If you have not yet tried out our “low-tech escape room” in Trivia Newsletter C and would like to do so, DO NOT CONTINUE READING, as the below will entirely spoil the game! You can access Trivia Newsletter C via the below button:
The below contains the entire text of the game together with some annotations/explanations added by me in this manner:
[italicized text in brackets set off as a quote]
Introduction
[As the story itself tells you, this entire introduction is for color and to provide a framing story around the puzzles.]
“And that’s why I need a trivia expert,” she says.
You blink. You were never good in median res. You’re in a poorly lit bar. She is to your left, agitated at your non-response to what has clearly been a long explanation of something. A dog occupies the barstool to your right, unless you’re a cat person, in which case a cat occupies that barstool. A flag hangs on the wall—you recognize that it is the flag of the State of Nevada, in part because the flag bears the words “Battle Born” in the top left corner, but admittedly mostly because the flag also bears the word “Nevada.” It’d be a California flag if it bore a bear, you idly think.
“You know? A trivia expert? You? That advertisement you responded to? The reason we’re meeting here to talk about what we’re about to do?”
“Can we just start over from the beginning?”
She sighs. Your intuition tells you that this entire scene is for color and won’t provide very much useful information.
“In 01946,” she begins, “a casino opened up nearby, back when people still gambled. It was called the Flamingo. Inside the Flamingo is something I want.”
“Wait,” you say, “is this a heist? Everyone knows the money’s been long cleared out. Besides, no one even uses—”
“Money? No. Glory? Do you know who Donald Featherstone is?”
[You’re here for puzzles and trivia and not for choppily written fan fictions, but the five-digit years and reference to currency possibly being obsolete are intended to be references to a utopian future—in this case, to Jon Bois’s 17776 universe.]
“Of course I do; I used to subscribe to this one trivia newsletter,” you say. “Donald Featherstone designed the plastic pink flamingo, the lawn ornament.”
[Even in my own imagined fantasy universe, I can’t retain subscribers?]
“That’s right,” she says, pleased she doesn’t need to repeat this part as well. “They’re kitschy and some people think they indicate bad taste, but those people are silly. A decade or so after the Flamingo opens, they have an exhibit—the very first plastic pink flamingo! But no one’s seen it since, or so the legend goes.”
“Okay. Looking for a flamingo in the Flamingo. Got it.” It occurs to you to ask a question you probably should have asked earlier. “Who are you again?”
“Me? I’m not really a ‘name’ person. Names are what we give to things out of sight, or else why would we need a name for them? And I’m always with me.” She is not saying this for the first time. “But for our purposes, you can call me Felicia Featherstone, scion of the Featherstone family, with no goal save one: finding the first flamingo.”
This all seems a bit contrived to you. “I’d like to better understand what value this flamingo has to you,” you say.
“People are always losing things. Their tempers, their senses, their keys, their incredibly rare artifacts. I’m a finder, and I’m good at it. One time someone lost their Marbles, and now thanks to me those are back in Greece—though I don’t think the British are too happy. But like I always say: ‘It belongs in a museum in its country of origin.’”
“Isn’t that from—”
“Everything’s from everywhere,” Felicia abruptly says. “Thanks to me, things get to where they’re supposed to be. I helped restore the Kasubi Tombs in Kampala, I found the Crown of Kartli-Kakheti and brought it back to Mtskheta, and I once spent thirty-four days finding a lost balloon so a kid would stop being sad. Now, the actual Featherstone family would very much like their flamingo back, and that’s what we’re going to make happen.”
“So wait, what does trivia have to do with any of this?”
“Before they closed the Las Vegas Strip, the people who ran the casinos tried to appeal to different crowds. You had your nightclubs and your dayclubs, your petting zoos, your reverse petting zoos, and for a brief period in late 02022 in connection with a trivia convention at the Flamingo, ‘escape rooms’ with puzzles designed for trivia buffs.”
[“Reverse petting zoos” is a reference to The Office—just having fun here.]
“Ah,” you say. “It sounds as though the puzzles are entirely restricted to information available in the year 02022, so we don’t need to worry about anything that’s happened since. Good.”
“Sure, whatever. I’ve sifted through tens of thousands of ‘tweets,’ a popular form of communication at the time, around when this convention would have happened. I still don’t know what a ‘Liz Truss’ is or why it was so fond of lettuce, but contemporaneous messages suggest that a particular escape room at the Flamingo had a plastic flamingo as a prize, and that the flamingo was a rare artifact. It’s my best lead.”
“You seem very good at this adventuring thing,” you say. “Are you sure you even need help?”
“Oh, I hate trivia,” she says cheerfully. “Silly people with their Pantheons and their Parthenons, their Monets and their Manets, their Invisible Man and The Invisible Man, all to flash peacock feathers at one another.”
“You sure know a lot of common trivia answers easily confused for one another for someone who doesn’t like trivia,” you say.
“I know enough to know what I don’t know,” Felicia says. “And what I don’t know is trivia. But you say that you do, and I could use your help. Are you in?”
ROOM ONE
“Okay, here we are,” Felicia says. After a couple hours of exploring the Flamingo, you and Felicia are in what is basically a closet.
Dusty television screens line the walls and appear to be inoperable. The floor is comprised of strangely ornate tiles that catch your eye. You count ten across and ten down: one hundred tiles in total. Most of the tiles seem to have had text on them at one point, but are now illegible. The two tiles you are standing on, though, are blank. You try the handle to the only other door in the room. It’s locked, though it’s seemingly controlled by a keypad next to the door, with the numbers 0 through 9 as the possible inputs. The only other item of note in the room is a large poster listing names and numbers.
[The hint here is the tiles. A typical edition of Scrabble has 100 letter tiles, of which two are “wild card” blank tiles, just like the floor in this room.]
“Back when this was an active puzzle room,” Felicia says, “there would have been someone who provided clues to the participants. Photographs suggest that there would have been more puzzles, perhaps with objects in the room to be manipulated. There also probably would have been printed reference material to help us with certain facts. That's all been lost to time, it seems. But we should still have enough here to make our way through.”
You look more carefully at the poster. Parts have been torn up and faded, but you can still make out a portion. Large text appears at the top:
BECLOUDED SORROW → _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _
Below that text appears names and numbers:
GEORGE WASHINGTON = 50
JOHN ADAMS = 44
THOMAS JEFFERSON = 66
JAMES MADISON = 48
JAMES MONROE = 44
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS = 84
______ _______ = ???
MARTIN VAN BUREN = 42
WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON = 68
The remainder of the poster is too obscured to read.
Felicia studies the poster. “So we’ve got to figure out the person who is missing, and then figure out what the numbers have to do with the other listed people so we can figure out what number corresponds to the missing person.”
You think. “Okay, they’re all U.S. presidents in order, so they want us to name the seventh president. That’s easy enough. But what are these numbers?”
“Does ‘beclouded sorrow’ mean anything to you?” Felicia asks.
“Nothing, but I think it’s some kind of anagram that they want us to solve,” you say.
Felicia is looking at the potential anagram and muttering to herself. “…Core…sword?”
You look again at the numbers and realize all of them are even. After some thought, you walk up to the keypad and punch in a code:
[The intended solution was to realize that this related to Scrabble in some fashion, realize that “Beclouded Sorrow” is an anagram for “Double Word Score,” know (or look up) that the seventh president is Andrew Jackson, and then look up that his name in Scrabble would be 30 points—so, double that (because it’s a double word score, just like the other presidents) and you get 60, the answer. “Sixty” or “60” both worked.]
ROOM ONE (CONT.)
The locked door clicks open.
“Nice work!” Felicia says. Then, she frowns. “Hey, you didn’t just keep typing numbers until you happened to type in the right one, did you?”
“What?” you say. “Of course not! Besides, it’s open anyway, what does it matter?”
“I need an expert, not a guesser. Why don’t you tell me what that puzzle was about before we proceed?”
You’re annoyed at Felicia’s suspicion, because you are a scrupulous person who correctly solved the puzzle instead of just punching in guesses. However, instead of playing word games, you tell her what was underlying the puzzle you just solved. [One word, eight letters, please.]
[This is meant to be a check against players who might have “brute forced” various two-digit numbers to advance. Telling you that the theme was one word and eight letters is a big clue, and the reference to “word games” was another tongue-in-cheek way to get you closer.]
ROOM TWO
You explain how each number corresponded to what that president’s listed name would be worth if each letter were given its value in the game of Scrabble, except doubled, because the anagrammed phrase was “DOUBLE WORD SCORE.”
“I see now. Nice work on that. Hey, by the way, you should write these answers down.”
“What?”
“Yeah, ‘sixty’ and ‘Scrabble’ and whatever comes next. Just in case. These puzzles might all reset after a while and we don’t want to do that work all over again.”
[This is just a little meta-hint for players to avoid annoyance if they have to come back to the game, since we certainly didn’t have the budget for a “save” feature.]
You wonder why you’d need to say “Scrabble” again, but decide to let it go. Felicia opens the now-unlocked door, and you both enter the next room. Though well lit, the room is even smaller than the first. There is another locked door with a keypad, though this keypad allows you to input letters, not numbers.
On the wall in front of you is a poem written in marker, all inscribed in a drawn circle:
Hey! I send a rhyme demanding
In circle width and round standing
Celestial spheres cooperate
For me: the estimate must relate
to locate that old, old flamingo
and lo! Puzzle's concluded: Bingo.
“There’s a note above the keypad,” Felicia says.
You look at it. It says “ONE LETTER.”
“That’s weird,” Felicia says. “Hey, now that I can trust you, let’s just try all the letters.”
She methodically tries each letter, A through Z, in the keypad, and clicks Enter after each try. The door does not open.
[Just wanted to save you 26 tries typing in single letters.]
“Weird,” she says. “What do you think?”
You think for a moment, and then turn to the keypad.
[The number of letters in each of the words in the poem correspond to the digits of an approximation of pi: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795. The next digit is “zero,” and so the poem ends there. The concept is not mine—for example, I borrowed “celestial spheres” since it was too good—but I wrote enough of it myself so that you wouldn’t just be able to Google the words. The other hints are that it’s a “letter” (which should make you think of other alphabets after English is off the table) and that the whole thing is inscribed in a circle (since pi is intimately related to circles).]
ROOM THREE
With your answer of “pi,” the door unlocks. You explain to Felicia how pi is a single Greek letter and how the length of each of the words of the poem corresponded to the first digits of pi.
“Math,” she says. “Why’d it have to be math?”
[This is our second, and not our last, suggestion that Felicia is a big fan of Indiana Jones.]
You enter the next room. It’s much larger. The next door and keypad are about thirty feet from the entrance. A large poster with text is on a wall to the side. It reads as follows:
[The idea here is that, while some of these pairs of words may be unknown to you and/or require research, you might be able to get a couple of them through Googling or thinking it out, and you don’t actually need all ten of these to realize that we’re building towards a phrase. One of the words/phrases in each pair relates to American football in some fashion, which may have helped as well.]
1) An app for leading ladies becomes dropping the ball.
[BUMBLE → FUMBLE (F)]
2) Pamplona runners become high-marked Orchard Parkers.
[BULLS → BILLS (I)]
3) A thin cut of meat becomes a beary indifferent smoker.
[CUTLET → CUTLER (R)]
4) A passing aquatic mammal becomes a microstate.
[DAN MARINO → SAN MARINO (S)]
5) An HPV-caused growth becomes an electric defensive family.
[WART → WATT (T)]
6) An appeal for a mother’s intercession becomes a desperate attempt.
[HAIL MARY → HAIL MARY (NO CHANGE)]
7) A certain entitled city, third most populous in its state, becomes a punk-rock band.
[GREEN BAY → GREEN DAY (D)]
8) Legal encumbrances of property become Thanksgiving regulars.
[LIENS → LIONS (O)]
9) A high tea technique becomes a speedy run outside.
[STEEP → SWEEP (W)]
10) A throw that isn’t forward-thinking becomes the answer to the Roman Question.
[LATERAL → LATERAN (N)]
Felicia stares at the poster and flatly says "What."
Above the keypad, a note says “You are limited to four attempts.” The keypad allows you to write both letters and numbers. You take some time to analyze the questions and then write the following:
[When you take the ten changed letters from the above list, in order, you get “FIRST DOWN.” The other clues were that you get “four attempts” (similar to a set of downs in football) and that the door is thirty feet from the entrance (since a first down typically requires a 10-yard gain).]
ROOM FOUR
The door clicks open. You describe to Felicia how each clue related to two words or phrases, and the changed letters made up the passcode. You realized that “four attempts” referred to the fact that football teams are limited to four attempts to get a new set of downs.
You both enter the next room. Someone else is here. Startled, you jump back. Felicia instinctively reaches for her whip.
“Whoa!” the man yells, also clearly surprised. “Who are you guys? No one’s been here in years!”
You take a closer look. The man is hunched over a laptop. He looks like a mess; he hasn’t shaved in a very long time.
Felicia speaks up. “We’re adventurers. What are you doing here?”
“All the world's a stage," the man says. "Since we're all playing parts, I like coming to Las Vegas and remembering what used to be here. This seemed like a good spot to hammer out some of my trivia newsletters.” He’s talking quickly, unfocused on you or Felicia. “Do you know how bad of an idea it was to use Roman numerals on these things?” the disheveled man asks.
“Don’t you just write a line above a Roman numeral to indicate that it’s one thousand times larger than—”
The man shouts, interrupting you. “The line doesn’t show up in people’s inboxes! So now the newsletter titles start with the Roman numeral ‘M’ sixteen hundred times! There are so many of these! People did not enjoy ‘Crustaceans Who Have Not Yet Won the Booker Prize’ as a theme. It’s such a mess.”
[Not that it mattered for the puzzles, but my own existence, combined with the fact that we’ve done over 1.6 million newsletters, is another big clue that the year is just about 17776 and we are in some alternate universe where people live that long.]
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Felicia says, not sounding sorry to hear that. “But we were hoping you could help us get into the next room. It’s about a plastic flamingo, you see.”
“The door,” the man says. “About that. I, uh, do these puzzles based on an old game called Wordle. You guess a five-letter word, and then the game tells you if the letter in question is in the secret word, and if so, whether that letter is in the right position. I wired the keypad for this door to one of the potential Wordle newsletter answers, but…”
[Regular Trivia Factorial readers know that we do Wordle games on every 32nd regular newsletter. Apparently, that tradition has continued.]
“But what?” you ask.
“I, um. I think I was too cute.”
“Oh, I’m sure we can figure it out,” you say. “Here, let me see it.”
The man reluctantly shows you his laptop screen:
“Oh, dear,” you say. “It’s just the same word six times?”
“The idea was to write difficult questions that all have the same answer. But now I don’t remember the answer! Here, I have my first draft of the questions. The same five-letter word answers each question and opens this door. But leave me alone, I have a lot of these to go before I sleep,” he says, turning to dozens of other scattered pieces of paper.
He hands you a sheet of paper. You look at it:
[After the last puzzle, this was designed to be the opposite—more of a fun breather that gave you multiple, but opaque, points of entry.]
1) WHAT city has a population of 408 people?
[Miles, IA]2) WHAT is the first name of the good friend of a fictional character who debuted in 1991?
[Miles “Tails” Prower, from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise]3) WHAT is the first word of the title of a song released in 1997? The song, which is from an album more famous for a different song, is based on a 1923 poem.
[“Miles to Go (Before I Sleep)”on Shania Twain’s album Let’s Talk About Love. That album is more famous for “My Heart Will Go On”. The same poem is obliquely referenced above in the last words of the disheveled man, as your one extra hint.]4) His live recordings include [Blank]! [Blank]! [Blank]! and We Want [Blank], recorded many, well, y’know, apart.
[These are Miles Davis recordings—each blank is his name, and they were recorded thousands of miles apart.]5) Didn’t lay an egg in TG:M?
[Miles Teller plays a character in the film Top Gun: Maverick; his call sign is “Rooster,” so he can’t lay eggs.]6) Morales and Messervy; comes from Latin soldiers?
[References to Miles Morales (Spider-Man) and Miles Messervy (M from the James Bond universe, sometimes); the word “mile” is derived from the Latin phrase “milia passuum,” referring to the one thousand paces Roman soldiers might walk in a day.]
You review the questions a few times and confidently type a word into the keypad.
ROOM FIVE
In response to "miles," the door opens.
“That's right,” the disheveled man says, “it was miles! You were supposed to realize it’s a Frasier quiz, and then the answer was ‘crane,’ because it’s secretly a bird quiz, and then you have to think of different types of jays, like sports teams and potato chips, because it’s actually a Kevin Smith quiz, and so the answer was going to be Dogma, and that’s how you realize the whole month was Alan Rickman answers, and then you have to realize that ‘Severus’ is a Roman emperor--”
“Hey, that’s great, thanks,” Felicia says, opening the door and quickly ushering you through. She closes the door behind her. “Yeesh. Okay, next room.”
You look around. This room’s a closet again. In the center of the room is a small raised platform with a placard on it. You read the placard:
THE WORLD’S FIRST PLASTIC FLAMINGO
The platform is otherwise empty, and so is the room. The only other exit is a locked golden door with another alphanumeric keypad next to it. The word “ARCHIVES” is written above the golden door.
“It was here!” Felicia says. “Maybe it was moved. We have to get into the archives if we’re going to solve this.”
You keep looking around, but there are no clues in this room; whatever was supposed to help you find the passcode was seemingly removed. Completely out of ideas, you try “1729” on the keypad. No success. You also try “2” for laughs. Nothing. Despondent, you consider why the archives might be important.
[I am a big sucker for these kinds of puzzles that require information outside of the game itself. Here, since we kept saying “archives” and we’ve already established that this newsletter is a part of this universe, the answer was to go to your inbox, or to the searchable archives of the newsletter, and look for words like “flamingo” or “golden.” Doing so would have shown you that, just one week before Trivia Newsletter C was published, we wrote the following in the recap of Trivia Newsletter XCVII (that was included with the publication of Trivia Newsletter XCVIII):
By the way: During your search for the pink flamingo in Trivia Newsletter C, you will reach a golden door that is opened with a keypad. You will be asked for an eight-digit number, and there will seemingly be no hints. The number that you need to use in order to progress is “87539319”.
[There was a single clue—the seemingly random inclusion of 2 and 1729. Those are the first two “taxicab numbers” in mathematics, and if you looked them up (either by just searching “2 1729” or “1729” on Google, you could have ascertained that the third is 87539319, our answer.]
ROOM SIX
The door opens.
“How did you figure that out?” Felicia says. “Actually, I don’t care. Let's find this flamingo.”
Your intuition tells you that whatever is in this next room will be the last puzzle. You both enter.
A large world map is built into the wall. You touch the map and are surprised to see that it lights up when you touch a country. After experimenting with the map, you learn that touching any country causes that country to light up. Touching a second country consequently causes the map to play a low musical note, seemingly indicating failure. The lights then switch off, allowing you to try again.
“Okay, we need to identify the pair of countries that this room wants,” you say. A laminated sheet of paper is on the ground. You pick it up and read it:
[One of our eagle-eyed readers pointed out that “you” should not have been able to infer this—perhaps the map wanted you to punch in a sequence of countries. Let’s just say, uh, that you have great intuition.]
Exactly two pairs of countries have a certain distinction. Tanzania and Kenya are one of the two pairs. What two nations, neither of which borders Tanzania or Kenya, make up the other pair? If Vatican City and Liechtenstein were no longer sovereign nations, then Italy and Austria could be yet another such pair.
“That could be so many things,” Felicia says.
You start thinking. “Whoever made this wanted us to see this map. That's a clue.”
After some thought, you tap two countries.
[Please do not use commas or any joining word such as “and”. The order of the two answers is irrelevant. For example, if you thought the answers were Cuba and Japan, you would write "cuba japan" or "japan cuba" to proceed.]
[This was tuned to be a bunch of work, but entirely derivable from just a map. Tanzania and Kenya are one of the two pairs of countries that border each other, and also each border the same number of countries as there are letters in their (common English) names. That’s why Italy and Austria would work if each of them bordered one fewer country. Hungary and Ukraine are the correct answer.]
ENDING
The door opens, and Felicia darts inside. A flash—everything is light. Confetti falls from the sky and a victory fanfare blasts through the PA system.
“We did it!” Felicia says.
In the center of the room: a plastic pink flamingo, about three feet high. Felicia scrambles next to it, examining it. She retrieves from her bag a small electronic device and runs it over the flamingo.
“Come on…yes! This was created in 01957! This is almost certainly Donald Featherstone’s original plastic pink flamingo!”
“What is that?” you ask, pointing to the scanner.
“Oh, you know how dendrologists count the rings in trees? This little thing just takes that idea—it counts the rings of atoms, though you might know them as electron shells, to tell us how old things are based on how many times the electrons have gone around.”
“That doesn’t actually make a lot of sense—”
She doesn’t hear you as she puts the scanner away and turns her attention back to the flamingo.
“Oh!” Felicia exclaims. “There’s something written on the flamingo! I think it’s a note from Donald!”
“What does it say?”
She stares at the flamingo, trying to make out the text. “It’s—” She gasps.
“It’s a dedication,” she says. “It’s perfect.”
“A dedication to the Flamingo?” you ask. “To someone in his family?”
“No. It’s better. Really, what else could it have been? Here, look for yourself.”
You look at the flamingo, finding the words, and then you smile to yourself. It is perfect.
Felicia begins to carefully pack up the flamingo. “I’ve got to run some errands before I get this to the Featherstones,” she says. “Do you want a ride out of here?”
“Actually, I’ll stay a minute,” you say. “Maybe that trivia convention left some other games around here.”
“Sure. Hey, by the way,” Felicia says, “Thank you. I couldn’t have done this without you. Now that there’s nothing to do other than whatever we want, all I do is adventures. It was nice to have a partner.”
“You’re welcome,” you say. “Maybe we’ll meet again?”
“Yeah, maybe in a hundred newsletters or so.” She finishes packing the flamingo and picks it up. “See you around, kid.”
“Bye—” You rethink your word. “See you later, Felicia.” As she leaves, you think about the day’s events and what was written on the flamingo.
“Hey!” you yell out. Felicia turns around. You raise a mock glass in the air, and you pick the flamingo’s dedication as your toast. “To whimsy!”
She laughs, and raises a mock glass in return. “To whimsy.”
[If you’ve gotten through the 4600 words or so of this game and the explanations—thanks for reading along. I hope you enjoyed our little story.]
THE END