"I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the zebra did it." (Or, Every Story is a Mystery When You're a Detective)

One of my favorite pleasures in life, as I've mentioned before, is what I call "The Rush." The jump of realization and epiphany that comes when you suddenly understand something that was previously kept hidden from you. When I experience it, I tend to give off a little laugh at the sheer, wonderful cleverness of it all.


(The Rush is what Q is talking about, I think, as the reason he spares humanity in the Star Trek: The Next Generation finale, "All Good Things...", the moment when Picard saves humanity, not through technology or bravery or even the power of friendship and loyalty (although his plan does require all those things), but in the moment at which his mind expanded to understand the bizarre nature of the problem. It's that quality, Q says, that marks a species for greatness, and I've always had a soft spot for that idea.)

There are plenty of opportunities to find the Rush, at varying degrees of difficulty. Whole genres of video gaming are built around encouraging players to epiphany. But prior to the invention of gaming, people looking to simulate the feeling (that is, those who don't get it naturally in jobs that rely on problem solving capabilities) were probably best served by reading mystery stories.

"Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?"

-Oath of the Detection Club

If you've read mystery stories with any regularity, you've encountered one that relies on at least one of the things damned in that lovely oath. Is there anything more upsetting than to have a never-mentioned clue appear out of nowhere to let the quirky detective suddenly lay a solution in front of the readers?

For me, and, I imagine, many others, the mystery story is a kind of game (ignoring the books, usually written for children, which make this explicit by presenting each chapter as a case and asking the reader to try to solve it), a race between the reader and the fictional detective to see who can solve the murder or robbery or what have you first. The detective has the advantage that, being a fictional creation, sprung from the forehead of the author, his eventual victory is inevitable. Barring some twist or narrative trick, the mystery WILL be solved by book's end.

The reader, on the other hand, has the advantage of being directly exposed to the text (or camera, in a filmed mystery). This limits the number of things the reader has to focus on to the bare minimum of what the author is willing to describe (or the director willing to show). At the same time, the reader/watcher also has the knowledge of all the literary conventions or editing tricks that a given genre has given rise to - foreshadowing, long lingering shots of significant objects or characters, all the tricks writers and directors use to imply significance that are invisible to the characters within the story.


(An example of an inversion here - I recently saw the excellent Source Code, and infuriated my mother by calmly pointing out the film's mystery villain within minutes of the film's start. I was able to identify him not because he was focused on, but because he seemed, very intentionally, to be OUT of focus... An act of misdirection that primed me to suspect him, and which I was only able to recognize through knowledge of the meta-information of editing/shot composition.)

Authors/directors can, of course, use those same tricks to mislead, subvert, confuse, or outright lie to the viewer - but that's all part of the fun. One of the joys of Andrew Hussie's amazing Homestuck (available at www.mspaintadventures.com) is the way it uses foreshadowing, established narrative structures, and pacing to play elaborate games with reader expectations.

Part of the fun of a story is its unpredictability, and this one has had plenty of it so far I think. Unpredictability is a significant basis for suspense, and I'm sure has other benefits we could examine. But I think there is also enjoyment value in occasional predictability, or rather, guessability. Setting up some obvious clues, and running with them to their logical conclusion. It's like throwing the reader a bone, particularly those who may be prone to feeling a little overwhelmed by getting perpetually outfoxed by the narrative.
-Andrew Hussie

There are pages and pages of speculation on Hussie's stories on his forums, and while some of it is asinine stuff and mindless guesses, a vast amount of it is strongly informed by the reader's understanding of how stories work generally, and how Homestuck - which is based on multiple viewpoints, subversions of dramatic moments, sudden bursts of epic action that significantly alter not only the content but also the tone and genre of the story, and a thousand other strange and wonderful elements - works in the specific. Weight in these arguments (which have a pretty good batting average of coming out true) is often given to considerations like the amount of time the text has spent with a given character, obscure bits of foreshadowing spread over the course of hundreds and hundreds of pages of story, and the nature of reader expectation itself. Each of the speculators is a detective, sifting through the text of the comic to solve the mystery: What happens next?


Of course, Homestuck isn't really a mystery story at all. But that's kind of the point: Every story is a mystery story, if you're willing to think about it. Every story can be a race between the reader and the director to work out how it's all going to end, what the next pages hold. The Rush from working out where a plot is heading, through clues both textual and subtextual, is as strong as the one produced by any product of LucasArts or Sierra.

Plus, the level of thought required to accurately predict what happens next forces the reader/watcher to actively engage with the work. Anything worth reading, I think, is worth thinking about. Obviously, there are shows or books that we treat as popcorn, that allow the reader/watcher to "shut their brain off" and just experience. But really appreciating something for the merits its creator was trying to express, to give it the full benefit of the doubt and assume that it was made by people who were thinking and caring about what they were producing (dangerous, because when you're wrong, a work can be ruined for you - see my entire relationship with the TV show Heroes) requires having your brain on - a process I've always found exhilarating.

The Beauty of Limitations (or, Just Because a Thing Sounds Stupid Doesn't Mean It Isn't Awesome)

Nintendo is a weird company, and they make weird decisions. Cartridges instead of discs for the N64. A motion-controlled non-HD console. Friend Codes. The Virtual Boy. And every time Nintendo announces another weird decision, my first instinct is to scoff, to say they've lost their touch for good this time. But I don't. For one simple reason.

Because that same Nintendo, following their weird instincts, made the DS, which is a) about as weird a collection of design choices as you could cram into a portable console, and b) one of the greatest consoles of all time.

Gimmicks (or, Comparisons Between Two Different Games About Teenagers Trapped in Shibuya for a Week)

The DS, when looked at as a list of features, is a gimmicky mess. A Wi-Fi-connected dual screen clamshell with built-in microphone and touch screen? It sounds like a platform designed to support about five first-party titles that exploit all of its mechanics and a billion pieces of shovelware where you touch the screen to throw a snowball at a monkey (I'm looking at you, Wii).


There is a belief that, when a piece of gaming hardware includes some innovative or strange feature, every game released for that system needs to use it. The big example here is the Wii - the system is a one-trick pony (albeit a pony that's very big, and very multi-faceted, like some sort of giant spider pony). Without motion controls, the only reason to play a game on the Wii is if it's an exclusive - Mario Galaxy would still be great without motion controls, but you wouldn't bother playing Madden on the Wii without them.

The beauty of the DS is that, except for the dual screens, all of its features are ignorable. Relatively few games use the Wi-Fi connectivity (which is good, given how useless the DS is with common security protocols) or the microphone. Most DO use the touch screen, but more often than not as an enhancement to the other controls (which is ALSO good, because the DS touch screen really isn't sensitive enough for fine controls - 5th Cell made Super Scribblenauts 1000% better than Scribblenauts just by letting you control Maxwell without having to use imprecise stylus controls).

What this translates to is an avoidance (for the most part) from weary, obligatory uses of those features. The system has a D-Pad and 8 buttons, so designers don't HAVE to use the touchscreen if they don't want to. And at the same time, it's there when they have a really good idea for it.


Square Enix's The World Ends With You is the best example that comes to mind of the DS features being used right. TWEWY uses everything on offer - combat occurs on both screens at the same time, with the upper screen being controlled with the traditional face buttons and the bottom screen's battle commands using every possible implementation of the stylus AND the microphone. A person playing the game looks like a total spaz, desperately scratching and blowing at their screen while furiously typing commands in on the D-Pad. Players can use Wi-Fi and passive contact with other DS owners to get bonuses. Hell, the game even uses the system's clamshell-closing Sleep Mode to kill a bonus enemy. The game was designed to use every feature of the system to the fullest, and it works on every possible level.


Contrast with Atlus' Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor. SMT:DS (And as much as I love the system, I will NEVER be able to defend the rampant tendency of developers to give their titles for it those particular cutesy initials) is a turn-based strategy game that incorporates traditional JRPG fights into its combat system. It doesn't use the microphone. If it has Wi-Fi, I honestly don't remember it, and the touch-screen is used only for menu commands. The only DS feature the game really uses is its inherent portability - it turns out turn-based strategy games work great on a system you can pick up and put down at a moment's notice. Past that, it's a game that could be on any system - and it's still great, one of the system's best titles. Because it wasn't on every platform... it was on the DS.

Why was that?

The Strength of Limitations (or, In Which a Controversial Argument Is Made Against the Noble Console Port)

The DS is not a powerful system. I'm not tech-minded enough to know all the details, but everything I've read says that it's roughly equivalent to a Playstation One. Its major competitor (in the pre-smartphone game world, anyway) is the Sony PSP, a system that absolutely crushes Nintendo's handheld in terms of graphic.

And that, I think, explains a lot of why I've spent roughly 10 times as much time with my DS than with my poor, neglected PSP.

The PSP , you see, is powerful enough that designers can, with a little work, make reasonably faithful portable versions of home console games. Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, God of War: Chains of Olympus, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. These are all good games that take the console experience and make it portable.

And that's why, on a fundamental level, they're boring. I have a home console, I've played those games already. Being able to play them on the bus doesn't make them anything new or exciting for me. It doesn't push designers to do anything except get existing games and mechanics to work on a smaller screen and a weaker processor.


But the DS can't do that. It's just not feasible to try to force a current-gen game onto the system (the sole exception I can think of being Disgaea, never the most technologically-demanding series in the first place). So even when the DS does get a console port, it's something fundamentally different. Weird strategy games, chibi-fied platformers... They can't just recreate, so they have to innovate. Have to step out of the current juggernaut genre (the first-person shooter) and try something else.

Genre (or, (or, How the DS Woke the Sleeping Princess Called "Adventure Games" With a Kiss, And It Was Totally Hot)

There are genres that have been left behind by the mainstream because they don't fit the image or the requirements a studio wants for their home console releases. Niche ideas whose small audiences don't support the cost of developing for a current-gen console. Adventure games, visual novels, first-person dungeon crawlers... All rare or extinct in the current generation. But they've found new life on the DS, because none of them demand powerful hardware - only good design.

(It doesn't hurt that the DS's mouse-like stylus design makes it great for adapting genres that have typically been most successful on the PC - the adventure genre, relying as it so often does on clicking hotspots and choosing dialogue options, is an especially good fit).

At the same time, relatively low development costs and unique features like the stylus mean that developers could delve into their experimental side. Surgery simulators, mini-game collections premised as historical recreations of fictional NES games, rhythm-based cheerleading games where you play as tiny men encouraging a white blood cell depicted as a hot nurse to eradicate a virus... All games that wouldn't have fit on a home console, but which work perfectly on the DS. Whole genres either created or pulled from the dust-heap and given new life.


A Justifiable Bout of Cranky Nostalgia (or, The Good Old Days Are Called That For a Reason)

I'm a little hesitant to write out this last point, both because it seems highly objective and because it makes me sound like an old fart, but here goes: The Super Nintendo era was a golden age of gaming. It existed at a point where technology was developed enough to make interesting experiments possible, without demanding huge investments of time and money to make a visually competitive title. After this comes the Playstation era, where games begin to bloat, with huge amounts of time and money being put into things like CG movies, where play times ballooned into the 80 or 90 hour ranges. We learned a lot in that era, but we also lost a simplicity, a fun that's vital to keeping a gamer interested in the hobby.

I see the DS as the answer to a question: What if the SNES-era never ended? What if developers were allowed to experiment, because the games they were developing weren't so expensive that an interesting failure would cripple the company? You might get a catalog of quirky platformers, deep RPGs, well-written adventures, brain-bending puzzles... And all of them available on-the-go, and at a lower price point, to boot.

So here's to you, DS. Resurrector of the Golden Age, Last Bastion of the Light. Your 3D cousin may eclipse you in the market, but never in my heart.

Salute!

Confessions of an Intellectual Drug Dealer

Hi, I'm Will. And I'm a puzzle addict.

I've always liked puzzles, for a simple reason: I'm EXTREMELY arrogant about my intellect, and I have a talent for abstract thought. I may not be the fastest kid in the class on a math problem, or the first to diagram a sentence, but when the teacher asked how to get the chicken, the fox, and the bag of feed across the river, I was the first man on the scene.

(In the last few years the phenomenon of the ARG - Alternate Reality Game - has both fascinated and repelled me. ARGs are giant puzzles that enterprising people -often but not always working to market a product in an innovative way - hide on the Internet and in the real world. ARGs create an amazing sense of the world as a place full of hidden secrets, but they're also frustrating. I was the smartest kid in Mrs. Dason's third grade class, but when the puzzle is available to the entirety of the population of the Internet, I almost always end up just watching the crazy mental gymnastics of the players at the genius end of the Bell curve with a mixture of awe and deep, deep envy.)


When I played my first adventure game 15 or so years ago (Space Quest 5, if you're curious), I was instantly hooked. Abstract thought mixed with funny writing and weird, interesting worlds? It was a perfect fit (barring the times I got stuck and had to beg my Mom to let me call the Sierra Hint Line in the sad days before I had Internet access). Over the next few years I devoured Sierra and LucasArts' back catalog, in search of new characters, cool plots, but most especially... The Rush.

You've felt it. The moment of epiphany, when your brain locks in and you and the game's designer experience a kind of time-delayed telepathy. 5 or 6 different elements come together in a new configuration, and your brain makes the logical leap. The feeling of dawning understanding. Endorphins for the mind. The Rush.

An easy puzzle won't evoke it. If the solution is obvious from the second you see it, there's no thrill, no challenge. Nonsensical difficulty won't, either, when you're just bashing away with trial and error until something finally works. The Rush only happens when your perspective suddenly shifts. The meaning of the impenetrable code becomes crystal clear, the Sphinx's riddle becomes suddenly obvious.


The single best evocation of The Rush I've ever found isn't from a video game at all. It's from the incredibly kinked mind of a guy named Jeff Webster. A few years ago, Webster started a site called Weffriddles. The premise is very simple: Weffriddles is a series of pages, each of which contains some sort of hint or hidden information. The player uses these hints to find the url of the next page. The puzzles start out extremely simply, but become beautifully, wonderfully, terribly complex.

My friend Kevin and I used to do weffriddles when we were bored at our lab jobs. This would inevitably turn into a competition, as each of us fought to be the first to get The Rush on the next puzzle, like two drug addicts fighting over their fix. The beauty of the riddles is that they are almost all quite simple - in hindsight. It is only once you have made the logical leap, felt The Rush, that things fall into place. Before that, you can spend days staring at them in incomprehension.


I have since tried to take up the Weff role myself. My Minecraft server is littered with mazes and obscure puzzles. I get a visceral thrill out of watching people navigating a teleporter maze I constructed over the course of a week. I find myself badgering people into playing through this stuff, because it gratifies the time I spent constructing it; because, as an asshole, I get off on watching them struggle with something I understand completely; and most of all, because I want them to experience The Rush.

Because that telepathy works both ways, and when someone solves a puzzle I've laid out, just for a second, there's someone else in the world who's thinking like me.

(Weffriddles can be found at www.weffriddles.com, and if you are of a certain temperament, will come to dominate your mind for weeks at a time)

Length as Storytelling

I've been replaying Persona 4 lately.

It's one my favorite games, and its only real competition for best PS2 RPG is its immediate predecessor, Persona 3. What I find fascinating about both of these games is that they use what became one of the sometimes-unfortunate defining traits of the Japanese RPG - their extreme length, especially when compared to other genres - and used it for storytelling purposes.


Game length is one of those nebulous topics where I find my opinions changing every time I think about it. I have felt cheated in the past by games that ended too abruptly, and been bored by games that were clearly full of padding to extend play time. What it comes down to, I think, is that a game should last for as long as it's fun, and as long as it has new things to say. Portal and Braid come to mind, as short games that explore their mechanics thoroughly in ~4 hours and then end, and I don't know that I've ever heard many arguments that those games need to be longer. (Portal 2 is significantly longer, but it earns those hours with great extensions to the basic gameplay formula, with constant shifts of setting, and with writing that continues to serve as a reward for players even if a puzzle isn't holding their attention).

But RPGs have often touted "length" as a major selling point. Boxes would claim 40, 60, 100 hours of gameplay, as though it were an end within itself. What this often translates to, however, are long, uninteresting cutscenes, slow-paced battle systems, needlessly obscure puzzles, unfocused, meandering plots. Padding.


Contrast, say, Chrono Trigger, and its sequel Chrono Cross. Trigger is generally considered to be one of the all-time best JRPGs. Cross... isn't.* There are a lot of factors at play to explain that, but the one that I want to focus on here is the fact that Chrono Cross is roughly 3 times longer than its predecessor.

Chrono Trigger is an unusually short game for its genre - about 20 hours, if memory serves. But it is also an extremely tight game - every action your party takes flows naturally into the next, into the next after that, from the opening Millenial Fair to the finale, where focus spreads to give each character their own character-defining sidequest and the player is given multiple options to tackle the final challenge against Lavos. I could chart every major story beat of the game from memory, if I was so inclined, and while that's partly out of familiarity, it's also because everything follows a logical order.

Chrono Cross, on the other hand, meanders. It runs through a cast of 45 playable characters and tons of NPCs. The player's end goal changes numerous times, distractions butt into the plot every few hours.. It's messy and it's tiring and it's LONG. At one point you're organizing a concert, then you're walking in a high-tech city from the future, then you're trapped in a crazy painting world. It doesn't feel long because the designers had a long story to tell; it feels like the designers were told to make a long game and threw a bunch of different ideas together.

(*Mind you, I do like the game. It has a good battle system and a great soundtrack, and it tries to deal in-depth with some interesting concepts that Trigger only deals with in subtext. But it IS a mess.)


Speaking of meandering, didn't I start this post by talking about Persona?

Persona 3 and Persona 4 are an odd blending of genre - they mix fairly hardcore RPG elements derived from their parent series, the Shin Megami Tensei games, with the time management and character-focus elements of a Japanese dating sim. The premise in both games is, basically, the one described on the TV Tropes page "Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World" - you're a high school student who must manage his social life during the day, and then use the power derived from your links to other people to fight otherworldly threats at night.

The games are long - my first playthroughs of each were in the ~60 hour range. But what makes them interesting in a discussion of game length are the way they use that longevity to their advantage. I would say about 40% of that time is spent in the actively RPG parts - exploring dungeons, fighting monsters, fusing Personas to increase your strength. The other 60% if spent socializing with your teammates and friends.

What's key here is that the games both take place over roughly a year. Your character goes (as long as you're managing his development and time properly) from a timid, coarse, friendless stranger into a brave, eloquent hero with a wide circle of friends supporting him in his fight. Huge swaths of game time are devoted to things like school trips or festivals. These occasionally lead to breakthroughs in your investigations, but they're mostly just chances for your character to interact with the rest of the cast, flirt with girls, listen to jokes, bond with friends.

Persona 4, especially, devotes a HUGE amount of time to the interactions between your main character and the other members of your party. As such, it's one of the few games that I've ever felt really conveys what a friendship is like - as much wasting time and shooting the shit as it is fighting to keep each other alive. There are concrete gameplay benefits to spending time with your friends, as they gain power the closer your bond is, but it's also pleasant. I find myself responding to these characters on an emotional level I usually don't, and that's at least in part due to the amount of time I've spent with them.


The player can generally chose to spend time in the dungeons to break all this character-building up with more traditional RPG stuff (Persona 3 makes this more mandatory because there's a limit to how long your characters can spend in the dungeon per trip, but Persona 4 does away with these limits) - but not always.

There's a long sequence in Persona 3 where the team, having reached a point of despair, refuses to enter the dungeon at all. As such, you can only watch them listlessly waste their days until a new catalyst sparks them to action. In gameplay terms, it lasts for maybe half an hour - but it's an extremely effective way to force the character's mindset on the players. It's boring, it's grim - it's good storytelling.

At the end of the day, the extreme lengths of these games make them FEEL like they take place over a year. It gives the player time to form attachments that mimic his character's, and those emotional resonances make the more epic beats of the story significantly more effective when they hit. All of which leads to a game that's way more affecting than others of its ilk.

What Happened at the Library Today

A woman just had a seizure behind me. I'm at the library at Chicago and Ashland, and she started to convulse and almost scream. Loud, inhuman, angry noises, and her body seemed to twist as if trying to pull itself apart.

She's sleeping now, gently snoring, sprawled across a few chairs. The man who's with her - a homeless guy I've seen at the library a few times before, held her throughout. He whispered "there, there" to her as her body bucked and fought. He was concerned, but not alarmed. He ignored the stares of the other patrons, told people grabbing their phones that they didn't need an ambulance. It was just a seizure, she had them all the time. Normally she had them in the mornings, but today she was having them in the afternoon. She'd quiet down in a few minutes.

He was calm, collected. Once her shaking had subsided and she had drifted off to sleep, mind and body exhausted by contortions, he turned back to his computer and waited for her to wake.

What's scarier? The loss of control? The realization that the human body, brain included, is not under the sole jurisdiction of the conscious thing we call "I," but merely a collection of connected cells that can suddenly cascade in painful, humiliating ways?

Or that this man, who I've judged before, for having less than me, for not always being able to bathe every day, treated what must be an incredibly stressful daily occurrence with grace and dignity, while I sat here, scared, and fucking BLOGGED about it.

Issue Nineteen: Assasin

This is late - I've been depressed. Also, no detailed summary - KM tricks Sir Miles, he and Fanny break free. Ragged Robin, Jim Crow, and Boy locate them magically. Miss Dwyer turns into a monster beetle, and Fanny and KM are still trapped in the base with her.

Everybody has a secret origin, and they all suck. Bruce Wayne is a crying little boy, Clark Kent is a farmboy. King Mob was a rebellious kid in a band.

That's why you wear the costume. You can talk all you want about "protecting your loved ones," but the truth is: Nobody would be impressed by Peter Parker fighting crime in jeans and a T-shirt. When you wear the costume, you become an icon. You take on meaning, become more than human. Hilde puts on a wig and leather and becomes Lord Fanny. And Gideon Starorzewski wears a suit made of pop-culture deities and rebellion and Michael Moorcock stories and magical traditions and becomes King Mob.

And the question remains: Is King Mob a good person to be? Dude destroys SOULS. Not in a "I shall destroy your soul, verily, let us wax wroth" way, but in a "I just ripped your aura out of you, and now you are going to cease horribly" way. I mean, it's right there in the title of this issue. ASASSIN. He's not a magician, not a shaman. If he's got the mirror stuff inside of him (and we can assume he does, since it seems to go hand-in-hand with having a Barbelith/magic stone experience), he doesn't seem to be using it.

Fanny runs through lust and filth because that's how she connects to the gods she uses as an interface between "her" and "the magic" (which is also her). King Mob is way more straightforward - his idealized version of himself is a badass superspy from a convoluted conspiracy thriller, and thus he lives a life where he gets to be that. That means he shoots dudes in the head, rips off auras, tosses off cheesy one liners. James Bond as totem animal.

Jim Crow drives around in a big hearse, because Jim Crow walks with death. And we keep getting told that death is no big, because life is a transitory existence and we're all going to wake up into infinity and blah blah blah. But, you know, just because a man's "initiated" doesn't mean he's good. Sir Miles is initiated. He's wearing a costume made up of aristocracy and he does some pretty crappy things with it.

So the question stands: Is King Mob a good guy?

I mean, it's not like the "scorpion gods" are other, evil gods messing with us. We keep getting told that ALL the gods/aliens/whatever are masks being worn by Barbelith. Is "Dude what kills better than anybody" a vital component in a team whose job it is to save the world? Is King Mob a necessary, aggressive part of the defensive program? Would you read a comic book if it didn't have awesome gun fights and explosions?

Once you've seen the big circle in the sky, once you have your magic stone, is that the end of growth? You pick your totem and you get your superhero costume and then you just fill that role for the rest of your life? Because King Mob just got tortured within an inch of his life. Yeah, it was a trap, but he was crying. He was close to broken. Does he just get back up and start shooting people again?

Or has all of this just been the secret origin of something even better?

Michaels & Sullivan: Holistic Sudoku

INT. OFFICE - DAY

The walls are covered with clippings from newspapers. Some of them have headlines that read things like "Sudokuists Supreme Sizzle Snake Smugglers," and "Puzzle Patrons Pummel Petty Pursesnatchers." Others appear to be solved puzzle pages. One whole wall seems entirely devoted to a massive, thousand-cell puzzle. A man, MICHAELS, is slumped, asleep, in a chair behind a desk piled high with pens. His face is ink-stained and grizzled, and his breath stinks of whiskey. Suddenly, the door bursts open and a fast-talking palooka with a lot of moxie (SULLIVAN) walks in.

SULLIVAN
Michaels, wake up, you worthless son of a Quizzler, we gotta case!

MICHAELS (groggily)
What? Who is it... Marlene?

SULLIVAN
Damn it, man, do I LOOK like Marlene? We both know that two-bit hussy walked out on you the minute Big Will Shortz flashed his bankroll at her. Now get your booze-soused brain in gear, we GOTTA CASE!

MICHAELS
All right, all right, I'm up. What's the skinny, Sully?

SULLIVAN
No skinny this time, boss, this one's all fat. The Clogstein Diamond's been lifted. Filched, even!

MICHAELS
Where's the canoe factory, Sullivan? That's flatfoot business. There's no angle. No percentage for numbermooks like us.

SULLIVAN
Boss, the gumshoes are stumped. See, the only dirt they could dig up at the scene was a Sudo! They figure the crim left it behind, as a clue, Gorshin-style!

MICHAELS
You got my attention but you ain't got my heart, ya loveable galoot. The boys in blue aren't the sharpest tacks in the tack shop but they can solve a Sudo if someone throws it in their faces. Why's this our business?

SULLIVAN
That's just it, Michaels. They solved it easy, sure, but then... when they filled all the numbs in, it formed 9 smaller sudos... and when they solved that one, another 81. By the time anyone realized what was going on, four coppers were dead and another 20 in the doctor house. This ain't no normal Sudo-crim, boss.

MICHAELS
Sully! The numbs in the first Sudo... anything twig you oddstyle about them?

SULLIVAN
Whaddayamean, boss? Looked fresh to me.

MICHAELS
And a clock just looks like a sundial to a caveman. But to a space caveman.. Sully, I'd bet you a year's pencils that those numbers were all prime. He's back.

SULLIVAN
Who's back, boss? What are you chewing on?

MICHAELS (standing up, putting on his hat)
Get my gun and my erasers, Sully. We're on the case. The Cross-Hatcher's gonna pay for what he's done.