Operation Justice Unlimited: Under Cover Of Darkness

Quickly yet safely the van made its way to the Golden Gate Bridge. We figured that some people from the team would need to get out and find something on the East Walkway. Then would need to get back to the van.

And probably the next clue location would be in Marin County. That is a strange prediction to make, and begs an explanation. This treasure hunt would take us all over the bay area. We'd spent some time in San Francisco, and it made sense to think that the next clue would be outside of San Francisco. If this clue was at the Golden Gate Bridge--maybe the next location was on the other side of that bridge.

With this prediction in mind, one could park the van at the South parking lot, send out a squad to pick up the clue, then take a few minutes to get the van out of the parking lot and into the bridge traffic. Team Mystic Fish did not take this approach.

Don't Try This At Home

Instead, the Team Mystic Fish van suffered an amazingly unlikely minor mechanical malfunction which coincidentally forced us to park the van (with hazards flashing) in a little no-parking area right at the bridge entrance. A few of us piled out of the van. Alexandra said: "I see them! They have capes!" So the runners had some idea of what we were looking for: Justice Unlimited personnel, in costume. We started jogging north.

When planning The Game, Team Snout had called up various law enforcement agencies to warn them that vans full of intense yet harmless people would show up at certain locations at certain times. Yet America's threat level was Elevated, and I wonder what people thought when they saw a van screech to a halt at a national landmark and saw us pile out and run onto the span. Thank goodness I had doffed the bandoleer.

We caught up the Justice Unlimited heros, who gave us an envelope. This was our next clue. We started jogging back to the van.

It was at about this time that I realized that I was a terrible jogger. I was having a tough time keeping up with David as we made our way back. I got a cramp in my side.

Before the trip, I'd prepared my essential gear. I had a light backpack that I could carry at all times. To this I'd attached a small figurine of the Hulk, liberated from the freebie Heroclix toy I'd received on Free Comic Book Day. It dangled from my backpack, attached by a thread. Now, as I faltered, it swung, and the tiny Hulk kicked me in the butt. "Run!" he seemed to advise. "Run, puny human!" I forced myself to keep jogging.

Soon we were back at the van, whose mysterious mechanical problem fortunately fixed itself right then. We drove to the scenic overlook just North of the Golden Gate Bridge to play with the contents our envelope: some strips of paper black on one side, beige on the other.

Dissolution, Solution

During the van ride, we figured out that we could wipe off the black surface on the paper strips to reveal something underneath. We also figured out that the sludge we washed off the paper would get all over the place. This was not an activity to carry out in the van.

So we used the water fountains at the scenic overlook to wash off what turned out to be a thin layer of black paint. Thus, we revealed some symbols. Then we cleaned up the black paint we'd dripped around the water fountains. Team Mystic Fish: Sometimes messy, but always good citizens.

We used the copier so that everyone would have a set of strips to look at.

We looked at four sequences of symbols. Each sequence was made up of instances of three symbols. And each sequence was made up of a multiple of three symbols--well, one of them wasn't, but maybe we still needed to wipe off some more paint. This suggested a ternary code: each triad of symbols would map to one character of the secret message.

We still needed to figure out which sets of symbols mapped to which letters. We started testing possibilities and discarding those that yielded garbage.

I started out doing this. Then someone faster than me called out that he'd already eliminated the possibility I was working on. So I started on another--and someone else eliminated it.

I was slow. My team-mates were overtaking me. I wasn't helping the team. These people let me ride in their van and I was letting them down. I was useless. I wandered a few steps away from the group so I wouldn't hear their speedy progress.

OK, slowly testing ternary codes wasn't helpful. What if this code wasn't ternary? What if it was Morse? Maybe one symbol was dot, one was dash, and one was a separator? I tried it. The first sets of symbols gave me "SAY MODEL...". I was getting English--not garbage. I wasn't useless. I'd saved the team time and effort.

Thanks to this, I'd be a lot more relaxed through the rest of the game.

(Lesson learned: If you're a second-tier solver, you're not useless.)

Seconds after I announced my find, the quick solvers had the message: SAY MODEL ENTER SEAMAN. (The "SAY" was actually "BAY"--we'd failed to uncover a symbol at the very beginning. This had also helped fool us into thinking each symbol sequence had a multiple of three symbols.) We were already on our way to Sausalito as we called Game Control to tell them our answer.

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