Prout's Hunt Puzzle Hunt [back to main page]

Meta (Answer)

By this stage, you’ll have obtained the following 10 puzzle answers:

AUSTIN POWERS
BUCKET ALGORITHM
COMMUNICATED
COTTAGE INDUSTRY
DIEGO LUNA
EXHAUSTION
FLIPMODE SQUAD
GUITAR HERO
RAINFOREST CRUNCH
VECTOR QUANTITY

The 10 answers each have all 5 vowels (and sometimes Y… treat these as consonants). If you ignore the consonants, you can arrange the 5-vowel strings into the 5x5 grid provided to make a Latin square: i.e., each vowel appears once in every row or column. This arrangement ignores the consonants that appear between vowels; the consonants that appear on the “outsides” of the words (like the FL and the D in FLIPMODE SQUAD) have room to project beyond the central square. Determining the only possible placement of all the words, you’ll get the following:

        DCVG
      *-----*
     R|AIOEU|NCH
     B|UEAOI|THM
    FL|IOEUA|D
     C|OUIAE|D
      |EAUIO|N
      *-----*
       R ST
       S TY
         R
         Y

Taking the letters that appear in squares 1 to 13 in order produces the string MCDNLDSDRVTHR. Naturally, the message is missing its vowels. You must insert them to produce the final answer to the hunt: MCDONALD'S DRIVE THRU!

Congratulations!