SOLVED: Fragment Seven: Yule

[Kelsey]

@Brendon

an address.

Maybe it is an address since none of the coordinates seem to be panning out and I feel like we have counted the letters/words almost every obvious way we can think of.

It could be that we count the words, and then take those numbers and manipulate them into letters. The most basic way would be numbers into letters but our starts would either be 48 which is DH or 28 which is BH - not good starts for words/addresses, plus we are relying on the fact that 48 is either the start of the word or the start of the address and then you have to decipher whether any other numbers are part of the numeric aspect of the address or if they lead into words. All in all, letter numbers isn’t a good idea (beyond the points above, it would be difficult to figure out which way to split numbers such as 11 to 1 1 or 18 to 1 8 or keep them together). Buuuttt, there could be some other way to similarly do it.

I’m not sure what to do because we can only assume that Green made the puzzle to be relatively easily decoded and included all the necessary information within the clue. Thus, I think we are overlooking some aspect or clue within the puzzle. I don’t have any insight as to what they may be but I think we are on the right path and are just missing the last jump to the finish line.

Sigh…end of novel lol

[Robert]

You know I don’t believe we have missed anything. I think it’s so vaguely worded it could mean anything. Whether Sullivan did that deliberately to make it harder or by accident I can’t say. He certainly wouldn’t be the first person to create a "simple " puzzle that no one ever solved.

I mean I still don’t buy that find the soonest word that begins with the 48th S even means “find the 48th word that starts with S not counting titles”. I’ve read that line literally dozens of times and don’t see it. I’m only going with it cause Endri is pretty much a genius at wording and I trust her. Without her telling us how to read it we wouldn’t even be this far.

I’m sure if we ever figure out the answer it’ll be obvious in hindsight but I think we’ve hit our wall. At least I certainly have. I’m sure it’s in our power to figure it out given endless time and effort but the proper solution seems like one many possible random guesses at this point.

[Endri]

I feel your pain, guys. And I am FAR from a wording genius (though thank you) but I think with this we should pursue multiple avenues, my idea being one of them and see what we come up with. One of those paths will lead to something. We may already be there and just don’t know how to use the information we’ve come up with yet.

From Sullivan’s pre-riddle passage he mentions having to hide the spell/book he initially created to protect Deirdre. If that’s what we’re pursuing, and if “what makes it done can also undo it” then he probably would’ve gone to great lengths to hide it. If he means performing the spell could reverse her protection, and someone wanted it, then I can understand why he made this so cryptic, frustrating as it is.

[Robert]

@Endri

From Sullivan’s pre-riddle passage he mentions having to hide the spell/book he initially created to protect Deirdre. If that’s what we’re pursuing, and if “what makes it done can also undo it” then he probably would’ve gone to great lengths to hide it. If he means performing the spell could reverse her protection, and someone wanted it, then I can understand why he made this so cryptic, frustrating as it is.

This paragraph finally showed me a light (not actually on topic, sorry). It only took me three months but I finally get why King Rabbit was helping us now. He wanted us to unravel part of the book, so it’d unravel part of the spell protecting Deidre so he could steal the watch from her.

See, you’re totally a wording genius. The right phrasing makes everything crystal clear or murky as mud.

[Brendon]

@Endri

I feel your pain, guys. And I am FAR from a wording genius (though thank you) but I think with this we should pursue multiple avenues, my idea being one of them and see what we come up with. One of those paths will lead to something. We may already be there and just don’t know how to use the information we’ve come up with yet.

I had a good chuckle reading this this morning @Endri. I like that the 48th word is “streets” and you chose to use “avenues” and “paths” in your paragraph. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but it still gave me a good laugh to start the day. That was my sidebar, now back to figuring out different “avenues” for solving/taking these clues forward

[Endri]

HA! Totally unintentional but maybe my brain has just been overtaken. I’ll leave cryptic clues to Sullivan and The Book.

[Robert]

Bah, stop being witty and fun! I’m trying to brood and be a quitter over here!!!

Fine…

Beginning again. Word definition 101. We are looking for ‘the first location’. What is a location? It could be an address (123 Main St) , coordinates (20.12121N, 15.53434W), a description (last house on the left on Elm Street, behind the bookcase, etc), or a proper name (Europe, New York, Aunt Edna’s house, etc)

We know we are supposed to start with the word ‘streets’, the 675th word in the first chapter.

We have a bunch of words crossed out or underlined we think leads us there…somehow.

All of these words are in the first chapter.

Counting is probably used somehow. What can we count?

-We can count the words between words underlined. (Both in the story, and in the clue itself)
-We can count the number of words underlined and crossed out.
-We can count the letters of the words underlined or crossed out.
-We can count the letters of the words that follow the underlined words in the story.

To that last point I messed around a bit with counting letters in following words. Following the underlined words in a single chain from streets for me to.

by: Line 703 following word: the : 3
4th to: line 740: word: whether: 7
5th a: line 884 : constant : 8
2nd he: line 922: is : 2
was : line 1005: going : 5
problem: line 2739 : though : 6

That gives me 6 numbers. They seem like nice numbers.

The really, really, really (like…really) big question we need to struggle with here is What are we supposed to do with the numbers we count with?!

We can try to make a coordinate starting with 48S. My problem is, there’s almost nothing interesting on he 48th Southern Parallel. Maybe we’re supposed to use the 48, but not the S? There are interesting things on the 48th Northern Parallel, but it’s a big world.

Oh, and fun fact in case anyone thought the same thing I thought. (And if you do, I apologize…how do you stand it?) I wondered where Switzerland was in terms of lat long, wondering if all this was going to lead us to a bank vault in Switzerland only to find out we were too late. Switzerland is on the 47th Northern Parallel. No part of the country crosses the 48th…but it’s close. So I guess we’re not going to Switzerland after all.

[Kelsey]

Good evening people - Lauren sent Cags an email and then she posted a picture of the Crimson Hall layout. In the corner is the number 18T 586398 4511820 which is a UTM or Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system. Could this be what our numbers are for?

48S ____ ____

I think this is it. This website might help - http://www.geoplaner.com/

[Kelsey]

@Robert

Streets: line 675by: line 703 : 28 words after streets4th to: line 740: 65 words after streets5th a: line 754: 79 words after streets2nd he: line 717: 42 words after streetswas: line 775: 100 words after streetsproblem: line 738: 63 words after streets

28 65 79 42 100 63

Using that geoplanner with 48S 286579 4210063 - gives the regular coords of 38.01315°N 102.56891°E which is in China. When I click on What’s Here it calls the place Wuwei, Gansu, China. I’ll keep checking other numbers we have come up with.

EDIT: As far as I can tell, the above one is the only one that works for me. Some of the other ones are “out of range” on the axis’. Also, they can sometimes change the letter to something different, but the one above gives me the S. The street the marker is near is called Jinse Avenue (in case we need to use streets still for some reason).

[Robert]

Nice Job @Kelsey! I didn’t know utm was a thing.

[Kelsey]

The Book bolded Gansu so that must be our answer. I had no idea UTM was a thing either. Luckily the one on the Crimson Hall layout came up when I googled it (or else we may have been stuck for a long time lol). Learning new things all the time

[reesylou]

Great job guys!!! Since a) Gansu is not a magimythical animal b) it does not work at BoB, I assume there is going to be more coming… maybe something more with the RSVP list and the room layout?

Perhaps we are going to be looking for some sort of chinese dragon this time

[LaylaLeFae]

Uhm… Well I have more of a question. I was lurking for more than 6 hours last night, poured over all of your research. Maybe we need DG for this… It’s just a thought but further up, Lauren is talking about a her in one of her emails. A her in Sullivan Greens journals… It only makes sense to me that maybe it’s more than time to bring her into the fold. Especially given the fact that Cole is now close to her. I believe we have been going at this the wrong way

[Kelsey]

Hey Layla - welcome to the party. If you have any questions let us know.

I think a lot of us share the same sentiments as you and think that Deirdre should be brought in to the fold. We actually are unable to contact Deirdre as we only have her blog and for some reason she cannot read any of our comments except for Cole’s. @Robert wrote an open letter to Cole and Cole seemed very resistant to the idea of telling Deirdre. We could keep pestering him and see if he will tell her about us, but that could upset him and push him away. As I said, I’m definitely for telling Deirdre as all of this could really help her but we need Cole’s help so he would have to agree on this point.

[LaylaLeFae]

Well that’s somewhat infuriating. Can’t we just knock him about the head until he comes to his senses? Does he understand that by keeping this from her he will only strain their relationship? Also, I’ve recruited my boyfriend to help. Smartest person I know. Anyway, about the numbers. Please if you could fill me in in the simplest way possible I would be appreciative.

[Robert]

I think Cole knows. As usual we’ve put him in a very tough position, but from talking to him I think he’ll do what’s best in the end.

And just as a test I sent Deidre another response on the blog but as with all the others it seems to have hit a wall.

[Kelsey]

Alright so, brief recap. Lauren uploaded a bunch of documents in the Yule folder of the Cagliostro index. Within that index there was one image called Yule6 which we figured was the next fragment.

We figured out that the word STUDY printed in red was referring to “A Study in Scarlet.” From there, we agreed on this version and started with the first clue in the text - ‘Find the soonest word within the story that begins with the 48th S’

Counting from the start of the story, we found that 48 S-words later we ended up on the word “streets.”

Now we had a starting point. From there we knew we had to do something with the underlined and struck out words in the Yule6 image - 48 S By To To To To A A A A A He He Was Problem. We eventually realized that starting at “streets” we should count the words to each of the words given above, skipping over the non-bolded ones/the ones that were struck out in the Yule6 image.

By restarting at streets each time we found:
by: 28 words after streets
4th to: 65 words after streets
5th a: 79 words after streets
2nd he: 42 words after streets
was: 100 words after streets
problem: 63 words after streets

Giving us: 28 65 79 42 100 63

Putting the 48S back at the start then gave us this set of numbers: 48S 286579 4210063

In this Crimson Hall layout that Lauren posted, we saw that there was a set of weird numbers in the corner. In Googling those, we found them to be UTM or the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system which looked similar to the set of numbers we had figured out.

Using geoplaner.com, we were able to input our UTM numbers - 48S 286579 4210063 – which spit out a location in Gansu, China.

The Book then confirmed that Gansu was indeed the location we were looking for.

Hopefully I’m not missing anything.

[LaylaLeFae]

I say we start scouring Gansu via Google maps. Unless that’s already been or being done. And there’s been nothing out of the book since? I really don’t believe we are going to get very far without help from somewhere. But where?

[Kelsey]

I personally have no idea what we are looking for yet, Sullivan called Gansu “the first location” so I think we will be finding other places across the world to unlock this fragment. What I believe will come next is that Lauren will post more images in the index from The Monarch Papers Volume 3 as we unlock each location and the journal reveals more of its secrets.

[LaylaLeFae]

Do you mean to tell me that we are now back to the sit around and wait for something to happen stage?