The Hunt: Stage 3 - Recap 33

The Hunt continued with Stage 3 and even more riddles. The first riddle led the Hunters to a landmark ferris wheel: the London Eye. Hunters had to climb up the side of the London Eye to reach a car with a key and piece of paper inside. Madame Florence was deemed best at analyzing the piece of paper, but on the adventurer’s way back, Grux hijacked the train they were taking: the Hogsworth Express. Once saving the train and finally making it to Madam Florence, there was no clear understanding of the situation at hand. Rani Lightwood was turned to, who gave a box discovered in Shakti’s old secret office. The box held the next riddle.

The riddle led to the Bhardwaj Estate. Once inside, there were a collection of paintings Hunters could jump into and secrets to discover that led to clues about the answer to the required “gateway question”. Once answering the question, the gateway opened up. This gateway led to more rooms inside of the estate with a safe in the center room. With the safe unlocked, clues for the next gateway were given to then continue on. The last room hosted memory veils and a crystal ball and led to the success of this section of the Hunt.

Another safe was later found within Vertick Alley. Everyone involved was clueless about how to open the safe, and Madam Florence was turned to once again. She directed the Hunters to a new individual, Kumi Suzuki. Kumi directed the individuals to each faction base. Each base held an enchantment on the area created by none other than Grux. This enchantment had to be broken by answering questions about one faction before moving on to the next faction. A five-digit code was discovered after the enchantments were broken and used for the original safe found.

The next riddle led to Riddleyard, and to a certain person… myself! I gave each and every Hunter an instruction booklet to hunt out the various faction leaders and individuals in command of the factions. Each leader gave their own riddle to be solved so an item of importance could then be found. These items correspond to a coded message revealing it to say “Order the view of the outside world.”

One last riddle in this grand adventure—one last location. This riddle led to Stonehenge, which also led to a list of extremely confusing magical runes that would be hidden beyond multiple extremely specific measures to protect themselves. The runes led to a very specific location, close to the native Runespoor population of England. There, Grux’s hideout was discovered! The first door of the hideout remained locked until a member of each faction was present. Grux intercepted the Hunters and broke a bridge over the chasm, creating an obstacle for them to reach Grux. The Hunters had to carefully parkour across the chasm. Across the chasm led to more locked doors. The first door required one thousand gears that came from defeating Grux’s clockwork minions and a key that came from the other side of the room to open. The second door was locked by a passcode that had to be discovered in other parts of the world to open. The discovery of this specific code came by helping Kyla Leveski in the Revenant gauntlet. The next code for the next locked door then came from leaving classes at Hogsworth before returning to the outside world of the school.

At this point, all of the doors had been unlocked. Grux was once again confronted, but this time greeted by Joel Crestello under the Imperium curse. The Hunters had to fight this version of Joel in a heated battle to break him free from the spell. Afterward, Joel explained the current situation, thus ending the adventure known as the Hunt!