Bruce meets Zoombinis
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They can be fluffy-haired in the second tree together!

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"All right. We have rooms for fluffy and ponytail hair; we need rooms for the other three hairstyles. Awoowoo, you try the next room. Fluffy-haired Zoombinis, line up with me." They trundle to the ground below Cafly's room. "Ponytails, Nawy's room. Impu, you take the room after Awoowoo if Awoowoo gets in, and Caure, the room after that, and everybody line up accordingly."

Zoombinis hop and bop and roll and flutter into nice orderly lines. Speeba waits to find out if the three new rooms will accept their prospective occupants before they try asking anybody else to enter one.

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This works great and nobody gets dumped on the ground!

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(Bruce has gotten his shit together and hopes nobody noticed his facial expressions or anything. Doesn't look like it. And everything appears to be going fine.)

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Bruce's facial expressions are very high off the ground and not anybody's priority to scrutinize right now, though Speeba does turn back toward him to call out, "Watch the doors and yell if anybody falls, okay? You've got the best vantage."

Then they scoot to the side of their own line and say, "All right, nice and tidy, one at a time, wait for the person in front of you to finish before you start climbing: everybody into your assigned room!"

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"Okay!"

Nobody ends up falling, though, despite the balconies having no railings even when they aren't being adversarial.

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Shortly after everyone is inside, the woman with the fluffy tail swings down to a low branch holding a hammock, fastens one end of it, swings on it Tarzan-style to another branch and fastens the other end.

"Excellent! A place for everyone and everyone in a place! Dream a little dream!" 

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Bruce divvies up everyone's stuff into their rooms after them,

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and then it's his turn to get dumped on the ground due to one of his features (clumsiness). He gets into the hammock on the second attempt though.

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Speeba pokes their snoot out of their room at the noise. "Everything all right?"

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"Everything's fine, I just f--messed up. Goodnight!" 

Time to sleep the sleep of the honorably exhausted. If this keeps up Bruce is going to be in the best shape of his life soon, infinite free pizza machines or no. Zzzzzzzz.

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"Goodnight!"

It's definitely a better night's sleep than any of the Zoombinis expected this forest to provide.

They wake up bright and early in the morning, make breakfast, and prepare to set off in search of adventure probably more puzzles.

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The underbrush starts to chill out a bit; that and strange unearthly birdcalls in the trees overhead are the main source of adventure until after lunch. Then the deer-trail they're following comes to a deep muddy creek flowing out from under a massive grey wall with a grid etched on it. Various boxes of the grid contain one, two, or three dots, with seventeen dots altogether. Straddling the creek is a set of three seesaws with "stand on this end" written on one end of each, and a strange assemblage consisting of a tank of semi-dehydrated river mud, a plinth onto which a spherical glob of the mud has been piped, and a control panel with a lot of buttons.

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...

What.

Speeba squints at the control panel. How impenetrable are the functions of these buttons, on a scale from Pizza Machine to Five Identical Doors?

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The buttons are Square, Triangle, Star, Oval, Rhombus, Orange, Red, Green, Blue, and Magenta. There's also a  row of five nozzles with the appropriate colors and a row of five swinging arm thingies with the appropriate shapes all pointing at the mudball like the crowd of microphones around someone giving a press conference.

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Pray tell, do these shapes or colours appear anywhere on the target grid?

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Nope! There is however a lever on the other side of the console, positioned so someone standing on the "stand on this end" could pull it.

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"I'm very tempted to push the buttons but my intuitions for how dangerous unfamiliar machines are were calibrated somewhere very different." He keeps his hands in his pockets.

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"All right," says Speeba. "Volunteers?"

Raclie flutters up to the machine.

"Try pressing the first shape button and then the first colour button and then pulling the lever," Speeba directs. "I apologize in advance if you end up flung into the woods."

"Gotta solve the puzzle somehow," says Raclie, following instructions.

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The mudball gets stamped with a square, then sprayed with orange dye that diffuses through it impressively quickly. The seesaw end descends gently when stepped on. The lever starts moving when pulled, then gets hung up as though some kind of internal safety is still engaged.

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"Maybe there needs to be people standing on all three things. Also, how weird should I be finding it that the label is in Islish?"

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Speeba calls for two more volunteers, and Impu joins their sibling on the row of platforms, followed by Plora.

"I suppose that's a little odd, but everyone we've met on this venture has spoken Islish too," muses Speeba. "Even you, for some reason."

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"I guess it isn't any additional weirdness on top of someone building this thing and leaving it here."

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"Well, it's the fabled Lands of Logic, what can you expect," Speeba says philosophically. "All right, Raclie, try the lever again."

Raclie tries the lever again.

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The lever works, and the machine fires the mudball at the wall, where it splats in a big orange splat right in the middle of one of the grid boxes: bottom row second column from the left, not one of the rectangles with dots in it. It holds together surprisingly well post-splat; you can still make out the square stamp if you know what you're looking for.

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