“Won’t be joining us?” asked Derek confusedly.

“Best if you look behind you.”

James motioned behind Derek, and he turned around. Long tentacles hung from the ceiling and coiled together before their ends connected to the other novices. Their eyes were glossed over, and their bodies were limp only held up by the inhuman creature. Derek took a step forward and James took hold of his shoulder.

“We can’t do anything about them. Not yet at least. If we tried to pull them out of their memory beast things won’t go well. But we are once again presented with a new problem by Ian once again. I should have remembered but our time outside the dungeon feels like weeks ago.”

Derek recognized what James saw now that it was pointed out. Hidden in part by the shadows and its fur was Ian’s mount. It looked deformed and broken. Its head caved in. Derek had no time to process this as he heard the sounds of coughing.

Naomi opened her eyes and the living vines slithered away from her as they disconnected. She was on her hands and knees as she crawled away from the entrance portal.

“Welcome back to the walking world,” said James. “I was wondering if anyone else was going to join us. For this next part, it will be better for us to have three minds instead of two.”

“Next part?” asked Naomi. Her voice sounded groggy and tired.

“This was only the first test of the floor. The next part is a puzzle. One that I might need your help to solve. It has changed nearly every time I have seen this floor you see.”

“What about the others?”

“They will join us later. We will have to come back to them later. Once the puzzle is done they will be woken up with the only casualty being Ian’s bonded cat,” said James. The lies came quickly to his tongue.

Once they left this room and opened the door to the puzzle room the dungeon would devour the remaining comatose and soon-to-be dead bodies. What he had said was a half-truth. James planned to learn about the puzzle and find a way to solve it eventually. By then the other novices would be alive in the loop.

To deal with the memory beast was actually quite simple and most experienced delvers did it despite its costs. One person, in this case, James would need to go through first and wake up before the rest of the team joined him. If he was able to do this he could then destroy the memory beasts and allow the others to skip the trial entirely. The downside was the change in difficulty. His memory beast would become harder knowing this was the choice he had made. At the same time once the beast was destroyed the second part of the floor would become harder. The type of puzzle would be the same, but its difficulty would increase.

It was a risk James planned to take. He wasn’t sure how long it would take him to prepare the novices for the memory beasts. James hoped that it would take him less time to solve the upgraded puzzle. Going the other route would require him to sit down with each of the novices and figure out their best and worst memories to try and optimize their thought going onto the floor. James decided to go with the destruction path. It was also chosen because it was easier to repeat loop after loop.

James opened the door to the next room and the others followed. The puzzle room had blank white walls except for writing on the walls. There was no clear doorway to move forward. James started reading the question of the puzzle.

Statements:

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All men are mortal.

All mortals are greedy.

Some mortals are animals.

Some friends are mortals.

State their Validity:

* Some friends are animals

* All animals are men

* Some who are greedy are friends

“How good are you two with logic puzzles?” asked James. “I find these an interesting brain teaser. It would be best if we had some pen and paper but that might make this puzzle too easy.”

“I have studied them a bit,” said Naomi.

“Good. Let’s try and build a diagram with what we have available,” said James. “It doesn’t matter what words are said exactly on the wall but the variables they represent. The words men, mortal, and greedy could easily be replaced by ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’, and so on.”

Each of them started to tackle one of the three questions and used random items to represent the pieces. When they placed the items on the ground they rotated them vertically or horizontally to represent a connection between ‘some and ‘all’. Their group was silent for a while as they thought about the logic puzzle in their heads.

“What happens if we don’t get the answer right?” asked Derek. His voice broke the silence.

James and Naomi paused what they were doing and looked up.

“This isn’t like the ninth floor. Failure means pain this time and moving forward it could mean death as well,” answered James.

“I am just having trouble visualizing it in my head,” said Derek. “I am used to writing it down and building actual Venn diagrams to help me figure this stuff out.”

“That is not something we have access to right now. How about this? I will explain my steps to you. Naomi can do the same for her answer once she has one and then maybe once we are done it will have sparked something.

“First we know that men are a subset of mortals. Mortals are a subset of greed. A nonzero part of mortals is in the animal group. Finally, there is a group called ‘friends’, and some of them are part of the mortal group. My question was some friends are animals. We can deduce that the pairing between friends and animals is empty. This information is shown in the first statement. Since you cannot build a connection following these paths the result is that nothing in the set is simultaneously a friend and animal. Does it make sense?”

“I guess it does. You may need to give me a minute to look it over but for the sake of time why don’t we move on,” said Derek.

“I will try and explain my steps so far. I haven’t quite finished my problem, but I am close,” said Naomi. “Some who are greedy are friends. I am leaning towards true. I tried confirming this by working from the third statement on friends. ‘Some friends are mortals’ and ‘all mortals are greedy’. Therefore, some friends are greedy. Then I think that that statement can be reversed and is true?”

“Good job. Your logic is sound, and I think it is true as well,” said James.

Derek took a deep breath in.

“I guess it is now on to me. We know that some mortals are animals from the third statement. And that explains the connection between men and animals because the first statement says all men are mortals. From there, I am not sure what I am supposed to take away.”

“That is a good start. I will see if I can explain it clearly. We know all men are mortals and some mortals are men. This leaves an opening for animals to exist that are mortals without being connected to men. Because of the second piece of information that says some mortals are men we can deduce that the statement ‘all animals are men’ is false.”

Naomi and Derek were silent, and James let them sit in silence and their thoughts for a minute.

“Do you think you could do this puzzle again?” asked James. “Without any help and maybe the terms switched up.”

“Probably not,” answered Derek. “I am more familiar with the matching puzzles and the memorization puzzles. These riddle and logic puzzles always seem to only annoy me instead of being something interesting to mix up the pace between all of the fighting of the dungeon.”

“I see. What about you Naomi?”

“If you added more statements it might be easier though it could also be more time-consuming. If I were to do this again paper and quill would be preferred. Doing it in my head would just take me longer and longer as the complexity grows.”

“Then I shall confirm our answers for us,” said James.

James stood up from the circle they had created and touched the wall with writing on it. James cleared his throat and spoke directly to the written words. James quickly said the answers and readied himself.

“The answers in order are true, true, and false!”

As he spoke the dungeon grabbed hold of him and kept his hand on the wall. Once he said the final word power entered his body through the wall. Before the others could fully realize what he had said the dungeon struck him down for answering completely incorrectly.