The Strange Flora Spreading Across The Coasts Must Be Stopped
OKAY, SA, EXPLAIN YOURSELVES
As many of you have noticed, an unannounced, secret icon hunt has been in place since the February newspost. ;)
There are five innocuous seeds there. If you checked the file names of the seeds, they spelled out "there are ten of these." We hoped that this would be enough to signal towards there being ten seeds and an obvious icon hunt, but as far as we know, only one person even noticed the seeds at all.
The March newspost featured five sprouting seeds, whose filenames spelled out "our time is running out." We hoped this would get some more people to notice, but while more folks did notice the seeds being in the post, only a few found the file names, and even fewer thought to look back to the prior newspost for clues.
A few days after the March newspost, we stuck the sprouting seeds in the main board announcement box, under Current Events. By then, a few people had mentioned seeing seeds in various places around the board for a while, and a few had spotted various flower icons as well. A lot of hints were dropped in the 'Souls Discord, but it (apparently) wasn't obvious which things we said were actual clues.
Later on, we composed and tweeted a poem regarding the locations of the seeds, as well as hints towards the steps for the puzzle after that. The poem was the best summary of what was happening and the closest you guys ever got to an "announcement." ;)
(1)
there's one in a past life,
and three in this one;
one in our memories,
our records of fun.
(2)
one in the den
of a friend since departed;
one writ in history
of a pack now uncharted.
(3)
there's one who's a guide,
so we're not led astray.
and one giving suggestions
for new ways to play.
(4)
and finally, the last one
hidden deep in the ground
of a ten year celebration
with fireflies surround.
(5)
send in your seeds
to see what they grow.
the path then reveals itself,
if you know where to go.
(6)
the mad scramble, the hunt
does not long last.
we've had such a history
with them in the past.
(7)
have fun, my dears,
for the ending is nigh:
behold this beautiful gift
from our friends in the sky.
Where were the seeds??
As the original seeds spelled out, there were ten seeds. As per the poem, three are in main board threads, one is in an archive board thread, one in the Yearbook, one is in a (main board) account profile, one is on a defunct pack site, one is in the RP Guide, one is in the thread prompt generator, and one is on the "ONE DECADE" board skin.
Actually while compiling this, Kiri realises there were actually none in the RP Guide and four in main board threads. WHOOPS. Good thing the poem helped literally no one anyway!!
What about the flowers??
There were six flower icons "hidden," all with hover text that decoded to "decoy." These were, as they say, totally just decoys, and contributed nothing to anything. c:
There were two flowers on the RP Guide, one in the Request autochecker's results, two in the Yearbook, and one in the Store.
WHAT WAS THE NEXT STEP?
If you PMed the SA with your seed findings, we responded with specific flowers depending on which seeds you found. If you had all ten of the seeds, you'd get back ten flowers. If you only had five seeds, you'd get five flowers, etc. The flowers had more clue words in their filenames, this time numbered in a particular order.
The ten flowers spelled out "the strange flora spreading across the coasts must be stopped."
The last step was looking back at the most recent icon hunt prior to this, which was our 13th Birthday Icon Hunt (awarding a rabbit), which involved collecting clue words to build a URL PATH. The URL path gimmick was also used in one of our 14th Birthday contests (awarding a knife). No one solved the URL puzzle in either case and Kiri figured THIRD TIME WAS THE CHARM.
So did anyone win?
Congratulations to MYST, who got to the last step by piggybacking on others' publicly solving some of the prior steps. ;)
Honorable mentions go to Kite, Vida, Kitty, and Despi for trying really hard, and to Lin, who was the only person who noticed the seeds for like a month.
SO IS THE EVIL FLOWER THINGY A REAL PLOT??
Who said anything about a plot? ;D
What did you guys vote for?
