Zoostuck 2

tie up all the loose ends

Tie up all the loose ends? Do you have any idea how many of those there are, no, you don't, because you're just a shapeshifting art critic who's vowed never to shapeshift again and you're caught up in a tale that goes beyond the boundaries of time and space in ways you don't even understand.

(A Tale That Goes Beyond The Boundaries Of Time And Space In Ways You Don't Even Understand is the title of the painting you're trapped in. It's not a great painting.)

into a noose, then put your neck in it and stand on a really big ice cube for a couple hours — the frozen water, not the rapper! i learned about that one the hard way; in a book of lateral thinking puzzles

Wait, what?

Tie all the loose ends into a noose? Well, there are a lot of loose ends in this painting, but you can't see why you'd do that. It's not as if this is some sort of game where the flamethrowerbots trying to burn the painting have infiltrated it and you have to work out who they are before they kill everyone in the painting. And even if there were, what would be the point of the ice cube? Would it help to identify the flamethrowerbots?

You are now a flamethrowerbot. You and your fellow flamethrowerbots were sent to burn a painting, but you ended up getting sucked into it so you're planning to pretend to be trapped guests and every night you'll kill one of them and probably do a bunch of stupid things while the rest of the guests are doing their own stupid things. This will probably involve some sort of lynch vote in an effort to figure out who the members of your team are. That's the plan, anyways.

There's just one problem, and that's the fact that you've all been programmed not to harm living beings. This seems a strange oversight considering that you were built to set things on fire and those things generally include living beings, but you didn't program yourself. That's why you haven't been able to strike yet and get this whole process going.

So what are you going to do about it?