Bang V: Arrrrgh

A piratical clue

Though Justin Graham had promised that we'd just be in the arcade a few minutes, but he obviously hadn't used the inclusive "we", because after I finished with Skee-ball, Team Fishstick Mess stayed sprawled on the floor, working on the pirate puzzle "Where's the Loot?"

The first step was to find some symbols on our "Standard Issue Map."

(We'd actually started looking at this on our way to Pier 39. But I didn't mention it then because I'm trying to maintain some semblance of continuity here.) Were we to find these symbols on our "standard-issue map"? When someone found the golden "&" in the Blue & Gold Fleet advertisement, we knew we were on the right track.

I spotted the B from the North Beach Pizza ad. On nights when I worked late and was too tired to cook (too tired even to warm something up), North Beach Pizza was a place close by my streetcar stop that was open late. I was never exactly glad to see it, but I'd developed a survival instinct of being able to spot its logo.

WTF? (Where's The 'F'?)

The third symbol eluded us. A few years before, "Where's Waldo?" had been a best-selling series of books. These books featured large, complicated drawings, each of which included a little man, presumably named "Waldo." People searched these drawings for Waldo. From the popularity of these books, there must be many people who specialize in searching a huge graphic for some little detail, but we didn't have any of those people on our team.

The arcade folks came along and gently asked us to leave. We left. Outside the arcade was an outdoor stage. Facing the stage were benches for the audience; there was no performance going on, so there was no audience. But there were comfy seats and there was light, and it was a perfect spot for puzzle-solving. In fact, there was another team working on a puzzle. We toddled over and sat and resumed our search.

We weren't even sure what we were looking for. Dwight thought it was a "D". I thought it was a lower-case "e". (We were both wrong; it was an "F".)

Then the lights went out. We looked up. There was a guy on the stage, standing astraddle a bike. "Oops, sorry, force of habit" he said, "I can leave the lights on for a while. But I do have to go home soon." He was a performer. He seemed tickled that treasure hunters had taken over his theater.

We handed the map around so that everyone had a chance to fail to find the symbol which we would eventually learn was an "F". And then the lights went out, this time for real. The performer wished us luck.

We found another lighted spot where we continued to fail to solve the puzzle. Was there a clue in the pirate names? If we just had three of the symbols, could we figure out a general region of the map to go to?

This wasn't working out. In hindsight, we should have used the hint envelope on this puzzle--we'd spent a lot of time failing to solve it. (I won't give the solution to this puzzle here, but will soon.)

Three Words

(Wrong)

We put aside that puzzle and to head out to Jefferson and Taylor. (You remember, the solution to "Take 1!") On our way out of Pier 39, we spotted the skyline. Somehow, we spent some time trying to line up our transparency with landmarks. Once I got over my shock at being able to see so much of San Francisco from the Fisherman's Wharf area, I realized that our effort was doomed. Earlier, we'd figured that to solve the puzzle, we probably wanted to be standing at the solution to some other puzzle. Now, for a while, we abandoned that guide, and just wandered around in front of Pier 39, trying to line things up. I doomed us by suggesting we head up to an overpass.

We found a spot where things lined up, if you ignored the blob. Inside the circle labelled "three words" were the words "Academy of Art College". This was probably not the right solution: there was that blob unaccounted for, we had an extra word, and the words "Academy of Art College" appeared in about a million billion places in San Francisco, which made it a strange choice for a puzzle solution.

(Right)

I figured that the solution to the Where's the Loot? puzzle was about at the entrance to Pier 39 (wrong) and that the Three Words puzzle solution-spot was at that solution-spot (wrong), and brute-forcing the Three Words puzzle by wandering around holding up the transparency was a waste of time (wrong). But in hindsight we should have headed down to the ground to keep looking.

We made our way to Jefferson and Taylor. On the way over, Alexandra spotted Greg of Game Control standing outside Ben & Jerry's, waiting to hand out more puzzle envelopes. She mentioned our try at "Three Words", postulating that the blob was something that was only visible by day. Greg said, "Actually, that is the light from a streetlamp." I finished the sentence: "...only visible at night." Beautiful. Too bad we missed it.

5x5, After-Party

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