2.10 Christmas Party

Order

2.06

Status

::POLISH::

Location

Status: Paine Memorial High School Teachers' Lounge, actually Highlands Rec Center, 1851 Lexington Ave. San Mateo

GC PoC: Erik & Melissa

Parking: Lot in front of Rec Center

Notes: Reserved

Type

Mandatory Puzzle

Plot Setup

Prof. Chronus has lost her bolt cutters and so can't get into Wesley's locker. She needs the locker combo. At a certain location a tachyonic vortex allows players to overhear snippets of conversation from the teacher's lounge.

Props

DVD player
4 Speakers
Coffee maker
Plastic inbox trays, qty. 5
Plant
Audio system
Audio data
Door sign
Hint sheet for Faculty Christmas Party puzzle

Plot Point to Convey

Short Description

Prof. Chronos needs Wesley's locker combo; ghostly voices from 1986 heard at the high school in 2011 help teams find where it might be recorded.

Open Time Period

Sunday, 4 - 7 AM

Staff Instructions

Your Role: Peach Frontier Lab Assistant.

Site Setup:

Set up audio system and set on repeating loop play
Call GC

Handout Instructions: Say words to the effect of

Thank heavens you're here. The laboratory's sensors detected some tachyonic radiation at this high school of all places. So I was sent to investigate. Now I hear all these strange sounds...but my grad school classes never covered this. Can you figure it out?

Hints: Since neither the lab nor your character know that Prof. Chronos wants the players to find a locker combination, you can't really help them.

Site Close Down: Clean up.

Other Instructions:

Stay in character.
Except ... if a team says "time out," break character and help them.

Detailed Description

Prof. Chronos has been sent to the right time & place, but she's lost her bolt cutters and can't get into Wesley's locker to take the envelope. She thinks the teams might be able to find the combination if they go to the school in the present day - but she doesn't know where the locker combinations are kept. At the high school, the players hear strange, disembodied voices in one room - pieces of conversations from a past Christmas party, made audible in the present by the tachyonic vibrations caused by Prof. Chronos' time travel to the school. It turns out that the voices form a classic logic puzzle (where Mr. Green sits next to a woman but not someone wearing red, etc.), and matching all elements in the puzzle yields a coincidentally useful phrase indicating where the combos are.

How To Give To Teams

Lab sends email to the teams,

Dear colleagues,

The View-O-Scope is fully working again and can see into the past, not just the laboratory's internal cameras! Enter access code 893416 into the interface and you can watch Prof. Chronos in 1986.

The video itself tells the players to go to the "high school" (including giving them the address).

Puzzle Answer

CHECK PRINCIPALS SUITE (with a hint to look in picture frame)

Puzzle Solution

The first step is to notice that there are four conversations with the same five teachers, and that there is some sort of standard logic puzzle about these five teachers. Let's label these voices by their personality:

MOUSE: male, mousy, insecure, eager to please
SMUG: male, smug, sarcastic, a southern drawl
CHIPPER: female, chipper, manic, City Girl Squawk
DEADPAN: female, deadpan, bored
ACCENT: male, stuffy, paternal

Also, for convenience, let's number the conversations:

This conversation has SMUG mentioning the room arrangement: numbered 1-9 along the hallway, with odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other.
This conversation has a champagne cork and a chorus "I do not own a watch!"
This conversation has CHIPPER say that the male names are male and the female names are female.
This conversation has ACCENT go into detail about the final message extraction.

By listening to the conversation, we can find out that these are the attributes we must match up:

First names: Alfred, Charlie, Ulysses (all male); Kimberly, Nicole (both female)
Last names: Campbell, Harrison, Iverson, Landau, Peterson
Subjects taught: Endocrinology, Isomorphisms, Robotics, Spectroscopy, Thermodynamics
Room numbers: 5 distinct numbers in the range 1-9, subject to certain restrictions
Break periods: 5 distinct numbers from 1 to 5.

The first step is to match some names with the voices:

ACCENT is Ulysses (SMUG addresses him as such in Conv. #1)
MOUSE is Alfred (SMUG addresses him as such in Conv. #2)
SMUG is Charlie (by elimination, the only male name left) Harrison (he reacts to ACCENT mentioning "Harrison" in Conv. #1)
CHIPPER is Kimberly (DEADPAN addresses her as such in Conv. #3)
DEADPAN is Nicole (by elimination, the only female name left) Campbell (CHIPPER addresses her as "Campbell" in Conv. #3)

The next step is to notice from DEADPAN Nicole's first line in Conv. #3 that one of the teachers is in Room 8 and has a 4th-period break. Who is it?

It's not DEADPAN Nicole Campbell, since she expresses desire for Room 8 in Conv. #3.
It's not CHIPPER Kimberly, same reason.
It's not ACCENT Ulysses, since in Conv. #3 he asserts that his room has a number less and 6.
It's not SMUG Charlie Harrison, since in Conv. #1 ACCENT Ulysses mentions that SMUG Charlie Harrison has two neighbors, and Room 8 would be at the end of one side of the hallway as the numbers only go from 1 to 9.
Therefore, MOUSE Alfred must teach in Room 8 and have the 4th period break.

Now we should look at which five of the nine rooms are used.

From Conv. #1, we can infer that three of the rooms are consecutive on one side of the hall, and the other two are consecutive on the other side of the hall.
Since Room 8 is in use (see above), we can deduce from that and the previous rule that Room 6 is in use and Room 2 is not.
From DEADPAN Nicole's line about multiples in Conv. #2, we can also deduce that Room 1 can't possibly be in use.
This leaves the following possibilities: 56789, 35678, 34568, 45678, 46789.
From DEADPAN Nicole's line about multiples in Conv. #2, we can eliminate 56789 (no multiples) and 34568 (3/6 and 4/8 are both multiples).

Now we can figure out a bit more about SMUG Charlie Harrison:

Although we can't figure out which one of 35678, 45678, or 46789 is correct, we can at least see that Charlie has two neighbors, must be in room 5 or room 6.
Since according to MOUSE Alfred in Conv. #3, nobody has a break

(to be written)

The logic puzzle solves to that explicit message. The conversation snippet that explains the extraction method for that phrase also gives a hint to "look at things in the right frame".

Budget

Credits

Manager

Dave S

Hints

Response to Correct Answer

n/a Teams should go off on their own to the principal's office

To Do

Finalize the script
Record final audio
Master loops and burn onto DVD
Test 4-channel loudspeaker arrangement

Other Notes

Candidate for final script:

Media:Script_for_Christmas_Party_--_January_26.rtf

Mockup with non-final script and voices:

See idea genesis at Background Chatter