• Graded • Routing the worshippers

In which Inali works for the Old Guard of Etzos

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Inali
Posts: 353
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 8:18 pm
Race: Eídisi
Profession: Tutor & Cryptographer
Renown: 35
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Routing the worshippers

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Ymiden 1, 718
Early evening

Inali swore lightly in the Ancient Tongue, knowing that all the other members of the Old Guard were far enough that they wouldn’t hear her struggle with this particularly difficult cipher. While Lerrik Calloso was fair and beloved by many, he had not taken kindly to her absence from the faction. Ever since she had returned, her evenings and nights were filled with pages of ciphers and keys, each demanding prompt decryption and breaks of her precious time. It wasn’t a punishment, per say, but Inali felt the weight of the reminder every time she trudged up the steps and through the oak door that signaled she was among fellow cryptographers and researchers. The latest encoded message had been spirited away from the Underground by a group of known worshippers of Syroa. They had left the rogue worshippers alone until there were reports of items being stolen and a drunk individual being viciously attacked. When the victim recovered, he could remember little of the traumatic attack, though many presumed he had said something distasteful about the group or their patron Immortal. The deep gashes that lacerated his body was more than enough to gain the attention of Lerrik. Privileges many Etzori enjoyed – such as worshipping Immortals in the privacy of their homes – would be at risk if the group made it out of the Underground and up to the streets of the city.

The letter that Inali had been given had been written in haste, and she allowed her fingertips to trace the smudged ink and sloppy lettering. This was generally a good sign. Those who were familiar with cryptography and stenography might place smudges intentionally to signal which key to use among many, but there were far too many on this piece of parchment. Even better, the haste in which it was written allowed her to make an educated guess that the group used only one cipher and had gotten quite comfortable with it. The hallmarks of a brand-new cipher could also be found within dried ink – letters were spaced further apart, and the ink often bled through the parchment as the writer hesitated and double checked the key they used. She flipped the paper over and confirmed that none of the ink had bled through.

Next, she wrote all the letters of the alphabet down on her own parchment and counted the number of times each was used before noting it next to the letter. The creator of the cipher had not been wise enough to utilize multiple alphabets, so it was a quick process to denote the number of times each of the 26 letters appeared. She circled the numbers that were notably high and underlined those that were low. She had prepared for this moment by picking up one of the Guard’s many reference sheets. In Common, the letters ‘E’, ‘T’, and ‘A’ were the most used. Conversely, she knew that ‘X’, ‘J’, and ‘Z’ were the least used. Now that she had identified possible candidates to begin digging into the text, she copied the entire letter onto another sheet of parchment and left a moderate amount of space in the margins and between the letters. While the Syroa worshippers were not advanced in some parts of her trade, they were smart enough to know that spaces within a message made it much easier to crack. This message was a string of letters with no punctuation to guide her. Inali smiled and stood up to make a cup of strong tea. While the night would be long, she had asked for this work when she approached the Patron of the city.
word count: 614
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Inali
Posts: 353
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 8:18 pm
Race: Eídisi
Profession: Tutor & Cryptographer
Renown: 35
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Routing the worshippers

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Now that she had an outline of the letters used and their frequency, she could begin the real work. Inali returned the first reference sheet and searched the stacks for one under the ‘C’ section. Her fingers moved through the neatly ordered sheets until she found the one she needed for this task. She brought it back to the table, stretched her arms and legs, and sat back down. This reference sheet was entitled: “Common: Frequent 2 and 3 letter words”. The sheet had a list of many words that were commonly used, ordered by frequency of appearance. Inali started with the two letter words and tried to match the three most common letters that she identified earlier. First, she searched the most common letter, which happened to be ‘R’ in the coded letter. For every instance of ‘R’, the Eidisi underlined the ‘R’ and the letter to the left with one red stroke, and the R to the right with a stroke of green ink. This method ensured that if the code was written backwards as a safeguard, she wouldn’t spend precious time trying to unravel a non-existent cipher. From the reference sheet, Inali listed the potential two letter words in the margin: Be, he, and me. She repeated this process for the two letter words that included a “T’: to and at. Lastly, she identified all the two letter words that included an ‘A’: as, at, an, and am.

There were, of course, other two letter words that showed up commonly. She would be looking for ‘my’ and ‘me’ especially, but she kept the reference sheet handy in case there were others that she missed. Inali took a few bits to close her eyes and focus her thoughts on matters other than cryptography. While it might look silly to an onlooker, this practice was critical if you wanted to stay sharp. Simply pushing through the exhaustion led to mistakes that took hours to unravel. Being confident that the three-letter chain you found was ‘she’ when it was actually ‘lie’ was devastating. She had made this mistake multiple times when she started working with ciphers, and then repeated the same error out of frustration. Both cryptography and forgery required a steady hand and mind to perform.

After her break was over, she pushed the sheet a foot across the table and stared only at the lines. The concentration and placement of the lines would tell her many things, but only if she sought them out. A preponderance of two letter words often meant that a group was over-using the words ‘he’ or ‘me’. These missives were generally letters or reports of current activities. From there, one could look at the first few letters of the missive to determine if a greeting was used. Many ciphers had been cracked by simply identifying the greetings ‘hello’, ‘my lord’, or ‘sir’. She doubted a faction that made their home in the Underground would use such pompous terms, so she pushed on, urging her eyes to see beyond the letters and into the colored lines that would serve as the basis for her key.
word count: 525
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Inali
Posts: 353
Joined: Fri Aug 26, 2016 8:18 pm
Race: Eídisi
Profession: Tutor & Cryptographer
Renown: 35
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Routing the worshippers

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Finally, she found had found a clue in this mess of a letter. She had found a group of letters that appeared multiple times in the document – KQJGS. The four mentions of this mysterious KQJGS were usually near one of the two letter words. More interestingly, the same two letter set ‘XN’ always appeared before this new five letter set. In the times Inali had seen this pattern before, it usually referenced a pronoun like ‘he’ or ‘me’ and it referred to the trailing word. The five-letter word wasn’t critical to decipher at this point, though she imagined it was likely the name of a person or location. With her knowledge of linguistics, Inali knew that the sentences where ‘me’ proceeded another name or place was rare. It was grammatically incorrect and grated the mind of anyone who read it. A good cryptographer would have scrubbed pronouns or tried to combine them with other words. It was becoming more apparent that this group of Syroa worshippers did not employ a skilled cryptographer. Inali started her proposed key, betting that the ‘XN’ pair stood for ‘He’ and referred to someone that the organization knew or was tracking.

On a fresh sheet of parchment, Inali wrote the missive out again, this time giving the rows of text far more room above and below. A small ‘E’ was written atop all the ‘N’s and a ‘H’ was written atop all the ‘X’s. Two letters down – hopefully. Inali breathed in and ran her hand over the parchment that held a dizzying array of lines. For now, she could focus on common digraphs – assuming that the letter e was paired with other letters in a predictable order. The digraphs that went along with E always irked her – the list contained 9 pairs – from the ubiquitous -er that was utilized as a suffix to the more uncommon ve- which was used in words like very. It was easy to ignore the last four digraphs. Due to the time needed to encode these missives, few people wasted their effort on descriptive words like ‘very’.

After another five breaks of fevered work – Inali had a finalized key that could be used to decode the cipher. With shaking hands, she rewrote the missive on a clean sheet of paper for the third and final time. The translated text was provided just above the letters in red ink.

It was done.

The letter was damning, and she had a feeling that the Syroa worshippers would be dealt with quickly. The ‘XN’ pair had indeed stood for ‘he’, and the ‘he’ that the group referred to was their next target – a man who was outspoken and brash about all Immortal worship. While there was no direct mention of killing, the implication laid out in the letter was very clear.

Inali grinned to herself and placed the final transcript and key atop the Patron’s desk. An envelope to the side contained her work which would be archived in case the cipher showed up again. Finally, she could go home and rest.
word count: 514
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Adam Michaels
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Posts: 180
Joined: Wed Apr 20, 2016 7:09 pm
Race: Human
Renown: 0
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Routing the worshippers

Overview

I for one am happy to have you back in our fold. And this thread was informative with attention to meticulous detail, don't be so quick to sell yourself short this was crisp and wonderful. I don't know anything about cracking codes but I felt like a kid that got a decoder ring out of the cereal box as Inali sluethed around looking for clues. You have wonderful passion, and I've always admired that and look forward to having more threads like this to read.

While I understand the new ways will be difficult to adjust too, with your drive and commitment Inali will go far as you the writer are in control of your characters growth and progression.

Although you did leave quite the cliffhanger, I wonder who could be the most outspoken against the immortals.

Points

XP: 10

Loot/Injuries/Overstepping

Loot: none
Renown : 10 for cracking the code, and intercepting valuable information in your cipher for the old guard.

Knowledge

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-Cryptography: Two letter digraphs (Common)
-Cryptography: Most frequently used letters in ciphers (Common)
-Cryptography: Difficult ciphers can be written in reverse
-Cryptography: Two letter pairs often signal 'he' or 'me' (Common)
-Cryptography: Missives need to be re-written multiple times to be decoded
-Detection: Observing a hidden pattern within noise
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word count: 240
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