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Puzzle 116 (Themeless #83) - That One Time at Band Camp

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.

PUZ - PDF - Solution


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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