19. A Feathered Fortune

This week, I will continue writing my thoughts about the ongoing Hoarder's Hunt mystery. I will discuss "A Feathered Fortune," the second installment of the mystery. (In case you missed it, click here to read about my experience with the first installment.)

A bright belly macaw looks over Golden Sands 

1. Learning to Speak Parrot

"A Feathered Fortune" kicked off on Thursday with a video called "Message from H."

This video of two parrots is adorable... and they were trying their best to tell us where the treasure was at! Unfortunately, it was difficult for many pirates to understand parrot-speech!

In this video, we can watch two cute parrots playing, grooming, chattering, and having a grand time. At one point in the video, we can see another Pigpen Cipher (which we learned last week) written on a banana. 

We learned about Pigpen Cipher last week, so this was easy!

This message on the banana was WHATTHREEWORDS, which is the name of a website that divides the entire world into 3-square-meter blocks, each labeled with a set of three words. Our mission seemed clear: Using this website, we needed to find a location based on three words spoken by the parrots. But there were two problems:

1. Pirates apparently don't speak parrot! No two picaroons seemed to agree on whether the parrot was saying "chest" or "jailhouse."
2. The parrots said many things... Some said there would be more than 40,000 possible combinations to try!

Rare helped us with the first problem by adding captions to the video. We could now understand what the parrots were saying. Hooray!

However, the second problem remained unresolved. 

2. Trying to Make Sense of it All

There must be some clue to hone in on the correct words. So I spent a day viewing the parrot video over and over. I realized that the video was divided into many fragments, which I tried to piece together.

While doing this, I figured out that (based on the background) scenes with two birds were filmed in Port Merrick, while scenes with one bird were filmed at the Shores of Gold. The Port Merrick scenes contained no dialogue. I thought these scenes must contain a clue on how to make sense of the words in the scenes with one owl.

Scenes with two parrots (above) took place at Port Merrick, and scenes with one parrot (below) took place at the Shores of Gold. In the background, you can see that the image in the window changes. Also, wanted posters of various Gold Hoarders appear in the Shores of Gold picture.

There are three things that change between the pictures: the scene in the window, the amount and kinds of fruit on the table, and the wanted posters that appear on the back wall and bookshelf. 

Incidentally, the third wanted poster depicts an unknown Gold Hoarder. Some classmates over at Ancient Isles University found the rogue in this character concept art (he is third from left in both pictures). Could this be the mysterious H himself?!?

During the Shores of Gold scenes, the parrot visits the window and the wanted posters. I found particularly interesting. At the window, it repeats the word "DIET," and at the wanted posters it says the word "MISFITS."

I wondered if "misfits" might be a clue that we needed to find words that don't fit into the Sea of Thieves... and there were a few of them, such as TURKEY, GOAT, FROST, and ROBOT. But I didn't have any luck.

While I slept, some members of the community discovered the answer: goat-turkey-lives. From what I gather, they were lucky! I think that is incredible!

But surely there was a hint that we missed? I still wonder if I was on the right track with MISFITS and DIET being important. After all, GOAT and TURKEY are MISFITS in that they do not belong to pirate's DIET on the Sea of Thieves!

3. That Cuneiform Class Came in Handy!

I studied Hittite in my university days. For the final test, the professor brought in a big slab of clay. He cut it into tablets and gave each of us a stylus. We wrote our answers in cuneiform on the tablets. It was an unforgettable class, but I never thought it would come in handy... Until this morning I woke up to this:

While I slept, the community made tremendous progress, and I woke up on Sunday morning to this page full of chicken scratches!

At the goat-turkey-lives location, picaroons found a clue which led to this mysterious note, all chicken scratches! I was so excited, because I immediately recognized the text: it resembled cuneiform! I called home, and my father (also a picaroon interested in this mystery) dusted off my old Hittite textbooks and sent me photos of the cuneiform tables.

They did not match. I guess that shouldn't be surprising, since cuneiform was not invented by the Hittites, but was used in many different countries. Some used the characters phonetically, while others used them as ideograms. The Hittites used them as both. 

If you look closely at the chicken scratches above, most of the text is lighter colored. Clearly, this was something we should be able to figure out so that we could read the darker text at the bottom (the final solution to the puzzle, perhaps!?). 

Someone in the community figured out that the text has the same number of words as "We Shall Sail Together," the Sea of Thieves theme song!

I don't know how someone thought to try matching those lyrics with chicken scratches, but BRAVO!

Understanding that cuneiform is not an alphabet, but that each letter represents phonetic sounds (or sometimes ideograms), you can easily solve this puzzle. Give it a whirl before you read my answer below! It was a fun puzzle. 🙂

Here is my solution... It could benefit from a few more phonetic symbols for the similar sounds. (For example ð and θ for the two TH letters, etc.), but it works!

This solution led us to this picture from an Xbox Wire article about the mystery. Hidden in this picture was a tiny X. Super sleuths found that the name of the color used to draw the X was 2FACED.

Do you see our little green parrot friend in the crow's nest? Actually, the community was aware of this picture very early on while working on "A Feathered Fortune"... If only we had investigated it a little more thoroughly, perhaps we could have skipped many steps! But what fun would that be, right? 

Well, that wraps up Mystery 2. What? The Voyage? Like last week, I am not going to say anything about the voyage except that I LOVED IT and that the in-game voyages in this mystery are SO MUCH FUN that I cannot encourage you enough to go check it out for yourself. Even if you are not interested in the difficult online portion of the mystery, you should definitely check out the in-game quests from Larinna. You won't regret it.

Enjoy! You can thank me later! 😁

Jimi with the Argent Silver Key! Only one more key to go!