Like always, we started our session by heading to the map room. And, like always, we promptly ignored it and went to wherever we fancied.

The first plan was to get on the monorail and ride it to some puzzles. James got on the monorail but I jumped and missed.

No big deal, I had a walkie talkie so I could let him know over the radio. We quickly learned that although the train can be stopped, it will restart eventually if you let go of the handle. And you have to let go of the handle to operate the radio.

Eventually we figured out where we both were and found somewhere to meet. And it only took half an hour!

Not our best work.

We wandered around some more and finally found our first puzzle. This was similar to the music puzzle from week 4 [§PST-0004], except this time we had an intercom but couldn’t see each other. So James had to describe/sing each jingle. We already had a rough way to describe these so it was pretty straightforward.

Next up we found a purple amphitheatre, which we’d been to before but skipped.

This was made up of an enclosed room with lights, and an outside area with some switches in the same positions. Originally the plan was to wave my arms to describe each light (so both hands up was the middle, one arm out was the right or left etc) but that didn’t work too well.

So instead I held a glowing ball and stood on the right or left part of the window, and then crouched if the light was on the lower row. I had to reverse my left/right position to match the switches (which sometimes I forgot) but we got there eventually.

We now had a full backpack so we walked back to the monolith. With the dog toys safely deposited, we headed out into the wilderness to find our next challenge.

It didn’t take long to find a huge hole in the ground which looked like a missile silo. At the bottom was a box which needed to be placed on a pedestal at the top. This had to be done by kicking/throwing it onto platforms around the center, and making sure we were in the right spot to catch it. Because if you miss, the box will inevitably fall to the bottom of the silo.

And miss we did.

But after much throwing (and some swearing) we got the box to the top and unlocked the penultimate dog toy.

Despite the slow start we made pretty good progress, and we’re ready to get the Big Key next week.