Round: 464

Jake has always been quite the explorer, but becoming one of Neopia's greatest treasure hunters doesn't happen without a little help. He had various contacts around the globe, all of whom provided Jake with information over the Virtupets network via morse code.

One day, while on the verge of his greatest archeological discovery to date, Jake recieved one of those communications. The only problem was, part of the message was encoded differently than usual. The entire message read as follows:

I found it. Took extra precautions in this message. The key to the information is mysterious, but I'm sure you can figure it out.

AACAAAAABA CBAABACBBC BACAABAEBB AACDCCBCEA ACEAACABCE
AAAABDAACECBADCACCCD ACACEADBAA DBBBAEAEAB CEAEAAEBAA

You owe me... again.

- Shortie

Unfortunately, Jake had no idea how to decode it. He'd better work it out soon, though. He had a feeling he wasn't the only one on the trail.

What did the code say? Enter JUST the uncoded message with no other information!

Hint #1: mysterious = 3967152486

Hint #2

B A C

A A B

C C A

A A A

A A B

B A A

A A C

E A B

B B B

B A C

A = Dot

B = Dash





Answer: The secret is buried in Tyrannia

Ciphertext:

AACAAAAABA CBAABACBBC BACAABAEBB AACDCCBCEA ACEAACABCE

AAAABDAACECBADCACCCD ACACEADBAA DBBBAEAEAB CEAEAAEBAA

Key:

MYSTERIOUS

1) Transposition ciphers commonly have a key (word) with the same number of letters as the number of columns in the cipher table. The order of the columns matches the alphabetical order of the letters in the word. The word mysterious has 10 letters matching the 10 columns. The lowest letter is E so that is 1, then 2 for I and so on to get 3967152486.

2) To make it easy, we already split up the ciphertext into 10-letter blocks. Notice the #6 block has twenty letters because it's actually two columns. You split it up by putting the first letter in the first #6 column, the second letter in the second #6 column, and continue back and forth.

3967152486

A
A
C
A
A
A
A
A
B
A

See above that the first chunk is laid out in the #1 column. Continuing on with the first 3 chunks written down in their columns:

3967152486

B A C
A A B
C C A
A A A
A A B
B A A
A A C
E A B
B B B
B A C

And then with all of the columns filled in (including splitting up the #6 block by alternating letters between each column):

3967152486

BCAAAACADA
AEACACBABA
CABACEACBD
AEACAAADBA
AACEAABCAE
BACAACACEB
AEADAACBAD
EBCBABBCEA
BACABCBEAC
BACAAECABD

3) We are now done with the Myszkowski transposition cipher. The next step is decoding the Morse code. We will leave A's and B's alone since those are dots and dashes. We will replace C's with spaces since those are letter separators and D's with new lines since that marks a word separator. The E's we will just remove since those are just clutter and don't mean anything.

B AAAA A
AAA A BABA ABA A B
AA AAA
BAAA AAB ABA AA A BAA
AA BA
B BABB ABA AB BA BA AA AB

4) Now, treating the A's as dots and the B's as dashes, using international Morse code we end up with:

THE
SECRET
IS
BURIED
IN
TYRANNIA




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