SOLVED: Fragment Seven: Yule

Robert · January 7, 2017, 1:51pm

Clues for the next fragment started appearing on the Cagliostro File Server.

URL: http://thecagliostro.com/directory/files/file_index_1/
Password: equicorun

Using the clues in red to determine the name of a certain work of fiction, and the underlined words to find word counts within we’ve come up with the first three locations.
A Study in Scarlet → Gansu, China

Call of the Wild → Brierley, England

Red Badge of Courage → Mor, Hungary

Love and Freindship → Lye, France

New files:

Yule1

Yule2

Yule5

Yule6

Kelsey · January 7, 2017, 3:18pm

If we are moving over here, I’ll throw my idea out that for Yule6 that perhaps the book referenced is A Study in Scarlet. I counted some S’s in the book and maybe the word is Stamford - depending on which S’s we count and where we start.

Endri · January 7, 2017, 3:39pm

You are officially wiki’d.

Robert · January 7, 2017, 6:22pm

Random thoughts.Standard over-thinking warnings apply.

I think @Kelsey is right that we’re looking for ‘A Study in Scarlet’ as the tale we are supposed to locate.

Next question is what ‘then find the soonest word within the story that begins with the 48th s’.

That may mean to find the word within 48th word in Study in Scarlet that starts with S : ‘Stamford’
It might mean to find the 48th ‘s’ in the story, and that should be starting a word. ‘should’ or ‘Subclavian’

However, it’s interesting to note that A study in Scarlet is the very first Sherlock Homes story. That makes it an interesting starting point for thinking in other ways.

It could mean the Story is what begins with the 48th ‘S’. If you list Holme’s stories chronologically The story with the 48th s counting titles of stories themselves (not the books collecting them) is ‘The Sussex Vampire’ With the 48th S being the first letter of ‘Sussex’. It could mean the first letter of this story, or ‘The’ (or ‘Holmes’) if you skip the title.
It could mean the first word in the 48th story, which would be ‘His Last Bow’ which is’It’ (not very exciting I know.)

Any other thoughts?

reesylou · January 7, 2017, 9:52pm

I agree with “A Study in Scarlet”, that much is obvious.

I think it is useful to keep other ideas in mind for the future, but based on a literal reading of the clue, number 2 is what I see as the correct interpretation.

The question for me is does “within the story” include some or all of the the book title(which is repeated inside the cover of a book so could be “within”), the contents, the other credits at the front, the chapter heading… or jsut the words of the story.

Edit: Counting for “In the year…” I get “succeeded” for 48th S and “strange” for 48th word starting with S

Robert · January 7, 2017, 9:58pm

@Kelsey asked And what do we think the giant blurry circle is about?

I’ve been trying to construct this in my head. Why the half pages? Why the are the rings on opposite sides of the pages?

There’s a visual component to this, I think. It took me 15 minutes to make this construct in my head, so I’m sure I’ll do a crap job of explaining it, but if you get a blank book it might help.

So Page 1 is not the first page in the journal. It’s the back of another page. Call it Page 0, I guess. Given where the holes are if you had the journal open on it’s spine, Yule1 would be on your left with writing only on the left (outter) side of the page. Yule2 would be on the right side of the book with the semi-circle facing away from the spine.

Page 3 and 4 are blank, so if you turned the page you’d be staring at 2 blank sheets.

If you turn the page again you’d be staring at page 5 on the left side of the book, with it’s semi circle pointing away from the spine, and page 6 is on the right of the book with writing only on the outside of the page.

Now, if you went back a page, so you were staring at blank pages 3 and 4 again. If you picked up page 3 and folded the outer edge towards the spine underneath you’d be looking at the text of page 1 on the left, and the semi-circle of page 2, now pointing towards the spine.

Similarly if you picked up page 4 and folded that into the spine you’d see the text from page 6 underneath on the right, and on the left you’d see the semi-circle of page 5 now also pointing towards the spine, matching up with page 2 to form a circle.

Although, now pages 3 and 4 are hidden inside this construct we just made. Is the circle a portal to what’s inside? Door handles maybe? Am I insane?

reesylou · January 7, 2017, 10:17pm

You are brilliant!

PS based on the words in my last post, and “follow me to the first location”, the first location following those words is Peshwar (or British, but that isn’t a location) or Stamford.

I was also wondering whether we coud have co-ordinates (ie 48th S = S 48 0 0) and the crossed out and underlined words give the E/W: by=1 to=4 (3 crossed and 1 underlined… etc… so 145 2 11 or 145 21 1

OR
the 1 4 5 2 1 1 are letters from the word…using locations: phwwpp or smftss … neither works. Using my words(succeeded/strange): sceuss or santss… using your words(should/subclavian): sulhss or scluss

nothing

Endri · January 8, 2017, 2:35pm

Just collating what you’ve all theorized individually with I’ve been thinking…

What seems relevant on this page:

The word STUDY printed in red - Pretty clear we’re supposed to look at “A Study in Scarlet”

Let’s be sure we’re all looking at the same edition.

The clue: ‘Find the soonest word within the story that begins with the 48th S’

The clue states “within the story” so my inclination is to ignore everything until the actual story begins… (but experimenting with other points as well can’t hurtl.)
Broken down, the clue could also say “From the beginning, count words in the story that begin with “s” and stop on the 48th one.”
I’ve gotten several results trying that simply because it’s not easy to catch them all/keep track That’s why I think working from a definitive edition and finding a more logical approach than counting with my finger might be helpful…

We can’t discount the underlined/crossed-out words in the clue and the following passage:

They are as follows: 48 S By ~~To To To~~ To ~~A A A A~~ A He He Was Problem
Are those words in the story?
Are they relevant to the overall puzzle? (I believe so.)
If they are, how do we use them to “follow” SG “to the first location”?

(If you can’t tell, this is my kind of goose chase…)

Robert · January 8, 2017, 2:49pm

I’ve been using the Project Gutenburg version which is copied (typoes and all) from the original 1887 version.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/244/244-h/244-h.htm

I don’t know a lot, but I can tell you how to count the words faster. With page open click search for " s" (a space followed by s, no quotes. Then hit the down arrow (on chrome, hit next if that’s your option) the first one should be the first S word in the story ‘surgeons’. Then just hit the next button 47 more times.

(The only issue I see with this is if the word is at the beginning of a line, then it might not have a space before it, but there doesn’t seem to be any cases of that this early in the story.)

I believe I get ‘streets’ doing this that with this version.

Problem is in the story prerrt early on, yes. The other words are all super common and are there as well.

Endri · January 8, 2017, 2:54pm

I’m using the same edition and just went a liiiiiiiiitle further. I copy/pasted the entire html doc into TextEdit and did a find/replace for every space and turned them all into line breaks so every word in the book was on a different line. THEN I used a “paragraph break and then s” search and tabbed 48 times.

I also came up with “streets.” Might that be our starting point to following SG?

Brendon · January 9, 2017, 5:51pm

As I said before this became its own topic, I am going to focus on the underlined and crossed out words. That is the kind of puzzle I like. So I am going to take the information you guys are figuring out and posting, and the different words we think the “48th S” and see how we can apply words that are crossed out, etc.

Kelsey · January 9, 2017, 9:27pm

New email from Lauren, looks like she is on the same track as us.

Good afternoon,

The performance:

I’ve updated the guest list. Carfax forwarded me information to reserve The Crimson Hall (I have) as well as the floorplan he proposes for the performance.
There are 32 seats and we’re at 27 guests now. Will I cut off the list at 32 or will you choose from those who’ve responded?
The journal:

The clue is about A Study in Scarlet, I’m sure. The passage is referencing words in the book, I just haven’t figured out what they are and what I’m supposed to do with them when I find them. I assume I’m supposed to skip the crossed-out words and focus on those that are underlined. But I still don’t understand the ring. He mentions a location so I thought I might be looking for latitude and longitude but lat/long don’t begin with “48S”.
I’m interested in who this man is, and the “she” he mentions. He left this “riddle” for her after all, didn’t he?
I spent the weekend with the materials in the Brachursis box. Poring over them. I may have imagined it, but I think I performed what The Theories of Non-Corporeal Traversal calls Conduit Foretravel. I was in the kitchen, making tea. I was stirring honey in the cup and got lost in thought, remembering my feet in the sand at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, looking up at the surface, far above me, like it was the sky… breathing the salt water like I belonged there. It took me a minute to realize the spoon was spinning around the cup by itself, faster and faster until there was a whirpool of tea, and at the bottom I could see the surface of the green sea I was remembering. I reached down and touched it and the tea stopped spinning. But I swear I could taste salt in it. Is it really this easy? Could I have been doing this all my life? So much wasted time.

The voice in my mind is like music. It never leaves me now.

Yours faithfully,

Lauren

Robert · January 10, 2017, 2:09am

I’ve been trying time and again to make sense of these words. My major workflow has been to start at a word representing the 48th S word, ‘streets’ for the time being. And then stepping forward in the story to the other underlined words on the list. That is…really uninteresting. So I figured maybe to grab the word following each underlined word.

Starting from ‘streets’ this gets me.

by: the

4th to: whether

5th a: constant

2nd he: is

was: going

problem: though

The whether constant is going though… Yes, I know it makes sense. And yes, I tried thewhetherconstantisgoingthough.com and my browser laughed at me.

There’s only so many ways to look at : 48 S By To To To To A A A A A He He Was Problem Yet somehow I’m failling to see a useful one.

Kelsey · January 10, 2017, 3:05am

Wowza. I have no ideas on this one right now.

This is out of game/out of character or whatever you want to call it - CJB posted on instagram 5 days ago the following “Every time she left her ordinary apartment and passed the squat little window on her way to her ordinary job she could hear beautiful but wordless singing wandering from inside. She always thought that it must take a particularly peculiar person to live somewhere called 77B Almost Completely Beneath MacDougal Street.” - this could maybe be hinting at what we are looking for as the B part could be a reference to Sherlock’s address and “Almost Completely Beneath MacDougal Street” in NYC would be Sullivan Street - so perhaps that was Sullivan Green’s starting point? Or it could have absolutely nothing to do with anything and just a hint to what we will be working on. Idk

Kelsey · January 10, 2017, 4:04am

Okay, I tried going from the start of the story and highlighting the underlined words. You can see it here - I could have messed up so feel free to edit if I made any mistakes. The only thing I can really think of is to perhaps get numbers from line and/or word numbers?

Brendon · January 10, 2017, 6:05am

I am glad I am not the only one wracking their brain on this. I mean, I am not glad, but you know what I mean. I have tried looking at the words directly after each word (using the crossed out words as a count, and not starting at streets) and got complete gibberish. I thought I was onto something when the one after the fourth “to” is “The Berkshires”, but the rest doesn’t make a ton of sense (the one after the 5th “a” is medical board). I even looked at most streets in the Berkshires to see if I can make sense of it. Nothing yet

Endri · January 10, 2017, 1:55pm

There has to be significance to those words. Not necessarily the actual word? And I agree with @Robert that we should be starting at streets.

Robert · January 10, 2017, 4:50pm

Alright so we need to go back to square one here and relook at this.

48 S By To To To To A A A A A He He Was Problem (Bold ones are crossed out because I can’t figure out how strikethroughs work yet.)

Let’s assume for the moment we’ve already used the 48 and S. That gives us 14 words remaining.

Words 1, 5, 10, 12, 13 and 14 are underlined.

Words 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 11 are struck through.

Are we maybe supposed to apply this pattern to the words following ‘streets’. To the letters? The sentence following streets is “You are as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut.” unfortunately only has 13 words or I’d be a lot more excited about this idea.

Does this jog any ideas maybe?

Brendon · January 10, 2017, 4:55pm

I am just throwing these out there to see if anything sticks with the rest of you,

So I was looking at the Yule6 page again, and reading it over. There is the line “… then follow ??? to the first location”. I thought, “hey lets look for the first location AFTER streets” but we wind up with Stamford again, and still no idea how to use the underlined and crossed out words.

I also tried counting the words after 48 S to the underlined words, taking into account the crossed out words, applying them to the story after “streets” but again, just gibberish.

Brendon · January 10, 2017, 5:15pm

If you want to strikethrough words, you use < s > “word or phrase” < /s > (minus the spaces, and you don’t need the quotations). Underline is < ins > “word or phrase” < /ins > (minus the spaces, and you don’t need the quotations)

So our combination is:

48 S by ~~to to to~~ to ~~a a a a~~ a he he was problem