A mysterious package

Correct. So we have the start of the solution somewhere up there ^

Was there much investigation into the icosahedron? Apologies for being lazy and not just rereading the original thread but it’s been a long day :wink:
According to wikipedia (long time since maths education), “each has 30 edges and 20 equilateral triangle faces with five meeting at each of its twelve vertices.” Does that correspond or relate to any of the ideas which were being floated?

Nah, it was delivered to Funcom but we didn’t look much into it. The thread had lost it’s momentum at that point. And we don’t even know if it belongs to the puzzle!

So i ran down the Sentence:

“To unlock the truths
of the void one must
off set themselfs
from the tenements
of known reality
”

Through Ceasar’s Cipher and did not come on to any results.

Tried the same for the Sentence spelled out by the files:
“Unlock the truth of the void” but again, Nothing.

Also tried to offset the word “Themselfs” using only the characters of "Tenements"
But atlas no interesting spoopyness happening there.

The decoder tries to “offset” every single letter by 1+ and does so for the whole sequence,
All the way up until it reaches the beginning, So if A+1 = B and so forth.

Also ran the sentence through Base 64 decoding, No results
ASCII, UTF-8, CP1256, IS-8859 1,2,6, and 15 also yielded you’ve guessed it, No results

Will keep prodding! Its difficult, But the mysterious oh so delicious!

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i think at this point the final clue as the creator Mocks in a way, resides in the note,

umagon: “The password exists and works. Do not pm, send me tells asking for it; as it will not happen.”

Umagon: “Maybe all the characters needed for the password are contained in the note.”

Im pretty sure this is the strongest and last hint everyone should need, That the secret lies within the note,
That in some way shape or form, The characters of the note should resemble the password for the rar file.

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Its been day one, No help yet.

I wonder if you will ever get a response. I’ll be eagerly awaiting any word.

More random thoughts on the whole “themselfs
 tenements” thing:

  • Set difference between the two words
    • Letter count and order don’t matter: “hlf” and “n”
    • Count but not order matters: “hlfs” and “nent”
    • Count and order both matter: “hemslf” and “enemnt”
    • Placement on the paper matters: “thsets”? (depending on how you line up the odd gaps)
  • “ten ements”
 what’s an ement? maybe a “*ement” word (cement, tenement, etc
)
    • There’s a lot more than ten of those
    • Ones with ten letters? (puzzlement, bafflement, bemusement, incitement
 no matter how apropos, none of those seem to fit with the rest of the note, maybe one of the other ones)

I’m not actually poking at the rar, so no verification on any of these, just random musing.

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I can tell you from my own research that Tens Ements is a real term. Notice that if you type it into the text window here you do not get the red ‘Spellcheck’ lines underneath it. The problem is, it seems to be such an arcane term that I cannot find a real definition for it. I HAVE found it used in quite a few antique legal documents online. It seems to have something to do with property law, land ownership, or land division, something like that. It could be, based on a footnote I saw, to be a root for the term ‘Eminent’ in Eminent Domain.

Eminent as “noteworthy, lofty, important”. The cloud of a judeo-christian background suggests that “ten lofties of known reality” would be the commandments. Discarding the thous (and the one thy) as being “themselfs” would leave the one about “remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy”.

Feels like stretch, but maybe. shrugs

It could also be that there are no spelling mistakes here. Themself is an actual word in English. Usage stretches back to the 14th century, though it isn’t as commonly used today it is still perfectly acceptable to use. It’s meaning differs very little from ‘themselves’, usually only referring to a single “self”. As in “If someone would find themself in this situation.” because we’re talking about a singular someone here.

As for tenements, why are we talking about that word? It’s a real word and it’s not misspelled. Its usage here is also consistent with its definition, if a little poetic in that usage.

Personally, this is the stance I’m taking on this. No misspellings, no incorrectly used words. All the words being chosen for their specific spellings so that all of the necessary letters show up in the right places for the password to be discovered. I think this is the “left turn at Albuquerque” that the guy was talking about.

As for an actual hypothesis, I don’t know if this has been tried, but here’s what I’ve been doing.

Taking the words literally and trying to offset “themselfs” from “tenements”. In other words, taking the difference between the letters. It makes some sense since both words are the same length. For example, the distance between “t” and “t” is 0. The distance between “h” and “e” is 3. The distance between “e” and “n” is 9, and so on. This pattern gives single digit results except for the distance between “f” and “t”. Even if you wrap around from Z to A you can’t get a single digit result. So now I’m trying multiple digit results in various combinations. For instance, forward results only meaning the distance starting from “h” and working through the alphabet and wrapping around from Z->A until I get to “e” which is 23. Another method would be not allowing wrapping and taking the direction in the only possible way. So in the case of “h” and “e” it would be -3. This gets tricky when you now try to decide how to combine the results you get. Is it a simple string of numbers from left to right? Do you have to do any kind of math to derive a result?

There’s a lot of different ways you can do this. Could take a while to putter around through them all.

If it weren’t for that stray ‘s’ perhaps. I think I agree that the ‘ements’ line is unlikely. The gap between the ‘n’ and ‘e’ is reasonably similar to other gaps before the letter ‘e’ in the note.

Is there a limit to the length of a password for a rar? If the answer was “all the characters (are) needed for the password” (aka: the whole note) and nobody’s managed to try it, there may be some hats digested.

The use of “maybe” has me discarding the notion of focusing only on the entire note at once. It’s not something that should be ignored completely, just not taken as gospel.

It could just as easily be that there is some code hidden in the message (like offsetting themselfs/tenements) that will give you a key that you can apply to the whole message. I don’t think focusing on one part of the message is a bad idea right now especially given that’s what we were doing before we were told we went off track.

You can type it all in (it doesn’t open) but raises the question of which spaces are real and what to do with newlines.

“the tenements of known reality” is 26 characters long so ‘off set __ from {26 letters}’ to me says you use some word as a lookup into it but going with ‘themselfs’ doesn’t work (generates ‘rmeonesnn’, which is not the password) so maybe it needs thought on who They are.

The other thing I tried unsuccessfully was using file sizes as hints - if you divide their byte length by 8 you get 15, 18, 7, 5, 9, and then Void is 133 bytes long which makes 8 and a bit. I just dunno what to do with 15 18 7 5 9 (8 or 9). 2nd line’s less than 18 letters long so it can’t be offsets into each line.

I’m probably going out on a limb, but what if “the tenements of known reality” has something to do with Hex?

Would Tenements have any connection to the apartments in Kaidan with the really long missions in it?

This package was received in 2013, long before Tokyo.

Perhaps. But Tokyo was planned from the start I believe

without content being released right?

So you’re calling our puzzle maker a psychic? Or a Funcom insider?