Solution: Transformative Social Change
Answer: WRACK ZONE
Written by Jonah Ostroff
Each puzzle in the Sociology department uses parts of the profiles of two fish. This puzzle uses the word search from Octopus’s Chumblr page, and the “Goals” section of Salmon’s PokeCupid page.
As clued by the text on Octopus’s page, the rows in the word search are all what3words addresses. Each one lies in a body of water:
| Order | Address | Body of water |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | shares.fortunes.noticed | Corral Lake |
| 2 | freshen.peppermint.goes | Ice Lake |
| 3 | fixtures.payee.levering | Anchorage Bay |
| 4 | auction.runaways.leaped | Artery Lake |
| 5 | gazebo.cushioning.along | Cats Bay |
| 6 | etchings.boxful.swooned | Lake Daphne |
| 7 | overpaid.symphonic.hand | Bohemian Creek |
| 8 | taxed.wrestle.connector | Gravestone Brook |
| 9 | landed.comically.donate | Pence Lake |
The first paragraph of Salmon’s “Goals” section lists nine things they’d like to do in the next year, and each of these can be applied to the names of the bodies of water to create a new word:
| Original word | Goal | New word | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| CORRAL | Appear on Grandmaster Puzzles. | CAVE | Grandmaster Puzzles refers to Corral as Cave. |
| ICE | Get a little hotter. | WATER | Ice melts into water. |
| ANCHORAGE | Stop showing my age. | ANCHOR | Delete AGE. |
| ARTERY | Become thinner and more refined. | CAPILLARY | Capillaries are tinier than arteries. |
| CATS | Run away from home. | STRAYS | Cats run away to become strays. |
| DAPHNE | Wear green instead of purple. | SHAGGY | Shaggy is the Scooby-Doo character in green. |
| BOHEMIAN | Write the second half of that song. | RHAPSODY | Finish the title “Bohemian Rhapsody”. |
| GRAVESTONE | Finally delete that number. | GRAVEST | Delete ONE from the end. |
| PENCE | Get a promotion. | TRUMP | Pence was the vice president to Trump. |
The Salmon goals are arranged into three sentences of three, so the next step is to look up these nine words on what3words, in three sets of three:
| Order | Words | Body of water |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | cave.anchor.water | Zinc Lake |
| 2 | capillary.strays.shaggy | Lake Nakayama |
| 3 | rhapsody.gravest.trump | Lake Dora |
These words can be transformed again with the second paragraph:
| Original | Goal | New | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|
| ZINC | Periodically take a step back. | COPPER | Take the previous element on the periodic table. |
| NAKAYAMA | Make some Flash games. | GROW | On Nakayama created the GROW series. |
| DORA | Get a monkey. | BOOTS | Dora the Explorer’s monkey is named Boots. |
copper.grow.boots is not in a body of water, but we can follow the last instruction anyway: go one space to the southeast to find the square shift.middle.twice. The word search grid is 21 squares wide, and Caesar shifting the middle column (UPYAIXMLC) by two gives the answer: WRACK ZONE.
Author’s Notes
Fortunately for me, it turned out that most words are the names of bodies of water. GeoNames was an invaluable resource for finding them.