Free Cragbridge Hall, Volume 2: The Avatar Battle by Chad Morris

determined.
    This time, it took the young man longer to answer. He breathed in heavily before responding, “Wisdom, great Socrates.”
    Again Socrates plunged the young man under the water. This time, he held him longer. Finally, he pulled the young man back up from the sea. “What do you want?” he asked again.
    The young man sputtered, gulping in air as deep and as fast as he could. “Air! I want air!”
    “If I were him,” Carol said. “I would say ‘air’ and ‘to punch you in the face.’”
    Both Abby and Derick suppressed their laughter.
    Socrates pulled the young man back up onto the shore. He crouched down and looked at him closely. “When you want knowledge and understanding as badly as you wanted air, you won’t have to ask anyone to give it to you.”
    The image faded out. Derick had to think about that for a minute: if the young man wanted knowledge, he could find it. He didn’t have to ask someone else for it—he just had to really want it. In fact, if he wanted it badly enough, that might be the best way to learn.
    Abby looked down at the black box. “So what now? I really want to know the answer, but all we have is a keypad.”
    “We obviously have to type in some sort of password,” Carol said. “I think with your grandpa, it would have something to do with what we just saw.” Carol pointed where the image of Socrates had been moments before. “Maybe type in Socrates.”
    Abby started to type in S-O- . . . “Um, there’s no C on this keypad.”
    Dead end.
    “There are tons of words we could type in. There has to be more of a clue.” Abby looked down at the keypad. “The letters are all out of order. I mean, they’re not in alphabetical order or the order they’re in on our rings’ virtual keyboard. And there are numbers in there too. Let’s see . . . there are . . . twenty characters . . . four are numbers, so only sixteen letters we can pick from.”
    “Wait.” Derick raised his hands. “The last thing Grandpa said in his message was a question: ‘How badly do you want to know?’”
    Derick thought for a moment as he looked down at the keypad. How badly did they want to know? He stared at the random assortment of letters, letting his mind rearrange them, trying to make sense of them. In a flash, he had an idea. He looked closely, searching the keypad for an A and then an I. There. And an R. Yep. He let his eyes backtrack to see if the letters before a-i-r were there. He moved the remaining letters around in his mind. Yep. They were all there. “Look,” Derick said. He began to punch in the letters:
    a s b a d l y a s y o u w a n t e d a i r
    “That’s what Socrates said,” Abby said, then felt weird for having said something so obvious aloud.
    The panel slid to the side, opening the compartment in the black box. Grandpa appeared again, blocking Derick’s view of what was inside. “Very good,” he said. “It is an interesting story, isn’t it? If we are determined enough, we can always learn. I believe this is what Socrates was trying to teach. It wasn’t that he was unwilling to teach the young man, but that he wanted his pupil to be an active learner, not one who expects others to simply give them answers. Though I am happy to help you find your answers, the question is, really, How determined are you? I require determination. Do you want the answers as badly as you want air?”
    Derick looked over at Abby, who raised her thumb. Carol smiled big. He wasn’t sure if that was because she wanted to know or if she was flirting again.
    Grandpa continued, “Learning to think in new ways, to ponder consequences, and to contemplate possibilities is a noble endeavor. Learning to learn is worth the journey.” The image of Grandpa disappeared. Inside the compartment were three small white spheres, each about the size of a grape.
    “So, cool little marbles are going to help us figure out how your grandpa knows where in time Muns has attacked,” Carol said.