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Divining the Elements

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Solves: 190

This puzzle is a metapuzzle. It uses answers from some of the daily "feeder" puzzles. It's up to you to determine when you have enough information to solve them.

Story (Does not contain puzzle content)

The tent flaps draw open on their own as you step up to the Fortune Teller's tent. Inside, your senses are assaulted by the mystical and the strange. Iridescent symbols cover the surfaces of furniture. Eccentric curios line the shelves. Sweet candlewax and spicy incense fill your nostrils. Unseen sources of unrecognizable sounds dart past you.

The Fortune Teller sits at a low table, gesturing for you to take the opposing chair. As you approach, the sights, smells, and sounds abruptly fade, replaced by a prickling stillness. When you reach into your bag to pull out your notepad, the Fortune Teller offers you a pen. You decline—only to realize you actually don't have yours—so you accept his sheepishly.

The Fortune Teller clicks his beak and draws your attention to the array of peculiar implements laid out before you.

Spoiler warning: The following story content is revealed after solving this puzzle and includes the answer to the puzzle.

The divination reveals that you need a PIECE OF HEARTWOOD. While there are no living trees in Antarctica, the paleontologists have you covered. They provide a piece of petrified heartwood that seems satisfactory to the Fortune Teller for reasons you don't fully understand. Apparently, even fossilized remains of forests from millions of years ago still hold power.

Hints

Keywords Hint
getting started
The symbols in the grids represent an old-fashioned way of denoting chemicals. Use a more modern version of chemical notation to identify and use the feeder puzzle answers with the grid.
after filling the grids
Each grid gives you a clue. The answers to those clues should match the enumerations at the top of page 3 in the same order and are constrained in a way hinted in the flavor text.
cards
The six dice symbols map to the six things you've identified in the same order, e.g., the ⚀ is first thing.
circles
The large circles form a Venn diagram. Consider how the six things you identified are related to (non-chemical) elements and can be placed as the six small circles with dashed square indicators.

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