Oh no! The mods are gone! (and Rand al'Thor, too!)

Question

Dear Puzzling Users,

Oh dear, where start? I guessed it started with my feelings that the mods are way too overbearing. And then I realized, "Hey, I don't have to put up with this sh*. I can just get rid of them all!" So that's what I did: I kidnapped all your moderators plus Rand al'Thor just for kicks. Now, I get that I have to leave "clues" or whatever bull crud I have to put up with, so FINE! HERE ARE YOUR RUDDY CLUES Y'ALL! BUT I'LL SOON TAKE OVER ONCE I CAN GET THE MODS TO HAND OVER THEIR POWER HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Have fun!!!!!!!!

Deusovi:
So the other day, my sis and I were playing poker. She's a notorious cheater though, so she decided to cheat by throwing some parsley at me. Yeah, I know. She's kinda dumb though. Anyhow, it landed on my eye, and in return, I landed a nice slap on her back. Didn't go well with my mom, though, when my sister started to wail, crying, "Whale!" Kinda random. Then my mom started going berserk saying, "Show me the card again! Show me the card again!" Then she said in a weird Southern accent that my sister was the winner! What the heck?

Oh you want Deusovi's location? Here: "Read and puncture the beginning, heart of a German man named Ing" (3, 7)

Rubio:

GPR:
Ontop of a very boring rainbow,
Lays Gentle Purple Rain.
He was like the 16 French kings:
Dead.
Oh the misery of his passing,
So clueless was he to wander so close to Rubio
And yet so far away, Ontop a very boring rainbow
Ontop of an entranced doorway,
On a very rainy day,
Laid Gentle Purple Rain,
Shivering in the rain.

Gareth:

^See edit note on the bottom^

Rand'AlThor:
You know me quite well, I hope,
After all, I warn you of the hags
By singing you a song.
And if the sky was clearer,
You could see the whole city from up here.
What am I?

Bet you could never figure out where they are. Ha! Rescuing them - that's funny. I'll see you later when I'm dictator of Puzzling SE

With Love,
North

Hint 1:

What's that hidden behind's Gareth's picture? What are hags? 16 French kings?

Hint 2:

Deusovi's is a giant wordplay and play-on-words. Also, every single mod besides Deusovi (because he's special) is in, on, below, around, at etc. a landmark. Regarding Rubio's — three of them are wordplay. If you can figure it out, the rest should become easier to deduce.

Hint 3:

In GPR's puzzles, there are only a few important key words to lead you into the answer.In Rand's riddle, everything is of pertinence.

Hint 4:

These are massive hints I am about to reveal:
Rubio's puzzle are puns on states or monuments/places found in those states.
Gareth's puzzle is anoter wordplay. Read the lines carefully, and almost attempt to take everything literally. Consider what the Reverse-Flash says about himself, and it should give you the location.
Rand is somewhere in Britain.
Parsley sounds a lot like this one place found in a bay somewhere mentioned in that ridiculous story. Just remove the l in parsley. The italisized give you indicators of homophones as discovered by one of the commentors.

Hint five: Several edits. A photo has been added to the Rubio's puzzle.

Deusovi is in Wales.
Reverse-Flash. Reverse flash. Reverse flash flash's name in reverse?
Hags ---> witches. Britain. Song. Tall building

---

Note: Don't worry about the CC. It was just an attempt at a practical joke — it was supposed to be answered as RED HERRING. Of course, the CC was not a very good one, and is not necessary to solve this puzzle by any means.

Edit: I'm really, really, sorry, fellow Puzzling SE. I for some reason, the image will not decode itself when imbeded into the question. There is some kind of mishap that happened, I am not quite sure how this happened. Please forgive me. In the meantime, the image that shoud've popped up when decoded should've been the Reverse-Flash picture.

Answer 1

Deusovi is

In Cardigan, Wales. I just swooped in and stole this from the hints and all of Strawman's work. "Card Again" -> Cardigan, "Whale" "wail" -> Wales. and the hint saying it's in Wales and not a monument.

Rand is probably

On Big Ben. Since it is in Britain, is tall sings a song "by chiming". The reference to witches is probably a warning about the witching hour. It is also one of the most well known monuments in Britain.

Gareth is

At Eastern Wall in Jerusalem Wally West in reverse is East(ern) Wall[y]

For Rubio is:

At the USS Utah memorial at Pearl Harbor.

Because:

1000 Canons = Grand Canyon Arizona
No place like home = Kansas
Penny Wood = Lincoln tree in Sequoia National park (Nevada) penny + sylvan = Pennsylvania
Frying pan = Rose Hill, North Carolina, home of the worlds largest frying pan? Alaska Oklahoma which is shaped like a big frying pan (thanks @thecoder16)
Should have left a virgin = West Virginia
Red is the new gold => El Dorado = city of gold => city of color = Colorado
Golden gate bridge is Red -> California (thanks @ffao)
Definitely a pyramid => Del operator + aware = Delaware. Very Mountain = Vermont Luxor Pyramid in Las Vegas, Nevada
Elephant Socks => Mass wearing Chausettes (french for socks) > Massachusetts.

 OK NV KS
 AZ WV PA
 ?? CA MA
 

As the discussion in the comments have seen, these States seem to be about US battleships. USS Okalahoma and USS Arizona were completely destroyed, Nevada, West Virginia, and California were damaged, Kansas and MA were not present, and PA was also not involved. The remaining destroyed battle ship is the USS Utah, so Rubio is at the USS Utah Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

Answer 2

I'm a first-time lurker and so probably very wrong, but here are some wild stabs in the dark mostly to get ideas going!

Deusovi: I'm going to guess

Parsley Island

although I don't have a strong justification for it. In Hint #2,

his clue is mentioned as "wordplay and play-on-words," which is a repetitious phrase, just with the words reversed. The clue itself has many repeated phrases, such as "landed on my eye" - "I landed," "kinda dumb" - "kinda random," "wail" - "whale", and the entire "show me the card again!" phrase twice. "Card again" could mean "cardigan," or I could be looking for homophones too much.

In the text itself,

there are various italicized letters in words, specifically: e in parsley, n in landed, l in wail, d in card, a in again, and u in southern. e n l d a u is clearly an anagram for "eu land", so we just have to comb all of europe and we'll find Deusovi ;D In these words, everything but "parsley" and "southern" are used in repeated phrases, but this could be me overlooking something or chasing false leads.

We can ignore the final part, because

'a' is the 3rd letter of the 7th word, so if we follow the instructions and puncture that out, our first word is "Red." A German man named Ing would be "Herr Ing," so we have Red Herr Ing. Typical that the misdirect is the only one I'm certain of solving correctly!

Rubio: I'm at a loss here. Two phrases I recognize as

references to shows/movies, where "Red is the New Gold" could be "Orange is the New Black," and "There's no place like home" is the famous phrase Dorothy said in "The Wizard of Oz." I have no idea what the columns, graph, or scrambled letters are for, however.

GPR: Another shot in the dark, but are they perhaps at

the arc de triomphe?

My very loose reasoning is that

the poem references both a rainbow and an entranced doorway. In French, "rainbow" is "arc-en-ciel," and I imagine a very boring one would be gray and missing all the usual colours. The "arc" could also reference an archway, which is a kind of doorway.

However, this can always be wrong because

It doesn't really use the 16 French Kings clue, other than the "French" part of it. This line could be a false lead, but the final king of France was Louis XVI, so maybe "Louis" is the important part to glean?

Gareth: As stated in comments, this is

Iguaza Falls.

Some googling says that

This location was used for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so maybe there's a secret kingdom with a crystal skull hidden behind it or something. I've never seen the movie (I know, for shame!) so I cannot really comment on that. It could also be a false lead and the falls have something else hidden!

Rand al'Thor: I don't have a specific place, but is it

some kind of storm warning site, or a weather balloon?

My line of thought is that

hags could be witches, but it could also mean storms in old Irish tales or something like that. A tornado siren or storm alarm would warn you of them via an iconic sound, but the rest of the clue suggests it would be somewhere high up. I don't know of any iconic landmarks that fit this criteria, though, so I'm quite possibly chasing a dead end!

Thank you for the puzzle either way! I'm certain that I'm very far off, but hopefully this can be the springboard to get someone else to the proper answers.

Answer 3

Building on Wandering Strawman's answer, my guess is that GPR is hidden

on top of the Gateway Arch in St.Louis

Because

The Gateway Arch is gray, so quite a boring rainbow, and is in a city whose name is the same as Louis XVI. Plus, "Gateway" really resembles the meaning of "entranced doorway".

About Rubio:

! As wolfram42 said, 1000 Canons = Grand canyon. I add: Frying pan = Oklahoma (because of its shape) and ????? = Area 51. Could Rubio be in the Colorado river somehow? No idea about the two other pictures, however...