The Only Way Out is Through

A Portal Hopping adventure

Suddenly a hole opens in the fabric of the world and Jenkins leaps through. As he vanishes, he drops a piece of paper. You pick it up.

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A1_The_Only_Way_Out_Is_Through.pdf

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The piece of paper

Jenkins appears to have borrowed a portal gun from APErture Labs and is now hopping from Portal to Portal throughout the world. Reviewing the paper he dropped, it can be seen that clues were left as to how to find him. Reviewing the clue list, each can be answered by a word that contains OO.

Answer	Clue
GROOMSMEN	• A year before his paper anniversary, these guys were indispensable
FESTOONED	• Covered in ribbons, lights, and bows
FLOODGATES	• Don't drive your Chevy to the levee, if they are open
BAMBOOZLED	• Fooled by Spike Lee
PRECOOKED	• Just like MREs
KABOODLES	• Kits' other halves
CARTOONISH	• Like Garfield and Cleveland but not Madison
SCHMOOZES	• Networks over bagels
BUFOONERY	• The sort of behavior one expects from a jackanapes
BALLOONIST	• The Wizard of Oz's farewell job

Each of the O's in the word represent a Portal where the word made a jump in the provided grid.

Words jump in the blue portal and out the orange

Reading the un-circled letters leaves a message on how to follow Jenkins

CONNECT WITH SEMAPHORE TO UNLOCK A PATH FORWARD

Read un-circled letters

Pairing up each half of the words by their portal points yields a valid semaphore encoding (https://www.dcode.fr/semaphore-flag). For example, BALLO-ONIST has BALLO- running West from the portal, and -ONIST running NorthWest from the Portal. This gives the letter O using semaphore.

Balloonist semaphore is O

Semaphore	Clue
O	BALLO-ONIST
P	BAMBO-OZLED
E	BUFFO-ONERY
N	CARTO-ONISH
S	FESTO-ONED
E	FLO-ODGATES
S	GRO-OMSMEN
A	KABO-ODLES
M	PRECO-OKED
E	SCHMO-OZES

Repeating this for the other 9 words pairs and putting the clues in alphabetical order gives the final way to join Jenkins, which is by saying OPEN SESAME.