The classroom is dark and empty – except for the light of the smart TV and the silhouette between it and you.
"Inez?" you venture, uncertain.
The shape beckons you closer. "It's funny," comes Inez's voice. "This isn't where I thought I'd find you."
"Where are we?" you ask, stepping forward. Within her silhouette, Inez's features melt out of the gloom. She looks much younger now – probably just in her early twenties. She's wearing high heels, a blazer, and a matching skirt.
"I taught here for a year while I worked on my Masters degree."
"Degree in what?"
Inez doesn't answer right away. You can see her eyes clearly now, but you can't interpret her expression.
"You have no idea who I am, do you?"
You shake your head. "In my timeline, we never end up together. I'm not sure we ever even met."
Inez's eyes start darting in every direction, touching upon every single point in the room around you – all except your face. You can all but hear the gears clicking in her brain. You wait, not knowing what to say.
"The good news," she announces at last, "is that you still have my path to follow. Stick to it and everything will end up the way it supposed to be."
"The way things were?" you ask.
"The way it's supposed to be," she repeats.
You both stand silent for several seconds. Neither of you seems happy with the direction the conversation has gone.
Suddenly Inez comes to life again, fixing you with that familiar, mischievous smile. "All right students – are you ready for class to begin?”
“Not really, no.”
She laughs, and then starts lecturing anyway. “Puzzles are more than just simple games. They’re all about pattern recognition." She touches the smart screen and the maze you just solved appears. "When you first see a maze, it looks like a plate of spaghetti. But the interplay between open pathways punctuated by the dead ends creates a pattern" – she touches the screen again and a green line starts zig-zagging its way through the maze – "giving you enough information to discern a path through all the chaos. When you look at it this way, each puzzle is a form of communication, with a maze being the simplest: its alphabet consists of just two letters: Stop and Go."
She turns to grin back at you now, and you return it with a blank stare.
She continues, undaunted. "You wouldn't think a two-letter alphabet could do much more, but watch this." She touches the screen a third time to reveal a grid with some numbers and letters along two sides:
"This," she tells you, "is called a nonogram." She's standing half turned away from you now, staring up at the screen almost reverently. In the artificial light, her skin glows a phosphorescent blue. "The best a maze can do with Stop and Go is lead you forward. But in a nonogram…." She points to Row D. "This '5' here is the maze with no dead ends —all Go, and so…." She slides her finger across the row and the squares all turn blue:
"And the '0' in Row A is all Stop." She taps each square in the row twice, creating a line of X's:
"In Row C, we need to pick two pairs of squares with a space in the middle. There's only one way that that's possible:
"But see how filling in Rows C and D also tells us how to fill in Columns a and e?
"We're still using the same binary alphabet as the maze. But the Stop and Go in each column constrains the Stop and Go in each row, and vice versa. That tension between the vertical and the horizontal doesn't just lead us down a one-dimensional pathway. It can draw two-dimensional images." Her fingers glide across the screen like she's strumming a harp, completing the puzzle:
She turns back to you at last. She reaches into her blazer pocket to come up with another one of her envelopes, her face beaming. "Here. You try."
Without waiting for an answer, she disappears again, leaving the envelope to flutter its way to the floor like an autumn leaf.
You sigh, frowning back and forth between the TV screen and the envelope. But if Inez is telling the truth – if playing her little games is the only way to keep moving forward – then you don't really have much choice.
Same as before, the envelope contains only a single sheet of paper – this one with a nonogram grid on it:
Once you figure out what the nonogram is instructing you to draw, find its name on the Solution Page. Or you can: