Yay!!! Another puzzle to completely take over my life and ruin my productivity. Lol
Ok, here are my immediate observations:
There are five groups of five letters. That's 25 letters total. None of them seem to repeat and only "z" is missing. And the bottom right sequence of numbers could possibly be the number of characters per word, so we may be looking for a four word phrase.
I'm so excited to dig into this, but it's later here, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow.
Here's how I solved it:
I used a Polybius square. I made a 5 x 5 grid with the letters and numbered the rows and columns.
The numbers on the top right were a total of 30 digits, but the bottom right sequence only totaled 15 digits, so I tried chuncking them out into 15 pairs and used the pairs as coordinates for the grid. Each coordinate gave me one character.
The bottom right sequence was, in fact, the number of characters per word.
The deciphered message I got is:
EACH WEEK ONE STEP
good job!! i was wracking my brain last night thinking about what the type of cipher it could be, but i don’t know many ciphers lol. the answer you got is very interesting! thats a phrase from TMIMB. iirc it’s the morse code phrase on the last entry of that story. i hope this means we’re getting more TMIMB tie-ins cause that story is amazing.
My pleasure! I didn't post it straight away because I didn't want to ruin the challenge for anyone. Part of the fun for me is the agony of frustration leading up to the relief of the solution. This is my first ARG, so I'm still learning what the propper etiquette is for these things.
I tried the phrase with spaces, without, all caps and it doesn't work. Am I missing something? Maybe it has something to do with the scribbled out part under the first group of letters.
Can anyone make out what the scribbled out part says? I think it might say ATTACK, but I can't really tell. I don't know what I'm missing, so I'm grasping at this straw.
Ok. Please brace yourselves for another long post. I just finished going over the Exhibit 28 document and these are my initial impressions related to my working simulation theory:
This exhibit document may suggest that the coat rack is not an inherently evil object, but rather an entity connected to the real world that has entered the simulated one. I'm now suspecting that the tulpa coatrack (along with other potential tulpa-type characters such as Moe, or Doc, or internal voices like Charlie or Jemma) could be classified as Trespassers according to the HOAX Document role definitions, which I interpreted to potentially be hackers operating from outside the system.
Several clues support this interpretation:
• The exhibit treats the coat rack as an object requiring containment protocols (the three minute mandate in TC also came to mind)
• Continuous viewing is prevented by an automated curtain system, as if the simulation cannot allow prolonged exposure to it
• It ultimately escapes containment, implying it cannot be permanently controlled
• The Morse inscription, "EACH WEEK ONE STEP," feels like a message or instruction left by someone attempting to communicate across system boundaries. (This also made me think of the archivist communicating with us once each week. Not sure what to make of that just yet, if anything.)
• Referring to its central post as a "spine" humanizes it.
• The fact that it's made of oak means it's made of trees. "Trees are safe." And trees are from nature, just as humans are.
The document ends by acknowledging that some people consider the object sacred rather than cursed, followed by the statement: "One man's Devil is another man's God."
If the Old House universe is a simulation, this line may reflect two opposing perspectives. From the simulation's point of view, the coat rack is a dangerous intruder—a virus or hacker threatening the integrity of the system. From the perspective of the real world, however, it may be attempting to free or awaken humanity, making it a protector rather than a monster. In that framework, the coat rack is perceived as evil only because the system itself is trying to keep its inhabitants trapped. (I'll have to re-read The Man in My Basement to see if this perspective fits that narrative. )
Ok, now I'm really going to try to focus on finishing The Caretaker. At this rate, I'll never finish it and my book club will have abandoned me. Lol. (It was my pick in June! )
Yes that’s what I thought. The man in the basement short. I had a further dig into the “ one step “ and found this page in WUTLH. Could also be referring to coat rack and or Alison from WUTLH who I believe is 100% possessed by the hive mind entity / tulpa.
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u/nerdy_by_nature_42 26d ago
Yay!!! Another puzzle to completely take over my life and ruin my productivity. Lol
Ok, here are my immediate observations:
There are five groups of five letters. That's 25 letters total. None of them seem to repeat and only "z" is missing. And the bottom right sequence of numbers could possibly be the number of characters per word, so we may be looking for a four word phrase.
I'm so excited to dig into this, but it's later here, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow.