Chapter Twenty
~ Glen Thornton ~
Keepingpressure on the lock with the larger paperclip, I rake the hooked one under the pins. In no time, I’m inside the superintendent’s office.
I open an incognito browser window on the secretary’s laptop and check my messages in the Realm.
Jackpot! There’s a message from Wonderman leaving clues to a gingerbread cottage in the woods—a trail of breadcrumbs I recognize as symbols in our guild.
My character is a thief, so I easily open the lockbox for the first clue. It’s a set of tangrams, shapes with holes that fit into a pattern. I rearrange the shapes, and note the symbol inside each of the colored holes.
It points me to the next location in the game: the library. Using the colored symbols, I rearrange the virtual bookshelf. There’s a number on the spine of each book.
I write the numbers down on a piece of paper, and then proceed to the bank vault. A ticker tape tells me where to put the plus sign and the negative sign, as well as the decimal points.
I end up with two numbers. One positive, and one negative with six significant after the decimal. I stare at it, and turn it around in my mind. It looks like a latitude and a longitude, something we learned about in geography class.
I plug the numbers into the Realm World and it lands in the middle of the ocean. There’s no cottage either of gingerbread or woods in the vicinity. Did I make a mistake?
I go back to the library and check the numbers again. Maybe they go from right to left instead of left to right. Maybe one goes left to right and the other goes right to left.
I rearrange the decimal point, the plus sign and the minus sign, but each time I plug the latitude and longitude into the Realm World, I end up in a dead end: a box canyon, a swamp, on a vast glacier, or in the hot sands of the desert.
What am I missing? Could this be a combination for a lock instead of a latitude and longitude? Did I miss a decimal point or a blank space?
Wonderman had said that the gingerbread cottage would contain another clue for me. If only I weren’t so stupid, I would have found it.
I notice PinkPriestess is logged in, so I shoot her a message.Tell Wonderman that I can’t find the gingerbread house. I don’t have much time before I have to disappear. I need more clues or I’m doomed.
She writes back.I’ll hang around the Temple and watch for him.
I write her.Can you ask him to uncloak himself?
She doesn’t answer, so I poke around, fight a horde of nomadic bees, collect their honey coins, and make my way to the Temple of Orion.
I need a real life adult to help me get to my mother’s money. Since PinkPriestess isn’t helping, my only chance is still Wonderman.
I open the breadbox to see if he left me any more clues. Scanning inside, I find a world map—only it’s not any of the Realm worlds.
It’s a flattened projection of the earth. I trace the longitude in the negative direction—west, almost a hundred twenty one degrees.
It lines up with the mountains where my parents have a vacation home. My heart beats in a gallop as I count the latitude lines, north of the equator by about forty degrees.
It’s in the Sierra Nevada mountain range—a real place.
