Operation Justice Unlimited: Arranging The Tubes

At the parking garage at San Pedro square in San Jose, the van experienced an amazingly unlikely mechanical failure which forced Alexandra to park it at a red zone out in front. While she sat in the van, the rest of the team grabbed walkie-talkies and headed in.

Watch That Step, It's a Doozy

The elevator let us out on the roof. We saw another team at the roof's edge, looking straight down. They looked up at us and one of them said, "He already jumped." We must have had alarmed expressions on our faces, because he said, "You'll understand soon, don't worry," and stepped into the recently-vacated elevator.

We looked around, and soon spotted the footprints drawn in blue chalk on the floor. They led up to the edge of the roof. Eric joked "I guess we're supposed to follow the steps and jump off the roof," but no-one took him up on it.

Then someone spotted the other blue footprints, the ones in the parking lot across the street. It was as if someone with blue-chalk feet at jumped off of this rooftop and glided down, landed in the parking lot across the street, and walked up to the trunk of a car. Didn't we have a mysterious key in our box of crap?

The rest of the team ran down the stairs to the ground floor. I waited for the slow elevator. By the time I reached the ground floor, Dwight had run down, run out of the parking garage, crossed the street, and was halfway across the parking lot. People from the other team still had the car's trunk open, and so Dwight picked up our clue box without confirming that our mysterious key was useful here.

The Last Color Matching Variation

The group was punchy. It took us a while to get organized for this clue. The van was parked illegally. We needed to stay close to the van in case we had to move it. The van was an oven, so we didn't want to stay in the van. A couple of minutes of grumbling ensued as people tumbled into and out of the van. Eventually, Alexandra drove us to a bank parking lot, where an amazingly unlikely mechanical failure forced us to park in a red zone in the shade next to a planter.

We piled out of the van. Soon we had the box open and its contents spread out over a whiteboard work surface. We were looking at some strands of plastic which had been painted in a few colors along with a number of black dots at the end. We were looking at some pieces of copper tubing of different shapes and colors. All this was in a box labelled

ACME Porta-Portal Deluxe

Pocket-sized! Disposable! Designer colors! Safely harnesses trans-dimensional forces for consistent, reliable wormhole alignment!

Contents:

• 6 reusable copper-alloy capacitive couplers
• 11 one-time use suspension elements
• 4 non-conductive spacers

Keep hyperspace clean! Dispose of used suspension elements properly!

The reference to portals got us thinking about color matching. The strands of plastic had parts painted in color. Someone noticed that two strands' red parts were the same length. Maybe we were supposed to lay the strands next to each other? If it were like the chicken wire puzzle, then we could look at adjacent sets of black dots after we had matched colors and maybe notice an interesting pattern. We tried this. And then we tried taking the matching color-parts and stringing them inside of matching-color tubing.

I say "We tried..." this and "We noticed..." that, but I did not try nor notice these things. I was swaying; I was having trouble keeping my feet. The world moved around me very fast. I was not 100% useless: when the breeze blew our plastic strands onto the ground, I rescued them and brought them back to our work surface. Perhaps this allowed people with still-functioning neurons to concentrate on the puzzle.

The matching-strands inside matching-tubing was almost working, but not in all cases. But maybe we needn't match strands to strands. Maybe we should just take one strand at a time, put it inside of tubing. We could always come up with something that fit. But what information were we supposed to get out of it? We had a few ideas.

Alexandra suggested that they might form letters. What if we put each strand into the appropriate copper tubing? The shape of the copper tubing might always form a letter. Sure enough, Eric held up one complicated configuration and it looked like a letter. We were impressed--both with our progress and with Eric's hands. They shook way off the Richter scale--he had just had a caffeinated cola, and it was sitting on top of a lot of other caffeinated things. His metabolism had achieved a higher plane.

Soon the nimble-fingered Brian Larson was at work threading strands through tubing and we noted down what we thought the letters were. But they did not form a message. In the end we called up Game Control. We were on the right track: we were using the right method. We had about half of the letters right. But we needed to re-try some of our letters.

Soon we had our solution: "GENESIS". We called up Game Control. They congratulated us on completing the Justice Unlmited Game and told us to drive to the finish line, where a party was taking place.

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