SomewhereInIA-64,000 stories Mystery Cache
Marshall421:
It's not there any more.
SomewhereInIA-64,000 stories
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(regular)
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Indoor cache, great for mosquito season, and winter too.
There are many stories at this location
And it is at above location, actually very easy to find, just go insided and ask for it.
It was behind 'The Desk' on shelf, you should be able to see the ammo can.
In your log, try not to give away any details about the type of puzzle, I want it to be a surprise.
- This is in a library, so it has limited hours of operation.
- It might take a while, I spent about 45-60 minutes on this puzzle the first time.
- Scary what you can find somwhere on the web.
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Sticky Problem
- Apply steady, and significant tension to the problem (pull) and adjust it until a sticking point is reached (stuck point actually). Once a sticking point is found, adjust it left and right and write down the upper and lower limits as a decimal estimated to the tenths place. For example '36.3 to 37.1'. The 'sticky' range should be around 0.5 to 1.2. Write the average of each range to the nearest 0.5. ie (36.3+37.1)/2 is 36.7 rounded to the nearest 1/2 is 36.5.
- Release tension so that you can manipulate the problem past the sticking point.
- Repeat above 2 steps until you find all 12 sticky areas.
- Basically, you want to find the average of the range of the sticky area. The more accurate, the better.
- An example might be 4,8.5,14,16.5,19.5,22.5,24,27,30.5,34,36.5,38.5
The Last Part of the Story
- If the next two steps do not work for you, go back and try to be more accurate with the sticky number.
- Eliminate all numbers that end with '.5' You should have 5 remaining possibilities, for example 4,14,24,27,34
- Notice that all but one of the remaining numbers share the same 'ones' digit (in this case 4). Eliminate them as well. This leaves us with one number. 27
- This is the last part of the story! Woo Hoo! Only 1600 possible stories left.
Magic number
- Take the above number, add 4 then divide by 4 and write down the remainder. For Example, 27+4 is 31. 4 goes into 31 7 times, with a remainder of 3.
- You now have the magic number.
- Remember we are only concerned with the remainder. The answer will always be 0, 1, 2, or 3.
10 possiblities for first part of story
- Keep adding 4 to the magic number until you get first 10 numbers that are greater then 0, in above example, possible 1st numbers are 3,7,11,15,19,23,27,31,35,39
10 possiblities for second part of story
- Add or Subtract 2 to the above list of numbers so that you get the first ten positive numbers, in above example, this would be 1,5,9,13,17,21,25,29,33,37
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- If you were careful doing the above steps, one of these stories should get you a happy ending. You've just narrowed 64,000 possible stories down to only 100. If you decode the hint, you can narrow it down to only 50 possibilities (but that is cheating)
- Some of the websites say that this only works on older librarians.
- If you are having problems, email me, and I will confirm the correct magic number.
- Also, remember that in these types of stories there is always a strange twist between the first part and the second part.
- They always start with the same preamble, something like 'A long time ago..'. No that is not it, eventually it will come to me...
- If all else fails, there is a purely mechanical way of doing this too...just search for it on the internet. I think the story method is cooler. Either way, it's pretty shocking.
I enjoy making problems for people
Don't help others cheat!
This is another problem transplanted here from SomewhereInND, Enjoy!
NOTE: The librarian has pointed out that there are far too many 'Woo Hoo!'s being yelled out in the library, so keep it down, or she will remove it ;-)
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Purng!
Svefg cneg vf va ynfg unys bs vgf yvfg.