The sand was falling and dropping its final drops of sand onto the bottom of the clock. Urien realized that it was time. This time, he wasn’t going to get fooled so easily. He realized that he might need to use the soda can as a knife as he didn’t know what was going to happen in the next TEST. He hid all the torn paper pieces inside of his room and then he folded the soda can back into the sharp shape of a knife. Slowly making his way towards the door to the stairway, he made sure to keep an open mind and not let himself get manipulated. He went ahead and opened the door and made his way towards the bottom of the stairway. This time he opened the double doors himself, and upon opening them, he realized that the three other people which were there just a moment before had disappeared.
“Urien! Come here.” – John shouted. John was peeking on Urien from the hallway which was on the left, opposite to the hallway where the bathroom and toilets were. Urien kept his calm, and he went up to John. “The sand in the clock told me it’s time.” – Urien said to John. “Oh, sure it did. I just hope you never mess with it, because those sand clocks are the only way to tell the time here except for the computer(s). The thing is, if you knew how much time had exactly passed, you would have been pissed off… Anyways, lets make it to the room where your second TEST will begin.”
“Yeah… Its like a casino: only they don’t have windows, so you don’t realize you’ve spent the whole day there gambling… At least I can see the pine trees from this building… - as Urien was saying this they were already on their way to the room John said was to be the room where the testing will take place. After walking for a while, they arrived.
The room had a clear label stating it was the “TESTING ROOM”. It had two entrances, one for the Tester and one for John. “Go inside and I’ll explain to you the rules as I look over you.”
Urien went inside of the room and the room looked as if it was a playroom for kids. In the middle of the room there was a table with a box on it. There was a chair, as well. A mirror off to the side and a couple of kids toys. The box on the table had no label on it.
“Welcome to your second TEST; The Puzzle”, Urien. In front of you is a box which contains a couple hundred puzzle pieces. They are all white with a couple of lines on them. Using those lines, you must form a rectangle along the puzzle’s landscape. Your finished puzzle must contain the shape, and you are to be locked in this room until you finish. There are a couple of rules:
You cannot quit. I have a timer which will tell me the time it took you to figure the puzzle out. You cannot ask for any help, and no food and water will be given to you. If you faint, the TEST will be marked as failed, and you WILL eventually starve to death this way. This is only the third time this TEST is being used on a Tester. Which means, you are one of the lucky ones. Don’t worry, you haven’t done it in any of your LOOPs before, so you are up for a challenge. Good luck. Your time starts now.”
John could be seen watching Urien as if he was a monkey being experimented on through a thick glass pane meant to withhold a bullet. Urien rushed over to the table and started to lay all the pieces out on the table. They all had marks of blood on them. As if someone tried to wash it off but couldn’t. Marks of dried blood stayed on the pieces which disturbed Urien. It was as he described: lines could be seen on some of them too. Starting with the corners, he made sure to build the corners out as quickly as possible. At this point, his mask was still on his head and his neck was itching even more. It was clear to him that there were possibly over three hundred pieces to this puzzle. It was a tiring process, trying to connect all of the (mostly white and bloody) pieces together. He thought to himself that this was a million times easier than he had imagined it to be. “He is probably trying to scare me with this blood and I will probably have to finish this as soon as possible for better results.” – Urien thought to himself, with a hopeful look on his face (behind the mask, though).
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As he started to connect more and more of the pieces together, he realized that there were numbers on the puzzle as well. As he looked back on the door he entered from, he saw a place in which you could enter in a code. His first thought was that after beating the puzzle you get the number to free yourself from the room and you beat the TEST that way. It took him a couple more minutes, but eventually, he finished the puzzle. One piece was missing from the middle, but the numbers could be read: “8428”. The lines formed a rectangle along the way around the numbers. “John, one piece is missing, but I finished the rest of the puzzle. I’ll go on ahead and finish this up now.”
As he stood up from the chair in which he was standing on, he went over to the console to input the numbers. To his surprise, they did not open the door. After trying again a couple of times, the same result was in front of him. The code didn’t work. “John, is this code a working one?”
John looked at Urien from across the glass and he gave him a thumbs up, all while looking at Urien carefully. John put on some blinds as to cover himself from Urien’s view. This confused Urien and thus he sat down on the chair at he pondered at the table, staring at the puzzle with one missing piece. It was too specific to be a blunder: the very middle piece of the puzzle was the exact one which was missing.
“Wait… These numbers, perhaps I can take my mask off with them?”
Urien went ahead and, trying his best to use the mirror to his advantage, tried to match the numbers on the mask’s lock with the numbers on the puzzle. A click was heard. His mask, with a little push of force coming from his hands, went off his head almost as smooth as butter. He could finally scratch his neck. Then, he felt it. There was a puzzle piece in the back side of his neck. It was under his skin.
“No… No. Don’t do this to me John. John? Hello? I am not about to do this!”
No reply was heard. He screamed as loud as he could, throwing the chair across the room. “This… improvised knife from the soda can… Do I really have to… No… There must be another solution… John!”
He was panicking. Even if he broke the glass, what good could it be? He still had to cut his skin open. “No… I can’t let him know that I have this knife on me… I have to break the glass; I have to fool him. He has to think that I’ve done it using the glass pieces. No way am I about to do this…”
Urien, in his raged state, went over to the mirror and he kicked the sucker right out of its place. Behind the glass there was a paper. It had the next note written on it: “Now you have something to cut yourself open up with, but, with no mirror, how will you see what you are cutting? :)”
In his rage, Urien had made the job so much harder than it already was. Now he had no mirror, so he is going to have to, using only his feel, cut out the puzzle piece from inside of his neck. All the dried blood on the puzzle pieces, now it made sense. He was about to bleed hard. Trying to slow his breathing down, with his shaky hands, Urien decided to get the chair back from the other side of the room where he threw it at, and, with a strong will to survive this TEST, he decided against starving himself to death. Urien started to whisper to himself… “This damn building, it’s a building for torturing people… Will I even get the money I was promised, no, I’m so suspicious of all of this, I need to escape, I need to save my life! This building will be the end of me, it will kill me, God help me!”
As he was talking to himself, he began cutting his skin up. His screaming could probably be heard a mile away… “God, help me, help me!”
The improvised knife was going through his skin, tearing it up and infecting his skin and body. It was pure agony, pure torture: he was getting nothing from doing this except the fact that he would live another day. In truth, he fought for his life full of courage. The screaming was nowhere near done and the cutting was just getting into the deeper part of the skin. It was slow, it burned, it bled, and blood was spurting everywhere, and the adrenaline from this was too much for the average man to handle. “God, help me! John, why are you doing this!?!?”
The cuts got to the point where he could feel the puzzle piece with the sharp edge of the improvised knife. With his arms shaking he folded the knife back as much as he could, and he realized that two more folds and the can would definitely break. It was nearing the end of its usability. He hid in inside of his pockets and he got the puzzle piece out, squeezing the skin around the cut as much as he could with his hands. It came out, all bloody, but intact.
He placed it onto the puzzle, and then he made sure to bloody some of the glass up so it could look like he used the glass to do it. A buzzer was heard, and the door opened. Urien fainted and fell to the floor, losing blood by the second.