Story

Where are my glasses?

It’s March 13, 2020. You open the windows and sunlight streams into your room. It’s a beautiful spring day: the weather is warm, there’s nary a cloud in the sky, and there certainly isn’t a deadly virus ravaging the globe.

It’s also finally, finally the day of the 2020 Galactic Puzzle Hunt! In just a few short hours you’ll be knee-deep in puzzles with your fellow teammates.

You open up your laptop to check if there are any updates when you realize that things are still out of focus. Of course: you need your glasses. But where are they? You begin to search your room…

Several hours go by. You’ve ransacked your whole house, but the only things you found were some odd pieces of paper with strange writing on them. Increasingly nervous that you’re going to miss the start of the hunt, you try to calm yourself down: Treat it like a puzzle. You’re good at puzzles after all.

You stare at the papers you gathered. They’re hard to make out since you can’t see very well; parts of them are still blurry. Hopefully they’ll get clearer over time, and maybe reading and understanding these pages can help jog your memory.

20/20 Foresight

FORESIGHT IS 2020, of course! You’ve lost your glasses before, and it was not a fun time. So you built yourself a system for finding them again. Whenever you might lose your glasses, you leave clues on the other sights around your house, and those clues always lead you back to your glasses. What foresight you had! If only you remembered what all the four sights were…

You think one of them might be your night vision goggles.

Night Vision Goggles

You grab your goggles and head to your basement. It’s pitch black down here, and without them you’d hardly be able to see anything at all. You put them on and you notice some green glows emanating from various spots. More puzzles to solve no doubt!

Periscope

How could you have forgotten the periscope that came with your bathtub submarine! You step up to your bathtub and peer down into its murky depths. It sure is far deeper than you remember. No matter, you think, and you board your trusty submarine. It’s a good thing you bought this—you thought you’d never use it. You head underwater and start looking for clues through its complicated periscopic system.

Microscope

While underwater, you were struck by an idea to check the water quality in your bath. You grab a pipette, fill it up, and head over to your home lab where you squeeze some drops onto a slide and place it under your microscope. You’re taken aback by the strange colors and shapes you see through the lens.

Binoculars

You’ve exhausted all the options for seeing things inside your house, but you still have your rather large backyard to explore. And what better tool to help you explore it than your fine pair of binoculars! You head outside and press the lenses to your eyes. There sure are some sights out here…

Four Sights

You’ve retrieved the clues you left for yourself at the four sights, but what now? Sounds like there are other sights you haven’t taken into account…