22-OCT-05
Clapham Common - North East Corner
Saturday 22nd October
Time: 2pm - 5pm
NOTE: The entire event Roundup can be seen at The unforums. It is quite long, but hopefully fills in the gaps, of which there are many.
General
After following The Receda Trail, PXC players realized that they must gather together to intercept a secret Third Power rendezvous. So on October 22, 30-40 people gathered in Clapham Common - from forum regulars to people whose interest had been roused by an ad in the Oct. 20 Metro:
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Secret Agents Required
Date: Lxmpksxv 22es Fzmfyok Time 2hd mf 5hd
xes Zcxhixd Zfddfe Lfpmi LNso.
fkrxenlxmnfe, xes N eoos vfpk ioch.
x loelo fa ndxrnexmnfe, mioe vfp'cc sf tocc. Toxk Ifdominer hpkhco
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A simple cipher reveals the message to be:
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Secret Agents Required
Date: Saturday 22nd October Time 2pm to 5pm
and Clapham Common South SIde. [sic]
organisation, and I need your help.
a sense of imagination, then you'll do well. Wear Homething purple [sic]
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Armed with maps from our anonymous friend and organized by GuyP, players arrived in Clapham Common wearing the requisite purple.
After groups began to congregate, a motorbike dropped off a package containing folders with maps and instructions, and the basic treasure trail, with five tasks in five locations (plus one virtual).
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The Third Power will be holding a rendezvous today, not long from now, less than a mile away from here. I wasn't able to find out exactly where, but I do know how you can figure it out. They've set up five puzzles in order to tell their agent the rendezvous location. I've marked where these tests are on the map on the back of this sheet. Between them, these puzzles will give you a codebook and four keywords. You can use them together to figure out a password. There's also some kind of online puzzle that will reveal a page where you can type in this password. Once you've done that, it should give you the final pieces of information you need to get to the rendezvous. |
So, the PXC players divided themselves into five groups, and commenced solving.
Online: 3P.html, the rapidly winding trail
The reader should understand how crazy this all was! Every 5 minutes, new pages were cropping up all over! -Scott
Our trail of the day began at:
3p.html kept a running update of changes. Immediately, this was noted:
- Updated Receda Approach is now active and ready
Which led us to look at this page:
This immediately made the astute think of other sites:
Carefully, it was noted the logcal connection would be the song, mentioned in the "approach" interview.
Once again, wise hands referred to past trail efforts, and dialed up the somnatherapy line. The sculptor page had a series of numbers, which gave clues about what to dial in what order.
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The 3p.html page was once again updated to say:
This led us to look here: However, the song being played is The Moonlight Sonata The long and very interesting path you are led on leads you here: Carrying on from above we got: Caps on the page give you bookitnow: Which redirects to:
On IRC, we've broken up into 4 channels..... The Coordinates
Cast Away
Buried SecretsSummary The team that headed out here was included Jeb, who was in contact with Jakeo by phone. On arrival, they discovered 3 aluminium suitcases, with two of which were padlocked. First briefcase The first contained two jigsaw puzzles that appeared to have braille on it in the form of orange and purple fish. Referencing the braille page on wikipedia ([1]) The page as translated into a sequence of numbers:
345589144233 The team on the ground solved this sequence to be: 34+55=89 89+144=233 144+233=377 377 was the combination to the padlocked suitcase. Second briefcase This case was initially opened by brute force methods, but the combination was 377. Inside the padlocked suitcase was another two jigsaw puzzles with coconuts and palm trees spelling out the number sequence 641 643 647 653. This is a prime number sequence, with the next being 659. This was the combination the the third suitcase. Third briefcase The third case (rumoured on irc to contain sudoku, see Boxes of Delight) contained another two jigsaw puzzles. This has maple brown and orange maple leaves which spell out MATCH 1 5 7 13 23. Match is presumed to be the keyword, the number sequence remains a mystery. Comedy Moment While on the phone with Jakeo describing the puzzle Jeb says 'Oh, okay. We've just smashed open one of the suitcases and are working on the next puzzle' Boxes of DelightThere was a fifth group on the ground who went to the location marked on the map by 'Boxes of Delight' but came past the 'Buried Secrets' group saying that they couldn't find anything (hence the confusion online as to where the sudokus came from - they were not in a 'Buried Secrets' briefcase). Fortunately a member of the group went and found sudokus in plastic cases attached to the trees. One box was ringed in red on each puzzle, and there were musical notes on the back of each. It was theorised that putting each puzzle in order of the length of the note on the back would have lead to a 33 digit number that could be used to find the keyword, but there was not enough time to solve all of them and the puzzle remains unsolved. Journey's end
Radio PlayThe handouts specified a telephone number, which instructed people to go to: The radio play team had to ring in the radio show, take pictures of themselves doing specific things:
Then send them to the 'online team', who put them up for us to see as a link off the radiofeed. When they'd done them all it gave us the codeword ether which then let us get through the authenticate page. They took pity on us...The goal, at length, was to get 4 keywords, which was then fed to a codebook, and placed in a webpage: http://secure.recedaresorts.com/trackaccess/index.php However as the last minutes ticked down, we only needed one keyword. The security protocols had changed. http://secure.recedaresorts.com/locationtracker.html This led us (them, really) on a wild and crazy run around london!!
What took place then was a string of wild chases, running through the streets of London!! To cut through the enthusiasm a bit, when Chippy finally reached the end of the run, the 3p.html page was reporting all sorts of cataclysm!
Or did they have us in a large complex snare all along?http://www.flickr.com/photos/24414503@N00/55298438/ We'll let Brat-sampson fill in what happened next:
The note dropped by O8, which reads "From O1: Watch"
It suddenly became apparent: The unidentified person beckoning us to help them was in fact an operative with The Third Power. The whole trail had been a lengthy drawn out procecss to see how tenacious we really were.
All was not lost. a discussion between 08 and 01 was observed, and linked to here: In 48 hours, the trail picked up here; See: 3PGroupwareManager
References
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