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| Location South Berkeley | Start Code: SENSES |
At the house, a Game Control volunteer handed over our next puzzle: a few pieces of paper, a CD, and five cupcakes. Brian and I carried these back to where Dwight had parked the van, around the corner. Then we sat and solved.
Brian tore open the cupcakes, revealing that each held one or more Skittles of different colors.
There was a sheet covered with Japanese katakana, the symbols used to phonetically sound out foreign words. I started writing down the sounds, which was silly: Game Control hadn't told us to bring Japanese-English dictionaries, and had not reason to expect that each team would have someone who knew Japanese. Soon, I had a bunch of sounds, but no idea what to do with them. But there were sure a lot of イ ("i") and ロ ("ro") characters.
There was a page containing stickers, which mentioned a game based around the Tale of Genji. Ah, this was a reference to Genjikou, an incense-smelling game which had come up during the McGuffin game. In spite of this, I didn't notice that the stickers were scratch-n-sniff stickers. It turned out that neither Dwight nor I could smell the difference between these stickers. Fortunately, Brian could smell them fine. Genjikou involve smelling five sticks of incense and noting which of them have the same smell. This puzzle had four sets of stickers, five stickers in each set. Brian had soon figured out which of these were alike.
In Genjikou, different combinations of incense-similarities map to chapters in the Tale of Genji. Maybe these four combinations all mapped to chapters in the 1-26 range, and we'd get a four-letter word? No, one of them mapped to chapter 27. I was stumped.
Dwight had previously solved part of a Go puzzle which we'd received at the start of the game: it had been five-bit binary and said "I SENSE DEAD PUZZLES". The text for our current puzzle mentioned something about a sixth sense, and a meta-puzzle. So that Go puzzle was related to those others.
One thing was certain: I had to pee. As we'd done chemical experiments on College Ave, I'd been dismayed that all of the nearby businesses had been closed. Now we were in this residential neighborhood and I was quivering. I scraped together some chutzpah and went back to the Taft house. When I asked if I could use the facilities, the Taftians said sure. Darcy apologized for the mess. The living room floor was lightly covered with various puzzle fragments. No doubt this is where the Taftians had assembled their puzzles. "Wow, it looks like someone's been organizing a Game in here or something." I said. Somehow, that living room still looked neater than my apartment. I don't know what my excuse is.
Back at the van, folks had made progress on the katakana puzzle. By treating the イ and ロ characters as "1" and "0" and ignoring other characters, we had five-bit binary numbers, all between 1 and 26. Aha. They spelled out "ROMAN". We entered ROMAN into the PDA. It didn't like it. Wow, was that another coincidence a la "BURTON"? There were all those characters we were leaving out: a bunch of non-i/ro characters, plus a column of i/ro characters off to the side that didn't map to 1-26 values.
Hey, here was another piece of paper. It had a bunch of clues that described hand gestures: "Hitchhiker", "Approval", "Market + Beef". Hand gestures were literally five-digit numbers. Sure enough, we were able to create five-bit numbers from those numbers were all in the 1-26 range, spelling out "MANIPULATE".
The PDA hints told us that all of these puzzles had something in common. Maybe they were all five-bit binary? It also told us that we should use software when listening to the CD. Ah, no doubt this CD contained an MP3 file instead of a regular CD track, and now we were supposed to use Actuate. I powered up the laptop, put in the CD, pointed at Actuate. Actuate patiently told me that it couldn't read this file, but advised us to rip this CD.
Uh-oh.
We tried listening to the CD: someone singing, with occasional loud tones tossed in. No doubt if we'd looked at a time/frequency graph of this track, we'd see that those tones formed a nice five-bit binary pattern.
Dwight polished off the Go puzzle, plugging in in the names of previously solved puzzles. I picked up the Genjikou puzzle. Ignoring the chapters of Genji and instead treating each smell combo as a five-bit binary, we got that.
This had taken us so long. I felt kind of frustrated that there were just three of us. I missed the full-sized Mystic Fish Team. With so many puzzles to solve, it would be nice to have more people.
I looked at my watch. It was 12:45 AM. The game would end in about 15 minutes. In ten minutes, would we have time to find a WiFi hot spot, download CD ripping software, rip the CD, analyze it in Actuate, get a five-bit binary word, combine it with the others, and figure out the final answer to this series of mini-puzzles?
Probably not. With mixed feelings, we pressed the "Give up" button for that puzzle. The PDA told us to drive to Eudemonia. But it wasn't telling us that the game was over.