152. In Medusa's Garden
Amy walks through the door to the outdoor sculpture garden. She makes her way cautiously down the steps toward the statues. As she does, the wind suddenly picks up. SLAM! She wheels around and finds that the door back to the mansion has blown shut behind her. She runs to the door and tries to open it again, but finds it has been locked. “Guess there's nothing to do but go forward,” she says to herself.
She turns back around to look at the garden. She is surrounded by statues, all of them amazingly lifelike. “It's interesting,” Amy thinks to herself, “That whoever bought these statues has such specific tastes. They're all very realistic. And all human forms. And... They're all nudes...” Amy starts to get a bad feeling. There's no diversity in these statues, no abstract forms, no stylized human figures. They're all incredibly realistic replicas of people.
But she soon realizes that they aren't all nude. The ones nearest the house are, but looking further out she sees a few with what look like shreds of shirts, pants, and underwear attached to them. “That's a weird statement to make...” Amy thinks to herself nervously. The further the statues are from the door, the more intact their clothing seems to be. Off in the distance, she even thinks she sees some fully-clothed statues. All of the clothing is real cloth, adorning statues of stone and marble and metal.
Amy decides to take a closer look at one of the statues near her. It's a young woman in what must have been a horribly awkward pose for the model to hold for the artist. Her face is a mask of terror. One foot is raised off its heel, as though she were about to try running away. Her hands are thrown up in front of her face, while her body is twisting, as though about to turn around. Amy thinks. “It's a hard pose to hold...” She then tries to duplicate the pose herself, “...But not very hard to move through. This is a pretty realistic action shot. Either the artist was very skilled, the model was very flexible and balanced, or...”
Amy quickly surveys the other statues nearby and determines that all of them are in roughly similar poses, more like candid photographs of someone caught in a moment of surprise and horror than like posed statues.
Recalling her Greek myths, Amy thinks to herself that it's generally not a great idea to hang around in places where there are a lot of lifelike human statues showing expressions of shock and terror. She pulls the mirror from her backpack.
“Alright,” she thinks to herself, “After all I've been through tonight, it's time to start taking this nonsense at face value. If I'm finding a bunch of mysteriously clothed statues wearing shocked expressions and tattered clothing, the best practice would be to assume that there's a medusa running around and be pleasantly surprised if there isn't.”
Amy tries to recall the various myths of the medusa that she's read. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of conflicting myths about how the fearsome gorgon was defeated. In some stories, all the hero had to do was show the medusa her face in a mirror. The reflected visage of the snake goddess would turn her to stone. In other stories, though, the mirror didn't reflect the medusa's spell. That meant that the reflection of the medusa was harmless to look at. In those stories, the hero had to use the mirror to watch what he was doing and kill the medusa in combat while always keeping his eyes on the reflective surface.
Amy startles as she hears a twig snap. Time to take a guess at what sort of medusa this is. She gulps nervously and mentally notes that, if she guesses wrong, she'll have a long time to reflect on her poor choice.
What should Amy do?