TASK DEFINITION: You will be given a summary of a story. You need to create a question that can be answered from the story. You can create a question about characters, events, facts and beliefs, etc. Your question should be specific, try not to use pronouns instead of full names. As the stories are sometimes movie plots, they will contain actor names in parentheses. You should not use those names. Only use character names. Try to ask a question about all parts of the plot, not just the beginning.
PROBLEM:  Ars ne Lupin is opposed this time by Isidore Beautrelet, a young but gifted amateur detective, who is still in high school but who is poised to give Ars ne Lupin a big headache. In the Ars ne Lupin universe, the Hollow Needle is the second secret of Marie Antoinette and Alessandro Cagliostro, the hidden fortune of the kings of France, as revealed to Ars ne Lupin by Josephine Balsamo in the novel The Countess of Cagliostro (1924). The Mystery of the Hollow Needle hides a secret that the Kings of France have been handing down since the time of Julius Caesar... and now Ars ne Lupin has mastered it. The legendary needle contains the most fabulous treasure ever imagined, a collection of queens' dowries, pearls, rubies, sapphires and diamonds... the fortune of the kings of France.
When Isidore Beautrelet discovers the Ch teau de l'Aiguille in the department of Creuse, he thinks that he has found the solution to the riddle ("l'Aiguille Creuse" being French for "The Hollow Needle", and also the French title of the novel). However, he did not realize that the ch teau was built by Louis XIV, the king of France, to put people off the track of a needle in Normandy, near the town of Le Havre, where Ars ne Lupin, known also under the name of Louis Valm ras, has hidden himself.

SOLUTION: Who is Louis Valmeras?

PROBLEM:  (From Conan The Warrior, ISBN 0-441-11465-2)
The foreword to the story tells of his travels to Punt with Muriela, refers to a scam perpetrated against worshippers of an ivory goddess and then on to Zembabwei, where he joins a trading caravan on its way to Shem. Around 40 now, Conan visits his homeland and finds his old friends are fathers. Bored, Conan sets off for the Bossonian Marches and becomes a Scout at Fort Tuscelan on the Black River. Naturally, there is a war going on...
A young settler named Balthus encounters Conan in the forests slaying a forest devil. Accompanying the young man back to the Fort, Conan finds the body of a merchant ensorcelled by a Pictish wizard named Zogar Sag and slain by a swamp demon.
The Fort Tuscelan Commander, Valannus, is a desperate man and asks Conan to slay Zogar Sag before he raises the Picts against the whole borderlands. Taking a hand picked team of scouts and Balthus, Conan sets off stealthily in canoes. Balthus is captured and most of Conan's men slaughtered in an ambush.
Balthus and one of the Scouts are tied to stakes and the scout is sacrificed by Zogar Sag to one of his jungle creatures. Before Balthus can meet a similar fate, Conan sets the Pictish village on fire and the two flee into the woods. Conan tells Balthus of the cult of Jhebbal Sag, now forgotten by most. Once all living things worshipped him when men and beasts spoke the same language. Over time men and most beasts forgot his worship. Zogar Sag has not, however, and can control those few animals and creatures who also remember. And they are on Conan's trail now.
Conan is able to neutralize them using a symbol he once noticed, and the pair hurry to return to the Fort to warn them of the impending Pictish assault, but they are too late. The Picts already are all around the fort, and furious fighting is going on. The number of Picts ensures that eventually the fort will be overwhelmed and the defenders slaughtered. The only thing left to do is warn the settlers to flee while the Picts are busy with the fort - otherwise they will be slaughtered, too.
Conan and Balthus go to warn the settlers that the Picts have crossed the river and are raiding. They are joined by Slasher, a feral dog formerly owned by a settler who had been slain by the Picts. Balthus is sent on to warn settlers of the coming Pict raid, and Conan parts from him to warn a group of settler who had gone to gather salt. Balthus warns women and children to leave their huts and flee. When a band of Picts arrives, who move quicker and might overtake the women, Balthus stays behind to cover their escape. Accompanied by Slasher he makes a stand against the coming Pict raiders, first shooting arrows from concealment and then in a furious face to face battle. The man and dog's sacrifice delays the Picts and gives the settlers time to reach safety. Conan manages to warn the salt-gathering party in time, but finds he has been marked for death by the gods of darkness for misusing the symbol of Jhebbal Sag. In the end Conan triumphs, but the fort is lost, and so is the entire province.
The story ends in a tavern. A survivor tells Conan about the courageous act of Balthus and Slasher, and how their final stand had delayed the Picts just barely long enough for the settlers to reach safety. Upon hearing of the fight, Conan vowed to take the heads of ten Picts to pay for Balthus' sacrifice, along with seven heads for the dog, who was "a better warrior than many a man."

SOLUTION: Who goes to warn the salt gatherers?

PROBLEM:  The protagonist is the novel's first-person narrator, Stephen Stratton. The Passionate Friends is written as if addressed to Stephen's eldest son, who is on the verge of adolescence. Stephen is the only child of a rector who loses his faith due to Darwinism.
The most important relationship of Stephen's life is with the Lady Mary Christian (later Lady Mary Justin), a beautiful blue-eyed contemporary who has been his childhood "playmate" and with whom he falls deeply in love at the age of nineteen during the summer before he begins his studies at Oxford. Mary returns his love, but will not promise to marry Stephen. Having resolved to "belong to myself," Mary weds Justin, a wealthy financier, but intends also to remain Stephen's intimate friend.
Stephen cannot accept this, breaks off relations, and experiences despair. In an attempt to put his troubles behind him, Stephen volunteers to fight in South Africa, where the Second Boer War has just begun (1899). He becomes an officer and distinguishes himself in the fighting, and also is exposed for the first time to "the social fundamental of Labor." Back in England he decides to pursue a political career, since his father has unexpectedly inherited a substantial fortune. But by chance his father is now living on a property adjacent to Lady Mary Justin's; they meet and become lovers.
Stephen had begun to court another near neighbor, Rachel, but the resumption of his passionate relationship with Mary suspends this project. Disaster strikes when Justin sees Stephen kiss his wife. In the following crisis the powerful Justin hides Mary away in an Irish castle and prevails upon Stephen to leave England for a period of three years.
Traveling the world, Stephen studies Asian societies and develops convictions about the historical development of humanity. He believes that "Civilization has never yet existed, it has only continually and obstinately attempted to be. Our Civilization is but the indistinct twilight before the dawn." He resolves to devote himself to "the making of a new world-city, a new greater State above your legal States, in which all human life becomes a splendid enterprise, free and beautiful." In a villa on the Rhine he chances to meet Rachel again, and after a trip to America he asks her to become his wife; they are married on Nov. 8, 1906. Stephen undertakes with a progressive American named Giddings a career as a publisher of world literature and reference books.
His work is going well when in 1909 Stephen receives a letter from Lady Mary Justin. She asks him to resume writing to her, and over a period of two years challenges him to integrate the problem of sex into his world-historical reflections and plans, warning that "All this great world-state of your man's imagination is going to be wrecked by us if you ignore us, we women are going to be the Goths and Huns of another Decline and Fall." Their correspondence addresses personal as well as religious and political matters, but they have no intention of seeing each other again.
However, by chance they do meet again at an inn in the Alps on Engstlen Lake, below Titlis, and share several hours of spiritual communing; they scarcely touch and never kiss. Stephen leaves promptly. But Mary's companion betrays her to husband, whose decision to divorce Mary after a trial for adultery threatens them both with social disaster. In order to forestall this, Mary commits suicide. In his final remarks to his son, Stephen Stratton judges Mary to have been a victim "caught in the net of animal jealousies and thoughtless motives and ancient rigid institutions." He resolves, in the novel's final sentence: "I give myself, and if I can I will give you, to the destruction of jealousy and of the forms and shelters and instruments of jealousy, both in my own self and in the thought and laws and usage of the world."

SOLUTION:
What causes Stephen's father to lose religious faith?