I looked up from the list. "Uberbob, could you weigh yourself without the giant hunk of metal?"
Uberbob, who was sitting on top of his new trophy, looked baffled. "I don't see why..."
"It's throwing off the measurements. We need to tell what you actually weigh."
"None of you took your clothes off. Faw even has a backpack. Those would've thrown it off too."
"Uberbob," I began, trying to rub a headache out of my head before it could root, "you are dragging a three hundred pound chunk of steel around with you."
"And you have pants. What's the difference?"
The headache won. I decided to try a new approach, hoping that if I lost him he would believe I was right. "Okay, let's use physics. Let's say the average clothing weighs C. Fawriel's, though, weighs 2C because he has a backpack and Araches' weighs 1/2C because she dresses like a sl-" I caught a glare from Araches, "-orceress. Now we need to find out what C is. Faw, weigh the backpack."
"Shuri, that math doesn't make any..." he caught on, "... problems in my mind!" He threw the backpack onto the scale. "3 'lbs'."
"Good. Now, from that we know that all of us weigh three pounds less than our measured weight, except Faw, Araches and the canoe. However, we don't know how many C the metal weighs, weigh yourself without the metal."
Uberbob started to take off his shirt.
"What are you doing?"
"Saving you some math work!"
Winners can't be choosers and I didn't feel like fighting this much further. "Okay, anyone that really doesn't want to see this look away."
So, after that ordeal (resulting in the number 130, and, after which Uberbob decided that carrying a 300 pound piece of metal slowed him down too much and left it), we took off back into the cold, back down the pipe, turned the wheel, and went down the newly warmed pipe to our left. After a short walk we reached another split. The left pipe went into the wall of a cave, on which there was also a large metal door. The right pipe (the heated of the two) went further into the red mists.
Last edited by Radium; Nov 28, 2006 at 01:38 PM.
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