Elementary School of Fish: Orgy Bound

Darcy had given us four plastic cannisters and told us to start driving back to Berkeley. She didn't give us a particular destination, but she had told us a word to tell our PDA, so no doubt the PDA would give us a destination in a while.

We got back in the van and back on the road. The PDA explained to us that these four cannisters were like the four stones in the movie. To activate them, we would need to apply elements to them. I.e, we'd need to apply air to one, fire to one, water to one, and earth to one.

As we drove along, the PDA kept giving more hints, but no location. It dawned on us that the PDA expected that we'd try to solve this puzzle in a moving van. Some teams do this. Mystic Fish generally doesn't. Carsickness can make things awkward for a team.

Still, Brian started working on this puzzle as Dwight drove and I navigated. The air cannister was pretty easy to spot--it contained three deflated balloons. Probably we were supposed to blow these up. Brian turned them inside out to reveal their contents: an orange skittle.

There was a cannister containing white powder. What element were we supposed to apply to it. Brian tried tasting it. It didn't taste like anything. There was a capsule painted black. Probably we were supposed to apply water to that--maybe it contained one of those expanding dinosaur sponges. And there was a cannister containing water. Brian tried a few things--but not so much. If the van had been a rental, he might have risked applying a math to that powder. But setting Dwight's wife's van on fire probably wouldn't have been a good thing.

By the time we reached Berkeley and pulled over at a parking space on College Avenue, the PDA was patiently telling us exactly what to do with each stone. We put water on the capsule. No dinosaur sponge burst forth. Hmm. We applied matches to the powder. Nothing happened. Fortunately, the PDA told us that the powder would turn yellow. We had some multi-colored dirt from the bag of crap at the beginning of the game. We put it in the cannister of water. Not much seemed to happen. (Later, we learned that we should have put in more dirt--then it would have been obvious that the red dirt floated but other dirt sank.) We dug the capsule out of the water. Oh, some of the black paint had worn off. Underneath, it was green. (When I looked at the soaking capsule a few days later, it had expended; it was a green sponge after all.)

OK, so we had an Orange skittle and a Green capsule. Thanks to the PDA, we knew that burning the powder should have given us something Yellow, and that the dirt should have turned Red.

Orange
Green
Yellow
Red

I pointed at the first letters: O G Y R. ORGY, I said. "Or gyro" pointed out Dwight. "The Fifth Element is love." I pointed out. Dwight gave me a look that suggested I didn't understand the depth of his feelings for gyros. Anyhow, the PDA liked it when we entered ORGY. It told us to drive over to a house where some of the Taftians lived.

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