Mr. Lemoncello and the Titanium Ticket Read online

  PLAY ALL THE GAMES,

  SOLVE ALL THE PUZZLES—

  READ ALL THE LEMONCELLOS!

  ESCAPE FROM MR. LEMONCELLO’S LIBRARY

  MR. LEMONCELLO’S LIBRARY OLYMPICS

  MR. LEMONCELLO’S GREAT LIBRARY RACE

  MR. LEMONCELLO’S ALL-STAR BREAKOUT GAME

  MR. LEMONCELLO AND THE TITANIUM TICKET

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Chris Grabenstein

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by James Lancett

  Emoji © Apple

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Grabenstein, Chris, author.

  Title: Mr. Lemoncello and the titanium ticket / Chris Grabenstein.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House Children’s Books, [2020] | Series: Mr. Lemoncello’s library; book 5 | Audience: Ages 8–12.

  Summary: “Four lucky kids go on a scavenger hunt inside Mr. Lemoncello’s Gameworks factory, where they compete for a chance to win a Titanium Ticket” —Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019031138 | ISBN 978-0-525-64774-4 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-525-64775-1 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-593-18144-7 (int’l) | ISBN 978-0-525-64776-8 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Treasure hunt (Game)—Fiction. | Contests—Fiction. | Libraries—Fiction. | Books and reading—Fiction. | Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.G7487 Mc 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780525647768

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Read All the Lemoncellos!

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Are the Games Over?

  Thank You!

  About the Author

  Favorites by Chris Grabenstein

  FOR THE PARKER BROTHERS, THE HASSENFELD BROTHERS (HASBRO), AND MILTON BRADLEY: THANKS FOR MAKING GROWING UP SO MUCH GIGGLY FUN.

  “There goes that clock again!” said Akimi Hughes as, off in the distance, four musical notes chimed three separate times. “We only have fifteen minutes left. Hurry!”

  “I’m hurrying!” said Kyle Keeley.

  “Hurry faster.”

  Kyle and Akimi had traveled from their homes in Ohio to help the world-famous game maker Mr. Luigi L. Lemoncello test out a brand-new, supersecret interactive gaming experience that would soon have its gala grand opening in Hudson Hills, New York—a town Kyle and Akimi had always dreamed of visiting.

  Because Hudson Hills was where Mr. Lemoncello made all his games!

  During the day, they’d toured the unbelievably amazing factory and eaten peanut butter pie with marshmallow and chocolate sauce in the company cafeteria. Tonight, they’d spent two hours running around inside a mysterious world of puzzles, games, and holographic surprises—piecing together a cryptic message on a tablet computer.

  “Here comes our final riddle,” said Kyle.

  A string of letters scrolled across the video screen in the dashboard of the miniature amusement-park car they were sitting in.

  “Oh, joy,” said Akimi. “This only makes, what? Eight of ’em?”

  Kyle glanced down at the tablet’s screen. He and Akimi needed to enter their response to the riddle in a series of letter bubbles, spaced to represent words, just like in the game hangman. Some of the bubbles had numbers underneath them.

  “Okay,” said Kyle, “this is going to be a four-word answer. Two letters, one letter, eight letters, four letters.”

  “This is also the most complicated game Mr. Lemoncello ever created!” said Akimi.

  “Because the prize is huge,” said Kyle. “A titanium ticket! Titanium’s better than gold, right?”

  “Totally,” said Akimi.

  “But what’s it a ticket for?” wondered Kyle.

  “Something bigger than big, or Mr. Lemoncello wouldn’t’ve flown us here on his private jet to test it!”

  “You’re right! Okay. Here’s our riddle: ‘When can you jump over three men without getting up?’ ”

  “Duh. Easy,” said Akimi. “ ‘In a checkers game.’ Two letters, one letter, eight letters, four letters. Ka-boom!”

  Kyle tapped in Akimi’s answer. The letters in the numbered bubbles automatically appeared in the corresponding numbered spaces in the phrase that Kyle and Akimi had been slowly piecing together as they worked their way through eight different game stations.

  “Excellent,” said Kyle, watching the computer do its thing and slide the numbered letters into the appropriate positions. “ ‘I’ is going to twenty-five, ‘N’ to thirteen, ‘C’ to fifty…”

  “Um, Kyle? I can see the screen. I don’t need a play-by-play.”

  Kyle and Akimi had been best friends forever—even before they started winning all sorts of gam
es together inside Mr. Lemoncello’s library, back home in Ohio. But a ticking time clock could strain even the tightest of friendships. Right now, they were a guitar string—one tuning-peg twist away from snapping.

  The tablet computer blared a triumphant, if tinny, trumpet fanfare.

  “Yes!” said Kyle. “With that answer, we have officially filled in the whole phrase.”

  Kyle and Akimi climbed out of the cramped little red car they had successfully maneuvered through a massive traffic jam of brightly colored vehicles that had blocked them in. A soothing female voice purred from hidden ceiling speakers: “Congratulations, KYLE and AKIMI. You have successfully completed all eight games.”

  “Yes!” said Kyle, with an arm pump.

  “Booyah!” added Akimi, slapping him a high five.

  “Good luck with the rest of your quest,” said the recorded voice. “We hope you make it to the finals.”

  Kyle and Akimi stared at each other.

  Finally, Akimi exploded. “The rest of our quest? We’re not done? We filled in the whole phrase!”

  “What ‘finals’ is she talking about?” added Kyle.

  “You have seven minutes remaining,” cooed the calm voice.

  “To do what?” Akimi shouted at the ceiling.

  Kyle’s mind was spinning. Racing. “Maybe there’s a hidden code in the phrase.” He looked back at the game screen. “Hang on.” Sixteen letters in the final phrase started glowing, the circles behind them turning into fluorescent-yellow lemons.

  “We’ve got glowing letters,” he reported. “G-E-C-E-C-D-E-D-C-D-G-D-C-E-G. And another ‘G.’ ”

  “You think it’s some kind of anagram?” asked Akimi.

  “Maybe,” said Kyle. “We should figure out all the words we can make with those sixteen letters.”

  “Good idea! Um, ‘deeded,’ ” said Akimi. “ ‘Ceded,’ ‘edged,’ ‘egg’…”

  “Egg!” said Kyle. “Mr. Lemoncello probably hid an Easter egg somewhere in one of these rooms.”

  “Easter was a while ago, Kyle. The egg would be rotten by now. We would’ve smelled it.”

  “In video games, an Easter egg isn’t a real egg; it’s an inside joke,” he explained. “A hidden message…”

  Akimi looked around. “Oh. So how do we find it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Wait!” said Akimi. “Maybe it’s a substitution code, where every letter stands for a different letter! Mr. Lemoncello has done that before.”

  “You’re right! But we need some sort of clue to know how many letters to skip ahead in the alphabet.”

  Akimi snapped her fingers. “There’s a license plate on the back of this car!”

  She scurried around to the rear bumper.

  “What’s the number?” asked Kyle.

  “Three!”

  Kyle tried to think faster than fast. “Okay, we jump ahead three letters in the alphabet.”

  “Or we could count three backward,” said Akimi. “After all, this is the rear bumper!”

  “Let’s do forward first.”

  “Fine.”

  Kyle started at the beginning of the string of glowing letters.

  “ ‘J’ is three letters past ‘G’…”

  “ ‘E’ becomes ‘H,’ ” said Akimi. “ ‘C’ becomes ‘F’…”

  “And ‘D’ becomes ‘G’!” added Kyle.

  “So,” wondered Akimi, “does that mean ‘D’ becomes ‘J,’ too? Because if ‘D’ is ‘G’ and ‘G’ is ‘J’…”

  “Why are there only four different letters?” shouted Kyle. “Why aren’t any of them vowels?”

  “ ‘E’ used to be a vowel!” Akimi shouted back. “Until you made me turn it into an ‘H’!”

  “You’re the one who did that!” countered Kyle.

  “Because you told me to! I knew we should’ve gone backward!”

  Off in the distance, clock chimes played their hourly melody and started tolling.

  It was nine o’clock.

  “Sorry,” said the voice in the ceiling. “Your quest remains incomplete. You lose.”

  “We lost?” Kyle groaned.

  “Only because this is impossible!” screamed Akimi.

  Suddenly, she heard a series of familiar, high-pitched burp-squeaks. A hologram of Mr. Lemoncello, dressed all in black except for his bright-yellow banana shoes, stepped out of the shadows.

  “Impossible?” he said. “Oh, it’s possible. But for a prize this humongous, I’m afraid the final puzzle must be magnifficult: which is to say, magnificently difficult! Because whosoever solves it will automatically win a titanium ticket and move on to the final round!”

  “The final round of what, sir?” Kyle asked politely. He’d loved Mr. Lemoncello since forever, but sometimes…

  “Sorry,” the hologram replied with a sly wink. “I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway. For, you see, good friends, the final round will be the most important game ever played in the history of gaming! Because the winner will become an instant bazillionaire!”

  It was after nine o’clock on a school night.

  Simon Skrindle, a short (and nearly invisible) seventh grader at Hudson Hills Middle School, had just crept out of the dark forest near the Lemoncello Gameworks Factory.

  He was a twelve-year-old on a mission.

  He was alone. Simon didn’t have many friends, especially not the kind who’d go on an adventure with him, sneaking through the woods late at night.

  And this was a BIG adventure.

  Simon was going to be the first to see what secrets were hidden inside the new building behind Mr. Lemoncello’s factory!

  For twenty-five years, Luigi L. Lemoncello, the world-famous game maker, had manufactured his games inside the fantastical castle fortress of the Lemoncello Gameworks—a sprawling factory perched high on a hilltop overlooking the Hudson River. Its four corner towers looked like upside-down snow cones made out of lemon-yellow oval bricks. The pinnacles at their pointy tips were topped with cello weather vanes. Sculptures of game pieces served as gargoyles. The factory’s water tower was a one-million-gallon lemon on stilts. During the day, enormous smokestacks puffed out billowy clouds of steam in the shapes of animals or famous faces. Simon loved seeing the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington clouds drifting across the sky over the factory every Presidents’ Day. And the bunnies at Easter time. People came from all over to take selfies with the cartoon clouds. Another pipe let out enormous rainbow-colored bubbles every weekend.

  There was also a giant ball-pit moat surrounding the whole factory and you could only enter when the drawbridge was lowered. Workers had to know the secret password and shout it into an enormous curled horn that looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.

  And for the past five years, Mr. Lemoncello had spent a ton of money and time constructing a top-secret new building close to his factory fortress. All the work had been done behind forty-foot-tall plywood walls (painted yellow, of course). The workers and contractors and architects had been sworn to secrecy about what they were doing on the other side of that wooden barricade.

  Rumors buzzed around the town, anyway.

  One guy at school, Jack McClintock, whose dad was the head of security at the Gameworks Factory, said the new building was nothing but a fancy warehouse for “storing junk.” A girl in Simon’s science class, Soraiya Mitchell, whose father was the plant manager, said the new building would be filled with “amazing twenty-second-century game-making technology.”

  Basically, nobody knew what was inside the new building. But everybody wanted to find out. Kids at school were even daring each other to “bust in.”

  No one had the nerve to try.

  Then, two weeks ago, the yellow plywood walls came down to reveal a modern, three-story silver box with mirrored wa
lls. At night, those walls reflected back the twinkling black sky.

  Plywood down, the secret glass building was now surrounded by three rings of chain-link fences, set up in concentric circles. Each fence had a locked gate, which could be reached by following a footpath from the factory parking lot past a bed of yellow and orange flowers spelling out the word “gesundheit,” then on through rows of topiary—evergreen shrubs trimmed to resemble Mr. Lemoncello in various poses (juggling, dancing, tipping an egg timer, balancing a pair of giant dice on his nose). Some kids at school said the fences were electrified, too.

  Security for the new building was tight. Super tight.

  Simon’s grandfather, who hated all things Lemoncello, swore that “the batty old bazillionaire is installing an army of robots in that new building so he can fire all the factory workers!”

  Simon’s grandpa, Sam Skrindle, had no proof for his theory. It was more or less a wild guess.

  That’s all anybody in Hudson Hills had. Wild guesses and theories based on even wilder rumors.

  So Simon decided he would be the first one to actually step foot inside Mr. Lemoncello’s secret new building. He’d show the kids at school. He’d take their dare. He’d also take a few pictures with his phone to prove that he’d done it.

  Besides, Simon had what his grandmother called “an insatiable curiosity.” He loved tearing things apart just to see how they worked. And then he loved putting them back together.