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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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POSTED COORDINATES ARE NOT THE CACHE SITE, but
what is there is in theme with the story. Final
destination is within walking distance. Cache is a sign only micro.
It has a pencil, but bring your own just in case. Hope you like
mysteries and a bit of pulp fiction.
October 8, 2003. 8:53 pm. Manila.
It was a dark and stormy night. Imelda arrived home from a long day
of Geocaching. She hadn't found a single cache, she was wet and
tired, had lost her flashlight and had ruined her best pair of
geocaching shoes. To make matters worse, she discovered that her
mansion had been robbed. Her prized posessions, gone, removed from
their high security vaults! The horror! What fiend would do such a
thing? And how did the thief get past her ample security force and
high tech security systems? And how were they able to move all the
loot in such a short time? This was a job for her secret agent: The
Source. She urgently dug into her purse for her cell phone and
pressed the 3 then the 7 then the "Talk" key.
Ring. Ring. (That's 2 rings if your counting.)
"Come on, pick up, this is an emergency!" She muttered into the
phone as if it were some sort of telepathic device and not just an
ordinary black cell phone.
Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. (Pay attention - that's 4 more rings.)
Chachick.
"I am The Source." Announced the deep, scratchy, deadpan voice on
the other end of the line.
Imelda instantly replied hysterically, "Emergency! Horror! Crime
spree! They're gone! They're gone! They're all gone!"
The Source replied in the deadpan voice, "I assume you are
referring to your..."
"Of course! What else would I be talking about!?!" Imelda screamed.
"When did you discover they were missing?"
Imelda took a deep breath, bent over as if to wind up for a golf
swing while she held the phone just a few inches in front of her
face. Then she said in a voice that attempted to sound calm and
collected, "212 hours ago..." Then after a 1 second pause she
screamed, "Aaaaaaugh! DUH! Just now, you loon! Do you think I'd sit
on an issue like this for more than a minute!?! This is chaos!
Crisis! Calamity! Emerrrrrrrgency!!!" as her hands flew into the
air and about her head as if her hair were on fire.
"Sorry, I should have realized." Spoke the scratchy, deadpan voice
without any emotional reaction to the outburst. "I'll get right on
it and I'll get back to you when I have something useful." Click.
22 Days passed. All during that time Imelda constantly paced the
floors of her mansion in her stocking feet, trying to understand
how this could have happened, who could have done it. But no update
came from The Source. Not having slept since before the ordeal, she
had become accustomed to pacing her floors in a perpetual ritual as
if she were a stocking-footed zombie on an overdosed Dr. Scholl's
prescription. Finally one day, gazing at her sore calloused feet
she noticed that her stockings, not changed and still caked in mud
since the whole ordeal began, had become threadbare and worn
through in places. And the big toe on her left foot had poked
through; like a mole's nose emerging from its muddy mole hole. "How
surreal... ...hey that gives me an idea for a cache...", she
thought. Disengaging from her temporary loss of focus on
priorities, she looked at her watch and realized it was again 6 am
- she had not slept in 579 hours. (Despite her sleep-deprivation,
she still had a mind like a HP calculator running on nuclear fueled
batteries, or believed she was anyway.) "I've had enough of this
waiting game," she thought. "I'm calling that guy again."
Just as she put her hand on her cell phone, it sounded off with the
ring of an incoming call.
She pounded the "Talk" key and in a hungry voice (she hadn’t eaten
much either, but had consumed at least several dozen gallons of
coffee since they last talked) said, "What do you have for me? It
had better be good."
The scratchy voice of The Source replied, "I've looked into it. It
was an inside job. Shall I tell you where to find the culprit?"
"Say no more. You've confirmed my suspicions. I know all I need to
know." Replied Imelda as she pressed the "End" key and ran off on
her mission (in muddy, holy stockings.)
At the other end of the line, The Source just smiled. Pressing his
own "End" key, he mused, "Right. You THINK you know where to go,
but the clues will mislead you. Only The Source can reveal the real
solution to this puzzle. My guess is that you’ll be back."
Update 6/21/05: The cache got relocated, so I've updated the puzzle
accordingly. Update 10/9/07: Another relocation. Update 10/10/09:
Another relocation and a new cache container thanks to
cachbefound
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Gur Fbhepr unf gur nafjre, bs pbhefr.