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| Location Eudemonia Game Store | Start Code: CUBES |
There was a parking space right in front of Eudemonia, so we ignored the PDA-supplied advice to park in a garage, parked the van, and went on in. In the back of the store was a room suitable for gamists to play games. But today, Taft on a Raft had taken the room over. There was a big table covered with Magic: the Gathering cards--but we weren't to solve that, we were being skipped over that clue. Instead we were handed a fake over-sized BART card, a standard map of the U.C. Berkeley campus, and a five-dollar bill.
The map looked unaltered, the bill looked real, but the BART card looked strange. Usually BART cards have printing on them to let you know how much value is still on the card, but the numbers on this card were unusual: 19.00, 5.00, 13.00, 1.00, 4.44. Oh, 19,5,13,1: S,E,M,A 444: PHORES. It was telling us to look out for semaphore code. Aha. The PDA had introduced this puzzle saying that we were looking at the rituals of people who used four hallowed languages. What were the four hallowed languages of the Game? Semaphore, Morse, Braille... uhm, and something. Finding a reference to semaphore seemed like a good sign.
Also on this card were four BART station locations. I was sure I had the answer now: if we drew a line from the first station to the second on a map, and then another line from the third station to the fourth, that would give us a letter in semaphore flag code: A. That, with the 5-dollar bill suggested that we should go to the grid A-5 of the standard U.C. Berkeley campus map. Fortunately, my team-mates weren't so sure they wanted to hare off to a random map location based on my hazy memory of the BART map. So I jogged over to the BART station to pick up a map and bring it back. While I was out, the PDA delivered some hints--first it pointed out the semaphore thing. Then it pointed out--Braille? Why was it telling us to look out for Braille?
I was back with the team at Eudemonia. We were looking for Braille everywhere. Were there hidden dots on the five-dollar bill? Subtle marks on the map? We stared at the BART card, rubbed it, held it up to the light. The $5 bill and the map got a similar treatment.
After a while, we were just sitting around staring at each other. Another hint came in--this one hinted that we should look for Binary. We looked. We didn't find it. Finally, someone went back to focus just on the BART card: What if each arm of the standard BART map represented a semaphore direction? Then these four stations represented two letters, not one--but those two letters didn't make sense. OK, what if each station was one semaphore letter? What if the tracks emerging from teach station were the "flags"? That would give us a four-letter word. And that word was CEML, no, CELL. We entered "CELL" into the PDA. It congratulated us and told us to head over to the BART station to pick up the next stage of this puzzle. No wonder we hadn't found the Braille--we hadn't picked up the right piece of the puzzle yet.
(We never did find out what the $5 bill was for. After the game, Brian used it to pay the toll on the Bay Bridge.)