When you arrive at the Arctic VPN™ arena the next morning, elfs are already running around with snowballs, cables and wide-eyed determination. You find dAnkan sitting on an overturned toolbox wearing a reflective vest and whistle, like they’re about to coach a preschool soccer team.
“You’re late. As an Olympic athlete, you should have already crossed the finish line!” dAnkan quacks.
“It’s six in the morning, boss…”
“Exactly! Practically lunchtime in duck hours. Now come along, Santa has put together a schedule that we have to confirm before he can start selling broadcasting rights. Some real sketchy platforms are trying to place early bids.”
You follow dAnkan into a makeshift planning room, four planks and a tarp pretending to be a conference table. A massive whiteboard declares:
“ALL SPORTS INVOLVE SKIS - SANTA’S ORDERS”
“Huh, guess your icesleeping won’t make it then,” dAnkan remarks.
“Well I wouldn’t be so sure, you can definitely sleep on skis if you– WHAT in the world!?”
You flip the whiteboard over to the other side and see a mess of notes. Some sports are mentioned: ski boxing, slope-ski curling, ski gift-wrapping, plus something called ski bomb defusal that you don’t even want to ask about, but the main figure is an unadorned Christmas trie:
“Wow, I knew that Santa was an artist, but this is something completely new. Inventive, creative, yet classical, and organic. An outstanding Christmas trie,” says dAnkan, putting their art critic course to good use.
“So we start at the ‘n’, and follow the arrows until a red stop node. But what happens then? What does stopping do?” you wonder aloud.
“Stopping makes a word,” answers dAnkan offhandedly while adding “ski yodeling” to the whiteboard. “You know N, E, A, R, STOP makes ‘near’.“
“I know how punctuation works! It looks like this stores data somehow, like how there’s syrup in maple trees. Words that start with ‘n’, perhaps?” you continue, before glancing over at dAnkan who has written some poetry on the whiteboard:
Near nougat, never neglect.
Negotiate noir notation, note noise.
“What do you think? I was inspired by this beautiful artwork, but I feel like I didn’t quite get everything out of it. I think it probably contains two more words, but what I need is a word that starts with ‘p’. You’ll probably need to dig deep to find it, to get at the deeper meaning of the words in the Christmas trie. Come on, help me out here and show that you have what it takes to beat the Norwegians in ski chess!”