We Freed Misty - my perspective

We Freed Misty - my perspective

In the lead-up to the second #ingress Anomaly at #sxsw in Austin today, I found myself unable to participate in the planning yet again, but was finally able to get back into it on Friday. I was assigned to the Roaming/Field team, headed up by Jon Harmon with Matt Zophiel as our operator.

My spot (after some discussion and back-and-forth - things ran very close to the wire given the nature of the plan) was Columbus, TX (SE corner on the map below). I was a lone L8 who considered bringing his L7 wife's (April Reynolds) tablet with him (she was indisposed for travel) just to get the range needed to link up to Weatherford (N corner, apex) but I didn't - that was cheating, and I wasn't going to be that guy. Another L8 Agent cherie sheriff - Mynx) had passed through to harvest keys and had 87'd all the portals in town, but even with my 87 added, I needed an extra 20-30 km...

So I tapped the network - Agent Arphax, aka Kody Klorres, was known to operate in the area. I sent him a PM with the details, asked him to consider meeting me there around 4-ish the next day, and left it at that. Busied myself with trying to poke holes in the Resistance infrastructure by hitting faction comms around the area and asking people to just do some damage around 4 pm, and keep it damaged until 7 or so, and went to bed.

Saturday morning is up and at 'em early(ish) - and Arphax has replied and is up for some fun! So I'm on the road at 9:30 to collect keys for Fredericksburg, TX from Mike Heeringa (just backups), then on to Bigfoot, TX and Fowlerton, TX to take out the L7 portals there. Just in case. They went boom around noon. Wild goose chase? Perhaps - but that dbellah (Daniel Bellah) is devious, I tell you!

Back home to check in on the wife and the dog, grab some food, review comms, and then go pick up keys for Weatherford, TX that were being chauffeured down by Agent Kansas (eric grant) - essential, as there were no keys for Columbus in Weatherford. Key pickup successful, and I hit the road.

Well, I tried. I needed gas, and my card got declined by the pump so I had to go see the cashier inside. Queue? Huge. Finally got my gas, and then missed the exit from 410 to 10. Like - really? Oh - and on the way, the bank called to make me verify my card because of the stupid gas pump. Anyway...

Two hours later, and I get to Columbus - 300+miles on the clock already. Arphax is there, with his lady - and a bad-ass roadster car that had exhaust pipes like running boards. Of course, I check the keys, and while I could see the target at Weatherford, I couldn't see Fredericksburg - and they couldn't see me.

Comms revealed that a rogue link from Delhi VFD was the cause, and Arphax was (voluntarily) dispatched to take care of it - it was 4:55, Delhi VFD was an hour away, so we were going to miss the first two time checks (5:02 and 5:32). Word was that we were outnumbered on campus, so making and holding the field for the last 3 time checks could mean the difference between winning and losing.

In the meantime, we decided to tip our hand and put what links we could in place - it would stop them putting more blocks in our way...

Against all the odds, (and because of, I suspect, a sound battle strategy), the team on campus took the first two time periods definitively. See the Niantic Project posts for blow-by-blow details - just search #FreeMisty

Speeddymon (Thomas Spear) actually got to the north end of the blocking link at the USPO in Manchaca, TX literally one minute before Arphax got to the Delhi end. Redundancy rocks!

We got the link, and thus the field, up (no idea who did it, wasn't me!) and we were in business for the third time check at 6:02 - so we had 3/5, and a win for our end (to even out our loss last weekend) giving our Enlightened brethren at Lake Geneva something to fight for. (Turns out that the campus battle went 5-0 in our favor anyway, but shhh - it's a big, pretty field!!)

By 6:25 however, Weatherford had come under attack and the links went down prior to the 6:32 time check - and they put a blocker in (not sure where, might have been Waco) to prevent me re-linking. We considered the fall-back plan, but decided that it wasn't worth it given that we had already won our part - it all depended on what happened at GaryCon now...

I left Columbus and headed for home in San Antonio at 6:45. On the way, just after sunset, Priyavadan Kumar called me to let me know that Lake Geneva had gone to the green, and all was well - The Enlightened had prevailed.

So not only has this frikkin' "game" got me off my ass and out into my city, it now has me looking at my entire state (and it is Texas, after all, it's not little!) and getting to know it intimately. Hard to believe this is all being run by ~40 people (contrary to what most people think, it's not Google, and they don't have unlimited finances and bajillions of servers to throw at it: Niantic is a startup-structured organization within Google, with all of the restrictions applied that any other startup deals with, and we all would do well to remember that) and yet we play for free...

Thank you Joe Philley Brian Rose John Hanke and everyone else at Niantic for doing what you do - the map is the conversation around these here parts :)

Many other agents played key parts today, but their stories are worth their own telling - this is mine, and I thank you for taking the time to read this far...

#ingressreport