As the Dial Turns...

The rest of the jar lids (10 of them) plus a long bolt and a nut were found...mostly in and around the apartment, but with the occasional oddball location -- viz., a pigeon hole on the Via Mezzomuro.

When put together, they form a dial-like cylinder (Michael had drilled a hole through the center of each one) with a pile of letters on the rims and on the center. The lids were assembled so the central letters spelled out, "xmaspuzlid" (sound familiar?). The individual lids could be turned to decode the infamous ZIQ! cipher that we'd been avoiding like the plague.

Decoded, the ZIQ! cipher reads, "Hah! I bet you didn't get far when you fed this through your online puzzle solver! Do you have any idea how hard it is to cut a circle into twenty-six equal pieces by hand? It is worth it, though, because this type of cipher is unbreakable as long as you don't encode more than ten characters on it or let any of the pieces fall into the hands of the enemy or give it to your kids as a Christmas present. Speaking of presents, if you want your real one, then give the owl the password "squiggle"."

"Squiggle" brings up a game commonly called "worm", where there is a graphic rectangle that grows in length while proceeding inside a rectangle. The goal is to eat white balls without running into the walls or yourself...106 of them! The little orange balls that come up occasionally make you shrink. It turns out that James, by virtue of much illicit nocturnal practice on his cell phone, is an expert at this game. Within a short time, he had won the game...and was told to look in the "bin in the hall." Excellent! A wrapped gift hidden in the laundry bin (Michael had rightly assumed that no one would be diving into the hand-washing "bin of shame" anytime in the near future) turned out to be...a bag of pingpong balls!

Said pingpong balls each came decorated with a number and a letter. The letters, when put in numerical order, spell out tsesafaatrotrarplseetchtpilendheorynstbgenwirgwhaenttaapial eianmottl amlginhhs relcdgaap etilobbse,  where the bold letters are the ones on the yellow balls. Michael had mercy and told us "the quantity of balls is significant": aha! 100 balls = 10 squared! Quickly putting the letters into a 10 by 10 square, we get (reading in columns) "To the nearest centimeter, how tall is a triangular pyramid of pingpong balls with a base that has ten balls per edge?"

When fed "33", the owl said, "That's the answer, it's true...not that it matters...'cause there's yet one more clue under the platters." Tearing apart cabinets under the platter storage cabinet led us to find an envelope. CARDS! Two decks...red and blue!

Hmmm....that sounds familiar. Time to go back to the card puzzle.

When laid out, it reads, "Sometimes a puzzle is more than it seems; in my schemes, Florence beams and then screams, 'This one's themes are in the extremes!'" If you look closely at the cards, you notice little black markings on each of the edges; these are NOT Vegas-acceptable cards. But how to order? Our first attempt -- dividing into deck colors and then into suits -- doesn't pan out. Back to the drawing board, and Florence rearranges the deck such that the letters around the sides spell, "Speaking of on edge, there's a key on the ledge of the second bedroom wall."

We're stymied, because Michael confessed that he's still working on this piece. So we are taking a break -- to go to the Live Nativity!

Love,

Alexandra