PSTH: Chapter Fifty-Two

Because dragons are cool, that’s why!

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Conclusion to a lecture on the apparently draconic shaped nature of many Primals, 117 Modern-Era

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I snatched up the piece of paper and unrolled it, half expecting to see another riddle. After all, the guy I’d spoken to at the desk had told me something along the lines of the box containing instructions on how to complete the challenge, rather than saying that the box was the challenge. 

I didn’t exactly get a riddle, but nor was I lucky enough that it said that I’d completed the challenge and was all done. Instead, the paper was covered with numbers, row after row of numbers separated by either short or long dashes. Scanning through them, it looked like the highest number was twenty-six, while the lowest number was one. I might not be an expert cryptographer – heart’s truth, I’m not even a novice cryptographer – but there was only one thing that I could think of that correlated easily from one to twenty-six: the alphabet. Admittedly, that was ignoring any of the letters that had a diacritic, like ñ, but those could probably be pieced together using context clues. 

I opened a blank page on my augpad and smoothed out the paper, giving it a sniff. It didn’t have the faint scent that seaweed paper tended to have, and I wondered if it was actual wooden paper. I realized I was getting distracted, and I turned to my augpad and began to slowly translate the numbers to their relevant number. I was so focused on my letter by letter translation that I didn’t stop to read it over until I was done, at which point I stared. 

It was utter nonsense. I had made an assumption that the short dashes were merely to indicate different numbers, while the long dashes were indicative of different words, but even if that hadn’t been right, it still didn’t explain the utter mishmash of chaotic letters on the page. Even a wrong spacing assumption and the lack of diacritics wasn’t a real explanation for the nonsense on the page before me. 

I sighed and flipped to a new page on my augpad, then began to look up simple ciphers. There was a nonzero chance that I’d done everything wrong, or made a false assumption that it had to correlate to letters when it really was something else, but I felt like that would be too… random… for a test. Sure, the various Councillors had a lot of leeway when creating their various challenges for each season of the Consortium, but they all had to be reasonable to complete. Tests of knowledge weren’t exactly uncommon, but this shouldn’t rely on something obscure. 

I found a simple substitution cipher decoder program online, and ran the page of nonsense through it, slowly offsetting. One letter substitution didn’t do anything, nor did two, but three finally got the page to translate into something I could actually read. The lack of accents and tildes did mean that I had to infer a few words, and there were one or two spots where I’d accidentally gotten the letter off by one, resulting in words like ‘bank’ read as ‘bamk’, but they were generally just from me accidentally shifting the number-letter correlation up or down one spot. Once I’d gone through and fixed my mistakes, as well as added the relevant markings, I leaned back and read through the paper in full, then did it again a second time. 

The prose was a bit flowery, but it boiled down to being a greeting from Councillor Kingfisher, followed by three addresses, one on each layer of the city, followed by a link. Each of the listed addresses had specific instructions given to it, which made me almost feel like I was a member of some sort of secret society of tamers. The site only furthered this further, as it required a three part password to access. I almost wished the paper had told me to memorize these instructions and then burn them, though I admitted that would be needlessly wasteful. It would also probably make some of the challenges harder. 

I did my best to memorize the instructions anyways, then tucked my augpad away and began to head up the streets, along an escalator that went between floors, and through the slices of the arena until I arrived at the first location that the paper had integrated. It was a butterfly breeding and raising center, aimed at working to restore the native populations of butterflies throughout the area. During the late Pre-Arrival and Post-Arrival cultures, massive numbers of butterflies had become endangered, or gone extinct entirely. While there were still other pollinators in the world, it was the kind of damage that was slow to heal, even hundreds of years after the event.

Given that it was currently smack dab in the middle of winter, and we weren’t close enough to the equator to have year-round butterfly weather, the gardens were currently in greenhouse mode. Several large trees, along with flowers, bushes, and fungi were held in glass habitats, with heat lamps and injected water vapor helping to simulate the summer conditions where the butterflies thrived. Each ecosystem was slightly different, and held host to different breeds of butterfly. Many contained multiple breeds, and each of them had a plaque describing what the environment was meant to simulate, as well as any cross-breeding or modification efforts to bring extinct species back. 

I wandered through the halls, getting lost for a long time, before I eventually found the center of the gardens, where a brass and stained glass bell hung from the dome. It was a purely decorative thing, with a series of interlocking triangles. That got me the first piece of information that I needed, so I flicked over to the open page on my augpad and wrote the word ‘triangles’ into the first of the three password boxes. It light up green, and I grinned. 

I did spend a little more time wandering around the gardens, looking at some of the more interesting butterfly mixes, as well as the handful essence-beast butterflies in the gardens, who were grown from the pollen of a rare essence-empowered flower. They didn’t live longer than ordinary butterflies, save for the few wood element ones that had learned life-extending spells. By and large, their greater effect was the spells that could ensure a greater number of eggs that would have sufficient stores to make it to adulthood without straining the plants in the facility.

Once I’d satiated my curiosity, I headed down to the middle story of Galena town, and followed the directions my augpad gave me until I arrived at a large, two-story mural. The mural itself was made of shifting and changing colors of light, and it could be manipulated by people using touches of anima. Most of the power was supplied by the enchantments in the paint itself, allowing for even kids or those who never awakened their essence to utilize it with the minimal stores of power that they could access. 

Where things went from being a more magical variation of standard street art to something particularly weird was the sound. Nine spells were embedded into the mural, producing soft sounds that responded to the various shifts of the light around them, and whoever the spell programmer had been, they’d been capable of some truly impressive work, as it was nearly impossible to make the mural sound discordant. There was, according to the linked article I pulled up on my augpad, something of a local tradition to try and make the mural make the worst noise it could, at which point the artist would come back and update the spell to patch it out. In its current configuration, the sound produced was somewhere between a recording of a rainforest and the low rumbling of a thunderstorm, which was pleasant, and made me feel a bit sleepy.

I reached out a hand and tapped into the art, using a swirl of anima to dye sections of a bright purple tiger that someone had left into a tawny brown color, then worked to try and turn the stripes red, almost as if it was a fire element essence beast. I wasn’t especially good at it, but the tiger was thankfully already somewhat abstract. My art seemed to add a faint humming sound, like a fan, while decreasing the sounds of the rainforest. Once I’d had my fill of playing with the interactive art display, I pulled up the page on my augpad and typed nine into the second password section. It also lit up in green, so I turned and began to head down to the bottom level of the city, and to my third and final puzzle-clue-hint-thing. 

There were a lot of things that the town did to try and stop the three layers of the city from turning into an instant break along class lines. But at the end of the day, even with housing and food established as human rights, the rotation of the rings to allow everyone to get sun, and the implementation of even more artwork, the bottom layer of the town was undeniably largely still the section that belonged to the least wealthy. But that came with a rather funny side effect – while there might be a lot of people stringing towels across laundry lines, or living in smaller spaces, the art on this level was far and away the most vibrant across the entire city. Neon colors spilled across roadways and up onto buildings, brightly glowing enchantments, constructed by who knew, were strewn everywhere. There were several warehouses, as this was where non-passenger trains and floating barges arrived in the city, and they were all transformed into dazzling displays of light and sound music. 

It was… a lot. Maybe that was just my small village upbringing showing, but I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer sights and sounds of the layer. In a strange way, I almost wished that Oceanseed didn’t have such strict laws against advertisements – if these were all just people trying to get me to buy things, I could ignore them. But most of these were art of some medium or another, which made me want to look, which in turn made me even more exposed. 

I eventually made it to the display that held the final password, and plopped down to watch. The display took advantage of one of the chunks of the city cast in shadow by the upper layers, and projected an entire shifting and moving night sky onto the ceiling overhead. It moved at incredible speed, almost enough that it was hard to process, with an entire year compressed into a day. 

The hint that had been hidden in the cipher had listed an assortment of different time to arrive, and as I watched the projected moon in the sky overheard turn a reddish color, I found the final password: Eclipse. I typed it into the page, and watched the third box turn green. That unlocked the entire page, and a text crawl began, giving me a confirmation code for my fight with Councillor Kingfisher. 

I leaned back against the bench and looked up into the sky as the message started to loop, and smiled.