| Arrived: 00:23 | Solved: 01:11 | Hints? No | Official Game Control site: Early_Edition |
Our next destination was a chrome sculpture on the median of Westborough Boulevard in South San Francisco underneath 280. Team Mystic Fish sped onward through murky streets. Street lights seemed like small irregularities in a black world of black blackness. I tried my first Rockstar Soda, which was described as a sort of "rotgut Red Bull". It went down like medicine.
Conversation turned towards a topic dear to this result-oriented
team's heart: how long would it take to solve the next clue?
"Two hours"
"I think I think--"
"Twelve minutes"
"Twenty five minutes"
"For new-- we need the lightning insights"
"Well, we've been getting the insights, we just--"
"Twelve minutes from the time I get the data."
I'm not sure how busy Westborough normally is, but at this late hour, we had no problem stopping the van next to the median (blocking a lane of hypothetical traffic) while Wesley hopped out, retrieved a clue, and hopped in. In general, the team didn't try to solve clues while the van was in motion, but in this case some people started solving while Alexandra and Wesley got the van to a gas station. Soon the van was full of gas and we parked in the gas station, an island of light in a dark area.
We were looking at a fake newspaper. It was mostly full of material which teams had contributed as part of their team applications: humorous news articles describing their exploits.
I was very glad to see a vintage Hostess Cupcakes advertisement: Red Tornado in "Clean Sweep".
But mostly we concentrated on the crossword puzzle. It was titled "Antialiasing". Hmm, were we looking for secret identities? The first clue was "The Incredible Hulk", the answer was elven letters. "DAVIDBANNER" was 11 letters long.
On another page of the newspaper was a grid labelled "Crossword solution", but it didn't have the answers. Instead, it was just a repeat of the grid with numbers in some of the squares. One each of the numbers one through 27. No doubt we were looking for a 27-letter message, and we could pull the letters out of the crossword as we finished it. We had this puzzle nailed!
Except that we didn't. It's not so easy to answer the question "What was _______'s secret identity?" The problem is nicely illustrated in this excerpt from the paper "Marvel Universe looks almost like a real social network" (2002. R. Alberich, J. Miro-Julia, F. Rosselló)
It is necessary to clarify what we understood by a character when building up [the Marvel Universe]. On the one hand, it is quite common for the same person in the Marvel Universe to take different personalities. As an example, recall Hank Pym, one of the original and most popular Avengers: it has been known, in different periods, as the Ant-Man, the Giant-Man, Goliath, YellowJacket, and has even appeared simply as the world's greatest biochemist Dr. Henry Pym in many books. On the other hand, from time to time different characters may assume the same personality: for instance, besides Hank Pym, there have been at least two more Goliaths: Clint Barton (who changed from Hawkeye to Goliath, before returning back to Hawkeye) and Erik Josten (who was Power Man before becoming the third Goliath, and after that he took the name of Atlas, being actually the second character with this nickname)...
Perhaps the puzzle's designer had put in the straightforward David Banner first to reassure teams that they were indeed looking for secret identities. There were a few other easy ones sprinkled in there. But there were plenty of obscure ones, too. It had always been a little embarrassing to know that The Green Lantern was originally Hal Jordan. Now it was embarrassing and inadequate.
David Walker directed our search on this one. He called out names of heroes, and checked to see which secret identities matched. Someone else did Google searches so that we could track down the obscure identities. Eventually, we had our answer: "TELEPHONE AND ENTER CODE TRANSIT".