The Challenge

Chapter Nineteen

The sun is melting the flesh right off her bones and the suffocating heat is frying her brains which is only causing her stomach to become nauseous. She's dizzy and overtired and now TJ wants her to recall the events from the night before and put together a puzzle?

He's insane is what he is.

Yet, there she is, swearing profusely as the host blows his horn and begins the race. Killian dumps out all the pieces while she begins flipping the boards over. Her limbs feel heavy and everything around her is fuzzy and she swears she's in some sort of dreamland but she needs to push all those feelings aside and end this so she can sleep.

All the boards have a question on them pertaining to each event from the night before. So she decides the best way to even begin, is to place the questions in order of when they first appeared. She scans the questions and finds the one that has to do with the man on the ladder. She finds the question asking what was the name of the radio station on the back of his shirt and places that one at the top of her list.

The other half of this challenge will be to find the answers on circular pieces that need to be placed on a pole to build a tower. Instead of having to take apart the tower if one of the answers is incorrect, they will be able to spin the pieces to line up the correct answer and have all the answers facing forward.

Without even speaking, Killian understands what she is doing and so he finds the pieces that answer the questions and begins stacking, starting with the last event to stack that piece on the bottom. This way the events will read first to last aligning from the top of the pole to the bottom.

"Iguana's name," Emma informs him.

Killian immediately finds Alberto without saying a word, so the other teams don't hear them and places the piece onto the pole. While her partner does that, she is already searching for the piece with the number three on it because that was the amount of times the man hit the barrel before lighting the other guy on fire. She hands the piece to Killian for him to stack on top and she quickly rushes to the next piece.

"The guy with the chainsaw," she mutters to herself, her eyes bouncing over all the pieces until she finds Hernandez and hands it over to Killian.

The next question asks what color the donkey's poncho was that served them tacos and Killian is already snatching up the piece that says green. She definitely remembers the juggler's shoes were red, so she is already handing that one over to Killian.

Unfortunately...

"Check! Check!" Mary Margaret and David holler in unison and her heart just sinks.

"How the hell did they finish so quickly?" She whines. "We are moving so fast."

"This is Mary Margaret's specialty," Killian whispers into her side. "I'm sure she didn't even look at the questions, she just stacked them by the answers."

"Fuck."

"It's fine, Swan. We've got this, just keep going," he sweetly encourages, snagging the next piece that has the number ninety-three for the dirt bike.

"Yeah, you're right," she says, even if she is sulking a little bit. She reads the next question and easily finds the number seven that indicates how many times the Mariachi band played their song.

"Check!" She hears Belle screaming and there goes another bit of confidence, along with another drop of energy.

"What the hell," she scoffs, handing over the last piece that answers what radio station was on the back of the guy's shirt who climbed the ladder.

"Check!" Regina's voice booms from across the arena and Emma feels this burning urge to kick down her tower in a fit of irrational, sleep-deprived rage.