As I mentioned in a previous question, I am trying to play through Praser 5, an old interactive fiction freeware game. In it, you visit four Marks, the marks of earth, air, fire and water. Each has a name found by solving a series of riddles and taking the first letter of each word in the solutions to the riddle.
Also, in the game, you discover the names of mythical creatures and use the names to get more riddles.
I have solved three of four marks. However, the Mark of Water is a giant chalice with words that say:
As I contain the waters of the world, so the 7 names are contained. (And they're names, not Names.)
iodine
silicon
radon
bromine
thorium
technetium
molybdenum
I've looked up the atomic number and abbreviations on the periodic table, but I don't know how to proceed. In an old forum, someone who solved it said it was a "fiendish puzzle" and that "the introductory text is very misleading".
The solutions to the other marks were ordinary English words (for instance, one was "wheel".
Edits from comments I have discovered that the answer is "diamond" using a decompiler. Diamond is contained in the seven words, but not in any uniform way. Why is diamond the right answer?
Copied from comments
"For those who want to see the riddle firsthand you can go to http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zweb/praser5/ to play Praser 5 online. To get to this riddle just type 'literal', then 'south', then 'read'. – finsternis 6 hours ago"
Rationale for accepted answer I think that the reasoning in the answer is mostly correct. I think it is easier to find English words in the element names first, and then try out the various possibilities (like ado/don) to see which ones give you the correct answer.
Also, for the wheel problem, I agree that the Hagia Sophia should be the second answer.
Answer
Step 1: What kind of puzzle is it?
Reading the parchment on the monolith in The Center of the Physical World yields the following text:
There Here be Emblems, four in Number. A Mark Each Bears, Enigmatic and Hidden; You may Discover Each by the Acrostic of Names Each Emblem Flaunts.
From that text, we know the answers must be acrostic (made by taking letters from words of phrases) based on the words inscribed on each emblem.
For instance, when you go north, you can read the following on the emblem of fire:
- In memoriam: D.C.
- Many faiths: Constantinople
- A bureaucrat's dream: New York City
- Great objections: Paris
- Exists no more: Alexandria
Which, when solved, yields the following:
- Washington Monument
- Hagia Sophia
- Empire State Building
- Eiffel Tower
- Library of Alexandria
The acrostic solution yields WHEEL. This conforms with the solution you found in the source code. I didn't solve the East and West puzzles but the number of items in the list aligns with the characters in ascension (West / Earth) and cipher (East / Air) so it can reasonably be inferred that their solutions follow an acrostic pattern as well.
Step 2: Extract Diamond from the Elements
As I already mentioned in a comment, we can brute force this to come up with 6 common English words that can be made from the letters in each element. This is crude, though, so there must be a more elegant solution.
Gabriel C. Drummond-Cole pointed out in their comment that the letters we need are the beginning of a short word that can be found inside the names of the element.
- ioDINE
- silICON
- rADOn
- broMINE
- thORium
- techNETium
- molybDENum
Of the 6 words that we brute-forced (diamond, dinette, doormen, dormice, economy, inanity), diamond is the only one for whom this property holds. I don't consider this to be a proof that it's right but it does seem to align with the "so the 7 names are contained" direction.
As I contain the waters of the world, so the 7 names are contained.
(And they're names, not Names.)
I struggled to extract some section of the introductory text in which I could find the letters SEA, OCEAN, BED, etc. that followed this same pattern. If someone could find that, I think it can be considered solved.
Conclusion: Andrew Plotkin is a Jerk
As someone posted in a forum discussing this game, the introductory text is very misleading. However, I would like to see some kind of connection between the text and the answer. That may be finding a similar pattern in the introductory text as I have already failed to do or something entirely different from this track.
I feel that we have found some clues to support the answer being diamond and we brute-forced the thing to narrow it down to a list short enough to simply try every answer. However, how could it be solved without brute-force and without working backwards from the answer?
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