Red shift

The Never Ending Quest - Episode 21037


Checkers takes her spear, and starts to carve the wallhugger. Fred notices that even left-handed, she wields the spear with skill of a surgeon. Fred sees a glinting object on the ground. He shuffles awkwardly toward it and discovers his sword. Picking it up and sheathing it in his scabbard, he stares at the strange woman. Something still does not make sense. "Checkers," Fred says, "you told me that your name was obvious and exposed your wing. I am sorry, but the connection was not obvious to me."

She continues to carve on the wallhugger, and explains, "We have a game that uses a piece of wood as a playing field, called a checkerboard. The board has an alternating pattern of red and black squares. My wings have the same pattern, and so the name stuck."

"We have the game, too. But your wing is pitch black."

She stopped carving, and looked at her wing, and shook her head. "The pattern's still there. It must be the light. Look."

"It can't be the light. You are wearing a red plaid skirt, blue jerkin, and your hair is red, so what I am seeing can't be a result of the light."

"Could you be under an enchantment from Belboz? I have dark brown hair, brown eyes, and I am dressed in gray and black, to blend in with the cavern."

"I might hallucinating, but you have not looked like that since I first saw you."

"If that were the case, that would explain why I have been having problems sneaking past people." Checkers turns away from the remains of the wallhugger, walks over to Fred, and has an idea. "You might be color blind. My map has a rainbow colored background, except for that strip of black in the center." She reaches into her pouch and unrolls a scroll. Here is the enterance to the cave right on this red strip...."

"I don't see it; it looks blacked out to me. Your map has two bars of black on the margins. It shades over to red here, then green, blue in the middle, then back to green, red, and the black bar again."

"You can read the middle of the map?", she said.

"Yeah, sure. I just don't see anything on the ends, and there is some fine print on the bottom of your map."

"I have never seen that. What does it say?"

"It looks like some incantation that I can't make out. 'By breaking the seal of this scroll you have accepted this license agreement. The licensee is entitled to make one copy of this map for archival purposes only. The licensee may not reverse engineer ....'"

"I think that we can safely ignore that." Her face brightens as she has an idea. "May I see your map?"

Fred rolls his map out with mounting excitement. For some reason, Checkers cannot see blue, but hidden things appear to her in red. Back home, there were rumors that the survivor had left a written notes encoded on the map, but nobody had ever found a code. Could she see the code?

Checkers confirms his thoughts on this when she observes: "Here is the cave opening. There are actually two openings - someone apparently penned in a red partition as an afterthought. There are two arrows, one pointing to the left opening that says 'captives', without much more detail, and the other to the right that says 'the dragon's chamber', with a lot of the complex mapped out, and all sorts of details."

"Checkers, I do not quite see that. It looks like just one opening to me, and I do not see the notes, but I believe you. And I think that I can help you with the 'black spot' on your map."

  1. Fred and Checkers try to find out where they are.

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10/27/2002 1:09:42 AM

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