Lunar talisman (solution) 29/5/97
Meithran walked in Honest Kolli's. The shop hadn't changed much in all the years he had been living in Pavis. A dusty, stuffed alligator hung from the ceiling, staring glassily at a painting that someone had liberated from the pavis art gallery. At the back of the sop was a high wooden counter. Behind it, on the wall, were row after row of small drawers, containing, no doubts, thousands of silvers worth of small artifacts taken from the Rubble.
Honest Kolli himself was working behind the counter, squinting through a small loupe at some jewellery. He wasn't as spry as he once was, and often left the management of his shop to his daughter while he dabbled in city politics.
Meithran dropped a silver talisman on the counter. On one side was engraved the number 128, surrounded by seven small rubies. On the other side, the medallion was divided into quarters, and in the four parts were the numbers 7, 21, 2 and 98.
"What do you think of this, Kolli? I took it off a troll."
Kolli squinted up at the tall elf: "You'll have to do better than that, squire, what would a troll be doing with silver jewellery?"
He turned the medallion over in his hand.
"It's a mystic Lunar medallion. As you can see, the sum of these four numbers is 128. But what is the meaning of the four parts into which the number 128 has been divided?"
Meithran said:"I don't care. If it's a Lunar medallion, then solving the riddle would probably turn me into a chaos lover. Anyway, I need 500L to pay off Grast the loan shark from when I borrowed money to get my armour fixed after I splatted a gorp."
Kolli said: "Done. I have a buyer in mind already. He's a bureaucrat with the Imperial Government. He wouldn't know a mystic puzzle if it propositioned him at Gimpy's, but he'll show it off and pretend to be religious."
And so the solution to the puzzle remained a mystery.
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