A geocacher who loved setting puzzle caches (Irate A. Pukejaws) got a bit fed up with the persistent racing to be FTF on his puzzle caches. So he set a private geocache for 4 geocaching buddies ("the Gang of Four") who liked to solve his puzzles and who often competed to be FTF. These cachers were called Alboy, Brambler, Garyhoney and Nanny Ogg. However, this puzzle also involved a rather shy 5th cacher whom we shall refer to simply as X. X did not know who the other 4 geocachers were; in turn they did not know the identity of X.
Irate constructed the puzzle so that they could solve it only by working collectively, thus ensuring that they would all share the FTF. First Irate gave the Gang of Four the coordinates of a large secluded yew tree. High up within its knotted and ancient branches he had chained an advent calendar. This advent calendar had the usual 24 sequentially-numbered doors but was also connected to a miniature keyboard. The 5 cachers were all aware that door 24 concealed critical information. They were also told that door 24 was protected with a password that they could work out only by working cooperatively. To prevent any attempt by X to meet the other 4, Irate did not give X the yew tree's coordinates. Instead he gave X a device to operate the advent calendar remotely from his home.
Each of the doors 1-23 could be opened by one of the geocachers, using their own private password that Irate had given them. Irate did not care that the Gang of Four were bound to email their passwords around to each other. They could not complete the puzzle because they did not know who cacher X was. Moreover, Irate's advent calendar was programmed so that each door could be opened only after midday on the appropriate day. The individual password given to each of the 5 cachers was derived from a cache set by one of the others in the group. Four of the passwords were: spaghetti, maiden, bound and worship. The way in which the passwords were constructed was not revealed to the 5 cachers. Cacher X received his/her password (worship) and did not deduce the basis for the password construction. Of course, the Gang of Four did email their passwords amongst themselves and this allowed them to infer the basis on which the passwords had been chosen. However, Irate had anticipated that they would do this and made the link between X and the password a little more opaque. The Gang of Four easily worked out which password was the odd one out; it had been given to Garyhoney. Now the gang of Four are not dolts, but try as they might they were unable to work out what information the password told them. They still had no idea who cacher X was.
Irate told them all that the cache box was hidden at N 51 A.B W 000 C.D Furthermore, he told them that the values of B and D would be revealed when they opened door 24. Irate told each of the cachers the days when they needed to open a door. The sequence was actually constructed by Irate so that Brambler opened door 1 on the 1st of December, another cacher opened door 2 on the 2nd, Alboy opened door 3 on the 3rd, and a fourth cacher opened door 4 on the 4th. Each of these 4 cachers was then scheduled to open doors according to their particular "cycle". Two cachers were on a +4 cycle, which meant that if they opened a door on the Nth of December they next opened a door on the (N+4)th of December. Nanny Ogg was on a +5 cycle, and another cacher was on a +3 cycle. If the cycles meant that two cachers would have been scheduled to open the door on the same day, then Irate's sequence gave precedence to the cacher who opened their first door earlier in the month. The 5th cacher opened only those doors not opened by the other 4. The 5th cacher opened 5 doors out of the first 23.
When a door was opened it remained open and displayed an icon corresponding to the cacher who had opened the door in the sequence given above. The icons depicted: a 35 mm film can (Nanny Ogg's icon), a GPS receiver, a travel bug (not Alboy's icon), a compass (not Brambler's icon), and a geocoin. The geocacher whose icon was a compass was given the password "bound".
To work out A, Irate told them all to look for the door which showed the 4th occurrence of the GPS receiver icon (in the sequence of doors 1-23). A is equal to the number (ie date) of that door. To work out C, Irate told them to look for the doors which showed the 2nd and 3rd occurrences of the geocoin icon (in the sequence of doors 1-23). C is equal to the sum of the numbers of those two doors. When door 23 was open it revealed a travel bug icon, along with the instructions for opening door 24.
On the morning of the 24th Irate finally gave X the coords of the yew tree and instructed all the cachers to convene there at midday, bringing their geocaching.com cacher id numbers with them. Door 23 explained that the password to door 24 was based on a number, equal to the sum of all their cacher ids.
I am not going to tell you the password given to Garyhoney, but I'll give you some clues. It's a real word which can be denoted by "qrst" , where (based on doors 1-23): q is the difference in the door numbers between the door revealing the third geocoin (in the sequence) and the door revealing the first travel bug; r is the number of the door opened the day before the third door opened by Garyhoney; s is the number of the door which revealed the 1st travel bug (in the sequence) plus the number of the door which revealed the 2nd gps icon in the sequence. To obtain the password, the numbers (q to s) above should be converted to letters using the usual alphabetic code (1=A; 2=B; 3=C etc), and you'll have to guess the letter corresponding to t.
Can you work out who cacher X is? The Gang of Four failed to do this, so it's obviously not straightforward, although I haven't played any tricks on you. When you know who X is you can work out the password required to open door 24 and so find this cache.
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