Crocin
File sealed
The detectives are still writing this one up. The poster and the facts are below; the film and the interrogation room open soon.
Booking photographs
The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, ruled every 0.25 nm. A nanometer is about how far a fingernail grows in a second.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Crocin. Also alpha-crocin, crocin-1.
- Height
- 3.5 nm, stretched out.
- Weight
- 1.6 zeptograms
- Build
- A rod with seven double bonds in a row, two sugars on each end.
- Color
- Gold to red.
- Habits
- Dissolves in water, unlike its carotenoid cousins. The sugars help.
- Origins
- Three threads to a crocus flower, picked by hand. 75,000 flowers make a pound.
- Associates
- Gardenia fruit, which makes it too.
- Last seen
- A 5 mL tube marked SAFFRON in the fridge at HQ.
of them in a single saffron thread, give or take.
Threads vary. You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Crocin, No. 76. They were made for noticeboards around Boston, Cambridge and the rest of the east coast.
Found one? Scan its QR code with your phone. If you're a signed-in player, the sighting goes on your record with +1 XP.
Not a player yet? Join the Epic Quest: the real role-playing game of Molecular Reality, a nanopore lab, with the CEO as gamemaster.