapes at the bottom of the columns.

“No,” Jason said aloud, getting the wolf’s attention again.  “Not C’s.  They are parenthesis.”  He stood and looked at his equation again.

(A+B) + (C-D) ^ (E-F)

That looked much better, but there were two problems with it.  The first was that there was no obvious way to get to 50.  The simplest way was to square seven and add one to it.  But the way it was written, he would raise C-D to some power, and there was no way to get seven from that.  The largest he could get was 6-1, which was five.  Four cubed and six squared were each 14 away from 50, but he couldn’t get 14 from adding two numbers under seven.

The second issue he saw bothered him more and made him think he was missing something important.  A and B could be swapped.  The transitive properties of addition meant it wouldn't have a unique solution if the equation stayed like this.  The wide square bases of the pedestals still hadn’t been cleaned, and Jason got to it.  He was rewarded immediately.  On both sides of the large stone squares were chevrons.  No, he thought, not chevrons.  They are “greater than” and “less than” signs.  Only every other pedestal base had them, but once he revealed them all, he stood back and liked what he saw better.

(> A < + B) + (> C > - D) ^ (> E < - F)

Now he could see that A had to be smaller than B.  But he had another problem.  E had to be smaller than F, which would create a negative number in the exponent, giving him a fraction, and making it impossible to get to 50.  Jason worried he was spending too much time on this but didn’t want to waste more of it by asking how much time he had left.

Think Jason, he said to himself.  Take a step back and think about this.  You must be looking at this wrong.  You need to put gems numbered 1 through 6 on six pedestals, and they will combine and make a gem that is 50.  He looked at the center pedestal, where he assumed the final 50-sided stone would appear.  Then it hit him.  He was looking at this all wrong. He was looking at it backward.  He was standing outside the ring of pedestals, but the answer would be inside.  Jason quickly moved between two pedestals and looked back out at the dishes surrounding him.  He had memorized which columns were which letters and now saw everything was backward.  Also, the E/F exponent was direct to the upper right of the A/B pair instead.

(D - < C <) + (B + > A < )^ (F - > E <)

This equation made him much happier.  It was easier to get seven squared now.  Every gamer knew how simple it was to add two numbers between 1-6 to get 7.  And the exponent was now positive and could be two.  He did have the problem that D - C would be a negative number because C had to be bigger than D, but he would worry about that later.  Now he wanted to concentrate on B + A.

Four plus three wouldn’t work.  That would leave 1, 2, 5, and 6, and there was no way to get a difference of two with those numbers.  Five plus two would work, as it left him 3 - 1 or 6 - 4, but then he was left with a negative two for the D/C pair, which gave him a total of 47.  So close.  One and six also worked to get seven, leaving him with 5 - 3 or 4 - 2 to get the two in the exponent, but it also left him with negative two in the D/C pair.  If only he could double the D pedestal, then he could put the three there and turn it into a six, and 6 - 5 would be the 1 he needed.

Jason looked hard at the D pedestal.  It was the simplest of all, with no intricate carvings or flourishes.  If he cleaned the whole pillar, he might find the symbol he needed, but he felt he was running out of time.  He knew it would cost him a minute, but he needed to know how many he had left.

“How many minut-,“ but Jason choked on the question as reality smacked him in the face.  Oh, you clever bastard.  If Jason had finished his question, the mage would have told him how many minutes he had left, thus answering Jason’s question.  According to what the wizard said initially if Jason forced the mage to answer his question, he would fail.  How much time would that have earned him in the dungeon?  Probably 50.  He looked at the far wall again and saw how most of them had numbers under fifty.  Jason was willing to bet they had all made that mistake.

Jason turned back to the mage, who was looking at him expectedly.  “Um,” he said aloud.  “How many, um, licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.”

“You have 12 minutes left.”

Plenty of time to clean that stem.  Jason turned back to it and stopped in his tracks once more.  He almost laughed at how obvious it was now that he looked at it again with a fresh mind.  The pedestal looked like a baseball bat with a large spherical knob at the base.  The stone that connected the ball to the main part of the column was so thin that when you looked at it quickly, it looked like the long part was hovering over the sphere like a . . .

“An exclamation point,” Jason said in triumph.  “Snowy, do you know what a factorial is?”  Jason cast a look at the mage to let the wizard know he was asking his pet, not him, and should not get penalized a minute.  The wolf seemed to know she was being asked a question and whined a negative response.  “All you need to know is 3! equals 6, 6 minus 5 equals 1, and 1 plus 7 squared equals 50.”

Jason carefully placed each dice into the appropriate dishes and paused as he held the number three ruby in his hand to look at the final equation one more time.

(3! - 5) + (6 + 1)^ (4 - 2)

There were three other ways he could get seven squared, but those would leave him with 1!, 2!, or 4! And none of those would give him a one at the beginning.  With confidence, he dropped the ruby into the last dish, listening to it bounce around, sounding exactly like a dice rolled in a ceramic bowl.

Instead of dying out, the sound grew louder, as if dozens of dice were bouncing down a stone dice tower.  He looked around him and saw each gem spinning wildly in their dish, and Jason felt that he might not be standing in the safest spot.  He scampered out of the center and turned to watch the process from a safe distance outside the pedestals.

Light grew over each bowl, growing in intensity with the sound.  Even the onyx gem created a deep black hole over its dish, threatening to swallow the light of the other stones, but instead, they each grew in their own brightness until they suddenly flashed toward the center pedestal as a six-spoked wheel.  The light exploded in the middle like a supernova, and Jason had to shield his light-sensitive orc eyes.  Snowy whimpered beside him, and he reached down to steady the wolf.

The light faded slowly, and eventually, Jason felt comfortable lowering his hand.  The six dishes were now empty, but the center pedestal was not.  Jason walked over to it and picked up the largest gemstone he had ever seen.  He had once held a 50-sided dice at a convention, and this was a good replica, only much bigger.  The crystal was the size of a softball and as clear and flawless as the most precious diamond imaginable.  Deep inside the stone, Jason could see the colors red, green, blue, white, and black swirling around in an endless vortex.

Acting quickly, Jason pulled down his inventory screen and tried to stow the gem away.  With the screen blocking his vision, he could no longer see his hand holding the stone, but he moved it around where he thought an empty slot was and “pushed” it in.  The gem appeared in his inventory, and when he stared at it, it was highlighted and said, “Level 50 Crystal.”

Jason closed the screen and looked down at Snowy.  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

The wolf whimpered again, and Jason couldn’t tell if it was from not knowing the answer to the question or because she was still hurt.  Jason turned to look for the wizard, expecting some form of congratulations, perhaps an iconic “You have chosen wisely,” but the room was empty.  Almost empty.

On the far wall, he watched as the numbers above the prisoners rapidly decreased.  As they each hit zero, the torture victim below disappeared.  The latest victim, who had somehow generated 10,001, was still in the thousands when all the others were gone, but the digits were decreasing exponentially. Within ten seconds, his number hit zero, and he also vanished.  Once the dungeon was gone, Jason could see the back side of the room held a door.

“That better not be trapped.”

Snowy barked in agreement, and the two of them walked forward, opened the door, and left the room.

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