Operation Justice Unlimited: Candy Weirdness Transcends National Boundaries

The Acme Scenery company's warehouse facade had a giant mime statue, providing a useful landmark. When Team Mystic Fish arrived, Wesley hopped out of the van, ran up to the statue, and retrieved our clue.

We drove a little ways away to solve. We didn't open up the van doors this time. That was fine with me. This place felt pretty spooky; I didn't want to stand outside the van while solving here; there was the risk of being eaten by a grue.

We beheld a small tub of candy. Candy marketing rarely makes sense. You may have heard me talk about my misadventure with a candy that had contained collagen. Why had the manufacturers added collagen? I don't know. Who first came up with the idea of naming a candy "Starburst"? Who thinks of a nova as tasty? What market were the Starburst people targeting? Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, perhaps? I don't know.

This brings us to this tub of small candies. It fit with the theme of this Game: it was named Cadbury Heroes. Who were these Cadbury Heroes? Looking at the artwork on the tub, they were: a piece of candy carrying a bindle stick, a piece of candy wearing Elton John-style glasses, a piece of candy attached to a golden spring, ... and other pieces of candy that had been accessorized in non-heroic non-candylike ways.

We had not yet opened the tub, and I was already boggled.

Inside the tub were many small candies. Some of these had been tampered with: slips of paper like fortune-cookie fortunes hid inside the wrappers, wrapped around the candies. Each fortune had a sentence of text containing two words in red print and two words in blue For example, two "Whole Nut" candies (pictured on the tub wearing top hat) contained slips of paper with the messages "Read about boa in magazine and how hobo learns hula" and "Nice bed for hobo has box spring and crown."

We gathered data. We had 12 slips of paper. We had pairs of colored words--and each colored word seemed to describe a character on the outside of our tub. Should we consider the position of each character on the tub? That would give us pairs of positions--probably a semaphore message.

Dwight took charge on this one, quickly figuring out what message we would get using various theories. First we tried a wrong idea of mine: what if the candy which contained the fortune indicated the position of the semaphore character's "flagman"? It would have taken me quite a while to figure out that this was nonsense, but Dwight was quick. Then we disproved someone else's wrong idea. Then we tried the right idea: If the message is "boa... magazine... hobo... hula", then treat that as two flags: one held to point from the boa-wearer to the magazine-reader (leftward) and one held to point from the hobo to the hula-twirler (rightward) If that's two semaphore flags, then that character is an R.

Soon we had EEGIIKLNNNRT. How to order these letters? Well, past answers had the word "ENTER". So we thought about "ENTER GIIKLNN." Some genius word puzzler saw "INKLING" in that mess. Thus, we soon called Game Control and received instructions away from that spooky place.

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