Solution: The Artifact

Answer: ALIEN COLD WAR

Written by Anderson Wang

CAST IRON DON JUAN FILM NOIR KOOL AID LIQUOR REVOLVER SWIMMING THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE TONGUE UNEXPECTED VIRUS WIENER

This metapuzzle is about languages.

First, the answers can be put in the blanks in the shell, to yield clues whose answers fit in the provided blanks.

Within each set of blanks, the numbers range from 1 to n for some n, so we can take those letters in order from 1 to n to get words that all happen to be numbers in different languages (some transliterated into English):

Note that a couple words have multiple language possibilities, like Afrikaans for Dutch, but in each case there is one language that has by far the most speakers and is the most “well-known”, and this will also be disambiguated in the final step.

The final step is to realize that each of the puzzle answers clues a two word phrase where the first word is the name of the corresponding language (this probably jumps out the most with FILM NOIR and Maltese). Indexing the number into the second word of the phrase gives the answer ALIEN COLD WAR.

Author’s Notes

The “process used to produce liquor” clue could potentially be FERMENTATION, though it’s a little weaker because fermentation produces alcohol in general while distillation is fairly specific to liquor. In any case, both answers result in the same word, AON. Also in testsolving, some people originally put down "Irish cream" instead of "Irish whiskey", but we kept it in because Irish cream is more of a liqueur, as opposed to Irish whiskey which is definitely liquor. Apologies if any of you were tripped up by this (in retrospect, we probably should have swapped it out with something completely unambiguous).

The very first iteration of the intro meta was proposed as a concept that would support a xenolinguistics theme, but not use the alien language that we would design for the main round metas. It stemmed from an offhand remark wondering whether British WWI general John French, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and French novelist Anatole France had ever met. That spun into a meta draft that involved translating puzzle answers into languages clued by people they were associated with, for example CORPS EXPEDITIONNAIRE BRITANNIQUE ("wait wtf," said the testsolving group, "why was John French in charge of that?!"), LINDA OG VALENTIN (the Danish title of Valérian and Laureline, whose recent film adaptation starred Dane DeHaan), or COMPUTER MOUSE (co-invented by Bill English). This ended up highly constrained, and many of the connections were awkward, so it ended up getting dropped (though Roy Lichtenstein ended up unrelatedly showing up in a different puzzle...).

A few people spun off working on an idea inspired by the testsolve, using English words that could also be words in other languages (like PAIN for FRENCH BREAD, or GRIPE for SPANISH FLU). We also generally liked the idea of phrases where one word is the name of a language. However, many of our translation-based ideas didn't work out because there's almost never an unambiguous translation for any given word, and in the end Anderson designed this shell by sticking to numbers to ensure more or less unique translations, which eventually became the meta we agreed to use for the intro round. Completely coincidentally, we ended up having another puzzle in this round (Courage and Purity) about words that were both English and Indonesian, so one could say the previous idea still lived on somewhat.