THE CHESHIRE CAT

This puzzle presents you with a long list of color names, all presented in different colors.

A first temptation is to try to find a correlation between color names and the colors they're printed in. Good luck with that: not only are most color names quite ambiguous to start with, a lot of these names are pretty obscure. Have you ever seen so much ecru?

Instead one should notice that there are a bunch of awfully obscure color names. And that suggests that the colors themselves aren't particularly important. It's more likely to be some other property of the name that matters such as other meanings, spelling, number of letters, etc.

After solving the previous puzzle, the notion to look at the first letters should be fresh in your minds. Which gives you:

b l i l a c a c o p p i n k e r k l e g g p e r i w i n k l e l a n a v a q u a j o t m o n i m e o l i v e o r u b y a m b r u s t o c h r e w n e r p e ...

At this point, you should quickly spot "lilac", "pink", "periwinkle", "aqua", etc. Clearly we must be on the right track - that wouldn't happen by accident. But what about egg? Is egg a color? It doesn't appear in the long list of colors (unlike eggplant and eggshell), so perhaps not.

The first hint tells you to "make the colors mostly vanish". If you've gotten this far, you've gotten rid of all but the first letter of each color. This is vaguely reminiscent of the Cheshire cat disappearing from his tail, leaving only his grin behind. But there are still colors! At this point a number of teams tried to make the remaining colors completely vanish by erasing them completely and were left scratching their heads.

The trick is to again make the colors mostly vanish by removing all but the first letter of the colors:

b l a c o p p e r k l e g g p l a n a v a j o t m o n i m e o o r a m b r o w n e r p e ...

Once you do that with "pink", you should immediately notice a "copper" left behind. We also see "navajo", "brown", etc. All that remains is to keep mostly vanishing colors. And eventually we're left with nothing but:

b l o o d

A nice colorful answer! Hmm, "attack" and "blood". We may begin to notice a theme..

(This puzzle was inspired by a similar one from a BANG event.)