D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

Chapter 1950: Chapter 1950 Life is Like a Box of Keys

--- Lily ---

When Lily and Hedera got themselves moving it was easy to clear the room. With Lily’s shadow control she didn’t even need to swim down to the bottom of the pool. If they’d been called out for cheating Lily would’ve swum down... but Trapmaster clearly didn’t bother being too strict in this room. It was more for getting clean clearly.

The next room had an obvious solution that required a fair bit of effort to implement. Inside was a big wall with four colourful buttons set in the cardinal directions. The big sign saying ’match the pattern’ was almost unnecessary. When you got close to the wall, the lights would flash in sequence, playing a unique tune for each. The top button was red, then going around clockwise you had blue, green, and yellow.

The red button sounded like a tuba, the blue one sounded like a trumpet, the green sounded like a cowbell and the yellow sounded a bit like a saxophone. Though not completely so it was probably just something similar. The patterns weren’t too bad at first. Red, blue, red, blue, green yellow. Easy. Even when they escalated a bit after the first round it was just a matter of pressing the correct buttons in order and Lily and Hedera both had the memory for it.

That is, at its base level. After five rounds of pressing buttons the middle section of wall opened up with another button. This one was purple and sounded like a flute, or maybe it was pan pipes. Lily couldn’t tell. Just one more button was fine though. It was easy to distinguish and even as the number of buttons they needed to press climbed higher it wasn’t too bad...

And then the opened up another set of five buttons off to the right. Lily stared in horror at them as she glanced at the empty space on the left, where it was almost certain you’d see another set of buttons at some point. The new set was the same colours, except they all had white diagonal stripes added to them now and when the next round started, the sounds that played were the same instruments but a much lower pitch.

Keeping track of everything was getting difficult. Not only was there ten buttons to keep track of, even with the sound queues helping, they were going off in rapid succession, the audio blending from one to the other and making it hard to keep track of everything. It was at the point where about halfway through the sequence Lily was honestly stuck. ”Is it... red or blue here?” asked Lily, shadow fingers perched above the two buttons in question.

”Blue?” offered Hedera. Lily glanced back with a questioning look but Hedera just shrugged. They were about twenty buttons deep into the sequence. Neither of them were sure. Sighing, Lily accepted defeat and pressed the button... and it was correct. She also had completely lost the thread and had no idea where to go next. Lily glanced back over at Hedera who sighed and pressed the striped yellow button near her...

Suddenly, alarms blared and all the lights flashed while a ’wamp, wamp, wamp’ sort of sound playing signalling failure. The message at the top changed and said ’press any button to start the sequence again’. Lily sighed and rubbed her temples thankful for the break. ”Bleh, I wish Kat was here with her perfect memory. It’s so hard to keep track of all this shit...”

”Yeah... I thought my memory was pretty good but so many of these sequences all coming so quickly and one after another has them blended in my mind a bit. Do you have anything that could make this easier or more consistent?” asked Hedera.

Lily shook her head. ”I thought about having like, shadow numbers in front of the buttons at first, before I realised how ’easy’ they were” sighed Lily with air quotes for the easy. ”Now though... there’s just too many. Not only would the shadows of different numbers be crowding the buttons... I don’t know that I even have ENOUGH shadow for that. Even making the numbers super small... I just don’t have enough distance to stretch my shadows that much.”

”What about just keeping track of the last few?” asked Hedera.

Lily shrugged. ”I’d need to concentrate decently hard to keep all the numbers in place so it would be down to just you at that point. At least with what we’re currently doing we can sort of split the two sets of buttons up between us and share the burden somewhat.”

”Ah... yeah I can see where that would be an issue,” frowned Hedera as she scratched at her chin. ”Do we just have to keep trying then? This isn’t like Kat’s weird challenge where she had three guesses. We seem to have as many attempts as we could want.”

”Yeah... but what if they send us all the way back to the start, and not one as long as our most recent failure?” asked Lily.

Hedera shivered. ”I don’t even want to think about that. This could take HOURS if they programmed it that way...”

So the pair got back to work and were somewhat pleased to see that the task had remained at the same level of difficulty instead of resetting. The small break they had was enough to hit all the buttons without mistakes... and of course that was the signal for the third set of buttons to show up. Lovely.

Despite their worries, in the end the third set of buttons actually made things easier. Perhaps it was luck, or perhaps Trapmaster didn’t want to make it impossible. What seemed to happen for the remainder of the challenge was five buttons from one section, then five from another, before moving on once again however many times it was necessary. Before, the buttons were perfectly happy to swap from one board and back again at random. It made compartmentalising things easy and replaying the whole thing even easier. You just had to remember each segment and then repeat that back.

The next room they came face to face with about a dozen boxes all filled to the brim with metal keys. The goal ’find the correct key’ was not one that they really liked the look of. There had to be at least fifty keys in each box, probably more and there were, after a quick count, thirteen boxes of keys. All with different colours, shapes and sizes. ”Urgh, how are we going to do this?” groaned Lily.

”I could try and pick the lock?” asked Hedera as she gestured to the lock in question. It was a beefy looking thing with a heart shaped body and rather obvious glowing runes.

”You think you CAN pick it?” asked Lily.

Hedera shrugged. ”It’s obviously enchanted but I’m not good enough with them to be certain what they’re doing. It might just be to make them glow. The locks for the primordial weren’t exactly proper...”

Lily shrugged, ”If you want to make the attempt you can... I guess I should get started on sorting out all of these keys? Would it even be worth sorting them? Or should I just try them all one after another assembly line style?”

Hedera shrugged back at Lily. ”Whatever you want. Maybe sort one box and see how useful that is while I try picking this for a bit?”

Lily nodded at that, and got to work with their plan in place. Hedera pulled out a few tools and got started on the lock while Lily summoned as many shadows as she felt comfortable controlling and moved the box over to the corner. The table with all the boxes wasn’t exactly large after all.

Once in place, Lily started to organise things. She kept it fairly basic. Keys of the same rough style were kept in the same line and she organised them based on size. There was a good variety of sizes and styles, even if a few keys seemed to straddle the line between types. What she did manage to figure out rather quickly, is that plenty of the keys were too large or too small for the lock. Though perhaps the smaller ones would work considering the enchantment.

The larger keys were much easier to discard though. They simply had no chance of fitting in the lock, even with its decently large size. Once Lily got into a grove she could sort the keys in no time at all. Her shadow tendrils would grab a key, wave it in front of her face, and then Lily would direct it to the correct place on the ground while she was already being shown the next key. Three tendrils remained on ’sorting duty’ and were used to make space for the keys as they went down while the rest grasped or placed down keys as necessary.

Lily managed to clear the whole box in around five minutes. Still not exactly amazing time, but much faster then she’d thought considering how many keys were in the box, and laid out like this she was sure that the number of keys was closer to one hundred then fifty. Now they had to work out how to test them all...