Enigmarch 2025, Day 29: COMPASS

[tahnan]

god I am so close

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Think of a Compass

The compass happens to be the symbol of the travelers, a kind of fraternal society at Otherworld. Every year, eleven of them come to the village of World's Edge, where a number already live. (We go through a lot of compass-shaped temporary tattoos.) Anyway, in their honor, here's a chance to think like a traveler.

• Think of a bird, eight letters long. If you add a letter you get a word meaning "unexpected"; if instead you remove a letter, you get a word that might describe someone reacting to something unexpected. What is the bird?
• Think of a colonial-era American author, enumeration (4 7). Add a space to his first name and you could read the resulting three words a spider might use to explain that he's not from Boston. (Look, they can't all be gems.) Who is the author?
• Think of a compass with eight points. Number them clockwise from the top, and then use the numbers as indexes. What is the word?
• Think of a movie of the last twenty years that was nominated for Best Picture (and won three other Oscars), eight letters long. If you remove the first letter and add a space, you get two words for two different body parts. What is the movie?
• Think of a number, spelled out. Remove two palindromic sequences from the start and you'll be left with a letter. What number is it?
• Think of a piece of jewelry, enumeration (4 7). The first word can be anagrammed to make something that might be an annoyance, and the second can be anagrammed to make a word meaning "more annoyed". What is the jewelry?
• Think of a piece of sporting equipment, enumeration (4 5). Move the space to get two sequences of letters. If you swap the first and last letters of the first sequence, you get a word naming some magical items; the second sequence is the second word in the name of a village you might find those items. What is the sporting equipment?
• Think of a region that many people call home, enumeration (4 4). Ignoring the space, remove a word meaning "region"; you'll be left with a word meaning "home". What is the region?
• Think of a word meaning "component". Remove every component that's a vowel, and add new vowels in every other position to get a new word meaning "remove". What is the original word?

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Comments

[lorelei]

Oh man, those clues were hard. I liked the extraction, though.