Solution: Intersecting Crop Circles

Answer: SPRINGSURE

This puzzle is just a Venn diagram with three intersecting circles, with a 10-letter answer that is probably a location (as suggested by the pin). This suggests you need to take the intersection of three things. Every time you solved one of the non-meta puzzles, two numbers between 1 and 40 were revealed. Even better, each number appears exactly once! The thing to do here is to compare the letters from the names of the two animals and the puzzle answer, and see which letters are common to all three. Trying this for a few gives confirmation that this is the right thing to do, since each answer shares exactly one letter in common with both the critters (with the exception of two double letters, as in the table below). This gives you 20 letters (22 if you count the double letters), but ordering them by release of the puzzle gives nonsense.

To order them correctly, we must use the narrative. A date is referenced in each chapter of the narrative. Ordering the letters chronologically by these dates, gives you the correct ordering of the 22 letters. Here is a table summarising all of this.

Reading the letters gives EIT AUSSIE PETRIFIED WOOD. Another instruction! In EIT, there is only one petrified wood on display from Australia.

That wood is from Springsure, Queensland, Australia. The answer is a 10-letter location, and the answer is SPRINGSURE. Entering SPRINGSURE into the answer checker unlocks the next part of the meta.

Author’s Notes

This Meta was inspired by the taxidermy animals found in the biology building. I have been a part of the campus community for over 25 years, and I never knew these displays existed until this past summer. I wondered what other interesting places were hiding on campus and that is how the EIT Museum and the Bio Wall entered the Meta as well.

Intersecting Crop Circles was written first, and when the idea for the puzzle just being an empty Venn diagram came up, the crop circle aesthetic was born. Could I possibly make the Meta just a bunch of empty circles??

Concentric Crop Circles was written next, and it relied heavily on constraining the puzzle titles. Not only did they need to share letters with puzzle titles both before and after them, but they all needed to be distinct lengths. This caused some stress and hair-pulling amongst puzzle writers, and is why some of the puzzles ended up with really long titles. Those of you who solved Concentric Crop Circles will be happy to know that we scrapped our first draft in which we did not provide any of the non-alphanumeric characters. Although I really longed for a Meta that was nothing but circles, without those anchoring characters the puzzle was a tedious, brute-forcing, mess.

Pedley’s Cascading Crop Circles was the last one to be finalized and it underwent the most changes. In earlier drafts the chains were spirals, and in one version the box code was ABDUCTIONS instead of COSMIC GLYPH. In the end, I wanted to have a piece of the Meta that was actually about crop circles (not just in design). I did a bit of research and came upon the phrase SAUCER NESTS which I thought was the perfect tie-in. When I saw that George Pedley and the petrified wood were both from Queensland, Australia, I felt like the connection was meant to be.