This chapter has a puzzle in it based off of the actual puzzle in the game. It should be pretty easy, since it's the first one. Give it a try!
Remember to look for me on deviant art, tumblr, and that patron site that I'm not allowed to mention by name on this site for whatever reason.
Chapter 2: Welcome to Dimension Q!
Still firmly held in the air by the collar of her shirt, Iz couldn't help but produce a puzzled and un-amused expression. Was this really what these strange Men in Black had wanted to show her? Was this supposed to be some sort of threat?
After they had been taken hostage by the two mysterious agents, Iz and Auggie had quickly been carried through a maze of back alleys beginning from behind the location of their audition fiasco. The journey was so quick, they had hardly been able to voice any protests or attempt to struggle free before the men had come to a stop at their apparent goal; a dead end dark ally where the only object of any interest was a solitary recycling bin, one the size of a large dumpster and colored a dingy, crust coated blue.
Iz continued to study the filthy metal container, trying desperately to riddle out why these strange shadow-like men had brought her to this very spot. What did she even have worth recycling? Had her audition been poor enough that they wanted to relieve her of her prized keyboard so she could never pollute the air with her noise ever again? But they had failed to bring both the keyboard and Auggie's guitar with them when the men captured them... She racked her brain for an answer; what would they recycle?
Auggie, of course! What else?
Iz could feel through her shirt collar as the men began to position themselves beside the dingy dumpster. "Look!" She suddenly exclaimed, desperate to save her friend and only other band member from being scrapped for parts. "I'll admit, Auggie blew it pretty bad out there..."
Auggie, who's head was firmly cradled beneath one of the younger agents burly arms (and his body gripped tightly under the other arm), blinked. It was upsetting to hear that Iz still pointed the blame squarely at him for flubbing the audition, even though he was sure he had done everything right. But now, he knew, wasn't the time to defend himself given the extreme circumstances.
"But!" Iz continued. "Recycling him is out of the question!"
Even suspended in a captive and vulnerable position, the rebellious teen cast a fierce glare of intimidation on the two suits. She wouldn't give up her robot without a fight.
But the men met her gaze with blank expressions devoid of any fear or concern. They held the unimpressed stare for a few uncomfortable seconds, and Iz had to fight to avoid shrinking down in submission. Finally, the older man placed his free hand and his sights on the grimy lid of the metal recycling bin, seemingly ignoring Iz's remark entirely.
"This..." He began, his dark voice similar to that of an old time-y radio announcer. "Is the gateway to Dimension Q."
With a hearty yank, the gray haired man lifted the lid of the aging dumpster, briefly bathing the entire abandoned ally in a brilliant flash of orange light. Iz and Auggie had to blink a few times to regain their sights before they could make out the contents of the waste bin. Instead of being filled with the expected assortment of bottles, papers, and other reusable metals and such, the entire container was filled to the brim with a thick yellow ooze bearing colorful rings of an orange red and appearing to be the consistency of table syrup. The initial flash had calmed to a faint yet eerie glow, and the musicians could swear they could hear the goo emitting a low frequency rumble like the growl of some monstrous beast.
As Iz and Auggie continued to stare, mesmerized by the sludge's hypnotic bubbling, they were surprised to find themselves being released from their captors and placed gently on the ground. Iz quickly turned towards the mysterious agent types, scanning their faces and posture for any signs of a trap. Though they seemed to be guarding the one escape route with their wide frames, they showed no hint of aggression as they gestured towards the colored ooze. Satisfied yet still unwilling to let her guard down yet, Iz turned back towards the recycling container and looked once more at the churning liquid. Auggie, who was too short to see the goo now that he was no longer being held, clumsily gripped the lip of the metal box and clambered atop the thing, balancing precariously on the edge with his single wheel. Able to see it once more, Auggie's face seemed to light up with a curious excitement.
"Dimension Q?" Iz questioned finally. "This is a portal to a dimension besides our own?"
"Dimensional gateways are hidden all throughout this galaxy." The younger but larger of the two men explained in a surprisingly quiet voice. "There exist an infinite number of these alternate dimensions, and with them, an infinite number of native alien life forms."
"Our agency, the DIA, is tasked with keeping these dimensions and our relations with these other intelligent life forms stable." The older man continued. "But recently we received a distress signal from our agent posted in Dimension Q. All our attempts at a rescue have seemingly failed. In total; Five agents have gone in."
"And none have come out." The younger man finished, an air of defeat in his voice.
"Take a look at this." The eyepatched agent fished a small electronic device out of his pocket and proceeded to tap on its various buttons in a chorus of tiny beeps. "This was the last transmission we received before losing contact with one of our agents, who went in attempting to rescue his comrades. The others, we now know, must have suffered a similar fate."
The older man turned the gizmo around to face Iz and Auggie as the screen began to flicker to life in a hiss of static. As the disturbance settled, an image of a bizarre man sporting some sort of electronic helmet and goggles appeared. The background of the video was in motion and the helmeted agent was rhythmically panting; it was clear he had been running from something when he recorded the message. There was a desperate, terrified expression on his face, with beads of sweat trickling down his brow.
"This is Agent number Four!" The man turned his fear stricken face towards the recording device, his voice and his hands shaking violently. "Please!" Suddenly, he began coughing uncontrollably, forcing him to come to a stop. His whole body quivered unnaturally, and his skin took on a sickly green color. He watched in awe and horror as his limbs seemed to lose their rigidity. Ripples radiated throughout his body as if someone were shaking some sort of gelatin dish. His entire form became more and more translucent.
He turned to the screen one final time in an absolute panic, screaming "PLEASE DO SOMETHING" just before his entire body seemed to melt into a gelatinous green goop, falling to the ground just as the camera recording him did. On impact, the video came to an abrupt stop.
Auggie, who had leaned his head in for a better look, suddenly perked himself up with a wide smile. "How exciting!" he exclaimed.
Iz was shocked at Auggie's nonchalant reaction to a man dissolving into a puddle before their very eyes. "How disgusting..." Iz groaned, feeling sick to her stomach. "Why would you show us something like this?"
"We have reason to believe..." The larger man began, his eyes quickly locking on to Auggie's figure. "That only a robot can resist the gelatinizing process."
It didn't take a genius to see where he was going with this. That's why they had kidnapped them. They wanted a robot. Well, Iz wasn't willing to share, especially if it meant risking the well being of her closest friend. There had to be other robots out there. Surely they could find one more suited to their mission than a housekeeper turned wannabe musician.
But Iz was horrified to see that Auggie looked like he was already on board. The thought of an adventure brought a sparkle to his bright eyes, and he was almost glowing with pride. "This is the chance of a lifetime!" He shouted.
Before she could talk him out of it, the older agent spoke up once again. "Indeed it is." He nodded, a sly grin forming across his face. "If you succeed in this mission, the DIA might just be willing to overturn a certain someones dishonorable discharge."
Auggie beamed, completely won over. There was no way he'd back down now.
Iz attempted to speak, but only managed to produce a series of utterly baffled and bewildered noises. Agencies, alternate dimensions, dishonorable discharges... This was too much information to take on all at once. Her brain fought its hardest to keep up.
Before she could riddle anything out, however, Auggie made his move. He leapt off his wheel with all of his might, diving headfirst into the thick ooze and disappearing completely.
"AUGGIE, WAIT!" She had cried, but her plea fell on deaf ears. Shocked, confused, and acting purely on impulse, Iz saw no other options. Just a few seconds following Auggie's dive, Iz, too, threw herself into the recycling bin and the unsettling sludge inside.
The older man smirked and slammed the lid shut behind them.
Iz had no idea how much time had passed before she finally came to again. With her back laying flat on what felt like cold asphalt, the girl produced a long, pained groaning, struggling just to lift her hands to her tightly clenched eyes. Everything was hurting. Her joints ached, her muscles burned; she imagined this must be what it feels like to have lost a boxing match. She tried to recall what she had done that would have left her feeling this run down. But the last thing she could remember was jumping in the recycling bin after her robot band mate. She released a growling sigh; she'd sooner walk a hundred miles than use dimensional travel ever again.
But had it actually worked? Was she really teleported to a dimension besides her own? Iz weakly removed her hands from her face, blinking a few times in rapid succession in an attempt to restart her fatigued eyes.
The first thing she noticed was the sky. Where she would normally find a brilliant blue backdrop painted with messy brush strokes of white, she found instead a foreign, dreary purple tone colliding with an unflattering dark gray. Further towards the ground, she noticed a cluster of depressing looking skyscrapers appearing to be just a short walk away. It looked a lot like some weird version of a city, except that it was eerily silent. She couldn't hear the ambient sounds of traffic or peoples voices. Iz could sense that this was not Earth.
As she continued scanning the surrounding ground, she spotted a strange dark blue object some 13 feet away from her. Straining her eyes, she quickly realized that it was Auggie's robotic body laying motionless in the dirt. His head, which normally floated just above his blocky chest, was absent. It took a considerable amount of force to break the magnetic field between his head and body, so Iz knew he must've hit the ground pretty hard when he landed. But, where was his head now?
Still laying prone on the ground, Iz rolled her head to look the other direction, only to find that Auggie's head had been sitting mere inches away. As soon as her tired eyes met Auggie's, the battered robot beamed a relieved smile, happy to see that his best friend was awake and alert once more. Iz tried to return the smile, but couldn't overcome her concern for Auggie's condition. His face was dented in several spots, and each of his three antennae hairs were bent. It seemed like they both took a beating somewhere in their journey through dimensions.
Iz groaned and began slowly lifting her head from the ground. "What a trip..." She weakly grumbled, her body aching all over as she finally stood up in a chorus of cracking bones.
Auggie grinned, still surprisingly upbeat about their new adventure. "Yeah!" He exclaimed, suddenly firing every hydrolic in his head, repairing the minor dents and crooked metal. "Cosmic!"
Now on her feet, Iz glanced once more at Auggie's fallen body to determine if he needed assistance getting up. He seemed to have everything under control, though. Auggie's head could move his body even at surprising distances, and the fallen frame was already finding its way back into a standing pose. Beside her foot, the robot's head continued to project a bright smile up at his human companion.
The enormity of the duo's situation was just starting to dawn on Iz. Though she was thankful that they were both in one piece, more or less, they still were lost in some alien dimension on some insane agency mission they knew next to nothing about.
Iz leaned down and gently gripped Auggie's disembodied head. "How could this have happened!?" She wondered aloud, lifting the complex machinery into her arms. Normally, Auggie hated being in such a vulnerable position, as his head housed all his main circuitry as well as all his memories and what was essentially his personality. Iz was one of very few people he found comfortable handling his most fragile component.
"Well..." Auggie began, missing the rhetorical aspect of the question and coming up with a very literal answer for his frustrated band mate. "I jumped into the bin. Then you tried to grab me. But momentum equals mass multiplied by velocity, and-"
iz's expression fell into an exasperated glare. She was in no mood for one of Auggie's overly complicated scientific explanations. She sighed, wishing she had known better than to expect anything less from her computerized comrade. As he continued producing a steady stream of mathematical nonsense, Iz realized Auggie's body had managed to find its way over to her, and she carefully positioned his still babbling head in its proper place, feeling the magnetic field take hold. Now properly assembled, Auggie began using his body to gesture along to his explanation.
Thankfully, the robot was interrupted only a split second later. His eyes began to flash a bright red as his body shook, producing a sound not unlike an alarm clock. Iz perked up again, quickly recognizing this odd behavior. It was Auggie's reaction to someone sending him an electronic message. Iz prayed it was one of the strange men telling them how to get back home.
Auggie closed his eyes and lowered his head slightly, opening a slot on his forehead to reveal a specialized cellular antennae. It took mere seconds for the entire message to beam into his database, at which point he retracted the antennae and obediently turned his back to Iz. The teen stepped closer towards the robot, carefully lifting the dark blue cranial lid on Auggie's head to study the screen hidden inside.
"Someones trying to contact us!" She exclaimed, watching as the screen flickered to life.
"Ten to one it's the agency!" Auggie responded with equal enthusiasm.
Before long, a message with an accompanying video began to play. Only a few seconds in, however, Iz realized something was wrong. The words seemed to jump around in a random order, and the visuals flashed sporadically. They could both clearly hear the distinct voice of the older, eyepatched agent, but they couldn't figure out what he was trying to tell them.
"This is garbage, Auggie!" Iz growled. "It makes no sense!"
Auggie, turning his head to face Iz, shrunk down in a somewhat submissive posture. "My inter dimensional communication facilities are... somewhat limited." He mumbled, embarrassed.
He was speaking in science nonsense again. "Meaning... What, exactly?" Iz snipped.
The robot sighed. "Meaning it's up to you to... Descramble the message..."
Struggling to retain her last bit of patience, iz roughly ground the palms of her hands over her eyes. "Auggie, you're a robot." She spoke slowly, trying her hardest not to sound angry. "Can't you use your computer to descramble it?"
"Normally I could!" Auggie quickly retorted before turning his open cranium towards Iz again. "But my central processing unit was damaged when we entered the space time continuum."
Deciding it wasn't worth getting upset over, Iz gripped the open chamber and pulled Auggie's head a little closer, making it easier for her to reach the buttons and other manual interfaces inside. Auggie's display changed slightly, opening the message using an editing software that began by splitting the video at the points that made no sense and arranging each piece using a single image frame in a time line at the bottom of the screen.
"So all I have to do is drag these icons into the proper order..?" Iz thought aloud, using the interface to randomly swap two images on the time line.
Yeah!" Auggie replied. "So that the message makes sense!"
Iz decided to listen to the entire message as a whole again to see what she was dealing with. She pressed 'play' and watched closely for where the program had cut the message into pieces.
1"Probe. This woman's hairdo could have saved Agent 1..."
2"You have a nice day. And remember, pepper is a better distraction than sodium chloride."
3"From the goo. Unfortunately you will never..."
4"At the salad bar. Finding the Q chip will help."
5"The XT-10 probe, in order to recover your music and..."
6"Your mission, and you have no choice but to accept it is to find..."
7"Get back home. You must recover as many..."
8"Meet her. So you'll have to think fast..."
9"Agents as you can. They have the code to launch the..."
The clips stopped there. Iz cracked her fingers. "Alright. Let me think..."
To be continued...
Can you figure out the message?