Work Text:
“Carlos,” Junpei says, rubbing at his temples. “Go solve the jigsaw puzzle.”
“You’re just mad that I was right.” Carlos’s attempt to defend himself falls on deaf ears as he peers out the small porthole of the spaceship. “You missed the ‘4’.”
“ Puzzle . ”
“Fine.” Carlos crosses the room, hanging his head. He takes over the jigsaw punishment from Phi, who springs up like a jack-in-the-box so she can continue to check every keyboard in the small room.
Sigma takes an exaggerated breath. His fingers tap anxiously against the sticky passcode buttons. Since when did the room feel so small?
“So, what is the password?” he asks.
Junpei squints out the window again, his breath fogging up the glass. “6748.”
Sigma copies it into the password box on the screen. A red error blinks at him, demanding a better answer. Again.
Pushing up from the stool, Sigma marches over to the shuttle window himself. Junpei protests as he gazes out into the expanse. His eyes need a moment to adjust; space is much darker than the pure white of the satellite station they are stuck in. The planets come into focus with his vision. A red one numbered “six", a blue one numbered “seven”. Purple has “four” and yellow has “eight”.
“You had the colors wrong,” Sigma announces. He remembers the lights flashing on the monitor twenty minutes prior, a hypnotizing (and epileptic) sequence. “It should be green, blue, purple, red. You switched the red and green.”
“So the numbers are?” Junpei had moved to the password screen, an astronaut determined to return home to Earth.
“8746.”
“8756?”
“46.”
“Four-six, what?” Junpei frowns.
Sigma pushes his hand off of the keyboard and types the numbers himself.
“Junpei… are you color blind?” Diana asks, tilting her head. She is helping Phi make her way through the rows of keyboards lined up on the desks. “Messing up the red and green is really specific.”
Sigma does his best to tune out the ensuing argument. He’s getting hungry and irritated. They’re taking baby steps towards escaping the room, but clues block clues until he’s dizzy trying to untangle them.
He almost forgets that he’s in a mall in the first place. The cramped interior and blank walls lend themselves well to an extraterrestrial colony. So much for a fun outing with the family (and Carlos and Junpei?).
Akane refused the invitation, rightfully if not politely. Sigma is glad she isn’t here; their critical thinking skills are at an all-time low. He wonders if the escape room is to blame with its poor execution and obvious low budget. Are they all like this?
The most frustrating part so far is the five hundred piece jigsaw puzzle that Carlos is dutifully constructing. Supposedly it has a code on it, but with the amount of pieces they can only make out a single number across the bottom. A nine which is an awful joke.
It has quickly become the punishment puzzle. Whoever annoys the others is sent to serve their sentence trying to sort through the ragged edges and overabundant colors. So far, Phi has spent the most time hunched over the small table like a child sent to the corner.
“Okay, so here are the missing keys from the keyboards.” Diana reads her notes out loud to the room. Sigma doesn’t see an immediate pattern, but there are already a few repeating letters.
“It looks like a cipher,” he says. “We probably need the numbers from the puzzle.”
“Don’t say that.” Carlos puts his head down on the table, straight into the puzzle pieces. Diana walks over either to warn him of how unsanitary the puzzle is or to help—Sigma isn’t sure.
“I wrote down all the missing keys in every order I can think of,” Phi says, clearly displeased. She brings the paper over to Sigma where they stare at it.
He can barely read his daughter’s handwriting, but eventually he makes out the letters. “I see. Do you think it’s an anagram, then?”
“If it is, it’s a nonsense one,” Phi says, ripping the paper out of his hands before he can take another pass at it. Sigma is sure that his younger self would have snatched it back, but he’s too tired. If Phi wants to glare at a shitty puzzle, so be it.
“No… no, maybe it is an anagram.” Phi says. She has her thinking-face on, which means she won’t listen to a word that comes out of Sigma’s mouth. “Before, there was another set of numbers that we didn’t use. 526426… the sum equals twenty five. If we assume that the numbers correspond to words, we’re looking at…”
With Phi lost in her own world, Sigma returns to the puzzle. Carlos is struggling, and Junpei is standing against the wall, directing him instead of helping. He crosses his arms, attempting to throw words together.
“That’s not English.”
“I’m not designing the jigsaw puzzle, I’m just putting pieces together,” Carlos says. “Besides, I think we have all the numbers. Sigma, come take a look.”
Sigma squints at the puzzle. Even with missing pieces, he can barely make out what the first half of the sentence says, “Pedes ad te—something, something—ad sidera.”
“That’s fucking awful Latin.” Phi perks up from across the room, discarding her work in the notepad. She is next to Sigma in an instant, blocking his view of the puzzle. “Pedes ad terrae visi ad sidera.”
She counts the letters on her fingers and compares them to her notes. “Are you kidding me? All these puzzles for nonsense Latin?!”
“Why would the jigsaw puzzle give us the answer to the anagram? And why is there a number at the bottom?” Carlos asks, doubtful. He’s stopped moving the pieces around to turn on the stool and face Phi. “Though… then where do we put in that answer?”
Junpei ignores both the questions. “How is it bad Latin? It looks fine to me.”
“Of course it would look fine to you.” Phi rolls her eyes. Her eyebrows are knitted in anger. Here we go . “It’s supposed to be Pedes in Terra ad Sidera Visus if that’s the vibe they were going for. They used the ablative proposition ad before the dative terrae and that’s not even the right declension.”
“What the hell?! Try to explain that to me in English this time!” Junpei finally snaps, which only gives Phi an opening to bite back.
“That’s the problem! It makes no sense!”
“Okay, okay—” Carlos tries to calm both of them down, standing up and stepping between them. “So what does it mean? Even if it’s incorrect.”
Carlos… did not help. Both Junpei and Phi explode on either ends of the argument, while the blond stands in the middle, defending himself to the best of his ability against the two stubborn young adults.
“Shut up, all of you!” Sigma raises his voice. His partner flinches, so he brings it back down to speaking, shy that this has driven him to a confrontation. He adds, “Sorry.”
He looks around the room at the half-complete puzzles. “This doesn’t really matter. For once, our lives aren’t tied to getting out of this room. We don’t need to complete the tasks, a guy is just going to unlock the door when he has to go on his lunch break. We could probably even break down the—”
“Yeah, no, don’t do that.”
Sigma is interrupted by the employee, a kid who barely seems old enough to work.
“Time’s up. You didn’t escape and you also broke half of the room.”
Diana smiles shyly. “I-I wouldn’t say we broke anything.”
“Please just get out of here before I call my manager.” The kid looks almost as exasperated as the five of them. Almost because his daughter is glaring at Junpei, her hands resting accusingly on her hips.
They file out of the room one by one like a class of preschoolers. Their heads hang low and they refuse to look any employees in the eye. Released back into the crowded mall, they take a deep breath.
“See?” Sigma says, although it’s more to himself. Perhaps two rounds of getting trapped in mazes and forced to solve puzzles have altered his mind for the worse. Maybe it was a bad idea to categorize it as a fun activity, given all they’ve been through. “They let us out, after all.”
Diana laughs uneasily. She doesn’t like making big scenes. The boys have no such reservations, and continue to argue with one another amidst the peaceful waves of shoppers. Sigma is sure that a pretzel or two from a couple of stores down will fix their mood.
Phi remains next to him.
“Feet on the ground, eyes towards the stars,” Phi mutters Then clarifies. “The Latin.”
“You know? I like that.” Sigma closes his eyes, letting himself imagine it for a moment. It sounds pleasant. If this timeline could remain firmly planted on the ground.