Operation Justice Unlimited: Beale Cipher, Speech Balloon Variation

Team Mystic Fish's next stop was the promontory by the beach that Anne Lamott calls the world's safest: the one by San Quentin prison. We left a Twinkie calling card, and other teams left calling cards, too. We picked up our next clue: an envelope containing five transparencies and a piece of paper. The transparencies showed word balloons such as found in comic books; most balloons were empty, but some some contained triads of numbers. The paper was divided into three columns.

We contemplated these items in the van on the road shoulder A couple of us stood outside the van's side door, standing extra-close when a car whooshed past. We had a pretty good idea of how to solve this puzzle, but also figured that we were in some trouble.

Five transparencies probably matched five comic books, and we only had four. We figured we needed five free comic books: the City of Heroes give-away which Game Control had sent us plus the four Free Comic Book Day comics they'd encouraged us to pick up. But we hadn't brought our City of Heroes comic. We searched through the comics that we had. For each transparency, we found a page in one comic book such that the transparency's speech balloons matched those on the page. Did I say "for each transparency"? Whoops--actually, we had one transparency left over. We were in trouble, all right.

We called up Game Control to ask for help. Game Control, in their infinite wisdom, mercy, and preparedness had stashed spare copies of the comic books at a business park a few minutes away. Thus, groups which hadn't brought their comics would effectively receive a time penalty as they drove out of their way to peek at these spare comics. (And thus we "sort of" needed a hint for this puzzle.)

We drove to the business park, got the spare comics, and made color copies of the relevant page from City of Heroes. We were back on track. We had a few ideas of how to use the number-triads to glean a message from these pages. The one that worked: Given the numbers X, Y, Z in a transparency's balloon; in the matching speech balloon, look at the Xth line of that balloon, take the Yth word from that line, and extract the Zth letter from that word.

This gives you letters, but how to order them? Draw each letter on the three-column sheet; draw it at a position about at the middle of the relevant speech balloon. Reading down the columns and fudging a bit yielded "ENTER CODE SMASHING".

We called up Game Control to tell them this and request our next location--and got a recording saying that all lines were busy.

Team Snout, Game Control, had prepared for a high volume of calls. They had a sophisticated phone system which would route incoming calls to several phones. They had four volunteers sitting by phones; if all of those were busy, this system could send calls to mobile phones of other volunteers. But this system had a small provisioning error, and all calls went to just one phone line. Team Snout didn't know it was happening--it seemed like there was a low call volume--just one phone line able to handle all of the calls.

Alexandra was worried--we were losing time listening to a busy signal. The San Quentin clue was by the Richmond-San Rafael bridge. Anticipating that the next clue was probably in the East Bay, maybe we should drive across the bridge now?

The rest of the team shouted her down. I helped shout her down--why risk anything when just one more call might reach Game Control? So I felt pretty foolish when we got through to Game Control ten minutes later--and our next clue location was in the East Bay.

(Lesson learned: Alexandra is always right.)

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