After Ren and Adah, Felt and Iyswell were the next two competitors to emerge from their tunnels with their teddy bears in tow. While they waited for the rest of the cast to finish the first round of the challenge, the four of them were allowed to mingle and relax out in the open. Although she’d been able to quell her anxieties earlier, Adah was still grateful for the opportunity to stretch her legs. Staying cooped up in that antechamber with nothing to do but wait would have been torture.
Of course, instead of mingling, the four girls split into two predictable groups. Felt and Iyswell walked to the right end of the room and whispered between themselves, eventually pulling Tiella into their huddle once she emerged as the fifth-place finisher. Adah wondered what they might be whispering about since the conditions of the challenge made teamplay near impossible, but she soon realized there was one major advantage to cooperating today. On top of that, it was an advantage that favored the girls allowed to use flashlights.
Certain aspects of these challenges were so obvious that it was easy to take them for granted. That had been how Adah had found the trick with the titles of the goal books during the last challenge. One of the obvious limitations to this week’s challenge was that all of Locke’s gifts must have already been placed inside these pipes. As such, it was possible that Adah and the other girls had already found the objects they’d need to search for in the second and third rounds of this challenge.
Ciel’s group must have realized this too, and were using this break period to pool information about what kinds of objects they’d found and where in the pipe they’d found them.
Having more players to share that info with was one advantage in favor of their group, and having flashlights with which to ascertain the identities and positions of objects was yet another. That flash of light allowed you to take note of multiple items all at once. Searching by sight was faster and more accurate than feeling your way around. Perhaps more importantly, those flashlights allowed the other girls to know for sure where certain objects were.
Adah had noticed while crawling out of her tunnel that her perception of distance had been thrown out of whack by the darkness. While she didn’t think that bar of soap she’d found would wind up being one of Locke’s gifts, she wouldn’t know how to find it again if it was.
On their own, these advantages for the flashlight-havers weren’t insurmountable, but they would snowball as the rounds went on. Felt and the others would enter the second round with more info than Adah, and that knowledge gap would only widen heading into the third round. She just had to hope they didn’t remember any items that wound up being relevant to Locke’s riddles.
“You look pale,” Ren said, snapping Adah out of her thoughts.
“I’m always a little pale,” Adah said, which was true.
“I’m not sure it’ll be the same for you,” Ren said, “but I saw what’s at the start of my pipe. An old-looking key, a deck of cards, some kind of sneakers—I didn’t get a good look at them.”
As Ren listed off random objects, she counted on her fingers as if to make sure she was reciting. She named eleven items in total, some of which Adah had been fairly certain she’d found during her own search.
“The light only lasts a second, maybe less,” Ren said. “I think next time I’m going to save it until I solve the riddle and know what I’m looking for.”
“Thank you,” Adah said, “but I don’t think I found anything that you didn’t. Without the light, it’s kind of hard to say for sure.”
“I don’t care,” Ren said, looking over her shoulder at the other group of girls. “I’m not looking for a trade.”
“Then why…?”
“You wanted to team up, right?” Ren said. “So I’m helping you out.”
That simple answer perplexed Adah, but before she could think more about it, a loud buzzer like the one that had signaled the end of the first challenge blasted throughout the set. Arthur’s voice replaced Locke’s on the loudspeaker. To her right, Adah noticed Zoe emerge from her tunnel.
“And there we have our sixth place finisher,” he declared. “Miss Pirouette, you can make your way to the front of your pipe and join us outside for a quick break, but you will receive zero points for this round!”
After Pirouette joined the rest of Ciel’s group outside the pipes, Arthur recapped the current standings in today’s challenge.
Ren
10
Adah
8
Felt
6
Iyswell
4
Tiella
2
Zoe
1
Pirouette
0