SOLUTION: SYNTHETIC FOODANSWER: SINE WAVE
Solvers are presented with a maze, with grayscale images of fictional characters at the top, and food items at the bottom. The characters have numbers below them; identifying their names and indexing with those numbers gives the word VOCALOID.
Each of the grayscale characters is primarily one color; those colors are the associated colors of various Vocaloid characters. The "aha" in this puzzle is that each of the food items at the bottom of the maze are closely associated with one of these Vocaloids. This page lists the items found in this puzzle, although solvers are by no means expected to find this specific source; there are other non-food items associated with some of these Vocaloid characters, and given the expansive Vocaloid lineup, many sources will not have all of these particular characters, so multiple sources are likely to be used in identifying the food associations. These food items can also be used to disambiguate the intended Vocaloid color pairings, as there are many Vocaloids who share colors. The Vocaloids and foods are:
| Grayscale Character | Color | Vocaloid | Food Item |
| Alvin | Red | MEIKO | Sake |
| Rosita | Teal | Hatsune MIKU | Spring Onion |
| Pikachu | Yellow | Kagamine LEN | Banana |
| Garfield | Orange | Kagamine RIN | Orange |
| Lucy | Blue | KAITO | Ice Cream |
| Chowder | Purple | Camui GACKPO | Eggplant |
| Mike | Green | GUMI | Carrot |
| Birdo | Pink | Megurine LUKA | Tuna |
After identifying the connections, each grayscale character can be connected to a food in the maze via a unique path, going through several letters. Solvers should notice that the letters along each path spell out the corresponding Vocaloid's name, with an added letter:
As instructed at the bottom of the puzzle, these letters can be sorted via the alphabetical order of the grayscale characters to spell out this puzzle's answer, SINE WAVE.
Yeah, so there are two Vocaloid puzzles in this hunt. I didn't have an issue with this in the original version of this hunt since Vocaloid knowledge is very ingrained between me and my partner, but I can understand that this puzzle might feel too similar to the other puzzle (remaining unnamed here in case you haven't solved that other puzzle yet). I stand by the decision to keep both puzzles, since that other puzzle is arguably not based specifically on Vocaloids, and there is no overlap in the datasets used for these two puzzles. I'm particularly happy with getting this puzzle to work; this is definitely one of those "more fun for the writer than the solver" things, but I love how many of the paths' letters overlap each other, with some being used as added letters for some names and part of the names for others.