![[Altered Scan: Wheel]](5_wheel_tm.jpg)
As it turned out, the next clue was on top of a hill. Team Fishstick Mess clambered to the peak as the sun set.
We arrived at seven speakers arranged in a ring around a couple of devices. From each speaker came the sound of Julie Andrews singing the "Do-Re-Mi" song from the Sound of Music. If it had been just me, I might have ripped open the hint envelope for this puzzle right away.
First things first--we fetched the wedge-wheel from the StrongBadian mini-puzzles. We overlaid the overlay, and found that we were facing the "The Hills Are Alive with the sound of music" puzzle. We also saw a picture of the Shoreline Ampitheater's tents. This told us how to orient this piece of paper in relation to the local geography--it showed how the seven wedges on the sheet mapped to the seven speakers on the ground.
Next, we listened at one of the speakers. It wasn't exactly Julie Andrew singing the Do-Re-Mi song. There was a word missing, the "Re". We spread out to figure out what was missing from each speaker. I listened at one that was missing four "note words". Alexandra and David looked dismayed when I reported this--they'd figured that just one word was missing at each speaker. They went back to re-check their work.
So we had a set of missing "note words". Some speakers had been missing just one word, some were missing two, one was missing four. We had a set of seven wedges with six letters in each wedge. How could we turn all of this into a message? How much trouble were we in due to our missing wedge?
Burninator Doug Zongker was standing by, making sure that nobody broke the sound system. I ask him: "Uhm, if we're missing one of our wedges, is that bad?" He said yes it was, and wrote the missing letters onto our game sheet. Game Control's mercy was without bound.
As it got dark, Team Fishstick Mess came up with many brilliant and insightful schemes by which one might encode a message in these wedges, but none of those schemes matched up with what the puzzle designers had. We were not looking forward to picking our way down this hill in the dark; it seemed like a good way to twist an ankle.
We made our way down from the hill and back to the border of the business park, hoping that we were going in the right general direction towards the next location, whatever that location might turn out to be.
And then we sat on a patch of lawn under a streetlamp and failed to solve the puzzle for a while longer, and finally ended up opening up the hint envelope. This revealed that for each word "Do" "Re" "Mi"... , exactly two speakers was missing that word. (This revealed that we hadn't correctly got the info from the speakers.) Each letter that appeared in wedges appeared in exactly two wedges. Thus, if speakers 1 and 3 were missing "Mi" and if wedges 1 and 3 both contained the letter "C" then "C" was one of the letters in the answer.
We set out along a dark road in search of the next location.
