Hinck’s Gazette - Volume 1, Issue 6

In this issue of the Gazette has Hincksville being used as a filming location for a pirate caper, but the script seems to have gone awry. Various letters are repeated, rather than the Arrrrrrr you’re expecting from a high seas adventure. We must sort out the letters’ true meaning before deciphering how we’ll be spending our Friday evening. 

There is no obvious starting location noted by the various sections’ text, so I began in the quiz, identifying that the four responses under each question were clearly Sherlock Holmes, Mario, Spiderman, and Ariel the little mermaid. No obvious way to continue from there, so over to the spelling bee, where the puzzle proves that the English language is a total mess. I don’t know how anyone ever learns it. Basically, the spelling bee contestants should have asked for the words to be used in context, as they spelled the wrong homophone. The pairs are: 

• Muscles - Mussels
• Profit - Prophet
• Aloud - Allowed
• Gambles - Gambols
• Compliment - Complement
• Principles - Principals

So far, so good. The next is to find the words on a 4x4 grid, another easy task. Woohoo, feeling smart. And then I get absolutely stuck. I can tell that the traceries make symbols, cued by far far too much time reading Masonic cipher recently. I try to make that make sense, completely ignoring that I can *see* another grid just to the left. Brain no work. So, I get a hint. It sends me to the grid. The shapes are part of the Masonic cipher, yes, but half of that cipher is based on a simple tic tac toe style 3x3 grid. Aligning the shapes, you get a series of Xs and Os, based on the played out game. Then, you read the hint to use that series of Xs and Os to apply to the quotes, which are also all 6 words. Duh…. I may have felt like a bit of an idiot. 

So, Finish the pat turn [pattern] then play sure lock [Sherlock] answers on the key board. 

The pattern on the keys isn’t obvious, or wasn’t to me, until I actually wrote out the differences between keys: +1, -2, +2, -2, +3, -2, +4, -2… etc. Ok, got it. Filled out all the way to the end. Then I got stuck again, trying to play the Sherlock answers individually, rather than realizing the 20 keys on the keyboard corresponded to all 20 of the answers, meaning it wasn’t 1, 4, 4, 2, 3, but 1, 8, 12, 14, 19. Those keys, in turn, gave the numbers 1, 5, 12, 17, and 28. Then, because the hint says backwards, I took those tracks backwards, giving match nonsense to proper nouns then solve. 

The nonsense in question were the non-Rs in the original article. The proper nouns are the names in the article: Zodiac, Violet, Eckhoff, Quinn, Network. Then, we know which letter of each to take by counting the number of letters. There are 5 Zs, so the 5th letter of Zodiac, A. Continue the pattern and you get ALONE. I will be spending Friday night alone. Thanks Hincks. Thanks…. :)