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JehosephatDostoevsky · Veteran Joined: 15 Apr 2011 Posts: 98 Location: UK

aha! I knew something didn't quite sit right. The poem just seemed a bit... detached from the story? It just didn't feel like an end in and of itself to me. Excited to see what this new parchment is.

Nice one on working out that message, completely missed it meself

**Posted:** Mon Jun 06, 2011 4:44 am

Zobot257

Now that WAS an impressive puzzle. Kudos, guys! I would have never solved that.

**Posted:** Mon Jun 06, 2011 11:39 am

draghkar

Well done.. Smile

**Posted:** Mon Jun 06, 2011 1:12 pm

_________________
I live... wake me when I die
Call me nightshade, since I am known as such in the summer court

draghkar

has anyone seen the new parchment yet?

**Posted:** Wed Jun 08, 2011 3:21 am

_________________
I live... wake me when I die
Call me nightshade, since I am known as such in the summer court

nomad

I found those Axelrod references a bit too persistent to be unrelated and took a liberty to look it up. And yep, I got something: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Innocence

**Posted:** Wed Jun 08, 2011 4:46 pm

Cephalopod · Boot Joined: 05 Oct 2010 Posts: 20

Hey guys, I got a message from Howard and also got the parchment.

Here's the message:

**Posted:** Wed Jun 08, 2011 10:17 pm

draghkar

got the same message... possibly the missing letters ~~give a keyword??~~ spell out

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 3:46 am

_________________
I live... wake me when I die
Call me nightshade, since I am known as such in the summer court

Minz · Decorated Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 183

Well, concerning the parchment, there is some text blended into it. If it is a scan of invisible ink, we should tell Howard to try and heat it up or look at it under UV light.
If that is not an option, there is always photoshop =)
Ramping up the contrast on the Cyan and Magenta channels, I got this :

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:11 am

Xerorex · Guest

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:29 am

Xerorex · Guest

Oh, sorry for the double post. That's also Venus' symbol on the right? Maybe Uranus? I know it belonged to one of the planets/greek god.

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:31 am

JehosephatDostoevsky · Veteran Joined: 15 Apr 2011 Posts: 98 Location: UK

It's the symbol for mercury. Minz, genius idea on the cyan & magenta thing. I got the e-mail too, I zoomed in on the jpg file and you can definitely see the letters don't need to be rotated or anything, they're written forward but they don't seem to make any sense. I saw "geb" in there, so thought it might be needed to be read backwards, but other words appear to be random, such as "bixb" or "fiiloqxifqu (or v)" which to me suggests some kind of code

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 6:04 am

reesylou · Decorated Joined: 07 May 2003 Posts: 260

Attempted to get what letters I could from the parchment... some of them are tricky to distinguish because of the script used (for example b/h, i/j). Others are tricky because of the coloration.

What I have extracted is:

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 6:52 am

draghkar

~~I was thinking a vignere, due to the randomness of characters.. but no luck so far.. can we make out the text fully?~~ its ROT-3

I have sent a mail to howard asking if he has a UV light to get a better show of the text, but in the meantime we need to work with what we have..

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 6:57 am

_________________
I live... wake me when I die
Call me nightshade, since I am known as such in the summer court

JehosephatDostoevsky · Veteran Joined: 15 Apr 2011 Posts: 98 Location: UK

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 7:12 am

reesylou · Decorated Joined: 07 May 2003 Posts: 260

**Posted:** Thu Jun 09, 2011 8:26 am