Monthly Archives: September 2015

Round 3 – the girls

Mystery

So, Skynet activated on May 14, 2015 at 4:45pm.  Moving through the www.simon4.ca/sky/greetings.html website, the girls replayed something like the iconic scene from Wargames (albeit without the chess reference – I was only able to program tic tac toe on my webpages).   It took them a while to beat Skynet, but eventually they arrived at the dreaded “Do you have the correct password?”

They tried all sorts of passwords, including the answer to the earlier riddle.  But to get past this webpage, a complete stumbling block, they needed to wait quite a while longer … until May 30th when they could follow the earlier clue to the Ottawa Citizen classifieds.

This clue took some doing.  I needed permission from several people from the firm that handles the classified ads for the Citizen.  I really loved this particular clue, though I don’t recall where I came up with it; probably old spy movies.  My daughter went to our corner store and purchased the Saturday edition of the Citizen.  She pored over the classified ads until she spotted this:

image9

Lots of puzzled thinking on this clue, but eventually they figured out that the code wheel they had received weeks earlier was the key.  Lining up the letters from the ad, and checking all the other combinations, reveals that the message translates as:

UGIVELTKPV  —  ISZNJAXAQY

PASSWORDIS — KINGARTHUR

My wife and I had been trying to get the kids to read about King Arthur and the knights of the round table, to no avail.  At least I get a quick reference into the mystery.  But after using the password, the answer to the earlier riddle also came into play.

Round 3 – the boys

Mystery

After piecing together the QR code for the login to the warehouse54 website, the Skynet link came into play.  I didn’t actually expect any of them to know the Terminator movies, but I was having fun with my pop references.  And the mystery arc, slowly being revealed (not that it made a whole lot of sense) was that Skynet (the computer that becomes sentient and takes control of missile defences in the Terminator movies) was about to activate (countdown on one the earlier girls’ website) and Moriarty was attempting to hijack the computer servers for his own dastardly purposes.   None of this made sense to the kids, and I’m still not sure they pieced this all together, but whatever …

Logging into the CityPower Grid website uncovered someone tracing the location of the boys (Moriarity?), only to be foiled at the last minute by ‘s.h.’ and giving them time to work out the “man behind the mask” clues.

Eventually, tracking the earlier encrypted message to their school library and doing some online research, the boys came across a sorta geocaching problem.  It required them to fit together a photo, a map, a note from ‘M’ and some old fashioned treasure hunting … X marks the spot … 10 paces west … clues.  I had buried something for them in a field not too far away. The packages they had received weeks earlier, with the trowel and the compass, now came in handy.

digging

They dug up a wrapped cell phone (an old one I wasn’t using anymore). Once powered up the boys explored it a little and discovered that the phone had been used to take this photo:

cell phone

An almost dead-end.  Some clues wouldn’t make sense until the boys and girls started working together, though as of yet they had no incentive to do so.  This particular clue would eventually give them an address to the final location (the showdown with Moriarty … otherwise known as pizza and a movie at a local recreation centre).