Ghost Patrol Playtest - Final Part
(Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
Ghost 7: Here I Go Again
It was back to the hotel analog — aka Casa de Ashby — for our next ghost. One of the upstairs rooms had been transformed into a temporary hotel room; we were the first team there. Lining the wall was a series of gold records from different heavy metal bands, each with a number from one to ten spelled out underneath it. I heard one of my teammates note that the fact that they were spelled out was important as I excused myself to make use of the facilities. By the time I got back a few minutes later, they had solved the puzzle. To this day, I don't know how it works.
The early gray of dawn was showing as we got a box filled with bottles. Heading out to the van, we put the bottles on the drafting table and began to consider what to do with them. They were all corked or otherwise stoppered, which impressed me for some reason. Each bottle was filled with liquid and...
I blinked.
By the time I opened my eyelids, it was more than a half-hour later. The sun was up. The bottles were lined up in a row on the table and Brian from GC had joined us in the van. Jonathan was attempting to blow notes on the bottles. My first though after my inadvertent nap, similar to a famous bowl of petunias, was “Oh no, not again.” (Our disastrous showing at Iron Puzzler II had had a bottle puzzle that consisted of blowing on bottles to get notes out of them; it was a frustrating puzzles.) Brian was kind of walking us through the clue since it was a music puzzle and our abilities with music puzzles are our main weakness. Also, we'd completely missed the fact that we needed to use the UV light to reveal the right liquid level for each bottle. Because of said past experience and because I'd missed most of what was going on, I just watched and didn't even try to help.
Whatever lead we may have had in the unofficial competition was lost due to our performance on that clue. And we felt bad, too, since it was Brian's puzzle. I have to say our poor performance was more a reflection on our team than on the puzzle; for all I know it was beautifully constructed and amazingly elegant.
It was at this point that we lost our handler, probably to the lead team. It seemed kind of weird not having David or Jenn around, like there was too much empty space in the van as we headed to our next clue.
After the normal joys of finding parking, we followed the SHaRC under a freeway overpass, where strange metal statues were. We spotted a member of GC across the street, but she emphatically waved us away. Our clue was on this side. We found it in the form of a CD behind one of the statues.
This clue put a little bit of moral back into our team. Each track had two songs mixed into it and the titles of the song were anagrammed into another amusing title. Removing the letters in the actual song title from the fake song title left a letter, and thus the solve.
The capture was nearby. We had only done three clues for this ghost. Slightly depressing.
Ghost 8 – Idea Pooping
The sun had broke through the early morning clouds and it had turned into a gorgeous morning as we pulled up for our next ghost at Lake Merritt in Oakland. On our way there, Jonathan finally got in contact with BANG Erik who had been planning on joining us at around 11am the previous day. He hadn't been feeling well, but could now make it. Jonathan gave him directions to the park and we got out of the van.
There we say the impressive figure of Jesse in his lab coat and Meat Machine throwing bocce balls over an impromptu line. They were just finishing up as we arrived, so we took balls in hand and since there were four of us, each tossed a ball at the jack. Jesse consulted a sheet at exclaimed happily “Amazing!” (or was it “Awesome!”) Eric immediately got out his clipboard and started writing as we continued to make several additional bowls. It became clear pretty quickly that each bowl, depending on the order away from the jack would get another word of praise, such as “Va-va-voom!”, “Terrific!”, or “Great!” (to which Jonathan replied, “Great? That's all you can say about that bowl? How about 'glorious'?”), each of which started with a different letter of the alphabet.
Jonathan and Eric broke the code within a few bowls and Eric had the entire code written down in a few minutes. Okay, so what now? We rolled a few more just to make sure, exaggerating distances to the extreme in order to be exact, such as the time I threw the blue ball twenty-five feet from the jack in order to make absolutely sure it was the farthest away. Nifty encoding scheme verified, but what did we decode with it?
While discussing, someone looked over at the balls left by the other two teams and decided that it wasn't a case of GC being too tired to pick up the their balls after all; they were, in fact, the message we needed to decode. “GUM” was the answer and apparent flavor of ghost. Jonathan and I had a short discussion as to whether gum actually had flavor as we moved on.
(At GC HQ at the actual event, I found out that the answer had been changed to “GNU” in a small tribute to our team. Well, that and mainly that it worked with the constraints of the puzzles.)
Our next location was a bit away, but we decided to walk it. We wandered past the real bocce courts and beyond a professional croquet court — which had people in their cricket whites playing that morning. We came to another one of those “It's straight ahead, but we can't walk on water” situations and curved around the lake to find Meat Machine sitting at a small labyrinth. There we got handed a piece of paper with a bunch of ones and zeros on it.
We stared at it for a while. Different theories were postulated. None worked. At first, we thought they could be Morse, but then later groupings were eight digits long. We thought it could be binary, but then why would there be both “0” and “000”? After about ten minutes we began to run dry of ideas. Given or I postulated something, but Jonathan said it wouldn't work (something that had happened earlier when Jonathan argued against “dogfish”, not believing it was a real fish). Eric took exception to this and said, “Don't poop on an idea!” “Until it poops out on you,” I added.
I thought then that should be our new team motto.
We continued to stare at the sheet of paper covered in only two digits. We thought about taking a hint, but Jonathan convinced us that there was no real hurry. Meat Machine was still there. It was a beautiful morning. BANG Erik was to be joining us at that spot shortly (at least in theory). A nearby squirrel hadn't been able to give Given his nut yet, despite several attempts. And we only had a few puzzles to go before this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience was over. So we stayed.
Now at least twice in the past, I'd had an ideas for solutions that I dismissed as unlikely, which later turned out to be right. I now suddenly had a very crazy idea, and hoping to avoid the mistakes of the past, decided to work it out until it did poop out on me.
I grabbed the paper from Jonathan and twisted around. (I won't go into the details of my theory here since, although improbable, someone could read this far and I could develop a puzzle using the idea.) I worked it and worked it and it almost seemed to be bearing fruit. Based on what I was doing, Jonathan deduced my theory, got the paper back and tried it himself. “You know, it's actually kind of working!” But it didn't work completely and we gave up on it.
Jonathan called Greg for a hint. Greg didn't answer. As he was leaving a message, though, he cracked the puzzle.
[Spoiler: The still improbable reader may wish to avoid the next few paragraphs if they want to solve the puzzle themselves; instead, they should probably click the picture to the right.]
It was all the codes we'd previous thought, but only back to back. Decoding the first set yielded MOPERS. As Jonathan set about decoding the second set using binary instead of Braille this time, I mentioned that MOPERS is Morse with an extra P. That was our solve: Each of the classic encodings was being used to encode a word that was an anagram of the code plus one letter. Eric and Jonathan figured the last set would decode to ATMOSPHERE before even trying it, since they had seen the same word used in the same way in a Shinteki Decathlon.
Greg showed up and said, “I hear you guys need a hint?”
(I later told Ian, the puzzle's author, that it was the puzzle that went from most frustrating to most satisfying in the shortest period of time. I was actually kind of disappointed when they didn't use it for the Game.)
In talking with Greg a little about the puzzle, he mentioned that they planned to have teams retrieve the clue from the labyrinth using RC cars. It depended on the budget and feasibility, though. We thought it was a great idea and only wished we could have tried it.
The SHaRC indicated our next clue was back the way we came. In a real game, deciding to walk the long walk would have been disastrous.
Back at the van, we finally met up with BANG Erik who had parked next to us. We got him up to speed as much as possible as we walked past the once bocce ball-covered field and on towards our destination. We rounded a corner and saw that the lake again stretched in our way and would make for quite a detour.
“Let's take the van.”
With our newly-acquired fifth player in tow, we parked near an Obama rally that, surprising to me, seemed to have attracted very few San Francisco attendees. With propaganda-ish music blaring over the speakers, we crossed the street to where three colorful Z's were standing. Meat Machine was just finishing up and leaving as we got there and got our clue: A series of Taboo cards, each with a dark side. On the front were five words, as in real Taboo, that players weren't allowed to say. It was up to us to determine what the actual word was, though; that part was blank.
We quickly figured out that all the front words began with “TA”. On the back was a ghost saying a “BOO”-related word. Some of them had half-circles on the edges. All of the stickers had images on them. For some reason, I said, “Let's make a ring using the stickers to join them together.” I'm still not sure why. The idea apparently had its merits, though, and we put the stickers on cards that had word portions in common. The easiest sticker was probably “BOO”, which connected TABOO to BOO-BOO. With them all connected, a series of Roman numerals were created running inside and outside of the ring. A discussion broke out as to which order to read the numerals, since we had all assumed they stood for letters. At some point, though, Jonathan pointed out that the outside read “PRWNL”. “It has to be PERIWINKLE,” he declared.
I offered the SHaRC to our newly-arrived teammate so he could get a capture in. He declined.
Finale – A View to the Killed
Our end game was at a Mountain View Cemetery. Honestly, it's probably the largest cemetery I've ever been to. We reached a van point at pretty much the high point on the mountain. It was a gorgeous view and I tried to take a picture of it. Unfortunately, my digital camera was set to “movie”, which I didn't notice until later. All I got was one frame grab and a short movie of my shoes.
Everyone was there. GC Brian greeted us and explained what was going on. For the actual event, the OWL would explain this all, but right now it was him. The ghosts in containment had congealed into a single boss ghost and when this happened, teams would actually get to chat with the nerd ghost (nerd ghost? I hadn't seen enough puzzles for the previous two ghosts to get a handle on their personalities). He would explain that instead of trying to contain the ghosts, which only made them angry, it was better to figure out how to heal them emotionally... give them the proverbial closure. They would then leave this earthly plane forever.
At the circular base of the gravesite we stopped at were the final puzzles, several of which had slime associated with them. Had we actually done any slime analysis like I told the non-navigating, non-driving portion of our team to, we could identify which ghost belong to which puzzle by finding similar identifying slime at the site. Instead, though, those two teammates had been in the back of the bus solving puzzle steps we backsolved or guessed at. That or they were watching the animations that each capture code elicited from the OWL. Although I had heard them talking about them, I only had a chance to sneak a peak at the first one and pretty much forgot about them until this point.
We gathered up the puzzles and failed to identify the slime. To my horror, two of the samples I collected were labeled as the same ghost. Someone mentioned that there may have been two different slime samples out for the same ghost. It didn't matter in the end.
Eric grabbed one puzzle with pictures of famous people on it, some of them famously dead. He solved it quickly without even knowing which ghost it was for and Brian, again acting as our OWL, gave us the story as to how we had mollified that ghost. Jonathan figured a puzzle involving pets probably belonged to the Benign Booga and solved it pretty much on his own. We got another Brian ending. A bunch of phrases on a sheet of paper seemed like the same font that was used for the St. Mary's park flower puzzle, so we figured it was the Chinatown ghost. Another one consisted of letters on a grid. There were some interesting parts to it, but nothing that I could figure out. Given was working on a bunch of cards that had been divided in two.
Noticing our stalling on these final few puzzles, Brian mentioned that we may want to concentrate more on each ghost's motivation, revealed in the ending videos. Oh, and we may need scissors for the letters for the grid one.
We gathered up the clues and got back in the van to watch each of the videos again. They were impressive, though only in rough draft form. One or two only had a description of what the animation was to be like. But it was enough to solve the puzzles: We split the letter grid in two and actually saw the ending animation of the bi-polar ghost being split in two. I inferred that half of his personality had gone to hell, while the other went to purgatory. We then used the honor-binary system to solve the kung-fu fright's problem.
Up next was the circus lady. Her heart had been broken by another circus performer, so one of the Eric's figured we only needed to put the heart cards back together, mending her broken heart. He pointed out that the letters those cards represented anagrammed to TIME, the perfect solution. This led to a heated — but as always, good-natured — argument, with Jonathan arguing that we were discarding 75% of the data and there was no clear order to the hearts cards. Eric, Erik, Given and I took a side and even after Jonathan had entered TIME as the correct answer, we continued to argue whether it was a satisfying clue or not. Eventually, we agreed to disagree. It was a fun discussion though.
Which left us with the rockstar ghost. We looked at all the pictures covering the sheet of paper, but no ideas seemed to be coming. We watched his video and saw he wasted away and died while trying to write his ultimate song. But still, no ideas came. “Here,” I commented, “is how I would want this puzzle to solve: I'd want each of these pictures to actually be a musical note. The notes would then be from a song but would be missing the last few notes or something and those notes would then spell out the answer.” Jonathan sat forward. “How about if they contained musical notes instead? Like this bulldozer has 'do' in it. You know, do-re-mi?” We liked the idea and set about to figuring out the proper names of the pictures so to extract notes. When done, we figured we'd have to sing the notes to figure out which song it was and what to do next. That, unfortunately, was not going to happen. The other teams had left and it was getting late. We told Brian we knew what to do but the odds of us doing it within a reasonable timeframe were kind of sad. So he told us the end story of the final ghost being released, and the nerd ghost finally getting his dream of having an adventure fulfilled.
It was such a satisfying ending.
GC invited us to lunch at a eatery down at the bottom of the hill, five minutes away. We graciously accepted and after getting organized, headed out.
It took us a half-hour to get there.
Ghost 7: Here I Go Again
It was back to the hotel analog — aka Casa de Ashby — for our next ghost. One of the upstairs rooms had been transformed into a temporary hotel room; we were the first team there. Lining the wall was a series of gold records from different heavy metal bands, each with a number from one to ten spelled out underneath it. I heard one of my teammates note that the fact that they were spelled out was important as I excused myself to make use of the facilities. By the time I got back a few minutes later, they had solved the puzzle. To this day, I don't know how it works.The early gray of dawn was showing as we got a box filled with bottles. Heading out to the van, we put the bottles on the drafting table and began to consider what to do with them. They were all corked or otherwise stoppered, which impressed me for some reason. Each bottle was filled with liquid and...
I blinked.
By the time I opened my eyelids, it was more than a half-hour later. The sun was up. The bottles were lined up in a row on the table and Brian from GC had joined us in the van. Jonathan was attempting to blow notes on the bottles. My first though after my inadvertent nap, similar to a famous bowl of petunias, was “Oh no, not again.” (Our disastrous showing at Iron Puzzler II had had a bottle puzzle that consisted of blowing on bottles to get notes out of them; it was a frustrating puzzles.) Brian was kind of walking us through the clue since it was a music puzzle and our abilities with music puzzles are our main weakness. Also, we'd completely missed the fact that we needed to use the UV light to reveal the right liquid level for each bottle. Because of said past experience and because I'd missed most of what was going on, I just watched and didn't even try to help.Whatever lead we may have had in the unofficial competition was lost due to our performance on that clue. And we felt bad, too, since it was Brian's puzzle. I have to say our poor performance was more a reflection on our team than on the puzzle; for all I know it was beautifully constructed and amazingly elegant.
It was at this point that we lost our handler, probably to the lead team. It seemed kind of weird not having David or Jenn around, like there was too much empty space in the van as we headed to our next clue.
After the normal joys of finding parking, we followed the SHaRC under a freeway overpass, where strange metal statues were. We spotted a member of GC across the street, but she emphatically waved us away. Our clue was on this side. We found it in the form of a CD behind one of the statues.
This clue put a little bit of moral back into our team. Each track had two songs mixed into it and the titles of the song were anagrammed into another amusing title. Removing the letters in the actual song title from the fake song title left a letter, and thus the solve.
The capture was nearby. We had only done three clues for this ghost. Slightly depressing.
Ghost 8 – Idea Pooping
The sun had broke through the early morning clouds and it had turned into a gorgeous morning as we pulled up for our next ghost at Lake Merritt in Oakland. On our way there, Jonathan finally got in contact with BANG Erik who had been planning on joining us at around 11am the previous day. He hadn't been feeling well, but could now make it. Jonathan gave him directions to the park and we got out of the van.
There we say the impressive figure of Jesse in his lab coat and Meat Machine throwing bocce balls over an impromptu line. They were just finishing up as we arrived, so we took balls in hand and since there were four of us, each tossed a ball at the jack. Jesse consulted a sheet at exclaimed happily “Amazing!” (or was it “Awesome!”) Eric immediately got out his clipboard and started writing as we continued to make several additional bowls. It became clear pretty quickly that each bowl, depending on the order away from the jack would get another word of praise, such as “Va-va-voom!”, “Terrific!”, or “Great!” (to which Jonathan replied, “Great? That's all you can say about that bowl? How about 'glorious'?”), each of which started with a different letter of the alphabet.Jonathan and Eric broke the code within a few bowls and Eric had the entire code written down in a few minutes. Okay, so what now? We rolled a few more just to make sure, exaggerating distances to the extreme in order to be exact, such as the time I threw the blue ball twenty-five feet from the jack in order to make absolutely sure it was the farthest away. Nifty encoding scheme verified, but what did we decode with it?
While discussing, someone looked over at the balls left by the other two teams and decided that it wasn't a case of GC being too tired to pick up the their balls after all; they were, in fact, the message we needed to decode. “GUM” was the answer and apparent flavor of ghost. Jonathan and I had a short discussion as to whether gum actually had flavor as we moved on.
(At GC HQ at the actual event, I found out that the answer had been changed to “GNU” in a small tribute to our team. Well, that and mainly that it worked with the constraints of the puzzles.)
Our next location was a bit away, but we decided to walk it. We wandered past the real bocce courts and beyond a professional croquet court — which had people in their cricket whites playing that morning. We came to another one of those “It's straight ahead, but we can't walk on water” situations and curved around the lake to find Meat Machine sitting at a small labyrinth. There we got handed a piece of paper with a bunch of ones and zeros on it.
We stared at it for a while. Different theories were postulated. None worked. At first, we thought they could be Morse, but then later groupings were eight digits long. We thought it could be binary, but then why would there be both “0” and “000”? After about ten minutes we began to run dry of ideas. Given or I postulated something, but Jonathan said it wouldn't work (something that had happened earlier when Jonathan argued against “dogfish”, not believing it was a real fish). Eric took exception to this and said, “Don't poop on an idea!” “Until it poops out on you,” I added. I thought then that should be our new team motto.
We continued to stare at the sheet of paper covered in only two digits. We thought about taking a hint, but Jonathan convinced us that there was no real hurry. Meat Machine was still there. It was a beautiful morning. BANG Erik was to be joining us at that spot shortly (at least in theory). A nearby squirrel hadn't been able to give Given his nut yet, despite several attempts. And we only had a few puzzles to go before this amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience was over. So we stayed.Now at least twice in the past, I'd had an ideas for solutions that I dismissed as unlikely, which later turned out to be right. I now suddenly had a very crazy idea, and hoping to avoid the mistakes of the past, decided to work it out until it did poop out on me.
I grabbed the paper from Jonathan and twisted around. (I won't go into the details of my theory here since, although improbable, someone could read this far and I could develop a puzzle using the idea.) I worked it and worked it and it almost seemed to be bearing fruit. Based on what I was doing, Jonathan deduced my theory, got the paper back and tried it himself. “You know, it's actually kind of working!” But it didn't work completely and we gave up on it.Jonathan called Greg for a hint. Greg didn't answer. As he was leaving a message, though, he cracked the puzzle.
[Spoiler: The still improbable reader may wish to avoid the next few paragraphs if they want to solve the puzzle themselves; instead, they should probably click the picture to the right.]
It was all the codes we'd previous thought, but only back to back. Decoding the first set yielded MOPERS. As Jonathan set about decoding the second set using binary instead of Braille this time, I mentioned that MOPERS is Morse with an extra P. That was our solve: Each of the classic encodings was being used to encode a word that was an anagram of the code plus one letter. Eric and Jonathan figured the last set would decode to ATMOSPHERE before even trying it, since they had seen the same word used in the same way in a Shinteki Decathlon.
Greg showed up and said, “I hear you guys need a hint?”
(I later told Ian, the puzzle's author, that it was the puzzle that went from most frustrating to most satisfying in the shortest period of time. I was actually kind of disappointed when they didn't use it for the Game.)
In talking with Greg a little about the puzzle, he mentioned that they planned to have teams retrieve the clue from the labyrinth using RC cars. It depended on the budget and feasibility, though. We thought it was a great idea and only wished we could have tried it.
The SHaRC indicated our next clue was back the way we came. In a real game, deciding to walk the long walk would have been disastrous.
Back at the van, we finally met up with BANG Erik who had parked next to us. We got him up to speed as much as possible as we walked past the once bocce ball-covered field and on towards our destination. We rounded a corner and saw that the lake again stretched in our way and would make for quite a detour.
“Let's take the van.”
With our newly-acquired fifth player in tow, we parked near an Obama rally that, surprising to me, seemed to have attracted very few San Francisco attendees. With propaganda-ish music blaring over the speakers, we crossed the street to where three colorful Z's were standing. Meat Machine was just finishing up and leaving as we got there and got our clue: A series of Taboo cards, each with a dark side. On the front were five words, as in real Taboo, that players weren't allowed to say. It was up to us to determine what the actual word was, though; that part was blank.
We quickly figured out that all the front words began with “TA”. On the back was a ghost saying a “BOO”-related word. Some of them had half-circles on the edges. All of the stickers had images on them. For some reason, I said, “Let's make a ring using the stickers to join them together.” I'm still not sure why. The idea apparently had its merits, though, and we put the stickers on cards that had word portions in common. The easiest sticker was probably “BOO”, which connected TABOO to BOO-BOO. With them all connected, a series of Roman numerals were created running inside and outside of the ring. A discussion broke out as to which order to read the numerals, since we had all assumed they stood for letters. At some point, though, Jonathan pointed out that the outside read “PRWNL”. “It has to be PERIWINKLE,” he declared.I offered the SHaRC to our newly-arrived teammate so he could get a capture in. He declined.
Finale – A View to the Killed
Our end game was at a Mountain View Cemetery. Honestly, it's probably the largest cemetery I've ever been to. We reached a van point at pretty much the high point on the mountain. It was a gorgeous view and I tried to take a picture of it. Unfortunately, my digital camera was set to “movie”, which I didn't notice until later. All I got was one frame grab and a short movie of my shoes.Everyone was there. GC Brian greeted us and explained what was going on. For the actual event, the OWL would explain this all, but right now it was him. The ghosts in containment had congealed into a single boss ghost and when this happened, teams would actually get to chat with the nerd ghost (nerd ghost? I hadn't seen enough puzzles for the previous two ghosts to get a handle on their personalities). He would explain that instead of trying to contain the ghosts, which only made them angry, it was better to figure out how to heal them emotionally... give them the proverbial closure. They would then leave this earthly plane forever.
At the circular base of the gravesite we stopped at were the final puzzles, several of which had slime associated with them. Had we actually done any slime analysis like I told the non-navigating, non-driving portion of our team to, we could identify which ghost belong to which puzzle by finding similar identifying slime at the site. Instead, though, those two teammates had been in the back of the bus solving puzzle steps we backsolved or guessed at. That or they were watching the animations that each capture code elicited from the OWL. Although I had heard them talking about them, I only had a chance to sneak a peak at the first one and pretty much forgot about them until this point.
We gathered up the puzzles and failed to identify the slime. To my horror, two of the samples I collected were labeled as the same ghost. Someone mentioned that there may have been two different slime samples out for the same ghost. It didn't matter in the end.
Eric grabbed one puzzle with pictures of famous people on it, some of them famously dead. He solved it quickly without even knowing which ghost it was for and Brian, again acting as our OWL, gave us the story as to how we had mollified that ghost. Jonathan figured a puzzle involving pets probably belonged to the Benign Booga and solved it pretty much on his own. We got another Brian ending. A bunch of phrases on a sheet of paper seemed like the same font that was used for the St. Mary's park flower puzzle, so we figured it was the Chinatown ghost. Another one consisted of letters on a grid. There were some interesting parts to it, but nothing that I could figure out. Given was working on a bunch of cards that had been divided in two.
Noticing our stalling on these final few puzzles, Brian mentioned that we may want to concentrate more on each ghost's motivation, revealed in the ending videos. Oh, and we may need scissors for the letters for the grid one.
We gathered up the clues and got back in the van to watch each of the videos again. They were impressive, though only in rough draft form. One or two only had a description of what the animation was to be like. But it was enough to solve the puzzles: We split the letter grid in two and actually saw the ending animation of the bi-polar ghost being split in two. I inferred that half of his personality had gone to hell, while the other went to purgatory. We then used the honor-binary system to solve the kung-fu fright's problem.
Up next was the circus lady. Her heart had been broken by another circus performer, so one of the Eric's figured we only needed to put the heart cards back together, mending her broken heart. He pointed out that the letters those cards represented anagrammed to TIME, the perfect solution. This led to a heated — but as always, good-natured — argument, with Jonathan arguing that we were discarding 75% of the data and there was no clear order to the hearts cards. Eric, Erik, Given and I took a side and even after Jonathan had entered TIME as the correct answer, we continued to argue whether it was a satisfying clue or not. Eventually, we agreed to disagree. It was a fun discussion though.
Which left us with the rockstar ghost. We looked at all the pictures covering the sheet of paper, but no ideas seemed to be coming. We watched his video and saw he wasted away and died while trying to write his ultimate song. But still, no ideas came. “Here,” I commented, “is how I would want this puzzle to solve: I'd want each of these pictures to actually be a musical note. The notes would then be from a song but would be missing the last few notes or something and those notes would then spell out the answer.” Jonathan sat forward. “How about if they contained musical notes instead? Like this bulldozer has 'do' in it. You know, do-re-mi?” We liked the idea and set about to figuring out the proper names of the pictures so to extract notes. When done, we figured we'd have to sing the notes to figure out which song it was and what to do next. That, unfortunately, was not going to happen. The other teams had left and it was getting late. We told Brian we knew what to do but the odds of us doing it within a reasonable timeframe were kind of sad. So he told us the end story of the final ghost being released, and the nerd ghost finally getting his dream of having an adventure fulfilled.
It was such a satisfying ending.
GC invited us to lunch at a eatery down at the bottom of the hill, five minutes away. We graciously accepted and after getting organized, headed out.
It took us a half-hour to get there.
Labels: ghost patrol, photos, writeup
posted by Skott at 1:39 PM
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