Volume 19 - Royal Guests, Chapter 144 - Talk Like an Egyptian

The four royal visitors left the Inn early in the morning and traveled by exquisite limousine to Ski Lodge Kobold. They returned to the Mountain Lily Inn just after dinner time, looking exhausted but happy. Yuisu checked in with Moira to see if the royal party needed anything, but their only request was for an explanation of how to use the hot spring.

While Yuisu explained the rules, Nemes slipped away and paid a surprise visit to the main house. When the mysterious sphinx appeared in the kitchen, all the liminal homestays were working together to clean up after dinner. Only Mara wasn't present, since she had a scheduled raid to attend.

Chione was the first to spot the guest who had silently entered the room. "Oh, uh, hello. You're Nemes, right?" she said as she returned a freshly cleaned wok to its shelf.

Nemes smiled wide, her perky ears flicking twice. "So I am. Please pardon this intrusion into your comfortable coven." Then her catlike eyes swept over all the women present. Her gaze was intense, as if she was judging them and deciding whether they were worthy.

Then she reached behind herself with a winged-arm and carefully plucked three rolled pieces of paper from the small of her back, where they'd been tucked into her sarong. She approached Haru with the three objects held on her wing.

Haru tilted her head, unsure what to expect from the strange woman. She'd heard from Yuisu that Nemes liked to speak cryptically and cause a bit of mischief.

Nemes had a cheerful look on her face as she spoke, "I present three riddles, each with a trinket to earn should a solution be discovered before dawn. Please collaborate and enjoy yourselves." With that short explanation, Nemes turned and padded back out the back door with her lion-like tail flicking through the air.

Aluru was the first to speak. "Oookay… What was that about?"

"Let's see," Haru said as she set the three scrolls on the kitchen table and unrolled the first one. Written on its surface in neat English letters was some sort of riddle.

Second fastest of 4234,

Riding to bury the old tale,

Jeff would be too casual.

Hakuto was curious as well. She stepped up to the table and unrolled another one, revealing a similarly formatted riddle, except it was in Japanese. She read it aloud, having a little difficulty with the unusual phrasing.

White feather on a polished mirror,

does it ponder this childlike approach,

to skirt a flawed law?

Hakuto bounced on her toes for a moment, holding one paw to her chin, then said, "I don't get it."

Haru smiled. "It wouldn't be much of a riddle if you could solve it immediately." Then she squinted her eyes in thought. "That 'polished mirror' part sounds familiar. Yuisu said that Nemes called her something like that yesterday."

Tsuen approached the table. "Let's check the third one." She rolled the parchment out flat and looked at the last riddle. It was in Japanese, but had a different format than the other riddles.

Rain, Rail, Lightning

2.1, 1, 0.030

A tribute to ancients.

Tsuen's Japanese skills had improved considerably since she joined the Exchange Program, but she was never very good at wordplay. Adding in the apparent math component of this third riddle, Tsuen immediately knew she was in over her head. "Uh, I have no idea where to even begin with this one. It's got numbers with decimal points, and not a lot else to work with…"

Haru took charge. "We should focus on one at a time. Does anyone have any leads on one of the riddles?"

Chione raised a stony hand. "The fact that only one is in English probably matters. Or it could even be a clue that we should translate the other ones."

Haru nodded. "Those are good ideas, but most of us don't speak any English, so I'm wary of starting with that one."

Chione wasn't discouraged. "I can start translating all the riddles, while you girls focus on another one? I can translate them to English, Japanese, and French, just in case."

Aluru waved a hand and started shuffling toward her bedroom. "Sorry girls, but this just isn't my jam. It makes me feel kinda dumb. Good luck on the riddles."

Hakuto and Tsuen both watched her go. It seemed they weren't confident in their puzzle-solving abilities either, but they didn't leave just yet.

Hakuto pointed with a white paw. "You said the mirror part of the riddle I read was familiar. Want to focus on that one first?"

"Sure. I think it was referring to Yuisu, and the 'white feather' could be referring to me." Haru's eyes shined with excitement as she dove into the task of unraveling the mystery of the riddle.

An hour later, Haru's enthusiasm had faded. She rested her chin on her folded wings and stared fruitlessly at the riddle. "Childlike approach? Flawed law? We still don't know what those mean… I feel like we're missing an important piece of information."

Yuisu rubbed her shoulders. "Don't get too down about it. It's just a silly game Nemes likes to play with people. There's no penalty for losing."

"But this riddle is practically addressed to you and me. We've gotta be able to figure it out. I don't want to lose to a dumb riddle."

Chione stood up and stretched her wings. "Sorry, Haru. I'm gonna bow out now. Gotta check in with Abyss before I start my night-watch." Then she added, "I'll keep thinking about them tonight, even though my translations didn't make any headway. Too bad Mimi wasn't here. She knows way more languages."

As Chione walked away, Yuisu suggested, "Let's look at one of the other riddles for a bit, to have a fresher perspective when we return to this one."

Haru nodded and used her wing to bring the other two riddles close. She unfurled one and started to ponder it.

Rem had been busy working when Nemes first delivered the riddles, but now she was on the other side of the kitchen table with a pad of paper, trying to solve them. She had a shortened pencil, still as long as her arm, and was jotting down notes and scratching out the approaches she'd already taken.

Her current focus was the riddle about the polished mirror, and she was pretty sure she had a solid lead. After her disaster of a homestay experience, Rem had done some research into Japanese law, and an interesting fact had stuck with her. She wrote her final thoughts down, then leapt to her feet. "Got it!"

Haru and Yuisu twitched in surprise. Haru leaned in close, staring at Rem's chaotic notes. "Really? Which riddle?"

Rem put a hand on one hip and smiled confidently. "I'm pretty sure I solved the 'polished mirror' one."

Yuisu read the riddle in question aloud. "White feather on a polished mirror, Does it ponder this childlike approach, To skirt a flawed law?" Then she looked back to the tiny gremlin. "So what's your answer?"

"Adoption," Rem answered, her catlike grin looking even more smug than normal.

"Adoption?" Haru asked.

"Yep! In most countries, adoption is used to give parents legal guardianship of a child. but in Japan it's occasionally used to bring an adult into the family."

Yuisu nodded and said, "Yeah, it's been a thing for hundreds of years. People use it to extend the family name, or for political power."

Rem raised a finger and said, "And some gay couples have been using it as a replacement for marriage, since it gives some of the same rights, like hospital visitation and inheritance."

Haru reread the riddle to herself, then said, "Yuisu and I are the mirror and the white feather, adoption is the 'childlike' approach, and the flawed law is the restriction of marriage to being between a man and a woman… It all fits."

"Nice work, Rem!" Yuisu said, very impressed. She'd had all the necessary knowledge for that riddle, but hadn't been able to put the pieces together the way Rem had.

Then Haru spoke, her voice quiet, "So, have we considered that approach? We could hold a purely ceremonial wedding, and look into legal adoption."

Yuisu put a hand on Haru's shoulder. "Actually, I did look into that a little, but there was a snag. It has to be the older person that adopts the younger, but you're not a Japanese citizen yet. I've been hoping the marriage law would change soon, so I never brought it up."

"Ah, of course."

Rem piped in. "Don't get down, girls! There are two more riddles to solve, and prizes too!"

A blur of pink zipped into the kitchen from the hallway. "Did I just hear you say riddles and prizes?!" It was Mara, apparently done with her raid.

"Yep!" Rem said. "Nemes gave us three riddles to solve, and I just solved one."

"Nice!" Mara held up a pink-carapace-covered hand and Rem gave it a high five. Rem's hand was so small, perhaps 'high 0.5' was more accurate. Then Mara asked, "So what are the remaining two riddles?"

Less than fifteen minutes later, Mara claimed to have solved both of the remaining riddles. She had a flair for theatrics, however, and didn't reveal the answers right away. She ran around the house and gathered the girls to bear witness. Tsuen, Hakuto, and even Aluru returned to the kitchen to hear her big unveiling.

Mara jumped on the table, causing Yuisu to give her a nasty look, but she let it slide for now. Then Mara said, "First up, well second after the one Rem already solved, is the English riddle."

Aluru gave a questioning look. "Do you even speak English?"

Mara shrugged. "Not fluently, but that actually helped here. You see, that lead me to do some internet searches for the words, which pointed me in the right direction." Then Mara lifted the scroll. "Anyways, the riddle says, 'Second fastest of 4234, Riding to bury the old tale, Jeff would be too casual.'"

She pointed at the first line. "We can thank Tsuen for how I solved this part. The word 'riding' in line two made me think of horses, and 4234 are numbers related to horses too."

Tsuen raised an eyebrow and her long ears quirked out at odd angles. "Uh, I'm not actually a horse…"

"But you run like a horse. And 4, 2, 3, and 4 are the number of beats in each of the standard horse gaits: walk, trot, canter, and gallop. The second fastest of those is the canter, our first piece of the answer."

Mara's audience nodded eagerly. They were getting wrapped up in her enthusiasm and the excitement of such a tricky riddle finally being solved.

She continued, "The next part was just a matter of combining the right words. You take the 'canter' that we got, add in 'bury' and 'tale', and you get The Canterbury Tales, a famous set of stories in Middle English from over 600 years ago. At least that's what the internet said."

Yuisu smiled at that. She'd heard of The Canterbury Tales once or twice, but didn't know anything else about them. It figures that Mara would have known even less about them before her internet search.

Haru was following along as best she could with her weak understanding of English. "So what's this last part about a 'Jeff'?"

Mara triumphantly raised the hand that was clutching the riddle scroll. "That's the final clue we needed. Jeff is a casual nickname for Geoffrey, and the author of The Canterbury Tales was Geoffrey Chaucer, and that's how we know the final answer is Geoffrey Chaucer!"

"Nice work, Mara," Tsuen cheered, and the girls all clapped for Mara's success, but only for a few seconds. They were eager to hear her solution to the last riddle too.

"For this last one, I'm gonna need Haru's tablet." Mara turned to Haru and held out a hand expectantly.

"Uh, why?"

"Don't worry, I won't look at your search history or photos. You can even do the driving."

"Good. I bet your claws would scratch it up anyway," Haru muttered as she jogged to her room to get her tablet.

"How rude!" Mara said in a joking tone.

Rem poked Mara in the arm. "Well, you just demanded it out of nowhere, you know?"

"And implying that there were lewd things on it was rather rude, Mara," Tsuen added.

Yuisu looked off into the distance, conspicuously silent, confirming that there were indeed lewd photos on that device…

Haru returned quickly, the large white tablet tucked under a wing. She sat at the table and said, "So what app do you need? Web browser?"

"Thanks, Haru. And I actually need the Maps app. Pull up Okayado on it, please."

Haru used a feathery thumb to bring up the map, which already defaulted to the tablet's current location. She swiped over a bit to show more of the town of Okayado. "Okay. Done."

Mara grinned. "Perfect, it even has the Mountain Lily Inn marked."

Everyone looked at her, waiting for some explanation of how this related to the riddle.

"The big trick to this riddle was realizing that the first line is a set of directions, with matching distances on the 2nd line."

"Directions? What do you mean?" Tsuen asked.

"Rain, Rail, Lightning", Mara read from the scroll. "Rain moves downhill, and so would an unpowered train, except it'd follow the rails. And lightning moves up."

Aluru scoffed. "Lightning moves up? That makes no sense."

"It's true," Haru said with a nod. "The part you can see moves from the ground up to the clouds." It was logical that a harpy would need to know about lightning and storms in general.

Aluru still looked skeptical, but she waved a hand dismissively, not caring enough to press the issue.

"But how'd you know those numbers were distances?" Tsuen asked.

Mara read off, "2.1, 1, 0.030," then said, "The third number was the clue, with that extra zero at the end. It suggested that it was 30 thousandths of something, rather than 3 hundredths. So that made me think of meters and kilometers."

She pointed a finger at the map, not quite touching the screen, and said, "So I followed those directions from here." She slid her finger downhill from the Inn and along the river's path for 2.1 kilometers, to where it it crossed under a train track. Then she followed the train track north out of town for 1 km, into a tunnel that cut through a small bit of mountain. Her finger had nearly reached the edge of the tablet, but she didn't ask Haru to adjust it.

Rem said, "So there's something 30 meters up above that tunnel?"

Mara nodded, then she asked Haru, "Can you make the map display shrines?"

It took a few taps and submenus, but Haru enabled shrines and temples on the map. "Here you go."

Suddenly, Hakuto started bouncing up and down next to the table. "My shrine, my shrine! They added my shrine to the map!"

Sure enough, there was a tiny shrine icon right next to the Mountain Lily Inn. Yuisu put a hand on Hakuto's shoulder, both to show solidarity and to calm her down. "That's great. It should bring in more visitors, for you and for me," she said, then she gestured with her other hand for Mara to continue.

"The last line says 'A tribute to ancients', and there is a small shinto shrine above that tunnel, one dedicated to the forest. Therefore, the solution to the last riddle is Forest Shrine."

As the exciting explanation came to a close, everyone just stared at Mara in surprise.

Haru said, "Wow, I can't believe you figured those out."

Mara stood up on her chair and put her hands on her hips. "What? Just because I'm hyperactive doesn't mean I'm stupid! And I've got tons of puzzle-solving experience from my years of gaming."

Tsuen quickly hugged her and said, "We never thought you were stupid. It's just that the way you solved those so quickly made us look stupid. Never stop being you, Mara."

Rem joined the hug, wrapping her arms around Mara's pedipalp. "Yeah, that was some amazing work, Mara!"

Then Hakuto raised a paw. "Uh, so what do you do now? I don't think Nemes gave us any instructions for what to do when we solved them…"

Fortunately, Yuisu had an answer. "Fal mentioned this to me. Apparently we can write our answers under the riddles and drop them off at Nemes' cabin. She'll bring her prizes around breakfast."

The prizes were not what anyone expected. On the kitchen table sat three clay jars of varied size. The smallest was no bigger than an orange, and the largest could easily hold four oranges inside. They all had a vaguely Egyptian pattern painted on the outside, and they seemed to be very well made. Regardless of the reward contained within, the jars would make nice souvenirs. Each one also had one of the familiar riddle scrolls tied to it with a ribbon, to indicate which riddle-solver had earned it.

Haru said, "Nemes told us to collaborate on the riddles, but I think it's pretty clear that Rem and Mara did all the real work. Everyone okay with them getting the prizes?"

A chorus of agreement came from all the girls present. Even Chione was still awake, since she was curious about the prizes.

Rem approached the smallest jar and found that the riddle she had solved was attached. "Convenient," she said as she grabbed the cork lid and opened the jar. Inside among some soft cotton padding was a small crystal figure, no more than three inches tall. It was pale blue, flawlessly cut, and shaped like a cat sitting upright, tall and slender.

"Pretty…" Tsuen said as Rem lifted it into the light where the figurine sparkled beautifully. It was clearly handcrafted and of impressive quality. The cat seemed to have a mischievous personality, with the way it's detailed face and ears had been carved.

"You can say that again. And it's actually small enough to fit in my house," Rem said. Her face bloomed into a wide smile. "This is awesome!"

Mara was itching to see her prizes, so she opened the largest jar in a hurry. Inside was a rectangular package, wrapped in plain brown paper. A paper label said 'Traditional Kemet candy. Contains honey, figs, dates, and pecans.'

She unwrapped and opened the small box, revealing 16 clusters of fruit and nuts, glistening with a coat of honey and nestled in crumpled wax paper. "Ooh, these look tasty…" Mara mumbled, her appetite returning despite having just eaten breakfast.

Rem's mouth was full-on watering, and she had to restrain herself from diving into the box headfirst. "Um, may I have a piece?" she said through clenched teeth.

"Of course! I'd like everyone to be able to try these, if they want. And you can have extra, Rem," Mara said.

While Rem deliberated on which identical piece of candy to eat, Mara opened the third and final jar. It wasn't a very large container, and she didn't know what to expect from it. Inside, protected by some cotton padding, was something small and shiny.

Mara reached in and plucked out the object. A fine gold chain came with it and she quickly realized it was a pendant. She held it up to get a close look.

The pendant, barely two inches across, was shaped like a scarab and set with blue gemstones that contrasted well with the golden base material. It was heavy despite its size, suggesting that it was actual gold.

"Now that's pretty," Aluru said. "Nothing like an eye-catching necklace to draw eyes to your chest."

Mara nodded slowly, still pondering the elegant trinket. Then she turned to her right and stood up on her chair. She reached out and put her arms around Tsuen's neck and fastened the necklace. "There we go. I think it'll look best right there."

The pendant sat just below Tsuen's collarbone, and did indeed draw the eye to her chest. She was wearing a simple orange sports bra, but all the women present were forced to admit that her perky breasts looked very nice in it.

"T-thank you, Mara," Tsuen said, a little flustered by all the sudden attention. "It's wonderful."

Mara bowed graciously, then changed gears and proclaimed, "The trio was victorious! Excellent work Rem, and thank you Tsuen for your constant support. How about a victory lap?"

Tsuen raised an eyebrow. "We already went for our morning jog…"

Rem had finished devouring one cluster of Kemet candy and was licking her fingers clean of sticky honey. She paused long enough to say, "Not that kind of lap," then resumed. This time, she locked eyes with Tsuen and licked her finger as slowly and enticingly as possible.

"Oh," Tsuen murmured. "Ohh." It seems the tone had taken a sudden turn for the lewd, despite the fact that the entire household was still gathered around.

Yuisu stood up and made a shooing gesture at Mara. "Take your silly celebrations to your room, girls."

"Fine, fine. Oh, and everyone's welcome to take one piece of that candy!" Mara called out as she tugged Tsuen away down the hall. Rem hopped onto Tsuen's back and rode away with them.