Operation Justice Unlimited: Light Reading

According to Game Control, our next clue was up in a tree. Specifically, it was up in a tree in Pacifica at a hill near the intersection of Lundy and Ridgeway. I cursed. When I had picked quotes from Hostess ads to put on our calling cards, I'd passed up using any from "The Incredible Hulk in 'Up a Tree'", thinking that I wouldn't have a use for it. I had been wrong.

As the Team Mystic Fish van pulled into the cul-de-sac in Pacifica, we saw a van leaving. Then ours was the only van there. We weren't in first place, but we were ahead of the main pack.

Alexandra sat in the van. I stepped out to stretch my legs. And the in-shape people went running up the hill in search of the clue. Soon they returned with something strange: a small circuit board covered with chips, switches, and LEDs--and a piece of cardboard shaped like a cape. Was it some kind of super-circuit?

We started pressing switches. There was one obvious switch, and the cape was attached to another. One switch lit up the LEDs. There was one green LED and a few reds. The reds lit up in a strange flickering way: they toggled on and off faster than we could see. Were we supposed to slow them down enough so that we could read their message?

Wesley, searching for inspiration, rustled through the box of crap we'd picked up earlier. He put on the X-Ray specs. He asked for the circuit, and we laughed as he brought it up to his face, his specs red with light from the LEDs. But we stopped laughing when he said "Hey, I see something!"

The X-Ray specs hadn't helped--they hadn't even let him see the bones in his hand. But someone had handed him the circuit while its LEDs flashed. When Wesley had taken the circuit and pulled it towards him, he'd seen something as it moved: the lights were making letters.

It was a persistence-of-vision gizmo. When an LED lit up, your eye continued to see its light even after the LED had moved or turned off. By swiftly moving this line of LEDs in front of your eyes, you could for an instant see a fragment of text. Was this the coolest thing that was ever cool? Maybe.

Soon Wesley was waving the gizmo sideways at us while we tried to read the words. It seemd to be a story about Batman and Robin: we caught words like "Riddler," "Robin," and "hostages." But it was pretty clear that we were missing several words. When we started to catch more words like "pee" and "bladders", I speculated that we were reading an excerpt from some Dynamic Duo golden shower slash fiction which we could find on the web--but I was wrong.

Ours had been the only van there, but now another van was driving up. If we stayed put, we could not conceal our waving LEDs; soon other teams would figure out what the lights were for. We hopped back into the van, waved at the new arrivals, and drove a couple of blocks away, around a corner.

Though the X-Ray specs hadn't been so helpful, our box of crap did contain something worthwhile: a piece of string with a zipper-pull-like thing attached to one end. The circuit board had a hook in it which attached to the zipper-pull very nicely. Now instead of awkwardly waving the board from side to side, someone could whirl it around in a continuous loop.

Soon the whole team was out of the van, standing on the sidewalk, noting down the story. Pressing the button would advance the story one sentence, and also set the green LED blinking a few times. So we wrote down each sentence and also the number of green-blinks associated with that sentence.

What if we used the green-blinks number as an index, taking the Nth word of each part of the story? That gave us "Wetter the I it dries what gets." Oh--what if we had one word wrong? We were close to "What gets wetter the more it dries?" What if this story about the Riddler resulted in a famous riddle? Someone blurted out: "A towel!" And when we called up Game Control to confirm, that was indeed the answer.

(We were off by one word: we'd written down an "any more" as "anymore".)

| comment? | | home |