Chapter Text
Berdly’s next puzzle didn’t fare much better than the last one.
“Wha—what do you mean it’s easy?” he scoffed, a little hurt. “It took so long to set up!”
“It’s…a block puzzle, Berdly? Like for little kids?” Noelle giggled. Behind her, Lancer was very focused in putting all of the blocks in the appropriately-shaped holes. Wait…
“Wha—he’s not even doing it right! They can’t all go in the square hole!”
“Well, I guess the puzzle just has solutions you didn’t know, faha!” Noelle said with a giggle.
Berdly huffed a little. “Well. My next puzzle is certain to…to…to stop you two in your tracks! Just you wait and see! It’ll be so incredible, you’ll…you’ll…just wait!”
Noelle looked at him expectantly, visibly holding back laughter.
He spun around so he didn’t have to look at that anymore.
Come on, think, Berdly! An incredible puzzle. Uh…um…any ideas? Sliding block puzzle? No, we already saw one of those! I don’t know if I can find any ice for a sliding block puzzle…enough with the block puzzles!
“I did it, birdboy! What next?” Lancer shouted. The Darkner slid in front of Berdly with a giant grin, as if waiting for something.
“Just—give me a moment to think!” he snapped.
Lancer just grinned deviously, making it pretty much impossible to focus on anything else. He tried, desperately, but with that smile right in his peripheral…
“Stop doing that!”
“Hohoho! No!”
“Grrraahh! Neither of you two would be clever enough for my next scheme, anyway!” he growled.
“What was your next scheme, Berdly?” Noelle asked ‘innocently’.
Why are puzzles so hard to set up?! “Um…um…”
Think, think!
He pointed dramatically at Noelle. “Making you the puzzle-master-villain!!”
She choked out a laugh. “What? Me? A villain?”
“Ohoho! How the turns have tabled!” Lancer said, immediately standing next to Berdly against her.
“Noelle, how could you betray the side of good so easily?” Berdly swooned, dramatically posing like he was a love interest in a soap opera. “Truly, you make my heroic heart ache.”
“But you were just the—oh, whatever,” Noelle said with a good-natured eyeroll. She grinned, scrunching up her nose that way she did when she was pretending to be mean. “Just you wait, you heroes, I shall defeat you with my evil ice powers!”
“Oh no! Chickennuggetman, what do we do?” Lancer wailed, grabbing onto Berdly’s wing.
“We must continue on our journey despite our adversary, and defeat her despite her terrifying powers and incredible puzzles!” he cried, gesturing widely with the other wing.
“Good luck, heroes!” Noelle said, unable to hold back her giggles.
She turned to leave, and Lancer moved to follow. “No, no, we need to give her time to set up a puzzle first,” Berdly told him. Lancer nodded knowingly.
“Was it fun being the bad guy?” Lancer asked with a wide grin.
“Fun? Pssh! I was too busy being wonderfully evil to be having fun!” Berdly scoffed. “My puzzles did a wondrous job of slowing down you heroes! …except, I’m the hero now, and Noelle is the villain…this is confusing.”
“Yep!” Lancer agreed happily. Then he gasped in realization. “We should have team names to differentiate ourselves!”
Berdly gasped too. “You’re so right! What should our team name be?”
“The Lightners!” Lancer suggested.
“…what? No, that’s me, Noelle, and Ralsei. Hmm…gasp! Noelle and I should be…the Light-Nerds!”
“Ohoho, cool! And Noelle and me could be…uhh…Team Noellancer!”
“Really?”
“Yeah! Isn’t it awesome?”
“It does sound like ‘necromancer’, which is cool…” Berdly contemplated. “What about for the two of us?”
“Hmm…”
The two of them sat in contemplative silence for a long moment, evidently having run out of puns or decent name mashups. Eventually, they resigned to brainstorming off of each other.
“Blackjack?” Berdly suggested.
“No, your name isn’t Jack,” Lancer denied. “Diggerboys?”
“Digging is so monotonous, I don’t want that for our team name! Something to do with blue?”
“Blueboys?”
“No, that’s not very intimidating…something to do with card suits?”
“Boys in Suits?”
“What is with your obsession with including the word ‘boys’?”
“You’re a boy, I’m a boy, Noelle isn’t a boy, it’s perfect!”
“Hmm, true,” Berdly admitted. “But ‘boys’ isn’t a very intimidating word. I prefer…guys.”
“Hmm…” Lancer began to spin again, deep in thought. Berdly didn’t fight it this time, instead just letting him think. “Oh! You know what’s really intimidating! The letter ‘Z’!”
“…what?”
“Guyz with a Z! It’s a classic!”
Berdly gasped. “It’s perfect! We could be…Guyz in Suitz!”
“Yeah!”
The two of them high-fived (well, as best as they could with Berdly’s wing and Lancer’s…nubs) and cheered loudly.
“Are you two ever going to come and do my puzzle?” Noelle called with fake annoyance.
Berdly and Lancer followed her to see that she’d set up…something? There were pieces of ice and three holes in a line and signs stuck in the ground next to them, and Noelle had climbed on top of a pillar so she could dangle her feet over the edge and smirk down at them villainously.
Well. As villainous as Noelle could muster. Which was pretty much zero.
“Muahaha! You will never be able to finish my puzzle!” she laughed, with all the intimidation of a baby duckling.
“Come on, Lancer, we must prove the Guyz in Suitz to be the superior team!”
“Guyz in Suitz? Did you give yourselves a team name?” Noelle asked, amused.
“Yeah!” Lancer responded. He had to crane his neck hilariously to be able to look at her perched so high. “You guys are the Light-Nerds, you and I are Team Noellancer, and the two of us are the Guyz in Suitz!”
“Light-Nerds, huh?” she asked with an eyebrow raised to Berdly, who suddenly became very interested in the floor.
“Come on, Lancer, let’s figure out the puzzle! We have to prove we’re better than her!” he seethed.
“I thought you were over proving yourself better?” she said, a playfully charged question.
“We have to…finish the puzzle so we can progress!”
“Ah, the Ralsei-approved strategy,” Noelle said with a smile. “Fair enough, carry on.”
Berdly and Lancer turned their interest to the puzzle on the floor. The pieces of ice were actually frozen shapes of dirt. Maybe she’d piled it into the shape she wanted and then cast IceShock on the dirt to make a sculpture?
That’s…very clever if it’s true.
Hey, she’d be able to do a sliding block puzzle! That’s like, the ice themed puzzle! Whatever.
There were five sculptures and three divots in the ground. Each divot had a small sign next to it. Berdly peered at the right one.
Three connections that reach for the sky, not with I, nor with me
What the hell does that mean?
“Is this, like, a thinky puzzle?” Lancer asked mournfully. “I didn’t know I had to be thinky.”
“It’s just a little bit of thinky!” Noelle protested.
“I’m plenty thinky enough for this,” Berdly shot back. “More than thinky enough!”
Now, time to figure it out…
The shapes in the sculptures were a ball, a cube, a pyramid, a flat sheet, a torus (which Lancer had immediately bitten into, thinking it was a donut, and Noelle had had to replace it). The three clues by the divots were all equally unintelligible.
Only one face that faces both ways, facing up in the opposite way
One for simplicity, three for good luck, and none for everything else
Three connections that reach for the sky, not with I, nor with me
Lancer looked at the signs forlornly. “This is a lot of thinky,” he moaned.
Noelle sighed in boredom. After fixing the torus (“donut!!”), she had decided not to return to the top of her column, and instead she was sitting off to the side on a rock and watching the two of them struggle. Since Lancer wasn’t really trying, she was really just watching Berdly struggle.
“Only one face…none of them are people and have faces…face as in side? So…only one side?” he muttered to himself, regarding the signs. “What has one side? A dot? So…the ball? No, the ball wouldn’t have a face, it’s just a ball.”
Noelle sighed again, louder.
“Have some patience! Genius…needs time to work, obviously.”
“Does genius keep marker scribbles on his armor?” Noelle asked, and Berdly didn’t dignify that comment with an answer. I just haven’t had the time yet, Noelle.
“Bird guy, we need to finish this faster if Guyz in Suitz is gonna be the best team!” Lancer half-whispered.
“It would be faster if you would help!”
“No…I…I can’t really do the thinky stuff.”
Berdly just groaned. “Why do I always end up doing all of the work?!”
Three connections that reach for the sky, not with I, not with me.
Not with I, not with me? Isn’t that an oxymoron? That’s not new information! It’s superfluous!
“Noelle, I think your puzzle is wrong,” Berdly said.
“What?” She got up to look at everything, regarding the signs and mouthing things to herself. After only a moment, she nodded. “No, everything’s right!”
“No, but…‘not with I, not with me’? That’s poor phrasing. That’s not grammatically correct!”
She looked at him playfully. “Huh. Maybe there’s a reason it’s like that. Maybe you just need to see it from a different direction.”
“Huh? What do you mean? That’s—you don’t see grammar from a different direction! It’s just grammar! And the puzzle is just wrong!”
“There’s a wrong puzzle?” a soft voice asked behind him, curiously.
Berdly, shocked, whirled around. Ralsei stood in the middle of the puzzle, as if he’d been there the entire time.
“Hey, Peach Boy! You’re back!”
“Yes, I am,” he said distractedly, reading the signs intently. Berdly huffed and stood next to him.
“Yes, as I was saying, this puzzle is incorrect! The grammar is wrong! This part, it says ‘not with I, not with me’! That’s wrong!”
“I…don’t think puzzles are usually wrong, Berdly,” Ralsei said gently.
“This one is! You try solving it, if you’re so sure!”
“You…you want…me to solve the puzzle?”
Noelle shrugged. “You might as well. Neither of them have any idea.”
“Well, um. If you want me to, I suppose I can…”
Ha! This’ll prove that Noelle got her puzzle wrong, Berdly thought smugly.
Ralsei read the incorrect part again, and then again, before gasping in pleased surprise. “Oh! ‘I’ as in one! So the three corners to the sky…the pyramid isn’t in one, and it isn’t in this one. So the pyramid goes in the middle!”
Berdly’s beak dropped open. Noelle looked thrilled that someone understood her puzzle.
“Three for good luck…well, triangles have three. Even if it’s a pyramid and not a triangle, I think the pyramid is probably the three. Then none, and one? That must mean the plate and the sphere are the other two.”
Lancer was tugging on Berdly’s wing. He was too busy dumbfoundedly staring as Ralsei solved the puzzle immediately.
“‘Only one face that faces both ways?’ That must be the plate…‘Facing up in the opposite way?’ Opposite way…surely it would be flat and the same on either side?…unless opposite way means the opposite side of the whole puzzle?”
Berdly watched in horror as Ralsei dropped the ball in the first divot, the pyramid in the second divot, and the sheet in the third one. After it landed, Noelle jumped up in the air clapping. “You did it! Yes! I made a good puzzle!”
“I…I got it right?” Ralsei asked, his blush visible even in the shadow of his hat.
“Yes! Completely! I…ohhh I’m just so happy someone got it!” Noelle squealed, jumping up and down in circles. Lancer, who both liked jumping and circles, joined her.
Berdly stared slack-jawed at the completed puzzle, at a loss for words.
“We have to pick the best team!” Lancer realized. “Goat boy! Which team is best? The Light-Nerds, Team Noellancer, or the Guyz in Suitz?”
Ralsei blinked. The other three looked at him expectantly.
There was a long moment.
“…did I miss something?” he hesitantly asked after an uncomfortably long silence.
Berdly and Noelle looked at each other, then at Lancer, who struggled to look at both of them at the same time, and all three of them collapsed into laughter. Ralsei just stood there in utter confusion, staring at all of the doubled over laughing.
“…no, really, did I miss something?”
Noelle just laughed harder. Berdly attempted to explain through chuckles of his own. “First I became the bad guy, and I made puzzles for them, and then Noelle was the bad guy and made a puzzle for us, and we all came up with team names—”
“—the two of them came up with team names—" Noelle corrected.
“—and it was totally cool and awesome!” Lancer finished happily.
Ralsei seemed in a state of shock.
“Oh, did you want a chance to be the bad guy?”
Another long moment, until eventually, the fluffy prince snickered, which he quickly tried to hide. “Come on, everyone, let’s keep moving,” he said, his smile audible.
Behind his back, the other three exchanged a high-five.