4522 {The Number Series}

6

        "That's weird," Archer said to me. I nodded in agreement. What did matching up colors on a box have to do with any of this? Our Officer motioned for us to follow him again to another table. I recognized a touch screen device they had laid out.

        "Here you will go through several different scenarios digitally," he said simply before walking away to another type of station. There was a ring on the wall filled with several other rings and a red dot as the center. "This is called darts."

        "Why would it be called that?" I asked.

        He smiled. "You have to throw these little darts at the board. You have to keep throwing them till you hit the center."

        "Why would anyone want to do that?" The girl with the green eyes asked. "How would any of these random things show anything?"

        "You don't understand, yet. We'll get there," the Officer sighed. "Eventually."

*

*

        I picked the station with the wierd colorful cube. I felt drawn to the little square. Hardly any of the colors matched up and, according to my Officer, I had to work on the puzzle so each color filled up its own side. I fiddled with it continuously but for how long I did not know. Soon I discovered it was easy getting on side to match but figuring out how not to mess it up while getting the other colors on their own side was the problem that I had to solve. Archer joined me after a while.

        "You look like you're doing good," he said as he pointed to it.

        "Not really," I grumbled. "I can only get part of it. What were you doing?"

        "The darts," he said.

        "How did that go?"

        "I hit the red dot," he smiled. Archer was proud. "It wasn't really that difficult. You had to just get  yourself to focus on nothing but the red dot. All I could think about was hitting it right in the middle and then, suddenly, it did."

        "Great," I congratulated as I continued to twist the cube around and around. Archer picked up a cibe of his own and followed my lead.

        Twist, spin, turn.

        Soon I realized there was a pattern. I continue with this for several minutes until every side had its own solid color. I smiled. I had solved it. What had seemed so difficult had suddenly become so simple.

        "How did you do that?" Asked the darker skinned boy who had been sitting across from mer. I shrugged as if I did not know. The only person I would tell my secret discovery to was Archer and only after I watched him struggle to solve it for a little while longer.

        I watched him as he worked on the cube. For fun I taunted him about how I solved it and he hadn't. It was all play teasing and he took it without getting angry at me.

        "Remi," he sighed as he set it down on the table. Everyone else had already left our section a long time ago as they were conquered by the cube. "Seriously, how did you do it."

        I laughed. "Okay, okay. I'll show you. It's a pattern."

        He watched as my hands worked around his square. I showed him how to solve the puzzle without trying too many combinations. When I finished he looked at it in awe and then tried it out for himself. He messed up a few times but managed to do it with my help.

        "You're above the others, you know that." He said as he looked at the two entirely solved puzzles and watched as I started working on a third.

        "What do you mean?" I asked. We weren't supposed to say we were better than anyone else. We are supposed to consider everyone equal.

        "You can do things that the others, including myself, can't."

        "It's just puzzles," I said.

        "No, it's more than that. Our Officer is testing us for something. I don't know what for but he is and your passing."

        "What if were being tested because of the way we are," I whispered. "What if it's a bad thing we're passing?"

        "It might be," Archer agreed without giving me any comfort. "I guess we'll just have to see. But he seems too proud of you for you to be in here for the wrong reasons."

        "You're right." I thought. "What did he say again when I asked what we were doing here?"

        "Starting a fire."

        "What does that mean?" I asked more to myself than to him. He shrugged in responce. Hardly anything was making much sense anymore and it was causing us to both fegel uneasy.

(Sorry for any errors. I will fix them later when I have time, I promise. Tell me what you think! Also, do you think this is a read that is friendly to both genders? I am trying not to make it seem too girly. Let me know!)

xoxo

~imaginationNationX <3