But then, Jack pulled a very cunning, very strategic move that forced Soraiya to block his horizontal and vertical lines of four but ended up giving him four in a row on the diagonal!
“Oh, man,” said Soraiya.
“We win!” said Andrew.
“You mean I win,” said Jack, leaping off the game board.
“We’re a team, Jack.”
“Maybe. But I’m the only one playing for the titanium ticket, Andy!”
“True…”
“Did a riddle pop up on the lPad?”
“Yes,” said Andrew. “It’s very simple.” He was about to read it out loud.
“Andrew?” warned Jack, shaking his head. “Don’t be an I-D ten-T.”
“A what?”
“An idiot! That’s our clue, not theirs.”
“Okay, okay,” said Andrew. “You know, I’m the one who’s won a few Lemoncello games. I’m supposed to be the one coaching you.”
“Just type in the answer if you know it, Andy.”
Andrew jabbed the glass screen of his lPad. “Oh. Nice. It gave us a bunch of letters in the phrase.”
“Great. Where to next?”
“The library!” Andrew said excitedly. “Now, in the library, you should listen to me. I was second-in-command for the Alexandriaville Middle School Library Aides Society.”
“Whatever,” said Jack. “Where’s the library?”
“First floor.”
The teammates took off, leaving Simon and Soraiya to stare at the yellow-and-red configuration of their losing Connect Four game. The sound of chirping crickets came out of the ceiling speakers.
“So, uh, now what?” wondered Soraiya.
“Good question!” thundered Mr. Lemoncello’s voice. “Jiminy, how did all these crickets hop into my soundproof booth? Shoo! Now then, Soraiya and, uh, Mario, you have a choice. One, you can wait for another team to come along and try to beat them at Connect Four—even though there is no guarantee that this particular exhibit will be a stop on any of the other teams’ scavenger hunt paths. Or…”
“Yes?” said Soraiya. “What’s our ‘or’?”
“Something you might use to row a boat. It might also be a naturally occurring mineral. Or, it might even be a different kind of Connect Four puzzle.”
“We’ll take the new puzzle!” said Simon. “If, you know, that’s okay with you, Soraiya.”
She nodded. “It’s what I would’ve said, too, Coach.”
Now they just had to wait for Mr. Lemoncello to tell them what kind of game they’d be playing next!
“Oh, are you waiting for me to tell you what kind of game to play next?” said Mr. Lemoncello.
“Yes, sir,” Soraiya and Simon said together.
“Very well, here is your second Connect Four puzzle,” said Mr. Lemoncello.
The nine discs in the center of the Connect Four grid—some red, some yellow—began to blend together and glow orange.
“Your challenge?” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Connect these nine orange dots using only four lines.”
“That’s impossible,” mumbled Soraiya.
“Not really,” said Simon. “We just need to look at the problem in a different way.
“When you think you have your answer,” instructed Mr. Lemoncello, “swipe a finger over the playing pieces and your motion will generate a red line. Remember, you can only use four lines to connect all nine dots.”
Simon hummed to himself and focused on the puzzle for maybe half a minute.
“Okay,” he said when the answer clicked in his head. “Here’s one way to do it.”
He dragged his hand across the game board, venturing outside the limits created by the square of nine dots.
“Or,” he said, wiping his hand back and forth like an eraser to clear the lines, “while we’re at it, how about this?”
He drew another connected four lines.
Soraiya clapped. Simon laughed.
“You are awesome, Mario!” said Soraiya.
And Simon actually felt like he was. Faking that he was the confident Mario was making him feel, well, confident.
“How about another one?” he said, swiping his hand across the board, creating four new red lines.
Now Soraiya was laughing.
“One more,” said Simon, with a boatload of confidence. Only this time, it wasn’t because he was pretending to be Mario. This time it was because he knew he was good at seeing things other people sometimes didn’t. He could deconstruct the pattern of dots and imagine new lines connecting them. “This time, I’ll use only three lines.”
“Congratulicitations!” boomed Mr. Lemoncello’s voice. “By doing more than was required, you have left me feeling inspired. You have also earned…”
There was a loud DING-DING-DING!
A rubbery playing card shot up from the floor as if it had been ejected from a toaster.
Soraiya grabbed it in midair.
“What is it?” asked Simon.
“Some kind of bendable bonus card!” said Soraiya, showing it to Simon. It had the word BONUS written in big, bold letters on each side. It was also made out of thin rubber and sort of floppy.
“What’s it good for?” Simon wondered aloud.
“It’s a bendable bonus card!” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Save it until you really need it and, then, use it wisely.”
“Um, okay,” said Simon.
“Don’t worry, Mr. L,” said Soraiya, sliding the rubbery card into her pocket. “We will!”
“Toodle-oo!” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Play on! Lemoncello, out!”
“What’s on the lPad now?” asked Simon.
“A very Lemoncello-ish question. ‘What would you call a similar game with one large pancake?’ ”
“How many words?”
“Two. Seven letters. Three letters. And every single letter is numbered. That means they all move into the seventy-six-letter phrase. This is big, Mario!”
Simon tapped out a glockenspiel tune in his head to help him think.
“Aha! ‘Connect One’! You just drop one pancake into the grid and win.”
When the letter bubbles were all filled, the screen dissolved into a progress report on the seventy-six-letter build:
“We picked up a few more lemony letters!” said Soraiya.
“Fantastic,” said Simon.
“Now we just have to figure out what they mean.”
“True. But first we have to move on to our next exhibit.”
“Right,” said Soraiya. “And, Mario?”
“Yeah?”
“Fix your wig. It’s kind of lopsided.”
“Gotcha!” Simon adjusted his hair while Soraiya tapped the screen. Up came a clue for their next destination.
“ ‘Strategy time. Go!’ ”
“That’s it?” said Simon.
“It’s all we need.”
“Seriously?”
Soraiya laughed. “Mr. Lemoncello is going old school on us. This game was one of my dad’s favorites when he was a kid. So, he taught me how to play it. It’s called Stratego!”
Simon finally got it. “Strategy, go! Stra-tee-go!”
“Exactly. So, come on. Let’s go!”
“Stratego is located on the first floor,” the lPad told Soraiya and Simon.
“Let’s take the steps instead of the elevator,” suggested Soraiya. “Maybe we can see how everybody else is doing.”
“Good idea!” said Simon.
They headed for the staircase. On the way down, the steps played “Heart and Soul.”
“Hey,” said Simon, “do you think Jack bought my Mario act?”
“Totally. Because pretending to be somebody else is letting you be who you are.”
“Huh?”
>
“You’re good at these games and riddles. You always have been. When you’re Mario, you let yourself have fun being clever. You don’t hold back.”
“I don’t come off too braggy?”
“Shh. There’s Haley and Carolyn. And that game is called Mr. Lemoncello’s Krazy Karaoke Dance and Sing Thing!”
The two girls were matching dance steps on the arcade game’s glowing floor pads while singing a song, karaoke-style.
“Let’s do another one!” said Carolyn when the song-and-dance routine ended. “How about ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge’?”
“But we already earned our next clue,” coached Haley.
Carolyn shrugged. “So? I don’t really want to own a game-making factory when I grow up. I want to be on TV like you! Let’s dance the Fudgsicle!”
“Oh-kay,” said Haley. She tapped a button on the video console’s control panel and they started singing and dancing again.
“Come on,” Soraiya whispered. “I think Carolyn has basically taken herself out of the competition. She got her prize. Meeting Haley.”
“So it’s just you, Jack, and Piya,” said Simon.
They hurried down the steps to the second floor. Now the piano steps plinked out “Chopsticks.” Sweat dribbled from under the webbed lining of Simon’s wig. It tickled his ears and neck.
On the second floor, they saw Akimi and Piya playing an oversized version of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots. The towering remote-controlled red and blue bots were inside a roped-off, official-sized boxing ring.
“I’m gonna knock your block off!” shouted Akimi, pushing a button on her controller that made the blue robot jab an uppercut at the red robot’s blocky head.
“Ha! Missed!” cried Piya, bobbing and weaving to avoid the blow.
“Well, one of us has to win or we’ll never get our clue!” said Akimi.
“Don’t look at me,” said Piya, punching a button to land another punch. “I’m not taking a fall!”
“Me neither!”
“Looks like they’re both way too into the game,” Soraiya whispered. “Guess that’s the danger of hosting a scavenger hunt inside a hall of fame that is basically a mammoth Dave and Buster’s. Too many distractions.”
“Fine, Piya!” they heard Akimi shout behind them. “Knock my block off. We need to wrap up our third riddle!”
“Third?” Simon whispered to Soraiya. “We’ve only done two!”
“Yeah. Losing that first Connect Four game slowed us down. But, like Kyle Keeley always says, ‘the game is never over until it’s over.’ ”
Mr. McClintock was in his security surveillance control room, where the fifty new screens linked to closed-circuit cameras inside the Board Game Hall of Fame were all glowing.
He was observing the kids on their scavenger hunt as it neared the end of its first hour. There was no sound, so he couldn’t hear what anybody was saying. But he could watch them.
Jack had been doing great, despite being teamed up with Andrew, the weak-kneed whiner from Ohio.
Akimi Hughes and Piya Sarkarati were hot on his heels. They’d finally wrapped up their Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots bout and had moved on to a railroad train game called Ticket to Ride. And yes, Mr. Lemoncello and his imagineers had installed an actual miniature ride-along railroad on the fourth floor.
Carolyn Hudson seemed more interested in singing, dancing, and Haley Daley than in winning. She wasn’t a serious threat and wouldn’t be going home with the McClintocks’ titanium ticket.
Jack’s other competition was the plant manager’s daughter, Soraiya Mitchell, and her partner, the supergamer Mario. The kid with the floppy black mop top was good.
While Akimi and Piya were slowing down (it takes time to build a transcontinental railroad), Soraiya and Mario were easily winning their Napoleonic battle on the first floor.
The forty Stratego pieces they played with looked like castle towers with turrets. Mr. Lemoncello and his imagineers had somehow made it so the chunky playing pieces, each one about two and a half feet tall, could whir and scoot around a game board that covered the entire floor of a room. Flat, flickering images of soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars were animated on the backs of the oversized playing pieces.
Soraiya and Mario won their battle in record time. Probably because Mario rigged up what amounted to a domino drop and toppled most of the enemy red bricks in an extremely clever, well-orchestrated move.
The leader of the triumphant blue bricks made some kind of speech, then nobly bowed. When he did, the rest of his army lined up and zipped an illuminated riddle across their blocks like you’d see on a digital reader board:
SMALL WAS MY STATURE, BUT MY SUCCESS WAS GREAT.
UNTIL I ENTERED BELGIUM TO BE HANDED MY FATE.
Mr. McClintock watched Soraiya scan the team’s tablet device.
They needed an eight-letter answer.
“Napoleon,” Mr. McClintock mumbled, one second before Soraiya tapped in that answer. Mr. McClintock toggled a lever to make the overhead camera zoom in on Soraiya’s lPad. Five of the eight letters from NAPOLEON flew into the seventy-six-letter phrase. One of them landed in the third circle, which was a lemon:
Meanwhile, in the second-floor theater, Jack and his partner, Andrew Peckleman, were having trouble deciphering Mr. Lemoncello’s Fantabulous Floating Emoji as they were projected on the movie screen.
“Come on, Jack!” grumbled Mr. McClintock, watching his son struggle. “This is baby stuff. The category is nursery rhymes!”
Up came another puzzle.
It should’ve been easy.
But neither Jack nor Andrew could figure it out!
If Jack didn’t win, that meant Mr. McClintock and his son would never get to take over Mr. Lemoncello’s entire empire and become bajillionaires!
And that, he thought, is one hundred percent unacceptable.
“I hate these stupid rebuses!” whined Andrew.
“Stand aside, Peckleman,” said Jack. “I’ve got this.”
He studied the string of images one more time:
“I know this one!” he said. “It’s ‘The Old Man and the Sheep’!”
“The Farmers’ Almanac,” blurted Andrew.
“That’s not a nursery rhyme!”
“Neither is ‘The Old Man and the Sheep’! That’s not even a real book!”
Jack hoped his father wasn’t watching this soup sandwich on the CCTV monitors back home in the guardhouse.
“Why does the farmer look old?” fumed Andrew.
“Because ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’!” said Jack.
Finally, bells rang and lights twirled. They had guessed correctly.
Another nursery rhyme rebus floated into view.
“ ‘The Rats of Narnia’!” blurted Jack.
“That’s not a nursery rhyme, either,” said Andrew.
“ ‘Three Blind Mice’!” said Jack.
“There’s only one mouse in the puzzle!” sighed Andrew. “And it looks like it wants to run up a clock.”
“ ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’!” said Jack. “The mouse ran up the clock.”
More bells and swirling lights.
“How many more of these are there?” asked Andrew.
“Three,” said Jack. “But then we get to go play Battleship.”
“Oh, joy,” sighed Andrew.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, Soraiya and Simon were heading to the basement.
“According to the floor plan,” said Soraiya, “that’s where we’ll find Candy Crush Hour.”
“Is that a real game?” asked Simon.
“It’s a hybrid,” said Soraiya, reading the notes on the museum map. “It’s ‘all the brain-puzzling fun of Rush Hour combined with the whimsical magic of Candy Land
.’ ”
“Oh-kay,” said Simon, who wasn’t familiar with either game. “What’s Rush Hour?”
“You’re basically in a traffic jam and have to slide trucks and cars and buses around to clear a path to the exit for your vehicle.”
“And Candy Land?”
“It’s for little kids. You race around Candy Cane Forest and the Gumdrop Mountains. You want to avoid the Molasses Swamp.”
“I wonder how Mr. Lemoncello mixed the two games together?” said Simon.
He and Soraiya soon found out.
“The game grid is filled with melted molasses?” said Soraiya when they reached the exhibit and smelled the thick, treacly scent of sugarcane boiled down to a syrup.
“Is that brown goop on the floor molasses?” asked Simon.
“Yep. And we have to move that red car over there out of this mess. See the exit?”
Simon nodded. “We’re gonna need to slide all these other vehicles out of the way first.”
“And,” said Soraiya, “the only way to do that is to hike through the swamp.”
Simon gestured to a bench that looked like it was made out of a bent sheet of blue, pink, and yellow Dots candy. “Guess that’s why there’re two pairs of snow boots under that bench.”
“So,” said Soraiya as they sat down to slip on the rubbery galoshes, “are you still glad you’re Mario today?”
“Hey, we’re a team. Not even molasses can slow us down!”
Simon and Soraiya stepped over the curb and into the gooey glop.
“What’s our play?” asked Soraiya.
Simon studied the arrangement of the very bright plastic vehicles, all about the size of bumper cars, trapped in the molasses.
Simon tapped out a silent melody on his thighs as he studied the board. Once again, he saw things that other people might not.
Mr. Lemoncello and the Titanium Ticket Page 12