The Artisan

Solution: ORBITING

Obviously, the first step here is to complete the Paint-by-Numbers puzzles. The first one doesn’t look too helpful at first glance. However, the second one, which consists of twenty-four arrows pointing in various directions, looks more promising.

To get the answer, solvers had to visualize the first PBN as a giant sliding-tile puzzle, with each tile consisting of a 5x5 square. (As a hint to this, the first letters of the repeated line spell out “SAM LOYD,” inventor of this kind of puzzle.) After discarding the all-black lower-right hand square and sliding the tiles in the directions indicated by the arrows, solvers got this image.

Regular GL’ers will recognize this as the title of ORBITING, who is therefore the answer.

Author’s Notes:

This was the third puzzle to be designed; I constructed and test-solved the entire thing during two-hour road trip to Orlando. All in all, I’d say this one is the most innovative of my puzzles, and several of the Hunters agreed with me.

After Solving The Artisan:

“Orbiting?”
BWOMP!
“Yes?”
“Hey, you’re back! Great!”
“Yeah, and apparently I’m a Mage! w00t!”
“Whoa! How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“You just said ‘woot’ out loud with zeros for O’s!”
“Really? Wow. I have GOT to cut back on my Internet time.”

Thanks to Duphrates for providing the images for this puzzle.

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