Day 7 - Toward the end of Team Challenges...

[MrBlarney]

You arrive at the challenge and you see this:

matter, tells hat, lasers, ______, aloof.
What belongs in the blank?

[plutonium]

Matter

Tells Hat

Lasers

_______

Aloof

[plutonium]

Matter, Tells Hat, and Aloof all have double letters.

[locus]

Repeating letters was the first thing I noticed.

T, L, S, _, O

That can't be it, though. Why "tells hat"? I think that might be the key to solving this.

[plutonium]

Let me check anagrams

[locus]

There also has to be a reason the blank is fourth, not last.

[plutonium]

Aloof anagrams into:

A Fool

[MrBlarney]

Gah, kind of fell asleep there.

The 'tells hat' thing is rather interesting, and breaks some patterns otherwise present in the sequence, as noted. All the items in the sequence are two syllables, so perhaps that's a pattern to exploit?

[devoutlyapathetic]

So....some random bullshit that might be right:

"for sale"

Each clue reuses 4 of the letters of the previous clue. The atte of matter is used in tells hat which gives up it's elsa to laser. So we need a word or words that uses four letters from laser while providing us with some o's and/or f.

For sale uses laser from laser and gives us a o and f to place with a and l in aloof.

I was vaguely considering that you had to use two letters from each of the two immediately preceding forcing dropping the letters from the third but aloof is impossible with that.

Actually, you may have to use two of the new letters as well which is why I've gone with for rather than of. If that's the case I think Aloof might be a dead end.

Oh, and I've submitted it as of 3:36 am.