Tower of Fate - Chapter 10: The Challenge Room (Patreon)

[Question one: Why are you more likely to find a single glove left on the ground than a pair?]

Hugo and I glanced at each other. This didn’t seem like much of a puzzle.

“Because only one gets dropped by mistake,” I said.

[Incorrect]

Around the room, stones at the bottom of the wall slid away and a green liquid started pouring across the floor. It grew closer, but before it could reach my feet, I climbed up on top of the console. The liquid kept flowing until it had covered the floor completely and slowly began to rise. Hugo pulled out a stray feather with his beak and dropped it over the side. There was a burning hiss when it made contact with the liquid before dissolving.

“It’s acid,” I said more calmly than I expected. Internally, my heart was racing. We needed to solve this before it reached us.

“Because only one hand gets cold?” offered Hugo. “Because some people have different shaped hands and discard the one they don’t need? Because there’s a concerted effort by a group of people to steal gloves, but they occasionally leave one behind as a warning to others?”

[Incorrect]

[Incorrect]

[Incorrect]

“You’re not helping!” I snapped as the acid rose higher. Thirty more seconds and it would go past the edge of the console and touch my feet, which I was still very much attached to.

I had to think. My first answer had felt accurate. Nobody leaves a glove behind on purpose, but maybe there was more to it than that. Think. Why is someone more likely to find one glove on the ground? I then made the mistake of looking down. Fear gripped me. Oh god, the acid’s getting close. Don’t look at it. Just think. Suddenly, an answer came.

“Attention!” I cried. “A pair of gloves even discarded doesn’t stand out to us as much as a single one does. It captures our attention by being unique. It’s not that we’re more likely to find a single glove, it’s just that those experiences stick out to us more.”

I closed my eyes. The acid was almost here. Once that happened, Hugo would be on his own. He’d have to fly around the room, but it might give him an extra few minutes to come up with another answer.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I never expected to die in a pool of acid. Honestly, being in my mid-twenties, I’d never given death much thought period. Of course, intellectually I knew that I would die one day, but there was an emotional part of me that thought I was the exception. Death was something that happened to other people. The elderly whose time had come, the young who’d contracted some deadly illness, or been caught in some life ending accident. But whenever I heard stories of the latter pair, it always struck me as examples of somebody winning the world's worst lottery. And whoever expects to win one of those?

“Good luck Hugo. If you make it out of here, try to look for an older man with a gun named Earnest. He’s a good guy. He’ll help you out.”

[Correct]

The System message thundered. Even with my eyes closed, I saw the word ring out across the space.

The acid stopped flowing and the pool started to recede. The two of us watched as it seemed to sink into the stone floor. Once it had gone completely, neither of us moved off of the console. I looked down at my feathered friend.

“Could you toss another feather down there?” I asked him.

The crow’s eyes narrowed. “It was just a stray one. Why don’t you rip out some of your hair instead?”

“Okay, point taken.”

I took off my belt and lowered the end until it touched the floor. When there was no sizzle, I assumed it was safe and hopped down. The elevators and the door remained locked, and no prizes had appeared, which meant that the challenge room wasn’t over yet. Something else was coming.

[Question two: What’s the most important thing to have in life?]

Oh great, a philosophy question.

Before either of us could answer, black smoke seeped out of the walls and rolled along the ground.

“Shelter. Safety. Health. Family. Love.” I kept rattling off answers as quickly as they came to me.

[Incorrect]

[Incorrect]

[Incorrect]

[Incorrect]

[Incorrect]

The two of us coughed and gagged as we accidentally inhaled some of the smoke. I shook my head. This was stupid. It’s not like there’s an objective answer to a question like this. I had to think about what the System wanted me to say. What answer did it think was right? Whatever it was, I had to come up with it soon. The smoke obscured my vision, and it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

“Meaning!” Hugo yelled suddenly. “A man can live in luxury, achieve great things and still suffer without meaning. He can also perform hard labor in the worst conditions with equanimity if he has the right reason. Meaning gives us purpose and helps make sense of the world.”

What the hell? Where had that come from?

[Correct]

The black smoke, as with the acid, began to fall away through the floor.

“How did you come up with that?” I asked him.

“It’s from Nunchuk Nightmare 4. It’s what Chase Storm says right at the end of the movie,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Putting aside the answer to the meaning of life being found in an action B-movie, we had to be getting closer to the end. I mean, how many more environmental traps is this thing going to throw at us?

The room answered by having four large pillars rise out of the ground until they were sixty feet into the air. Each pillar depicted a unique carving of an animal on it. The first was a lion, then a wolf, and then a hippo. The fourth pillar depicted some alien creature with an oval-shaped head, webbed hands, and scars on its neck.

A new liquid started gushing out through holes in the walls. It looked like water, but I wasn’t taking any chances as I hopped back up onto the console.

[Question 3: Who is the king of the jungle? (Note: You each can only submit one answer but may talk out loud amongst yourselves about possible answers)]

“Okay, this one doesn’t seem as bad,” said Hugo. “We’ve got a fifty percent chance of getting it right.”

This feels too easy.

The liquid was rising faster than the other two substances, which meant we had even less time than before.

“I think we should pick lion,” said Hugo. “I mean, if a crow was an option, I’d obviously feel conflicted, but hippos and wolves don’t live in the jungle. Plus, we don’t even know the name of the alien thing.”

Before the liquid could spill over, I pulled a loot box out of my inventory and stacked it on top of the console to give myself more room.

“Okay, go ahead,” I said.

“The lion is the king of the jungle,” Hugo declared.

[Incorrect]

More parts of the walls opened up to allow more water to rush in. A wave of it splashed over me and I lost my footing. Hugo leapt off of my shoulder and started flapping to avoid sharing my fate.

“Lucas!” he cried as I fell into the water.

The coldness of it hit me first. I closed my eyes and tightened up for the inevitable pain.

It never came.

Oh, thank god. It really is just ordinary water that’s going to try to drown me. I don’t know what I was so worried about. I kicked up hard and broke the surface, gasping for breath.

“You’re alive!” said Hugo.

“For now.”

The water had swallowed up the console and was rising steadily towards the ceiling. We needed to give an answer soon, but I didn’t like the options. The System was baiting us with this question. A lion was the most obvious choice, and it wanted one of us to throw away our answer on it. But the remaining choices were two animals that definitely didn’t live in the jungle and an alien species whose name we didn’t know. Wait? Come to think of it, do lions even live in the jungle? In nature documentaries they were always shown on an African savannah. So does that mean the alien is the correct answer?

Hugo flew up to the top of one of the pillars to rest, but given how rapidly the room was filling up, he wouldn’t have long. I continued to tread water as I floated closer and closer to the ceiling.

“Er, you might want to pick soon,” said Hugo, before the water crested over the pillar. The crow jumped off and tried to float in the water, but found himself sinking whenever he stopped frantically flapping.

Thirty feet of space left.

“Pick one!” Hugo yelled.

Two obvious wrong answers, a less obvious third, and a wildcard for a fourth. The alien had webbed hands and scars… no, not scars, gills. It’s some water-based creature. That doesn’t immediately discount it. Jungles have rivers with predators in them, but it makes it less likely.

Ten feet remaining.

The question had only asked who the king of the jungle was. It hadn’t mentioned the pillars at all or that this was a multiple-choice question. We’d just assumed it. The answer isn’t on the pillars, so where does that leave of us with the king of the jungle? A tiger or gorilla?

Three feet remaining.

“The answer is mankind!” I yelled as the ceiling closed in.

[Correct]

The water stopped and then began to withdraw. As we floated back down the ground, the pillars receded back into the ground too. I was steaming with anger by the time the water had disappeared completely. This whole challenge was a joke on us. Talking about what experiences mattered most to humans, how to live their lives, and rubbing it in our faces that we’re no longer the apex predator on our own world. I’d woken up with the System feeling confused and then later humiliated by it, but this was the first time I felt pure hatred for it. It wasn’t even capable of winning gracefully.