Elementary School of Fish: Radio Rhod

In spite of some good directions, we still got turned around a couple of times on our way to Walnut Creek's Civic Park. But eventually we found it. We parked the van and hopped out, ready to pick up our next puzzle.

We were at a small playground. Ruby Rhod, intergalactic superstar of Radio Cosmos (yes, that's another movie reference) was up on the play structure. Down on the ground, a Rhodian sycophant let us know the deal. He pointed up at some monkey bars, painted red. We were to negotiate these "ruby rods" to reach Ruby Rhod.

I reached up to grab the monkey bars and started walking along the ground. (The monkey bars were not very high.) Ruby did not like this approach: he said "Bzzt!" and then he said "Bzzzzzzzt!" some more. The sycophant explained that we must negotiate the ruby rods without having our feet touch the ground. "Uhm, maybe someone not so tall should try this." Brian Larson stepped up, but he was too tall, too.

Someone suggested that we climb up on top of the monkey bars, and that worked fine. Well, maybe we should have had Brian do that instead of me. I sort of slid along on top of the monkey bars on my butt, taking my time. "Let's put some muscle in that hustle, Mystic Fish!" Ruby yelled. I thought a bit about the movie. Hadn't Korben shoved Ruby around when Ruby got too obnoxious? With these happy thoughts to buoy me, I eventually reached Mister Rhod. He handed me a CD, and seemed to think I'd be really excited by it. "Great." I said.

And then we headed back to the van. Looking at the physical CD, we could see that the labelled side was decorated with squares and lines. Squares on the outer rim were red; squares a little further in were orange; this spectrum continued: squares at the inner circle were violet. There didn't seem to be much of a pattern to the lines, though.

I loaded the CD into my laptop. When advising teams on what gear to bring, Game Control had mentioned an audio-editing program named Audacity. Maybe we were supposed to use it here? I started it up. I pointed it at the CD track. Audacity said it couldn't import CD tracks. Hmm, I'd only tried it on MP3 files. Audacity suggested that we rip this CD using our favorite CD ripping software. Hmm. I'd never ripped a CD before. My laptop didn't have any CD-ripping software on it. (I think. Maybe so many of these young whippersnappers today rip CDs that the software comes with the computer?)

Brian gently suggested that we just listen to the CD. I started playing it. My speakers were too wimpy to be heard against the background noise. Brian plugged in headphones and listened, started scribbling notes furiously as the CD played. Another play through and he had a bunch of phrases to read off. To check some phrases he wasn't sure about, I had a listen.

The CD had "Ruby Rhod" singing a song full of clues. Each clue pointed at a phrase containing "red" or "green". Part of the challenge of decoding these clues was that Ruby sang very fast. Also, it was a very silly song, so it was difficult to keep from giggling over key phrases. But eventually we prevailed. So now we had a list of phrases like "Greenspan" "Red-headed" "Greenpeace" "Red-Eye" Looking at the "Green" phrases in order, a pattern leaped out. If you took the first letter of the "other word" in the green phrase:

greenSpan
greenPeace
...

...you got "SPIN THE CD". Similarly, for the red words, we got "HERRING"--ah, a red herring. We should ignore those.

We took the CD out of the laptop. We spun it. The lines disappeared, and the squares stood out, creating a set of ROYGBIV rings. Uhm, "rainbow"? "spectrum"? Brian entered RAINBOW. The PDA congratulated us and said we were going to Concord. Hey, good news! We had a map of Concord. It was good to be leaving the terra only-vaguely-cognita of Walnut Creek.

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