Measure Of Devotion

Harvey Jones

HINTS:

Key bits of the flavortext:

"Middle of a seemingly infinite journey" What's a seemingly infinite journey? A trip down the infinite corridor. Where is halfway through? Lobby 10.

Look up, at the inscriptions in honor of MIT students that have died in World Wars 1 and 2, Korea, and Vietnam. This is the key to decoding the symbols

SOLUTION:

Decoding:

The key consists of four lines of four elements: Location, number, number, symbol.

Locations are K, V, 45, and GW, which key Korea, Vietnam, 1942-1945, and the Great War, which is how the inscriptions refer to the wars they list. The two numbers cue nth name, nth letter. Thus, each symbol is keyed to a letter. These letters are V, I, L, and X. What does one do with this?

Translating:

The key is that these are all Roman numerals. With that in mind, one can see that the label of the key is 10, confirming that it was decoded in lobby 10 and showing the hunter that they are on the right track. The heading of the next section is 7, sending them to lobby 7. There are 6 roman numerals in the next section. Index these into the inscription over lobby seven, and one gets the letters F, E, N, N, E, and L. FENNEL is the answer.

Answer: FENNEL