This is a puzzle about Grimm's fairy tales. Each story prompt reads like a real Grimm's fairy tale with something off, which clues a modified fairy tale with a single letter in the title changed.
| Prompt | Treat | Modified Title | Original Grimm Fairy Tale |
|---|---|---|---|
| One day a small brown bird came across some mist. The mist was hungry, and the bird offered to find it food. They became fast friends. But, when a brash wagoneer kills the slumbering mist, the bird vows revenge. | Marshmallow | The Fog and the Sparrow | The Dog and the Sparrow |
| A small child with a married hat is given a task to travel to her grandmother's house to deliver a basket of treats. But she must beware the wolf along the path that might lure her off the trail. | Kitkat | Little Wed Riding Hood | Little Red Riding Hood |
| There once was a beautiful lady whose father wanted to find just the right match. One day, a rich and good looking suitor appeared, and when the father could find no fault with the man, he promised his daughter then and there. The daughter spies on her husband to be and discovers he's part of a gang of stretchy men. She steals evidence of their elastic deeds and the town brings them to justice. | Cupcake | The Rubber Bridegroom | The Robber Bridegroom |
| Once upon a time there was a king who became lost in a forest. In exchange for learning the way home, he agreed to marry the daughter of a witch. The king knew he could not break his vow, but he wanted his children of a previous marriage to be safe, so he hid them away. But the step-queen found all his hidden sons, and for each of them sewed jerseys of white or red, along with matching stockings. When she put them on his sons, they turned into beautiful, graceful, water-dwelling, and baseball-loving birds. However, the step-queen did not notice the king's daughter, who eventually found her brothers and sewed other jerseys for them, breaking the 86-year curse as they flew to her just in time. | Honeycomb | The Sox Swans | The Six Swans |
| Once upon a time there was a fox with seven little children. Unfortunately, one day she left her house and despite warning her children to not let the wolf in, she returned home to find only one of her children still there, and learned that the wolf had eaten all the others. Fortunately, she was able to find the wolf sleeping, cut open his belly, and replace her still-alive children inside with stones, which caused the wolf to fall into a well. | Oreo | The Wolf and the Seven Young Kits | The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids |
We can also ID the treats, which some might notice are all Android version names. The original letters spell out DROID to confirm the IDs of the treats and stories.
The flavor word “shifty” clues that we're concerned about Caesar shifts from original to modified letters. To extract, apply the same shifts to the initial of the respective treat, as clued by “treats they initially see”:
| Treat | Shift | Shifted Initial |
|---|---|---|
| Marshmallow | +2 (D → F) | O |
| Kitkat | +5 (R → W) | P |
| Cupcake | +6 (O → U) | I |
| Honeycomb | +6 (I → O) | N |
| Oreo | +16 (D → T) | E |
The shifted treat initials spell out the answer, OPINE.