Five days before Christmas a coded message appeared in our blog, and it wasn't from me.
It was to me.
The title was from a Christmas puzzle I posted in 2012, and it was clearly a shot across the bow: the text deciphered to "You taunted us with five-fold verse, now you’ll get your
three-fold curse. If you solve the final clue, you’ll know that we can’t outwit
you. If you take our gauntlet up, you will drain the bitter cup."
I knew I was in for it, but what could I do but accept the challenge?
The blog taunts continued until Christmas, when I was was handed a beautifully-lettered envelope (lettering courtesy of Florence).
Inside, a dozen puzzle pieces and a sheet of paper. What you probably can't see is that it is also embossed with braille.
The puzzle pieces made far less than a complete puzzle (I put what I could together anyway), so I started on the braille next, as the more obvious of the two codes. "A silly gift you’ll begin to rue, once your children give it
back to you." Not much to go on there, so I had little choice but to do what I could with the food items.
I am a systematic puzzle solver, much more comfortable with a step-by-step approach than great leaps of brilliance, so the first thing I needed to do was to transcribe this into a form I could manipulate. What are those, anyway? Maybe a roast turkey, a chicken leg, a hamburger, and holly that looks like lettuce and a tomato in the context. Fine, we will call that salad. Soon I was calling out "turkey, chicken, turkey, turkey, chicken, hamburger, salad" as I typed "TCTTCHS" into a spreadsheet. Picture that on top of the kids calling out "red, red, green, yellow, green, red, gold" as they worked on my puzzle to them. It was a pleasantly chaotic Christmas morning in the household.
Eventually I had my spreadsheet, which let me see that the "salad" divided groups of other foods into multiples of three, and that moreover there were 24 of those combinations. Ah, a simple substitution cipher disguised in food triplets! Exactly like those colors the kids were working on, actually. A few minutes later I had my deciphered text: "BE AS QUIET AS A MOUSE AS YOU CHECK OUR SWEET OWLS HOUSE IT MIGHT BE EASY JUST FOR YOU BUT YOU MUST KNOW WHAT TO DO RHYMING VERSE IS VERY HARD I DIDNT WANT TO PLAY THIS CARD WE WORKED ON THIS WITH ALL OUR HEART THIS SHOULD GIVE YOU A GOOD HEAD START".
Sweet owl's house? We live in an apartment. It could only be a reference to the little thumb-drive owl I put in the Christmas tree last year. Two careful minutes of examining the tree later, I found it. A string of colored beads and two clear ornaments that contained puzzle pieces when I took them off the tree. All of this was deep in the bottom back of the tree, so I was well covered in needles when I finally emerged with them.
A hunch proved to be correct: if you treated red and green beads as dots and dashes, and black beads as intervals between letters, you can read that string in Morse code. It says: "JULIUS CAESAR THOUGHT THAT HE WAS SUBLIME, BUT FIBONACCI WOULD'VE KEPT HIM IN LINE."
Now I was stuck. The puzzle pieces still did not complete the puzzle, and the only unsolved codes I had to work with were the mysteries in the kids' blog posts here and here, and my hint was this riddle I wasn't getting. The kids just snickered, but I was OK with that since they were still hard at work trying to open their present from me.
About the time I exhausted every angle of attack I could think of, the kids relented and dropped enough of a hint for me to realize the they had made a substitution cipher like a Caesar cipher except where each letter in the message is replaced by one that is the next number in the Fibonacci series away from the original. So in the message that starts with "Txbu wmm",
- The T rotates 0 positions to T,
- The x rotates 1 position to w,
- The b rotates 1 position to a,
- The u rotates 2 positions to s,
- The w rotates 3 positions to t,
- The first m rotates 5 positions to h, and
- The second m rotates 8 positions to e.
The series gets out of hand in a hurry, and Jeremy had to point out mathematical techniques for keeping it within what Excel could handle for even this short message: "‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house not a creature was stirring, not even a bunny rabbit…"
Eventually I found the envelope taped to the top of the space where the rabbit lives under the fireplace. An envelope beautifully addressed to "The Garland Thief".
Ha, ha, very funny giving me Runny Babbit from the bunny rabbit house:
Play a hymn, eh? I'm not all that musical, but I did know that the most likely instrument was the electric piano. And sure enough, there was a score waiting on it. A score with braille.
A quick reading gave me:
‘smoked, salted ‘clupea harengus’
‘please don’t get mad and harangue us
Clupea harengus? No! That is herring, which in Christmas puzzle tradition is red. Dead end!
So back to the keyboard I went, followed by my laughing children, who continued to mock me (gently) as I searched for another clue. Eventually Jeremy guided me in the right direction and I found the recorded music on the piano. And played it. Over. And over. I simply could not quite figure out what it was. It was only the melody, played simply, and seemed like it could be some sweet Christmas carol about Jesus in a manger, but I could not place it. Finally we called Ashley in to listen to it. She instantly groaned and told me it was the sloth song Jeremy plays all the time. Of course it was! I was just stuck on the idea it would be something seasonal! Off to search Jeremy's record collection, where I found the next hint and THE LAST PUZZLE PIECES in the Flanders and Swann Bestiary.
I had my puzzle!
Where in the world had they found that? "We got it off their web site." Well, I hadn't expected they found it in Italy, so off to the next part of the Christmas puzzle, which now included the writing on the back of that puzzle and the note that accompanied the last puzzle pieces.
Hoo, boy. This was not getting easier. Now I had:
- The puzzle back,
- The remaining blog post,
- A mysterious hint about rotors, rings, start positions, and patch cables, and
- A color code on that message.
I toyed with the idea that "patch cords" was a masked hint for a substitution code, but that got me nowhere on either the puzzle back or the blog message. Could rotors have something to do with the way to interpret the colors? Eventually I gave up those lines of thought and decided to do some research online.
Enigma. Fantastic. These were all settings for use on World War II Enigma machines, the ones so famously cracked by the team at Bletchley Park. The details were all online, but this was not the type of thing normally solved by hand. Was I going to have to code an Enigma machine to get my Christmas present? "Don't be silly," said Jeremy, "we didn't. Use one of the ones already available online. This one works well."
Thirty minutes of fiddling with settings later, I had the last blog post decrypted!
"IN ORDER TO DECRYPT THE STRANGE AND IRREGULAR SCRIPT ENCODED BY
THREE-ROTORED ENIGMA (WHICH CHANGED AN ENTIRE PARADIGMA), TO TRANSFORM THE
COMPLEX HARD-TO-READ CYPHERTEXT, FIRST YOU, THE DECODER, MUST SET THE ROTORS IN
THE ORDER AND POSITIONS MEANT TO FOIL THE MATHEMATICIANS. THEN ADJUST THE RING
SETTINGS THAT GET ENEMIES FRETTING, AND USE PATCH CORDS TO FORM THE PLUGBOARD
CONNECTIONS WHICH BRING FORTH SOME LESS-THAN-POLITE EXPRESSIONS. FINALLY, SET
THE STARTING WHEEL POSITIONS. TO DECODE THE WELL-ENCRYPTED TRANSMISSIONS, TYPE
ON THE KEYBOARD- THE WORK’S A BIT MANUAL- AND CAREFULLY NOTE THE REPLIES FROM
THE LAMP PANEL. P.S. THIS IS THE
LAST RHYME WE WILL DO, AND IT’LL SEND YOU TO THE LOO."
It served me right that their plaintext was mostly noise, since I had just done the same thing to them in the "Directions" cipher.
Our bathrooms are tiny, so it was a foregone conclusion that the next hint would be at the bottom of a toilet tank. Sure enough, removed from its protective enclosure, was...a small plastic chicken drumstick:
That was a drumstick that also happened to be a USB thumb drive. Containing a program. A program I instantly recognized as Chicken Invaders from its theme music. Aghh! Of course! How could I have missed all of the clues! The food was roast chicken, chicken drumsticks, and chicken sandwiches from the video game! And "clupea harengus" was an entirely useless powerup in one of the previous versions. And the puzzle!
Super cool! My kids had gotten me a game we all remembered fondly from before coming to Italy.
But wait. What was this? A login screen?
Hm. I guessed that I wouldn't get to play without reading that puzzle back. I was in luck, though, and that puzzle back was a simple substitution cipher reading, "THE CHILDREN'S CHRISTMAS REVENGE, 2016 WITH MUCH LOVE FROM: ELEANOR, FLORENCE, ASHLEY, JEREMY, AND JAMES. I KNOW I SAID THAT I WOULDN'T RHYME, BUT WE ALL LIE FROM TIME TO TIME. HOLLY IS WHAT YOU'LL NEED IF YOU WANT TO SUCCEED."
Awww.
That would be the holly from the food puzzle, of course. After thanking my children for their great present I typed in "HOLLY" and started zapping those invading chickens in their Christmas costumes, along with their minions the gingerbread men, all to classic Christmas music (this was the just-released latest Christmas edition). My children rejoiced in my successes, and I easily defeated that first boss. And got a stunning surprise:
THAT most certainly was not in any publicly released version of the game! What? How?
"We wrote to Interaction Studios and they were super nice and helped us out with a modification even though they don't do custom software!"
Wow!
Now what was that message? Oh, no. That second phrase said, "Because we want you to look like a dork, go pay for your coffee with a fork."
Seriously? But what can you do when your children have gone through all of the trouble? Off we trotted to Pianegiani's--I let the children choose the locale--for coffee and hot chocolate. "Anna, I have a question. Can I pay with a fork?"
"Of course! Anything for you."
So, to the amazement of the other patrons present, I handed over one of our kitchen forks and got my receipt. Feeling like a dork, of course.
Some receipts contain more information than others...
I couldn't think of anything to do with it, so I played Chicken Invaders through the next boss level and was rewarded with another cipher.
I was stuck again. Not substitution. Not the Fibonnacci thing. Not Enigma. Decidedly not Runny Babbit.
"Oh, Daddy, that one is easy! You've hit us with one of those several times!"
Had to be Playfair. And the only keyword I had was "EIGHT". That at least explained the plethora of Z's (Playfair has several cryptographic weaknesses). To my vast relief the guess was correct and I read, "Up above the books so high, twinkle diamonds in the sky..."
Sure enough, there on top of the bookshelf was a stack of cards with scrambled words. When I pulled out the diamonds they said:
Now you might not have a chamber pot to look in, but Jeremy and Alexandra bought an old nightstand to use as a telephone stand last year, and that nightstand has a small cabinet at the base for a chamber pot. Sure enough, my present was waiting there, in a borrowed chamber pot, no less.
It was a book! A book of quick puzzles from the folks at GCHQ, the successor to the British team that cracked Enigma. I have my work cut out for me!
Thank you to all of my children and everyone who helped them with this brilliant Christmas puzzle!
Michael
