There were teams, and I was on one of them. Nobody in the scavenger hunt were originally from the planet we were on. We weren’t scavenging for stuff, it was for clues to some puzzle. But the puzzle wasn’t just some made up game, we were really supposed to figure something out that would help people everywhere.

This clue was in a ruined mansion near a lake. It was night. Everything was dirty and grubby inside and it smelled woody and earthen. The wooden fixtures were getting eaten by termites and decomposing into dirt. The lighting was bad, maybe there were candles, and we had flashlights. On the second floor there was a Vandercook cylinder press under a dusty tarp in one room. Other teams were racing past. We lifted up the tarp– other people had been there before us– and I started to read the clue spelled out in the type. There was one interpretation of the clue that the words seemed to suggest. but I could tell there was a trick there: I could see that there was some arrangement of other letters, mostly “C”s near the bottom that, along with the words, made some kind of design, but it was hard to see. I realized I should just go to my printing studio and get some ink and actually run the press and we would see something the other teams hadn’t seen.

I ran outside to get on my bike to go to my studio (which was still in Somerville, which apparently was on this planet). It was dawn outside, and hilly, and it smelled like Pennsylvania, and I think it was.

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