Operation Justice Unlimited: Bless The Darkness, Destroy The Candle

Our next destination was Montara State Beach. The Team Mystic Fish van made its way North along a road that wound through darkness. Alexandra was driving; she was impressed with the tight turns in the road. She encouraged us to wear our seatbelts. I felt beside me for my seatbelt buckle. I didn't find that, but I did jab my finger on the tip of a pencil that had slipped under the seat cushions. I gave up on the seatbelt and asked Alexandra not to hit anything. And she didn't.

Soon we arrived at the beach parking lot, easily spotted because the Scooby Team's Mystery Machine van was already there. They said that we were the second team to arrive.

Enough Sand

Our instructions from Game Control said that our next clue was somewhere on Montara Beach. So we took a walk on the beach at night, searching for clues. We wandered with flashlights and walkie-talkies. We played our lights over sandstone cliffs. It was a cool evening and the sound of waves was constant. It was a great night for a walk on the beach.

As I was searching, someone walked up to me, double-checking the places I was searching. I asked, "Do we even know what we're searching for?"

"Nope."

"Oh! Your voice sound unfamiliar. Are you even on my team?"

"Nope."

"Oh well, have a nice night!" After I said that, we went our separate ways.

We scanned the cliffs. I had walked most of the way North along the beach when someone on the walkie-talkie said that Advil had found the clue already. In hindsight, I should have realized something--this meant that I'd walked too far. In my sleepy state I was thinking that Advil had arrived ahead of us--but they hadn't; that was the Scoobies. Too bad I didn't figure that out: Advil had shown up after us, and no Advil person had passed me on my journey along the beach: therefore, I was North of the clue, and should have turned back.

After about half an hour, we had to call up Game Control for a hint. Even with the hint, we had a hard time finding the clue--it was not so easy for the hint-givers to describe one spot on a sandstone cliff.

But we did find it.

We called back Game Control. We'd had such a tough time finding the candle, even with their hints, that they wanted to know our hints on how to find it.

WAX HACKS

We faced a wax candle. Coffee beans sat embedded in the wax. According to our DRUID, the superhero Too Much Coffee Man had been experimenting with aromatherapy, and this was the result. Somehow we had to get a message out of this.

Was it a scented candle? It looked like the candle consisted of an inner cylinder of differently-colored wax surrounded by a layer of coffee-bean-embedded wax. Maybe the inner cylinder consisted of layers with different scents? I tried a scratch-and-sniff test on the candle's top, and got nothing.

Maybe we should light the candle? A preclue had told us to bring fire. But before we lit the candle, it was time to get out of the parking lot, away from prying eyes of other teams. We drove a ways up Highway 1 until we reached some turnout.

We piled out of the van before lighting the candle. Somehow, an open flame in a van full of scattered papers seemed like a bad idea. Lighting the candle revealed... a lit candle. It was a double-wick candle. was that our clue? As the candle burned down, would it switch between single- and double-wick? The burning was going slowly, wasn't releasing any scents.

We needed to explore the depths of this candle more quickly than a candle flame would allow. Should we hit it with a hammer? Slice it with knives? Tear it apart with our bare hands? Eventually, the precision-minded folks won out: we put out the candle and stood back as Eric cut into it with a knife.

This revealed a plastic sheet sandwiched between the inner wax cylinder and the coffee-and-wax shell. We pulled the sheet out of what was now a mass of crumbled and molten wax. It contained letters. A message hidden under a layer of wax? Hadn't Herodotus described this trick in the tale of how Demaratus warned the Spartans of a pending attack by the Persians? This was a great variation on a classic theme.

But there was more to solving this clue than digging it out of the wax, assuming that the answer wasn't "GBYJV GQRJ UYQRYNS QEP"

Vigenere Visionaries

"GBYJV GQRJ UYQRYNS QEP" was more than I could handle.

The code seemed to be divided into words. The first two words were of the pattern "_ _ _ _ _   _ _ _ _". To be consistent with other clues, this was probably "ENTER CODE...". But it obviously wasn't a simple substitution cipher:

GBYJV GQRJ
enter code

A simple substitution cipher wouldn't use G and J to represent 'e'.

Alexandra piped up: It's probably Vigenere. I shook my head--it couldn't be Vigenere. Vigenere was too hard to solve; didn't it require computers?

But it didn't necessarily require computers. We were pretty sure that the first two words were "ENTER CODE". The strong solvers went to work. If this code was a Vigenere, then we were looking for a series of offsets. So we wanted to look at the code text and look at our guess at the solution, and look at the resulting offsets.

  G  B  Y  J  V     G  Q  R  J
 -2-14 -5 -5 -4    -4 -2-14 -5
  e  n  t  e  r     c  o  d  e

This looked very promising: it looked like there was a repeated pattern of offsets: "-2, -14, -5" appeared twice. What if we tried repeating that pattern of offsets? Would we gt a complete code message?

  G  B  Y  J  V     G  Q  R  J     U  Y  Q  R  Y  N  S     Q  E  P
 -2-14 -5 -5 -4    -4 -2-14 -5    -5 -4 -4 -2-14 -5 -2   -14 -5 -5
  e  n  t  e  r     c  o  d  e     p  u  m  p  k  i  n     m  a  n

"enter code pumpkin man"? That didn't make much sense, but it was English, and when we called up Game Control, they liked it fine. As we drove off towards Half Moon Bay we figured out the code word that would give us that pattern of offsets: "coffee".

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