Story
Epilogue
It’s been more than a month since you last heard from the Watcher, and things have returned to – well, not normal, exactly. But there has been a return. A return to sleep. A return to eating meals instead of subsisting entirely on coffee. A return to spending time with friends, and actually listening to what they’re saying.
Somehow, miraculously, you passed all your midterms. Despite missing a couple of jazz ensemble practices during your ordeal, the director gracefully lets you stay. And, as February fades into March, things are starting to feel a little less bleak, a little less grey.
Hours, then days, pass without you looking over your shoulder. Instead, you find yourself looking at what’s right in front of you. You start writing a review series for mathNEWS about your quest to find the best cinnamon roll in the city. You go to a karaoke night downtown and belt out ABBA’s “Waterloo” (what else?) while your friends whoop and cheer. You volunteer to help with an oral history project at the public library.
One afternoon, you’re walking back from jazz ensemble practice, enjoying the feeling of the timid spring sun on your face after so many frigid days. Just after you cross the bridge, you see it: the first pale, tender green leaves of a weed pushing their way up through a crack in the sidewalk.
Instantly, your mind goes to the Watcher’s last message – but to your surprise, you don’t feel the same sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that you did before. Instead, you feel relief. You crouch down next to the sprout, admiring the creases in its leaves, the way the sun makes it almost glow. “Hi, little guy,” you whisper. “Welcome back.”
And then, as you straighten up, you see her: a girl standing among the trees, looking perplexed, scribbling notes in a tiny notebook. In her left hand she’s clutching a red envelope. The world seems to tilt on its axis. Could it be that you weren’t – aren’t – the only one? Do you leave her alone?
Maybe. Or maybe you’ll go talk to her. Offer to team up. See if the problems that seem insurmountable are easier if you face them together.
After all, it’s easier to remember things together than alone.
“What am I forgetting?”: A Q&A with Melodie Roschman, a.k.a. “The Watcher”
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What role did you play on the Key Clues team?
Ty and the Key Clues team thought it would be fun to include story and design elements in this year’s puzzle hunt, so they asked my brilliant coworker Elisabetta Paiano (Digital Communications Officer for the Faculty of Mathematics) and I (Communications Officer, Media) to get involved. Together with the other enigmatologists, we came up with the film noir, Hitchcock-style theme for this year’s puzzle hunt, then helped turn the puzzles created by our incredibly talented team into something narratively cohesive. While I play-tested a lot of the puzzles, I only helped create one (Tragedies). I’m in awe of what the puzzle designers do.
Practically speaking? I’m a writer, and I got to dream up all of the narrative elements of Key Clues, from the teaser, to the snippets accompanying each puzzle, to the Watcher’s final message and the epilogue. That’s even my voice (with the help of a voice changer app) on his final recording!
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What did your process look like?
At first, I only had the vibe to work with. I wrote the teaser for the hunt last summer while on the light rail, listening to jazz and picturing how I always feel in January. Everything kind of came to me at once – the tone, the red envelopes, the Watcher himself. I was so engrossed that I missed my stop!
Creating the narratives that accompanied the puzzles themselves was harder and more rewarding – I had a list of buildings I needed to connect for the meta, and I knew I didn’t want to make things too obvious or easy. So I picked up a paper map of campus from the Turnkey Desk, grabbed a notebook and a pen, and spent two days tracing the character’s steps myself and noting anything interesting I found along the way – like the bizarre tunnel leading from the Arts Lecture Hall to SCH. I must have looked so suspicious, peering through windows and trying to open doors and taking notes on my map!
Then, it was a simple matter of combining a narrative of my/the player’s movements with the atmosphere and theme. I’ve often day dreamed about becoming an escape room designer, and it was very fun to get to describe the player doing things that would be difficult or expensive to create in real life, such as the piano that opens when you play “Every Breath You Take.”
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What parts of creating the narrative were the most frustrating? The most rewarding?
Honestly, the whole thing has been an absolute pleasure from beginning to end. Most of my work is writing press releases and news articles about math and computer science research, so this felt like I was getting to play at work.
Writing can be a very solitary act, so I loved getting to talk to so many people while I was doing research for the story. Many of the minor characters who appear in the narrative are people I met during my adventures, like the kind woman in the co-op building who answered my questions about the sculpture. I particularly loved my chat with the curator of the Earth Sciences museum, who showed me the meteorwrongs – and I’m so grateful to math professor/engimatologist Paul McGrath for filming a video for me of the path up to the observatory.
The most frustrating moment? Probably when I couldn’t find any information about the Theatre of the Arts in 1975 (when the Watcher was a student at Waterloo). I ended up calling seven people across campus before I finally learned from the theatre’s director of production that the records prior to 1980 were missing. Unfortunate for them – but perfect for the story I was telling!
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What’s your biggest takeaway from the experience?
Back in 2023 I created an escape-room-in-a-box for my best friend’s 30th birthday, and discovered that while I liked designing puzzles, I loved creating the story and artifacts to go with them! I’m so grateful that Ty asked me to be a part of the team, and that I got to learn so much more about the place where I work every day.
I hope you had as much fun playing through this story as we did creating it, and that it has encouraged you to pay more attention to the people, places, and histories that give richness and texture to our lives!
Prologue
The sky is a pitiless steel gray on the day you receive the first cryptic message from The Watcher - the kind of sky that gazes at your anxieties, your achievements, and your tenuous dreams with the same indifference.
You’re making your way across the bridge to Conrad Grebel for jazz ensemble practice, numb fingers clutching a rapidly cooling cup of coffee.
The icy wind is a knife, stabbing you anywhere it finds a vulnerable patch of skin: your ankles, your cheeks, the sliver of flesh between your parka and your jeans.
Your thoughts, occupied with a tricky couple of bars of Rhapsody in Blue, are abruptly interrupted when your right foot hits a slick patch of ice and slides out from under you. You go down with a cry, your coffee cup flying out of your hands.
Swearing, you pick yourself up gingerly, cursing the ice, January, and every decision that led you to this moment. Why didn’t you go to Stanford? You could be sitting under a palm tree right now.
Your coffee is a seeping brown stain in the dirty snow. “Like a bloodstain,” comes the thought, unbidden and unwanted.
As you bend to pick up the cup, wincing at the new soreness in your knees, you see a flash of crimson in the corner of your eye, bright and strange against the dull landscape. Probably a discarded Tim Hortons cup from some other unlucky soul, you think, but no.
There, wedged between two rocks on the riverbank, impossible to see except from where you are crouched, is a red envelope. You shuffle over and carefully pick it up. It’s made of heavy, quality paper, strangely unblemished despite the snow and the mud.
You turn it over, and feel a stab of ice in the pit of your stomach that has nothing to do with the now-forgotten wind.
Written on the envelope, in an uneven scrawl, is your name.
With shaking hands, you break the envelope’s seal, and reveal the contents...
