Mystery, Code, Conundrum (Attn: Erika Brady)

Narration:

Correspondence and some other routine matters got a bit behind during the three nights of torpor Erika had recently endured. While working on getting caught up, she notices in among her mail something unusual: a thick, padded envelope addressed to her, c/o the shop's address, and with no return address. The postmark is local.

By the size and weight and general feel, Erika guesses the envelope to contain a thin book of some sort.

Narration:

Erika manages to connect deeply to the psychic impressions on the item, enough to watch a strange scene unfold. She sees a rather bored clerk in a package and mail store watch the clock, waiting for closing time to appear. Then she sees a man enter the store, hand the clerk a book with dark bindings and instruct the man to package it for shipping. Next she sees the man hand the clerk a note with an address on it, and watches as the clerk writes out a mailing label addressed to her. Finally, she sees the man put the book in a padded envelope and affix the mailing label.

Through all this, the clerk's emotional state was one of boredom and anticipation of the end of a workshift.

What was vastly more interesting to Erika was the man who hired the clerk for this task.

In the memories imprinted onto the package by the bored clerk, she sees that man was her own sire.

Narration:

The contents of the envelope consist of one thin book, the one she'd seen in the vision. Other than that, the envelope is empty. The book's black covers are sturdy, and the binding is black leather. The binding and covers are in very good, though not new, condition, and neither bears any markings. Erika notices that the book's pages are not in such good condition.

Narration:

The first page, inked in a handwriting Erika does not recognize, reads:

The following was found among the belongings of a mortal thief caught ransacking the San Francisco chapter house of the Ordo Dracul in 1914. The thief took his own life, apparently to avoid interrogation, but the Dragons were able to trace his movements back to where he'd been staying and were thus able to recover his belongings. The Dragons' records indicate that the thief carried upon his person unspecified "items of mystic power," which is intriguing given the content of the present text.

The code was not particularly difficult to break, but the locations mentioned are unfortunately too obscure to provide much in the way of guidance. Thus, pending further information, this remains a tantalizing enigma deserving of continued investigation.

N.Q.
3 March, 1922

The following pages are in poor condition: yellow, stained, folded and torn in a few spots. They are of uneven size and do not match the size of the first page. Erika notices the edges of pieces of a different type of paper in between the first and second page and between each of these later pages; this suggests to her that pages were cut from the bound volume.

These later pages are handwritten in a small cramped style, and in a language Erika recognizes as Greek.

((ST Note: Great rolls!))

It doesn't take Erika long to realize that simple translation is impossible, because while the letters are Greek, the arrangement of letters - whether left to right, right to left, vertical or horizontal - doesn't consistently spell out words in Greek. Once she figures that out, she quickly realizes that the mention of code on the first page of the book probably refers to the entirety of this text - the whole thing is written in code.

((ST Note: Still going with the great rolls Erika achieved above.. more than enough Sux to get her through this part.))

Erika takes time to double-check her work, and after an hour or so of comparing the text she's memorized to her available translation resources, she concludes that not only is the text written in a code using Greek letters, but that the content of the text is almost certainly in a language other than English.

Erika comes to this conclusion by noticing the frequency with which some of the Greek letters are repeated. Through her knowledge of cryptography, she pretty quickly determines this code is probably a substitution cypher of some sort, but she just as quickly realizes that transposing likely English letters for the most frequent of the Greek letters results in too many unusual letter combinations for the underlying language to be either standard or phoenetic English.

Spoiler:

It takes Erika a couple hours of work going back and forth between cryptography and Greek reference volumes, but eventually she is able to make a rough determination of relative frequency of the various letters used in Greek, and from there she is able to determine that, yes, the text content appeared to be Greek. Thus, she had determined that the text was in Greek, but was encoded using a substitution cypher. Substitution cyphers were fairly simple to break - essentially, one simply used one letter in place of another. Thus, a substitution cypher using English letters might use C to denote A, D in place of B, E in place of C and so forth. The same basic concept was applied to this text.

From there, it would be a fairly simple process, albeit a time-consuming and tedious one, to decode the text. The harder part would be translating several pages of Greek text. That, she knew, would probably have to be done over the course of several nights, depending on the complexity of the text.

((ST Note: At this point, Decoding is an extended skill test using Intelligence + Investigation (Cryptography) with a +3 bonus per roll. The target number is 20, with each roll indicating 1 hour of work.

Translating will be harder, especially since Erika is not fluent in Greek. That will be an extended test using Intelligence + Academics -2 due to relying on reference books rather than actual fluency. The target number is 40, with each roll reflecting about 4 hours of work. Unlike normal extended checks, a failed roll does not apply a penalty to all subsequent rolls (if that was the case, it would be virtually impossible to complete a translation task). Instead, each failed roll adds one extra night to the total time required to complete the task.

Obviously this means Erika will be at the task for a significant period of time, so you should determine approx. how many hours a night she will be putting into translating this. ))

(( Erika would likely devote the last four hours of every night into decoding it, with some nights spending more time, if she has less to do that night. Would Research help any with the rolls? ^^ ))