Nootkatone
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 0.05 nm. A nanometer is about how far a fingernail grows in a second.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Nootkatone, after the cypress it was first found in.
- Height
- 0.96 nm, standing on end.
- Weight
- 0.36 zeptograms
- Smell / Taste
- Grapefruit peel. Bitter. Its mirror twin: faintly woody, 2,000 times weaker.
- Habits
- Ticks and mosquitoes keep their distance.
- Associates
- Valencene, from oranges. One oxidation away.
- Marks
- Builds up in the peel as the fruit ripens.
- Last seen
- A 5 mL tube marked PEEL in the fridge at HQ.
of them in the peel of one grapefruit, very roughly.
Peels vary over a hundredfold. You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Nootkatone, No. 46. 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.