The girls, much like the boys, all received letters and a few objects on April 24th. But, first, a month before the mystery began, I planted this picture frame at one girl’s house. The art is from Elise Plessis (eliseplessis.com), who painted card art for a few board games that I own. This one is called Porte Verte.
Two of the girls also received a crossword puzzle, ripped in half, to force them to work together to solve it.
I got this idea from the history of Bletchley Park, where during WW2, they sometimes used crosswords in the paper to screen promising candidates. Hidden behind the picture frame was a scrap of paper with the following:
(167.24.3)(57.3.6)(13.1.4) (184.29.5)(140.4.3) (199.24.6)(76.12.3)
The girls were cued about Porte Verte over email. I had hoped that a google search, which will show the art image, would be enough, but a couple of weeks later I needed to be a little more direct because this needed to be solved by a certain date.
In case anyone wants to work through these clues, the solution is hidden here:
Although used often historically, I got the idea for this last code from a made-for-tv movie I watched in 1979 (on a rainy Sunday, if I remember correctly) — The French Atlantic Affair. I remember that Telly Savalas was in it, a ship was hijacked, and a teenager had a hidden CB radio that he would use to communicate with someone on shore using this secret code technique.
One of the girls received this QR code on a scrap of paper:
This, of course, introduces Skynet into the story. The website (still up) originally showed a countdown to May 14, 2015, 4:45pm. Our own local Judgement Day. Conveniently timed for after school so that the kids could get home and to a computer in time. During the mystery, it was a long three-week wait for the countdown to finish. It’s now set to sometime in 2017 to show the countdown effect. The original website, when the countdown reached zero, redirected to this site:
www.simon4.ca/sky/greetings.html
And we shift from Skynet to a different pop culture reference. Moving through the website eventually ends at another dead-end, requiring a -not yet known- password.
And, finally, one of the girls received the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle, which provided a few clues to the end of the mystery (a date and locations to visit). Of course, the puzzle was incomplete (the most important pieces weren’t found for a few more weeks).
