Mr. Lemoncello and the Titanium Ticket

by Chris Grabenstein

  “Together?” asked Simon.

  Soraiya shrugged. “Guess so. We’re a team.”

  They held hands and hopped their way to the fifth square.

  When they landed on it, Simon heard something click.

  The floor didn’t feel so firm.

  Then it fell away.

  Simon and Soraiya dropped down into a very long and windy chute! Simon’s stomach felt as if it had just lurched up to somewhere behind his nose.

  “Hang on,” cried Soraiya. “It’s a waterslide without any water! Woo-hoo!”

  Simon wasn’t enjoying the slide down the winding gerbil tube as much as Soraiya seemed to be.

  They were falling so fast his cheeks were fluttering as they whipped through a corkscrew of twists and turns.

  “At least it’s not a straight drop!” shouted Soraiya.

  That’s when they dropped about ten feet straight down into another series of wicked switchbacks.

  So that’s why I saw those clear tubes snaking through the atrium, Simon thought. They were the “snakes” from Snakes and Ladders. The chutes from the more modern version of the game.

  “Close your eyes!” cried Soraiya as they flew through the hard plastic tube. “Here comes the floor.”

  Simon dared to look down.

  The floor was coming up at them fast.

  The Board Game Hall of Fame wasn’t officially open to the public. They were the first ones riding this ride! What if it didn’t work? What if they crash-landed?

  Suddenly, there was a FWOMP and a SWOOSH.

  A circular chunk of stone the size of a manhole cover flopped down. A burst of lemon-scented compressed air shot up from the basement and buffeted Simon and Soraiya, making their baggy, sweaty clothes balloon up into thick cotton parachutes.

  “We’re slowing down!” said Soraiya. “It’s like we’re inside a pneumatic tube.”

  They slowly drifted down, eased through the hole in the floor, dropped out of the bottom of the chute, and plopped into a barrel filled with foam rubber fruit.

  “Now that we’re still alive,” said Soraiya, who, like Simon, was sprawled on her back in a bed of squishy fruit-shaped balls, “I have to admit: That was awesome.”

  “Yeah,” Simon agreed. “It was.”

  They both grabbed hold of the lip of the barrel and pulled themselves up to survey their surroundings.

  “That barrel over there is filled with apples,” said Simon. “Wonder why it’s down in the basement.”

  “Could be a future Apples to Apples exhibit,” said Soraiya.

  “Is that another game?” asked Simon.

  “Yep.” Soraiya hauled herself out of the barrel. Simon was right behind her.

  “Huh,” said Simon, reading what was written on the barrel they’d landed in. “These ones aren’t apples. They’re figs.”

  “Well, that’s weird. I don’t think there’s a game called Figs to Figs….”

  The lPad BA-BLINGed again.

  “New riddle,” said Soraiya, staring at the screen. “ ‘What did the three little figs say to the big bad wolf when he told them to open their doors?’ ”

  “You mean the three little pigs….”

  “Nope. It’s the three little figs. Hang on. They’re giving us the first words. We need to fill in the last three….”

  “My grandmother used to read ‘The Three Little Pigs’ to me when I was little,” said Simon. “The pigs say, ‘Not by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins.’ But there aren’t enough bubbles for that.”

  “So,” reasoned Soraiya, “counting the letters and applying Lemoncello logic, the three figs might say, ‘Not by the hair of our figgy-fig-figs.’ ”

  Soraiya tapped in the answer. The lPad trumpeted a tinny fanfare and the numbered letters flew to their appropriate spots.

  “I think I can solve it now!” said Simon. “Great success comes from dedication, doing your best, and, of course, having gobs of giggly fun!”

  “You might be right,” said Soraiya. “But we have thirty-five minutes and only two more exhibits to visit. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

  “But I really think we can assume we know what those letters are.”

  “Scientists never assume, Simon. It’s against all the rules of the scientific method. And those, my friend, cannot be bent, even if you have a rubbery bonus card!”

  Simon nodded. “So where to next?”

  Soraiya studied the lPad. “Big-Time Boggle. Second floor.”

  When she finished saying that, a new escalator ladder rose up out of the basement floor and headed for the ceiling, which was actually the atrium floor, where a trapdoor slid open.

  “Looks like that ladder is headed to where we need to go,” said Simon.

  This time, he climbed aboard first. Soraiya hopped on right after him.

  “Let’s just hope that every ladder doesn’t come with a chute,” she remarked. “Because the second chute may not have such a soft and figgy landing!”

  Meanwhile, on the fourth floor, Akimi and Piya were about to complete their sixth game.

  After they’d finally finished their Ticket to Ride transcontinental railroad (and earned two sets of letter-filled bubbles instead of just one), they had ridden that railroad across a towering trestle bridge to the mysterious island of Catan, a strange land made up of interlocking hexagons.

  Now they were settlers, looking for bricks, lumber, wool, grain, and ore to build a city.

  “Do you think Mr. Lemoncello knows that my dream is to become a civil engineer?” asked Piya as she and Akimi chased after an audio-animatronic sheep (at least Akimi hoped it was audio-animatronic) in their quest for wool. “Is that why our path through the hall of fame has included so many building games?”

  “Maybe,” said Akimi, right before she dove for the ankles of the mechanical sheep—and missed. She landed in a very realistic-smelling pile of artificial sheep dung.

  * * *

  —

  On the second floor, Haley and Carolyn were playing a game called Encore, where they had to come up with songs containing a certain word, such as “lemon.”

  This was their second-to-last game, but Carolyn wasn’t in a hurry.

  She just wanted Haley to hear how well she sang!

  * * *

  —

  Also on the second floor, Simon and Soraiya found the Big-Time Boggle display. It was an eight-foot see-through plastic cube with sixteen letter blocks arrayed on a four-by-four tray in its floor. When you looked through the plastic dome, only the top letter of each block was visible.

  “We have to shake up the letters and then make sixteen four-letter words out of the sixteen letters facing up after our shake,” said Soraiya, reading the instructions off her lPad. “So, it’s just like Boggle. Only bigger.”

  “But how do we shake up the letters?” wondered Simon. “The box is huge.”

  “We have to push the shake button.”

  “Great. Where is it?”

  Simon and Soraiya examined the exterior of the eight-foot cube. They couldn’t find a button.

  Until one started glowing.

  Inside the cube.

  “I’ll do it,” said Simon, lifting a hinged panel on the clear cube’s side. “Huh. The walls are cushioned. Like the plastic’s puffed up with air or something.”

  He climbed into the letter box.

  “Hang on,” said Soraiya. “We’re a team. We’ll do it together.”

  She ducked down, stepped in, and walked across the soft and squishy letter cubes to join Simon near the button.

  “Ready?” said Simon.

  Soraiya nodded. “On your mark, get set, lemon, cello, go!”

  Simon pressed the button. The eight-foot cube bucked up and down. Hydraulic pistons in the floor rocked
it and rolled it, shaking it like a paint-mixing machine at the hardware store. Letters started tumbling. So did Simon and Soraiya.

  “H-h-how l-l-long w-w-will th-th-this th-th-thing sh-sh-shake?” Simon shouted as he and Soraiya bobbled and bounced.

  “I—I—I h-h-have n-n-no i-i-idea!” Soraiya shouted back. Then she and Simon bounced around some more.

  “That’s hysterical!” said Jack, laughing.

  He was watching Simon and Soraiya being shaken inside the Boggle box on his phone. He could also see Haley and Carolyn singing while Akimi and Piya pushed a wheelbarrow full of iron ore. The screen of his phone was divided into a grid of images, each one corresponding to one of the security cameras inside the Board Game Hall of Fame.

  The CCTV app was a perk of being the head of security’s son. It was excellent for tracking his opponents’ progress. He tucked his phone back into the side pocket of his camo cargo pants so his partner, Peckleman, couldn’t see him using it.

  They’d just completed the seventh game. Which was why Andrew was off in a corner, trying to wipe the yellow sludge off his glasses. Their seventh game had been played with Pimple Pete, a ten-foot-tall replica of the goo-shooting plastic head from the grossest board game ever invented (so far). The thing moved around on hidden wheels like a ginormous remote-controlled car.

  “Well,” said Andrew, rubbing another glob of fake pimple gunk off his shirt, “that was definitely explosive fun for the whole family.”

  “Hey,” said Jack, “check this out.” He’d moved around behind Pimple Pete’s giant plastic head. “There’s a controller tucked into a nook back here. You can manually override the big head’s preprogrammed moves. You can make Pimple Pete do whatever you want him to do.”

  “There’s also a label on the controller that says ‘For staff use only,’ ” remarked Andrew.

  “I’m on the staff,” said Jack, prying the remote out of its cubbyhole.

  “No you’re not.”

  “I help my dad all the time,” Jack insisted. He removed the remote and fiddled with its color-coded buttons. They were set up like the ones on an Xbox controller for PlayStation. The huge head moved forward, backward, sideways. Its pulsing pimples blinked. Its red nose bulged and glowed.

  “Where do we go next?” Jack asked Andrew as he continued fiddling with the controller, making Pimple Pete spin in circles.

  “Um, Pimple Pete’s puzzle gave us every letter we needed except two,” said Andrew, checking the screen on their lPad. “And those last two are lemons….”

  “What’s our eighth and final game?”

  “Guess Who? The mystery face game from Milton Bradley,” said Andrew. “The exhibit for it is on the first floor.”

  “Great. And guess who I’m taking with us?” Jack thumbed the remote. Pimple Pete whirred forward.

  “No. You. Are. Not,” said Andrew.

  “Look, Andy. Soraiya and Simon are on their seventh game, too. There’s only like thirty minutes left. If they come gunning for us, we can slime them with Pimple Pete. Slow ’em down.”

  Andrew bristled. “That would be cheating!”

  “No. I’m just angling for a tactical advantage.”

  “That’s it. You are not going to pull a Chiltington on me! You, sir, are on your own! I quit.”

  “Fine. I don’t need you. And if that idiot Simon Skrindle can bend the rules, so can I!”

  Simon and Soraiya stepped out of the tumbling Boggle box, feeling the way socks probably feel when they come out of the dryer.

  “You okay?” Simon asked.

  “Yeah,” replied Soraiya. “I’m just glad we never had time to eat one of those ham and cheese ice cream sandwiches.”

  The lPad made a ZZZZZIIIP sound.

  Sixteen letters—four rows of four letters each—matching the sixteen now in the grid on the floor of the Big-Time Boggle box filled the screen:

  U B R H

  U L U M

  I Q M T

  U S S P

  “Okay,” said Soraiya, after reading the game’s instructions, “this is a little different from regular Boggle. We now have three minutes to find at least sixteen four-letter words using these sixteen letters.”

  A green light inside the clear cube started blinking.

  “Blip,” said Simon. “Bump!”

  “Burp,” added Soraiya. “Hips, hubs, hums…”

  Simon took over. “Limb, limp, mist, er…mush!”

  The green light changed to yellow.

  “We only have two minutes left,” said Soraiya.

  Simon rubbed his stubbly hair. The pressure was on. He didn’t want to let Soraiya down. And what about Jack? Had he and Andrew already figured out the seventy-six-letter phrase? He started humming.

  “Why are you humming? We already did ‘hums.’ ”

  “Music helps me think,” said Simon. He put himself up in his attic with his glockenspiel. He saw the notes. Saw the colors. Then, in a flash, he saw words that Soraiya and he hadn’t seen before.

  “Plum, push, rump, slip…”

  “Spur!” shouted Soraiya.

  The light turned red. They had one minute.

  “Pits!” cried Simon.

  The lPad sounded another tinny fanfare.

  “You did it!” shouted Soraiya.

  “No,” said Simon, “we did it.”

  He leaned in to look at the tablet.

  “There’s no riddle? Just sixteen letter bubbles? What sixteen-letter word are we looking for? How many letters does ‘Lemoncello’ have in it?”

  “Ten.”

  “How about ‘Luigi Lemoncello’?”

  “Fifteen,” said Soraiya. “But the rules never said the answer to every game had to be an actual word or words….”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “We’ve just been staring at sixteen letters! I’ll try those!”

  “Good idea! See what happens.”

  Soraiya typed the sixteen letters into the sixteen bubbles.

  The tablet GLINGed to let them know they were correct.

  “Whoa!” said Soraiya. “Check it out!”

  As the screen dissolved from the sixteen-letter answer to the seventy-six-letter phrase, only two letters remained blank: the lemons at 13 and 68.

  “The last two lemony letters have to be ‘C’ and ‘G’!” said Simon. “That last bit has to be ‘gobs of giggly fun.’ ”

  “What if your hypothesis is incorrect?” countered Soraiya. “What if it’s gobs of wiggly or jiggly fun? What if we guess incorrectly instead of gathering the final two pieces of data? According to my watch, we still have sixteen minutes.”

  “Okay, okay. We do this the right way. We play on.”

  “One more game and we’re done, Simon! Guess Who?”

  “Um, you’re Soraiya.”

  “Correct. That’s also the name of our last game. Guess Who? It’s on this floor. Near the far wall to the west.”

  They took off running.

  Simon could hear the clock down in the atrium doing its bing-bong-bing-bong thing three times in a row. That meant it was 7:45.

  “Now we only have fifteen minutes!” cried Soraiya.

  “No problem,” said Simon. “We only have one game left. We can win this thing.”

  They hurried under the arched entrance into the Guess Who? exhibit.

  Mounted on the far wall were twenty-four flat-panel video monitors, arranged in three rows of eight. Each one of the screens had a slightly animated cartoon face displayed on it. The twenty-four faces blinked. And smiled. One labeled “Sam” fidgeted with his glasses.

  Suddenly, all twenty-four panels started flashing.

  “Your character is now being selected,” boomed a game-show-sounding announcer. “Guess who!”


  The TVs returned to their portrait modes. The cartoons kept smiling.

  “We have to figure out which of the twenty-four faces the computer just selected before time runs out,” Soraiya whispered to Simon. “We can ask questions to narrow down the field.”

  A two-minute digital clock started counting down.

  “Go for it,” said Simon.

  “Is our person a female?” asked Soraiya.

  “Yes,” said the game show announcer.

  Nineteen of the twenty-four faces, all of the males, faded to black.

  “Seriously?” said Soraiya. “There are only five female figures in this whole game? What’s up with that?”

  “Guess it’s an antique,” said Simon. “Must be why it’s in a museum.”

  Soraiya was about to ask her second question when Jack McClintock burst into the room.

  And he wasn’t alone.

  “Stop the game!” Jack shouted as he thumbed the buttons on a small controller he clutched.

  A giant plastic head with a queasy expression on its face lumbered into the room. The white bumps dotting its chin, cheeks, and forehead throbbed as if they were ready to burst. So did the bright-red beacon on its nose.

  “You guys remember Pimple Pete,” said Jack. “Looks like his nose is about to blow.”

  “This is so gross,” Soraiya muttered.

  She and Simon reflexively took one step backward as the big pimple-popping head swerved on its wobbly wheels.

  “You two don’t mind if I play through, do you?” Jack said. “This is my last game. Then I win.”

  “Actually,” said Simon, “we were here first.”

  “And we’ve already started our game,” said Soraiya.

  “You’re smart, Soraiya Mitchell,” said Jack. “You fooled everybody. Except me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Everybody thinks you teamed up with Simon—even disguised him as Mario—because you felt sorry for him. But you know what I know. Simon Skrindle is good at these Lemoncello games. He’s an idiot about everything else. But games? Oh, he’s a sneaky little genius.”