three: i'm sure izzy wouldn't mind

Matt and Samantha team up with Tanner and Conner to help crack the gobbledygook they found within the lock making kit.

     “QR codes?” Samantha questioned.

     “What the hell is this now?.” Matt caressed his beard as he examined the collection of five codes on cut out pieces. Four were next to one another, and the other in the upper right. The silence hung for a while. “Let’s scan it, I guess.” Matt’s brow bobbed.

     “I was just about to say, should we scan it? So yeah, I’m game.” Samantha’s body hopped in the chair, letting Matt know she drank her coffee too fast.

     With phone in hand, Matt scanned the barcode on the far upper right and waited for it to generate a response. The screen flooded with an unlikely result. A total of twenty sets of ones and zeros were populated.

     “Gobbledygook.” Matt uttered, one of his favorite terms since becoming a dad.

     “That’s bizarre.”

     “Yeah, let’s try a different one.” Matt scanned another code, which rendered a similar result.

     “I don’t get it,” Samantha admitted.

     “Me neither. But Kevin’s gonna need this room in less than ten, so let’s go find Tanner and Conner, maybe see if they have any thoughts before we start the day.”

     Together they began another trek to orange base, where Conner and Tanner were wasting time at the kitchen counter, chatting about some games over a few breakfast bars. Their day wouldn’t start for another thirty minutes, giving enough time to pick their brains about the kit.

     Matt lifted the tray of pieces again. “Those are QR codes,” Tanner stated while tossing a piece of food into his mouth. He looked like he had just rolled out of bed, but once it was time for official work to take place he pulled together really well.

     “Yeah, I know. But they don’t really do anything when you scan them.” Matt confessed.

     “Really? No website or URL pops up?” Conner shook his husky build, bringing his shoulders up to his ears. His hair was always put together, not that you could notice it past the striking sheen of his eyes.

     “Yeah, it’s just gobbledygook.” The term flowed out effortlessly again. “It’s just ones and zeroes.” Matt pulled out his phone to demonstrate for the two of them. The screen showed the sets of numbers again.

     “Have you tried a binary decoder?” Conner asked while playing with a cereal dispenser. The team ignored his actions, accepting his inability to not be destructive.

     “Yeah binary is what comes to mind for me as well.” Tanner wrapped his arm over his shoulder to reach an itch, choosing to ignore the rattle of cereal pieces hitting the floor near his feet.

     “Oh,” Matt’s mouth made a matching shape. “I didn’t even think of that.” Of course he hadn’t, he was too focused on his short desk.

     The four of them moved to a less common area and rescanned the first code. Matt copied the sets of ones and zeroes and pasted into a binary decoder and pressed ‘convert’.

     “T Left? That doesn’t make any sense,” Matt blurted out with a shrug. He looked around and no one else offered understanding. “Okay, someone write that down.”

     He scanned the next code. “Eft Left Lef,” he read off. Conner typed it in. “Wait, I think these are out of order.”

     “Yeah maybe that’s meant to go before the first one,” Tanner suggested while popping a sour gummy worm in his mouth. He was always eating.

     “P Right Up Up Right… Left Right L… Straight Left Left U…” Conner took to a gridded whiteboard and started to try and connect the fragmented directions together.

     After a few quick corrections, a plausible order was found. “Straight, Left, Left, Up, Right, Up, Up, Right, Left, Right, Left, Left, Left, Left.”

     “Is that some kind of cheat code?” Conner laughed after reading it out.

     “And where did you find this?” Tanner asked.

     “So, Woods found the kit in a desk in red base.”

     “So maybe it leads to something in red base!” Samantha’s epiphany came off loud. The rest of the group didn’t seem as excited though. All but Samantha was present during the last incident that led to the TS5 key, so no one else showed stimulation from the idea. In fact, they didn’t even bother to try and loop Paul into the QR codes, knowing well and good that he’d pack up and quit before going on another wild goose chase. But she was right, it just made sense with how all things involving keys went. They had to follow the direction, just needed to know where to start.

     They collectively decided to start at the front door of red base, taking each direction as a decision to be made at each fork in the way. The idea fell short fast though, leading them into a wall. They then decided to try from the warehouse entrance, but alas it led to nowhere as well.

     “Hannah,” Matt called for a passing girl’s attention, but she nodded and continued. “Hannah, Hannah, Hannah.” He continued until she stopped and veered her attention away from her phone.

     “What’s up?” she asked, with a raised brow.

     “Were you with Woods when he found that desk? The one the old tenant left behind?”

     “Yeah, why?”

     “Do you know where the desk was originally at?”

     “Yeah, it was right next to the stairs, right over here.” She led the group to the stairs in the warehouse where a newly vacant spot was.

     “Okay, thanks. So let’s try from this point,” he announced to the group.

     They followed the directions, and quickly realized that it was on the right path, as the ‘ups’ lined up perfectly with sets of stairs. They continued to follow the path until they were in a room so new to them, that the floor was concrete and had glue streaks from the carpet that had been pulled up recently.

     They took the final three lefts within the room and found themselves facing a wall. It was only about three feet long, and a doubt brewed within the group that it was the right place, but the directions lined up almost too perfectly for them to believe it wasn’t the correct spot.

     “Wait, wait, wait… do y’all hear that?” Matt hushed the room while tapping the wall, listening for any differences. Thud. Thud. Thud. Clink. Thud. Thud. Clink. Clink. The bottom of his fist strategically hit the wall, locating a point that wasn’t a hollow as others. Clink. Clink. Thud. Clink. It didn’t sound like a beam though, and didn’t run straight down the wall. The clinking sound was allocated to one area.

     “There is definitely something in there,” Tanner noted while sucking the air out of a fruit punch pouch.

     “So, Matt, can we go in the walls?” Samantha asked. She moved closer to the wall to hear better, as if it weren’t obvious from a distance that the banging sound was much different in this one particular area.

     “Well this technically is a renovation area, so why not?”

     “Yeah I’m sure Izzy wouldn’t mind,” Conner concurred, implementing that Izzy had nothing better to do than fix random holes in the wall.

     “Dude, I’m sure you’d love to tear into the wall, but is it worth it?” Tanner patted Conner’s chest, but it seemed like his mind was already set.

     “I’m not gonna stop you, if you wanna take a knife or something…”

     BANG!

     The empty room echoed. Everyone watched in disbelief as Conner reverbed off of the wall after using his shoulder to plow a square shaped dent into the drywall.

     “Dude!” Matt’s jaw dropped.

     “Are you kidding me?! That’s a perfect square!” Tanner pressed his palms against the punched in wall.

     “HA! I told you guys I played hockey at two AM some days!” Conner clapped for himself before letting out a big “WOO!”

     Matt stepped in to get a closer look, realizing that the drywall had at some point been cut in that exact location. He pressed firmly on the square and a rattling sound ensued. He turned with bulging eyes to the rest of the group. “There is something back there.”

Author's Note

**Brief disclaimer** This is a re-imagining of a preexisting story that contains real persons. For the sake of receiving entertainment from a new source, the story being presented is NOT 100% cannon with what is seen in the collection of videos provided by the Matthias YouTube channel. This written story is rather an alternate universe and should be treated as fiction. Please view the complete disclaimer in the chapter selection of the book here:
https://www.writerscafe.org/writing/dominicrosales/2767991/