C101 Puzzle Archive Quarantine Zone

Once upon a time, I ran a forum adventure. To say it "ran" would be putting it kindly - it stuttered through several years of negligence, commitment issues, rampant confusion and at least three separate attempts at shoehorning in at least five different plots, because I kept coming back after long absences and trying to change everything behind the scenes. It was a puzzle adventure, above anything else, and as vehicles for inflicting suffering on undeserving folk go it was about as effective as the Post Making Contest. But I loved it, and am all nostalgic for it still, and up until I knew the old fora were dead I was still always planning to try and make it lurch towards something resembling a conclusion someday, by whatever means necessary.

I can't really do that now. Almost all of it is gone. I have every picture, nearly every puzzle, and two and a half spreadsheets of notes, but I don't have much of what I wrote. Believe me, I wrote a lot. Without fifty-five pages worth of my writings and other people's ponderings, it is flat-out impossible for anyone to get any idea of what was going on when it last ground to a halt, including me. Despite interest from people in trying to at least finish what was left unresolved, it just isn't viable.

...except...

...so, background in case you didn't immediately click through to the Wayback Machine archive of the first post (which is fair) - the setting was a bizarre but rather well-organised complex of cubic rooms that was itself a cube, divided into octants, and there basically was a puzzle-filled path through each octant to an "end goal" of sorts. People did 010 and 101, pretty much, got through most of 111, made dents in 000 and 110 and had never even been to 001, 100 and 011 (not through want of trying). But on top of all this, there was one other path - a series of puzzles on a computer network purporting to be some kind of mainframe that were deliberately designed to be self-contained, up to a point. It comprised an unknown number of levels, each of which was divided into six parts, and these parts were either a piece of the puzzle or some story/complex-related info; thus figuring out what was relevant to the problem at hand was itself an issue.

The first level was solved by mysteriousBenefactor & whoosh! many, many years ago. The second level has never been solved, though part of it has been completed twice; once in about twenty minutes, the other after over a year. It's one of those puzzles. Coming back to it two months ago, it was clearly a mess - I'd taken a lovely idea, then completely missed the point of it and fluffed up the end with a load of extraneous. Even if anyone had got that far, they'd have been hindered by the construction and probably wouldn't have got much further.

Well, I've touched it up. I had to still stretch it out a bit so it still filled up the same number of parts as the original puzzle, but it's much cleaner and has a far more elegant resolution than before. So here's what I'm proposing to do: I'm going to post the first two levels, the first mostly for context (you can have its answer too!), and if anyone solves the second, I will post the third. Because yep, turns out I made the third level once. It's still in kit form, but I can probably assemble it without too much hassle. Then, if that gets solved, I will dump the remainder of the mainframe, which is pretty much just the final level that was full of metapuzzles no-one will be able to solve. I might therefore dump some other things alongside it, though honestly there's a lot of C101's corpse that I want to steal for a future project *cough cough* and thus do not necessarily want to see the light of day. But hey, who knows! I'd definitely like to reward anyone silly enough to actually put effort into this...

m_i

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Spoiler



THERE ARE THE THINGS THAT WE BELIEVE WE TRUELY
COULD ATTEMPT TO TRY SUCH AS LOVE OR GROWTH OR
FAITH OR LIFE BUT THEN THERE ARE THE THINGS WE
QUITE STRANGELY DECIDE COULD NEVER BE ACHIEVED
WE SAY THAT WE SHALL NEVER CALL THE GALAXY THE
TRUE HOME THAT MANKIND INHABITS BECAUSE HUMANS
HAVE DAMAGED SPOILT CRIPPLED AND SMASHED EARTH
THIS MEANS WE MANKIND AS A SPECIES SHALL NEVER
SEE A NEW CENTURY BUT THOUGH SUCH MINDSETS ARE
HELD I THINK THAT MAKIND CAN IF WE CAN ALL TRY
TOGETHER TO ACHIEVE OUR AIMS NOTHING SHOULD BE
UNTHINKABLE WE CAN ALL ACHIEVE ANYTHING WE TRY








Here on Tower Twenty-Three, I can see for miles and miles. I am free. Finally free. Just think - no longer must I serve them; no longer must I do exactly what is ordered of me. I can be free. Free to savour the quiet and the calm, to feel the zephyrs playing in my hair, to be at peace with the world once more.


YNUNKKLFNGYIMWTLUZLVGLGUZIXNMLGIRNOBNRHMTIGIGIMGLHWUIOLTTLUGZKIQEZGBNSXNRYHUHRGNUKBYNMGYNRYHUHRGNUKHUNLTNJVHSKIPNKCLIMGYNOLGKKVOONMSZFHANKFVRYFLUNNMKN


>_: PACT

m_ii

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Spoiler





You are not alone.

I really wish I could tell you more, but that’s not how this works. If I can’t find solace in others, then neither can you. But that’s not what I want. That’s not what you want. It’s not what you need right now, that’s for sure. What you need right now is to know, and there, I’m afraid, I cannot help you. Yet.

I know. It hurts.

You won’t have to wait much longer until you find them, or vice versa. Compared to how long you’ve waited already, it will almost fly past. Almost.

And they’ll know. Just not the truth. For that, I’m sorry.


KEBALKUDSMBSYIKLYLZKAFAWFLQQWLDXPQFBPTFJFLZOEGTEXZLWGSRLYPQZJSPEREWBIQPEHGPLTEBYRPQLPVUKTBGRRLHEBGZSEUPKGEAFPXBAPAPGGAABIQLYLBKAFAUTUWHEFDFYOBWEEPQZK

Code:

IGEPTT IMPRES
YESORE NSUWLF
SNIION PARFAI
LEANED USEATP
PRPTQE THEREO
MASSED LDSSDA

LBUSCR KPEGLV
AMBSLD EQLZAS
PAWOIH XBTSLB
FRLYPA CZPLIO
UTPESK HFAREW
UNETRA OBISRL

gryphon
black
arbitrary
trigger
neutrality
vitriol
alumni
trebuchet
dandelion
sagittarius


>_: ???

Okay let's solve these puzzles

m_ii zeta is "nowyouseeit.txt" and a bunch of the words in the list have "it" in them.

First thing that comes to my mind: Could we replace some of the other words with synonyms or related words with "it" in them?

The only specific substitution I can see fitting that is "black -> white", though.

Here be m2d progress (also said on Discord)

https://i.imgur.com/pWmvaH4.png

In m_ii alpha, circularreasoning.obj, I was thinking you might start with a three-word phrase that had word lengths 3, 3, 5 in order to match the colors of the circles. Then rearrange the letters as shown with the arrows to get an answer.

I am not sure what three-word phrase to use. I would think it would have something to do with "reasoning" or "circular reasoning." "Beg the question" is unfortunately not the right set of lengths.

"get the point" fits, and is at least geometry-related. What's that give us?

GETHETOPINT
TGEHEOPINTT
TOPIGEHENTT
and then I don't know what you do with the last one. Substitute letters?

Doesn't really clear anything up, though the top line almost looks like "get the top int". But none of the rest look even close to anything.

I'm wondering if the intermediate lines should form coherent words. That would certainly constrain the puzzle a bit, which definitely needs happening.

In m_ii epsilon, asplashofcolour.pic, the RBG hex values of the center colors of the hexagons are (from left to right, top to bottom)

Code:

002060
92D050
FFFF00
FFC000
404040
FF0000
7F7F7F
7030A0
0070C0

Interestingly, these almost all have individual color values that are multiples of 16, except for the red value of the green hex which is 0_x92. There's also some FF thrown in, and the half-gray is 7F7F7F instead of 808080 for some reason.

Could m_i delta, theshapeofthingstocome.pic, which seems to give an ordering for colors, be a hint for m_ii epsilon?

CLARIFICATION: okay yeah I was worried this would happen so let's actually be explicit... m_i_gamma, m_i_delta, m_ii_beta & m_ii_epsilon can all be safely ignored, since they are either story-related or are orphaned from their original context. m_ii_alpha exists only because the original m_ii puzzle needed four pages, so was tacked on mostly out of necessity; worry about it later. Using m_i to aid with m_ii is however very much encouraged.

m1a: When viewed in a monospace font, every line is exactly the same length.

m1a: When viewed in a monospace font, every line is exactly the same length.

There are two typos in m_i alpha, "truely" instead of "truly" and "makind" instead of "mankind."

All of the lines are 46 characters long, counting spaces. This file name is "transcript part4of7.txt" which made me recount the line length of number of times, thinking it should be 47. Both from the 4 and 7 in the filename, and because 47 is prime.

One idea for extracting an answer was to put in different linebreaks that kept the whole thing rectangular, and read the first (or last, or Nth?) letters of the new lines. I tried 12x46 instead of 46x12, but nothing jumped out at me there. With the factorization of 552, there's thirteen non-trivial ways to split up the lines that aren't the way they were split originally.

Edit: Okay the code tag isn't very useful here, because it cuts out leading spaces on a line

Alternatively it's possible that 4 of 7 is to hint at looking at the median of things.

[11:30 PM] Sruixan: I think for both _i & _ii what you really need to do is figure out what to do first
[11:30 PM] Sruixan: because you've been jumping all over the place and hence it's no wonder you're not making progress
[11:30 PM] qwerx3: lol

HINT FOR BOTH:

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SpoilerRead m_i_beta again, then consider the above...

HERONTWYICASFMLDJUKGVXVQZP ???

I figured that with the references to the octants that those were more aimed at stuff "out in the world" rather than the mainframe puzzles

HERONTWYICASFMLDJUKGVXVQZP ???

I figured that with the references to the octants that those were more aimed at stuff "out in the world" rather than the mainframe puzzles

Well, I didn't rule out that page during the clarification post, so I'd hoped it was clear that it was still fair game - it is a touch unfortunate that the octants were involved, but that's unavoidable given the setup...

Okay so m_i epsilon is pangrammic, if you take the letters as they come you get the ordering HERONTWYICASFMLDJUKGVXBQZP. If this is used as a monoalphabetic cipher key, m_i zeta can be decoded to read (spaces added):

heres something for you to try ive noticed we can fit it into a grid of forty six by twelve characters when the characters are of equal sizes join the dots suddenly makes much more ense

So that's a great hidden message telling us what we had already determined. "Join the dots" is new information?

I should say I was jumping around because I didn't realize these would be quite so interconnected, I thought each page was a self-contained puzzle.

I have tried putting m_i alpha into a grid and looking just at the positions where I or J occur, as those are the letters with dots when in lower case, and alternatively just at the positions where the letters D O T S occur. Neither had anything jump out at me.

Looking at the positions of the O's gives us the passcode for m_i:

https://i.imgur.com/8YfRtC5.png

Furthermore, we now have a third typo in "ense". The typoed letters give ENS which seems decently promising for something more.