Greetings and salutations to the Mistigris puzzle quest nation! Tuesday, October 6th, we gave a monster artpack, MIST2000, a limited release – for a limited time made exclusively available to any parties able to overcome a devious series of oldschool puzzles only solvable by a master of the traditional computer arts.

What this means is that so far, the pack has been released to two people – devious and crafty oldschool types, who, as it ironically turns out, already had access to the artpack due to being longstanding members of the Mistigris inner circle for decades. (But they diligently sweated through the puzzles anyhow, for strange kicks.)

So far, 36 of you have taken on the first puzzle in the chain, but following the better part of a week, only 10 of those 36 managed to progress through to the second. (And, as we have seen, only 2 of those 10 successfully followed the chain all the way to its conclusion.) Now, despite appearances, I actually do want people to be able to access the contents of that artpack, and I also do want people to be able to appreciate the work that was put into the puzzles – which they cannot if over 75% of them are turned away at the very first step. So I will do 28 people a favour and “spoil” the first puzzle for them, and I will try to do so in the methodical step-by-step fashion of Infocom’s classic InvisiClues, so you needn’t get spoiled in regards to parts of the puzzle you hadn’t seen yet.

Now, the first thing that you’ll see when you start doing the puzzles is a redirected URL, http://bit.ly/WeTakeManhattan. This is nearly enough to actually guess the second URL, but I don’t require you to make the jump; there are further clues. If you follow that URL, you download a compressed file entitled killallthelawyers.lzh. The ‘90s were a time of a shrinking of a teeming microcomputer ecosystem (not just the PCs and Macs, the Amigas and Atari STs, and a special few BeBoxes and NeXT Cubes, but also the end of the line for the Apple 2s and C64s) and rapid technological change even within then-new product categories like file compression standards. Most of these have been casualties left by the wayside but I thought that it might be fun and adding period flavour to give the old formats one last kick at the can as part of this nostalgic exercise. (Just be glad I didn’t require anyone to mount a Stacker- or DoubleSpace-compressed filesystem.) So in order to access the clue, you first had to know what an LHA file is (mostly used on Amigas and in Japan) and how to open it. Now, I’ve got to say that my free copy of IZArc, my standard all-purpose unarchiver, handled these all seamlessly, but I regret to announce that my experience was far from universal.

Whazzit> In opening it, I get this:

Now, while my program was able to open these all with deft aplomb, getting the historical archive files made in the first place was not as easy, and typically I had to resort to period programs running under DOSBox. It seems that not all unarchivers are born equal or support all versions of archives equally effectively, so some of you would see repeated errors if you did not use equivalent unarchivers of a similar vintage. Sometimes the errors interfered with your accessing the file, sometimes not. Let’s assume not. So, what you would see in the archive is a file named theangryflea.lit.

What do you do with a .LIT file?

Whazzit> I had no “.lit” viewer, so the first one stymied me. I may not be the only one.
Cthulu> while historically some were coloured as ANSIs, most .lit files, including this one as it turns out, are just raw text files 8)
/me furrows his brow and ponders if any group, anywhere, ever released a dedicated .lit viewer. The closest I can think of is Tribeview’s unsolicited auto-enhancement of .LIT files
W> I just installed Microsoft Reader, but it can’t open the file, saying Error: A book file may be missing or damaged.
C> You’re, uh, trying too hard! Notepad will do the trick!

Anyhow, this file, when opened in a text editor, yields the following puzzling contents:

jvaqf bs punatr jrne uvyyf gb fnaqcvgf
rer gurve frpergf pbzr gb yvtug.
guvax bs nyy lbh'ir yrsg oruvaq,
nyy lbh'ir lrg gb yrnir.
xabjvat jung'f sbhaq jvyy or ybfg sberire,
rire fubhyq lbh tevrir.
Or gur punatr lbh jnag gb frr,
rfpncr gur punatr lbh'q engure abg
eryrnfr lbhe qhgvrf,
ynl qbja lbhe znagyr.
vg'f abg zhpu bs n cbrz…
arire jnf, gubhtu.SAUCE00the angry flea (encrypted) cluethulu Mistigris 20150928j

I know, it looks mostly like gibberish.

W> Ahh. It’s a cipher. I thought it’d be a riddle, so when confronted by absolute nonsense I figured something had gone wrong somewhere.

But then at the end, a glimmer of coherence. There, what we see is the contents of the file’s SAUCE entry – SAUCE (“Standard Architecture for Universal Comment Extensions”), that ridiculous but handy ACiD-dictated metadata format for computer art scene files. We can see that the SAUCE was added (with SPOON) on September 28th of this year, that the file is assigned to “Cluethulu” (that’s me, plus a clue) of Mistigris, and that its title is “the angry flea (encrypted)”. Encrypted? Well, that would explain the gibberish – that or else it might be Klingon poetry.

Now, with encrypted texts, there are a few approaches you can take: you can count all the letters, chart their frequency, and map them against standard English letter frequency (which trends toward the most common letters looking like ETAOIN SHRDLU); or you can take brief 2- or 3-letter clumps and do substitutions to test hypotheses such as “what if this was 'and’ and that was 'if’?” Or you can just shift the whole text along one letter at a time and stop when the results look like something. This was not encoded with strong cryptography; in fact, it uses about the most bog-standard, nominal cryptography scheme in wide usage, generally to avoid printing spoilers in blog comments. The crypto scheme employed here is that known as ROT13, so dubbed because every character in the alphabet is shuffled along 13 spaces, totally garbling the message but making it very easy to decrypt – by shuffling it along a further 13 spaces, amounting to a total movement of 26 spaces or one full rotation through the alphabet.

In this case, what you get is a bad poem:

winds of change wear hills to sandpits
ere their secrets come to light.
think of all you’ve left behind,
all you’ve yet to leave.
knowing what’s found will be lost forever,
ever should you grieve.
Be the change you want to see,
escape the change you’d rather not
release your duties,
lay down your mantle.
it’s not much of a poem…
never was, though.

There is some rhyme, the lines are coherent enough on their own but it doesn’t seem to amount to anything, a radical departure from the Mistigris World Tour (1997), where the poem was the main thrust of the riddle-clue. More ScrollZ standard than the rarefied lines Mistigris was known for! (Sorry, am I supposed to be over that cattiness yet?) OK, so where could there be hints embedded in this poem? Is it a certain kind of poem, conforming to particular metric and rhythmic constraints? Do the lines point their way to a specific word? Is … OK, we don’t have much to go on here. Does anything stand out? Well, there are no capital letters except for one B at the start of a line, could that be important?

Maybe the title of the poem, “the angry flea”, will shed some light on things. I don’t see the flea anywhere in the poem, however… could it be some kind of metaphor? Well, it is wordplay of a very “cryptic crossword” variety (an aside: did you know that the UK government recruited codebreakers to work at Bletchley Park on decrypting WWII Enigma transmissions by headhunting the winners of special newspaper crossword puzzles? This led to the invention of Colossus, “the world’s first electric computer” (before which computers were typically rooms full of women with calculators) and leads in a roundabout fashion to our computer art of the '90s and indeed your reading these online words today) — if you switch out “angry” for the near-synonym “cross” and “flea” for its bloodsucking relation, you can shimmy from “the angry flea” to “a cross tick”… which, pronounced phonetically, gives you the word “acrostic”.

No, it’s not painting on beeswax – that’s “encaustic”. An acrostic is a poetic device where messages can be embedded in texts running perpendicular to their usual read sequence, as you might see in a word search puzzle. Typically acrostics spell out missives using the first character in each line. Back in college I wrote a terrible poem pastiching all the styles of my classmates while simultaneously spelling out the acrostic “HELP I AM A PRISONER IN A POEM FACTORY”. Now, over a decade later, I wrote another terrible poem spelling out a more concise message:

“we take Berlin”. As in the Leonard Cohen song lyric, “First we take Manhattan” (which we have just recently seen variantly capitalized, delivering us to this problem!) / “then we take Berlin”. (Why? A sequence is implied: what we do “first” comes first, and “then” something else follows.)

Hence… this trail has delivered us to its transfer point, a phrase to plug in following a bit.ly URL, giving us bit.ly/wetakeBerlin … and suddenly, the chase is on again!

Are there any further easter eggs hidden in the work? Why, that’s entirely up to you…

Nail> So I’ve just started your treasure hunt and either you’ve intended it and I’m just too stupid to get think of the right clue… or the reference to German reunification is utterly accidental. 8D

Cthulu> I can assure you that is unintentional! Are you reading deeper meaning into the poem? Some German-ness does come up later on…

N> Well, you start with a link of “WeTakeManhattan” … there’s a song by Leonard Cohen that goes on with “then we take Berlin”

C> I went for [First] “We Take Manhattan” just because it was the First clue. Every subsequent clue includes some sequential or numerical referent
just to help me keep track of what order they were going in 8)

N> And the first line of the poem, “Winds of Change”… that’s a song by the Scorpions that was played a lot during the time of the fall of the Berlin wall
add to that the fact that German Reunification was 25 years ago last Saturday… 8D

C> Ahaha, I was aiming to write a bad, disposable poem, and “winds of change” is a cliche line … that happens to meet certain requirements needed to provide the code for the next puzzle. The words are only on the page in service of the code; most of them are pure filler.

N> Good thing you said you were aiming for a bad poem, cause… that was my wife’s first comment when I asked her for help, thinking that maybe it’s a language barrier that keeps me from getting anything useful from the poem ;)

C> It’s fascinating that you were able to read that additional context into it however, it goes to show that they say the writer comes in with his baggage, the reader comes in with his baggage, and the poem the reader experiences lies midway between them.

Maybe it was insider bias or genre chauvinism that compelled me to make the lit puzzle the first one – I just didn’t think that any of the individual bumps amounted to much of an obstacle, though of course I am not the best judge of just how hard my own puzzles are. The next one is quite a bit easier! Go on, take a whirl!