2008: It’s All Relative

Monday morning you find a recital invite taped to your OCMR from Rebecca Smith-Meyer, a lovely double degree junior majoring in chemistry and organ performance. Head to her Facebook profile, figure out her blog address, and you can find out that she’s been poking around at some odd occurrences on campus, things that her parents and aunt might have noticed twenty five years ago. Rebecca’s figured out one location on campus definitely connected to the happenings, and then latches on to something bigger – what she thinks is at the center of everything.

Thursday morning Rebecca disappears.

Piecing through old notes and riddles you find that plenty else has changed, too – Rebecca’s father’s died several years ago, her mother isn’t mentioned anywhere, and her father and her Aunt Ella (actually a family friend) spent over twenty years arguing about what turns out to be a big problem: something, located under Mudd’s ramp, is sending gravitons back through time and altering reality.

You make plans to meet Ella at Mudd on the following Saturday night but instead are met by members of what seem to be a group of Slovakian conspiracy theorists who claim Ella has disappeared. They hand you… a stack of 25 year old bad poetry that suggests the locations of the five places of interest and tell you that, to your good fortune, the flash from a digital camera should be enough to activate the items. Unfortunately, the poems only really describe four of the five, with vague notes on the fifth. It seems hopeless.

That is, unless you remember what Rebecca found…

Winners:

1st Place ($200) – 4396D(team =yes!)// [5/5 correct answers]
2nd Place ($25) – Zombie Wolves (the lone wolves squad) [4/5]
3rd Place ($25) – The B.B.C. [4/5]
4th Place ($25) – 967310334 (aka Tiger Lily) [4/5]
5th Place ($25) – Team Benedict [3.5/5]
6th Place ($25) – Krislov’s Army [3.25/5 … who the hell was scoring this?]
7th Place ($25) – abc gumshoes [3/5]
8th Place ($25) – We Are Not Thieves [2.75/5]

Materials:

  • Since this game involved the space time continuum, game materials will be posted tomorrow.

Fun Facts:

‘SKSK’, the Slovakia conspiracy theorists, was an accidental creation. SKSK is actually the signoff code for ip-relay, a telephone service for the hard of hearing that was being used for some brief aspects of gameplay. During a last minute planning session to set the Mudd meet, someone realized that SK was also the country internet extension for Slovakia.

Historical anachronisms scattered around town during the closing hunt – illustrating, of course, how time was coming apart at the seams – included Henry the VIII and two wives, a flapper, a 50s gangster, a Victorian gentleman, and two early 90s club kids. We went with what we had in our closets.

For yet another friggin’ year a number of teams didn’t realize they’d been handed the first clue, despite all the members of their team getting an identical invite from someone they’d never heard of. This, among a few other things, prompted ObieGame Central to start work on a players guide. [Since deprecated, because no progress appeared to have been made. –2020]