Banana Lobster Grass Chocolate

Or, How We Got a Free Dinner

Hello! Is anyone actually reading this? Or is everyone doing fun summer activities? Anyway, yesterday I went to MIT with Sachi, Philip and Marianne to visit our friend Zandra. We found her on a couch, sleeping. But that's later.

First, we bought Sachi some coffee. Because she hadn't slept in a very long time. As we tried to cross the street, Sachi reminded us, "I'm holding coffee. We have to remember to do everything at coffee speed."

"That sounds like it would be fast though," Philip commented.

"Okay, what about coffee-holding speed." That was better. So eventually we crossed the street at coffee holding speed, only to eventually decide to go back to the building we had just been in, in the hopes that Zandra would be in the ESP office there. After wandering around the building for a while, we found the ESP office.

"Is Zandra in there?" we asked.

"Yes, but she's sleeping," was the answer we got. We entered to find Zandra partially asleep on a couch in the room. We went out into the hall and sat down, and tried to talk to the half-asleep Zandra.

"Is that Gennie N----'s sister?" Sachi asked Zandra. (Names are removed to preserve anyonymity). "No," said sleepy Zandra. "That's Abby N----."

"Yes," said Sachi. "Gennie N----'s sister."

After a few more incoherent utterances, Zandra suddenly said, "It's Alex!"

Alex came over and talked to us. "I'm here because I had to drop off my glasses," he explained. A minute later Zandra said to Sachi, "Wait, why is he here?"

"His glasses," Sachi said. After some conversation, Alex said, "I wouldn't have recognized you from down the hall except that you said, 'It's Alex!'"

"What?" said Zandra. "Do I look so bad that you can't even recognize me?"

"No," said Alex. "I coudn't see you because I don't have my glasses."

"Oh," said Zandra. "That kind of glasses!" A little later we discovered that Zandra was creating a puzzle hunt for her friend. She was much more awake by this point. We asked if we could look at it and she said if we tested the puzzles for her, she would bring us to dinner. We consented, and got to work.

The first clues we recieved told that we had to give some kind of sacrafice. It said, "a sacrafice of any nature" and somewhere else, that the sacrifice was "heathen's choice". We spent a long time debating whether or not that meant we could give anything as a sacrifice, until eventually I decided to "call a priest" which the instructions said you could do for help. We pretended to call the priest (Zandra) and I asked, "What is a heathen?" She said "you."

This was enough, we decided that it must mean we can give anything. Instead of giving real objects, since we weren't really doing the puzzle hunt, we were supposed to write what we would give on a piece of paper and give it to Zandra. "Can we sacrifice God?" asked Sachi, loudly, as someone walked by.

So we did, and the sacrafice was accepted. Our next puzzle resulted in a code that turned out to mean "Apple lobster". We went to Zandra and said "Apple lobster", and she responded, "Banana lobster grass chocolate." We didn't know if this was important or not, so we wrote it down, while an amused Zandra smiled at the fact that we were looking for clues in her nonsense. It soon turned out that that was irrelevant and we had to use the same method to decode a different message to get our answer.

Eventually it was time for dinner, only we were late. At this point Zandra revealed to us that we were going to Junction dinner, Junction being a program for high schoolers that ESP was running. After running to the building, Zandra deposited us into a line and disapeared. When we got to the front of the line we realized why it was so urgent to get there on time; Zandra had to serve food.

-Rebecca