Solution: Citius

Answer: ENGINE AND TONIC

Written by Jonathan and Xue Heng

We are presented with 2 sets of 7 audio tracks, we can start by transcribing them, we note that these descriptions are presented alphabetically and so some reordering is needed.

The first thing to note about these words is that many of them seem to be opposites of each other. For instance, “normal” vs “very skillful”, “prevented from … move” vs “headed in”, and perhaps most directly “whack something” vs “failure to hit something”. The flavortext further clues this, by describing 2 opposites “move quickly” vs “completely stuck”. The realization here is that we are clueing contranyms, which describes words that can, depending on definition, be used to describe 2 opposites, with the flavortext clueing the word FAST either as moving quickly or being completely stuck. We can thus pair up the descriptions with their contranyms. We note that each contranym is of a unique length, which helps with our ordering. Thereafter, we note that our puzzle answers can be prepended to each contranym to form a phrase, which helps match our answers to contranyms.

The other interesting fact about these clips is that each clue phrase has 5 words. We can further note that these audio tracks have been sped up or slowed down, with certain words seemingly being spoken faster than normal, and others slower than normal. In fact, all words are slowed down to either 0.5x speed, or sped up to 1.5x speed. Taking 0.5x speed as 1 unit of time, 1.5x speed corresponds to 3 units of time, which hints at morse code, where the duration of each dah is 3 times as long as each dit, further clued by the flavortext "sending messages in fast and slow bursts". We can thereby convert each 5 word string into 5 dots or dashes in morse code, which translates to a single number each, to be used as an index.

The answer is ENGINE AND TONIC.