Operation Justice Unlimited: Handling Addictive Substances

The Team Mystic Fish van was in Half Moon Bay's city center. Dwight was awake again. Ilse the talking GPS unit was telling us to turn left.

"Oops, we're not in a left turn lane."
    "At this hour of the night, this is a perfectly valid left turn lane."

We parked tha van, hopped out, and scattered to find John Carter Park. I was with the the group that went in the wrong direction, and thus was not freaked out to see a statue of a pumpkin man loom up out of the darkness. Which is probably just as well, because I scare easily.

Soon we gathered back at the van with a box full of clue. We drove back to Half Moon Bay's main retail street. Street lights cut through the drizzle.

You may recall that I'd received a freebie Hulk Heroclix toy on Free Comic Book Day. Do you know what Heroclix is? It's a game played with these little SuperHero figurines. It's one of those games where you can collect the pieces. You can keep buying more figurines, convincing yourself that you're improving your stable of superheroes. It's an addictive habit. We moved forward with due caution.

In the base of each Heroclix figurine is a slot, revealing part of a dial within the base. There are numbers printed on the wheel. When you turn the dial one "click", a different set of numbers is revealed. The numbers represent the hero's abilities: attack strength, defense, speed. When a hero starts the game, he is at full strength, with high numbers. But if he gets hit, you rotate his dial by a click: revealing a lower set of numbers. If a hero gets hit too many times, all of the numbers become "KO"--knocked out.

We faced a box containing an audio CD and a few Heroclix. Each Heroclix depicted s different character. And each of these characters was mentioned in the first track of the audio CD.

In Detroit, T.O. Morrow is speeding to escape a detonating bomb. Near Mazatlan, a Skrull Agent is defending against an escaped convict. In Downtown Los Angeles, a Checkmate Agent is attacking the diamond exchange...

Each character was attacking, defending, or speeding. That suggested that we should choose one of the numbers from the base-dial: attack strength, defense, or speed. But how should we position the dials? When they first arrived, they were all "KO". We tried turning each dial so that the Hero was at full strength. Taking the appropriate number from each dial gave us... numbers. What did these numbers mean? Maybe 1 was A, 2 was B... this gave us garbage. Maybe they were indexes into the city names? More garbage.

The nimble-fingered Brian Larson wandered out of the van and sat on a scenic bench on the sidewalk. He had the right idea--it was cool outside. But it was also drizzly. My notes were soon covered with dew.

The audio CD had mentioned a strange set of international cities. They sounded like the kind of cities you'd see if you tried to tell your computer what time zone it was in. If you choose Los Angeles, it tells you that's Zulu time plus 8 hours. Maybe we should offset our numbers by the time zone numbers. Maybe we should take the number of the Checkmate Agent (in Downtown Los Angeles) and increase it by 8? This gave us more garbage.

A time zone was sort of like a measure of rotation. Maybe instead of spinning each Heroclix' dial to full strength, we should have dialed it as indicated by the time zone. We tried that--and got more garbage. There were many things to try, and we tried them for about an hour.

We were ready to call up Game Control for a hint. It seemed like we'd probably tried each of the ingredients of the solution. But it would take us a long time to find the right combination from among all the wrong paths.

Do you remember the Game Control phone system provisioning problem? It re-surfaced at this time. The Game Control hint line said that all operators were busy. We sat watching mist and drizzle. And called again. And all operators were still busy. And still busy. And for the first few minutes, this was nice. It was a chance to unwind, to think about nothing. But as time went on, and as all hint lines kept on being busy, things became tense. How much time were we losing?

About half an hour later, we got through. We'd been on the right track and a few wrong ones. Game Control was surprised that we hadn't solved the puzzle; we'd tried all of the pieces. Rotating the dials based on time zones was right, and the resulting numbers would give us 1=A, 2=B numbers. But we hadn't considered British Summer Time. We'd calculated all of our time zones based on offset from London time, not from GMT time. So all of our offsets were off by one. Oh, ah.

When Alexandra started saying, "...and could you make a note that we waited 28 minutes while all hint lines were busy?" her voice was calm. But by the time she finished, there was an edge there. We'd lost momentum. She wanted it back.

We gave the appropriate Heroclixen an extra twist and soon had an answer for Game Control. We were ready for our next clue.

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