colt_browning (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
colt_browning) wrote2025-03-27 08:30 pm
colt_browning) wrote2025-03-27 08:30 pm
Entry tags:
Quest 2025
This is an English version of the previous post.
This winter, Varya created an incredible quest for me. Last time she made a quest of a comparable scale was for the New Year 2021.
Everything started from a mysterious carton box which I found at my workplace...
Also, somehow a little pig figure appeared in my drawer.
Inside the carton box I found a wooden puzzle box. The carton box itself also carried a mysterious message.
Opening the puzzle box was interesting and difficult, but I made it! That's what I found inside: one more pig, a flash drive, a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and a scroll.
This is the scroll. It is a mysterious haiku! About ninja, shadow, and colour.
Wait a second, what does a... Bible do on my shelf?! In fact, this is not a book, but a safe! And the haiku about shadow and colour — perhaps it hints on Varya's UV flashlight? Taking into account that she also has a marker pen which leaves marks visible only under UV?
"FLASH EVERYWHERE"
"Everywhere – really everywhere!"
"love you =)" ^_^
UV-visible inscriptions helped me to find a riddle, a codeword for requesting a hint, helped me to break the haiku into lines, and highlighted something on the Bible safe.
And there were pigs in other places! I have collected almost a dozen of them.
Having answered the riddle mentioned above, I was able to open the Bible safe. I found inside another flash drive and the rest of the jigsaw puzzle pieces.
On the back side of the jigsaw puzzle, I found this chart.
Wait a second. Actually, the pigs have labels with numbers from 1 to 12. It was a pigsaw puzzle! And each label is either black or white. This is a QR code!
The code lead to a board. It is locked by a password! But let's take a look at the front side of the jigsaw puzzle.
The board puzzle is entirely contained in this picture. You don't need any other parts of the quest to guess the password. You only need to ask yourself: who is this girl next to a locked door? Enter the password in the same way as the character's words are written: starting from a capital letter, ending with an exclamation mark, in English.
And what was on the flash drives? An encrypted message. The first chapter of Harry Potter in Russian and English, encrypted with the same cipher, split into pages. A password protected archive file. And this image.
The Minotaur has been generated by AI and improved manually, as were the pictures from the board and the jigsaw puzzle.
In the top-right part of the board, you can see a whale and a 7 in a triangle. They hint at certain places in our room in a very simple way. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to solve this riddle. When I succeeded, I got the password for unpacking the archive file. It contained a program which took a Unicode character as input, returning certain numbers related to its Unicode code point.
It remained to solve the cipher. Apart from Harry Potter, the samples of the cryptograms are shown on the board: Santa Clauses (note that they are identical, and they actually say the same line in English), Slepakov (a Russian comedian singer, who in particular wrote a hilarious New Year song – note that it was written at the end of 2018, the man is just a prophet), and a Japanese man who is writing something – actually, the haiku from the scroll. Additionally, a bit of the same cipher was on the Bible safe.
"Ministry of Enlightment"
Spoilers for the cipher below! If you want to try breaking the cipher yourself, ask me for the Harry Potter file.
What can we notice on the cryptograms? They consist of these eight-pointed stars, where each of the 8 strokes can be present or absent. The stars are clearly grouped into 4×4 squares, and the squares themselves are grouped together into larger squares or sometimes rectangles. In the English texts, the strokes are mostly present, while their density in the Russian texts is much lower. Also, Russian texts have red strokes in the same position within each 4×4 square. The haiku and the main message also have blue dots and red strokes in other positions.
I immediately noticed that the Harry Potter cryptograms are very long: the number of 4×4 squares in them is approximately equal to the number of characters (in the both languages). Thus, it should had been obvious that the coding is very redundant. Still, due to inertia of thought, I spent quite a lot of time trying to find meaning in the stars themselves. After all, there was exactly 256 combinations of strokes. But then I finally realised to just count the total number of strokes in each 4×4 square (this number has a maximum of 256, too). At that point, the English cryptograms started to make sense. This was the most difficult part of breaking the cipher.
From the technical side, to analyse the cryptogram, I parsed SVG file rather than recognised the images graphically. Fortunately, the structure of all SVG images was uniform and predictable.
There was a nuance: what is the right order for characters? Should I read out the 4×4 squares by rows, by columns, or in some other way? The answer to this is given by that mysterious message on the black carton box lid: it was a reference to a programming homework problem which I and Varya did almost 20 years ago (!), which provided the answer to the question.
The red stroke in the Russian texts indicated to switch to the Unicode range for Cyrillics, it was clear. Understanding the blue dots was more difficult. I realised that in the main encrypted message the characters with blue dots were emoji, while in the haiku they were hieroglyphs. After playing around with Unicode code points for hieroglyphs and emoji, I figured out that the position of the red stroke encoded a number which should be multiplied by 0x80 and added to the total number of strokes, and the blue dots in three possible positions meant a 3-bit number which should be multiplied by 0x4000 and added too.
That's how I solved this! I enjoyed this very much.
This winter, Varya created an incredible quest for me. Last time she made a quest of a comparable scale was for the New Year 2021.
Everything started from a mysterious carton box which I found at my workplace...
Also, somehow a little pig figure appeared in my drawer.
Inside the carton box I found a wooden puzzle box. The carton box itself also carried a mysterious message.
Opening the puzzle box was interesting and difficult, but I made it! That's what I found inside: one more pig, a flash drive, a few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and a scroll.
This is the scroll. It is a mysterious haiku! About ninja, shadow, and colour.
Wait a second, what does a... Bible do on my shelf?! In fact, this is not a book, but a safe! And the haiku about shadow and colour — perhaps it hints on Varya's UV flashlight? Taking into account that she also has a marker pen which leaves marks visible only under UV?
"FLASH EVERYWHERE"
"Everywhere – really everywhere!"
"love you =)" ^_^
UV-visible inscriptions helped me to find a riddle, a codeword for requesting a hint, helped me to break the haiku into lines, and highlighted something on the Bible safe.
And there were pigs in other places! I have collected almost a dozen of them.
Having answered the riddle mentioned above, I was able to open the Bible safe. I found inside another flash drive and the rest of the jigsaw puzzle pieces.
On the back side of the jigsaw puzzle, I found this chart.
Wait a second. Actually, the pigs have labels with numbers from 1 to 12. It was a pigsaw puzzle! And each label is either black or white. This is a QR code!
The code lead to a board. It is locked by a password! But let's take a look at the front side of the jigsaw puzzle.
The board puzzle is entirely contained in this picture. You don't need any other parts of the quest to guess the password. You only need to ask yourself: who is this girl next to a locked door? Enter the password in the same way as the character's words are written: starting from a capital letter, ending with an exclamation mark, in English.
And what was on the flash drives? An encrypted message. The first chapter of Harry Potter in Russian and English, encrypted with the same cipher, split into pages. A password protected archive file. And this image.
The Minotaur has been generated by AI and improved manually, as were the pictures from the board and the jigsaw puzzle.
In the top-right part of the board, you can see a whale and a 7 in a triangle. They hint at certain places in our room in a very simple way. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to solve this riddle. When I succeeded, I got the password for unpacking the archive file. It contained a program which took a Unicode character as input, returning certain numbers related to its Unicode code point.
It remained to solve the cipher. Apart from Harry Potter, the samples of the cryptograms are shown on the board: Santa Clauses (note that they are identical, and they actually say the same line in English), Slepakov (a Russian comedian singer, who in particular wrote a hilarious New Year song – note that it was written at the end of 2018, the man is just a prophet), and a Japanese man who is writing something – actually, the haiku from the scroll. Additionally, a bit of the same cipher was on the Bible safe.
"Ministry of Enlightment"
Spoilers for the cipher below! If you want to try breaking the cipher yourself, ask me for the Harry Potter file.
What can we notice on the cryptograms? They consist of these eight-pointed stars, where each of the 8 strokes can be present or absent. The stars are clearly grouped into 4×4 squares, and the squares themselves are grouped together into larger squares or sometimes rectangles. In the English texts, the strokes are mostly present, while their density in the Russian texts is much lower. Also, Russian texts have red strokes in the same position within each 4×4 square. The haiku and the main message also have blue dots and red strokes in other positions.
I immediately noticed that the Harry Potter cryptograms are very long: the number of 4×4 squares in them is approximately equal to the number of characters (in the both languages). Thus, it should had been obvious that the coding is very redundant. Still, due to inertia of thought, I spent quite a lot of time trying to find meaning in the stars themselves. After all, there was exactly 256 combinations of strokes. But then I finally realised to just count the total number of strokes in each 4×4 square (this number has a maximum of 256, too). At that point, the English cryptograms started to make sense. This was the most difficult part of breaking the cipher.
From the technical side, to analyse the cryptogram, I parsed SVG file rather than recognised the images graphically. Fortunately, the structure of all SVG images was uniform and predictable.
There was a nuance: what is the right order for characters? Should I read out the 4×4 squares by rows, by columns, or in some other way? The answer to this is given by that mysterious message on the black carton box lid: it was a reference to a programming homework problem which I and Varya did almost 20 years ago (!), which provided the answer to the question.
The red stroke in the Russian texts indicated to switch to the Unicode range for Cyrillics, it was clear. Understanding the blue dots was more difficult. I realised that in the main encrypted message the characters with blue dots were emoji, while in the haiku they were hieroglyphs. After playing around with Unicode code points for hieroglyphs and emoji, I figured out that the position of the red stroke encoded a number which should be multiplied by 0x80 and added to the total number of strokes, and the blue dots in three possible positions meant a 3-bit number which should be multiplied by 0x4000 and added too.
That's how I solved this! I enjoyed this very much.