It's a puzzle holiday!
We just tackled the funny pages promo pack, now it's on to card three of cryptic cryptids. Oh Frabjous Day! Callooo! Callay!
On the front, we have a picture of a shark, with a quote above.
On the back, we have a list of five letter words, a message, a series of xs and what look like a series of coordinates. As I'm typing this, my partner finds: The Xs tell you which letter of the five letter word to use. Doing that gives you CANBERRA, Australia.
I am not to be outdone, and find our cryptid: a BUNYIP. Per Wikipedia, The bunyip is a creature from the aboriginal mythology of southeastern Australia, said to lurk in swamps, billabongs, creeks, riverbeds, and waterholes. A little disappointed that all I had to do was google the quote. James Ives is indeed the one who gave the quote back in the Sydney Gazette in 1812.
The stamps I partially recognize. Postmarked July 27, 2020. One is Julia Gillard, Australia's 27th PM. I have to look the other one up, but I'm sensing a theme. The 30th Australian PM is Scott Morrison, who I recognize by name only. Definitely a theme.
The numbers could correspond to the message text, but that breaks down as there aren't 18 lines. Then I realize that there is an arrow between the stamps and the numbers, so we pull up a list of the prime ministers. FIND THE DAMN SCRIVENER. Ok... Funnily enough there's a Scrivener Dam in Canberra, which creates Lake Burley Griffin
All of which brings us to another message from Scarlett, our postcard sender.
I talk my partner into....
Card 4
This card has us going to Japan - a picture of snow-capped Mount Fuji on the front, with the word Tadaima, which Google tells me is something you say on returning home from foreign travel. On the back is a haiku, which seems to represent a volcano, a series of stamps with what I am going to assume are Japanese numbers, and a list of what I think are Japanese provinces islands. The names of the islands are written on broken or oddly ended lines - I Ching? It's got the right number of lines, but some are broken into 4, rather than two. Could be two hexagrams?
I give up on that a bit and look at the stamps. They are Japanese characters for numbers: 9-7-1-17-12-19-4: IGAQLSD. Hmf.
I am super stumped by this card. I look up the clues. It is NOT I Ching. Which is a loss. Instead, it is counting in as many times as there are breaks. So, four breaks on the top line gets us to K. Heading right, like the arrow, the first letter in on the second line is Y. Heading left, like the arrow, the last letter on the third line is U... keeping going gets us KYUSHU. Maybe if I hadn't gone down the i Ching rabbit hole?
Talking with my partner, we're looking at the stamps again. Tadaima can also be used as "I'm home", so if there's some sort of home base on Mt. Fuji, then the stamp rotations mean something? Where as the last one felt super quick, this is a bit of a slog. Clues tell us it's a ROT cipher. Banging my head repeatedly. So, rotate T 9 times - C, A 7 times - H...
CHERUFE... But then the internet tells us they're found in Chile?
So we have a Chilean magma spirit, living in volcanoes, feeding on virgins, found in Kyushu, which apparently has
26 volcanoes.
Let's see if that's enough for Scarlett... No, looks like she wants a specific volcano.... and it turns out it's not a volcano, but a caldera from an ancient one. Lake Ikeda. The closest volcano to Lake Ikeda is Mount Daimon.
Finally that works. This was a lot more googling and a lot less actual puzzling than we normally like, but with all the hints we got there in the end. Would have been nice if Googling 'what volcano is closest to Lake Ikeda' actually got the answer we wanted.
That was kind of annoying, so we push through to the final puzzle for a hopefully more satisfying ending.
Card 5
Ok, we're in the savannah this time. There's a silhouette of a giraffe with Herhaal - Afrikaans for repeat - and a bunch of words, many of which have repeated letters. Quickly: MAMOU MAMBO. Hmmmm. maybe not.
On the back we have South Africa's flag with a shape on it. After last card I'm stuck on lakes, but it turns out to be the shape of LESOTHO. I guess we have a starting location. The stamps are of a pair of hands - adult and child, a mountain range, a level, and the Eiffel Tower. There is a jumbled message with different colored letters. I keep trying to see WELCOME TO in brown. The stamps actually may be color coded to the scrambled letters: tan4, brown3, red2, blue1.
- blue: EHLALN
- red: HOBSTA
- brown: EWLMECIKTORE: WELCOME TREKI
- tan: RAOLEG
The message is also odd. On a guess I google water and the capitalized words LHWP: Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which provides water from Lesotho to S. Africa.
This is ceasing to be fun. It seems like another googling one, rather than a solve the puzzles thing. This is feeling like work and research.
