Night 69: Basement: The Sphinx's Chamber

[ryuuzaki]

[From here.]

L hated to be the first to enter a room. The necessity of sometimes doing it anyway had come hand in hand with his abduction; while he could occasionally alternate the job with a companion, or could simply subtly manipulate the person he was with to always be in a position to open the door, it was impossible to keep it up indefinitely. Someone would notice after a while, and it would be bad for his alliances, which would render him largely impotent in terms of trying to bring an end to the place -- that would require collaboration, which required doing things he would ordinarily prefer not to do.

He had already taken the lead with this group, as much as anyone had, and so he opened the big golden door a crack to see what might be inside.

After a moment, he pulled it open to allow the others through, relieved that they had found something that probably wouldn't try to kill them on sight. But that didn't mean it wouldn't try to kill them eventually, and either way, his relief was short-lived.

The room was as he remembered it: gold upon gold, ornate, opulent. The low ceiling made it lean, in his mind, towards oppressive, an impression that wasn't helped by the large animal resting on a central dais. It had a remarkably human face, remarkably intelligent, and the body of a lion, including the claws.

In his stomach, he felt the same heaviness as before, the same certainty that he had come across another of Landel's prisoners, someone it was unlikely that anyone would think to liberate, and someone it might not be a good idea to liberate.

The Sphinx might or might not recognize him. He'd find out soon enough. He was confident that he could answer any riddle the creature might set, but that was all; conversing with it made him acutely uncomfortable.

"Good evening." His voice didn't betray his unease.

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[mirrorimage]

Nina frowned, thoughtfully. She was usually good at riddles, but trying to turn this one over in her mind simply felt strange to her. The flow of it was all wrong, somehow. She was going by what the others had said as much as anything that had come from the sphinx himself. They kept talking about time passing. But she put her mind to the task at hand anyway.

"Falling from Heaven sounds like an angel," she ventured. And an angel would have more time than a human, because it would be immortal. Still, even as she said it, she couldn't bring herself to believe it. The answer felt all wrong somehow.

"Maybe it's a clock? No." Since when did clocks fall from Heaven? She sighed in frustration.

[ryuuzaki]

L had entered the room thinking that he would let the others answer the riddle, unless they were about to make an obvious, dangerous mistake. The Sphinx hadn’t outsmarted him before; it was unlikely to outsmart him now. Most of the other patients who had attempted this seemed to have made it through. It seemed just possible that someone could have failed, yet he couldn’t recall ever having seen a notice on the bulletin about an entire group disappearing while exploring the basement.

Still, he found himself sorting through ideas just as everyone else was. He had rejected rain and snow as answers by the time Lana said anything about it: raindrops and snowflakes didn’t fall one by one. But something that fell like rain and snow, only one at a time... a drip? Maybe a water clock. There was a reference to time later in the riddle. But... “our world is ever upturned”? When did upheaval ever give a sense of having more time?

There was also the issue of how “past” was spelled. P-A-S-T or P-A-S-S-E-D? Could the meaning of the riddle rest on this kind of pun? He wouldn't be surprised if it did. Even if the Sphinx’s pronunciation had been precise enough that the difference was audible, there would still have been the problem of the low resonance of its voice, where the distinction probably would have been lost again.

One thing struck him as potentially useful. There was little chance that he spoke Edgar’s native language, and he suspected that Lana’s was English. Nina’s, however, was one he spoke, but not natively. It should work similarly with her as it had with Lunge, and it was worth a shot. The ambiguity between past and passed wouldn't exist for her.

He turned his gaze to her.

“Nina. The word you heard as ‘past’ -- can you spell it for me, in German? Does it begin with a P, or a V?”

A tense of passieren, or Vergangenheit? If he was right, it could help clarify the riddle's underlying meaning.

[mirrorimage]

Nina blinked at him. "Oh! Yeah. Okay."

She cleared her throat. "It starts with a V. V-E-R..." She began to spell it out, until she was finished, then kept looking at Ryuuzaki expectantly, brows furrowed. "Why do you ask?"

[fourstonewalls]

Lana could guess, although her knowledge of foreign languages was limited to enough Spanish to order lunch and the occasional German obscenities and/or legal terms von Karma used to sound superior to his colleagues. Ryuuzaki was looking for clarification on nuances of meaning, though the answer didn't help her.

"The translation," she said, tapping one ear. Puns and double-meanings abounded in riddles, although she assumed Nina knew that as well. "We heard the riddle in English, of course." She still wasn't entirely sure what distinction Ryuuzaki was looking for; passed could mean the dead, but so could past, with the looseness inherent in riddles.

Bones didn't fall from heaven, though, and leaves had upturned edges, but it didn't help them last. Smiles did, though -- but no, the rest of it didn't make any sense.

The clock was ticking; they didn't have long to last, if they wanted to get through this. But she couldn't pick this apart; they got no more questions.

[ryuuzaki]

"Yes," he replied to Lana with a brief nod, too tense for his expression to brighten much. "It's P-A-S-T, then."

He tilted his head and sighed, and pushed his free hand up into his dark hair to rub his scalp.

"I thought it might be a water clock, but certain parameters in the riddle don't quite fit. The drops of water wouldn't remain drops anymore in the basin... they wouldn't retain their structure, so they wouldn't last some time, and you don't 'upturn' a clepsydra. But --"

A look of realization dawned on his face, and he glanced at the others to see if the same idea was coming to them.

[damned_monsters]

It was interesting, at the very least, to watch as they worked around the auto-translator that was installed in this place. That very translator was what allowed the sphinx to communicate with humans, after all.

But the sphinx remained silent as they all spoke among themselves. He could tell that they were slowly getting closer to the answer, and it was all he could do to not let out a growl of frustration.

"Half your time is up," he informed them.

[fourstonewalls]

A water clock was an excellent idea -- she'd kept on thinking of more natural phenomenon, until he and Nina had started going back and forth about translation and clocks, and it wasn't cherry blossom petals or dead leaves, even if they tended to fall with edges cupped upwards. Lots of things could act like a clock -- accidental homicide via ice carving was the least weird of the cases that sprung to mind.

But a trip down memory lane wasn't going to stop their five minutes from running--hold it!. Running out on them. Of course.

"That's it! It's an egg timer." About the same amount of time as they'd been given, really, and she narrowed her eyes at the Sphinx. Had that been a hint? Not the time, but the reminder that it was halfway up. "Or, more generally speaking, an hourglass."

She thought a moment, and then added. "Or would the answer properly be the grains of sand themselves?" A technicality, to be sure, but the Sphinx's anticipation of their failure had looked disturbingly reminiscent of von Karma's sharklike grin. Except with teeth that could actually back it up.