Grandpa's game

Over the next four days, the brothers worked diligently following the trail of clues that their Grandpa had left for them. After the initial breakthrough, there was no doubt about the nature of the game they were playing. The initial ciphers were part of a chain of riddles, each one leading to a different challenge. It turned out that the map cipher was actually the third link in a daisy chain of clues that had them searching all over the estate for specific books, pictures or other oddities collected by Grandpa in his travels.

The nature of the puzzles would change, once it was simply a matter of reading the book carefully, another time the twins found a set of lockpicks and directions to a small locked cabinet in the corner of grandpa's lab. When they finally opened the door (it turned out that Julien was more adept with the picks than his brother) they found a riddle written in one of the Lander's forgotten languages. It took a trip to the local Xeltan church and a borrowed latin dictionary to translate the riddle and another hour or two to puzzle out the answer. It became clear that even from the grave, Gramps was testing the boys like he had so often in their childhood.

One of the hardest challenges was a Cryn puzzle box that took the brothers a full day to figure out, initially the box stymied both James' methodical aproach and Julien's less reasoned but more sensitive fingers. After his third attempt Julien was ready to smash his way into the box with a hammer, but James' patience was rewarded in the end. It's a good thing too, because inside the box was a delicate bulb of blown grass and on the fragile glass was written the the name of a book, folded tightly was a list of twenty pairs of math problems, at the top of the page it said simply, First = page number, second = word number.

Julien cringed as he saw the wide range of problems on the pages. There were word problems, algebra problems, applications of trigonometry and geometry, number theory questions, sequences and series and even a few calculus questions. The brothers again shared the task, Julien selecting the easier problems and letting James tackle the ones he couldn't even understand. It took the rest of the afternoon to remember all the math that Grandpa Wilheilm had taught them years before. In the end there were still three problems that the twins could not solve, but they had translated enough of the rest to infer the meaning of the message.

The brothers didn't realize it when they found the final clue literally inside the binding of a volume on the history of Veer pottery. The clue was another of the fencing-notation ciphers but after several failed attempts at interpreting the notation, it was clear that the solution was not the same as the earlier codes.

In an attempt to clear his mind, Julien finally carried the scrap of paper down to the fencing hall where he spent so many hours with his Grandfather. Starting in the center of the hall as always he moved through the pattern. It made little sense as a training drill, but unlike the first collection of ciphers at least this was a drill he could follow. He smoothly worked through his Grandfathers pattern until he reached the last notation. Loosely translated the pattern ended with a fierce downward trust of his sword. Only when he gently lowered the point of his blade to the parque floor did he notice that one of the hundreds of boards just inches from where the point rested was slightly raised.

His grandmother was going to kill him, he decided as he dropped to the floor and set to work with his main guache chipping, hacking and prying into the section floor that caught his eye. It would take a skilled woodworker to repair the damage to the laquered wood flooring in the room that in addition to a fencing hall was also used for the occassional dances and dinner parties that his grandmother so loved. Julien didn't care about any of that, after four days of following the chain of Grandpa's clues he was more eager than ever to start the next puzzle.

It took almost ten minutes of digging with his blade, but when Julien pried up the board to his delight he saw a folded piece of paper lying hidden under the flooring. Vindicated by the existance of the paper Julien noticed that this find was different from the others; under the paper he saw the distinctive leather cover of one of grandpa's binders. Leaving everything exactly as it was, Julien sprinted to James' lab yelling for him in excitement. Puzzled and intrigued by his brother's enthusiasm, James let himself be led to the fencing hall. When he saw the loose tile and piece of paper, he hugged his brother and waited for him to pick up and read the paper.

"You read this one, you found it."