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Son Of The Realm Of Unspeakable Chaos

Kevin Wald

Using the already-established grammar and vocabulary from the Realm Of Unspeakable Chaos puzzle in 2001 (linked to in the flavortext), the occasional recognizable Greek borrowing (in italics) or proper noun, and context, the solver must deduce what the Chaotic dialogue says. The complete translation, and a discussion of grammar and vocabulary, is included here, but not all of this is needed for the solution. One path to the solution (omitting many confirmatory clues in the dialogue):

(1) The names are (in order of first appearance): Blue-se, Purple-teacher, Green-ge, Red-se, White-se, and Yellow-officer. So these are the suspects in Clue: Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum, Mr. Green, Miss Scarlet, Mrs. White, and Colonel Mustard. And that makes the other individual mentioned, Dullo-ge, Mr. Boddy.

(2) From the reference to Buffy Lokula-Lamia, since a lamia is a vampire, we know that lokula means "killer". Also, the modifier in the compound comes after the modifed word; this will continue to be the case throughout.

(3) In the second line of dialogue, each of the suspects is associated with a design described in flag terms. (In fact, the designs are those of their T-shirts, but that fact isn't needed). Four of the suspects are refered to by name:

  Mrs. White: bleg py naste py molden tawa-parature:
    blue and white and green divided tawa-paratu-wise.
  Miss Scarlet: molden py mage amelare:
    green and yellow divided /-wise.
  Col. Mustard: magy py dryl py blyg py moldyn zudure:
    yellow and black and blue and green divided X-wise.
  Mr. Green: mage py drel rabare:
    yellow and black, divided raba-wise.

The first two must be Prof. Plum (the speaker) and Mrs. Peacock (the previous speaker) in some order; the descriptions start with Na pazosto do and na pazosto zo, so it appears that do and zo are first-person and second-person terms of some kind. Later on, we have:

  Prof. Plum: . . .
  Mrs. Peacock: Trido zi, "Nea fi Trekkie at"

and Nea fi Trekkie at is something Prof. Plum said earlier. So presumably zo and zi are second-person, and do (and di, seen elsewhere) are first person. Thus, we have:

  Prof. Plum: molden py naste rabare:
    green and white, divided raba-wise.
  Mrs. Peacock: magare blyg prasu ut:
    yellow, with a blue horizontal stripe.

(4) To determine what raba and tawa-paratu mean:

(5) Much of the dialogue emphasizes the fact that Mr. Boddy is red-green colorblind (zopa-wudo-moldan-sulda). If you take the six designs described, and replace green with red wherever it occurs, you get the standard naval signal flags for the following letters:

  Prof. Plum: U
  Mrs. Peacock: D
  Mrs. White: W
  Miss Scarlet: O
  Col. Mustard: Z
  Mr. Green: L

Taking, for each line of dialogue, the letter for the character speaking, you get DULOWUDOZUDU. Since zudu is X, wudo is "color," and dulo is "body" (this last can be deduced from Mr. Boddy's name, and the pun made on it the second line of dialogue), dulo-wudo-zudu is a compound word that, broken up, means "X-color-body." Taking this as (like so many other compounds in the dialogue) a calque from Greek, we get the answer, X-CHROMOSOME. (Note that this is the chromosome on which red-green colorblindness is passed -- as well as hemophilia, as hinted at by the title, Tulola-Gobu.)