Mr. Lemoncello and the Titanium Ticket

by Chris Grabenstein

  Simon had no idea what she was talking about. He was more of a doer than a theorizer.

  Finally, Soraiya slid a brick from somewhere close to the center. It came out pretty easily.

  But she still had to place it on the tower’s summit, alongside the wobbler.

  It stayed put.

  For two seconds.

  Then it rumbled, slid sideways, skidded toward the edge, and knocked the whole tower off-kilter. All fifty-four rubbery, blubbery blocks tumbled to the ground, where they bounced and bobbled.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Skrindle!” cried Mr. Mitchell. “You made the last successful move. You win with a wobbler!”

  The crowd in the tent cheered.

  “Way to go, Simon!” added Soraiya, who was probably the most non-sore loser Simon had ever met. “That move you made was amazing!”

  “Let me see your scorecard, Mr. Skrindle,” said Mr. Mitchell.

  Simon gave him the cardboard sheet.

  “Because you won with a wobbler,” Mr. Mitchell explained, “you just earned twenty points—double what anyone can win in any of the game tents.”

  “Woo-hoo!” shouted Soraiya. “You’re more than halfway home to the sidewalk board game, Simon, and that much closer to the titanium ticket!”

  Hearing that shocked Simon a little. “Seriously?”

  “Totally,” said Soraiya. “You earned the points for winning two games by playing just one. That was very efficiently done. I love efficiency! Don’t you? Where to next?”

  “Huh?”

  “We both get to play two more preliminary games, even though you really don’t need to,” said Soraiya.

  She whipped a brochure out of her back pocket, scanned the Gameworks Factory Picnic app on her phone, and somehow still had a free hand to wave goodbye to her father. Soraiya Mitchell was very good at multitasking.

  “Which one of these games would you be best at?” she asked. “We need to play to our strengths. For instance, I’m good at Mr. Lemoncello’s Fantabulous Fourth Knight Free-for-All. There’s another arena competition in the big blue tent in thirty minutes. The first one’s already underway.”

  “Fourth Knight? I don’t know that game….”

  Soraiya started speed-walking out of the tent. Simon followed her.

  “Fourth Knight is huge online,” Soraiya explained. “You and about a billion other players from all over the world are the fourth knight auditioning to join the king’s elite three-member guard squad. You have to battle all the other players and some dragons and ogres to prove you’re worthy. Last player standing wins.”

  They passed a booth that smelled like freshly made doughnuts, sugar, and cinnamon.

  “I’m hungry,” said Soraiya.

  “Yeah,” said Simon. “Me too. I sort of skipped breakfast.”

  Soraiya checked her watch. It was one of those that could tell her how many steps she’d taken and what her heart rate was. “Well, there’s twenty-nine minutes before the next game starts. We should probably carbo-load like runners do before marathons. You want a fried butter ball? I think it’s too early for a pickle pop.”

  “Um, I didn’t bring any money,” Simon said sheepishly.

  Soraiya laughed. “You don’t need money. This is a Lemoncello company picnic. Everything is free. Even the chocolate-covered bacon on a stick.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “Good?” said Soraiya. “It’s delicious.”

  They went to the concession stand, picked up several red-and-white-striped paper trays filled with doughnuts, deep-fried Twinkies, and thick slices of chocolate-dipped bacon on wooden skewers, then found a spot at a picnic table.

  “So,” Simon asked, after gobbling down a doughnut stuffed with melted jelly beans and another one filled with lemon custard, “you’re good at Fourth Knight?”

  “I’m not good, Simon. I’m great. The way you were with Kooky Kujenga? That’s me playing Fourth Knight.”

  “Then we should do that next.”

  “But you’ve never played before.”

  Simon nodded. “We don’t have Wi-Fi at my house. My grandfather doesn’t believe in it.”

  “He’s the one who hates Mr. Lemoncello, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s too bad. I wonder if he hated him back when your mom and dad worked at the factory.”

  “My mother and father worked for Mr. Lemoncello?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t know that?”

  Simon shook his head. “No. My grandparents never told me.”

  “Huh,” said Soraiya. “I wonder why.”

  “Yeah,” said Simon. “I wonder, too.”

  Jack McClintock limbered up his thumbs.

  Once they were loose, he cracked his knuckles.

  Then he linked his fingers and stretched them out.

  “You warmed up?” asked his buddy Aiden.

  Jack nodded. “This is the most crucial part of my battle plan, bro. The warm-up. The flex. Most wars are won before they’re even begun. It’s all in the prep and planning. And when the dust settles and this duel is done, I guarantee you: I will be the fourth knight chosen by the king. I will be in the sidewalk board game. I will take home the titanium ticket.”

  “I just hope I can come in second, man,” said Aiden. “Then I’d be, like, the fifth knight!”

  “Tell you what, bro. I’ll slay you last. Take you out with a sponge dart.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  Jack and Aiden were in the blue video game tent. A giant twelve-foot-wide monitor was erected on an elevated platform at the far end. The screen was surrounded by rock-show-sized speakers. A loop of martial music blared as rotating images of knights of all shapes, sizes, and genders (all of them with bulging superhero muscles) danced in place like they were riding invisible bucking broncos in a rodeo. It was called the Hoss—its signature move, the Lasso—and was one of the many dance crazes inspired by Mr. Lemoncello’s online video game. Another was the Boneless Chicken, where you had to flop around like a rag doll while clucking, “Bruck, bruck, bruck!”

  Some of the computer-generated knights had cowboy hats or ski goggles or bunny ears or fluorescent-green hair. Some had all four. The costumes, including suits of armor made out of sparkly spandex, weren’t exactly historically accurate.

  Jack’s avatar, the character he’d created and played with all the time, was up on the screen wearing camouflage armor and wraparound shades. He didn’t wear a helmet, so everybody could check out his hair. It was slicker and blacker than an oil spill on a lump of polished coal.

  The weapons weren’t traditional Middle Ages stuff, either. Some knights carried lances and swords—but they were laser-guided lances and Wiffle swords with holes in the sides so they whistled when you swung them. Other knights were armed with rotten-egg bazookas or squeeze-bottle slime shooters. Some tried to start dart wars. One even had an automatic angry weasel launcher. Battles in Fourth Knight were always loud, funny, and messy, just the way Mr. Lemoncello liked them.

  Jack saw two silhouettes enter the tent’s brightly backlit entrance.

  “You can talk to my dad about your parents later, Simon,” said a chipper voice that Jack recognized from school. “Right now we need to focus on the games. Is there room for two more?”

  “It’s that brainiac Soraiya Mitchell,” hissed Aiden. “From science. What’s she doing here?”

  “We’d like to sign up for the next Free-for-All,” said Soraiya. (It was as if she’d heard Aiden ask his question.)

  “You’ve got it, Miss Mitchell,” said the adult signing up combatants and handing out the Lemoncello video game controllers. “How about you, Mr. Skrindle? Do you want to play?”

  “Um, I guess so,” Jack heard Skrindle say. “I’ve never played before.”

  “You’ll need a
controller,” said the adult.

  “What do these buttons do?” asked Skrindle, fiddling with the colored buttons and central joystick.

  “Don’t worry,” Soraiya told him. “I’ll give you a quick tutorial.”

  “What an I-D ten-T,” sniggered Jack.

  “Yeah,” said Aiden. “That means ‘idiot,’ right?”

  Jack ignored his friend. He was fully focused on crushing Simon Skrindle. The little weenie who had somehow bested the gate riddles outside Mr. Lemoncello’s new supersecret building and figured out Ms. Pulliam’s riddle. (Jack had followed him down the hall that day during lunch.)

  They had to be flukes, Jack told himself. No way is the village idiot better than me at anything!

  “All right,” said the lady running the game, “we have our fifty players. I’m your referee, Mrs. Lauren Coffin from the boxing and shrink-wrap department. This will be a double-time Fourth Knight Free-for-All. You’ll have fifteen minutes to find your weapons, build your barricades, dance your dances, wrestle the unicorn, toast marshmallows over a flaming dragon mouth, and, of course, storm the sandcastle before the king gives his toilet a royal flush and the walls wash away.”

  Jack laughed when he saw Simon staring at Soraiya after Mrs. Coffin ran through what would be a pretty basic fifteen minutes of game play. The poor guy had no idea of what kind of extreme chaos he was about to be plunged into.

  “Hear ye, hear ye, knights and knaves,” said Mrs. Coffin as the giant screen on the raised platform dissolved into an aerial view of a green medieval landscape that, strangely, also had skyscrapers and fast-food drive-throughs for knights on horseback (that’s where you could pick up bonus life points if you ordered a salad instead of a cheeseburger). “Board the battle blimp. We are now flying over one of the castles of Mad King Ludwig. We drop in five, four, three, two, one! Good knight, it’s time to fight!”

  Jack jabbed his controller and leapt out of the blimp.

  He knew how to aim his avatar just so to land on a warhorse that would carry him off to the pile of weapons in the town dump just over the first knoll faster than any other mode of transportation.

  Except for the armored rhinoceros.

  Which Soraiya Mitchell was riding.

  She passed Jack on his right and grabbed a clump of low-flying Bongo Birds. Bongo Birds were worth fifty points and could be used as a screeching weapon.

  Which Soraiya did! The angry birds screeched and wiped out ten contestants.

  Simon Skrindle was one of the gamers eliminated by the Bongo screech. Soraiya thundered toward the Citadel of Sand on her charging rhino, doing a triumphant saddle dance.

  Jack realized he’d made a tactical error.

  He shouldn’t have been focusing on Simon Skrindle. The goofus was only good at riddles and playing with blocks, not real games.

  Surprisingly, it was the science nerd Soraiya Mitchell whom Jack needed to worry about.

  Because, as he galloped across the Forbidden Island toward the sandcastle, all Jack could see in front of him was leathery rhino butt.

  “This is stupendelicious!” cried Mr. Lemoncello as he marched through the exhibition halls of the secret building with Dr. Zinchenko and Mr. Raymo. “Hi-ho, Cherry-O, you two have done an amazible job back here!”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Dr. Zinchenko.

  “Ditto,” said Mr. Raymo.

  Mr. Lemoncello swung open his arms to take in the vast expanse of the hall they were standing in. “This building, dear friends, will be my legacy! Not to be confused with my Legos at sea, which, hopefully, will float.”

  “But, if I may,” said Dr. Zinchenko, “it is far too early for you to talk of your legacy. You’re still young.”

  Mr. Lemoncello sighed. “True, true. But I’m not as young as I used to be. Why, I feel twenty-four hours older than I did yesterday. Oh, this looks like fun!”

  Mr. Lemoncello scampered into a muggy atrium featuring a giant submarine game, based on the Milton Bradley classic Battleship. Two fifty-foot-long and -wide wave pools, each one marked off into ten-by-ten grids, were separated by a tall wall, also blocked out in a 1–10, A–J grid. In the board game, players would alternate turns, calling shots at the other player’s ships. In this larger-than-life version, they would ride in the open hatches of yellow submarines and toss water balloons over the dividing wall at each other—if they weren’t swamped by a wave first.

  “Do we have time to play a quick game?”

  “Of course, sir,” said Dr. Zinchenko. “The children are still in their preliminary, elimination games.”

  “You go on the other side, Chester, and set up your sub, and I don’t mean a sandwich. I’ll do the same on this side.”

  Mr. Lemoncello stepped off the edge of the pool and into one of the yellow submarine’s two open hatches, right in front of the purple periscope. Wobbly battle balloons, filled with colored water, green sludge, and pink mayonnaise, were waiting for him in a cargo net down below.

  The wave pool started undulating. Mr. Lemoncello shouted, “Cowabunga!” and piloted his mini-sub across the rolling surf toward a spot in the middle of the indoor ocean.

  “Will this be one of the eight games the four lucky children get to play tonight?” he shouted to Dr. Zinchenko, who stood patiently at the side of the wave-swamped indoor pool.

  “Yes, sir!” she shouted back. “Battleship is a classic. The victors of this game, and all the others, will be given a riddle, puzzle, or question that will move them closer to the ultimate goal—finding the titanium ticket.”

  “Excellent. Fire at will, Chester!”

  A quivering water balloon flew over the dividing wall.

  “A-eight!” shouted Mr. Raymo.

  The balloon belly flopped in the D-4 square.

  “Miss!” shouted Mr. Lemoncello. “This one is going…wherever it lands!”

  He heaved up a water balloon.

  “Oof,” cried Mr. Raymo, his voice sounding slightly higher-pitched than usual. “Direct hit. I surrender. You win, sir.”

  “But I only fired one shot.”

  “It was a good one, sir.”

  Off in the distance, a grandfather clock started to sound its hourly melody.

  “Oh, how I love the tintinnabulation of those bells, bells, bells,” said Mr. Lemoncello, sailing his sub back to its docking slot. “Reminds me of our doorbell when I was a child!”

  “Because, sir,” said Mr. Raymo, emerging from the other side of the watery board game, “that is the classic doorbell melody, based on the Westminster chimes of the Big Ben clock tower in London.”

  “Those peals are so appealing,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Just like my banana shoes.”

  The clock chimed out twelve resounding bongs.

  “It’s noon,” remarked Dr. Zinchenko, glancing at her watch. “Only two hours until the Slippery-Sloppery Sidewalk Board Game on Main Street.”

  “Which means we are moving closer and closer to someone finding the first titanium ticket!” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Is it hidden in its proper position?”

  “That it is, sir,” said Mr. Raymo.

  “Excellent!”

  “Are you really certain you wish to go through with this, sir?” said Dr. Zinchenko. “The titanium ticket seems so dramatic. So, so…Willy Wonka–ish. So Ready Player One.”

  “As it should, Yanina. Are our Ohio friends in the air?”

  “Yes, sir. The banana jet left Alexandriaville an hour ago. Kyle, Akimi, Andrew, and Haley are on their way.”

  “Wondermous. Now then, where is the dedication room? I’d like to see that before we return to the picnic festivities.”

  “First floor, sir.”

  When they reached the room, Mr. Lemoncello stepped up to one of its twenty-foot-tall marble walls. Chiseled into the stone were these words:

&
nbsp; THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE PUZZLE SOLVERS.

  THIS BUILDING IS DEDICATED TO ALL THE CLEVER ENGINEERS WHO HAVE MADE SO MANY WILD AND FANTASTICAL IDEAS LEAP TO LIFE.

  MOST ESPECIALLY SALLY AND STEPHEN SKRINDLE.

  Mr. Lemoncello went over to the wall and rubbed his fingers along the notched names.

  “Sally and Steve,” he said softly. “If it weren’t for them, there might not be a Gameworks Factory or even a Luigi L. Lemoncello. I owe them everything.”

  Mr. Raymo nodded. “True legends among us imagineers.”

  “I wish I had met them,” said Dr. Zinchenko.

  “Oh, you would’ve liked them, Yanina,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “They weren’t just incredibly clever. They were also kind, humble, and gracious. But as much as I miss them, I’m sure their son, Simon, misses them more.”

  Mr. Lemoncello sat down stiffly on a wide stone bench in the center of the room.

  And for the first time that either Mr. Raymo or Dr. Zinchenko could remember, Mr. Lemoncello wept.

  Simon thought Soraiya was amazing.

  Eliminated from the Fourth Knight game, he stood gawking at the giant video screen. He and all the other players who’d been knocked out of the battle royal by Soraiya or Jack were now eager spectators. They watched Soraiya’s and Jack’s medieval-ish avatars (each carried gear that didn’t exist back in the olden days) going up against each other in solo combat. One would be the last knight standing. Jack’s character was swinging a war hammer with a squeaky plastic head that collapsed when it hit Soraiya’s character’s football helmet or hockey pads.

  Each squeak lowered the life force of Soraiya’s avatar.

  “Yield!” shouted Jack.

  “Never!” replied Soraiya, who, for the final round, had chosen a very peculiar weapon: a portable microwave oven, which she wore strapped to one arm like a boxy shield.

  Jack swung his squeaky hammer. Soraiya popped open the microwave’s door, snared the hammer’s head, and slammed the oven door shut on it. Jack yanked hard on the handle but the hammer wouldn’t budge. It was trapped inside the microwave.