“There’s a lot of tiles,” Matt answered Kylie. He looked around for any flat surface large enough to sort the tiles on, his eyes finding nothing until they landed on the wide wooden porch of the house. “Let’s do it over here.”

The group made their way to the porch, then they sat around the pile of dumped-out tiles in a circle. “Where do we even begin?” Matt said, looking hopelessly to the scattered pile of letters, hamster prints, and snake prints. “This looks really complicated.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Kylie murmured, already going to work by sorting the tiles into separate piles according to letter and print pattern. “There has to be a way to figure this out or the Game Master wouldn’t have given it to us.”

“That’s true,” Becca said. “It’s almost like the Game Master wants us to beat their game, they just don’t want to make it easy. We can do this if we put our heads together.”

“So obviously the tiles are going to end up spelling out a message,” Miguel noted. “But the question is how to figure out what order to arrange them in? There must be a pattern.”

“Exactly,” Kylie said. Her eyes darted back and forth between the separated piles. “If there’s an order, I’d imagine it has something to do with the animal prints. One of them, either the hamster print or snake print, must be an indication of the start of each word. But which one would be more likely to come first?”

“The hamster prints,” Frankie said, nodding. “It has to be, because Elephant was stolen first!”

“The word hamster also comes before the word snake, alphabetically speaking,” Kylie agreed, nodding as she leaned forward to scoop away all the hamster-print tiles. “I’d say that’s as solid of a start as any.”

Kylie lined up all the hamster-print tiles in a row, flipping them over to reveal the letters they held. “If our theory is correct, these tiles are going to start every word in the message,” she said. “That would mean there are fifteen words total.”

“Nice,” Matt said, looking over his shoulder to the empty window behind them. “This is moving along already.”

In the distance, the wind blew through the trees, making it sound like the forest was full of whispers. The sooner they could beat the game and get out of here, the better.

“Now we need to use the snake-print tiles to try to create words on them,” Kylie continued. “After we’ve made fifteen words using every spare tile, we’ll be able to try to rearrange them into any sort of message that makes sense or reads like a clue.”