Hunt '09 Recap, Part 4: Endgame
This wasn't the first time I've been on a team that's gotten to the endgame; I was with Codex for both '06 and '07, where we cracked every meta, but weren't quite fast enough to come in first. It was, though, the first I was actually on-site for the endgame, and for the most part I had a great time.
Wes led the way during the actual runaround segments and coordinated password collection. When we got to where Algernon was ejected, I had the "these answers share exactly one letter" a-ha, and we were off and running again. We made it past Harold's stop without incident, and on route to Scotchy's I had the idea of looking up the puzzle answers as we were running so as to streamline things slightly. Unfortunately, Gabby's wireless didn't take kindly to runarounds, so we wound up doing it the hard way.
Then Leah happened to us.
We had only two of the requisite answer for this stop, AMMONIA and NICOLAS CAGE, which meant we didn't know whether to use A, I, N, or O to look up passwords. (We later realized we were using the wrong moon phase for Geek Drama and corrected NICOLAS CAGE to SHANIA TWAIN, although that didn't help much as we already knew from one of our lost crew members that O wasn't going to work). The third was Astro Traffic Control, which we hadn't done; if we'd brought along our information from that meta, we'd have known that it was going to be a seven-letter city that started with T and ended with O, and might have guessed TORONTO, but we didn't, so.
It turns out Evil Midnight had given us the wrong number for one instruction, which threw us off. And they didn't realize their mistake until we'd second-guessed ourselves and discarded one of our correct answers. So we sat in a hallway for nearly an hour as Dart and Wes typed and re-typed every possible wrong combination into the laptop.
I took this time to work with Martin, who still had a working Internet connection, to compile a list of all the icon/answer correspondences for the remaining three rounds. That finished, I waited. And watched as our Evil Midnight guides made calls back to HQ. And worried as Ertch's cellphone went dead, stranding him alone without contact on an unfamiliar campus. And fretted as reports trickled in from one of our crew members that another team was in the runaround. (This turned out to be a false alarm; from what I can tell, one or two teams guessed where some or all of the runaround locations were going to be, and went to take notes accordingly. This was probably what our crew member was seeing.)
Finally, Evil Midnight took pity on us and gave us the passwords to let us on to Ralph's leg of the runaround, where our prodigious backsolving had given us all the answers we needed. Our answer list gave us the letter early, so we were able to pass instructions along to everyone before we even finished running. Zoe's stop didn't work out quite so well, though... because we needed so few answers to make it through to the Lazyr Zone meta, we only had one of the three words we needed, and I and several others had the unfortunate task of calling lost crew members and telling them they needed to collect the answers for every letter in the word DRAGONFLY. Miraculously, this went fairly quickly, and we breezed through Ernie's stop, after which Jenn/Captain Blastoid suggested ("May I make a suggestion? ...Guys? Guys. When I say, 'May I make a suggestion?', you probably want to listen to me.") that we reassemble our team. We chose Lobby 7 as our rendezvous point, and Wes pulled us off behind one of the pillars to wait, as we still thought we weren't the only team in the runaround.
After we were all reunited, we followed the final instructions to what turned out to be Zyzzlvaria Alpha (aka the Magic Space Closet) again... but at some point we lost Ertch, and Julia went off to look for him, and Wes went off to look for her... Apparently Ertch was having health issues and had to make his way back to HQ to recuperate, which was a bummer.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team got a space map from Zoe (or the person playing her; she was taking a lot of pictures, so I don't know if she was supposed to be in character or not). It was crowded and chaotic at that point, so I'm not sure if I was the first to suggest lining up our location in reality on the map with Zyzzlvaria Alpha on the board and proceeding to wherever lined up with Outpost 9 on the map, but I think I was probably at least the loudest. Others more familiar with the campus had by that point made a list of the locations of all of the stops, and they did indeed line up with the appropriate spaces on the game board, so (after we'd made sure all of our missing people knew where we were headed) we ran off to Outpost 9, where once again Zoe happened to have a puzzle for us. This got handed to Tyler, who solved it as the entire rest of the team hovered around him and made occasionally-helpful suggestions. The final answer of CORE REACTOR, though, was all him, and after lining up the map to the board again we were off.
Kudos to Evil Midnight for finding someplace so wonderfully grungy and pipe-filled and just generally Core-Reactor-y for the Core Reactor. The search space seemed a bit wide to me at the time, though; there were several potential candidates for "fourth step" around, including a suspiciously shiny ladder and a set of stairs with a tempting (though filthy) crawlspace. (From the description on the Hunt site, though, it'd appear that the room number we were given was indeed associated with one specific staircase, so that was our mistake, not theirs.) I actually stuck my hand under the correct step, either completely missed the little black box that concealed the C.O.I.N. or dismissed it as part of the staircase, and had run halfway back to that crawlspace to try it instead when I heard the cheers.
We congregated for a couple of very nice group shots (including a video that apparently made it onto G4's Attack of the Show!), made our way back to HQ, unwound, did some housecleaning, and collectively realized What We Had Just Done. Then we all went our separate ways and got some sleep.
I may have one more post forthcoming, about all of the puzzles I didn't get a chance to look at during the Hunt but have since tried at home. In case I don't get around to that one, though, I want to thank the Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight for an amazing ride, and to everyone on my team, and particularly our team leader Dalry, for being awesome.
Wes led the way during the actual runaround segments and coordinated password collection. When we got to where Algernon was ejected, I had the "these answers share exactly one letter" a-ha, and we were off and running again. We made it past Harold's stop without incident, and on route to Scotchy's I had the idea of looking up the puzzle answers as we were running so as to streamline things slightly. Unfortunately, Gabby's wireless didn't take kindly to runarounds, so we wound up doing it the hard way.
Then Leah happened to us.
We had only two of the requisite answer for this stop, AMMONIA and NICOLAS CAGE, which meant we didn't know whether to use A, I, N, or O to look up passwords. (We later realized we were using the wrong moon phase for Geek Drama and corrected NICOLAS CAGE to SHANIA TWAIN, although that didn't help much as we already knew from one of our lost crew members that O wasn't going to work). The third was Astro Traffic Control, which we hadn't done; if we'd brought along our information from that meta, we'd have known that it was going to be a seven-letter city that started with T and ended with O, and might have guessed TORONTO, but we didn't, so.
It turns out Evil Midnight had given us the wrong number for one instruction, which threw us off. And they didn't realize their mistake until we'd second-guessed ourselves and discarded one of our correct answers. So we sat in a hallway for nearly an hour as Dart and Wes typed and re-typed every possible wrong combination into the laptop.
I took this time to work with Martin, who still had a working Internet connection, to compile a list of all the icon/answer correspondences for the remaining three rounds. That finished, I waited. And watched as our Evil Midnight guides made calls back to HQ. And worried as Ertch's cellphone went dead, stranding him alone without contact on an unfamiliar campus. And fretted as reports trickled in from one of our crew members that another team was in the runaround. (This turned out to be a false alarm; from what I can tell, one or two teams guessed where some or all of the runaround locations were going to be, and went to take notes accordingly. This was probably what our crew member was seeing.)
Finally, Evil Midnight took pity on us and gave us the passwords to let us on to Ralph's leg of the runaround, where our prodigious backsolving had given us all the answers we needed. Our answer list gave us the letter early, so we were able to pass instructions along to everyone before we even finished running. Zoe's stop didn't work out quite so well, though... because we needed so few answers to make it through to the Lazyr Zone meta, we only had one of the three words we needed, and I and several others had the unfortunate task of calling lost crew members and telling them they needed to collect the answers for every letter in the word DRAGONFLY. Miraculously, this went fairly quickly, and we breezed through Ernie's stop, after which Jenn/Captain Blastoid suggested ("May I make a suggestion? ...Guys? Guys. When I say, 'May I make a suggestion?', you probably want to listen to me.") that we reassemble our team. We chose Lobby 7 as our rendezvous point, and Wes pulled us off behind one of the pillars to wait, as we still thought we weren't the only team in the runaround.
After we were all reunited, we followed the final instructions to what turned out to be Zyzzlvaria Alpha (aka the Magic Space Closet) again... but at some point we lost Ertch, and Julia went off to look for him, and Wes went off to look for her... Apparently Ertch was having health issues and had to make his way back to HQ to recuperate, which was a bummer.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team got a space map from Zoe (or the person playing her; she was taking a lot of pictures, so I don't know if she was supposed to be in character or not). It was crowded and chaotic at that point, so I'm not sure if I was the first to suggest lining up our location in reality on the map with Zyzzlvaria Alpha on the board and proceeding to wherever lined up with Outpost 9 on the map, but I think I was probably at least the loudest. Others more familiar with the campus had by that point made a list of the locations of all of the stops, and they did indeed line up with the appropriate spaces on the game board, so (after we'd made sure all of our missing people knew where we were headed) we ran off to Outpost 9, where once again Zoe happened to have a puzzle for us. This got handed to Tyler, who solved it as the entire rest of the team hovered around him and made occasionally-helpful suggestions. The final answer of CORE REACTOR, though, was all him, and after lining up the map to the board again we were off.
Kudos to Evil Midnight for finding someplace so wonderfully grungy and pipe-filled and just generally Core-Reactor-y for the Core Reactor. The search space seemed a bit wide to me at the time, though; there were several potential candidates for "fourth step" around, including a suspiciously shiny ladder and a set of stairs with a tempting (though filthy) crawlspace. (From the description on the Hunt site, though, it'd appear that the room number we were given was indeed associated with one specific staircase, so that was our mistake, not theirs.) I actually stuck my hand under the correct step, either completely missed the little black box that concealed the C.O.I.N. or dismissed it as part of the staircase, and had run halfway back to that crawlspace to try it instead when I heard the cheers.
We congregated for a couple of very nice group shots (including a video that apparently made it onto G4's Attack of the Show!), made our way back to HQ, unwound, did some housecleaning, and collectively realized What We Had Just Done. Then we all went our separate ways and got some sleep.
I may have one more post forthcoming, about all of the puzzles I didn't get a chance to look at during the Hunt but have since tried at home. In case I don't get around to that one, though, I want to thank the Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb at Midnight for an amazing ride, and to everyone on my team, and particularly our team leader Dalry, for being awesome.