Little Birds Solution
The puzzle consists of multiple parts:
- Overhearing conversations to complete missions
- Recognizing NATO in those conversations
- Using NATO as a key to the cipher text of the guards
- Using that text to find a secret room
Overhearing Conversations to Solve Missions
- Succeed and fail as a team
- You can solve by yourself if you can (but with a team is easier)
- You fail if you anyone on your team gets too close or if no one on your team hears one of the lines
- You succeed if any combination of people on your team listens to every line in one loop of the conversation without getting caught.
- All conversations must have a checkmark before they move on. It's part of the puzzle.
At puzzle start you see two missions:
- Find your way to the security room (LOCKED)
- Gather information from the casino employees (UNLOCKED) You MUST complete (get a green checkmark) on gathering information before you move forward to finding the room. As you start exploring the casino, you start seeing conversations. When you hear a conversation for the first time, it's added to your mission log. (Example above was the Ruby/Scarlett conversation). To get a checkmark for an eavesdropping, you must listen to EVERY line of a conversation in one cycle without getting caught. The NPCs loop and have a conversation during that loop. If your team listens to every line of the conversation in a loop without triggering the "too close" conversation, you get a checkmark (and a result transcript link, which we'll talk about later). States a mission can be in:
- Empty white circle: Not started. This happens for conversations that haven't started yet or are on the first line and you haven't heard it yet.
- Yellow partial check: In progress of a successful run. You haven't made a mistake yet!
- Red exclamation point: You have made a mistake and failed this loop. This will reset to Not Started state when the loop is back at the beginning.
HOW THEY CAN FAIL:
- If you miss a line. You (individual) don't have to hear every line, but SOMEONE on your team must hear every line. So if no one on your team heard one of the lines, then you fail that loop.
- If you get in an NPC's line of sight. If ANYONE on your team walks into the line of site of an NPC while solving, the mission fails for that loop. The line of sight is displayed as yellow tiles which turn red if you step on them.
There are 7 conversations to overhear (6 colors and 1 guard). ALL must have a green checkmark before the next portion of the puzzle is solvable. Once you get those green checkmarked, the second mission unlocks to find the secret room. Even if you find the secret room early, NOTHING will happen unless they have them all complete.
NATO in Conversations
Once you have started hearing (and completing) conversations, you will get a transcript for every conversation. It's a small purple button that when clicked, links out to a PDF.
Here is an example:
On these transcriptions you get exactly what was said in the eavesdropping plus some blank lines with numbers.
In the transcripts you can see nato alphabet, and you'll notice that there is the same number of nato letters as there are blanks. In this example, you would see KILO, WHISKEY, UNIFORM. So the blanks would be 1=K, 2=W, 3=U.
It's worth noting as well that every conversation also represents a color, which you can determine from their names or their outfits. That will be helpful later.
| Conversation | Image (text bubbles are old) | Transcript Link | NATO | Color |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ruby and Scarlett |  | Transcript | India=1 Hotel=2 November=3 | Red |
| Ginger and Rusty |  | Transcript | Sierra = 1 | Purple (Violet) |
Note:
The art in the final casino is a bit different from the art above. Here is an example below. It doesn't change the puzzle though, they just look a bit different.
Decipher Guard Text
Also in the Casino there is a set of guards that you can overhear, but if you see their text it is Ciphered for security purposes. Their completed transcript:
Their conversation in the casino looks like this (different letters now but same vibe). Their conversation isn't unlocked until you have eavesdropped on every other conversation.
Their text is a vigenere cipher where the key is the same length or greater of the phrase. It's actually a more specific vigenere cipher called a Vernam cipher / One Time Pad, but it works the same way.
In the transcript you'll see we point that out and give them a bunch more blanks but this time they are different colors:
This is the hint that you take the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd nato letter from the conversation that represents that color. When you do that, you get USE THIS STRING AS YOUR KEY.
If you use USETHISSTRINGASYOURKEY as the key of a vigenere/vernam cipher with each individual line, your decoded phrase becomes:
Guard 1: Well I'm off for the night.
Guard 2: You gonna wait for me?
Guard 1: Duh.
Guard 2: Cool. Behind the red ferns?
Guard 1: Yeah go there.
Guard 2: Cool.
Guard 1: Cool.
Find the secret room
With the decoded guard conversation and the final mission (find the secret room) unlocked, you should find the place in the casino that has two red ferns. It looks like this:
If you continue walking…and walking…and walking past the red plants and through the wall, a mysterious room appears!
If you walk up, the little guard out front starts talking and as soon as you complete listening to him you get your final transcript, your missions complete, and the correct answer is submitted to spiderdog.
Solution
DO NOT ENTER: Correct! You managed to find the secret entry AND who might be able to let us in. Nice.