Author's Note: Hope you're ready for more puzzle rooms.
Nonary Game: Resonance
"I'll go ahead and take Door [2] as well," Robin decided. As much as he wanted to believe that he could find a way to relate well to any of the other participants, he couldn't help feeling that Leo was someone he could trust more easily. Indeed, the muscular man seemed to be content with that decision, although Robin began to wonder if he found Robin's constant presence to be an imposition.
"If we're going to enter all three of the doors, then we'll have to divide into three groups of three," Lucky said. "So, I'll be going through Door [2] with Leo and Topaz." 5 plus 8 plus 7 equals 20; 2 plus 0 equals 2. Externally, Robin maintained a neutral countenance, but he could have thought of a few of the others he would rather have been assigned into groups with. Lucky wasn't exactly the caustic type, the kind of person that irritated Robin the most, but the way they spoke did little to assuage any of his discomfort at being forced into the Nonary Game.
"In that case, whoever joins me better have a digital root of 5," Ian noted. "Who's undecided… Basilio, Boxcars, Marcus, Cody, and Delta…" The way he recited everyone's names made it apparent that it had been more for his own benefit.
Alas, Delta was faster to the conclusion than Ian could have been. "The only pair that makes a digital root of 5 is Basilio and Marcus." 1 plus 2 plus 3 equals 6. "So that just leaves Boxcars, Cody, and me to enter Door [1]." 6 plus 9 plus 4 equals 19; 1 plus 9 equals 10; 1 plus 0 equals 1.
"Is everyone satisfied?" Leo asked.
"Like I said earlier," Delta answered, "how could we possibly have that strong of a preference to begin with?"
"You got to make your choice," Lucky agreed. "That was the plan, so it doesn't matter what we want. Honestly, you should consider making decisions for your own benefit and not caring how anyone else feels."
Robin could tell that Leo's jaw clenched in response, and he thought he could see a vein twitch on the man's neck. Lucky, however, seemed unfazed. They gave Leo an indescribable expression before making their way toward the hallway which diverged into Doors [2] and [6].
"Well, same as before, keep safe," Cody said.
"We'll see you all before too long, alright?" Boxcars assured. With a few more basic words of departure, the team heading for Door [1] split off, chattering quietly with each other before activating the RED.
Although Robin knew consciously that his team would want him to get going, he stopped at the top of the tiny staircase, giving a sidelong glance as Delta, Boxcars, and Cody jogged through Door [1]. He waited in place until the door had completely shut, then feeling Leo's hand on his shoulder. "Come on, dude; they're probably too busy for us to check in." Robin shook his head to clear it, following the other five to the intersection in the hallway.
In a manner of seconds, they found themselves before it. "Well, there they are," Basilio sighed. Ian stood just behind him, his hand absently placed on Marcus' shoulder as though to guide him. "See you all soon. Hopefully." Basilio's last word was said quietly, as though it were unintended. Within another twenty seconds, the Door [6] group had departed.
"That's our cue, I suppose," Lucky said, adjusting their cap before placing their hand on the RED's scanner panel. "After you."
Robin followed suit, finding the RED colder than he remembered during the first round. He retracted his hand immediately upon registering the beep, allowing Leo quick access. The muscular man seemed to be more prepared than the others; he scanned in and pulled the lever without any consideration. Thus, the three jogged inside, hoping to find the DEAD nearby.
"I don't see it," Leo grunted a few seconds after the door shut behind them, the beeping punctuating his breaths. "Let's hurry." The hallway was surprisingly bare for being on the first floor of a school, so the group could easily note the lack of DEAD. They jogged quickly ahead, finding the surface of the walls fairly uniform.
"Well, this is unfortunate," Lucky said, inhaling deeply. "Didn't think our kidnapper would play us like this."
"There can't not be one," Robin sighed. "How long has it been?"
"Less than 90 seconds," Lucky replied.
"We know that, genius," Leo called. "Don't fall behind, you two." With that, he picked up the pace, rounding a bend and disappearing from view.
"Well, shit," Robin groaned. Physical exertion was hardly his area of expertise, and from the look on Lucky's face, they weren't pleased either. Their watches beeped on, driving up their heart rates further as they trailed behind Leo.
He seemed to be about halfway down another long hall, which Robin spent no time analyzing for unlocked doors, before he shouted. "There! It's at the end!" Somehow, he found himself even further invigorated, since his speed rocketed up again.
"Christ," Lucky muttered. Alas, by the end of the next minute, all three had registered at the DEAD and freed themselves from the fear of penalty. After allowing everyone a minute to catch their breath, Lucky finally spoke again. "Let's see if any of these doors are open."
The first thing Robin noticed was a large steel wall placed at the mouth of a hall perpendicular to the one they had just run down. Unlike those seen during the first round, though, this one looked completely smooth and steadfast. "I doubt we'll be finding a way to open this thing," Leo sighed.
"Then we must not be meant to go this way," Robin replied. "I suppose we passed a lot of rooms on our jog down here, huh?"
"Most likely," Leo agreed. "But if it's anything like Floor 0, then most of them are locked classrooms that don't matter for this game."
Opposite to the steel wall was the rest of the perpendicular hallway, which went for only a few yards before reaching another wall. "This must be the edge of the school. Think we can break through and get the hell out of here?" Lucky asked.
"I doubt it," Leo groaned, knocking on the wall and hearing no distinguishable sound. "It's probably solid brick, maybe even a few layers thick. Our kidnapper isn't about to let us off that easy." With a sigh, he shuffled towards a set of double doors. They were the only doors in the small stretch of perpendicular hallway open to them, situated near the corner. Leo took hold of the handles and turned them, throwing the door open.
"Well, that went better than expected," Lucky cheered.
"This must be the next puzzle," Leo said, holding the door open for the other two. "It's the auditorium."
"Kind of a weird place for it," Robin sighed. "Who designed this school?"
"I'm willing to bet we won't be searching any more of the ordinary classrooms," Lucky continued. "Probably why our kidnapper had us run past all of them." As they passed through the door, they let it fall closed. The auditorium around them cooled with the faint light, predominantly emanating from the stage. They had entered in the back, it seemed, and there were several rows of seats before them. "Be careful," Lucky exhaled. "I don't want to be looking for bandages if one of you eats shit."
"Rude." Robin's response earned him a quick laugh from Lucky, who lead the way down the left aisle. At the end, he looked around, a bit confused. "Isn't there usually an emergency exit door at the front of this kinda room?"
"Yeah, bro, it's here," Leo said, down the short aisle parallel to the stage. After another second, he spoke again. "But it's locked tight. I don't see any locks on it though, so I guess we aren't supposed to go out this way."
"Let's check the other side of the room," Lucky followed, leading the way down the stagefront aisle. There was another door on the right side of the room, and Lucky threw their hands against it. "This one moves. And I think there's a weird keyhole here."
"That's got to be the exit, then," Robin agreed.
"Here we go again," Leo sighed.
(Suggested listening: Quinary Game)
Pleased to be in better lighting near the stage, Robin first looked in his immediate vicinity, starting with the rows of seats the group had just passed. "There sure are a lot of chairs here, huh," he said.
"Yeah," Leo said. "Kinda weird that all the seats are down instead of up."
"Maybe they're just poorly designed," Robin said, "unless it's some part of this puzzle."
"Has anything our kidnapper's done so far been without purpose?" Lucky added. "Look, each seatback has a little plaque on it. This one says… A10." The small, brass plaque was quite simple and unobtrusive, just large enough to be legible from right in front of the seat. "And A11 is next to it, so the lettering must be by row."
Leo and Robin diverged from the seat to count the number of rows and columns. A quick glance at the seat nearest the left side of the room revealed there had to be 50 seats in each row, with aisles separating seats 9 and 10 and seats 41 and 42. "The last row back here is Z," Leo called. "So that's 1,300 seats." Robin had to admit that didn't seem like nearly as many as he was expecting for a school that was this large, especially considering how oppressive the dimness had initially felt. Alas, perhaps a school this fancy would probably have more than one auditorium.
"In any case, I don't see anything terribly interesting down here," Lucky noted as the other two returned. "Perhaps we'll have more luck on stage." With that, Leo hoisted himself quickly up on stage. He extended a hand down to Robin, who graciously accepted the help in spite of the awkward transition. When he turned around, though, he noticed that Lucky was gone.
"Where the hell…" he muttered.
"Behind you," Lucky's voice came. "If you had been a little more attentive, you may have noticed the stairs beside where the emergency exits should be." Robin gave them a firm smirk before walking past them to the side of the stage, where he spotted an unusually large podium.
"Are they usually this… wide?" he asked. As he approached it, he noticed a series of marks on its surface. There was a row of thirteen circular indentations, which appeared as though they could each be filled by a large coin. The row was followed by a square button, similar in size but protruding outwards. With an internal shrug, Robin gave the button a push, although he didn't notice any effects. "Guess we have to put something in these indents first."
Robin's attention turned next to the back wall of the stage, which appeared to have been painted white and overlaid with a complex pattern of multicolored spots. None of the colors seemed to be cohesive into specific images, however. "That's gonna be an interesting problem to solve," Robin sighed.
"Topaz, over here," Leo called. "Lucky thinks they can play the piano."
"Lucky knows they can play the piano," Lucky replied, stretching their arms and clearing their throat. As the other two walked up beside them, they began to play. A delightful tune of several notes rang out across the room before Lucky stopped, their hands hovering over the keys. "Hmm, no effect. Well, this piano works just fine, so we're not gonna have to figure out which keys are which or something like that."
After the others were satisfied with the initial investigation of the piano, Robin directed their attention to the back wall. "Do you think there's any chance we could figure out what picture that's supposed to be just by looking at the colors?"
"Well, there's all sorts of reds, greens, blues, pinks…" Lucky started. "It's all a bit too random. I can't make heads or tails of it."
"Same here," Leo grunted. "We'll have to come back to all of this later."
On the side of the back wall away from the podium and piano, there was a simple metal box. Although it retained a grey color, it almost seemed to have been painted. "It must be the breaker panel," Lucky stated, approaching it. "Oh, look. There's a tiny little keypad on here." As the other two inched closer, they tapped on the side of the box, apparently testing a random combination in the pad. After four beeps, Lucky stopped and frowned. "Well, it looks like we only need a four-digit combination."
"There's a door over here, too," Leo noticed. "It's pretty out of the way, so I bet it's not actually the exit or something."
"Yeah," Robin agreed. "It's probably just a storage room for stage stuff."
"If that's the case, it can't be very big. The room ends not far after this wall," Lucky added. "What sort of key are we looking for?"
"Hang on now," Robin interrupted. "It might be unlocked." With an air of coolness, he grabbed hold of the handle and depressed the lever. Alas, it refused to move all the way.
"At this point, I assume every door is locked," Lucky said, sounding less condescending than Robin had been expecting.
"This one probably just needs a standard key," Robin sighed. "But the keyhole looks kind of small."
Although the trio spent another minute or so wandering around the stage, they had exhausted their productive search of the area and so climbed back down. As they began to circle the central section of seats, Robin's eyes landed on the wall beside the stage. Upon it at roughly eye level was a simple switch. "Hey, maybe we can finally get some light in here," he stated, a bit of cheer on his voice. Lucky and Leo gave him slight nods, and with that, he flipped the switch on.
A quiet, smooth noise filled their ears, an electric or mechanical hum from the ceiling of the stage. Robin associated it quickly with the movement of the curtains, which he noticed had begun to close. Although he had rather been hoping for an easier time seeing, it became clear that, at least, this portion of the puzzle would not be too terribly difficult, as there were a few characters written on the curtain in glowing ink.
"I guess this room's low light conditions were an important part of designing this puzzle," Leo mused. "There's two things written up there. It says "R+G" in the bottom left and "1691" in the top right."
"We'll have to add "R+G" to the list of things to get back to later, since I bet I know what we need the number 1691 for," Lucky said, waggling their eyebrows. They made their way over to Robin, flipping the switch again to reopen access to the stage. As the curtains hummed, Robin retrieved his notebook, writing the messages on a fresh page.
When he looked up, however, Lucky had already departed. Robin sighed, not bothering to follow them to the set of stairs and instead hoisting himself on stage. By the time he returned to the back wall, Lucky had already entered the four digit combination, earning themself an airy chirp from the keypad. The door slowly swung open, revealing none of the switches that Robin had been expecting.
"Is this even a real breaker panel?" he asked.
Lucky shrugged. "Maybe. I guess our kidnapper blocked it so we wouldn't actually have a chance to mess with any of the electronics in the place. But he did leave us a nice puzzle here." They shifted out of Robin's line of sight, showing that the bottom of the interior housed a simple fifteen puzzle. "This slidy sort of thing isn't exactly my area of expertise. Want to take a crack at it?"
Leo approached the two then, but he stayed far enough back to let Robin take the lead on solving the puzzle. Thus, Robin nodded once, moving towards the panel. "I guess one of us will have to figure it out eventually." Before he began, he looked at the inside of the panel's door, noticing three blocky characters written in it. "I guess this is the model number. It must be… 5E3? Or SE3?"
"Kind of hard to tell when they use the shitty electronic font," Lucky concurred. Leo glanced down at his watch, the [5] on his display looking much like that on the door.
After another couple of minutes, Robin had navigated each of the numbered tiles into proper order. A solitary LED lit up, and the group heard another humming noise from beside them. A panel of the wall had opened up, revealing a staircase. "Looks like we're going up," Lucky said.
"Up?" Robin asked. "Where the hell could we be going?"
"It's probably to a little room where they control the lights and sound, all that stuff," Lucky stated. "Although why they'd have a single door to it back here is beyond me."
"It's probably not the only way to get there," Leo said. "But I'm willing to bet it's the only one the kidnapper made available."
"Yes, he does seem to like these puzzles that give us only one course of action," Lucky agreed. "I hope he's enjoying his time controlling us like lab rats. When it's over, I'm quite sure I'll be ready to make him very unhappy." With that, Lucky began to ascend the corridor, leaving Robin to offer Leo a disquieted look.
The stairwell was even darker than the rest of the auditorium, and although Lucky wasted no time ascending it, Robin and Leo weren't as quick to move. "This is weird, right?" Leo asked.
"I wouldn't know," Robin admitted. "I've never really spent time in any of my school's auditoria. But I doubt this building is any indicator of most schools."
"Hey, do you two want to hurry up?" Lucky's words echoed down the corridor, earning two sighs as a reply. However, it was successful in getting them to reach the upper level, which Robin was surprised to see was primarily occupied by control panels. One large interface facing the front of the area was alight with all manner of switches and buttons. A couple of chairs sat behind it, overlooking the rest of the auditorium down below.
"Whoa," Robin mumbled.
Lucky nodded a few times, allowing the others to take the sight in. "Kind of a weird layout for such a small area, but… Like I thought, this is definitely where the stage crew would go to mess with the lights, speakers, and anything else they needed. I don't even know what the hell all of these controls could be for, unless we're looking at a very nuanced system of lights."
"I guess it's not too hard to consider," Leo added. "Like, if you're doing a play, there's gotta be like twenty different people with microphones on, right?" This seemed to satisfy Lucky, who turned back to inspecting the machinery.
"There isn't much room up here for anything else," Robin noted. "It makes me wonder why they bothered with the secret staircase in the back."
"Wait," Lucky interrupted, pointing to the back of the room. "Looks like that wasn't the only staircase." They pushed open a door, then raising their eyebrows. "I'll go down and see where this one comes out, if you two want to look around for anything exciting up here."
Leo trudged up to the main control interface, rubbing his hands together absentmindedly as his eyes traced over the columns of switches. "Well, worst thing that could happen is we turn off all the light or something." With no further justification, he pulled one from its position at the bottom of a slider up to the top.
"...I don't believe anything's happened," Robin stated.
"I see," Leo agreed. "Then maybe the worst thing that could happen is we waste our damn time." He gave a half-hearted attempt at a chuckle. "But there probably is at least one of these controls we can actually use, right? Or else it'd be pointless to let us up here."
Robin nodded a few times, lazily, giving the control panel a hearty once-over. "Eh… which ones do you think actually work?"
Leo gave the matter a serious bit of consideration before his finger shot up. "These two keypads here look pretty promising. Besides, they're the only ones that aren't simple buttons and sliders. At least, I think they are." Robin glanced down at two rectangular areas that were bordered with simple white lines. Each was roughly the size of his splayed hand and filled with rows of keys.
"So we have all the numbers and letters of the alphabet," he noticed.
"Yeah, and at the top here is a little LED display. It's got three spaces, so maybe we need three characters."
"Oh! The seat designations," Robin cheered. "They're one letter and two numbers, right?"
"So I guess the crew guy enters a certain seat and then…" Leo let his sentence fade out as he keyed "A01" into the left keypad. From the ceiling above them, something whirred, and in a manner of seconds, a light was shining straight down at the seats below them.
"Well, look at that." Lucky's voice behind Robin surprised him a bit, but he maintained his composure as he glanced down over the interface. The spotlight on the ceiling had focused down on one seat in particular, in the front corner of the room.
"That's seat A01 alright," Leo said. "Then that means we can focus two spotlights on whatever seats we want."
"How do you think we get it to turn back off?" Robin asked. Leo offered him a shrug, then tapping "AAA" on the keypad. The three characters flashed in red once, clearly being an invalid combination. A few seconds later, the light dimmed to darkness and began maneuvering back to its starting place. "Alright," Robin sighed, "that was a little too lucky."
"Hey, look back here," Lucky said, "We've got sticky notes." Robin could hear the sound of Lucky pulling the note from wherever it had been stuck, followed by their footsteps. "Q02," they read.
"Well, that's a pretty obvious hint, I'd say," Robin stated. Thus, he typed the three characters into the keypad before him, and the spotlight came to life.
"We should head down there and see if moving the light there did something," Leo said, heading for the stairwell.
"Hold on just a moment," Lucky interjected.