Transcription
Welcome back to part two. Are we going to get to see the dragon today? Probably not. I really, really wanted to get to the good stuff, but I got some feedback on my first video, and it was basically, "slow down."
How did you get there? What was your process? Things like that. I will go back later and film a video or make a video of the word search, the number solve, and the anagram in more detail. I just really want to get to the good stuff. I will try to slow it down going forward, so those of you that want more detailed time on the anagram and things like that, I will provide videos for that much later.
I did like it when Netflix came out with the entire season in one chunk. They just started binge-watching, and they just dumped it in your lap, and you were able to watch the whole thing in like a day and get to the end. That's kind of what I wanted to do for everybody. I was like, "Let's just get to the good stuff."
So, I am going to slow it down a little bit. We're not going to quite get into the dragon yet because if I just dumped the dragon in your lap, you guys might be like, "Well, how'd you get there? That doesn't make sense." I get that, and that's fair to question those things, and I appreciate people questioning those things.
Some other feedback I got was that I blew past the numbers—the importance of the numbers—and they do come into play later. I should probably mention this: I use this term a lot, "put a pin in it," because we'll come across a clue that will be important, but I don't want to drive down that road and try to solve that. I just want to move forward.
Back to the anagram. He does say at the end here, and this makes a lot of sense at the beginning, "just remain steady." Of course, I thought I was just trying to come up with something cute to put in there, but it does make sense. He wants you to stay on course; he wants you to remain steady to complete the mission.
So, stay on course. There's going to be a lot of shiny things to distract you along the way. There are going to be some paths that you go down that lead to a dead end. You've got to come back to the path and keep going down it.
I’m going to find things, and I’m going to show you a little bit about it, and then I will try to mention, "Hey, I'm putting a pin in this; we're going to come back to this later," because things do kind of circle back, and they are important. But sometimes, if I explain it at that moment, it's not going to make a lot of sense why.
I'll give you an example. If you were working through this word search, everybody that I saw put the word search in here, but instead of putting the O on the right side, they put it on the left side. These O's ended up acting as spacers when you created the anagram.
Again, I'll have another video going through this in detail, but a lot of people kept putting—basically, I'll just move it over here real quick—they put the word search there. Instead of using the O that was on the right side, they added the O, you know, here.
Basically, let's see if I get that in there. Okay, we are not operating at full capacity, so that's kind of what everybody else's board looked like. I will tell you right now that's incorrect. And why would I know that?
So, that's something that is going to have to be explained way down the road, but it will be explained, and you'll understand why when I get there. So, this is actually the correct way it's supposed to be, and some people fight me on that, but I have a really good solve later, and there's a reason why this is over here and not over here.
The O's are important. That's something that I should have taken more time to emphasize. Obviously, they're important in finding the tic-tac-toe board, which hopefully some of you are already starting on solving this, and maybe you'll join me on my boots-on-the-ground to go pick up the treasure.
So, the O's were important here to weave through this area to create your tic-tac-toe board, but later, when you're solving the clues, it turns out—and you've learned this along the way—you don't use the O's when you're trying to solve the clues. They're actually not used; they're spacers.
You have to, if they're part of, like, let's say you had to grab a chunk of text, let's just, you know, this area here, you're not going to use the O's. That's something that you learn along the way. So, it's important where the O's are, and that's the one instance where a lot of people didn't know quite where to put that O.
I'm going to tell you right now it's on the right-hand side, so put a pin in that, and when we get to it later, we can discuss it in more detail. But today, I think it's important to go back to this step where people were actually coming up with the anagram and then, you know, taking it a step further by lining it up.
What really was overlooked here is the time that people spent on the bottom two rows trying to find something, trying to find meaning in this area, whether it was a cryptogram or some sort of cipher or something like that. I don't know who actually solved it, but I know B brought it to me, and I think it is something he was working on.
Basically, you take the last column here, the last two rows, 14 and 15, and starting with B, N, S, you go ahead and unjumble that anagram out. It does spell out something and starts to make sense of the area, you know, what you're supposed to do with it.
So, at this stage, let me go and pull that up. I got a whole page for that to make it really easy and clean for you to see. Oh, get a little ahead of ourselves. We don't see those tabs because you'll see the answers maybe.
All right, join. Here we go. All right, so if you go ahead and take this bottom section in pink here and you anagram that out, you're going to get "play basic ciphers." This is where I didn't know anything about ciphers, to be honest. I never used them.
I haven't done a lot of treasure hunting since I was a kid. I helped my mom with Forest Fen a little bit, but that was really her thing. I barely cracked the spine on my book on that, so I had to do some research on what basic ciphers were.
The Caesar cipher is the easiest of all, but basically, there is a little hidden clue here. It, in the blue, kind of runs down into it. It's attached to this clue. Now, that's important. That's a lesson right there: when you're working on one clue, the other clue might be attached to it.
So here we got "play basic ciphers," and attached to that clue is "Caesar." I got this little try here; I'm sure that was part of it, but maybe not. So we're going to go ahead and learn a lesson here, which is we've got one clue, and another clue is attached to it.
This is something a lot of people play with in the beginning. I'm not going to take credit for any of this. I did mess with the Q, V, U up here in the corner; that's spelled "John." But the rest of it, I never really got anything.
So there was a group solve where I wish I knew who did this specifically so I could give them credit because it was a great solve. They were looking at all the corners. There's another page to show you that there's this corner here, but looking at a Caesar cipher, basically, I would suggest you just Google it and learn a little bit about it because I'm not going to give a whole lesson on Caesar.
But Caesar's very easy. You're just adding a letter to it; you're shifting the letter. That's the best way to put it—shifting—because I got it written down here.
So, for instance, what is a Caesar? Okay, if I have the letter Q, V, U, and I have Caesar 19, that means to shift it 19 spots. Basically, if you got a Q, you just keep—you just count past that.
So, Q, R, S, T, U, V, blah, blah, blah, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and when you get to Z, you just start back over at A. I could, you know, lay that out for you with an alphabet and then show you to count it, but I hope you guys can figure this out.
If you can't, just go Google Caesar, and maybe there's a short video on it. I was just watching that. But if you shift 19 and you count upward on Q, V, U, and then start back over at A, you end up with J.
Then the V, you count over 19, you end up with O. And the same thing, you count and then start over at A and finish your count, and you end up with N. So, I thought we were done with that. That's John; his name's in there.
We got Ma and Pa in here. You've got his wife's name; you've got his kids' names in here. They are mentioned in the book. I'm not being a creeper and tracking down his family; they are mentioned in the book.
So, I was like, "Okay, that's kind of a cool Easter egg." I call a lot of these things Easter eggs, but I ended it there and walked away. That's the neat thing about some group shares: people can find other things that you don't.
That's another reason why I'm sharing some of this too. If I don't find the treasure and this helps somebody else find it, hey, you know, just remember me, and I could use a new set of golf gloves, so I do appreciate that.
Moving on, I'm boots on the ground tomorrow, so we'll have some answers soon enough. Okay, so let's take a look here. Other people decided to take a look at this, and if you do a Caesar cipher 19 on the B, M, A, it doesn't work out to anything.
However, the reason why people came up with 19—I should mention this—I'm moving so fast here; I do apologize. It's in the same row as 19. So, I actually just started using all the numbers, and I did the whole board in Caesar, and that's where John popped up when 19 came up.
I didn't think to use it specifically because it was in the row, but the person that came up with this next solve said, "Hey, I'm going to use a 19 for a reason." Then the B, M, A, I'm going to go the opposite direction. Usually, Caesar, you count forward, but in this way, they're like, "Hey, let's go backwards 19," which would effectively be a seven.
Caesar seven—26 letters in the alphabet minus 19 is seven. So, basically, we're going to go ahead and do a Caesar minus 19 shift or plus seven if you're familiar with that.
So, we're going to B, and we're going to count forward seven. You'll end up with I. Count seven, you get T. Count seven, you get H. Or rather, if you want to go backwards, you can count backwards and do that to the 19 backwards.
That's a really cool solve, actually. I really enjoyed hearing about this. Down here in the corner, we got A, P, S, and since it's on the row with zero, we're going to go ahead and not shift that at all. We'll talk about the I, R one later if that actually plays.
So, you go ahead and shift all of those, and obviously not this one, and you anagram it out, and you get "join pass." I just gave you the answer there. We're going to hold that back a bit so you can go back and pause. You'll get that little clue, but you got "join pass."
I kind of had an idea of how that applied to the board already, so it was kind of nice to see this much later. But I already had the idea in place of what I was going to do with the board as I was working it.
So, when I saw this, I was like, "There you go." It's kind of like he's going to give you all the answers. Sometimes you got to come up with them on your own, but I think if you find the right clue, he's going to give you that solution for you.
So, this just confirms something I was already doing, so that was exciting. Let me go and jump ahead here.
There's another idea of using the I, R, and when you do that and you try Caesar, you come up with "join the pairs." Now, this could be something very amazing; it could be nothing at all. Maybe it doesn't apply; maybe it does.
I know the "join path" is definitely applicable. A lot of people think, "Oh, you're going down a trail, and you're going to join paths, and that's where the treasure is," or something. I've got a solution, and I'll give that to you later.
But the I, R, this could lead to something. So, what I'm going to do, though, is I'm going to put a pin in it because I cannot—I’ve got enough clues right now to get me very, very close to where I need to be to find the treasure.
But this right here could play into it. This, in fact, I should take the time to mention, I don't know all the answers. If John takes a look at the board and sees what I did, he might grade me like a B or like a high C.
Maybe there are some things I missed; maybe I did them slightly different. I think what I have, though, is pretty good. So, you know, it's all up for debate. If you guys want to look at it and debate, "Hey, did he anagram this correctly? Did I do this right?" That kind of thing.
Maybe you'll find a, you know, a chink in my armor kind of thing, and maybe you'll figure something out. So, anyways, I think that might be all we should really go over for today.
I hope everybody is at least trying the board and trying to anagram some things. I don't want to give you too much. I'd like you to have an opportunity to solve some of this yourself and maybe come up with different answers.
Then when you see what I have, maybe you're like, "Oh, okay, I see what he got," or "Wow, no, my solution is actually better," and that would be awesome for you. You know, but hopefully, I've got the correct answer.
I will say that when I shared some of these results, people have noticed a thing here or there that I've been able to correct or fix. One example was just a misspelling. I had a clue, and I couldn't figure out why it was wrong or why I couldn't anagram anything properly, and I had one letter wrong in my spelling of a person's name, which you will get to see when I get to present the dragon.
Kind of exciting! So, we'll go and end part two with that, and I will try to give you the good stuff as fast as I can, but I also will try to slow things down and go over things in a little bit more detail.
So, we will see you in part three.