To Solve the Room

After going through a few arcane gestures and mutterings, Molsalkisa was able to enlarge the text in the reflection and transfer it onto a sheet of wood she kept in her bag. She took a moment to look over the script before saying, “This is an older dialect of the draconic language; most scholars don’t see this, since it was back when the Dino-kin were at the height of their culture before things collapsed, so our kind refer to it as being the original saurian script.”

“So your language is derived from the language of dragons,” said Trisha with surprised amusement. “Can you translate it enough to actually make out the message?”

“Yes,” said Molsalkisa as she looked over the script on the wood, “but it might take some time to work out; it seems to have been written as a riddle.”

“It will probably take her a few minutes, at most,” said Ulnarka, “in the meantime, let’s see what else we can find around here.”

The group spent the next minute, or so, seconds looking around for a bit before Molsalkisa said, “I think I’ve got it, or at least managed to make sense of the riddle. The riddle says, ‘To those that watch but have to experience, the scepter will be yours to know; to those that have experienced the gratification of the scepter, you shall proceed to a different point in the trial.’ I’ve managed to piece together that it involves experiences, but I’m not really able to make sense of the wording.”

“Oh, for the love of…” said Jonah as he pinched the bridge of his nose in mild annoyance, “it’s talking about sexual experience; scepter is a common euphemism for a penis…”

“At least where we come from,” said Marsha, “it’s treated as more an inside joke among those that enjoy the fantasy genre. And last I checked, there’s only one person sporting one of those here…”

“And only two of us in the room have had intercourse with that same person…the threesome was fun, but I recommend some one-on-one time with a partner before going for partner sharing at the same time.”

“But how do we get the room to confirm something like that,” inquired Ariana, “I don’t see any tools to help with that.”

“I think we all have to get naked,” said Jonah as he began to strip, “it makes the most sense.” The twins followed his lead.

“And then we have to stand in front of the mirror,” said Trisha with slowly building comprehension; she already had her top off and was getting ready to remove the bottom portion of her attire, “the mirror has been showing different reflections…”

“But,” continued Marsha; making completing the removal of her leafy top and removing it, “ it seemed to not show anything different with us, so the mirror has some sort of enchantment that works with different things under certain conditions.” She watched her sister stand in front of the mirror, and her reflection flashed green and blue. Then Jonah handed Trish her stuff, and his own before standing off to the side. Marsha completed removing her own attire and put on the pile that Jonah had put in her sister’s arms before going to stand before her reflection in the mirror; she saw her own reflection flash blue and green as some sort of approval. She also noticed a door that hadn’t been in the reflection before had swung open. “Come on, sis, it looks like a door has opened for us,” she made a mischievous smirk at Jonah before returning her attention to her twin, “and something tells me he is definitely not going to need what he brought here for a while.”

“You have a point there, sis,” said Trisha with an amused giggle, “lead the way.” Marsha led her twin toward the open door she had spotted in the reflection; on the way out, Trisha gave Jonah an amused pat on the shoulder and said, “Don’t agonize over who to get it on with first too long; we’ll be waiting to hear about the results, and maybe have a little fun if another room has a similar setup.” With that, the twins were out; following an invisible path only they could see before waltzing through what seemed to be a solid wall toward the back of the room and on the left of the entrance.

“Well,” said Jonah, “I guess we should get the party started,” and stepped in front of the mirror. The mirror itself flashed blue, green, violet, and indigo in spaces around his reflection while leaving the reflection itself free of any short-term color shifts or flashes. He stepped to the side and said, “So, who wants to follow the lead the twins just had?”

The three remaining ladies looked at each other with confusion, unsure of how to proceed. Truth be told, they all wanted to know what it was like to get pounded by Jonah; they just had hangups and the like that were deterring them from doing so. Molsalkisa was held back by wanting to be the one observing from afar; she was unfamiliar with the concept of a Participant Observer; chances are she had never heard the expression before, and probably wouldn’t until Jonah or one of the twins enlightened her, which had yet to happen. Ulnarka was held back by her general fear of accidentally harming Jonah; in addition to being much larger and potentially heavier than him, she was also considerably stronger than everyone else in the room; Molsalkisa came the closest to matching her strength, but had opted to not exercise to a point where she could viably challenge Ulnarka. Ariana was held back by being the new one in the group, she was still figuring out the appropriate dynamic to have in the party, and she didn’t want to intrude on the dynamics of the rest of the group.

“How do we decide something so crucial,” inquired Molsalkisa.

“Roll a die, spin a bottle, as me a to think of a number, play Roshambo, or with similar probability to all of those,” said Jonah.

“What’s Roshambo,” inquired the three ladies in unison.

“It’s also known as Rock, Paper, Scissors where I come from…I suppose a better way of describing it in the context of this world is Stone, Parchment, Shears. The rules are simple; a clenched fist is in the explanation is the stone, which is beaten by a flat hand that represents parchment, which is in turn beaten by the shears,” he made the motions for each of the gestures in the game, “and the shers are beaten in turn by the stone. The stone breaks the shears, the parchment wraps around the parchment, and the shears cut the parchment; that’s why the system works the way it does.”

“Oh,” said Molsalkisa with intrigue, “it’s a simple game, with easily understood rules, but you can use it for deciding the order of operations in a group. Fascinating.”

“Let’s do that one,” said Ulnarka, “anything else we should know about it.”

“You all shake your fists while facing each other and either call out the name of the game or count down to zero before revealing your choices; at the same time, whoever got the choice that beats another player’s choice is the one who beats them. Now, you can decide whether the one who won the game or lost the game has to do what you were playing the game over. I recommend deciding before you start.”

“I say whoever has the most losses out of a set of three games,” said Ulnarka, “that way we don’t put it all on a single go around. Anyone players with equal wins and losses have to continue until a winner is decided.”

“I say we make whoever has the most wins,” said Ariana, “It’s all something we seem to want to do but have never gotten around to for whatever reason.”

“Agreed,” said Molsalkisa, “whoever has the most wins by the end of the game goes first. And while that person is going, the remaining players will flip a coin to decide who goes next.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Ulnarka and Ariana at the same time. The three started shaking their right fists in the middle of each other while counting down from twenty, Jonah thought they would have started the count down from ten, but he supposed that still worked.