Shakespeare on the Cache
"What's that you've got there Shakespeare?" Lucy asked as she bounded up the front steps of the house.
"Meow!" The cat needed, before picking up the small packaged that had been situated between his paws and ran off, carrying it away with him.
"Well fine!" She called after the flash of fur. "Don't tell me."
Lucy watched the bushes where the cat had disappeared and when the rustle of the cat’s movements stopped, Lucy turned away and unlocked the door.
"Daft cat, always running off with my mail..." Lucy sighed, dropping her keys in the sideboard as she walked past. With work done for the day, she could turn her attention back to the mystery that had been hounding her day and night since it had been released.
She situated herself at her computer and opened the website so that she could get to work.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Lucy's fingers tapped rhythmically against her desk as she stared at her computer screen. The website stared back at her, unrelenting in its unwillingness to show her the answer she was seeking. Between the cat stealing her mail and this seemingly unsolvable puzzle, she was frustrated. Star-Crossed Lovers, the name of the cache was supposed to be easy. Shakespeare was kind of her thing, so she had jumped on the opportunity to solve it first, but as of yet, she had not had any luck.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
What had R+J4eva been thinking when they published this puzzle? And worse yet… What had the Community Reviewer been thinking when they released it? Lucy sighed, still tapping her fingers against her desk in frustration as she continued to stare at the screen.
What did she know about puzzle solving? It wasn’t always what was shown on the screen… Sometimes it was something else altogether. But she had already highlighted the white spaces, downloaded the various pictures to inspect the file names and checked the source code of the post. There had been nothing that had stood out. Still, if she had exhausted all the possibilities, she needed to start again. Look at things she had discounted in the beginning. The puzzle itself was likely still the words that were presented. Those quotes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, yet she had seen nothing about them that would-
“Wait!” she cried as slapped her hand against the desk in sudden excitement. Lucy jumped up from her seat and rushed to her bookshelf, looking for her Collected Works of Shakespeare. Why had she not thought of it earlier?
Four long days earlier. It made her wonder why no one had solved the cache yet, but an FTF* would make her day. FTF’s on puzzles were hard to get, especially when you overthought the whole thing. It would be a smiley to be proud of, one she could boast about at the next meet… If she could just find that book… She ran her fingers across the spines of the books on her bookshelf, humming to herself as she cocked her head to the side, trying to read the titles as quickly as she could.
“Ah ha!” she exclaimed, grabbing for the large book. She flipped it open, finding the start page for Romeo and Juliet and looked for the line that was staring at her from her computer screen. Distracted by the book, she sat down back at her desk, almost falling off the chair as Shakespeare jumped up from where he had been curled up on the chair. “What the?” Lucy cried in surprise. “Where did you come from you?”
The cat stared up at her with eyes full of contempt, before turning away from her and stalking away, his tail high and proud.
“Where my mail cat?” she called after him. “I’ll find it, you know!”
He looked back at her over his feline shoulder and it was probably her imagination, but he seemed to glance at her computer, before appearing to raise an eyebrow at her. Then he turned away once more and finally walked away as if saying, ‘ah huh, just like you found the answer to that puzzle…’ She could practically feel his scepticism.
“I’ll show you!” she called after the cat. “I’ll show you!” Lucy looked around the room, finally realising that she had been arguing with her cat. The open window that he had climbed in from looked out onto her neighbour’s front porch. The old woman who lived there was out watering her plants and Lucy cringed in embarrassment as she found the woman staring at her. “Afternoon Mrs Kravitz.” The nosey neighbour nodded to her and waved awkwardly. Putting on a bright smile, Lucy added, “Shakespeare ran off with my mail again.”
Mrs Kravitz nodded, but seemed to hurry through her watering and then disappeared inside the house. Lucy sighed in frustration then sat back down to find out if she was right.
“My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep. The more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite… 122” she murmured to herself. “Act two… Scene two… Right… There!” She exclaimed to herself. “They’ve gone and gotten the line numbers wrong… That last line is 135… Not 122… What else is wrong?”
She flipped through the pages of the book, looking for the next line in the puzzle, wondering how she had missed this simple mistake… And with it being so simple, why had no one claimed the FTF? Ok… Maybe that was too harsh, she still had no idea what to do with this revelation. “How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, Like softest music to attending ears! It says 132… But it should be 169… Hmmm…”
She collected all the numbers, making sure that each one was incorrect, finding that about half of the lines that had been attributed to the correct lines from the play. She noted them down, but focused instead on the incorrect lines, writing them down hastily on the notepad she had beside her keyboard.
“Now what?” she asked as she stared at the numbers she had managed to gather:
122 132 52 3912 12 251 521 131 1818 25 135
Just looking at it, she could tell that it would not translate directly into coordinates.
“Meow!” Shakespeare stood in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen staring at her as though he had always known that she would get stumped all over again.
“Yeah, yeah!” Lucy muttered, waving the cat away. “I’ve got this!”
The cat mewled at her again, before padding off so that he didn’t have to watch her flounder. She opened another tab on her browser and when to the most useful puzzle solving tool that there was, a website that collected together links to all the various puzzle solving ideas. Code translators, antipodes converters, anything you could think of that you might need to solve a particularly difficult puzzle cache.
She typed the numbers into a multi code breaker and let the site do its business. When it had finished, he scrolled through the different options. She had been right, whatever it was, it wasn’t a set of longitude and latitude. Everything seemed to come out as complete gibberish and she was about to shut the page down when she caught sight of her name. One of the codes had spit out her name as part of the answer… It was a simple alphabet cypher, one of many that had been run depending on how you split the numbers up. This one had been split: 12 21 3 25 23 9 12 12 25 15 21 13 1 18 18 25 13 5.
Who on earth was R+J4eva?
Heart thudding in her chest Lucy copied the answer, her hand shaking so much that she had to highlight the text four times before she was finally able to capture it for copying. Swallowing hard, she changed tabs and pasted the answer into the answer window and hit submit.
“Congratulations, you will find the cache here:” appeared on the screen along with a set of coordinates. At the bottom of the page was an additional instruction. “Bring the package!”
“What?” Lucy exclaimed. She picked her phone up, typing the coordinates into the Geocaching app. The location was the small park just down the road from her house. “The package… The package…” she mumbled, then remembered. “SHAKESPEARE!” She cried out. “Where’s my mail? Where is it?” She run into the kitchen but didn’t find the cat there. She opened the back door, hoping to find him out on the back porch. She cat had once again done one of his vanishing acts. “Where are you?” she cried in desperation.
He wasn’t in his bed, or the cubby on the cat tower… But ever the Geocacher, with a bad habit of sticking her hands into dark, unknown places for her finds, she stuck her hand into the cubby on the tower, flailing it around to search of her mail. She almost jumped in surprise when her rand touch the surface of a paper wrapped box. “Got it!”
She ran through the house, barely remembering to grab her keys. The cat stared at her in disbelief from the couch as she slammed the door behind her.
She ran for the park. Would he be there already? She had no idea… But how had he known that she wouldn’t solve it four days ago? She had no idea, all she knew was that she had to get there fast, as if a real FTF really did depend upon it.
The park was in sight and she could swear that she saw him standing there, waiting, like Phil waiting at the mat for contestants to arrive to the pitstop on The Amazing Race. He was there. He was waiting for her.
Cars passed in both directions, preventing her from crossing. The nearest lights was over a block away… The exertion from running down her street had her panting for breath at her forced stop, her hand clutching harshly at the small box she grasped.
Finally, a break in the traffic and she dashed across the road, running into the park to meet him. She could see several others waiting there. Had they solved the puzzle before her? Highly likely with the way she had overthought the entire puzzle before her startling revelation… She never thought to check the solve/fail graphic. They were cheering her on as if it was the finale of The Amazing Race and she was running first onto the mat.
As she approached, he dropped to one knee, looking up at her. “Lucy,” he said solemnly.
I just nodded, so out of breath that words could not form in my suddenly dry mouth. I nodded again, vigorously, trying to make my answer known.
He smiled at me and around us, our friends were grinning, dabbing at eyes, or whispering to one another. “Why don’t you open the package?”
She nodded once more and tore into the wrapping, noting that Shakespeare had left tooth and claw marks on my package… And then she had almost crushed it on the way to the park.
As the wrapping fell away, Lucy gasped. Tied to the hands of a Signal* doll, was a ring. She nodded again, “Yes!” She finally managed to gasp out. “Yes.”
“Go on, kiss the girl!” one of the onlookers cried. “So, we can sign the log!”
*FTF = First to Find
*Signal is the name of the frog mascot of the Geocaching game.