Solution to FJF,S

The insight in this puzzle is something near and dear to the author’s heart: keyboards. Each of the nonsense strings can be understood as a word that has gone through a transformation based on a standard U.S. Qwerty keyboard. For example, “dikkiq” is “follow” if typed one key off to the right:

This realization allows us to come up with a bunch of words and a corresponding direction:

Given word	Encoded word	Encoded direction
dikkiq	follow	right
suewxruiba	directions	right
wjr	and	down & left
tryu[r	retype	left
sd	as	left
kv	if	up & left
fbptsl	dvorak	left

First, let’s look at the directions. If we move our little grey person through the grid according to the directions, we obtain a string YODDGLU.

This string is meaningless on its own, but if we assume it was typed on a Qwerty keyboard and make the transformation as though we intended to type in Dvorak, as instructed in the puzzle, we obtain the answer, FREEING.

QWERTY:

DVORAK:

WHOLE GRID IN DVORAK: