Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

You'll need to know what came before
To get to what comes next.
Two things, an answer and a method.
Both are mine, and both are important.
The soul surgeon knows one,
The mild maid knows the other.
You'll need them to continue.
Hog'h wzxfg tybq vodi.......................You'd enjoy this more,
Ar mfc pixrnnpiv kcl eeix Zjtyef........If you pretended you were Batman.
Tsim, I'ce ervq cgg gfue yxjy............Here I'll give you some help,
Od, vsfvvz, Wyxycsfsfq kztl..............Or, rather Wheatstone will.
Ity qxaea jz 3an9SKtJ gi Xhlhpiwi....Raa hxoai xl 3sn9ZMkJ ue Fvxghifp. 3jf9STaL xi Ldtvbroi.
Efp hun rhaww ixzcbkgdqem.............Gwp vqu ftjow rebtbycleqv.* Nns yub npoif axjjdbgrmma.

"This is the beginning of part two. My previous riddle was just an introduction. I let you start things off slow. My apologies to Risu for the forthcoming mess."

Answer - Artemis Fowl II

Guesses from 16493 - 16698
[Riddle temporarily suspended due to technical failure.]
Guesses from 16915 - 17059

Casualties: 1

Clues:

"There are two RRRs [Riddle Room Regulars] mentioned in the current part of the riddle."

"Since Val has not been showing up lately, here's a hint for his part:
2:5:.2.4:.7::3:
"It shouldn't be very difficult."

"If any of you solve this, I'll give you a hint."


Other Information:

"For the last riddle, the first part was an increasing letter shift, oscillating up and down, and restarting after 13. The second part was a telephone code: The number in each two-character pair was the number on a telephone, and the letter (A, B, or C) was the letter off of that number (A being the first, etc.). After identifying the poem Riding Fons, you got to the actual riddle."

The answer to the previous riddle was Professor James Moriarty

On a riddle-related note, I studied the riddle again, trying to apply different techniques to solve it, but to no avail. Hopefully with Gorn's new hint I might be able to find something. I have a theory that "Efp" is "the.".

"You would not be able to do the first decoding without the previous riddle."

"I'm gonna tell you this now, since it may be confusing (that is, more confusing than intended). The answer was given to me, and the method was given by me." [Soul Surgeon = Valgee] [Mild Maid = Atomsk]

I have a theory that 3an9SKtJ is a website because of the presence of numbers.

"Look for patterns, and post your thoughts. Maybe start with the part that I said was easy."

"I'm not sure, but I THINK that "Xhlhpiwi" is Wikipedia, or something like that." (I shifted the three first letters one to the left and got "Wiki" )
"I'm pretty sure 'Xhlhpiwi' is one letter too short to be 'Wikipedia'."

"I don't know whether this conclusion is legitimate or not, but considering the telephone code from earlier if Valgee corresponds to 2:5:.2.4:.7::3: then according to the phone that would be Blaise, and that could possible correspond to Blaise Pascal, which means Atomsk would become 7.2.7::2:.2.5:. since Pascal conveniently has the six corresponding letters necessary to match up."

"Well, you've correctly decoded it. It does indeed say 'Blaise'."

"Is the vsfvvz part the word esteem?" No

The tight Blaise is on this list.

"The Vigenere Cipher was the method from Val. That just leaves..."

Using the Vigenere cypher, the first four lines of the encoded message read, 'You'd enjoy this more, / If you pretended you were Batman. / Here I'll give you some help, / Or, rather Wheatstone will.' I'm assuming this is to suggest that the last two lines, which don't work out with the Vigenere cypher, are actually in a Playfair cyphe.r

"You're ignoring parts of the riddle."

"Maybe I should follow the advice of my roommate: type the riddle into my calculator, press enter, and if this causes my calculator to generate a taco out of thin air then I win. I wish that would happen. A taco-generating-riddle would be amazing."

"I have a feeling that 'Xhlhpiwi' is 'pastebin'. Mostly because it has the right amount of letters. Also because '3an9SKtJ' seems like it could be a pastebin thingy.

"I don't think the last two lines are a Playfair cipher. Mostly because it has the letters J, I, and Q and because of this.

"So the method was from Val and it was a Vigenère cipher, right? So the answer was from Atomsk, and Atomsk answered the last Gorn-riddle. So the answer mentioned in this riddle is James Moriarty? And that was used to solve the Vigenère cipher, so everything from the first part of the riddle has been used, right?

"So are we ignoring the batman part of the riddle? Or is there something else from the previous riddle that we're ignoring? These questions are rhetorical, by the way."

*The last line was doubly encrypted
you'll want to use the version that came out after you decoded it with the vigenere:
The last two lines no longer Vigenère cipher-ed:
Raa hxoai xl 3sn9ZMkJ ue Fvxghifp.
Gwp vqu ftjow rebtbycleqv.

Maybe it's a null cipher, since that was mentioned in The Dark Knight.

I'm still pretty stuck on the Playfair thing, part of me thinks it's a Playfair cipher using a batman-based keyword. I've tried a few of them, I'll leave a list of the keywords I've tried.
All squares for the cipher have been written from left to right and restarting at the far left, one row down at every fifth letter. It's not impossible that the letters could have been in a spiral or something, but that would be pretty cruel.
The following have been tried as keywords so far:
-The Riddler
-Riddler
-The Joker
-Joker
-Hugo
-Strange
-Hugo Strange
-Dr. Hugo Strange
-Bruce
-Wayne
-Bruce Wayne
-Batman
-I am the darkness
-I am the night
-I am Batman
-Darkness
-Night
-I'm the Batman
-I am the Batman
To this point they've all yielded gibberish when used to attempt to decipher the riddle.

Whoever decrypted the last two lines messed up. Sorry I didn't notice it earlier, but it's not exactly obvious, and the rest was done right. The correct key for the Playfair is on that list, though. <---- Gorn

I accidentally closed it, so I can't get the full conversation, but this covers every important bit including me not understanding.
Valgee: Okay, okay. You say the first three words were correct, but the only way I'm seeing Ity-Raa is if the codeword started with JHC.
=(e)=Haragorn:uh
=(e)=Haragorn:I think the first three
=(e)=Haragorn:everything before the first number
Oh wait, I think I know what I'm doing.... actually..
Yeah- Yeah. I know what I did. Ignore what I said, Gorn says the first three words are right.
Okay, so I'm fairly certain these are the last lines correctly decoded:
3jf9STaL xi Ldtvbroi.
Nns yub npoif axjjdbgrmma.
This may require checking. I kept messing up in the beginning, so I'm not positive of how well I did it this time.

Okay, I was able to go over it on my lunch break and the deciphered version I came up with was 'Raa hxoai xl 3jf9STaL xi Ldtvbroi, / Nmr yub npoif axijdbgrmma.' but to be fair, I was rushing at the time, so it's not impossible that I might have messed up, but I'll check it over and fix it if I see any problems.
Aaaaand, after a few times running through the message to check for mistakes, the above interpretation should be error free.

First of all, the key to the Playfair cipher was Bruce Wayne, or more appropriately BRUCEWAYN written from left to right and starting again at the right at the end of each row, omitting Q from the 26 letters. This yields the following message:
'Try going to 3ij9ZSrG on Pastebin, / You are doing Wonderfully.
Now, if you follow the link to www.pastebin.com/3ij9ZSrG you reach another encoded message, this one stating that the key is the capital of Jetstone, which I took to mean Spacerock, the capital of the area called Jetstone in the webcomic Erfworld. However, this in no way helped me decode the message so I just followed the trends and bashed my way through it to yield this second message:
'What does Fumbles the goblin say the very first time he uses the first feat he gets? Go to tinyurl.com/TheAnswerToThatQuestionWithoutSpaces.
A little searching on the internet revealed that Fumbles the goblin is from the webcomic Goblins and the first feat he gets is called Dodge. Upon receiving it he says, 'I declare my dodge on you'. Therefore, the next link to follow is www.tinyurl.com/IDeclareMyDodgeOnYou, which will lead you to the final part of the riddle, or so I assume, I haven't solved that yet but I'm assured it's not a cipher again.

Spacerock one was just a keyword cipher.

___________________________________________________________________________

0 - 9 - 007, 1

A - Arithmancy, Artemis Fowl, Avatar (Last Airbender, the), Avocado

B - Bananas, Bane, Battle of Hogwarts, Binary Code, Blaise (Saint)

C - Catholicism, Conan Doyle (Sir Arthur)

D - Darren Criss, Dynamics of an Asteroid (The)

E -

F - Fingerprints, Fire Nation

G -

H - Half-Blood Prince, Hush

I - Le Petit Prince

J - Jansenism, Jersey, Joker (The)

K - Kittens

L - Life, Lord Haragorn, Love

M - Magnifying Glass, Math, Missingno, Moran (Colonel Sebastian), Morse code

N -

O - Oxygen

P - Pascal (Blaise),Penny, Philosophy, Prometheus

Q -

R - Ra's Al Ghul, Riddler (the)

S - Service, Sherlock Holmes, Slughorn (Horace), Snape (Severus), Solar System, Sore Throats, Starkid, Strange (Professor Hugo), Stutter, Sun

T - Tax, Theory of Relativity

U - Umbridge (Dolores), Universe

V - Very Potter Sequel (a)

W - Watson (Dr John H.), Wool

X -

Y -

Z - Zabini (Blaise), Zodiac killer (Seito Sakakibara)

Uncategorised -