The second challenge
30 May 2017 | Danny RocketA couple weeks went by, and the unlikely group of wizards spent most of their time at the local Library! reading up on ancient lore. They had absolutely no idea how to find the key or the door or whatever it was that they were looking for.
Wizarding competitions look fast pace and exciting in the movies–they even look fairly high-paced in the books, but in this story, it was extremely slow and tedius. They weren’t even looking in the right places, which has a way of extending a research venture.
He whined and complained like a baby to the writer, who was having a grand time listening to audiobooks. Something about pushing the story forward, giving them a hand, or writing anything interesting.
He had developed dark circles under his eyes from worry and lack of sleep. Studying is tedious indeed. One day, as Danny sat in one of those reading cubicles with a pile of lore and a short stack of dog-eared notebooks, he fell asleep.
In his sleep, Danny stood on a green hill, surrounded by many other green hills. Some of the hills has clusters of trees on them and others didn’t, but they were all made of the same green sand. Every few seconds the world seemed to flicker, like the refresh-rate on his mind wasn’t set quite right, and the monitor was struggling to keep up. So he started walking.
After what felt like a night’s walk, he found a cottage guarded by a small pack of angry poodles–all safely leashed to a stake in the ground. They were, however, close enough to the door, that entering would be problematic if he wanted to keep all his ankles–which he did.
It all looked very familiar.
So he opened his inventory, and inside, he found a rope, a cutlass, a steak, two mugs, some poison, a fish, some flowers, and a bowl of unknown slime. Perfect He combined the poison and steak and tossed it to the poodles–who fell upon it with great fury. Then they all fell asleep.
Inside the cottage, he found a fairly obvious looking scroll with a bunch of riddles on it. The contents of which cannot be written here due to potential copyright infringement law. Sufficive to say, Danny filled in the answers on the blank lines provided after each riddle: a mountain, sunflower, fish, teeth, and “lint or nothing.”
He was’t entirely certain that the last answer was what the scroll wanted, but as soon as he finished writing it, the scroll rolled up and started to crawl away. It inched along then jumped into the fireplace. In its place, Danny could see gleaming metal, so he grabbed the tongs and pulled out a ring. Or at least it looked like a ring at first. As the ring passed out of the coals, it continued on into a very old looking golden key.
Remembering the sage words of Gandalf, he dropped the key into his hand and immediately let out a scream as the hot metal burned into his dainty hands. He clutched his burned hand and heard footsteps behind him. Turning around, he realized that he was in the library again, and the fierce librarian glared down at him.
“Sir, I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave. This is a Library!”
“Sorry,” Danny tried to look more ashamed than in pain. He’d probably be kept for questioning if they saw the burned hand. He quickly gathered his notes, and key–which had landed on and scorched his notebooks.
He got a cup of ice nearby and walked quickly home, He didn’t know what the key was for, but now, finally, he was making progress again.