CYOA: Escape Room - Chapter 4 (Story) (Patreon)

Those shapes were absolutely important, Alecia was convinced. Serena seemed to have the magnets under control - or, at the very least, she was concentrating quite hard on them, and Alecia didn't want to interrupt - so Alecia decided it would be best for her to concentrate on those instead. If she could figure them out, then maybe she could announce it Serena, prove that she was a useful member of the team, and that her decision to climb up onto the high chair hadn't been as pointless as the other girl had been convinced it would be.

"Okay," she said to herself, closing her eyes to help her remember what she'd seen from the tray, looking down. "Where to start?"

The shapes were scattered around the floor, seemingly at random. They were all pretty basic: squares, triangles, circles, diamonds, and stars, colored in purple, orange, pink, and a soft gray. Not every shape came in every color, however... She might have wondered if she was wrong about that, if she was misremembering, but her mental image was as clear as a bell.

In fact, taking a moment to count them, she realized there were only three of each shape, which, obviously, meant it was impossible for any of them to come in all four colors. Was there something to that? Was it worth deducing what colors were missing from which shape, and trying to work out what that could mean? The thought of it made her head hurt, to be honest...

She opened her eyes and glanced over at the fridge again, and the magnets. For a split second, looking at the blue and red magnets, she felt the synapses in her brain firing, telling her that those could still be connected to the shapes after all. Blue and red made purple, after all, and there were purple shapes... And red and yellow made orange... 

What about the pink and gray shapes, though? She frowned, the brilliant plan forming in her brain quickly grinding to a halt. There were no white letters to combine with the red ones, and also no black ones to go with the equally non-existent white ones. Unless that, in and of itself, was the clue? Was she supposed to disregard those colors altogether?

She was getting ahead of herself... She still didn't know what they were even meant to do with the shapes. She walked over to the closest one, a purple diamond, and knelt down, taking a closer look at it. It really didn't seem any different from the rest of the white tile floor around it, other than the design, and, running her hand over it didn't do anything either.

"What are you?" she asked out loud. She wandered over to the next, a gray circle, and found exactly the same thing there, nothing that made it stand out from the diamond. If the colors were they key, she had no clue how, or why.

Why it took her so long to think of it, she didn't know, but finally, she decided to step onto the shape, tentatively putting one Velcro-sneakered toe onto it. It felt the same as the floor she'd been walking on this whole time... Of course, the shapes were a part of the floor, and they'd been tromping all over them since they arrived here.

It wasn't until she put both feet onto the circle, however, that something happened. It was subtle, and, if she hadn't been desperate to find anything to indicate she was on the right track with her hunch, she might not have noticed it, but she was sure it had happened, and stepping off and back on confirmed it. If she fully stood on it, rather than just quickly stepping on it as she walked, it sank down, ever so slightly.

That was it! She gave a little jump, feeling proud of herself. It was a trigger for some kind of secret passage, like old castles in movies had, or something like that! She glanced around the room to see what had opened up, but as far as she could tell, nothing had changed. Even stepping off and back on didn't work.

And then she went back to the diamond and did the same to it, her heart sinking a bit along with the shape. Of course it wasn't that simple... She should have known that she hadn't just lucked into picking the one shape that happened to be the solution. Maybe, though, if she found all the ones that did this, that would be useful, and help her narrow down which were important, and which weren't.

It didn't take long for her to realize that it wasn't only a few of the shapes, it was seemingly all of them. The same thing happened with each one, nothing different to make any of them stand out. She almost gave up, but by that point, she was too stubborn, searching now to see if she could find one that didn't move under her weight.

She didn't, and, while she didn't take the time to do a full scan of the room every time, nothing obvious opened or unlocked after she'd stepped on all of them. Maybe it was a combination thing, and she had to step on them in the right order... But there were fifteen of them, and the thought of trying every possible variation, and keeping track of which she'd done and which she hadn't, made her head spin.

Or maybe it wasn't that difficult... Maybe it wasn't a sequence of fifteen, but a combination of three. This place had been so insistent that they have at least three people to do this room... There had to be a reason for that, didn't there? 

"It has now been ten minutes," the woman's voice announced from out of nowhere, making Alecia flinch. Ten minutes?! Already?! She had taken quite a while, examining the tiles... She glanced up at poor Julianne, still trapped in her high chair, no closer to being released. Alecia didn't want to leave her there, of course, but she also didn't want to find out what was going to happen if she failed to get out of here, and she had no clue how to free her friend yet. If it came down to it... Could they get away without her?

She toddled over to the stool, dragging it back away from the fridge, and a pouting Serena, and over to the closest shape to it, an orange star, watching it carefully as she set the stool down on it. The star didn't budge, and she spent another moment or two adjusting the stool, ensuring all of the stool's legs were within the borders of the star, wishing it had been any of the other shapes to make it a little easier. No matter what she did, the stool didn't seem to work. 

All three of them were going to have to be down here, on the floor, to do this... Serena had been right; they were going to have to open the lock holding Julianne in the high chair. And, hopefully, they'd find something to tell them which of the shapes they'd need to stand on, too, because even after Julianne was free, and Serena was done with whatever she was doing, trying out all the combinations blindly would still take a long time. But where should she even start looking to find out how to do any of that?

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Serena groaned, her brain aching as she stared at the letters, trying to will them to do what they, so far, had refused to do, to fall into any kind of useful pattern, moving them all around one another, searching for a word that would tell her what to do next.

"Oh!" her eyes widened as she saw something start to form, eyes darting over to a letter she was sure she'd seen. Sure enough, it was there, and she dragged it over, adding in another.

"Pagoda," she read out, feeling proud of herself for managing to spot it at last. It wasn't the most common word in the world, which made it the perfect one to be used in this puzzle, and soothed her ego a hair for how long it had taken to spot it.

But... What did it mean?! There was nothing here that could be considered a pagoda, and she had no clue how it could even connect to anything in the room... Perhaps there was more to it than that, another word that would clarify things... The letters she had left were practically useless, though. 

"Ugh!" her victory quickly turned into a defeat - or, at the very least, a stalemate - she plopped down, diaper crinkling beneath her as she sat on the floor, pouting. Why was this so hard?! All she had to do was find the word hiding in these letters, and she was failing miserably! What was she doing wrong?! She really wished she could ask Julianne, to see if she'd encountered anything like this in another escape room...

This wasn't like other escape rooms, of course... She was sure Julianne would have mentioned if being shrunk to the size of a toddler was common practice in these sorts of places. So maybe she needed to think about this differently... This place was treating them like babies, so, perhaps, she was thinking too hard about these letters... Was there something simpler in there?

"Moo," she mused, moving the letters together. "Moo-moo..." Was there a cow in the room somewhere? A toy, obviously, but a toy cow certainly seemed more likely to exist here than a pagoda... 

And then, finally, she saw that she could actually make the word using only yellow letters, pushing aside the blue O's that had snuck in there. Were the colors important? She rolled her eyes at herself; the better question was, why hadn't she assumed that was the case from the start?! She'd been happy to think that the multiple colors were there for aesthetic, to give it more playful vibe, but you could never trust that something in an escape room was just coincidence...

Splitting the letters up by color instantly made them feel more manageable, even if, in practice, it didn't help as much as she might have hoped. There were still too many O's, too many of what had to be decoys, since there was nothing she could think of that would make sense using all of them. "Go, go?" she read out the blue letters. Did they need to move fast? Absolutely... They all knew there was a time limit. 

"Gag?" the green letters seemed to spell. Was that connected to the high chair, and the baby food Julianne was being fed? How? Did they need to have her eat a specific flavor? "Pay?" was the best she could come up with for the red letters, and yellow brought her right back to "Moo-moo," or, perhaps, "boo-boo." Did they need to find a cow and pay it something? Or did they maybe need a band-aid, and that was their payment to... something else?

"I don't get it!" she stomped, feeling so incredibly stupid and overwhelmed, and almost ready to throw in the towel... After being obsessed with them for so long, was she just too dumb for escape rooms?!

"It has now been ten minutes," the woman's voice boomed.

She was still on her first puzzle! She was never going to get out of here! She crossed her arms sulkily, not wanting to have to use a hint already, but feeling totally stumped, and too upset about it to react when Alecia came to take her stool.

She glanced up at the letters one more time, sick of the sight of them, yet knowing that if she gave up on them, she would have wasted all that time for nothing. And something clicked in her brain.

She'd still been thinking too mature... The answer was simple, if she was willing to go back a bit further. She knew, in her heart, that this time, she'd done it, confirmed by the fact that, for the first time, she'd used every single letter.

"Goo-goo ga-ga," she read out, feeling silly and proud at the same time. "Diapy boom-boom."

Her pride quickly vanished when, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she felt her knees bend, and her body begin to push, letting out a soft grunt against her will. "Stop!" she squealed, horrified... Or tried to, at least. Instead, she heard an unintelligible bit of baby babble in her ears, not too dissimilar from the first two words in the puzzle's solution.

"What's happening?" she attempted to ask, those words coming out the same way, and interrupted by another grunt as she was reminded of what else was going on, her eyes widening as a warm, mushy mass formed in the seat of her diaper. The question was pointless anyway... She knew exactly what was happening... She was filling her pants like the toddler she was the size of, unable to even speak like a grown-up as she helplessly felt her diaper balloon behind her, growing larger and heavier and stinkier with every passing second, no matter what she did to try to halt it... 

She should have known better... She knew there were usually red herrings in escape rooms... Julianne had told her about them. The magnets had been too obvious, she realized too late, fighting in vain to make her tummy stop pushing, nothing seeming to work. Maybe if she'd had some more first-hand experience, she would have recognized the danger... Normally, though, a red herring just wasted your time. In this room, apparently, they could do much more than that...

"Uh-oh!" the woman's voice returned. "Looks like somebody had a little accident!" Serena blushed bright red, tugging at the skirt of her dress, though she doubted it would matter... It hadn't been long enough to begin with, and now that her diaper was very full, and sagging lower with the weight she'd just added, there was no chance it could do the job. Her only hope was that Alecia wouldn't look her way, would assume that it had been Julianne... Because, as an older sister, Serena had no doubt Alecia was capable of recognizing a dirty diaper on sight, even across the room. She couldn't let that cheerleader see her in poopy pants! But, thanks to her outfit, she also didn't have a choice in the matter... 

"Don't worry," the woman taunted. "If you need a change, all you have to do is ask... Oh, but you can't do that, either, can you? That's all right... Just do your best, and I'll figure it out. It'll only cost you one of your hints."

Serena whimpered, squirming in her squishy pants. She did very much want out of this, to escape the humiliating thing she'd just done... Did she really want to waste one of their hints on it, though? If they ended up needing help to get out of the room, and weren't able to get it because she'd wanted a clean diaper...

She groaned, wrinkling her nose. It was hard to imagine continuing on this way, but they were nowhere near getting out. She needed to get back to work, if she could possibly concentrate on anything while stuck in a poopy diaper. What was she going to do?!

Should Serena... 

Ask for a change?

Check under the sink?

Check the sink?

Try to open the fridge?

Look at the picture books?

Look at the pots and pans?

Examine the baby gate more closely?

Or ask for a hint?

And should Alecia...

Check under the sink?

Check the sink itself?

Try to open the fridge?

Look at the picture books?

Look at the pots and pans?

Examine the baby gate?

Or ask for a hint?

Again, I don't know that I'll do this every time,  but considering how things went, I thought I'd show a bit of the process that led to what happened in this chapter.

Alecia had some very bad luck. That option was really meant to be a red herring, honestly, and I tried to hint at that a bit by saying in the last chapter that looking at the shapes, in and of themselves, probably wasn't going to be enough. In her roll to see if she could work out why, however, she rolled a 1, which I'll now reveal is what Serena rolled at the end of the last chapter in order to determine whether the magnets were worth continuing to spend time on - maybe I ought to use a different dice roller - which means both of them wound up wasting time working on things that probably aren't the most useful in getting out of the room in time. I guess red herring might not be the best term for it, but the knowledge she got from the option is something that, with a better roll, she could have gleaned very quickly and moved on. She did roll very well to move the stool, though, and to work it out in the end.

Serena's luck was a bit more mixed, but even when it was good, it made things worse for her. She failed a second wisdom check to solve, and then just barely passed one, enough to let her figure out the colors went together, but not to find out what any of them said, then aced her next check to be able to solve, which meant that she put all the words together in one go, which, unfortunately, is not such a good thing in this case, since it tripped both potential traps in that puzzle... 

I don't have a set plan for how many chapters this will go, in relation to how long the escape room is meant to take - it should vary, depending on what, exactly, they do in each chapter - so I wouldn't say that every two chapters will be ten minutes in the story world, it just was this time because they were both very distracted by their respective red herrings.