Ingress: The Via Lux Adventure Medal—Intro and Day 1

Every year, Niantic hosts gatherings called Anomalies, where agents from both sides gather to progress the Ingress story-line. Usually, these gatherings take place in large cities a very long away from Australia… although in 2016, part of an Anomaly was hosted in Sydney, with an accompanying mission day. Still, Australia is a big country, and Sydney, although close, was still four hours and several days I couldn’t take off from family and university away, so I didn’t make it. Anomalies come with badges to celebrate participation, and, when they are hard to get to, it can be a bit discouraging, but you accept it and enjoy the game you can play. So, you can imagine my surprise, when Niantic announced a medal for the latest anomaly that could be played anywhere in the world. It really made me feel part of the game, again.

This medal was still going to be a challenge, though: Find, visit and hack 300 portals you haven’t visited before. I’ve been fairly thorough in getting to the portals around where I study and live, so this meant a little bit of journeying for me—but not as challenging as it would be for some of the players who’d been playing much, much longer. To make it just a little more difficult, the challenge started when I was in the middle of a mission series, which I’d already taken far too long to complete. I couldn’t just dump it, when I’d finally reached a point in the semester when I could complete it, now, could I?

So, what could I do?

I took a look at the next few sets of missions, and realised they would take me to portals I’d never visited, and, as a bonus to that, each set of mission portals was surrounded by a bunch of others that weren’t on the mission. I love multi-tasking. Score!

Now, I could really get started.

While the mission started on September 1, the weather and some loose university ends meant I didn’t really get rolling until the 4th, when I undertook Part 10 of the mission series, along the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. To be honest, I didn’t expect to come across any portals I hadn’t visited yet, because I’d already done a mission series in the area, but I was wrong.

I found five! Now, five isn’t a lot when you have 300, but it’s still more than zero. With this very, very slow start, I was on the board.

Only 295 to go.

That’s just under 12 new portals to be hacked each day for the rest of the month.