The Ninja Master Puzzle

The puzzle booklet presents hunters with the following:

The Ninja Master looked sternly into his pupil's pupils. "What is your quandary, my son?"

"Sir, I do not know where to go. Can you help me in my quest?"

"When you answer these four questions, you will know where to go. Seek the Princess when you arrive.

1. What does the man do who fails to lose?

2. What do they call the man who is stupid?

3. When cosmological tranquility is broken, and peace no longer exists, what kind of state are we in?

4. What's the name of that, you know, that white stringy thing on the top of a candle that you light with a match or lighter?"

"Thank you, master, for your wisdom. I know now what I must do."

When strung together, the answers to the riddles tell our hero where to go: WIN + DUMB + WAR + WICK = Wyndham Warwick. Proceeding to the Wyndham Warwick Hotel just down the street from Rice, our hero "seeks the Princess," or in other words, goes to the Princess Room, one of the Wyndham Warwick's conference rooms.

In the Princess Room, the Hunt's acting troupe, The Hunt Players, were putting on a carnival with an assortment of games to be played.

Teams could buy popcorn with one of the coupons printed in the back of the puzzle booklet; in the bottom of the popcorn tub was a house-shaped cookie cutter.

Tossing rings onto alphabetically arranged bottles, players could win a special coin by spelling "C-O-I-N" with moderately accurate throws.

The coin allowed players to acquire a 16-piece puzzle which, when assembled, showed a hand flipping a pancake in a frying pan, with grease spattering from the pan in a seemingly random pattern. Assembling the puzzle was pretty easy, but players had to realize that the pancake being flipped implied that they should then flip the puzzle over. If the players did this, the puzzle pieces would now be arranged in four rows of four letters each: LPFI, CAHE, KCBA, and VREO. Unscrambling each row of letters into words yielded FLIP EACH BACK OVER. If each puzzle piece was flipped back over in its new position, the grease spatters now formed an easily recognizable digit "4."

Armed with the cookie cutter and the solution to the flipping puzzle, teams were allowed into an adjacent room, which had a rotating mirror mounted on a table in the center of the room, and mirrors and bottles of various Findivver elements scattered around the perimeter of the room. Also mounted on the wall of the room was a picture of a house, which happened to be exactly the shape of the cookie cutter (key) players received in the popcorn.

If players inserted their cookie-cutter-key into the house picture, a circuit was completed that turned on a laser from behind a screen in the corner of the room. The laser was aimed to strike the rotating mirror in the center of the room. A smoke machine in the room (mostly for effect) obscured the whole layout somewhat, but also served to make the laser look neat once it was turned on.

Players could set the position of the rotating mirror to different numbered settings, which would cause the laser to reflect off a different set of mirrors, and eventually into one of the bottles of Findivver elements. Rotating the mirror to the "4" setting directed the beam toward the bottle of Cachezak, the correct solution to the puzzle.

Bonus Clues

Butterfly

In the Carnival Room, players were told by the Fortune Teller that they were "under the sign of the Butterfly."

Flamingo

In the Laser Room, there was another setting labeled "bonus" which aimed the laser at a plastic pink flamingo concealed in the corner of the room.