LEEY: LRPYE ULNVDZY on Aladren Commons

Mara Morales

January 14, 2021 4:37 PM

LEEY: LRPYE ULNVDZY by Mara Morales

Mara was, in her own estimation, fairly clever. She did not feel she was being excessively arrogant in thinking this, not when she had a lifetime of report cards, glowing notes, and certificates of achievement to back her opinion up. In one area, though, she had always found her mind a trifle lacking, and that was in the area of solving puzzles.

At first, she had tried to reason her way into breaking the cipher. The 'l' had seemed like her best clue - surely, in a message, if each letter corresponded to another letter, a single-letter word would come out as "I"? She had wasted about an hour working under that assumption, before it had become obvious it was not working out. After that, she'd spent at least another hour trying to figure out if it had anything to do with vowels before the painfully obvious had occurred to her, causing her to smack her own forehead in annoyance once it had hit her.

Even then, though, she had made it harder on herself than it had had to be, at least at first. She had copied out the alphabet, then the message, and tried to go back and forth - the whole message shifted one letter to the right, then, on the next line, shifted one letter to the left, and so on. 'So on' had only ended up being about four rounds, though, before, struggling to keep the count right in either direction, she had gotten impatient, thrown her hands up, and abandoned the whole thing for a few hours until she had had a better idea.

Instead of writing the whole message horizontally, she had instead compiled out only the first segment, and had done so vertically, one letter above the next. Then she had drawn out columns and rows, and on each row, had written the rest of the alphabet out from the starting points Bertie had given her until she managed to get one column to contain a recognizable word.

Once the first word had emerged, she had been grimly pleased, but still wary of deeming the thing done. She'd therefore done the same with the second word, only counting how many columns between the ciphered message and the second word after she reached the second word. It was the same number she'd needed for the first word. Now more confident, she had gone ahead and made charts for the remaining words with that number of columns and filled them in. They had all worked. She'd broken the key.

That done, she had composed another set of charts to compose a message of her own. Once she'd had it, she'd then written it out on a slip of paper:

YZH T SLGP ESP LWASLMPE DZYR DEFNV TY XJ SPLO! ESLYVD ESZFRS - HLD QFY. XLCL.

Unsure of the timing on owl post, she had kept this message to herself until they got back to Sonora, whereupon she had waited for a chance to, in the common room, magic this message across the room to land on top of his books when she thought he wasn't looking.

16 Mara Morales LEEY: LRPYE ULNVDZY 1472 1 5

Bertie Jackson

January 14, 2021 6:44 PM

Reporting for duty by Bertie Jackson

Bertie was happily doing his homework, and had turned to double check something in his textbook. When he turned back to his own notes, he found a note of a different kind, and one that had not been there before.

He glanced up, scanning the common room, quickly repressing the excited grin on his face because he needed to be covert. Mara was present. So was Quincy, but if Quincy wanted to drop a secret message to him, he had their room, which was much less likely to be compromised by enemy agents, plus Bertie and Mara currently had an ongoing conversation. Plus, he really, really wanted it to be from her.

It also wasn’t a bad guess given the pattern of the four letters at the end, and he used those as his starting point. He set aside his quill, even though it would be a little quicker with notes, but wanting to respect the confidentiality of the message - plus he liked the satisfaction of doing it in his head. The letters from ‘Mara’ didn’t fill in enough of any of the other words for him to guess at them, except for telling him that the single letter was most likely ‘I’ not ‘A’ - that also ruled out some of the more common three letter words for the opening, because ‘The I’ was not going to make anything grammatical (though nor would ‘the a’). Based on the last word being ‘Mara’, he could add or subtract the number of displaced places, and he knew the number values of all the letters of the alphabet, or in some cases just work by relational positions - if he’d cracked M, knowing N didn’t take much math.

He laughed out loud when he got to the end of the first line. Within less than ten minutes of receiving it, he was grinning broadly (he had been slowed down a bit by his excitement, which just scampered about his brain wanting to jump ahead and making it harder to think in straight lines).

He picked up his quill, contemplating a reply, but feeling impatient… He had mentioned talking to her in his letter. Was this an invitation to do just that? He was definitely glad she could code, but he had so much he wanted to say. And that would compromise the integrity of any cipher, because the longer the message was, the easier it was to crack. So, he should just go talk to her, even if it wasn’t very covert.

He made his way over, hoping that was acceptable, and just about managing to hide the grin on his face, as he dropped into the chair next to her without looking at her.

“Well, you g-got Ffffeliz Navid-dad stuck in mmmine,” he whispered, glancing sideways at her with a small smile, “So, I’d sssay we’re even.”

13 Bertie Jackson Reporting for duty 1497 0 5

Mara Morales

January 20, 2021 8:47 PM

Excellent. Any idea what your assignment is? by Mara Morales

Mara was not entirely surprised that Bertie approached, but she was taken aback by the first thing he said. She looked at him in surprise for a few seconds, and then broke into a grin.

“Dang, you’re good,” she said with open admiration. “Took me forever to figure you out – do you have the whole thing memorized?” she asked with interest. “And was there any reason for picking that many places to shift the letters? I almost wondered if I knew what I was doing after the first four didn’t work,” she admitted, tucking a loose strand of hair back behind her ear. “I am sorry about Feliz Navidad, though – that might beat the alphabet song for being kind of a pain to have stuck in your head for too long.” A tiny frown appeared between her eyebrows as a thought occurred to her. “Now I want to find a version of that song in, like, Portuguese or something – to see whether it’s better or worse to have it in your head if you don’t know all the words.”

Though, of course, he could have figured out some of the words through use of her parcel – the contents of which she now felt had been thoroughly outclassed. She had been about as taken aback to find two whole books in hers as she had been that he’d decoded the message that fast – appreciative, but taken aback just the same. Books were not exactly cheap even in her world a lot of the time, and books where she came from didn’t use parchment. Two books was a pretty nice gift, she was reasonably sure – just as she was reasonably sure that she was the one between the two of them who had more resources to hand for producing nice gifts. The impression she had of Bertie’s family was that they were probably fairly well-to-do – stuff she’d heard indicated they were well-educated, an impression backed up by Bertie…just Bertie-ing, and that usually meant there were resources to spare – but there was no denying that the odds were against them being her financial equals. There were richer families – the mysterious figures at the tops of the mega-conglomerates and stuff, beside which Arvale Cosmetics almost looked mom-and-poppy – but the vast majority of families…were not in that category. It was just a fact.

“Those books you sent, those were really cool,” she said. “It’s interesting – digital fairy tales, they have magic and stuff in them, you know, and magic’s not supposed to really exist at all out there, right? And from the footnotes, it sounds like the magic kind also have magic in them that isn’t really how magic works here. It kind of makes you wonder.” Not that she wished to encase any of her organs in crystal so she could become a person with antisocial personality disorder for fun and profit, but…the stories she had grown up with didn’t always have exactly accurate magic in them, but if she squinted, it resembled stuff here. So what did the wizard version resemble?

16 Mara Morales Excellent. Any idea what your assignment is? 1472 0 5

Bertie Jackson

January 28, 2021 7:47 PM

Teach you spy skills? by Bertie Jackson

Dang, he was good. He was possibly not so covert right now, because at the compliment he couldn't help but glance up at Mara, a triumphant grin on his face.

"I can h-h-help you get b-better," he offered quickly and enthusiastically when she admitted to taking forever with his. His immediate disappointment at the fact that she wasn’t already a super sleuth was very quickly soothed by the mental image of spending time teaching her to become one whilst she looked up at him admiringly and paid him further compliments and continued to have incredibly shiny hair and really nice eyes.

“The whole thing is r-really just the alpha-alphabet,” he stated, tilting his head at her in some confusion when she asked if he had the whole thing memorised. Although memorising the alphabet didn’t really help solve the puzzles, given that was a thing that almost every small child had down. “It-It’s not so much a-a----- there’s only so much t-to mmmemorise that would be useful,” he explained, “Th-there isn’t a set of answers you c-can rote learn. You’ll always h-h-have to apply them and do-do some wwwworking out. That’s what mmmakes it fffun,” he smiled, pretty sure she would agree with that. “It-it is useful to mmmemorise the number values of the alpha-phabet. Then-then if you wwwork out one wwword you c-can work out the difference from the original position, and then a-apply that to each other letter. E mmminus four equals A-A, for example,” he explained.

“Mmmaybe,” he smiled, when asked if there was a significance to the code he had come up with. He was pretty sure puzzles were no fun if someone just told you the answer though. But they were also no fun if you got stuck forever. “It wwas significant, b-b-but not due to the number of sssspaces moved,” he offered.

He was glad she had also appreciated the gift he had sent her. She definitely didn’t seem to think he was calling her childish, which was good, and was applying some excellent analysis to the content already.

“People always wwwwant what they don’t have. Mmmyths explain what we d-don’t understand. Fairytales o-offer what we don’t have,” he supplied in return.

13 Bertie Jackson Teach you spy skills? 1497 0 5

Mara Morales

February 18, 2021 8:39 PM

Sounds like a good time. by Mara Morales

Mara nodded with a grin when Bertie offered to help her improve her facility with codes and such. "Yeah, that sounds cool," she said. She didn't think that businesses usually did things involving code and the like anymore, but she didn't know it for sure. Plus, she was a witch now, and they were old-fashioned enough here that maybe running a business would eventually involve using handwritten secret codes. Additionally, it was always good to improve areas one saw one was weak in, and she was not strong with puzzles. Mara might not have much practical use for a lot of puzzles, but she knew that those kinds of skills were good for brain operations generally.

She nodded again when he explained his system for keeping track of codes. "That makes more sense than what I was thinking," she readily acknowledged. "I was thinking along the lines - if you always wrote to one person using the same key, you might memorize the alternative alphabet. Your way makes more sense, though - just one set of alternatives to remember, and then basic math."

The shift was significant, but not because of the number of spaces. Huh. Mara was beginning to feel distinctly intellectually outclassed here. It was not a familiar feeling at all, nor was it one she thought she much enjoyed. What could moving the letters eleven spaces mean that had no relevance to the number eleven? "Can I get another hint?" she asked. "We're definitely going to have to do something I'm already good at sometime, too, so you don't start thinking I'm an idiot," she added, only half-joking, with a laugh.

Mara considered his position on fairy tales. "You're not wrong," she said slowly. "And the magic here is more...woven into the story I guess? In the stories I grew up with, the magic is something that just - intrudes. Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, they don't use magic themselves. Even when it's not a bad thing, right, it just - intervenes, but in these, it makes problems and it solves them. Maybe that ties back to the part about fairy tales where they're supposed to teach you something - the ones that do, anyway. That's another problem with trying to sum them up, they come from all over, not even counting the ones that were made up after the traditional ones and everything." She tilted her head a little, thinking, unconsciously mirroring a gesture her older sister often made. "In a way, these are less terrifying, a lot of the time," she offered. "The cause and effect are a lot clearer. If you think about Cinderella happening to have a godmother who can make custom shoes - " why was her brain hopping over to an image of Mrs. H.? - "and all these princes kissing women in comas, it seems like it's almost completely random. The world just happens to you, for better or worse. The hopping pot, though, it put on a shoe when the guy reformed, the Fountain people overcame their own issues, the cloak guy used common sense - the hopping pot and the cloak guy, those had a lot of 'why you don't want these things' or 'why you shouldn't do this' as much as 'what you want,' too." She realized this had not been very concisely or coherently put. "Sorry," she said self-consciously, reaching up as if to push her hair back. "I'm rambling. Thinking out loud. I should have written up some notes or something."

16 Mara Morales Sounds like a good time. 1472 0 5