Placeholder [The Orphanage] Lesson on Family Values... And Cryptic Words

Tierra takes the time during classes to try and do some cryptic writing.

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A city floating in the center of a lake, Ravok is a place of dark beauty, romance and culture. Behind it all though is the presence of Rhysol, God of Evil and Betrayal. The city is controlled by The Black Sun, a religious organization devoted to Rhysol. [Lore]

[The Orphanage] Lesson on Family Values... And Cryptic Words

Postby Tierra on August 31st, 2017, 3:55 pm

60th of Summer 517

Tierra was listening to the instructor going on about the Families of Ravok. The Nitrozian, the Lark, The Galatos, the Lazarin, and the Valdinox. They were the wealthy, the ‘nobles’ of Ravok They had their ties to the Black Sun and the Ebonstryfe. The Galatos themselves had stood up the very location Tierra called home – The Commorancy.  There were small notes besides each family. But there wasn’t much Tierra has written thus far. Instead her gaze was elsewhere, there was an orphan boy in the corner in front picking his nose and eating them. The girl behind him was falling asleep. On the other side of the room Tierra noticed that a few of the orphans were truly paying attention.
 
Today though, Tierra wasn’t paying as much attention to the coursework that is true. Instead on the right hand edge of her paper, down the length of it she had written twenty-six different character pairings: AZ, BY, CX, all the way down to XC, YB, AZ. In where her notes would normally have been written were the ‘words’: YLB RM UILMG RH KRXPRMT SRH MLHV ZMW VZGRMT RGBoy in front is picking his nose and eating it If anyone was to pick up her notebook and find that 'note' they would easily be able to decode it with time, and Tierra was none the wiser of that currently, she felt rather smart for ciphering a line of text.

Placing pencil back to paper she kept flicking her eyes back and forth between the right hand side of the paper and where she was writing, slowly working her way through thoughts and comments and observations. Marking down notes to herself. She has paused and looked at the written stuff above, it was really hard for herself to read it. Looking around though Tierra found she was not being watched, the teacher was at the front of the room with her back turned writing on the board, the other orphans were doing their own thing. This left Tierra to her own devices. Reaching to the back of her notebook she pulled out a page as quietly as she could, it was only a scrap but it looked to be enough to write down the jumbled words she wrote earlier.

Writing the letters in the order she wrote the note down before she looked at the cryptic message and frowned, the meaning was already gone from her head, even though she had just wrote a ticks ago. Grabbing her pencil she examined the letters and tried to find the fastest way to figure out the message.
If I didn't not have the key to figure this out... How would I do it? There has to be a way to do it. Let's find it. Tierra grabbed her note book and tore the right hand line of paired letters out and folded it up and crammed it into her jacket pocket.

Once the key was tucked 'safely' away she wrote down the letters A to Z in the note taking side of her paper and counted the number of each letters she had seen. Marking them down as she went, only writing the counts down for the letter in her message.
What she had numbers written for :
B= 1 G= 3 H=3 I= 1
K= 1 L= 3 M= 6 P= 1
R= 7 S= 1 T= 2 U= 1
V= 2 W= 1 X= 1 Y= 1
Z= 2


After the tally was made she couldn't see anything that made sense. She scribbled out the coded word and tapped her pencil against the paper, thinking.
Total Threads: 9/10|ThreadAny Threads that are not solos 6/8|Solos 3 of 2

Until I have some free slots available I will not be taking on any new threads.
Thank you for understanding.


Due to some changes in my family dynamics I will be as active as I can. Please bear with me.
Tierra
You have no secrets even in shadows.
 
Posts: 131
Words: 73477
Joined roleplay: September 15th, 2014, 5:13 pm
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[The Orphanage] Lesson on Family Values... And Cryptic Words

Postby Tierra on September 12th, 2017, 12:40 am

OOCAll letters Tierra finds are in {}.

The 'words' were still visible in her attempt to blotch out their existence and that was bugging her. She wanted to make sure she could actually decode it without any help, but instead the girl found herself pulling the key back out of her pocket and setting it down on the paper and once more rewriting the 'words' in visible text again. Looking at the list of letters she had written that had their counted numbers marked. Taking note of the first letter that had a lot in her message Tierra looked at the message and underlined all of them, trying to see a pattern of some kind.

It just looked like a big jumble of letters, though she knew it had a message. She wrote it for Rhysol's sake. The letter 'R' is the highest marked letter, so that means what? It is a common letter used apparently. Okay, so what letter is it? Running her pencil down the length of her key Tierra stopped at the letter R on the left and the letter I on the right. Okay, so all the R's are I's Tierra nodded at that and penciled down lower cased i's in all the spots were the capital Rs resided. With that all finished the orphan moved her pencil away and looked at the words puzzled. Nothing rang true to her mind as words as that should have been clear.

The 'words' were still just a jumble of letters with a single letter figured out, and that was in the aid of her trust key. Placing her hand over the key and closing her notebook Tierra looked up as the Instructor cleared their throat. She was caught. Shyke.

“As I was asking Miss Tierra. What is one important thing the Galatos family did for the city?” Tierra looked down at her notebook, pulling the cover open to the page her 'notes' were on. “Uhh...” She whispered softly, even though it carried. What are they known for? That was it! She knew something. “Well, the Galatos Family has been grateful is providing us orphans a place to live. A roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and education such as this.”

The instructor nodded and turned their back around and started writing once again on the board they now faced. Tierra sighed in relief as she once again went to her notebook and examined her listing of frequently used letters. The next letter that is heavily used is... M. M converts to... The orphan's pencil tip once more ran down her key until it found M on the left and N on the right. N. M converts to N.

Moving her pencil over to her 'message' she replaced all the Ms with Ns. With this method Tierra was able to find a single word found out. It took her two iterations of her key, one for each letter. That didn't include the three or four passes through the message to make sure she got them all. I may need to pick this up later. Else I will get caught.

What the Code Looks like now :
YLB {in} UILnG {i}H K{i}XP{i}nT S{i}H {n}LHV Z{n}W VZG{in}T {i}G
Total Threads: 9/10|ThreadAny Threads that are not solos 6/8|Solos 3 of 2

Until I have some free slots available I will not be taking on any new threads.
Thank you for understanding.


Due to some changes in my family dynamics I will be as active as I can. Please bear with me.
Tierra
You have no secrets even in shadows.
 
Posts: 131
Words: 73477
Joined roleplay: September 15th, 2014, 5:13 pm
Race: Human
Character sheet
Storyteller secrets
Plotnotes

[The Orphanage] Lesson on Family Values... And Cryptic Words

Postby Tierra on October 9th, 2017, 6:45 pm

It was after the class had ended that Tierra was able to get back to work on her little message to herself. It was a bit of an interesting twist in fate that she was able to stay in the room all alone. Most times other orphans were told to leave when the instructor was leaving. Tie figured he just had forgotten she was there and left without kicking her out. Either way, it didn’t matter to the orphan. Once again her notebook was open to the message and her pencil was tapping against the white sheet with as much determination as she could muster.

“So now that the big counts are taken care of, the next largest is three of the following letters: G, H, and L. So if I go with that in mind, I will tackle the G letters first and translate them through to their proper letters.” Pulling her key of sorts so it was visible and nearby she ran the tip of her pencil slowly down the left column until she spotted the ‘G’, to the right of it was the letter ‘T’. “G to T…” With the proper changes she turned around and paused. “Okay, so if G is the same as T, that means T is the same as G? That makes sense… Right?” Tie once again ran her pencil down her key until it game across the letter ‘T’ and sure enough, on the right was the letter G.

A brief smile came to her lips as she mouthed the parts she could ‘read’. Not much was visible beyond the parts saying ‘ing’. From her reading lessons and growing up ‘ing’ words meant it was an action of some kind. “So whoever or whatever it is – is doing something…” She focused on the two encrypted words that when completely decrypted would end up with an ‘-ing’ and provide actions.

“Something –eye- something something –ing…. And something something –ting” She went down the page a bit and wrote down the words beneath one another so she could see them closer. As they were with both translated and untranslated letters Tie wrote them down so that the translated letters were underlined and lowercased and the others capitalized.

KiXPing
VZting

As soon as she wrote them down she could see that nothing lined up with them, no letters matched. At least, not with each other… “If I can crack those two words I should be able to crack the rest of the message. I don’t think they are the breaking point for this code, but they are certainly a key component. If I know the actual verbs I can figure out the rest.” She hunched over, her finger on the letter ‘K’ in her message and her pencil sliding down her key. Her eyes darting back and forth to keep track of both the location in her message so she didn’t lose it and the key itself. Once she landed on the letter K she found it matched up with the letter P. “K is to P… That makes sense though, M equals N, and K is two letters before M and P is two letters after N.” Tierra wrote that tidbit down on the bottom of her page. The note looks like this:

K -2-> M <--> N -2-> P

It was, in its own way, a cryptic note, but it was something Tierra understood for now. Back to the message though, Tierra read the two words. “Pi - something-king…” Her lips screwed up in thought, “Only one word makes sense in that case and that would be the word ‘picking’ so, the X should be a C… Picking.”

Once more Tierra read through the sentence. “something in something something picking something something something eating it.” Tierra drummed her pencil against the desk, tapping it as she thought through the message.

What the Code Looks like now :
YLB {in} UIL{nt} {i}H {picking} S{i}H {n}LHV Z{n}W VZ{ting} {it}


WC: 648
Total Threads: 9/10|ThreadAny Threads that are not solos 6/8|Solos 3 of 2

Until I have some free slots available I will not be taking on any new threads.
Thank you for understanding.


Due to some changes in my family dynamics I will be as active as I can. Please bear with me.
Tierra
You have no secrets even in shadows.
 
Posts: 131
Words: 73477
Joined roleplay: September 15th, 2014, 5:13 pm
Race: Human
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[The Orphanage] Lesson on Family Values... And Cryptic Words

Postby Tierra on October 11th, 2017, 4:53 pm

It was no longer as easy to determine what the next letter was so Tierra went to her trusty key, in this case the 26 pairings of letters that ran down a strip of paper. She started with the first letter in the sentence, the ‘Y’. With her finger the orphan ran down the left until she found the letter Y, and its partner in crime on the right: the letter ‘B’

“Y to B… B to Y” She went through her message and replaced the Y’s with B’s, there was only one, at the beginning… And there was only one B, which she promptly flipped to a Y. “B something Y… If this is a noun then it would be the one performing the action of picking… But what? Bay? Boy? Buy? Bey? Biy?” Tierra wrote these words down on the side, the middle letter was underlined to illustrate the missing constraint.

Bay
Boy
Bey
Biy
Buy

Of those words she was able to immediately cross out ‘buy’ as that was an action, and she was fairly certain that the message was starting with a noun. ‘Biy’ and ‘Bey’ were also just as quickly ruled out because she knew that they were not real words. This left: Boy and Bay. She looked at the words. “If B is to Y… That means… A is to….” Tierra thought for a second before thumping her hand against her forehead, “Z! Of course… Reverse the alphabet.” She muttered. The middle letter was ‘L’, so that removed ‘bay’ as an option leaving Boy.

“Boy it is.” And with that change she smiled and now had the beginning of the message.

“Boy in something something picking something something something eating it” She giggled at figuring it out, “That means though that ‘L’ is moved to ‘O’ and I can make that change now.” With a bit of logical thinking on her end she was able to not only figure out another word, she was able to determine the correct results of another letter. It was slowly coming together. “So what would a boy be picking…” She looked down at her message. “Something he owns? Someone else’s stuff?” She read through the message briefly again.

After a few ticks of thinking she was almost certain it was something he owned, “The action of picking is followed by two words, something something… That first something must be his. It has to be, the middle letter is an I, so it can’t be her, and it is only three letters long so it isn’t them or theirs or something like that. So yes, must be him.” She leaned down and replaced the S{i}H*Following same format as below in the spoiler for readability sake with his, it also coincide that the letters H and S were paired together, this Tierra was able to doublecheck on her key… “That means the word before picking is the word is.”

Another quick scrawling scribble with her pencil and she was able to replace the encrypted word with ‘is’. “That also helps figure out that the word after ‘his’ has an ‘s’ in it.”

One those changes were made she read through the message as much as she could “Boy in something is picking his something something something it. What does a boy have that started with n-o-s?” This felt an obvious answer that Tierra felt was right there in front of her face… Literally. “Nose!” She exclaimed, granted no one else was in the room she still hunched down a bit embarrassed. “That means ‘V’ is ‘E’. means that the boy was picking his nose something e something ting…”

Tierra shuddered, “Gross he was eating it. A to Z. Gross. He was picking his nose and eating it…” She grimaced at her own message after she changed the ‘W’ to a ‘D’. “That leaves one word… One single word. What kind of word is it?” A frown creased her face. “Let’s see here. I am sitting here at the back of the classroom. I didn’t look to my left or right at all, so the kid isn’t in the back, meaning I was looking ahead.” She frowned, “If he isn’t in back he is in…. Middle?”

Tierra leaned forward and marked down the word middle with each letter, it was clear immediately that middle was not the correct word. “Not middle… That leaves one location…” She wrote down the word front, underlining the first two letters.

front. “The message says something something o-n-t… That has to be front.” And with those two letters in her message replaced with ‘fr’ Tierra was able to see the full message as it was decode.

“Boy in front is picking his nose and eating it. Gross.” She grimaced and giggled at the same time. “I did it. I figured out my own message.” Tierra scribbled the message out so it was nothing more than a heavily marked spot in the middle of her notes. The key of 26 pairings got shoved into her coat picket, where it would remain unless she needed it.

What the Code Looks like now :
{Boy} {in} {front} {is} {picking} {his} {nose} {and} {eating} {it}



WC: 838
Total Threads: 9/10|ThreadAny Threads that are not solos 6/8|Solos 3 of 2

Until I have some free slots available I will not be taking on any new threads.
Thank you for understanding.


Due to some changes in my family dynamics I will be as active as I can. Please bear with me.
Tierra
You have no secrets even in shadows.
 
Posts: 131
Words: 73477
Joined roleplay: September 15th, 2014, 5:13 pm
Race: Human
Character sheet
Storyteller secrets
Plotnotes

[The Orphanage] Lesson on Family Values... And Cryptic Words

Postby Madeira Dusk on February 15th, 2018, 11:42 pm

Image
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Tierra

Skills
  • Observation: 1xp
  • Logic: 4xp
  • Cryptography: 4xp
  • Deduction: 3xp
  • Subterfuge: 1xp

Lores
  • Galatos Family: runs the orphanage
  • Cryptography: key code

Awards & Retribution


Notes
Nicely done. Honestly, most of this went over my head, but I feel smarter just having read it. I look forward to seeing Tierra cracking more complicated codes in the future!

If you have any questions or concerns, please PM me.
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Madeira Dusk
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