Saturday, July 30, 2005

The Fruit of our Discord

Here's one more puzzle our team went through during The Game. I'll try and get more up next week.

When we last left our adventurer, he and his team had just deciphered the next clue: “LIBRARYKARPELES”
 
It turns out that there is a library in Tacoma called the Karpeles Manuscript Library. It’s quite a walk from where we are right now, at the Seaform Pavilion, so we begin the walk in (hopefully) the right direction. Along the way we check Streets & Maps to make sure, and one of our own decides to run ahead once he knows the route. The rest of us meander our way to the library. Once we finally get there our brave runner points out the valet booth. This is where we pick up our van! However, there’s a catch; the valet claims he doesn’t understand our ticket.
 
Meanwhile, our runner tells us about the next puzzle. Inside the library is a “Song of Illumination.” When he challenged the librarian about the song, she told him a cryptic phrase. He managed to find the manuscript with the phrase, but hadn’t made any more progress. He had tried challenging the librarian on the name of the manuscript, with no luck. One of our team members tries saying the next sentence. Success! The librarian gives us a small pamphlet with quote/response pairs as well as word decryption.
 
First we think that these phrases may be on the manuscripts. However, the new phrases were odd and did not appear on anything. For example, one pair was something like “The hawk soars above” / “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” One of our team members takes the word decryption to the original Song of Illumination. This does it! We get a long poem instructing us to go to the botanical garden across the street, and look for a lizard statue looking at a plant.

Our team spends a lot of time searching the garden, unsure of exactly what the cryptic poem wants. Eventually, we discover that the clue is the country of the plant the lizard is looking at. Calling the hotline, we find that this is correct, and we must go to the Western Inn in Lakewood.

One problem. We don't have our van, and the valet won't give it to us! Someone notices something on our claim ticket; each line is exactly as long as our answers. The clues above answer it:
"The key is where you have already been"
"One key per line"

The solutions from our three locations are the keys for decrypting the valet ticket. First we try adding letter values and modding 29. No luck. Subtracting.... no luck. We're getting frustrated, hungry. We try multiplying the ASCII values and then modding 29...

"TOGETVANTELLVALETT".... we know we're on the right track. When all is said and done, the ticket now says something along the lines of...
"To get van, tell valet the fruit of discord"

One of our fearless team members knows exactly what is going on, and tells the valet of the apple of discord, and we get our van back! To Lakeview!

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