Operation Justice Unlimited: We Live To See Another Dawn

Game Control told us to go enjoy the sunrise at the Len Turner Vista Point in Belmont looking over Crystal Springs Reservoir. It was a gray morning, and the sunrise wasn't so clear, but there was a puzzle there to keep Team Mystic Fish occupied.

It was a picture showing superheroes, and five of them had speech balloons full of code. "OUT DOC U BED", "IN U COD OF I" "YET PI KID I PUT" "LILY GOO ON T" "POOP I OILY EVE X FIT IN"

Our DRUID told us "The stenographer at the JLA/Avengers conference turned out to be an evil llama in disguise, so they fired him. What's worse, he couldn't type. Can you make any sense of this?" Ah ha--stenographer... type. Probably this was a clue based on keyboards. Also, looking at the text, we saw clusters of 1-4 letters. It looked like Morse code.

What if the keyboard's right-hand letters represented dot and the left-hand letters represented dash? Or the other way around? We got garbage. What if the top row represented dash and other rows represented dot? Variations on this got us more garbage. I quickly narrowed in on the word "POOP" as useful for eliminating false theories in a hurry. It was a cluster of four letters close to each other on the keyboard.

Then we had a visitor: a guy outside the van motioned that he wanted to talk to us. It was dawn at a scenic overlook, and we weren't expecting to talk to anyone who wasn't part of The Game. But this was a bustling morning at this scenic overlook. The guy was an organizer for the Tour de Peninsula. I knew this bike ride: it was the furthest I had ever bicycled on purpose.

This guy couldn't just say "It's a big bike ride," though. He explained it. And then he over-explained it. I tried to concentrate on Morse, but couldn't. The guy finally got to the point: the Tour wanted to set up a water stop at this scenic vista. But here were mysterious vans, blocking the way. Would we be gone soon? We would, but there would be more on the way soon. We encouraged him to call up Game Control so that Game Control could skip other teams past this site. And then the guy talked at us a lot more instead of calling up Game Control. We were a van full of people peering at laptop keyboards and scribbling on pieces of paper in a magnet-festooned van out in the middle of nowhere at dawn: couldn't he see we were busy? Eventually, he wandered off. Meanwhile, we kept trying to solve the puzzle.

Alexandra noticed that if the message was Morse code, then the first balloon might contain the words "go to". The rest of the team shouted this idea down: it was so logical that each balloon would contain exactly one word. Why put two in one balloon?

The code text contained no "Q" "A" or "Z"--the leftmost letters on the keyboard. We tried some variations which assumed that the typists hands had been shifted to the right. We got more garbage. We tried some less-likely keyboard-based ideas. Then our theories started wandering far afield. The DRUID had told us that the stenographer had been a "llama". Were we looking at some variation on l33t-speak? Well, probably not.

A van containing a rival team started up and drove away. "Therefore, a solution exists." We redoubled our efforts.

The Tour de Peninsula guy came back to talk at us some more. This time, I succeeded in ignoring him and concentrated on solving. But we got nowhere. And soon after he went away again, we gave up and called Game Control.

We were supposed to look at the bottoms of the letter-forms. In the word "OUT", the bottoms of the "O" and "U" hugged the baseline for a while, so those were dashes. The bottom of the "T" was just a point on the baseline, so that was a dot. The whole keyboard idea had been a red herring.

As we started putting Game Control's big hint into practice, the first thing we saw was that the first speech balloon contained the words "go to".

(Lesson learned: No, really, Alexandra is always right.)

Soon we had the answer: "Go to stone river. Code 'peckish'". Morale was low. What clue had we missed that would have pointed us at the feet of the letters?

(Game Control skipped most teams past this clue. I guess they were being nice to the Tour de Peninsula people.)

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