Day 2, Part 6: The Walking Dead

Okay.  We're driving around in Allegheny Cemetry, trying to make sense of the first clue:

The first line does not refer to the breast sizes
of the female statues.  We checked.

This seems like it's trying to lead us around a small chase in the cemetery.  While the rest of us look out the window for ideas, Dan is searching on the cemetery's website for the names in the riddle.  If I wasn't already three days behind this blog I would show you the details, but I'll skip to the end and say that the mini-hunt ends at this creepy ring of gravestones of the Ewart family.

He's holding a compass in his right hand.  Really.

The starts of the lines are cardinal directions that point to specific stones (fortunately Josh had given us not one, but two compasses in our kit) and the numbers index into the stone names.  The code decodes to "WE WERE KNOWN FOR", and fortunately someone online actually cares about stuff like this.  The word "GROCERS" decodes the Vigenere, and gives us a message about looking for an Ent.

Found it!  Oh, you meant in the cemetery.

We drive around and find this:

It must have taken years to grow the concrete tree to precisely those
angles and branch count.

This matches the diagram on our clue page quite well:

Either that or this is a very badly-designed golf course.

This gets us some vague instructions for how to get to the location of Clue #7:

The picture is of Ollivander's.  This is a reference to the
fact that the statue appears to be holding a wand.

Unfortunately, the wand was casting LUMOS at the time,
so we couldn't actually see it.

This marks the first time we've actually tried using the Hint messaging system.  Some awkward snafus later, we figure out which of the three "Mary"s to put into the system.

We were instructed to swear at GC.  I swear.

This is a reference to the grave of Alexander Hays:

And his family.  And his little dog too.

At first we thought that Clue 8 had something to do with playing
cards, but then we couldn't find the "Z" in our deck.

We count the letters in quotes, and solve Clue #8 by matching frequencies to letters.  For example, there are 10 "E"s in the quote, so 10 corresponds to "E".  Yes, there are significant ambiguities with numbers smaller than 10 and we have to make educated guesses.  The decode tells us to look for a Medal of Honor recipient nearby, and we find the grave in question, which belongs to A. L. Pearson:

That's a really big penny.

This last clue (#9) stumps us for longer than it feels like it should be.  We find the quote on the plaque and it's clearly "A WORTHY FRIEND OR FOE".  The text seems to say that we should align this with the alphabet, so that A encodes to A, B encodes to W, C encodes to O, and so on.  Of course some letters appear multiple times so there's a lot of ambiguity.  We'd really like the message to start with "LOOK", but if that's the case than "KL" would encode to the "IE" in "FRIEND" -- but the 11th and 12th letter of the phrase are the "EN" in "FRIEND".  We play around with trying lots of different offsets of the phrase, and hunt around for other phrases, and even consider other encodings.  Eventually we decide to ask for help.  The automated hint just confirms the quote, which is of not much help.   After some more back and forth, Josh shares a screenshot of his spreadsheet with us:

We put the "spread" in "spreadsheet".

This sheet confirms that our initial approach had been the right thing all along... so why wasn't our decoding working?  This is left as an exercise for the reader.

Anyway, the message decodes to "LOOK IN WOOD FAMILY CIRCLE".  We're hoping to find more clues here because with that sheet consumed, we're fresh out again.

Don't stick your hand there!  You don't know
where it's been!

Inside we find a CD and these two sheets in a box:

It was upside-down in the box, too.

I don't think Will Shortz is going to be approving
this any time soon.

Also on the box is the message "ONE HOUR BONUS FOR A TEAM PIC FEEDING A DEER".  We don't have any deer food with us, but we attempt the bonus quest anyway.  In any case, we're told to start driving to Columbus and solve this clue in the car, so we embark on a 3-hour drive!  Hope this one CD clue is meaty enough to last us the trip.

Day 2, Part 5: In Which we end up Seeking the Dead

We're riding up a funicular and making stupid pun jokes about the name.

All the stupid jokes were about the "fun" part of the word, though.
I guess we weren't very particular.

Having just done a 30-minute wild goose chase and driven past an obscure photography studio, we're back on track.

Someday we might figure out a better way to copy-paste SMS.

We have a cryptic phone message  riddle that we'll have to solve when we get up there, which is repeated below for your convenience:

head up to monongahela

if you are so inclined 

where the severed head of washington 

feeds the second silver eye 

seek until you find someone 

very much like you 

staring with her green eyes 

to help you crack the clue 

last fourteen letters at the very end 

serve as your final key 

to crack your final cipher and set the cryptex free 

We know that the answer to the riddle is going into this Vigenere decode:

OTFFTTPQ... One, Two, Four, Twelve, Thirteen, ... uh, Pentillion?

And so we get to the top of Mount Washington and we see a wonderful view of Pittsburgh:

And a not-so-wonderful view of my thumb.

And.... we're stuck. There seems to be no strong direction to go. There's a small shopping district which might have murals but it's a bit of a walk. I notice that way far in the distance there's a billboard that shows a woman holding two slices of kiwifruit over her eyes, which maybe fits the description of "her green eyes":

Enhance!  Enhance!  Real life is not like CSI.

But the billboard is way far away and there's no way to make out the text written on it. So we walk into town, looking for anything that might match the poem. Eventually we see a sign with some green "i"s on it:

We also considered the stripes on the awning, but that felt like a stretch.

They don't have the answer to the riddle, but they do have ice cream. So we stop and get that. The ice cream is long gone by the time we have combed a quarter-mile radius and found three murals and bupkis (not necessarily in that order). We decide it's time to give GC an update on our progress, or lack thereof, and GC offers an unsolicited hint:  It's the kiwifruit poster.

Enhance, darn you!

Now Josh gets to hear the collective groan from our team. There's still no way to make out the text on the poster from this distance (we don't find out until hours later that "silver eye" is a hint to put money in the pay-binoculars), so we make our way back down until we're close enough to make out the text on the poster (it's UPMC HEALTH PLAN, if you were wondering). This gets us the phrase GRAVE UNLOCKS YOUR CRYPTEX TO SET YOU ON YOUR WAY TO ALLEGHENY CEMETERY FOR THE NEXT FEW CLUES TODAY. We open the Cryptex and a sheet of clues pop out:

It's a good thing GC gave us more clues at this time, as we had
clearly demonstrated that we were lacking in clues.

And we're off to Allegheny Cemetery.

Day 2, Part 4: In Which we Fail to Escape from Mr. Death

Here's where I left off:

City Hall should really do something about their spider problem.

We knew we were at the right place, but somehow we expected that once we were there we'd know what the right thing to do was. But... there didn't seem to be anything to learn from the environment. Aside from the letters, there wasn't any obvious change to the graphics. There were no giant trails on the ceiling which we could use to trace out a message on the printed photograph.

The right insight came 20 minutes later -- we had totally been overthinking everything. The actual arrangement of letters on the ceiling was irrelevant. This was just a simple Rail Fence Cipher. Three of us all had the insight and the message at the same time: SEEK UPON HONEST ABE FOR ALL THREE YEARS. Just inside the arch (ah, here was the part which required us to actually be present!) we found the years 1809, 1865, 1939. We filled that into our form and headed back to the car.

One clue left, #3.

If you had to guess that one of these was called "Pigpen",
which one would you choose?.

The pigpen cipher translated to FIND BOBO AND THE FAMOUS DATE A MAN ONCE MADE A DEAL TO SWING FOR THE DISTANT FENCES FOR TWO FOR QUITE MANY KS PER YEAR. Unfortunately we didn't know where Bobo the Clown was, which made reassembling the jigsaw on the right difficult, especially since it almost certainly did not contain all the pieces. On the other hand, presumably once we assembled all the jigsaw pieces, the letters and numbers would form a message, so all we needed to do was to find a reasonable message from the letters AEEHINRSSTW022279. We also knew from the final readout mechanism that the answer would be a 6-digit number, and that when filled it, it would give us the three missing digits to a telephone number: 202-??9-9?89. Our anagram skills found that the letters anagrammed to "THE ANSWER IS 022279"  Or, more likely, some rearrangement of those digits that actually formed a date. This meant that we only had to try around 25 different phone numbers until we found one that answered, right?

Well, we were not too comfortable about doing that. So instead we drove around to the only other nearby area that we hadn't looked at today, the Cell Phone Disco. Lo and behold, what do we see just down the alley?

Mr Death says: "It's too hot to be wearing a long cloak when reaping souls.
I think I'll just put on a blue T-shirt instead,"

We park the car illegally, right next to this sign. Very quickly I determine that "9" is directly to the left of "7" but can't quite place the rest of the pieces. While I scrabble with technology to try to get a version of this picture I can draw on, Jonathan narrows the possibilities down to about three phone numbers and starts dialing them.

He hits the jackpot on the first time, and we put the phone call on our car's speakers. This is when I discover some facts about our team: (1) Dan is fastest at typing spoken words; (2) I am worst at identifying spoken words. After about 4 calls to the same phone number we get that it is this poem:

head up to monongahela

if you are so inclined 

where the severed head of washington 

feeds the second silver eye 

seek until you find someone 

very much like you 

staring with her green eyes 

to help you crack the clue 

last fourteen letters at the very end 

serve as your final key 

to crack your final cipher and set the cryptex free

The poem is recited twice on the voice mail with slight variations -- the second time the word "very" is missing and the last line changes to "to help your team to win". In a Bay Area Puzzle Hunt I'd immediately think that those changes were relevant. Here, I'm not so sure.

Anyway, we do some research and find a reasonable guess for the answer to this riddle. Just about a 15-minute drive east of Pittsburgh, in the town of Braddock, is the Battlefield History Center. This was a museum dedicated to the Battle of the Monongahela, a battle that George Washington was involved in. It seemed pretty likely that there'd be some bust of George Washington there, and Josh did warn us that we'd be driving a bit after the first wave of clues.

So, off we go. While on the way, I finish the jigsaw:

More aspiring artists should try to draw on an Android tablet
in a bumpy car at least once in their lives.

It definitely says "THE ANSWER IS 02 29 72". I do some research and determine that February 29th, 1972 was the date Hank Aaron was signed to a three year deal with the Atlanta Braves. I excitedly mention this to the car and the car's response is about the same as my response to James Brown -- indifferent skepticism.

We reach the History Center in Braddock, where we meet a very nice couple at the front desk...

"Nobody cares about history museums these days.
Lost puzzle hunters actually account for 68% of our revenues."

... who seem interested in our hunt but also seem completely surprised to see us. They tell is that there is absolutely nothing like a "severed head of Washington" in the museum, let alone anything with silver eyes or green eyes. But, they helpfully mention, there is an art studio called "Silver Eye" just south of Pittsburgh.

Dejected at our wild goose chase, we embark on the 15-minute drive back to downtown Pittsburgh. But this time, since our best theory is even more shaky, we text Josh to tell him what we've done and that we're going to the Silver Eye studio.

The studio was very recently a victim of a drive-by shooting.
As in, we drove by the studio and I shot this picture of it.

This is when we discover that following GPS directions at a city's maze of highway ramps is surprisingly difficult, and we spend another 10 minutes taking wrong ramps and learning first-hand why Pittsburgh is sometimes called "The City of Bridges".

In some sense, this is a mixed blessing, because Josh, probably very amused at us by now, tells us that we should be taking the Monongahela Incline. Yes, Monongahela does not refer to the river, or the battle, but the funicular. And it's on Mount Washington. And it has the word "incline" in the title. And it's only a 5-minute drive out of Pittsburgh instead of 15 minutes (25 minutes with GPS). Dan gives himself a hard time for thinking about the possibility but rejecting it without mentioning it.

The seriousicular was taken.

In any case, we approach the funicular, ride it up, and what do we find at the top?

You'll have to find out in the next post.

Day 4 mini-summary: A birthday miracle!

It was another late one tonight.  We finally finished right around midnight in Chicago.  Lots more

will be explained in due time, but the two key developments of the evening were the race is now over (the day 5 in Chicago leg was canceled, not exactly certain why) and the Raven is coming back for another stay in sunny California (!).  More details after we get some sleep... :)

Dan's birthday dreams come true, while Wei-Hwa engages in some celebratory breath-holding.

Day 2, Part 3: "Think"... "Bewildered"

As I start write this, it's currently 10pm and we're on the stretch from Indianapolis to Chicago on Day 4. There's still a bunch of puzzles in Chicago waiting for us, so I figure any chance of this blog getting updated will require a much faster update pace. So here we go.

We've got three puzzles left. One of them is Bobo the Clown, where I've seen but spectacularly forgotten its location. One of them is in the graveyard. One of them is a ceiling and we have no freaking clue where it is.

Jonathan theorizes that since there were three legs yesterday and a meta, that our four clues today will be one from each of the legs and the meta. We point out that we've completely retraced all our steps for the meta, and also one of the legs was pretty far away. This does not completely dissuade Jonathan.

Nevertheless, there seem to be two things we can do. We can go to the cemetery, where we think the Mason stone carving probably is. Or we can go to the car and drive around while retracing our steps from yesterday, hoping to see the other puzzles.

The cemetery is a bit closer than the car, so we do that first. Once we get there, we have no problem locating the object in the photograph -- it's the second tallest gravestone in the cemetery. The name, Nathaniel Bedford, doesn't seem particularly famous though. I think maybe there was some Civil War general with that name?

I bet a wizard is buried here.

We have some problems with the rest of the poem, though.

Already the first lines make no sense.
How can "Mason" possibly be a famous name?

We hunted around the gravestones for 10 minutes or so, looking for a dead person who shared a name with someone famous. I found a gravestone for someone named William Butler, and tried, unconvincingly, to make the clue work for William Butler Yeats. We kept on searching. Eventually someone thinks to check the tallest gravestone in the cemetery, which happens to be someone named James Brown.

When I was a kid crayons were smaller
and had less religious iconography.

Aha!  He's the "godfather of soul" (hence to no child). I wasn't as convinced with the "brother you'd recall" or the "one on one but on one other 17", but everyone else was sure that we were done, so we copied down his birth and death year and started the trudge to the car.

We got to the car (detouring a bit through Market Square just in case Bobo decided to show up) and started driving around. As we drove by Pittsburgh City Hall location (where we had solved the Mayor puzzle), I shouted "look at the ceiling!"

See the resemblance?   If not, don't worry, we'll wait.

Indeed the ceiling was our missing Clue #4. We stopped the car and jumped out to look at the ceiling. We speculated loudly for ten seconds before someone thought to look at not-the-ceiling and notice that there was another team there. Oops.

It's currently 3AM in Chicago here, so I'll have to break here. Continued tomorrow morning.

Day 4 quick update, Cincinnati => Chicago

We're entering the outskirts of Chicago now.  Solved a pile of clues in Cincinnati and another pile in Indianapolis and we have four more waiting for us on arrival.  It's been a hard day!  More later, as ever, when we get time...

A little miracle of science!