1.06 Calibration

Order

1.06

Status

::PROTO-READY::

Location

Likely delivered via DVD at the Long Now Foundation.

Type

Mandatory Puzzle

Plot Setup

Prof. Chronus nearly has the machine working properly with the new pep rings, the password, etc. But it still needs to be "calibrated." The View-O-Scope has recorded the different times and places the Doctor has bounced to. (Players are seeing where the Dr. has been while they were doing the previous puzzles - it's not supposed to be "live".)

Props

(Delivered via DVD.)

Plot Point to Convey

General time hijinx, ending in Dr. When bouncing to the Big Bang.

Short Description

DVD containing short clips of famous movie scenes, with Doctor When inserted into them in humorous ways.

Detailed Description

Players receive a DVD containing the View-O-Scope recording of the different times that Dr. When has bounced to. Each of these is a short clip from a famous movie scene (Dr. Strangelove, Titanic, and Gone With the Wind are a few examples), with Dr. When inserted in a (hopefully) funny way. The players' goal is to figure out where Dr. When bounced to at the end, so that they can "calibrate" the time machine appropriately and "lock on" to him. Additional details that are relevant at other points: 1) Dr. When loses the envelope during the Vertigo scene at Fort Point - they'll need this information later to get to the Retrieve the Letter event; and 2) in Act III, players will use the sequence again (which will end partway through) to figure out his next location quickly.

Puzzle Answer

NEXTGATEWAYTHEBIGBANG

Puzzle Solution

(Erik has sent Wei-Hwa a Word document to insert/convert to the wiki.)

Budget

Cost for DVDs to deliver the puzzle, plus any cost to produce the movie. Estimate: $200.

Credits

Design: Erik Stuart, Wei-Hwa Huang

Movie production: Sarah Kling, Wei-Hwa Huang

Manager

Sarah Kling

Hints

General hints:

- Any data associated with the movie – title, release date, names of actors or directors, etc. –is irrelevant to the puzzle. Recall that the introductory message said that these are actual events, despite their similarity to famous movie scenes.

- Anything Dr. When does is also irrelevant.

- The only thing the clips themselves are used for is to set the order. After that, the timestamp carries all the information.

- The semaphore letters are not exact, but it should be generally clear what letter they represent if teams look at an actual clock with hands set correctly.

- There’s a lot of data here – lots of numbers in the timestamp, the times depicted, and a lot of irrelevant information. If teams are having trouble, steer them toward ordering the clips as a first step.

Q: We can’t figure out what movie X is.

A: “Movie? What movie? These are real events –where the Doctor is in trouble, no less! Don’t think about any movies – that can’t possibly be right.”

Q: The timestamps are all screwed up! (E.g., months are wrong, or daytime scenes have a night timestamp.)

A: “Yep, it looks like a bunch of that data got corrupted. The years, though, seem right – or at least possibly right, given that the View-O-Scope can only show two digits.”

Q: We don’t know anything about the years when some of these scenes took place!

A: “Well – we can figure out _something_, can’t we? No, we don’t know exactly when the Doctor was running from dinosaurs – but it wasn’t the present day, and it wasn’t 5 billion years ago. Our margin of error may be wide, but we do have a range.”

Q: What the hell do we do? There’s so much data!

A: “Hmm… there has to be some reason for the Doctor bouncing to various times. If only we could figure out the right order in which to sift through all this data. With the scenes themselves - not the timestamps, since those seem to be at least partially corrupted – how could we order them?”

Response to Correct Answer

Lab assistant, over phone: "Great! Now I'll just refocus the Temporal View-O-Scope to fourteen billion years ago. You'll want to get remote access too - you should go to Location X [location for the Send Me Back puzzle - possibly the Presidio, or thereabouts]. Once you get access, we'll watch the Doctor and he'll tell us what to do!" [Teams proceed to the location for the Send Me Back puzzle.]

To Do

Produce the video. Make copies of DVDs.