Elementary School of Fish: Welcome to Paradise

We found parking a block away from Todos Santos Park in Concord and made our way over. A bunch of teams were clustered around Darcy of Taft on a Raft. She waved us away for a while. Then she was done with those teams and we came over along with some other new arrivals.

She held up a lei. I put my head down and she slipped the lei onto my neck. "Welcome to Phloston Paradise." "Aloha," I replied. Fortunately, the lei was made of artificial flowers and I did not devolve into a sodden mass of allergies at this time. She told us to come back in 20 minutes when the Diva would be giving a concert.

The lei held a pouch, which we brought back to a stone table. This part of the park had a number of triangular stone tables. A fine place for solving. Maybe. A couple of young men watched us from the next table. They looked bored. They looked mean. They looked like the sort of people who, upon observing others having fun, would not ask, "Hey what are you doing?" but would instead try to ruin that fun.

We opened the pouch. It contained many icosahedral dice. Each die had one number marked in violet and a few numbers marked in red. We started transcribing data. And then it was time for our concert. We were supposed to head back over to Darcy. "Should we leave our stuff here?" Dwight asked. I remembered the mean-looking young men. "Let's take it with us," I said.

As the "concert", Darcy handed us a CD. "You don't have to work on this now, but you should solve it before the end of the game." She wrote something on my arm in invisible ink. And she told us to head over to the local Q-Zar (laser tag) franchise in about ten minutes. Wait, if Darcy was giving us a concert, and if this game is based on the Fifth Element... "Hey," I asked, "are you a diva?" Darcy Plavaluguna smiled and said "Yep, that's why I'm blue, see?" and pulled back part of her coat--revealing her blue coat skin underneath. I found this pretty funny, which either meant that I was getting tired or else all of the Fifth Element references were making me giddy. Or both.

We headed back to that table so we could resume transcribing data off of dice. As we walked over, one of the mean-looking youths asked me "Spare change, man?" This was no panhandler--he was dressed better than I was. "Nope," I said.

Soon we had written down all of the marked die numbers on a grid. We had a good idea of the next step--it looked like we could arrange the stripes of this grid to form a bitmap picture showing some letter-forms. But now it was time to go play Q-Zar.

Next

| comment? | | home |