Mysterious Shapes

Prince Link rubbed his head. For a man sitting at a wonderful, mahogany desk, in a large bedroom, with a king-sized bed at its centre, he was certainly stressed out. “Did you send out all the invites?” he asked for the third time.

“Yes, my lord. Please don’t fret, we are an hour away from the gathering,” his aid replied. She was a mature woman with greying hair and a calming presence.

“Erin has to see that I’m exciting. Do you understand?”

“My lord, you are the prince. You are exciting if you say so.”

The prince groaned. “You know, Vivian… sometimes I wish I wasn’t a prince. That way, I’d know what people really think of me as a person,” he said, halfheartedly. Then, he leaned in conspiratorially. “Has Erin ever spoken to you about me?” he asked.

“Sir, she’s only been hear a day and night and she’s quite the recluse,” Vivian apologetically told him.

“You’re old, right?”

Vivian hid her annoyance well. “Older than you. Why?”

“You must have some dating wisdom to impart on your favourite royal, don’t you? Do you think a man like me has a chance with a woman as beautiful as Erin?”

“Of course. You’re the prince. You have the money and the power-”

“Yes, yes, I know,” the prince interrupted with palpable irritation. “But I’m referring to my appearance, Vivian. Am I handsome to you?”

“To me, I can’t answer. Erin, on the other hand…” Vivian looked up as she thought about it. “My lord, I don’t think your appearance is of any concern to that woman,” she concluded.

“Why not?” Prince Link asked, curiously.

“Well, my lord… I think lady Erin is blind.”

***

The room we entered was smaller and emptier than the last. The walls were made of bricks and there were windows for the first time. Sure, they were too high for us to look out of, but they were a much-needed reminder of the outside world. In the centre of the room was a rectangular, wooden table. It looked slightly weathered, yet sturdy all the same. On the table were five A5 notebooks. We each took a chair. There were exactly five of them. I sat in front of the black notebook, Kiru in front of the white one, Kelani the blue, Guam the green and, of course, Taul sat in front of the red notebook. In the middle of the table was a wooden plaque. Guam read it aloud:

“Solve the puzzles in this notebook to find the correct door.”

“Easy,” Taul said, eagerly opening up his notebook. He hummed. “It’s a cipher.”

“Everyone, open up your notebooks and see what’s in them,” Guam instructed.

Upon doing so, we realised that they were all ciphers of different kinds.

Kelani looked excited. “Finally, something of interest!”

Meanwhile, Taul groaned. “I don’t want to sit around writing things down. The first trial was boring enough,” he said.

Much like Kelani, I rejoiced. I’d studied cryptography extensively and had often solved ciphers for fun. I opened my notebook. It was empty, safe for a handful of symbols written on the first page. I grinned. I knew these symbols. It was a simple pigpen cipher.

I started by drawing the classic pigpen cipher key, then got to work. The designer had tried to trick me by adding undecodable symbols, sometimes in the middle of words, but I easily sidestepped them. I added all decipherable symbols together and using my key, I decoded the cipher. The phrase read: "Hear say of all wrong things in order to resist."

It reads like a warning about deception or manipulation. But why is it so strangely worded? I wondered. “Has everyone finished theirs?”

Kiru and Kelani were done, but Taul and Guam told me to hold off.

“Let’s share what we have so far, and then we’ll all work on the last two,” I suggested.

“No, I can do this!” Guam and Taul cried in unison.

“Okay…” I said, putting my hands up in surrender. “Do you guys want to share your results?” I asked Kiru and Kelani.

“Sure, I’ll go,” Kelani volunteered. She set her notebook down for all to see. On it, was a large 5x5 grid drawn in black ink. It read:

“K E Y A B

C D F G H

I L M N O

P Q R S T

U V W X Z”

Underneath it, was the gibberish phrase: “N KO YNESBOS, N KR MQYY, AIZ GKI XQA LY GX BMWP EYK. M YN YSKQNZ.”

A Playfair cipher?

“Luckily, I know exactly what this type of cipher is. The grid is almost the alphabet, but the J is missing, and the letters K, E and Y are all at the start,” she began. “So, I did what you do with this sort of thing,” she said, casually flipping the page. We were met with a lot of scribbling. “I paired up the letters and switched their columns, to obtain…”

I looked down at her answer: “IAMBLATANTIAMFREEYOUCANUSEMEASYOURKEYIAMAREPO.”

“I am blatant, I am free, you can use me as your key. I am a repo,” Kelani read. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the last five letters, but there’s no way I got them wrong. What the hell is a repo’?” she asked.

“Beats me," I admitted. "Kiru, you’re next up."

Kelani moved her notebook, so Kiru’s could replace it. It read:

“07-18-14-22 25-22-13-23-08 25-06-07 13-22-05-22-09 25-09-22-26-16-08 26-11-26-09-07, 19-22-26-09-07-08 22-13-23-06-09-22 04-18-07-19 08-07-22-26-23-02 21-15-26-14-22, 14-18-13-23-08 14-26-02 21-26-15-07-22-09 02-22-07 08-07-18-15-15 08-22-22-16, 08-19-26-23-22-08 09-22-24-22-23-22 25-22-21-12-09-22 07-19-22 23-26-04-13, 07-09-06-08-07 26-15-12-13-22 04-18-15-15 22-05-22-09 15-26-08-07.”

“The numbers only went up to twenty-six, so I figured I was dealing with a letter-number substitution. If that was the case, I could write off the zeroes as distractions used to make all number sequences the same length. This is what I got:”

He turned the page and pointed to the first sentence written on it:

“Grnv yvmwh yfg mvevi yivzph zkzig,

svzigh vmwfiv drgs hgvzwb uoznv,

nrmwh nzb uzogvi bvg hgroo hvvp,

hszwvh ivxvwv yvuliv gsv wzdm,

gifhg zolmv droo vevi ozhg.”

“Did you screw it up?” Kelani asked.

“Part way through, I started to doubt myself,” Kiru admitted. “But I decided to carry my logic all the way. Given how frequently the letter z appeared, I figured it might be a stand-in for another letter. I ran down a list of commonly used letters and found ‘a’ to be the most fitting. That led me to the conclusion that all letters were inversed. A became Z, B became Y and so on,” he reasoned. “In the end, here’s what I got:

Time bends but never breaks apart,
hearts endure with steady flame,
minds may falter yet still seek,
shades recede before the dawn,
trust alone will ever last.”

“It’s a poem,” I concluded. Kiru nodded. Something told me we weren’t going to hear him speak for that long ever again.

“Got it!” Guam exclaimed. He slammed his notebook down over Kiru’s. Pictures of clocks were carefully hand drawn on page one. I counted sixteen. “I’ll make this quick. The hour hand depicts letters. Given the twelve hours on a clock, but twenty-six letters in the alphabet, the puzzle is split into two blocks: block one is A to J and block two equals M to X. The minute hand shows you which block the letter belongs to, in intervals of five,” he ranted. “If the hour hand is on 1 and the minute hand on :00, that's A. If it's on 1 and :05, then it's B."

Kelani blinked. “Just tell us the solution,” she said, irritated.

“Fine, fine. It reads…” he dramatically flipped the page. “What is a wheel?”

Before we could discuss the answer, Taul shrieked in triumph. We all snapped our necks to face him.

“What the hell are you screaming for?” Kelani angrily shouted.

“I am blatant, I am free, you can use me as your key. I am a repo,” Taul said, cryptically. “It wasn't 'a repo,' it was 'arepo,' and it was the key to my cipher! I finally have my answer!” he cried, overjoyed. “See? I told you I’m not stupid!”

“Nobody said you were,” Kelani pointed out.

“Well, go on then. Show us your solution,” I urged. We’d already been here for thirty-eight minutes, and I was getting nervous.

“Behold!” he decreed, slamming his notebook down over both Kiru and Guam’s notebooks. The cipher text read: “YLUII SOO TDO LMOQA FK TFJO.”

“I suspected it to be a basic substitution cipher, so I tried every trick in the book. However, I clearly needed a key. Well, when Kelani read her solution, I got curious and wrote this down:”

Taul had written two rows of letters in surprisingly neat handwriting:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

AREPOBCDFGHIJKLMNQSTUVWXYZ

“Substituting the first five letters of the alphabet for AREPO led me to a coherent sentence. The answer is ‘You’ll see the opera in time,’” he proudly declared.

“Okay, so what does all of this mean?” Kelani asked, impatiently. “We’ve been here for forty-five minutes, after all!”

Opera?! OPERA… AREPO… “What is a wheel?” It can’t be…

I quickly scribbled something down and picked up my own notebook. “Hear say of all wrong things in order to resist.” That was my deciphered text. If this was what I thought it was, then there had to be one of two words hidden in this message. I found it almost immediately.

Take the first letter of every two words. SATOR.

The others were still discussing our answers. I frantically yanked Kiru’s notebook off the pile, causing them to jump.

“Time bends but never breaks apart,
hearts endure with steady flame,
minds may falter yet still seek,
shades recede before the dawn,
trust alone will ever last.”

I already knew what word to look for…

There! First letter of the first row, second letter of the second, third of the third and fourth of the fourth. TENET.

I went as pale as a man dying of the plague. “I’ve solved it…” I gasped.

“Really?” Guam asked, concerned about my complexion.

“Then why do you look like you’ve just seen a ghost?” Taul questioned.

“Just tell us the answer, so we can get out of here,” Kelani groaned.

Kiru quietly observed me but remained silent.

These are the words for a Sator square. They’re Latin words…