Hull Breach

In this metapuzzle, each answer from the round is associated with a number. Indexing into each answer in the order given yields the answer TINKER.

This seems to be a dead end, though, since when we submit TINKER, Matt and Emma aren’t able to fix the hull breach and the timeline resets. That was way too simple. There must be another way to solve this puzzle…

In another timeline, Matt and Emma encounter a colorful deck of cards that doesn’t seem relevant to any of the other puzzles. Each card has a suit and rank, as well as another number in the center.

Looking closer at our feeder answers, we can associate each of them with a suit. Using the meta’s given numbers as card numbers, we can get a new number for each meta answer from the deck, then use that as an index to extract a new answer:

Submitting the answer SUIT UP leads the twins to don spacesuits and unlocks the spacewalk round.

As Matt and Emma try to fix the hull breach from the outside, they wonder whether these suits were the only answer to this problem, and whether there could have been a more arcane solution.

As it turns out, this metapuzzle has a third answer. Instead of using classical French suits, we can instead consider minor arcana tarot suits. These have a canonical correspondence to classical suits, which is further reinforced by the background art on the deck of cards:

• Hearts = Cups
• Diamonds = Pentacles
• Clubs = Wands
• Spades = Swords

This time, we associate each feeder with a minor arcana suit to get a different set of suits. With those, we can use the same given ranks and extract the same way:

Submitting the answer TAR OUT branches the timeline, as Matt and Emma come up with another solution to fix the hull breach. And with that, we’re done!

Authors' Notes