trans_9 | Dungeon Keeper

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Dungeon Keeper

The Tapestry had spoken. Not in words, but in ideas and images, ciphers and cryptic nonsense that had been laboriously deciphered, interrogated with spells and technology, pieced together from scrap. They had led here.

Planet Designation: AST994-III Status: Terrestrial, K-class. Non-sentient life: None. Semi-Sentient Life: None. Sentient Life: None. Water: None. Climate: Desert/barren. Landscape: Rocky crags. Air: Normoxic concentration: 29% oxygen, 60% nitrogen, 3% xenon, 6% trace gases, such as hydrogen, krypton, and argon. Air Pressure: 14.352 pounds per square inch. Sky: Red. Cloudless. Sun: Class A star. Warnings: Information from Tapestry indicates significant underground population. Subsurface information not available. Use caution. Mission: ?

Somewhere down there, an object valuable and vital to the mission lay in wait, something so important that its existence was encoded into the Tapestry itself. Whatever it was, they needed to get it.

The only problem was, how to get in? The subterranean world had no access to the surface, and to physically breach it would not only be prohibitive, but catastrophic to the point of apocalypse to that underground world. Science could not solve this problem; thus, the crew turned to magic. The Tapestry had provided what were, after some analysis, unquestionably teleport coordinates. Five of them, for three people each.

To ensure the crew members were not lost, nor left behind without help, contingent spells were laid upon them, to return them to safety and help should they become injured, or should they find the item.

Without further ado -- with no natives to meet and negotiate with, no further preliminaries to make or plans to be made -- each of the five groups, with their supplies and equipment, were taken to the start.

[OOC: Don't worry too much about posting order. I will jump in where a response from the mysterious sky narrator is needed! Going with this, if you feel you're getting lost or outraced in posting, let me or the group know and we'll slow it down. The explicit purpose of this plot is for everyone to have fun, so please speak up if there's anything anyone can do to make that happen better!]

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"The Great One anticipated your arrival and set up this simple challenge, really quite trivial, to ensure that you aren't, you know... the unsavory sort," the face said confidentially. "Goblins or kobolds or whatnot. Just a simple test of intelligence and reasoning, if you're ready?"

That still left the categorization of what was unsavory and what was not rather vague, but a reasoning puzzle didn't seem too difficult on the surface. He was set, but he looked back at his team mates for confirmation.

Maybe they had more insight. How likely was this to be a trap with some trick?

The Doctor wasn't a fan of magic - it was just another word for science that people didn't full understand - but he was fascinated by the mysterious tapestry. Despite the fact that he hadn't been on the ship for long and still had a lot of Stacy to explore, the Time Lord hadn't been able to pass up an opportunity to visit another planet and see what was happening in the world outside. If he was going to stop this war, he'd need every scrap of information he could get.

And he would stop it. Eventually.

He felt more in control now than he had done on Stacy. This, this, was more like it. This was the sort of thing that he did every day. He was in his element at last, gazing up at the tower and the cavern - a bizarre, beautiful cavern - with unrestrained delight when they arrived.

"Brilliant!" he exclaimed, with the sort of enthusiasm that only a Time Lord with nine hundred years of experience - someone who was truly qualified to decide what was brilliant - could manage.

"Of course we're ready," he said, nonchalantly, flashing Billy a genial grin. "But I wouldn't mind knowing who this 'Great One' is first. What if you're the unsavoury ones?"

Billy's found himself with an eccentric genius again. Ever since he befriended Jamie and took the helm of the Engineering department, it's become distressingly common. Not that he isn't one himself, but some are more excitable than others.

"And we still don't know what we're questing for. But I think I'm as prepared as I can be."

"You're not goblins or kobolds. You should be able to pass quite handily," the face said encouragingly. "Now, look to the squares and describe what I say with them!"

The face paused, allowing them a moment to prepare, then spoke again in formal tones.

"Three by three enclose one. Three by three enclose five."

"Grid measurements..." Billy muttered, staring down at the squares. He pictured the way their colors might change if he moved. Enclosing one square in glowing ones? That was easy. Enclosing five? Not so much. There had to be some trick to it.

Billy thought he knew where to start. He drew a little box in the air with his finger, checking the proposed solution. "Shall I?" he asked his partner.

Just checking! There might be a trap or some other insight to consider.

The Doctor was almost disappointed. He'd been looking for a bit more of a challenge. (For his part, the Time Lord wasn't overly concerned about the fact that they didn't know what they were questing for. Sometimes, the journey mattered just as much as the destination.)

He grinned at Billy. He would have corrected him if he hadn't been happy with answer he'd drawn in the air, of course, but it wasn't necessary. He was clearly a very intelligent human.

"Go on then."

Billy wasn't too worried about that. More challenge would come later! These things had an annoying tendency to escalate.

He walked the required path in a more cautious square than he otherwise would, careful to place only one foot on each square until the circuit was complete. That was one...surely they'd get confirmation by then.

"Ideas about the other clue, sir?" Billy had a faint idea of who he was talking to from the buzz on the ship, but he tended to err on the side of formality.

The mechanics were quite simple; touch a square, and it would light. Touch it again and it dimmed once more. It was not designed to be punishing.

In fact, there was no response, one way or the other. Having been delivered together, the paired clues were considered just one question. He hadn't been disqualified immediately, though.

"Sir? Sir?" The Doctor glanced around, as if he was trying to work out who Billy was actually talking to, then pointed a finger at his own chest. "Me? I'm not a sir. Well, not really. There was the time I met Queen Victoria ..."

If he'd had a companion with him, they would have chosen that moment to hit him on the arm and bring him back to the problem at hand. He didn't, though, so the Doctor had to manage it himself.

"Just call me the Doctor," he finished, before starting to jump from square to square to answer the second part of the question. He moved with such enthusiasm that it seemed almost random, but he knew exactly what he was doing and why.

"Right. Hello, Doctor," Billy nodded, a faint little smile of recognition on his face. With that much enthusiasm for a little puzzle, how could the man possibly be anyone else? Among the many versions of Jamie's mentor and friend he'd met, that never changed. "I'm Billy. Just in case you need a name at some point."

He watched the solution, slapping his forehead after the second square. "Of course. Enclosure doesn't necessarily have to be contiguous...right."

~~Now they were just describing things vaguely so the DM felt they got the answer right~~

Correct; if a square was formed from three-by-three lines oriented diagonally, it enclosed five spaces rather than one. The face smiled cheerfully.

"Well-reasoned! If four threes are sixteen, then four fives are what?"

Jamie had told him that he'd been on the ship before, despite the fact that he had no recollection of it, but the Doctor hadn't really thought about the fact that there were people on the ship that knew him when he didn't even remember meeting them. For the consummate time traveller, it was usually the other way round.

The Doctor grinned at the prospect of another challenge, starting to consider the problem as he produced a pair of glasses from a pocket and popped them on.

OOC: Take pity on a mun who is nowhere near as smart as her character!

((ooc: no worries, it's the same for me!))

That was a trickier one. He turned the problem over and over in his head, trying to figure out how it could be possible. Four threes weren't sixteen, they were twelve. Whatever pattern led to this answer would tell him what to do with the fives, so...

There were ways to make sixteen, all right. Four times four, eight times two, sixteen times one, ten plus six, eight plus eight...but nothing with four threes.

He conjured up a mental image of threes, wiggling his fingers in the approximation. Wait. That sort of looked like eights if two of them were mirrored and the four were squished together...but then how could the fives be twisted? All that made was symbols that looked like little cherries if they were mirrored the same way as the threes. Some other way, or a new path entirely?

He tried to show this idea to the Doctor, but it was difficult without a pen and paper. It ended up as a series of finger squiggles.

The squares on the ground, it might be added, continued to glow. Evidently their part in this challenge was not done...

It wasn't entirely clear what Billy was trying to show him, but, thankfully, the light from the ground provided a suitable distraction.

"I think that might be a clue."

"Oh, right!" Billy had gone off so far in his own head that he hadn't noticed the squares at first. "I'm sorry. Scrap that, I'm sure it must be something else. "If four threes are sixteen, four fives are...what?"

He doesn't dare to walk, but he instead sits on the squares, tapping his palm and occasionally looking out at the adjacent squares.

"Or is it algebraic? If everything's supposed to be multiplied by the factor..."

((Guess who remains commpletely lost.))

"Ah, yes. Perhaps a slight guide," the face said with a smile.

Abruptly the squares beneath them were dull and dark, save for one directly in front of them. "This is one one."

A second square lit up immediately above the first. "This is one two."

Two squares over, two more adjacent squares lit up, so that two bars now glowed before them. "This is two twos. Does that help?"

"I don't need a guide!" objected the Doctor, tapping two more squares to create another glowing bar as soon as the face had finished speaking. He was frowning with concentration, but he was still in his element.

To Billy, he added: "It could be a few different things. If it's algebra, it's 1.3. Or it could mean that we're supposed to take three and four as equal. Which can then be used to infer that five and six are equal. Or the first bit is just a red herring and we should just say what four times five is."

"Right," Billy confirms, running over the calculations. "But I expect we have to input the answer the same way, leading to some sort of pattern."

He taps his palm over and over again in various configurations of the four lines of three squares each, trying to somehow box in, write, or otherwise display the concept of sixteen.

"Not roman numerals...or a pun? No. Argh." He raked his hands through his hair, quietly wondering what horrible fate awaited people who were judged to be goblins.

It wasn't quite time to give up, though. No.

At the Doctor's irritated insistence, the guide vanished immediately, and the lights returned to their prior configuration: the two three-by-three squares, one oriented along the lines, the other diagonal.

"Well, at least we've got a bit of peace and quiet now," noted the Doctor, who was still in a better mood than he had any real right to be. He wandered over to give Billy's shoulder a comforting squeeze, still watching the lights.

And then it hit him.

"Of course!" He laughed. "It's so obvious. Brilliant. Brilliant."

Billy exhaled, releasing that frustrated sigh that made his hair fly up. He turned to look at the Doctor and start over with their thinking. That was when the sudden epiphany caught him off guard, leaving Billy to lean back and wonder what he'd missed.

"What was it, Doctor?" He'll learn something, even though he didn't get it. There's that.

The floating face also waited, curious to see if the Doctor in fact had figured it out, or was simply planning to roll an Intelligence check and beg the DM to rule the problem solved based on the results.

Well, the Doctor would prefer to be assumed right simply because he's the Doctor, but his mundane is happy to take whatever they can get.

The floating face had returned to listen to the answer, but the Doctor turned to look at Billy instead.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

The answer he expected was something along the lines of ‘no’ or ‘probably only to a Time Lord’.

Dungeon Keeper

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I couldn't resist, I'm sorry. ^.^

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