PostCurious - Ministry of Lost Things - Case 1: Lint Condition

 It’s been a while since I’ve had the brain power and concentration to be able to puzzle, but I have a nice quiet Christmas today, and a backlog of puzzle presents that I’ve purchased for myself this year, and possibly from before. I’ve got my tea, my cinnamon rolls, and starting with PostCurious’ Ministry of Lost Things, Case 1: Lint Condition, which bills itself as buying for 2-3 hours. I can already tell you it takes longer than that when there’s a cat happily sat upon your notebook and puzzle pieces, demanding more Christmas treats before she allows you access again to your puzzle. 

The box opens with a note, explaining the world  you have found yourself in - gneesters rehoming lost and forgotten objects to the elusiverse, and sometimes mistakenly taking important items. You’re told to log into a website, then open the first ‘transmission’. I was a bit annoyed that there was an online component - I wanted a decidedly analog holiday - but the use really does just seem to be for submitting answers and checking them. 

Transmission 1

Transmission one begins with two notes and a map. We are to figure out, from the information provided, what the missing item is, who it belonged to, where it was last seen, and where we should look next. Pattern recognition time! The second piece of the note is actually a list of other case files, where we get clues as to how to decipher our own. Essentially, you can look at the case file as a concatenation of several bits of information. Comparing them with the others you get X.YYYY-ZZZZZZZ-A#.XX, which, based on the other cases, breaks down as follows. So as not to spoil the puzzle, I’ll use the first case number provided: M.116F-168152015-D6.OM, rather than the actual case number provided.

• X……XX - Three letters telling us who this belonged to. MOM - ‘formerly owned by a mother’. 
• YYY - The Gneester who retrieved the item. 116F in this case.
• ZZZZZZ - an A=1 cipher of the missing item. Note that it drops all leading 0s, which is annoying. So, 16/8/15/20/15 - PHOTO - a photo of the seaside is missing.
• A# - the first letter of where it was found, followed by the number of letters in the location name. D6 becomes drawer. 

After doublechecking the logic on a few of the other items, I figured out what article was missing and the other information. The final question, though, where we should look next, was my favorite part of transmission 1, because it involved solving an entirely new alphabetic system, ‘Gneesterese’, in order to translate the punny names of the Elusiverse’s many regions. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but I really do love these kinds of ciphers. Plus I can now solve all the messages on the box, which are also in gneesterese, but more on that later. 

As with any new cipher, especially if you think it’s a straightforward mapping onto the alphabet, look for anything you’re relatively sure of and start there. For the map, it’s at the bottom, where there’s a clear legend of ‘The Elusiverse’ in the new script, verified by confirming that the ‘E’s are all where you’d expect them to be. That then gives you the symbols for THELUSIVR, which you can then use to plug into some of the other names, using logic to figure out the rest, also helped by the cute illustrations of the map itself, and the authors’ penchant for puns. Where do your pencils end up? Pencilvania. Your purses? The Leatherglades. Much amusement ensued. Eventually, you realize there is only one possible location for the missing article, which is where your search confirms you go next. Congratulations, and go have  another cinnamon roll to celebrate. 

Transmission 2

Transmission 2 contained several sheets of paper and puzzle pieces representing items from the box from whence the item went missing, per the last solution. We meet a charming Moose ranger, who tells us his path may have come across the article in his travels. Of course, we don’t know what order his travels took, but he has notes on each day, and we can use logic to sort out the pattern. This is where I needed my first hint, not because the puzzle was poorly designed, but because of the way I like to solve puzzles. Rather than writing on the provided map, as was presumably the intent, I copied the map onto my grid paper, keeping the original map intact. Unfortunately, while this keeps the puzzle itself pristine, it means I missed the point of the puzzle - the lines cross over letters on the map that I hadn’t copied out. I was stuck trying to compare the path to the shapes of the letters from the sigils in transmission 1 until I gave up and checked the hints. Thankfully, once that was solved it was simple, another charming pun for our next location. 

The puzzle pieces ALSO required some persnickety thinking on my part, simply because I’m not used to thinking in 3D. The letters that were in the box all had faded shape images on them, implying depth. However, I kept trying to make it all one layer, where the shapes and pages overlapped. Instead, you need to make a full sandwich, with 100% overlap, and fit the shapes of the items squarely on top of the letters, like a tangram puzzle. When you do that, you realize that some of the shapes have small holes that give you access to the puzzles beneath, providing the explanation of what the item meant to the person who lost it, or from whom the gneesters stole it. Very very cute.

Transmission 3

It seems that the article’s owner has moved as well, but that the mismatched socks of the Elusiverse have a message for us. Essentially, this transmission is two puzzles. The first, the socks, is a jigsaw puzzle of a sort. You need to match pairs of socks by color, pattern, and/or theme. It helps that there is also a frame for the socks to fit in, so if you’re having trouble matching the mismatched pairs, you can use jigsaw puzzle logic to fit them together. When assembled correctly, they give you a bit more information on the missing item. 

The next puzzle is a bit trickier, as it involves sorting out where the previous owner moved, given a calendar, a series of email synopses, three business cards, and a set of rules. As you work your way through the items, it becomes a process of elimination as to which institution and location the previous owner moved. Hard to believe that there’d be that much flying these days, or in person interviews. Plug the information into the website and receive the next transmission (open the next envelope).

Transmission 4

Here, we find that not only does Gneesterese use its own alphabet, but it also has its own slang! We have to learn Gneester-jive to get a special message to our missing item, asap! We also have to figure out the recipient address for the missing item, as there’s apparently more than one person with that name in the town we discovered last transmission. How dare people reuse names! 

Thankfully, we have lots of notes from interviews with other inhabitants of the relevant Elusiverse land (no spoilers!) who can help us translate the message. That part was fairly simple, and involved reading context and getting what someone meant by a ‘footnote’. Many many fun puns allowed the translation of the note into the relevant Gneester-jive.

Now, we have to find the actual street address. Thankfully the target’s son left notes behind, encoded, for a friend to find and understand his address. The first part is fairly simple - fold the three strips of paper appropriately to make the numbers, then put them in the order indicated for the street number. The next part is slightly harder. You realize that in the child’s note, there are symbols under certain letters, with no immediate clue on what they mean. However, the solution is provided when he signs the letter, Love Danny, with symbols next to them. Looking at the text, you realize that the triangles have to do with a Caesar cipher (Rot1) and the squares mean look at the prior or following letter in the letter itself. Together, that gets you the street name. 

Where I almost lost my mind, however, was the street suffix. The puzzle itself is wonderful - it’s a series of gophers holding different colored balloons, and it’s almost immediately clear that adding up the values of the balloons gets you the number of the letter, A=01, of the corresponding gophers. This is clear when you look at the only two gophers with only one kind of balloon - Binxi (B=2) only has one yellow balloon, whereas Finley (F=6) has three yellow balloons. Ok, yellow = 02. Easy peasy. What is NOT simple is doing this in poor light and not realizing that there are both Purple AND Black balloons. The light I was sitting in made them all look Purple. I spent a good 45 minutes trying to make the math math, and it wasn’t mathing. Eventually I figured I must be on the wrong track entirely, caved, and looked at hints. It was either that or blunt force it - there are only so many suffixes that have five letters… The hint mentions black balloons… I growled in frustration, scaring the cats, and promptly solved the puzzle in a couple of minutes. 

DO YOUR PUZZLING IN GOOD LIGHT, PEOPLE!!

And that concludes Ministry of Lost Things’ Case 1: Lint Condition. I had a lovely holiday time solving it, adoring the puns and the cute world they’ve created. The final envelope even includes some small rewards - a fuzzy sticker of the case and a little magnet of an Elusiverse travel postcard. The next step is finding a cool way to display my success. I’m thinking a shelf in my book case by the fire. I’ve already preordered Case 2 and am looking forward to helping reunite others with their lost items.