Tag Archives: Girls’ clues

Round 6 – The end

November 1, 2015MysteryBoys' clues, Girls' cluesFranco

The final confrontation, an allusion to Sherlock’s story at Reichenbach Falls. Friday, June 26th, first day of summer holidays.

Part 1. The abandoned nuclear bunker (aka, the Diefenbunker), 3pm
I had wanted to arrange for a sleepover at the Diefenbunker, with the whole mystery ending there. It would have been a nice conclusion, as well as a great tie-in to Skynet and the history of the Terminator movies. But they don’t do sleepovers. So this was just a way station on the final day of the mystery. The plot of Terminator 3 includes John Connor being tricked into going into an old retired government bunker, while nuclear war is waged outside.

I let the kids tell me where we were going that day and when. And so in two cars we made our way out to Carp, and then down into the tunnel (which they had seen as the first clue in the mystery).

After the tour (nuclear war not having begun), but before leaving the bunker, I had arranged someone to hand a box over to the kids. It contained the final set of two puzzles, which the kids divvied up. They had already pieced together the location that they would be travelling to next, and while en route, they worked on the puzzles . The location we were going to next had a door lock and an electronic security system that needed deactivating. The puzzles, if solved, would give them both secret numbers.

I lacked imagination at this point, and so gave the girls a Sudoku to solve, some of the numbers being specially marked for use in the electronic security system deactivation. And for the boys, I shifted the earlier maze puzzle to here. The kids were solving the puzzles as we drove home. It was great hearing the boys (who were in the car with me) reason through what to do with a bright red marker, the maze, and the page of numbers.

This, when solved, gave them the door entrance code to the building.

Part 2. The Skynet server farm and Moriarty (aka, a local recreation centre), 6pm
Breaking into the building, the kids discovered a single box sitting on the floor in the middle of a large empty room. The box contained a “this is the end” note in Sherlock style and a DVD movie. I was also contemplating having a sleepover there, but I wasn’t sure it would actually work, so instead I had my laptop, a digital projector, and a big screen with the movie going, and we ordered pizza. Most of the kids ended up having a sleepover at my place. I originally wanted the final geocode to lead to a rented cabin out on some lake in the woods, having the kids really get excited about a long weekend trip out to some mysterious place, but I never found something good enough, and not too expensive, for eight kids and several adults.

Denouement

Not sure what the kids were expecting, and I think this was possibly a little bit of a letdown, but I wasn’t sure how else to finish things off. I made them Irregulars and honorary members of the Simon 4, my old mystery gang from the late 70s … yeah, it didn’t mean much to them. It was, however, nice to come full circle for me!

The mystery wasn’t really a resounding success. I think I strung it out too long and perhaps made it too complicated. Maybe a little more insight into the story would have helped them. I had trouble gauging the difficulty of most of the clues. Some that I thought would take a few minutes took weeks. And others that I expected to take days, were solved in minutes.

I now resign myself to solving my own little mysteries …

Round 5 – everyone

November 1, 2015MysteryBoys' clues, Girls' cluesFranco

Having found the book safe at the library, and having realized that one of the boys had the key to the safe (received as the very first clue two months before), the two streams of the mystery finally came together. The kids unlocked the safe to discover:

A flashdrive
The remaining jigsaw pieces (with the writing that identifies some of the final locations)
And this note:

Excellent.  You might still become one of the Irregulars yet.  By now you have discovered something unique in Skynet, a sentient computer.  But there are those that would see it used for evil purposes.  Take M. -- He is the Napoleon of crime.  He is the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city.  M. sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.  We must interrupt his plans. On the flash drive, I have acquired a clip of M. speaking.  We must get one step ahead of him, and find the location of the Skynet servers.  Follow up on this clue. I believe we are getting close.
-s.h.

simon4.ca/sky/close.html

Half of that is a direct lift from a speech given by Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem.

The sound clip of M.’s voice was from the new Sherlock TV series adaptation.

It still wasn’t clear to them who M. was, even with the clip. But I also included a clip of music, which my daughter recognized as the theme music to the show.

With that, the Sherlock Holmes ties to the mystery became clear to everyone, as well as who s.h. was, what the reference to the “irregulars” meant, and that M was Moriarty. On the flashdrive was also this picture of the “Skynet” computer server farm, which was to be the location of the final confrontation with Moriarty, and where they would foil his plan.

I was in seventh heaven with all these details and the overall story arc. Not sure what sense it made to the kids, but at this point they were really into it and were driving forward toward the final clues.

The ‘close’ website was a different problem. None, of course, knew the pop culture reference to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a favourite movie of mine. But most of the kids had been in piano and music lessons long enough that they figured it out somewhat easily by ear, leading to the final clue, giving some structure to the June 26th agenda.

Round 4 – the girls

November 1, 2015MysteryGirls' cluesFranco

I had to scramble at one point, because I had put a clue up on a bulletin board at a local arena, but the girls took a while figuring out the previous clue and my wife told me that the entire notice board had been cleaned off just days before the clue was to be discovered.

And so, with some last minute reprogramming (I was overseas at the time, and couldn’t get the clue re-posted), I excluded the bulletin board clue, and with the KINGARTHUR password entered, the girls arrived instead at a website named ‘steganography’ and a scrambled painting of what was clearly the Mona Lisa. The answer to the earlier riddle, what does man love more than life, etc., was used to unscramble the image.

The Mona Lisa. This required a little more know-how to figure out the next clue.

I had arranged for a special book to be placed in our local Ruth Dickenson library. All the librarians were in on it, except – as chance would have it – for the one the girls approached that night. The library was busy and there were lots of people there and the guy who they approached looked up the code and couldn’t find it in his system, providing no further help. But they eventually figured out it was for books usually found in the travel book section. The girls searched and found my book next to a book on travel to Egypt. I overheard them for a moment discussing whether they were going to make a pilgrimage to Egypt to complete the adventure! Frustrating to them was that the book was actually a hollowed out book — a locked safe, and that I wouldn’t let them break it open physically.

An interesting twist is that, on the spur of the moment, I said that the girls might need to smuggle the book out of the library because there was no bar code to sign it out. Half scared, and looking incredibly guilty, they made for the door (of course, it was all arranged ahead of time, though it crossed my mind that I was encouraging theft).