BasketMC

Juggling Jugs, Episode 12: Quern

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The whole video is one puzzle: five jugs that go on stands around a table with a fire bowl, a lever that plays them, and a chart on the wall of a room across a bridge that seems to show the tune. Basket sorts the jugs by ear, tries swap after swap, and even reads the chart upside down. It ends with the jugs back in the order the commentary believes is right, nothing opened, and Basket heading back for another look at the chart.

Starting over from the notes

The commentary recaps: there are jugs "that I can put in here in a different order," and when "we pull the lever" each one makes a sound with "a different tone." Then, "over here on the wall there's different levels for the sound, and I'm guessing that's the sequence." The chart is a board of lines with a zigzag drawn across it. The notes on paper turn out to be missing the order. "I didn't write down all my notes. Good, well then we'll start over."

A round room under a big wooden wheel, with a lamp-lit table of colored bottles and, on the back wall, a board of horizontal lines with a zigzag line drawn across them

Lowest and highest

Basket labels the jugs A to E by shape and plays two at a time. "Right now I just want to find the lowest." The fat one, A, is lowest, so it goes third, where the chart drops "way down to the bottom." C sounds next lowest and goes fifth. The highest is harder to hear: "They're slightly different. I don't know which one's higher." The flask wins by "a tiny bit" and goes fourth, at the top of the chart.

A pale jug with white stripes on a round metal stand under a weathered wooden table, with two more striped jugs on stands to either side and ferns on blue-lit ground

Nothing opens

The lever plays the five jugs, and nothing happens. Comparing the tune with the chart, the commentary hears the second and fourth as wrong and swaps them. "Cross our fingers and toes." Still nothing. A horn sticks out of the stone nearby, and the commentary expects a door to open: "It's a door that's gonna be listening." Swapping the third and fifth doesn't work either.

A rusty horn-shaped funnel sticking out of a round fitting in a pale stone wall, its dark open mouth turned toward the viewer

Nothing else nearby helps. Another door needs a key, and a bench of ingredients is for brewing a potion, but "the potion requires this thing which we don't have any of." The commentary decides, "this is the puzzle we're on."

A bench of ingredients on a woven mat: dishes of purple, orange and glowing yellow powder, a green-lit goblet, a blue cup, and a purple flask in a wooden barrel

Upside down

A suggestion read out on the stream is to reverse them. Reversing the order doesn't help. Next comes the idea that the chart works the other way, "high is low and low is high," with the paper turned upside down. A few more swaps, and: "this doesn't work, we're gonna go back to our original plan."

Where it ends

The jugs go back in the original order: the curvy one, the flask, the fat one, the skinny one and the last. A viewer asks to see the wall one more time, and the video ends with Basket crossing the bridge into the room with the chart. Nothing has opened.