Work Text:
Sayeon’s been writing partial derivatives for so long that she’s not entirely sure she remembers what a regular derivative is anymore.
The clock on the classroom wall ticked past nine half a problem set ago, and outside a broken streetlamp casts the field in an eerie green glow. The night staff will probably kick her out soon, but until they do, she keeps working. However tired she is, she doesn’t want to go home just yet.
A scrape of metal on classroom floor. Sayeon looks up, startled; she hadn’t even heard the door open, and it’s early for the janitor to be making his r—
“Hey, class prez,” the newcomer chirps, swinging the chair around on its legs so that he can sit it in backwards. “Whatcha up to?”
Sayeon rubs her eyes. It’s not even that late yet. Is she hallucinating? “Jaeil?”
“What, don’t tell me you know someone else with a face this handsome,” Jaeil preens, turning his face back and forth as if to admire himself in the mirror. “Why the surprise?”
“Because you—what’re you doing here? You didn’t even come to class today! You know we had a pop quiz in English, right?”
Jaeil winces. “We did? Oooof. There’s goes my D… and I was doing so well…”
It’s Sayeon’s turns to wince. “God, your grades. That’s—that’s not something to be proud of. You know that, right.”
“Easy for you to say, Ms. Top-of-the-Class,” Jaeil sighs. He glances down at the thick stack of worksheets and the carefully annotated textbook on her desk. “Not that you haven’t earned it, jeeeez. Anyway. You busy tonight?”
“Well I have two more problem sets to—”
He covers up the papers on her desk with his hands. “All the studying crap aside. You need to be home anytime soon?”
Sayeon exhales slowly, tilting her head back in her chair to stare at the ceiling.
“…you know I don’t,” she says softly. It’s a game the two of them play some nights, when Jaeil’s not busy trying suspicious substances with his shadier friends: how long can they avoid going home?
It’s not a very fun game. Spoiler: Sayeon usually wins. Samin’s rarely ever home in the evenings, after all.
“Why?” she finally asks, glancing back at Jaeil.
“Juuust checking,” Jaeil says casually, “’cuz I need you to do to me a tiiiiny favor… and it might take a while, is all.”
She squints. “You’re not in trou—”
“I wouldn’t come to you for that kind of thing,” Jaeil snorts. “Just trust me on this one?”
Sayeon hesitates, finger twirling a strand of hair anxiously. Jaeil is—not exactly the sort of person who inspires trust.
But he’s the kind of friend who does.
“Alright, fine,” Sayeon relents. “What do you need?”
Jaeil immediately lights up. “Wait, seriously? Okay, cool! So pack up, pack up, there’s this place we need to go to…”
The city is drenched in neon as they make their way through the streets. Sayeon’s rarely out this late in a place that isn’t home or school, and she has to remind herself not to flinch every time broken glass crunches underfoot. Jaeil’s company helps, somewhat.
They come to a stop in front of a quieter storefront. Sayeon has to squint to make out the half-lit sign in the otherwise overlit street. Moon Rabbit Puzzle Escape. “This is it?”
“Yup!” Jaeil says, still having offered no further explanation. “Go in, go in.”
She does.
There’s a single employee at the counter, quietly leafing through a book. She looks up at their entrance. “Hello! Do you have a reservation?”
Reservation…? But this place doesn’t seem like any sort of restaurant.
Sayeon glances at Jaeil questioningly, but he’s as laidback as ever. “Yup! 9:30? Prison break?”
What?
“Oh, of course. Mr. Jaeil Kim, yes?”
“Yup, that’s us!” Jaeil says.
“Alright, just a moment, I’ll get the room prepared for you,” the employee says. “You can wait on the couches over there, and I’ll come explain the rules in a moment.”
She disappears.
Sayeon immediately whirls on Jaeil. “A prison break!? Where are we?”
“Waaait, wait!” Jaeil says, holding up his hands in surrender. “Okay, look. So. Do you know what an escape room is?”
Sayeon hesitates. Chews her lip. “Nooo…?”
“Okay, well, it’s like. A room full of puzzles! Like that! They’ll set up a scenario for us and everything, and we have to solve it in the time limit! Sounds fun, right?”
Sayeon’s eyes stayed narrowed. It does, but…
Jaeil finger guns her and barrels on. “Ah-ha, you look intrigued! See, I figured a brainiac like you would love it. This one has really high ratings, and it’s supposed to be really difficult, so!”
“Okay,” Sayeon says slowly. “So it’s just like… karoake. But for nerds. It’s just… one of those bonding activity things you do with friends.”
“Uh. Sure.”
“So why’d you bring me here?”
“’Cuz you’re my friend, duh,” Jaeil rolls his eyes. “And also—I don’t think I’ve seen you do anything except eat and study since you got that 98 on our last math test. So, I, uh, figured you could use the break.”
“Oh.” She fiddles with the cuticle on her thumb. So he was… worried for her? That’s… “And why the prison theme?”
“Oh, that’s ‘cuz I needed the practice,” Jaeil says brightly. “For when I turn to a life of crime and you—”
The rest of his sentence is lost to laughter as he dodges Sayeon’s backpack.
They wind up locked up in a jail cell.
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Sayeon murmurs, fingers wrapped around the bars of their cell. A cracked yellow light hanging overhead illuminates walls covered in fake grime, and there’s even a broken toilet in the corner. “The atmosphere is very… realistic. A little too realistic for my tastes, I think.”
“Your tastes?” Jaeil groans. “Sayeon, please, I’m the one who’s handcuffed to a bedpost here.”
“You volunteered for it.”
“Yes, because you’re the only one with any brain cells, and if we let you get chained to the bed we’d be here forever.”
“Tough luck,” she laughs. “So I see one combination lock and one lock with a key… oh, two, actually.” Because of the handcuffs. “And…” She tilts her head quizzically at the maze framed on the wall. “What is this supposed to be, room décor?”
“Probably some kind of puzzle,” Jaeil says. “For later. Y’know. After you’ve freed your dear old friend.”
Sayeon taps her chin thoughtfully. “Weeeell, I dunno, maybe he deserved it. What was the storyline we were given, again? You got locked up after some grand heist… gosh, maybe it’s for the best if you stay here! Society will be better off.”
“Noooo,” Jaeil gasps dramatically. “Sayeon, it’s too late to be talking like that. You’re an accomplice, you can’t just leave me to rot here! Besides, who will help you solve any, uh, poker-themed puzzles?”
She snorts. That sounds so dumb. “There’s not going to be any poker-themed puzzles.”
“Who’s the escape room expert here?” Jaeil rolls his eyes. “Also, can you check the toilet? I think the water tank lid looks loose.”
“Oh, are there hidden components to this?” she asks, walking over obediently to check the tank. “We’ll have to check the room more thoroughly for clues then.”
There’s… no water inside. There is a thin bar of soap, as well as a balled up pair of socks.
She holds the soap up to the light. “Huh. Will you look at that. How convenient.”
This feels less like a puzzle and more like a treasure hunt, but given time and economic constraints to run a place like this, she supposes beggars can’t be choosers. She tosses the soap in Jaeil’s direction.
He yelps. “Hey! I don’t have hands! What’s in it?”
“Some sort of key,” she says. “Hopefully yours. I assume you have more strength to break that open than me.”
Jaeil perks right up. “Oh! Never mind. I knew you kept me around for my rippling muscles.”
Sayeon snorts as she unravels the socks. They’re very long, but nothing else of note. Nothing hidden inside, either. It doesn’t seem like they’ll be of immediate use, so she sets them by the maze painting for now and goes to look for more clues.
A loud clank from behind her lets her know that Jaeil has indeed managed to free himself, but she’s too busy checking the underside of the small bed to look back. Her fingers brush against a metal box.
“Huh,” Jaeil says, as she pulls an oddly long briefcase out from the depths. “Well, will you look at that! I told you I’d come in handy after all.”
She tilts her head, puzzled. “What, you know what this is?”
He just laughs as he flips the latches, opening the case to reveal a neatly arranged set of—
“Oh,” Sayeon mutters. “Of course. Poker chips.”
It takes them twenty minutes to get out of their cell (use the amount of missing chips to determine a password for the combination lock. Use the hint inside to decode the newspaper clipping and press the loose bricks on the wall in the right order to reveal another pair of socks, this one with a weighted ball inside. Tie the socks together and throw them out the cell to get the cart in the hallway and unlock the cell. Easy, if a little baffling in process).
It takes them another twenty to finally finish the maze puzzle.
The thing is, the problem with the maze puzzle isn’t that it’s complicated. Once they’re out of their own cell, they find a locked door and a neighboring cell with a large frame on the wall, this one with a metal ball in it. They can’t see the maze at all from this side, so Sayeon figures out pretty quickly that they’ll need one person to navigate and one person to actually get the ball to the other side.
The real problem is this: Jaeil doesn’t quite know his left from his right.
“Okay, and then go up here, keep going, keep going, and then left—”
The ball hits something with a clatter, and falls back down. For the fifth time now, it starts rolling back towards the beginning along some invisible track Sayeon can’t see.
“Uh. Your other left.”
Sayeon sighs. “Jaeil… do me a favor.”
“Yes?”
“Raise your index finger and your thumb. Both hands.”
“Okay…?”
“You have them up?”
“Yeah?”
“Okay. Which one is making an L? That’s your left hand.”
Silence. Then: “So, uh… I’m gonna be real with you class prez, I don’t actually know which way an L goes either. What was that noise?”
The glass squeaks as Sayeon’s face slides down it.
“Nothing,” she lies.
God help her.
Five minutes left on the clock finds them in some sort of boiler-themed room. Jaeil’s messing with the water valves, which Sayeon assigned him to less because she thinks he’ll actually be able to solve the puzzle, and more because there’s few enough possible combinations that there’s a chance he might blindly stumble upon the answer. She’ll take whatever they can get this late in the game.
For her part, she’s trying to figure out what on earth the fuse box of brightly colored buttons is supposed to mean. There’s some kind of diagram drawn on it, but it may as well have been drawn by Jaeil for all the sense she can make of it. In the corner there’s some sort of gear puzzle that they spent all of two minutes fiddling with before agreeing to return to later.
Three minutes on the clock. Sayeon’s figured out that there’s a second fuse box, making this another pair puzzle and also a lost cause. Jaeil is inventing new swears because he’s accidentally rotated one of the valves clean off its piston.
Two minutes. Sayeon’s back to messing with the gears. Something clicks on one of the walls. Did Jaeil say this was supposed to be stress relief? She’s so fucking stressed right now.
One minute. The employee over the loudspeaker is telling Jaeil to leave the valves alone. Sayeon’s feeling for whatever new clue dropped when—
A small buzzer sounds. The exit door slides open.
“Sorry,” the girl from earlier says, looking appropriately apologetic. “You two failed to escape.”
“Maaaaan,” Jaeil sighs, dropping the two valve pieces he’s somehow managed to remove. “And here I thought I’d finally be able to break my losing streak.”
“I haven’t failed that badly at something since I took up running with you,” Sayeon murmurs to Jaeil later, in the lobby, as they collect their things from the lockers.
“Really?” Jaeil asks. “Why am I asking, of course you haven’t. But did you have fun?”
She looks away. “I-I guess.”
This is less because of the escape room itself, and more because of Jaeil’s presence. But he doesn’t need to know that. His ego’s big enough as it is.
“Great! Then mission accomplished,” Jaeil grins. “Not everything has to be won, y’know? ‘Sides, just between the two of us, that’s the furthest I’ve ever gotten in that particular room. Even though I usually come with more people.”
Sayeon can’t help but huff a laugh out at that. “You’ve done this before? And you’re still this bad at it?”
“Hey, now…”
“You know, maybe you really should apply yourself to your studies more. That water pressure one? If you’d known your sevens’ times tables, you’d have been able to solve it on your own.”
Jaeil groans. “Please don’t talk about math with me right now.”
She elbows him playfully. “Walk me home, and I’ll consider it.”
“Deal.”
And it’s a long way home for Sayeon from here, and it’s late enough that the night is cold and the residential blocks have started going dark—but Jaeil’s company is more than plenty to keep her warm the whole way back.