Operation Justice Unlimited: He Was A Daredevil

At McLaren Park, I was one of the last people out of the Team Mystic Fish van, and did not follow my team-mates to the water tower. Instead, I took this opportunity to take a pee behind a shrub. As always when peeing outdoors, I had a sense of disappointment, a feeling that civilization was letting me down: why wasn't there an 24-hour public restroom here? Night had fallen, and I looked down on a peninsula of lights. Cool night air blew over me, carrying away the heat of the van.

Soon the main body of Team Mystic Fish was back with the clue. As if climbing the water tower hadn't been hard enough, they'd had to scale a barrier which safety-conscious builders had erected around the tower. It sounded like quite an adventure.

And now we had a clue to solve. We had an audio CD. The first track sounded like a piece of movie soundtrack or a radio play. The second track was a voice telling us that the rest of the stuff on the CD was not a clue. The rest of the CD was full of old Radio Justice content.

So we listened to the first track. It was sound from the movie Daredevil. Over this was laid some sounds: high tones and low tones. The tones came at varying intervals.

Daredevil was blind, so the first thing we tried was Braille. We got nothing. So it was time to get creative. Should we look at the timing at which the tones appeared? Most of them seemed to fit with a beat. But some did not.

John Owens of Team Advil stopped by the van to chat. Team Advil had just run the Genome Game a few weeks before. Alexandra and John talked a little about clues in this game versus the clues in Advil's. But eventually John wandered off and it was time to get back to solving the clue at hand.

Didn't Daredevil perceive the word via something like SONAR or RADAR? Maybe high tones were outgoing pings and low tones were incoming pings. But the number of high and low tones didn't match, so that wasn't it. Maybe it was Morse? No, it wasn't. Our theories spiraled outwards towards silliness.

It was interesting to watch ideas travel around the van. The van interior's soft surfaces muffled sounds. If you sat in the front or back row and had a brilliant idea, you couldn't announce it to the rest of the van without raising your voice to an unacceptable level. Instead, ideas traveled row by row. If the person in the back seat had an idea, he'd say it in a conversational tone--and only the people in the third row would hear it. If one of them thought that the idea was worth relaying forward, the idea would spread; if neither of them did, then the idea would stop there.

Someone walked past our van outside with a strange twisting motion. I looked up as they went past. He had something large in his hand--which he slapped onto the van of Team Blood and Bones, which was right in front of us. It was one of the magnetic fish decorations that had been on the outside of our van.

I took this as an excuse to hop out and stretch my legs: I would retrieve our magnet. I stepped over to Blood and Bones' van, and they looked up at me with alarm when I retrieved the fish--who was this guy yanking stuff off of their van? Back at the Team Mystic Fish van, I saw that we had a new magnet. It was a small one saying "Carl Pauling was here"--a reference to Team Advil's recent The Genome Game. Perhaps John Owens had left it for us.

Soon I was back in the van, failing to extract sense from our clue.

In the end, we called Game Control: they were surprised when they heard that we'd tried Braille and got nonsense: we were supposed to use Braille. There were many blushing faces around the van. We tried Braille again, this time being extra-careful. And instead of nonsense, we got a message: "ACME SCENERY CODE COYOTE"

We called up Game Control with this answer and found out that our next destination was the Acme Scenery shop in scenic Brisbane, California.

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