Private Finished Puzzling Problems

Keen

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God dammit.

Nebula had been teleported from her dorm room. Right in the middle of a game. She was lucky that this happened during a solo player game. The worst thing that would happen is that the timer tracking how long it takes her to play a game won't be accurate, but has it ever?

Okay, who was she helping this time? She looked to be in someone's bedroom. A boy's bedroom, judging by the only person here. And he was playing with a puzzle? This should be easy.

Giving the boy advice took a little longer than Nebula expected, but in the end, she was impressed by his persistence. He looked to be human too, and humans had to sleep at night. He must have really liked this puzzle if he was working so hard at it tonight.

Watching him continue at it after taking her advice, it looked like Nebula's assistance wasn't required any longer. Despite that, she didn't leave. No, she was sort of curious. Not too much about the boy. There were dozens of determined teenagers she could find around here. It was more that she was curious about what would happen if she suddenly appeared in front of someone here. She had been warned that it would be her fault if she got reported, but the idea was too fun to ignore. It'd be her first time revealing herself, and there was no Veil to worry about.

So in her smallest, two-foot-one form, her body appeared from nowhere. It was as if the air above the almost-finished puzzle became pixelated and turned into her.

"Hello! I'm Nebula Sprite, the pixie that helped you with that puzzling problem you had!"


 

Mint

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After spending the entire day going back and forth between research and training, Alby was tired. After pushing himself a little too hard at bending the spoon on his desk, he didn't feel he had the energy to do anything. Plus it was late. So he decided to boot up his laptop and play a video game for a change. He didn't have many, mostly just a few puzzle games. He finally settled on one with a a bunch of weird structures that you'd lead a character through to find a door.

It was all well and good until about the sixth level. He just couldn't figure it out and had tried everything he could think of. But quitting wasn't really something he did, so he just kept at it. He repeated things, ran into walls in hopes of some secret revealing itself and even started writing a few notes down on a stray sheet of paper. But nothing.

Until, he got a sudden thought to try going back out to the beginning of the level which he hadn't explored in a while. Sure enough, there was a new path right there. He'd been pulling levers that changed the structure around and without even knowing it he'd unlocked a new path forever ago. He felt pretty silly about this, but also content that he'd solved the part he was stuck on.

Then, completely out of nowhere, a self proclaimed pixie randomly appeared before him. He stared, wide eyed for just a moment as the situation slowly processed in his brain, until... "Aaaaa!" He wasn't scared, the screaming was purely out of excitement. "Oh my goodness!" His eyes examined her from head to toe. "I've never seen a pixie before, this is so cool!" He stumbled over to his bed and grabbed a white journal that was sitting on top, then opened it and walked back, grabbing the pencil from his desk that he was writing notes with earlier. "You say you helped me with a problem, are you talking about my game?" He seemed to totally ignore the fact that this person had entered his room without permission, it wasn't important to him right now. "Do you have some kind of mind control powers?" His eyes held a childish curiosity that made him look like he was containing an explosion.
 

Keen

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Wow. If all humans responded this way to a pixie, hiding would feel a lot less rewarding. Nebula had fully expected the human to be terrified. No, maybe not fully. If she did, then she wouldn't have shown herself. She didn't like scaring people. She definitely didn't like being reported for breaking and entering either.

Nebula refused to admit to herself that she did this for simple, stupid curiosity's sake.

"I sure did help you with your puzzle. I'm a pixie who helps people with gaming. What I did wasn't really mind control. Basically, I whisper advice in your ear that you think is yours, then leave you to choose if you'll take it and hope you use it well. And you did! I saw how hard you worked and I was like 'Damn, this guy's cool, and I could use a chat,' and here we are. By the way, you okay? You look like you're about to pop."
 

Mint

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Alby scribbled down notes as the pixie spoke, listening very intently to every word. "That's incredible!" He wondered if all pixies were like that and how many fields they must work in. How many actions did he take in a day that were influenced by pixies? It was fascinating just thinking about it. Being referred to as a cool guy was also flattering, it felt good.

He was torn from his thoughts when the pixie asked him a question before he could. "Huh?" He smiled, and let out a small giggle. "Don't worry, I'm just excited." It wasn't everyday a pixie randomly appeared in your room."I'll try to dial it back, it's just..." He bit his lip for a moment. "I have so many questions, this is so so cool!" Dialing it back was easier said than done for him.

"I'm Alby, it's nice to meet you Nebula." That curiosity never left his eyes. It was taking everything he had not to unleash one hundred questions on the small pixie, but he was showing an impressive amount of restraint.
 

Keen

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Nebula fluttered onto Alby's shoulder to take a peek at his journal. He was writing in it so fervently. What did he have to say about Nebula? Perhaps he was smitten?

"Good! I can't have you dying on me yet. How do you think the school would react?" she said, pretending to be absolutely serious.

"And it's nice to meet you too! So, what questions do you have for little ol' me? This must be a teenage boy's best dream, huh? Having a hot magical girl show up in your bedroom doesn't happen to just anybody. Count yourself lucky, Alby."
 

Mint

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The notes in his book were nothing that would surprise Nebula. Just the facts he'd gathered from what she'd said so far, all written under the title, Pixie with the sub heading, Nebula Sprite.

"You are really pretty, your robotic look is especially neat, are you a cyborg of some sort?" They seemed to be open to questions, which was amazing news for Alby. He didn't like making people feel uncomfortable by asking too much, it was comforting when they were open to it. "And how often do pixies show up to help people? Do they only do it for games or are there pixies that do this for other parts of everyday life?" He had a lot of things he wanted to know all at once, but tried to pace himself. Even if they were down to hear his questions, he didn't want to ask too many and overwhelm them.
 

Keen

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Nebula paused for a second. She had fully expected to throw this boy off his guard. He didn't look like anything special. Not the type to have girls (or boys) swooning over him. She thought he'd love this sort of attention from a girl. Instead, he went on to give her a straightforward compliment, then question her.

"O-Oh, haha, thank yooou. I'm actually a robot. Built by someone from the robotics sect of my court. Which leads into the answer to your next question. I'm from a court of pixies whose main purpose is to help humans urbanize and industrialize. There are different sects for different pixies, and we all give advice to humans about our specialty. I'm from the gaming sect." Nebula then pointed at Alby's journal. Specifically, at the heading. You should note that not all pixies are like this. I'm a faerie, and there are plenty of sub-categories of us. A lot of us have courts we come from "
 

Mint

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Nebula was a robot? That fact alone sparked many more questions inside Alby's head. "Oh wow!" He got busy taking notes of all the information that was given to him. He was surprised at how different pixies were from how he pictured them. Or at least how different this pixie was. He didn't know enough about them right now to determine just how broad the term pixie went.

"Interesting." He wrote down two simple notes, robot and faerie under Nebula's sub heading. Then flipped several pages before adding a new heading, robots, and jotting down Nebula's name and the page number of his previous notes. He then repeated the process for faeries before returning to the earlier page.

"What are these courts like? If your's focuses on industrialization then is it fairly young? Oh! And where are they located?" He had so many questions to ask that it was a challenge deciding which answers he wanted to hear first. He figured he'd first ask to learn more about the courts. "What other courts are there?"
 

Keen

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Nebula was immensely impressed by how organized this boy was. She was already doing something similar, by having notes stored in her files about important information she learned. Alby was another human that would fit very well in her court.

"My court is called the Perpetual Motion Machine. We're not young at all. We adapt as humans grow. We help humans grow and that helps us grow. It's a cycle. Think about agriculture. Some of us gave humans tips on producing more crops so they could focus on other jobs. We're located in... I don't know. We all get back in different ways. I leave and enter through technology."

Now, other courts, that was a problem Nebula had trouble with. She didn't do much research on other faerie courts. It wasn't part of her job to deal with them. "Mmm... I've never been to another court. I heard someone from the Daunus Court is here. The child of the Monarch? But that court's basically dead. There's also... uhh, the Midknight court! They're a Seelie court and their main focus is protection. A lot of them are familiars to witches. I think you'd learn a lot more from the library or a teacher who teaches fae lore."
 

Mint

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The Perpetual Motion Machine. Sounded cool, he would've liked to have seen it, but seeing as how one would need to travel through technology, he figured that wouldn't be happening any time soon. He also found it interesting that they'd been around for quite some time, supposedly pulling strings from behind the scenes. Alby jotted down the name of the court and the little tidbit about traveling through technology. And then only listened to the part about other courts. It was cool to know there were others, and she was right about the teachers, they'd be a great source to get reliable information. The library was good too, he'd have to check that out sometime.

"Great ideas! I'll have to try those out later" He smiled, doing a much better job of staying calm than initially. "Okay, so you're a robot, but your behavior seems totally human, how's that work? Are you some kind of hyper advanced AI?" This really left him to question just how advanced technology really was. Up until this point he figured that the island was at the same level as the rest of the world, but it seemed that wasn't the case.
 
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