Someone else who worked the puzzle out sent me a nice description of the solution. If you wanted to know what it was all about, read this!
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Sati,
I too, was stumped at first when I looked at this puzzle. 7UC3? made no sense to me at all, so I dismissed it as just a reference number for the puzzle. Likewise, I dismissed the sequence with two digits missing, as there was no way I'd figure it out just by staring at it.
That just left the coordinates and the three marked words (Disk, Pin, Feather) as clues that could be used in finding the solution. I noticed then, that the coordinates were wrong. Something was missing from them. Then it hit me: negative coordinates were not marked correctly, thus a parameter in the coordinates was missing! So I had to run my feet to the bone searching all over Mega City trying each possible coordinate set I could come up with.
For example, 561.5.1280 could be any one of:
+561 +5 +1280
+561 -5 +1280
+561 +5 -1280
+561 -5 -1280
-561 -5 -1280
-561 +5 -1280
-561 -5 +1280
-561 +5 +1280
Thankfully, I could just ignore the Y part of the coordinate and concentrate on +/- variations for X and Z.
Oh! Before I forget, it seemed your friend was trying to confuse you with the formatting of the coordinates. He grouped them in an order that implied they would be located in the same areas but this turned out to be not so. Forget the formatting and treat each one individually.
Anyhow, after doing this for a few of the coordinates I noticed that they were all pointing to construction sites within Mega City. And then the "reference" number: 7UC3? finally made sense to some obscure part of my mind. Most of the sites I looked at were simply listed as "Under Construction" within city records that my operator pulled up for me. I then searched until I found all the construction sites in Mega City. There were ten in total. Seven of which were "Under Construction" (the 7UC) while three of them were named (the 3?). The puzzle gave us the coordinates to six of these sites, and the items listed were connected to the gangs residing in three areas that each had a construction site.
In total, we had been given enough information to point us to nine of the ten construction sites, so it seemed obvious that the solution was connected to the missing one. Which just happened to be a named construction site found in the International district.
But how did this match to the sequence, 79101414__30323641? The answer to that, too, literally hit me in the head. I was sitting in the middle of a construction site pondering this problem, when I was attacked by a member of the local gang. He was quite a tough guy - at least for me! But once I'd killed him, he dropped a token. I remembered then, that the tokens these gangs held, played a part in this puzzle. As such it wasn't long until I'd gone and collected tokens from each gang to see what the connection was. During my fights, I noticed that each gang was of a different level in strength. The lowest being 7 and highest being 41. With nine sites given by the puzzle, I soon noticed we had nine numbers too: 7, 9, 10, 14, 14, 30, 32, 36 and 41. These were connected to the strength of the gang hanging around the construction site. The missing number was thus 19, the level of the gang at the unlisted construction site. The required token was the one that they dropped: A dragon medallion.
Well, Sati. As I have no interest in rewards, I sent this solution to you, and not your overly hostile friend. I'll be in touch.
Halgarth
