The puzzle starts with a visit to HQ, where we are given eight unlabeled drinks, in two 2x2 takeaway containers. A tasting* reveals the following identities:
Crush | Sprite | Some seltzer | Ginger ale | |
Coca Cola | Ice tea | Root beer | Dr. Pepper |
*In the virtual version, a teammate generously provided some tasting notes.
The drink brands are subanagrams of the list of clues at the beginning of the puzzle. This also helps us pin down some of the last few drinks, such as La Croix, Brisk and Canada Dry. The leftover letters usually anagram into words. These words and, in one case, acronym, are all fandom names for different K-pop groups.
Clue | Drink | Remainder | K-pop group |
---|---|---|---|
A BRICK STAR | Brisk | CARAT | SEVENTEEN |
CAN CONCOCT ZEAL | Coca Cola | NCTZEN | NCT U |
CHARLES SYRUP | Crush | PLAYERS | Superkind |
MAST GUY | MUG | Stay | Stray Kids |
MICROXYLA | La Croix | MY | Aespa |
NOT BRADYCARDIA | Canada Dry | Orbit | LOONA |
PRIMARY SET | Sprite | Army | BTS |
RED COPPER PEN | Dr. Pepper | Once | TWICE |
The next step is to use the videos of the soda cans moving around. Each video represents a dance by one of the groups, tracking only the formation changes.
Typically, the number of members can help us match videos to groups, to reduce the search space. Most notably, Superkind has a virtual member that helpfully disappears and reappears during some of the video. Aespa has four members. Since there are no videos with only four soda cans, there must be back-up dancers in the video.
Fan-created dance formation videos and dance practice videos are usually the best way to find matching dances.
# | Song | Group | Highlighted time |
---|---|---|---|
1 | PTT | LOONA | 0:00 |
2 | Black Mamba | Aespa | 0:05 |
3 | Dance The Night Away | TWICE | 0:34 |
4 | Permission to Dance | BTS | 0:57 |
5 | Watch Out | Superkind | 1:25 |
6 | 24H | SEVENTEEN | 1:37 |
7 | Hellevator | Stray Kids | 1:49 |
8 | Make A Wish | NCT U | 2:21 |
Once all the dances are matched, we extract by taking the arm positions of the dancers highlighted in green on certain beats, and arranging them into the original 2x2 squares provided with the drinks.
The arm positions spell out 2 Korean characters, as clued by the 2x2 grid and the K-pop theme, to get 뇌우.