Escape the Night: An Invitation
A/N: And the first challenge of the night begins!
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Disclaimer: I don't own anything from Escape the Night. I just own any and all characters that I just happen create.
CHAPTER EIGHT: SEARCHING FOR KEYS PART ONE
After choosing teams, Dawn, Joey, Eva, and GloZell hurried out of the dining room to search for the first key in the study, while Tim took Andrea, Sierra, and Justine with him to search for the second key in the library. Matt, Lele, and Oli hurried into the foyer to search for the third key while Bart and Benny were helping Arthur with looking after Shane, having placed a pillow under his head.
In the library, Tim was searching the shelves for the book they needed. "Uh…" He scoured the place, scanning the shelves for potential clues. "Letters and words are in books…" he muttered. 'Come on, DeLaGhetto, you have one job, dammit!'
Now, if it was just him, he knew he could probably do a pretty decent job. But he had Andrea, Sierra, and Justine with him, and he suspected that none of them had read a book in years. That was going to be a problem.
"Is this a…" Sierra poked at an especially thick book on the mantlepiece that had a complex lock on it. "Is this a thing?" She giggled.
'A definite problem,' Tim thought. 'Shane's gonna die because I have three dumb girls with me!'
In the foyer, Oli, Lele, and Matt found another box that they were pretty sure hadn't been there when they first arrived, and they were examining it, trying to find the key to save their friend.
"Where's the key?" Matt wondered, trying to peer through the holes into the box.
Oli, however, was right on top of things. "Hold on, wait!" He waited for Matt and Lele to get their heads out of the box, and then he started poking around the hole – or, at least, one hole in particular. "The square…so we need to get it to the square…" He stuck his hand straight through the hole.
"I've got something!" he shouted in triumph when he felt something inside the box. "A box…a box of some sort…"
The pieces click together in Matt's mind. 'The key, the key, this has to be the key…but how in the world are we going to get that box out of this gigantic box?'
The three of them started sticking their hands through every available hole, feeling around, pushing the box, trying to guide it towards the exit…
'…the helping hand of a friend…the helping hand of a…'
Joey entered the study with Dawn, Eva, and GloZell, searching for the location of the key, that was supposed to be as high as a mountaintop. It was clear to them that whoever had poisoned Shane had a thing for riddles.
GloZell was looking around and she noticed something odd about a portrait of a mountain. Something was sticking out of the top of the top of the mountain. "Look, look!" she exclaimed, pointing to one of the study's many paintings. "There's somethin' sticking out of that mountain."
Joey, Dawn, and Eva dropped what they were doing and took a gander at the painting in question. Yes, there was a mountaintop, and GloZell was right; there was some sort of string sticking out of it.
"I don't know now, don't mess up these people's paintings…" GloZell warned as Joey got to work pulling on the string. "That's someone's painting!"
Personally, Joey didn't give two cents about the painting, not when Shane's life was on the line. So he gave the blasted thing a few good yanks, the string came loose, and there was the key!
"A key!" he shrieked, smiling for the first time since this entire mess began. 'We got it, we got it, thank God, we can still save him…'
"Come on," Dawn said, feeling relieved. "Let's get this back to the dining room and save Shane."
Agreeing, they hurried out of the study, feeling hopeful.
In the library, Tim picked up the book that Sierra had found on the fireplace mantle, and sure enough, it was the book they needed. That was the good news. However the bad news was how were they going to open the blasted thing?
He set it on the table and they all examined the cover that had devils on it, along with words and numbers.
"So there's two devils," Andrea read, trying her best to conceal her confusion. She was the Fixer, she can fix anything, surely a simple math puzzle isn't beyond her abilities. "How many souls has he perverted this week?"
Justine was already way ahead of her. "Three young ones."
Andrea stared at the riddle before her. It was a sea of words and numbers and devils and perverted souls, none of which make any sense to her. And the font was kind of hard to read; she was honestly getting a headache just looking at it.
"To confound the king of devils and avoid his fiery wrath, he gives them a riddle instead of a straight answer." Justine took a deep, shaky breath. "Okay."
And that's when Andrea started to panic. She was no good at math—never has been—and Fixer or not, this was way too confusing for her tiny YouTube brain to comprehend. "We're YouTubers," she fretted aloud. "We're not mathematicians."
"Where's the mathematician?" Sierra asked, giggling.
"It's all right." Tim took the book from Justine. "I'm Asian. I got this."
'Thank God,' Andrea thought, and she moved aside and let her friend take over.
Oli, Matt, and Lele were still trying to get the box with the key through the maze that was inside the large box, and they were briefly distracted when Joey ran by with the key, and Dawn, Eva, and GloZell were right behind him.
"Guys, we got a key!"
Oli ignored them and spoke to Lele. "Put you hand in there," he suggested, pointing to one of the holes she did so, and she was also wishing that Matt would actually help, but he was just standing nearby, being useless.
In the dining room, Joey was trying the key on the locks, and so far it wasn't fitting the first two locks. "It has to be this one," he said to Dawn, Eva, and GloZell, sticking their key into the one compartment they hadn't tried yet. Fitting the key into the lock, he turned it, and it unlocked, getting sighs of relief from the girls since it meant that they had a real chance of saving Shane. He quickly took the tiny bottle out of the compartment. "I got it!"
Eva snatched the bottle from him and kneeled down next to Shane. She unscrewed the cap, and held it out to him. He took it with trembling hands and down the whole thing in one swallow.
Dawn knelt next to Shane and checked his pulse. "It's working," she informed them. "His pulse is starting to steady."
"We need all three in order to cure him!" Arthur called out, reminding them all that Shane wasn't out of the woods just yet.
Trying to ignore her tear-stained thoughts, Eva kept her eyes fixed on the ginger-haired boy she was going to all this trouble for. 'C'mon, Shane, you can do this,' she thought, 'you're gonna make it, you've gotta fight it…Shane, please, hold on, they're coming, just stay awake, stay alive, don't leave me…I can't keep this secret alone.'
In the library, Tim was trying to figure out the riddle so that they could unlock the book and get the key, but he was having troubles since Andrea, Justine, and Sierra weren't being very helpful, and it was making it hard to focus on the numbers.
"There's three young ones," Tim muttered, going through the riddle once more. "And how old are they?"
Andrea shook her head. "We're not doing very good, man!"
"If you multiply their ages," Tim continued, ignoring her, "you will get the number thirty-six. If you add all their ages together, you will get the number of devils in the grand council." He pointed at the small, winged creatures engraved on the cover of the book. "Oh, wait, is this the number of devils?"
"That doesn't have anything to do with it!" Sierra protested and she was still giggling as she said it, and Justine couldn't help but wonder if the girl was secretly some sort of giggle machine.
"It'll help us solve the riddle!" Tim insisted.
So they counted up the devils, and there were thirteen of them, and Justine was just glad they're making progress.
"Do we have, like, a pen?" Tim asked, looking around for a pen to write with so he could do the math.
"A pen?" Sierra repeated, almost hysterical. "We don't have a pen! We don't have time for a pen!" And her statement was immediately proven correct by the butler. "We only have three minutes!" he shouted, and even Justine's optimism was beginning to wear thin.
A/N: Will they save Shane, or will he die? R&R everyone!
