Solution: Internet Café
Answer: VILLAGE OFFICER
Written by Teo Xue Heng
From the flavor text, Guild of the Fabled is synonymous with League of Legends, and Alice's referral to the playable characters as “champions” reinforces this as well. Bob's referral to the playable characters as “heroes”, as well as “protect[ing] the primordial village”, suggests Defence of the Ancients.
The six excerpts are independent, and each description of the suspect clues a LoL champion. The first letters of each character's name and epithet matches that of a LoL champion. Bob's first line is a description of the champion's physical appearance, followed by a description with words common to their ability names, which can be found here, which aids with identification. Each champion is uniquely identifiable by the name and epithet given by Alice, as well as the description given by Bob.
| Excerpt | LoL Champion (epithet) | DotA Hero | Moves used on victim | Extracted letters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Singed the Mad Chemist | Alchemist | GREEVIL'S GREED (5) ACID SPRAY (3) |
V I |
| 2 | Maokai the Twisted Treant | Treant Protector | LEECH SEED (1) LIVING ARMOUR (1) |
L L |
| 3 | Wukong the Monkey King | Monkey King | TREE DANCE (6) JINGU MASTERY (4) |
A G |
| 4 | Orianna the Lady of Clockwork | Clockwerk | BATTERY ASSAULT (5) POWER COGS (2) ROCKET FLARE (7) |
E O F |
| 5 | Vayne the Night Hunter | Nightstalker | CRIPPLING FEAR (10) VOID (3) DARK ASCENSION (7) |
F I C |
| 6 | Sion the Undead Juggernaut | Juggernaut | HEALING WARD (2) BLADE FURY (8) |
E R |
The next step is to match the epithets of these champions to a corresponding hero from DotA. Alice's second line calling each character by epithet instead of name suggests the epithet to be important. Further, “turning into the ideal hero” suggests that solvers might want to try mapping these epithets to appropriate DotA characters (called heroes). A simple Google search putting “DotA” in front of the epithet (e.g. DotA Mad Chemist) is likely to yield the appropriate heroes. For the remaining parts of each excerpt, each line mentions a fictional ability with the same initials as a real ability belonging to the hero and a number which is used to index and extract from the ability's name. All heroes and their abilities can be found here. This gives us the answer, VILLAGE OFFICER.
Author's Notes
I was actually surprised that to date, I have not found a puzzle about either League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients, so I decided to write one about it. Previous versions of this puzzle attempted different ways to map each LoL champion to a unique DotA hero, or vice versa, but the game developers knew well enough to make sure that characters with similar appearances do not have similar abilities, and vice versa; and that between any two characters, there are only one to two abilities with similar mechanics. So most of those mapping attempts came to nought when I couldn't get sufficient matches. I also toyed with the idea of using hotkeys QWER to clue the abilities, since both games use the same hotkeys, but that didn’t come to fruition – perhaps for a future puzzle, it will.
This is also the first hunt puzzle I have ever written, so I tried to keep it on the simple side. Hopefully the googling wasn't too tedious.
[Update after Silph:] Wow – we certainly did not expect this puzzle, out of all, to get sniped a week before our hunt. What's even more miraculous is that this puzzle originally involved an extraction via keybindings as well, so technically this puzzle got double sniped!