Trust me [Text only]

[Brickman]

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The "It's anyone's game" adventure reminded me of an idea I had for an adventure, but since it's already moved into the antics of the numbered people I don't think it's likely to head in the direction this will go. Probably. If it does I'm going to feel a little bad for stepping on its toes but whatever. Anyways, this adventure will be 100% text because that's the way I envisioned it in the first place and images would just distract from the fun part (for me). I'm not dropping Cursed either; I'll update them both as suggestions come in (which is at a slow enough rate that I think I can handle two). So, without further ado or any more spoilers than I've already let slip:

It seemed so much like an ordinary day that you can't help but wonder if you could have gone about your entire morning routine and been out the door before noticing anything wrong. Your phone's alarm setting woke you at seven thirty, sunlight streaming through your window, you grudgingly got out of bed and dressed for class. Your roomates being gone was to be expected since they have class an hour before you. The house seemed a little cold, but whatever; it was snowing out last you checked. But even with a bit of sunlight coming in you happened to try the light switch to no avail. So you went to open the curtains all the way and...

That was ten minutes ago. You're still staring. Your house is still there. All the other houses are still there. Your car and all the other cars are still there too. A light snow is even still falling. It's just every single inch of ground which was not directly underneath a house or a car which is gone. Pillars of concrete reach up from what looks to be a yawning abyss, going down farther than you can see, just wide enough to support the building or vehicle resting on top of it. It doesn't take a stroke of genius to see why the power's out--whatever strange force did this didn't seem to consider telephone poles or power lines worth saving.

Behind you, your phone plays a few bars of song. You look at it and see that you've got two text messages waiting, one from ten minutes ago and one from just now. Despite your surroundings your phone shows four full bars of reception, which is more than it's ever had in your life. Your laptop also sits on a table nearby, closed but powered on, with the light signaling a wireless connection turned on. The charging light, however, is most decidedly not on--from experience you've got about six hours of active use before it needs recharging, or a couple of days if you leave it closed or turn it off.

:> _:

[AvzinElkein]

Check the text messages.

[Miraculous]

> Read the text messages.

[Brickman]

> Read the text messages.

The first message comes from the number 555-5555, which you are fairly certain has never been a real phone number. The phone identifies the sender as "K".

Sorry to say it, but if you're here your luck's really run out. For every one person who survives this little "game" there's twenty who don't. And by that I really do mean "don't survive". Whatever you do, don't think for a second you're not in danger, or that you can trust everyone. You can trust me, though, because a few weeks ago I was in the exact same spot you're in now and I'm not gonna just leave a fellow player hanging there.

I can't see what the Hex you're in right now looks like; you can describe it to me if you're really stuck but that's not important. I don't have anything special to say about the specific hexes that you couldn't figure out by looking. What's important is where you are on the map. The fastest way out of this Hex is going straight East, towards the sun, and that's the direction you wanna be going now anyways. If anyone tells you to go West they're not on your side. Ever. Grab whatever you need here before you leave, because you shouldn't be coming back.

That was... unsettling.

The other message is perhaps worse. This phone number is 666-6666, and the sender is identified as "M".

You just got a message from K, right? Don't trust her. Don't trust her for one minute. You follow her advice and I promise you will end up dead. I'm the one on your side here.

Right now you want to go east until you reach the edge of the Hex. You'll know when you do, trust me. I'd suggest you grab your computer before you go, it won't do you much good just sitting in your room. Not that you'll need it much anyways. My only idea for getting there is to jump between rooftops --those houses aren't that far apart, you can probably make it. It's better than staying put. If you've got a safer idea go for it though.

Her suggestion isn't sounding very safe in the slightest. Her advice isn't reassuring either, and you're not sure what to make of the fact that they ultimately both told you to do the same thing.

The moment you set down the phone after reading the second message, as if on cue (or maybe it was on cue) you receive a third message, from "X" at 999-9999. This one's much shorter

haha human you are totally fucked

but no less disturbing.

:> _:

[AvzinElkein]

Trust none of them and go west.

[BurntSquirrelMan]

They sound like nice people; go east.

[Brickman]

>Trust none of them and go west.
>They sound like nice people; go east.

How do you even go about deciding whether to trust these people or not? They both happen to be telling you the same thing so far, so if either of them were trustworthy east would be the direction to go, but that seems like a big if. If you go west, what will they do? Give up on you? Try to change your mind? Keep trying to give you advice on surviving anyways? You don't know what's in store for you in either direction. And that's assuming you can even get out of your house; you're not seeing a good way of doing that unless you want to try some rather extreme amateur parkour on unfriendly ground, and even that would only get you to the end of the block.

Another text message comes in while you're pondering. This one is from "B" at 222-2222:

You look like you could use some help getting out of your place. I'm betting there's a trick though. A lot of the Hexes aren't as difficult as they look. Try throwing something out the window and see what happens.

Better hurry though. Bad stuff'll happen if you spend too long in the same place, though you get a bit of a grace period at the beginning.

Not seeing a better alternative, you grab a sock from the pile in the corner and roll it up into a ball. You reach out the window and drop it. It falls straight down, and you scold yourself for picking something too soft to make a noise at the bottom. As if that would help. But... she said throw, not drop, right?

You try again, this time halfheartedly throwing the new sock in the direction of the house on the other side of the street. To your surprise, as soon as it's just past where you could reach it if you leaned all the way out the window, gravity seems to stop pulling on the sock. It travels in a straight line, completely horizontal (even though it wasn't horizontal just before that point), until it's a couple of feet away from the house you threw it at, at which point gravity switches back on and its flight arcs downward. It bounces off the side of the house near its base before plummeting into the abyss, but as you strain your eyes you see it suddenly stop falling after moving a certain distance from the house. It floats slowly, horizontally back towards you until air resistance brings it to a stop, then just hangs in midair.

Your phone makes its text message noise again. It's B again.
Good job! See, it's not so bad. I'm sure you'll do fine.

If you want to reach me, I'm way to your south. Since the game is made of Hexes that means you need to make a lot of moves southeast and southwest, rather than a straight line.

Just as you're closing your phone comes a second message from X:

aww
i thought thered be more to this hex
maybe the next is less boring

You put away the phone, for real this time. You've got some idea how you're supposed to move around now, but you still need to decide which way to go and who, if anyone, to trust.

:> _:

[Miraculous]

> Grab your laptop and some kind of inventory holding item, like a backpack. Grab some basic supplies too, in case this is going to be a long trip. Head towards B and start by heading south-east.

[SeptimusMagistos]

Don't rely too much on the gravity. See if you can find an ironing board or something.

[AvzinElkein]

Imagine this world is like a dream you can't wake up in. In a dream, you can shape the world around you...

[Brickman]

>Imagine this world is like a dream you can't wake up in. In a dream, you can shape the world around you...

Sadly this does not work. It's hard to imagine a place like this really existing, but it seems to be quite real.

>Don't rely too much on the gravity. See if you can find an ironing board or something.

B and X may think the solution is obvious, but your life is probably at stake here. You can't trust this strange anti-gravity thing to work predictably and should try to get as far as possible without relying on it.

Being college students none of you has an ironing board and you laugh at the thought as soon as it pops into your head. However, it does remind you of a different type of board available--one of your roommates snowboards and keeps both his and his girlfriend's in his room. You're reasonably willing to put thoughts of personal property or privacy on hold given the situation, and go into his room to get it.

Using one of the huge rolls of duct tape your other roommate is so enthusiastic about, you attach the two boards together as firmly as you can. You're left with something that's probably not long enough to stretch between two roofs. As you try to think of something to add you remember that there's a ladder still sitting in the basement that you borrowed from your dad for fixing a broken gutter. And it's probably a lot sturdier than anything you could make with duct tape anyways. Getting it upstairs and onto the roof will be a challenge, but it's got to be your safest option.

> Grab your laptop and some kind of inventory holding item, like a backpack. Grab some basic supplies too, in case this is going to be a long trip. Head towards B and start by heading south-east.

Right. You shut your laptop down and stick it in your bookbag, which you empty of books for weight. While taking stuff out you decide to leave your calculator in there just in case; if nothing else it's got some AAA batteries in it. You go downstairs and eat as much of a breakfast as you can without power, then stow some food in your bag--a bag of very salty nuts, some bread, some apples, and some bottles of water. Not ideal trail food, but it's what you have. As an afterthought you stick the roll of duct tape in there too, and a few pairs of clean socks in case you need something you can afford to throw away. Or, in case your feet get wet somehow--you don't want to go through this whole mysterious adventure with wet socks. A message from M signals the end of your supply-gathering phase:

That looks like enough. I don't know if I made it clear before, but you're on a time limit here. The ladder is a good idea though.

Remember, head east. It'll get you where you need to be fastest.

However, by now you've already decided that you're heading southeast, no matter what M or K says.

Getting the ladder onto the roof through a window by yourself takes some doing--you're only able to do it because gravity shuts down on any part of it that is more than a few feet from your house, though maneuvering a bulky, heavy item without gravity isn't very intuitive. Once on the roof, you stretch the ladder across the gap so the other end is securely planted on the house to the east of yours, and crawl across. You become weightless a few rungs away from your house, and have to hold on to avoid floating away--and you quickly realize that you're in severe danger of knocking the thing down since only the ends have weight, making it much less sturdy than it looks. Still, you make it to the other side and are able to repeat the process until the end of the block, turning south at the corner and going until you reach the end in that direction too.

Progressing any further south or east will require a leap of faith, unfortunately, and your imagination swims with ways it could end badly if you try to bring the ladder across with you and then lose your balance at your destination. As you take a break to catch your breath and muster up your courage, a message arrives from K:

Is something stopping you from going East any further? I really can't tell, all I can see is which way you're moving on the map. I'd really appreciate it if you described your Hex for me. I hope it's not a maze or something, that would be a nightmare to start out in.

There's no reason to assume that if you sent a text to 555-5555 she wouldn't recieve it. There's also no reason to assume you're still going to care when this month's phone bill arrives.

:> _:

Inventory:

[In Backpack]
1 Roll Duct Tape
.5 Loaf of Bread
1 Bag of Nuts
3 Bottles of Water
2 Apples
3 Rolls of Socks
1 TI 83+ Calculator with 4 AAA Batteries

1 Metal Ladder

[Miraculous]

> Lie and text her that the way east is impeded due to a lack of buildings to cross, so you have decided to go south and make your way east as soon as possible.

[Brickman]

> Lie and text her that the way east is impeded due to a lack of buildings to cross, so you have decided to go south and make your way east as soon as possible.

You aren't planning to go east right now, but if you can put off tipping K off about that you will. You make up a lie that you can't safely go any further that way because there's no buildings there. A few moments later you have a reply:

There's no buildings over there? I don't know what the Hex you're in right now looks like. Maybe if you explain it to me I can help.

Oh. That's what she meant. In that case, do you tell her the truth?

:> _:

[Miraculous]

> Explain the hex truthfully. It'd be suspicious to refuse to say and we don't know how hexes work fully yet, so we can't lie safely.

[Brickman]

> Explain the hex truthfully. It'd be suspicious to refuse to say and we don't know how hexes work fully yet, so we can't lie safely.

You briefly explain to K how it's basically your area of off campus housing with the ground missing, and describe how you think the gravity mechanic works. She (this is a she, right? M called K "her") takes a few minutes to come up with a reply, which you spend nervously keeping watch for anything that looks like the enforcement of a time limit. Eventually you get a series of texts in reply.

Huh, wasn't expecting the first Hex to be so elaborate. You say there's no buildings any further East than here? That's really weird, especially since I'm betting there were some before you came here. Normally there's nothing in a Hex to make going in any direction impossible, but some directions can be harder than others.

If you don't want to risk a blind jump East, you don't have to. In that case it's better if you go North rather than South; the place you need to get to is way to the East and a little bit North from the starting Hex. Wish you'd asked me sooner, I could have saved you some time.

My recommendation is to break into those houses and find something you can use as a rope and something heavy to attach to it. It doesn't have to hold your weight; an extension cord would do if it was long enough. Throw the heavy thing across the gap so it lands on a house, jump into the void and use the rope to reel yourself in. Don't worry about time; the others are probably trying to rush you but you've got plenty for the first Hex.

Don't worry about the houses, they're just copies. Nobody's gonna miss anything you take.

You like this plan better than a blind jump, certainly, but you doubt you're going to find a single extension cord that can reach all the way across the street. And it looks like you can't put off making an open decision about directions after all.

:> _:

[J Deschain]

> Find many extension cords and plug them together.

[Brickman]

> Find many extension cords and plug them together.

You don't even need one in front of you to know that if all you do is plug them into each other, a gentle tug could separate them and leave you stranded. Your "rope" doesn't need to hold weight but it needs to be able to handle a little tension from you pulling yourself with it.

[Miraculous]

> Tie them together instead. With a decent knot, they should be able to handle a bit of tension. As for the direction, there's no way around it. Ignore K and continue south-east.

[ShadoWKilleR]

Do the knot you do on shoes, those knots only tighten from stress and they are wide enough to not cause the extension cords to rip.

[Brickman]

> Tie them together instead. With a decent knot, they should be able to handle a bit of tension. As for the direction, there's no way around it. Ignore K and continue south-east.
> Do the knot you do on shoes, those knots only tighten from stress and they are wide enough to not cause the extension cords to rip.

You clamber around looking for a window you can reach from here on the roof, but don't find one; looking around you do see one on the previous house you crossed and reluctantly backtrack to it. To your surprise the window is unlocked. It's the middle of winter, that can't be right, can it? Either way, you climb inside and search for an extension cord. You find three in the house's "basement" (which you suppose is probably now built right into the concrete pillar), among other assorted junk. Trying to come up with the best knot you know and realizing you don't know many, you settle for the shoelace knot. It takes a couple of tries to do it with the knot with the fat, relatively inflexible extension cords, but eventually you get it. You tug as hard as you can and the knot holds.

The only thing you find with enough weight to even consider for this plan is a chair. You tie one end of your extension cord rope to the chair and return with it to the roof. As a test of the workability of this plan you chuck the chair onto the roof to your south (the one at the corner) and then leap across holding the other end. Your initial jump gets you stuck halfway between the two houses, but you reel yourself in by gently pulling the cord--until you get close to the other house, at which point the flaw in your plan presents itself. You drop almost straight down for about a foot before the cord swings you in towards the side of the house, which you hit (though not hard enough to lose your grip). You fully expect the chair to come falling at this point but it doesn't.

Slowly, carefully, fueled almost entirely by adrenaline, you climb the extension cord hand over hand while bracing your feet against the house. You curse yourself for not thinking to bring gloves, though you wouldn't have even this much of a grip if you had. Eventually your first successful pull-up in years helps you scramble back onto the roof. You sit panting for a minute, and have time to see that both legs of the chair that were touching the roof are caught in the gutter, which is no longer attached to the house very securely.

A text comes in, from X. At least his are short:

hahahahaha that was great. whose idea was that? i need to hold this against them for a long time

Just as you're beginning to boggle at the sheer impossibility of this challenge another text comes in. This one's from M:

Whoever it is that designs these hexes went overboard on this one. I'm sure eventually we could think of something to do from your end here, but we don't have that kind of time; every failed plan chips away at your grace period.

There is something I can do to help though. I can only do this kind of thing once or twice in the whole game, so if you've got another plan do it, but I can make this hex much easier.

If you do want it, just tell me east or south-east.

:> _:

[Miraculous]

> There must be a better way than relying on M. There's also no point in wasting whatever it is she's offering to do on such a simple hex.

How feasible would it be to create a bridge of sorts? If we could somehow weigh the edge of the ladder down on this roof, the part above the empty void wouldn't need any sort of structure to keep it up due to a lack of gravity. Then, if you could attach another long object, like the ladder, to the end of the first part of the bridge using the extension cords. The trouble with this plan is that you'd like lose the ladder in the process. Then again, thanks to the lack of gravity, it might be easy to pick up the bridge once you reach the other side..

[Brickman]

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Are you in a house? Take a look out the window at the house across the street. That's how far you need to get. And at least on my street, it's not close.

I'm kicking myself because I did not mean for this hex to be this hard. It's just that every time a solution was presented, by you or by the texters, I couldn't even finish typing it out before realizing a way in which it would go tragically wrong. So after this they're all going to be a huge letdown unless I work super-hard at coming up with good challenges. I just lucked into this first one, I'm going to have to work for the rest.

Let's just say that right now any entity that you asked would probably assure you that this is not a "simple" hex.

> There must be a better way than relying on M. There's also no point in wasting whatever it is she's offering to do on such a simple hex.

There's nothing stopping you from duct-taping a piecewise bridge together using all the furniture in these houses, since nothing except the first piece or two has to hold even its own weight, rather less yours or the structure's. There's probably no safe way to extend it into the gravity-affected region at the end, but if you angle the bridge upward you can surely jump that far.

You suppose the real question is, do you believe that you have that kind of time? K seems to think you do, but M is quite insistent that you do not.

:> _:

[Miraculous]

Inspiration has struck me. The Journeyman Project 2 has given me an idea.

> What you need is a way to propel yourself. Like a makeshift jetpack. Except it won't need to be strong enough to lift you, due to the lack of gravity between buildings. Search the house for something to propel yourself with, such as a spray can, or a hose. The more you can find, he better. Then, you should be able to step off the boundary and into the null-gravity void, then use whatever you have to propel yourself to the next building. Provided you propel yourself to a bit of land on the next building near the boundary, gravity shouldn't be a problem.

[Brickman]

> What you need is a way to propel yourself. Like a makeshift jetpack.

You go back into the house, climbing in again through the window, and begin searching again with a different goal in mind. It turns out things which can be used for propulsion and don't have to be plugged in to the wall are few and far between. Eventually, you stumble onto a gold mine. The basement, the same basement where you found the extension cord, is perhaps the most cluttered junk hoard you've ever seen, and among the junk is a little fan which uses batteries for power. It's about the right size to sit on your desk and it swivels around on its neck; from context you guess that the owner uses it to dry the glue on his collection of half-finished model airplanes. You're not complaining. You root around some more until you find an unopened package of eight AA batteries which would fit the fan; since it only holds two that's more than enough.

You return to the roof, stealing a jacket and a pair of gloves before you go. The ladder is still here from before, connecting this house to the one on the corner. Since you're not sure this plan will work, you tie the extension cord rope to the middle of the ladder, hold the other end and jump off towards the street parallel to your intended destination; if you can't propel yourself with the fan you can rope yourself back in to the ladder, without repeating the last disaster.

The fan ploy does, in fact, work. Progress is painfully slow, since the fan is very small and you are very large and friction with the air tries its best to cancel out your momentum, but you can control the direction of your nonzero movement and you know you've got plenty of battery life. Avoiding contact with the houses you float southward down the street, angling your movement upward so that at the end you'll be able to fall onto a roof even with your pitiful momentum. You may not have to though--after another half a block you reach what can only be the border of the hex.

From twenty feet away there's nothing unusual, and the houses continue on into the distance. From fifteen feet away there's nothing unusual. At ten feet away a blue shimmer becomes visible, and as you get closer it expands into a transparent circle, whose radius grows as you approach it and moves with you along the invisible wall. On the other side you can make out a small, square patch of solid ground a few feet wide and what may be a foot-wide trail leading away from it; it's hard to tell more than that because the view is hazy.

A text arrives from B; you carefully hold the fan in your other hand while you fumble with your phone to read it:

That was trickier than I thought! I was this close to using my intervention for you. Anyways you're going the right way--that's the southeast hex border. They're each a different color so you can tell them apart--southwest is going to be green, southeast is blue. If you ever get disoriented you can just ask me which way's which.

Now, onward to the next hex!

Playing the same game as always, a text comes in from X immediately after:

the funniest part of this whole game is that you're so convinced that there's some way it can end that doesn't suck for you. the sad part is that you'd be right if it wasn't for me.

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I don't expect any responses here, the next one's almost surely a ==>. It's just that a) I'm tired and b) This update's already long enough. Mostly a.

[Brickman]

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Alright, I give up. There's no way every hex will be able to top that one without devolving into full-on Weird Puzzle Shit, which is not the direction I want this going. I do have two ideas that'll hold up to the first's standards, but I unwisely constrained myself with the description of this hex so I'll have to go with an old cliche.

==>

You float forward through the wall and make the least graceful landing possible from about six feet in the air. Just knowing it was going to happen was not enough preparation for gravity returning after what felt like half an hour without it.

What looked like a landing platform was indeed a landing platform. What looked like a narrow path was not. Instead, it was one of the white spaces on the edge of a giant chessboard, each square a foot across. Most of the pieces are missing--each side has a queen, a king, a bishop and a knight left. On the other side is a giant hexagonal platform, each side wide enough to border the entire board. If that's the entire hex then it's a lot smaller than the one you just came from.

A quick check tells you that reaching the other side of the board is impossible of these pieces don't move but are still dangerous--both queens threaten an entire row. You step on to the board, and then move forward once, left once and forward once to test this theory. Everything except you remains in place.

For the moment your contacts are all silent, but you could always contact them. Not that this puzzle looks half as hard as the last one.

:> _: