Hogwarts Inside Out: The Play-test: On the Road

We found Nimbus Road on our AAA map, saw where it intersected with Folsom Road, started up the van, headed up out of the parking lot. We were in the familiar rhythm: get in the van, drive to the next clue. We were looking at maps, navigating. There was music on the CD, chatter in the back seats. Folks practiced with the wand.

When we arrived at the intersection, it wasn't clear that we'd be able to reach 2000 Nimbus Road. Nimbus Road was blocked off by a chain-link fence. There was a gate in the fence, but that gate was closed. Beyond the gate was a reinforced guard booth, unoccupied. Not promising. Then again, a sign indicated that this site belonged to a company named GenCorp Aerojet. Had Game Control decided that this aero-something manufacturer made Nimbus 2000 flying brooms?

I hopped out to look for a hidden clue envelope or whatnot. Other folks stayed in the van to look at the map and brainstorm. I spotted no envelopes--but I did see a little telephone by the fence gate.

I wandered over to the phone box, opened it, and picked up the phone receiver. I heard a ring at the other end. Then a voice answered, a voice that seemed surprised to be disturbed.

Him: Hello?

Me: Hello. Uhm, I'm with a van full of people. And we're trying to get to 2000 Nimbus Road. And we're kind of surprised to see this gate here. And... uhm, are you expecting anything like this?

Him: What building do you want?

Me: Uhm, we want--hello? Uhm, we want 2000 Nimbus Road.

Him: I need to know the com--not the address, but what you're...

Me: All we have is an address. Uhm, it could be a wrong address. Oh! Uhm, oh, my friends back in the van are honking for me, so I should probably better get back in the van.

Him: You're not going to be able to get through, you'll need, uhm...

Me: OK. Does Nimbus Road continue, like on the other side of this place or something?

him: Nope.

Me: OK. Uhm, I should go find out what's going on then. Thanks a lot.

I wonder which of us found that conversation more surreal.

Back at the van, I found out what was up: further perusal of the map had uncovered another Nimbus Road nearby. It wasn't connected with this Nimbus Road. There was an Aquatic Center there.

Here we had a conversation about the Nature of the Game: "That's why I love the game, though. For a chance to just kind of go up to some security phone--" "--out in the middle of nowhere, at some military contractor's compound--" "--yes."

On the other Nimbus Road, at the Aquatic Center, we hopped out of the van and wandered amongst party areas, boat-rental shacks, shaded picnic tables. There were no addresses on any of the buildings. How would we know which one was 2000 Nimbus Road? And wouldn't we have an easier time thinking about this after a break at these conveniently-placed restrooms?

Erik wandered off to a reception room he'd noticed, hoping to ask for directions. And now here came Team coed astronomy. The spotted us, motioned with their hands--as if to say, "Where is GC?" We shrugged. Anna Hentzel said "Well, we already solved it!" but coed astronomy wasn't buying it. We compared notes: both teams had figured out that there was more than one Nimbus Road. coed astronomy was trying to pick which one to try--and they'd spotted our van and had followed us. We told them they were lucky that they hadn't tried the other Nimbus Road. We talked about the security phone. And so we went to visit Erik in the reception room, where the nice ladies behind the desk were using some online maps to find out what was up. It turned out that there were three Nimbus Roads around here. They all pointed in different directions, they didn't quite meet. The only one left to try was the site of a fish hatchery.

When we emerged from the reception area, coed astronomy was on the phone with GC, getting confirmation on which Nimbus Road we wanted. We wanted the fish hatchery. Which was not close to Folsom Road, nor in the town of Folsom--and that's why you play-test.

At the fish hatchery, hidden amongst some rocks, there was a bucket of brooms. We got one. Inside its hollow handle was a rolled-up slip of paper.

That slip of paper contained a minesweeper puzzle. It was a clever puzzle, but I was impressed by the tiny size of the piece of paper. Well, it wasn't that tiny--it was perhaps the third of letter-size. What was really impressive is that Prasad and Rebecca could crowd in together to work on it at the same time. When I tried to work at the same time as Prasad, my elbow got in his way.

One reason I wanted to play with other teams was to see how they worked together. Well, here's a shallow observation, but it's what I saw: if no-one on your team is a behemoth, then it's easier to gather them around a puzzle. In the end, I leaned away from the puzzle, giving Prasad and Rebecca more room. I looked up at the sky. It was darkening. It would soon be night.

The sky darkened as we drove up into the mountains. We came to some intersection in some town where, next to some fountain, we found some box containing a puzzle. Just one puzzle: we'd slipped into last place.

This was a mirror with a strangely decorated frame. Someone realized that the frame's decoration was a Hofstadtereque set of writing combined with the reflection of that writing. Something like "THIS MIRROR HIDES A SPELL FOR DRUMMING NOT WAVING". Someone pulled the frame off of the mirror: hidden underneath was some text in a font called Mira in our textbook, but which someone recognized as the Mara font from the Indiana Jones Adventure attraction at Disneyland. This text was reversed--as you might see it in a mirror.

We wrote down the regular English letters corresponding to this tough-to-read font--and it didn't mean anything. Someone said, "Hey, what if it's a mirror substitution--A means Z, B means Y..." and sure enough, that's what it turned out to be. This gave us "PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON".

How were we supposed to "drum" this? Someone grabbed the wand and tried tapping it on the mirror in rhythm with the song: "tap... tap tap tap tap.. tap.." No dice. Tried it again. No dice. Maybe we should try tapping out more of the song? I put the kibosh on that idea: "It's not like the message said ...IN A LAND CALLED HONAH LEE." What if we tried casting the wand in the usual way, but using only flick motions, no loops? That was something like drumming. Tried it, no dice. Tried it again, no dice. Hey, it's a mirror puzzle, maybe we should try reversing the flicks.

Anna Hentzel observed us. Then she did something unusual. She asked if she could try something with the wand. Someone gave her the wand. Anna wandered around to the other side of the van, out of sight. We continued to natter on about are ever-more straw-grasping ideas.

We tried blowing (puffing) on the mirror, hoping to uncover a message. Wasn't "Drowning not Waving" the name of a song or an album or something? It sounded familiar, but no-one could quite put their finger on it.

Someone applied psychology: probably we had tried a good idea, but had messed up the wand-work. Why was this likely? Well, probably Anna had taken the wand so that she could try using it. If it turned out that the wand was broken, maybe she didn't want to watch us struggle with this for another hour. "Hey Anna, could we get the wand back?"

Anna sidled around to our side of the van, the wand behind her back.L Someone asked: "Is it showing the answer right now?" "Uhm, yeah." So we tried an earlier idea, drumming out the "lived by the sea" verse, too. That worked. The wand told us to head to the Cozmic Cafe in Placerville. Anna warned us that she'd be leaving us in Placerville. Another observer would rotate in to take her place. "Wahhh! We'll miss you!"

The Cozmic Cafe in Placerville turned out to be a surprisingly cool place. They had art on the walls. They had live music. They seemed to have every goth teenager from within 100 km. We pushed our way through the front door, made our way through the hole in the back wall to the weird mining tunnel, where our GC contact gave us some money to buy dinner and a stack of chocolate coins: our next puzzle. The cafe looked like fun, but we were all starving, and we'd all looked longingly at the Mexican restaurant next door. So we left the Cozmic and headed next door.

The restaurant seemed empty when we first entered, until we poked heads around the corner, and saw another dining area--where there were two occupied tables, one with coed astronomy and one with Get on a Raft with the Weasleys. All of the teams had ended up at the same restaurant.

Dinner was a wonderful thing. Normally, I might not appreciate a burrito with so much sour cream, but hunger makes all things appeal.

The chocolate coins in our stack were mostly identical--but each of them was stamped with a different number. All of the numbers were divisible by three, and most of them were divisible my nine. We noticed other things too: prime factorization, shapes, and the difficulty of ordering pineapple juice although it was listed on the menu. Eventually we tried writing the numbers as ternary. Well, other folks did. By this point, I was in post-burrito coma and was not capable of simple arithmetic. But each of these numbers in ternary had a sequence of ones and twos, with all of the other digits zero. If twos were "dahs" and ones were "dits", then it formed Morse code. We had our answer. I forget what the answer was, but I remember it was long. It took many tries to cast it with the wand. Finally, the wand gave us our answer. It was long, describing a trail-head, directions to reach that trail head involving a stop sign, warnings not to bottom out our "dorm room". When we were done, Anna told us: Actually it didn't say that. For the purposes of this play-test, it said "Throw it away".

"Throw it away" was certainly mysterious. Maybe we were supposed to throw the wand. Would it notice if it was in free-fall and show a message? Throwing the wand seemed risky. Maybe there was a thrift store around here named "Throw It Away"? At the restaurant's front desk, we asked to look at the phone book. No "Throw It Away". Having paid the bill, we wandered out in front of the restaurant, asked some random passers-by. One of them pointed out that there was a dump outside of town. Maybe we wanted that? A dump seemed to me like just the sort of place that Team Snout would put a clue. Didn't they have a reputation for gross things--porta-potties, meat necklaces, stuff like that?

And so we piled into the van. And so Anna bid us farewell, her time as our observer was done. And so we picked up our new observer, who turned out to be Jim Keller! I'd played with Jim in the McGuffin Game a year before. Jim took his role as silent observer very seriously. He was totally quiet. It was kind of spooky. (After a while, I told him that it was impressive that he was taking so many notes on our progress. Still, he wasn't doing as good a job as Anna had at telling us stories of growing up in Iowa.)

Erik started up the van and we made our way up a windy road. The town dump was theoretically somewhere off of this road. We had gone quite a ways. Had we heard the local's directions correctly? Had the local given us bad directions? We decided to call up Game Control to confirm our plan. Thus we found out that we weren't going to the Placerville dump. Or rather, we were, but only because the access road to the Placerville Dump is named "Throwita Way". Oh, those wacky mountain punsters.

With confidence thus bolstered, we continued on until we came to Throwita Way. There was a white van parked by the side of the road, full of Rafting Weasleys. We must be in the right place. We drove up to the end of the road, stopped at the gates of the dump. Was that a suspicious-looking box under a lamp? We piled out of the van and trotted towards the lamp. Behind us, doors slammed--Team coed astronomy was arriving. Thus we had witnesses to our disappointment: the "box" under this street-lamp turned out to be a section of curb painted white.

Someone (Yar?) on coed astronomy called out "We'll let you know if we find it." Thus I learned that coed astronomy was a class act. We searched up and down Throwita Way in the dark. Eventually, one of the Weasleys took pity on coed astronomy and pointed out the clue location. coed astronomy, being a class act, pointed that location out to us.

Soon we were back in the van with five oddly-labeled containers of sports drink. We gathered data from the labels, and soon had a pretty good idea of how to get a message out of it--except that we needed to figure out how to arrange five beverage flavors in order. Avocado Tumbler, Gooseberry something, Lemony Cricket, Savanna Banana. Sin Apple. Arranging them alphabetically didn't work. Arranging them so that their first letters formed the words GLASS didn't work. Arranging them so that the first letters of their main ingredient were alphabetical didn't work. Various other things didn't work. Finally, we called up game control. They let us know what we'd missed; a section of our textbook gave magical hazard numbers for various substances, including different fruit. We wanted to arrange the flavors by this hazard number. And so we learned to check our textbook when things didn't make sense. And as we made our way to the next clue site, someone scanned the book pretty earnestly. And I was glad they did.

Erik drove us up, up along Highway 49, a dark mountain road. We moved through a dark, dense forest. We were far from cities. The existence of a world beyond the range of our headlights seemed open to doubt. We made our way up to the town of Coloma.

I grew up in San Francisco, and when it was time for us to learn about the California Gold Rush, we went on a field trip to Sacramento to look at Sutter's Fort. Erik grew up in Sacramento, and he said when Sacramento kids want to learn about the California Gold Rush, they go on a field trip to Coloma, the site of the first gold discovery. I don't know where Coloma kids go when it comes time for them to learn about the California Gold Rush.

Our next clue site was just past the historic town of Coloma, at Henningsen-Lotus Park. Our directions to reach the correct trail-head were complicated, and in the dark, it wasn't clear that we were following them correctly--but when we reached the site of our best guess, there was a blinky light hanging from a fence post, so we were probably on the right track.

We piled out of the van. I strapped on the triclops headlamp, powered it up. Soon we were picking our way down a dusty trail towards the sound of rushing water. Later on, Anna Hentzel would say that she knew it was me coming down the hill with the triclops headlamp--that or else three people walking very close together. She'd say that later. Now she was waiting on the beach with Curtis. It was dark, trees hung over us, and we couldn't see past the beams of our lights. It was spooky. Thus, it was extra-disconcerting when Curtis started acting like a crazy woman.

Specifically, he was acting as Cassandra Cross, our missing professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts. Cassandra groped around as if blind. She was quite mad now, but from her ravings, we gleaned some facts. She'd been researching the Draconus Device. She was losing her powers, no doubt due to Mugglium poisoning. She'd She'd found a spell to destroy the Draconus Device--at this point, she grabbed Erik's arm and wrote "DYNAMITE" on it with a fat marker. And she gave us a piece of paper that prophecied the repair of the previously-destroyed Draconus Device. She encouraged us to be on our way. And soon we were on our way back to the van.

So we had a prophecy written on a piece of paper. The language seemed strained. Did it use all of the letters of the alphabet? No. Why did the font's "O"s look so funny, was that a signal? Probably not. The prophecy talked about destruction and repair and jerking around--could these be "cryptic crossword" hints that we should anagram certain words? Probably not.

It was a good thing that someone had been reading the textbook, because they noticed that some parts of the prophecy described the effect of some spells in our text book. That turned out to be the key. Thus we got the magic word "DORMIENS". After failing to cast that with the wand for a long time, we called up Game Control and begged them to tell us what the wand would say if we could cast the spell.

| comment? | | home |