Thing Aren't Always as They Seem

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Doors Trial!” the announcer announced. “The rules of the game are very simple. There are four rooms. Each room has multiple doors, but only one of them leads to the next room! You must use the clues in the room, as well as your own skills as an investigator, to figure out which door is the right one! However, the difficulty increases with each room. Room one has two doors, room two has four, room three has eight and room four has a whopping sixteen! Only one door per room is correct. Fail to pick the right one and you will be disqualified!” he explained. “Any questions?”

“How do we know we picked the wrong door?” a contestant asked.

“The doors will have letters assigned to them. You must announce which one you want to go through. The wrong doors will lead you to your demise! You may fall off a ledge, walk into a spike trap, be eaten by wolves or worse!”

A shocked murmur spread through the crowd. Some people began to protest.

“If you don’t wish to participate, you may leave now and let the real investigators handle this!” the announcer teased.

Several contestants quit and were led out of the tower. I counted twelve. That meant there were exactly one hundred contestants left.

“No more questions allowed. Now, please listen for your name, as we split you into groups!”

***

I was in a group with four other people. One of them was the thuggish looking man with fiery red hair. Another wore a black tuxedo and a blank half facemask. The third was an albino woman with short hair and a weird face. She wasn’t ugly, just… weird looking. Her red pupiled eyes were huge, her mouth was wide, her teeth sharp, ears pointy, and she had greyish freckles. She wore a simple, yellow dress and brown sandals. Finally, there was a short, stocky man with an impressive, bushy beard and matching eyebrows. Clad in sturdy armour, he looked like a fearsome dwarf.

What a bunch of freaks, I thought.

“You all look like a bunch of freaks,” the red-haired man informed us.

“Let’s just try to work together,” the dwarf said in a gruff voice.

“We’re not teammates, we’re opponents,” the red-haired man replied.

“Well, for this trial, we are teammates, so you will cooperate,” the dwarf reminded him.

“I’ll make your face cooperate with my fist!”

“Try me!”

The two began going at it.

Wow, what a fantastic start…

“You two! No fighting, or you’ll be disqualified!” the announcer called out.

The pair immediately stopped and agreed to settle things later.

What the hell is there to settle? Who’s the bigger moron? I wondered.

“First team, come up on stage!”

The salaryman looking guy from earlier stepped forward, along with his four teammates. The announcer pointed at the huge, metal door behind him. Its gears began turning and the door slowly opened. “Please enter!” he instructed. The team walked through the doors, which shut behind them.

***

*knock, knock, knock!*

Erin lazily sat up in her gigantic bed. Its red sheets were silky smooth, and the bed itself was big enough for three. She was in the guest bedroom in the prince’s palace. She opened the door. It was the prince.

“Erin, my love! Lunch is almost ready!” the prince informed her. “You’ll be staying for dinner like you promised, won’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” Erin assured him with a smile.

The prince told her to be downstairs in five minutes, then gleefully departed. As soon as he was gone, Erin’s face fell. Her smile immediately turned into a dead-eyed scowl. She shut the bedroom door.

***

“Never mind, I don’t want to die!” a contestant yelled out. Team seven.

“Sorry, my friend, but it’s too late to back out now! You’d be letting your team down,” the announcer told him.

“I don’t care! I don’t even know those creeps! Let me out!” the contestant hollered.

“Boy, you really don’t have the makings of a Head Investigator,” the announcer said, disappointedly shaking his head.

The panicking contestant’s teammates were all freaking out on him, telling him he was going to get them disqualified.

“Ladies and gentlemen, fear not!” the announcer told them, hearing their concerns. “You won’t be disqualified because of this. You’ll simply be fighting at a disadvantage,” he informed them.

The only one of their teammates that didn’t say anything was the young man with the eyebags that I’d noticed scoping out the competition earlier. He simply stood there, slightly hunched over, with his hands in his pockets.

Two guards grabbed the liability and dragged him away. “Sir, you will be fined severely for disrupting the competition and disadvantaging your teammates!” the announcer called out as the man was escorted out of the room.

***

“Team eleven has made their choice! Now, step forward, team twelve!” the announcer invited.

I perked up. This was it, the moment of truth. My team and I walked up to the stage. I could feel myself shaking and sweating.

“I hope none of you will regret staying,” the announcer said. There was something about his tone and the look in his eye that felt so ominous. Furthermore, he seemed to stare right at me as he said this.

Could I really die during this trial? I was especially worried about being mauled by wolves, given my… experience in that regard… The doors slowly pulled themselves open. Every part of me wanted to run away. The red-haired man waltzed in like he was entering his living room. He was followed by the albino, then the man in the tuxedo and finally the dwarf.

I took a deep breath and entered.

***

Erin dug into her fancy pudding.

“Are you enjoying the meal?” the prince asked for the fifth time.

Her mouth too full to speak, Erin just nodded.

The prince smiled. Suddenly, Erin noticed a wave of nerves overcome him. He fidgeted in his seat like a schoolboy about to ask out his crush. Erin observed him intently, though the prince took no notice. “Erin,” he began. “You are the fairest maiden I have ever come across…”

“He’s not about to ask me to marry him, is he?” Erin wondered.

“Please don’t leave after lunch. Please come join me in my chambers tonight!” the prince begged.

Erin was dumbfounded. She furrowed her eyebrows. “I’ll- I’ll think about it,” she stammered. She clutched her knife as she did so.

***

The door now shut behind us, we found ourselves in a large, completely blank room. The walls, floor and ceiling were all an uninterrupted white. Despite my feet being firmly planted on the ground, I felt like I was floating. Up ahead were two golden doors, placed about a metre away from each other. The one on the left had the letter A written in big, black letters on it. The one on the right sported the letter B. They each had a silver plaque above them.

Another detail: there was an analog clock on the wall set a 12:30. The second hand was ticking anticlockwise.

"There's a timer," I pointed out. "I imagine we have thirty minutes." My observation went largely ignored.

“I hope they get a little more creative with these room designs later on,” the red-haired man commented.

“Right? It’s so tasteless,” the albino lady critiqued in a surprisingly haughty way.

“This is a test about applying information. This room is intentionally devoid of all distractions, because everything we need is likely on those plaques,” I hypothesised.

The dwarf agreed. “I’m glad to have been paired up with a thinker,” he said. It wasn’t really praise, so much as a subtle insult towards our other teammates. They definitely caught on and began slinging their own insults.

Ignoring them, I approached the doors and read the plaques out loud:

The plaque on door A read: “Plaque A is false.”

However, the one on door B puzzlingly stated: “Plaque A is true.”

The others immediately stopped arguing.

“What?” asked the red-haired man.