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Instructions
It has been a weird chase. Seems like I'm not the only one after this prize. Competition is the last thing I need unfortunately. I'll try to find out what others have found that I have missed. It could cost me, but it'll be worth it. I hope.
It all started with the weirdest quiz I have ever been to. It wasn't even announced, I just happened to be at the pub. The quizmaster seemed to be in a hurry, since he rushed through the questions, left without anyone having the chance to turn their answers in, and he forgot his notes. I was lucky enough to snatch them. That was great, since I could never have memorized all that he said, it went so fast. I don't think anyone saw me grab the notes either...
The questions seemed simple at first, but after a few minutes I realized that this not a quiz. I think he was speaking in some code. Like he was delivering a secret message to someone at the pub.
I have come back to the pub for a few nights now, but no sign of the quizmaster. Although I'm not completely sure what he looked like. Very unremarkable man. There are a few others that I think is chasing the same idea, but I feel that I must be secret about this whole thing. I have noticed at least two others that seems to be just as mysterious as myself.
One is a business-looking woman always working on her laptop. She mostly stares at graphs, at first, I just thought it was for some corporate presentation or whatever. I think she might work for IKEA. But something is a bit off. I think it has something to do with the quizmaster. Or maybe she just doesn't have a life, just like me.
The other one is a bit of a weirdo. He mostly sits in a dark corner, scribbling in his notebook. Not sure, but he might be homeless. Smells like it at least. I've seen him getting pretty drunk on a few nights. If the quizmaster is a spy, this guy is his Russian handler.
A few nights ago, I managed so sneak a photo of a page in the weirdos notebook. He hid his notebook under the table when I sat down across from him, so I took a picture under the table with my phone. I don't think he noticed, after all he was pretty smashed. He mumbled a bit about something he had lost. He was pretty beaten up about it, and I guess that's why he was drinking. This time at least. When I got home and looked at the picture, I saw he had ripped most of the page out. Need to find that other half somehow.
Last friday I happened to sit on the table next to the business-woman, I think her name is Lisa. She apparently dropped a memory stick and asked me if I could help her to look for it. After some searching, she gave up, and said it was okay. She had backups of everything, and the memory stick was encrypted anyways. It was a nice icebreaker to help her to find that memory stick, I took the chance to try to find out more about what she knew, and I could mask it as a harmless attempt to hit on her. When I asked her about the charts she just laughed and said it was a bit of a side-quest for her, and closed her laptop. Kind of hard to bring the subject up again without raising any suspicions... She did invite me home that night, so I got that going for me, which was nice. I took some photos of her apartment when she was out buying breakfast the next morning. Maybe they might come in handy when I try do decrypt her memory stick. Of course, I found it first :) I put the photos on the memory stick as well.
Memorystick -
Answer
meteoritic
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Solution
In the story in the task, you'll get the notes for a weird quiz, a photo of half a page from a notebook, and a zip file with some files in it - both some password-protected zip files, and some photos from Lisa's apartment. While it is technically possible to solve the task with just the note for the quiz, it is probably more feasible to do if you use the rest of the clues as well. In the task it is mentioned that Lisa might work at IKEA, while that's probably not true, she likes to use the names of IKEA furniture as passwords. In the images from the apartment, there are three different items from IKEA. A dresser called MALM, a fruit bowl called STOCKHOLM, and a bathroom rug called TOFTBO. These passwords will open the three zip files. One contains something of a love letter from Lisa, one contains the missing part of the notebook page, and the last one contains 10 charts - the "sidequest". By piecing together the two page halves, you get something like an instruction on how to use the quiz note, and the sidequest is also mentioned as related to a secret part of the instructions. Each of the charts in the sidequest corresponds to one line on the quiz note. And each chart is a breakdown of the colors in the flag of some country. Later on it will be nice to have a country associated with each line, and these flag-charts can be used to disambiguate in some cases. Now, following the instructions, treat the first number as input data, the question as an index, and the number in parenthesis as a metaindex. The metaindex is a reference to a specific word in the question, "indexing the index" so to speak. Each of these words is very similar to a currency. Using the sidequest you can make sure you have the right currency. The input data is the numeric code to the respective currency, and it can be transformed into a three-letter acronym. This is the "secret method" in the instructions. Lastly, the answers to the actual questions are all numbers from 1 to 3, use these to index the acronyms, and finally arrive at the word meteoritic. This task uses ISO 4217.
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Stats
Total finishes:
# Team Time 1 #mdbot 00:08:07 2 Much Owl Multi-Fail Vafan 01:32:47 3 eniteam 02:52:50 4 Bronies 03:55:05 5 Kattass 04:18:22 6 Travel Cthulhu 16:25:04