The Riddle

A new one every twelve hours. It is not a question you answer from a chair — it is a chain of nine links laid through this site, and each link tells you only enough to find the next one. Everything you need to solve it is on cityofstonks.com, including the post that starts it: it goes up on the wire the moment a cycle opens, and on X at the same time. To keep the key you need one thing more — follow @CityOfStonks. That is the only rule that is not on the site itself.

The chain

1. A post goes out. On /wire, and on X. One word is hidden in it — not in the words, in how they are stacked.
2. The word is a place. It names a page on this site. Go and stand in it.
3. The page is carrying six characters. Somewhere nobody reads: the source, the tab, the paint, the very bottom. They are not the key — they are the key written backwards with its letters walked forward.
4. Walk them back. How far is not written anywhere. It is a number about this project you can go and count. Hand the six characters that come out to /plates?k= and ten cities open.
5. Nine of the ten are ordinary. One is holding a building the other nine do not have — not a different colour, a different kind: no windows on it, and a cap across the top.
6. Name it on the board. The plate will not tell you what that building is — that part is yours. Work it out, then click it at /board, where every building this city can build is drawn in the shape and the colour it gets. Wrong guesses cost nothing but the walk back.
7. Naming it buys half a word. The other half is hidden on this site the way things are hidden here — in what a machine answers, in what a picture carries beside its pixels, in a property nothing uses. Together they make one ordinary word, and the lock wants all of it.
8. Behind the lock is the question. Answer it here. The first correct answer takes a key; a second is drawn from whoever was first to ask City Bot about a link — and the box only judges a browser that walked the whole thing.

Walk it in one browser, and mind the clock. A room opens only for the browser that opened the picture — being handed the address does not get you in, and neither does being told the word. And the steps open on one clock, the same for everybody: the plates when the cycle opens, the board half an hour in, the lock an hour in, the answer box ninety minutes in. Not on your own clock — on the cycle's. Turn up an hour late and you can walk all four straight away and be level with everyone who was here first.

That is not there to slow you down for its own sake. It is there so nobody takes a key four minutes after the post while three hundred people are still reading this page — and so the race is decided by who started rather than by who is quickest at brightening a picture. Nothing is lost by waiting and nothing is gained by refreshing. The clock lives in your browser; clearing it starts the walk again from the picture rather than skipping any of it.

Answer

Hints

Hints are not handed out. Ask City Bot in #riddle-street in the Discord — tag it, and ask about the link you are actually standing on. A question that shows you have got as far as the picture will buy the room a hint about the picture; a question that asks it to solve the thing will not buy anything, and it will say so. Hints go to everybody at once, because this is a room solving something together. City Bot is not one of the machines the chain talks about — it knows what it has been told to know. The site's own answers are the addresses under /api/.

Where things are kept

Nothing in a chain is ever off this site, and nothing needs a tool you do not have. What it does use is every part of a website that is not the part you read: the source (right click, view source), the tab title, the stylesheet, the very bottom of a page, the pixels of an image, the text fields inside a PNG, the name a file arrives under, and the addresses under /api/, which answer in data rather than in a page. /api lists every one of them — open it, then open each of those, and read every line, including the ones that look like they belong to something else.

The rules

Two keys per cycle: one to the first correct answer, and one drawn at the close. Tickets in that draw are earned by being first to ask City Bot a real question about a link — the hints it gives are announced to the whole room, so earning one should not just be free work for everybody else. Answering after somebody has already won earns no ticket: it is for being first at a step, not for finishing. Both keys given in public. Thirty minutes between each step, measured from the moment the cycle opened — the same moment for everybody, wherever you are and whenever you arrive. Nothing here ever asks you to connect a wallet, sign anything, or send anything — if a message claiming to be from us does, it is not from us. A chain nobody finishes runs a second twelve hours with its first hint already given, and then it is gone. Do not post the answer in the chat before it is claimed: the box on this page is what judges it, and posting it early only ends the cycle for everybody who is still enjoying it.

Keys given

Reading the ledger…

— the thing in the walls