We’re presented with a graphic of performers with some colorful masks all piled up, and cryptic-sounding sentences that don’t read quite smoothly. We can attempt to read these as crossword clues, but we won’t get very far in their current state. Since the words in the clues are ordered by length (helpfully hinted at with the monospaced font), we know we need to re-sort somehow. The flavortext tells us they “need some assistance with balancing,” and if we look closely at the second line “We can help these people stack them all up!” we get the proper ordering of re-sorting lengths in a pyramid-like order (e.g. 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2).

As a helpful guide to sorting (since there are some ambiguities), we can often look at words that go together, like “armed forces“, “secret faction“, or “silly string“. Helpfully, the punctuation remains attached to the end of the same words.

The “peaks” of each clue can be either the longest or shortest word, so if we apply that transformation to all our clues, we can start solving them as cryptics:

Horizontal

Vertical

With pyramids in mind, we might notice that the clue enumerations follow a similar format. We might also notice that the longest word, CONTESTATION, has the same length as the number of heads in the bottom row of the graphic. Using the heads as a guide, we can build a pyramid with our horizontal and vertical answers. Once built, we extract the spaces marked by masked performers, and sort by ROYGBIV according to mask colors (or the number of feathers on the mask, provided for colorblind accessibility). Doing so, we get the cluephrase CENTERS.

This clues us to take another look at our re-sorted clues, and pluck out the central word.

• DISPUTE WITHIN PARTY FROM CON: TAKE SIDES BEFORE OUTPOST
• VERY SWEET SERIES CLOSING EXOTIC CHINA RACE
• KIN WITH WHALE QUOTES “WATCH THIS, PIG!”
• INNER WEST END HELD NURSE
• DISGUISED TRAVELER MISSING POUNDS GIVEN BISHOP CREATES BACKBONE COMPONENT
• ODDLY, AUNTIE FORMING CUCKOO GROUP
• DEFEATS SENTENCE ENDINGS?
• FRONTING DEFENSE OFFERS BODY’S RANDOM: AFRICAN CURRENCY
• TIN-LESS SILLY STRING MAKES DIRT BIT
• LIBIDO STATE BORN OUT OF SEX NEED: KINKY HENTAI
• SHYSTER EYEING CIVIL TORT HEADS SECRET FACTION
• PITHILY WORDED CHANT FROM SHORT CHURCH SERVICE
• ARMED FORCES’ LEADERS IDENTIFY BLINDED MOSCOW RULER

Taking these words, and applying the same transformation that we did to the clues results in: IDENTIFY CLOSING STRING GIVEN FROM END OF CON TORT BODY’S QUOTES FORMING SENTENCE.

The “contort body’s quotes” might sound familiar, as they’re the other set of cryptics found in the puzzle, Contortionist’s Act, indicating that these two are entangled. If we take the last word of each block quote in that puzzle, and do another pyramid sort, we get one last cryptic:

Take the first letter, or “head,” of LOUSE, and insert it into another word for “rotund,” or FAT. This gives us a four-letter word, and our final answer, FLAT.

Author's Notes

This puzzle, along with Contortionist’s Act, was the proof-of-concept for our entanglement hunt mechanic that we tested at our potluck event—and we definitely caught our teammates off-guard! It was fun to watch everyone mull both of these puzzles over, and the response when it finally clicked that they were experiencing the hunt mechanic for themselves really solidified the idea that we could build a hunt around this.

PS: We’re sorry to any teams that got accidentally tricked into thinking the masked figures were paired with Quick Response, as this was completely unintentional! (Both puzzles were developed completely independently.)

PPS: We’re not sorry for the hentai clue.