Eccentric Flower:199901/this dog wont hunt

sixteen january

this dog won't hunt

This postcard, although about real events, is written in the style of my little protagonist friend A.D. Roehm. I will be working more on the Exchange Student novella this weekend, and I need a warmup exercise. So here's A.D.:

I should probably explain now about the Hunt. I mentioned it already, but I didn't explain. Did you ever notice that people usually won't ask you to explain? If you drop in some word they don't know, they'll just nod and pretend they know what you're talking about. I wish they'd ask. It'd save a lot of trouble later.

Anyway, the university has this thing called the Mystery Hunt. It happens every year in January, when there are no classes and a lot of little "activities" happen, like classes but short - two or three days each - and not very serious. Like the Charm School for geeks. I wouldn't go to that. Maybe I need charm school but I don't think I'd want to be in a room with some of these other kids. They scare me.

The Mystery Hunt works like this: The team that's running the hunt hides a little doodad, usually a coin, somewhere on campus. Then they make a series of clues that tell you where to find the coin. Then they do something to conceal these clues - usually they hide them in a big bunch of puzzles - I mean puzzles on paper - that you have to solve to find the coin.

The solvers are also in teams - each team gets the package of puzzles and anything else the huntmaster wants to give them (sometimes there are props, some item you have to figure out what to do with) and they go off and don't sleep for two or three days, working at it, until one team finds the coin.

The puzzles are way too hard for one person to finish in time. Really hard. The kids at this school are kinda smug about how they know so much more than everybody else in the world, and they like to try to figure out nasty problems. Even if the problems are useless to figure out, even if there's no point to solving them. They like being able to say they could do it.

I guess I'm giving away what I think of the Hunt. Well, I wasn't going to try to hide it. I did it for a while. I was on a solving team twice, and was on a puzzle-making team once.

Being on the team that's running the Hunt is really rough. Everyone's got other things to do, you know - classes and work and stuff - so you have to write all these puzzles and get them all together so they work right and duplicate them. It's a big job. When I was a solver, I wondered why there were always at least one or two mistakes in the puzzle set. Gee, I thought, can't they get it absolutely right just once? But it's harder than it looks.

Being a solver is kinda fun, but how many puzzles can you work before your brain melts? After the first twelve hours I don't want to even look at the puzzles again. Plus there's always fighting. People fussing about each others' answers, people playing "I know more than you do," people claiming puzzles and not wanting any help from other people. Well, actually, I do that part too. How many people does it take to do a cryptogram, anyhow?

And the group of people I was always on a team with is a close bunch - everybody knows everybody else, sometimes people are living together, there's always some politics or something going on. I hate politics.

I don't know if I got tired of the people first - I like them all okay as long as they're not at the Hunt - or the puzzles. Maybe I'm just over my lifetime amount of puzzles.

Anyway, that's what the Hunt is about, and that's why I'm not there this year, for the second year in a row. I guess maybe I should have just not bothered to explain, and you could have nodded your head and pretended you knew.

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