azurite | Cookies and Heists

This is the last of my posts for the initial communiques for MacHeist 2009 mission. It includes my process for figuring out the last two communiques from Sophia, our contact over at the Directorate.

So, if you've been keeping up with the forum posts and the discovery of the *.tga images (and inputting them into the Mainframe), you should now have two apps in your Loot:
(1) Process
(2) MacDust
What will we get upon completing all nine communique missions, I wonder?

Let's head to the post "Worth a Thousand Words."

Awesome work, so far you’ve entered the location of seven files into the MacHeist mainframe. I’m not sure how long this can keep up, but we’ve received another message containing:

Cryptic.jpg
and
maroon.zip

The image is of a multicolored image with lots of overlapping images and words. Surely our clue must be in there, but how do we know what's worth examining and what's a red herring?

The *.zip contains an application called "Look Beyond The Red" that activates your iSight and displays everything in a red hue. Also, your image is upside down. Perhaps this is a clue for how to deal with the Cryptic.jpg! How about we open up an image editor with Channels, and see what the image looks like in the red channel, upside-down?

Okay, in the red channel with the image flipped vertically, we see this image. Let's try decoding what it says, okay?

First, we've got the number "4." Okay, 4 sounds like "for" or "four." Then, we add... a traffic light to it? But no, more specifically, it's the green light-- the light that means "go."
So we've got "for" "go" and "ten." Hey, I know that word-- it's "forgotten!"

Next up is pasta on a fork, but minus the a. Okay, so PASTA minus the A-- it's either PSTA, PAST, or PST. I'm thinking it's "PAST," because that's actually a word that makes sense.

So, "forgotten" and past"

Then we have a gun's "trigger," plus "s." That's easy enough: "triggers."

Then we have "re" next to a girl walking her dog. It looks like a scottish terrier.

Redog? Reterrier? I doubt that. How about "pet?" After all, a dog is a kind of pet, right?

"Repet..." and then we have "eye" which sounds like "I" followed by a body part just below the knee. It's pointing at the front of the leg, not the back (calf), so how about... shin!

Re+pet+i+shin = Repetition!

The total message comes out to forgotten past triggers repetition.

Okay, but what do we do with that? Why not do what we've done with a lot of the other "weird words" in our previous missions and try it as a URL?

forgottenpasttriggersrepetition.com

And there it is, our next *.tga image! Whoo-hoo! Input that into Mainframe and keep going!

Next up is a communique that I can read even though a lot of others couldn't: it says おりがみ. That's Japanese hiragana that reads "origami." You know what origami is, right? It's the Japanese art of paper folding! Hey, are we going to be making cranes?

Let's find out:

This is really starting to come together, the computer has calculated that all of the files in the locations you’ve entered are definitely segments of a larger file.

A delivery service just came by HQ and dropped off a painting. When we unwrapped it, it was a painting of a red fish and signed ‘Molly McFord’

Allons-y!

A red fish? Molly McFord? Origami? How does it all fit together? Well, let's start with a method we've used with previous name droppings: go to her website!

mollymcford.com

It takes us to a very artistic site featuring none other than... origami (not paintings. I wonder why McFord painted something?)! From left to right, the origami items are:
* A red tulip
* A pink elephant
* An orange cat
* A green crane
* A rainbow-colored ball
* A gold dragon
* An orange ??? (giraffe? dog?)

The gallery is the same as the main page, so let's try the other links.

On the tour page, we're given four cities: Seattle, Rochester, San Francisco, and Tampa. It says "if our paths intersect, your city could be next." Is there a place where all a line coming from four cities intersect? I made this map on Google Maps that seems to show Denver as the point where they all intersect. But what does it mean?

The other sections don't seem that helpful, but interestingly enough, Molly DOES have a "Client" section that's password protected. What could the password be?

We still have the clue of a red fish, so let's try that: redfish
Nope, no dice.

What about 'Denver?' Bingo! Make sure to capitalize the 'D,' okay? Now you've got the next *.tga location, so enter it into the Mainframe!

That's the last one, so you should get a message saying that "Pandora's Pests" was added to your loot bag. It's a game about swatting bugs and defending your home turf from invasion of the insects! Eek! Not my style game, but some people might have fun with fly-swatting.

What's in Sophia's last message, the debriefing? Are there more missions to come?

Agents,
The MacHeist mainframe has determined that we have found all of the segments of the file that “The Source” was trying to send us. I’m still not sure what all of this means, so please be patient while the computer sifts through the data and decodes the file.

Congratulations, and I’ll keep you notified via the mainframe if we make a breakthrough.

Thanks again for your help,
Sophia

Hm, seems like there might be more to come once we figure out the significance of our completed picture. Stay tuned!

Hope you had fun following this first part of MacHeist with me. It was fun for me too, as my first time participating in MacHeist. Some missions were a lot easier than others, so I'm looking forward to future challenges!