Howdy everyone! First thing's first, we have a winner to announce from the metapuzzle "Final Destination"...congrats to lily for getting picked out of all the correct answers! She will get to pick out a seed entry/clue in an upcoming puzzle (and mwahahaha I get to outsource some of my work!). I'll put the solution below today's puzzle so those who still want to solve can do so unspoiled.
Today's puzzle - I have really liked putting 9/10 length seed entries offset in the middle toward a corner, and building around that (instead of a more...traditional? standard? start with a corner triple stack of 9s/10s). Think it's something that Brooke Husic did in a collab of ours a couple years back, but I can't actually find which one. Anyways, it's a nice way to both start with a medium-length seed, and still satisfy my OMG SPRINT TO THE MIDDLE OF THE GRID sense while I'm gridding.
Meta answers below.....
... keep going ...
... bikes rule cars drool ...
Okay, we'll go step-by-step with a little pause in between in case someone wants just a hint or something to figure it out on their own. For "Final Destination" there were four entries that will ultimately lead us to our meta answer. Hoping the mirror symmetry + the title of "Final Destination" would both give little nudges.
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Those four entries are: MOSQUITO, HEATHENS, OBERLIN, and TILAPIA.
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Or, alternatively put, mosQUITO, heATHENS, oBERLIN, and tilAPIA.
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Respectively, those cities are the capitals of Ecuador, Greece, Germany, and Samoa.
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And, if you take the first letter of each of those countries, you arrive at EGGS, which is our meta answer. Woohoo! This started when I was screwing around wanting to make an Only Connect connecting wall for fun (been a while). Anyways, discovered those, discovered it's a pretty tight set, and all of the "this is a theme" alarm bells started ringing. Plus it felt like fun to turn it into a little meta, so that's what I did! For the longest time, the working title of this puzzle was "Gastrotourism", which I also liked, but changed at the end so the title could give a hint to the mechanism, and not the final answer. Tried for a while to come up with something that combined geography, food, and ending/right/some little hint at the mechanism - if you have something let me know and I'll track you down 2 years from now when I do my next meta puz!
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