Day 9: Finfolk

The Solution

The "finfolk" of this puzzle and the fishman in the illustration could refer to any number of fantastical piscine humanoids, but the phrase "deference & devotion" clues D&D and indicates that these are Kuo-Toa. The "Sea Mother," the Kuo-Toa goddess of D&D lore, is named Blibdoolpoolp.

  1. The string you should begin with is the name of our divine Sea Mother, worthy of all deference & devotion. BLIBDOOLPOOLP
  2. Extract the penultimate letter from the string and insert it into your secret bladder. BLIBDOOLPOOP (Bladder contains L)
  3. For each pair of consecutive amphibious letters in the string, delete the second one. BLIBOOLPOOP
  4. Extract the penultimate letter from the string and insert it into your secret bladder. BLIBOOLPOP (Bladder contains L, O)
  5. Identify the leftmost terrestrial letter in the string. Delete all other instances of that letter from the string. BLIBOOPOP
  6. Identify the leftmost amphibious letter in the string, which we will call "glaaul" (B), and the rightmost amphibious letter in the string, which we will call "mleemenedh" (P) .Identify the first terrestrial letter that comes after mleemenedh in the alphabet; we will call this letter (T) "vuuhlgaam." Replace each instance of glaaul in the string with vuuhlgaam. TLITOOPOP
  7. Identify the first aquatic letter that comes after mleemenedh in the alphabet; we will call this letter (S) "gah-uogu." Replace the first instance of mleemenedh in the string with gah-uogu. TLITOOSOP
  8. Identify the last amphibious letter that comes before gah-uogu in the alphabet; we will call this letter (R) "bauloolgaaaaa." Replace the second letter in the string with bauloolgaaaaa. TRITOOSOP
  9. Replace any letter in the string that has no nature with the third letter in "vuuhlgaam." TRUTOOSOP
  10. Remove something from your secret bladder. (O) Chop off the top half and discard it. Append the bottom half (U) to the end of the string. TRUTOOSOPU
  11. Replace each double-letter pair in the string with a single E. TRUTESOPU
  12. Transpose each amphibious letter in the string with the letter directly to its right. TURTESOUP
  13. Remove something from your secret bladder (L) and insert it between the fourth and fifth characters of the string. TURTLESOUP
  14. Insert a space in the obvious place. The answer is TURTLE SOUP, unless I screwed up somewhere.

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