Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Desconstructing the Devil's Advocate, Part II: Jail Bird

Danger! This box is still alive, and able to be found and logged.  Nevertheless, the clues is mostly broken down below.  Spoilers ahead...

So.  Where were we?  The first boxed clue was going to be the first of a pair of clues that together would give you GPS coords as the start point to the final box.  (As per the last post, that start point was in High Park.) The box was the Jail Bird letterbox.



Jail Bird Letterbox stamp image


The carve I put together used some images I had found around the internet.  I then implanted the north coordinate number (from a pair of GPS coordinates) as the "jail bird's" inmate number.  There was no hiding this number; I hoped most people would recognize the "43" as the beginning of a GPS coord since pretty much all coords are in the 43 range in southern Ontario.

(And, if not, the other stamp might give clues to that, but more on that in a later post.)

In order to find this box, you also had to solve the clue... I put it in the form of a communique between an inmate and his lawyer and made it look like it was encrypted - but it really wasn't.

I in essence wrote the text, put it in all caps, deleted all the spacing, then respaced it in three character intervals and reparagraphed it in triplets.

The result was a little like this:

NOT ETO FIL 
E:C LIE NTC 
ALL EDM YOF 
FIC ETH ISM 
ORN ING .AP 

... etc.

But, leaving when you read it while ignoring the spaces or the paragraphs, it reads: Note to file: client called my office this morning.  Apparently broken out of the slammer.  Accomplice sent him birthday cake with file inside.  Client ran out of the building, but didn't get far - followed jack a short ways, but then darted inside nearby athenaeum and took refuge in a corner a number of floors below some lawyers gone bad.  Must contact crown and seek plea bargain.

So, even decoded a litter vague, but the important parts are: left a jail and darted inside nearby "athenaeum" {Google: athenaeum = library}.  Clue says Toronto.  So, a jail close to a library - well, there's the infamous Don Jail, and hey, the road in front of it had be renamed for Jack Layton - so following "jack" a short ways, you get to the Riverdale library...

And "took refuge in a corner a number of floors below some lawyers gone bad": there's a non-fic section of books somewhere in this library... A few "floors" below = shelves, there is the magnet box.

First box and first clue down... A finder would now have half a GPS coord to use to find the final box, whether they knew it or not.  Two to go... 

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