Chapter 53: Cipher, Decoding, and Descent (1/2)
The Room of Requirements has always provided its user with what they desired. Today, too, the person who called out to the room got what they sought from the magical room.
On a very long table sat long strips of paper with symbols written on them in black ink. There were hundreds of these strips. Each long strip of paper representing a plank of symbols that Quinn copied from the Room of Rewards.
He arranged them in the order of time. The plank which held the oldest binders went first, followed by the planks which had binders that came after them.
This arrangement was the one that made the most sense to Quinn because he did not know what the symbols meant. They weren't alphabets from any traditional language that Quinn knew.
The symbols were made from figures with angles, triangles, with at most one dot per symbol.
”This is a cipher,” was the conclusion that Quinn came up with. The symbols weren't random, and Quinn could see the pattern and repetition in the symbols.
”There are twenty-five (25) distinct symbols. One less than the English alphabet? Hmm... is there a missing letter in the code?” noted Quinn, his hand holding his chin in thought.
Within a blink of his eyes, twenty-five symbols in red appeared in front of Quinn, floating in mid-air. These were all the unique symbols present in the cipher.
Using illusions instead of writing the symbols down was redundant, as Quinn needed to maintain his magic while focusing on deciphering the cipher, but he did it for a reason.
Last year, Quinn had noticed that he was spending too much time in the Icy vault. He did nothing but try to get into the vault and spent a lot of time doing it. The time that could have been better managed by him to focus on other areas of magic.
So to avoid that problem this year, Quinn had decided that while he focused on the vault, he was going to make sure not to let his other magical studies fall behind. Practicing Illusion magic was just one example of Quinn making sure that he didn't spend all of his time on the vault.
Quinn stared at the twenty-five symbols for a while before deciding the next step of action.
”Alright, let's apply the usual substitution cipher techniques.” He clapped his hand and rubbed them rapidly as he roamed his eyes over the multiple strips of paper and symbol.
Quinn judged the cipher as a substitution cipher. A substitution cipher was a way to encrypt data by replacing the plaintext with ciphertext. In Quinn's case, the ciphertext were symbols, but they could be anything from letters, numbers, arcane symbols, lines, and dots, or weird alien squiggles.
For example, Ceaser cipher was a way to encrypt information using substitution. The key to the Ceaser cipher was to involve a simple shift to the alphabet. The following represents a Ceaser cipher with a shift of three places,
Plaintext: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
Ciphertext: XYZABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW.
In the above example, 'A' was ciphered by shifting three places to the left and getting 'X.' So when you wanted to write 'A' in your ciphered text, you would write it as 'X.'
And, thus began long hours of rational and logical reasoning and study of ciphertext. Quinn was not experienced with ciphers and was the first time he was working on something like this. It took days over days of grind to work on the ciphered text that might give him the vault's location.
While working on the ciphertext, Quinn learned a lot about substitution ciphers and how to decode/decipher this type of cipher. There were techniques, tips, and methods that went into decoding substitution ciphers.
The first step to solving a substitution cipher was to look for single-letter words because they were almost definitely 'A' or 'I.' By having a guess on the singular-lettered words, Quinn could have a solid estimate on two letters.
Another technique was to count the frequency of the cipher symbols that appeared in the text. In the English language, or more specifically, an English text, some letters appeared more than others.
According to the statistics,
E - T - A - O - I - N - S - H - R - D - L - U,
Were the most appearing letters, with 'E' appearing the most and the frequency decreasing as we moved onto the right.
A technique that might have worked was to look for apostrophes as --T, -D, -M, -LL, or -RE typically followed them. But, there were no apostrophes in the text, so that went out of the window. This did make Quinn realize contractions like 'can't' were written in their expanded form of 'cannot.'
From here on out, things got tough as Quinn had to search for repeating letter patterns. They were common repeating letter groups such as -TH, -SH, -RE, -CH, -TR, -ING, -ION, and -ENT.
With time, he started on trying to decipher two-, three-, and four-letter words.
Two-letter words almost always had one vowel and one consonant. The five most common two-letter words, in order of frequency, were -OF, -TO, -IN, -IS, and -IT. The five most common three-letter words, in order of frequency, were -THE, -AND, -FOR, -WAS, and -HIS.
The most common four-letter word was 'THAT.' An encrypted term with the pattern { [#] _ _ [#] } was likely to be THAT. However, the pattern { [#] _ _ [#] } also represented thirty other words, so Quin had a lot of combinations to work on.
Quinn also scanned for double letters. They're most likely to be -LL, followed in frequency by -EE, -SS, -OO, and -TT.
Decrypting a cipher with hand took time, but slowly and surely, Quinn began making increasingly accurate guesses. Typical word fragments start to reveal themselves, though Quinn had to start over quite a few times because he guessed wrong.
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- (Scene Break) -
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Quinn sat in the History of Magic class, his head resting on his palm. Professor Cuthbert Binns droned about various Goblin Rebellions and Giant wars to bored, sleeping students. The ghost's lessons were regarded as some of the most boring at Hogwarts, leading many students to not paying attention in his classes.
The reason Quinn didn't listen in Binns' lecture was that the ghost spoke in straight facts. Those facts were all stated in the books, and Quinn felt that reading the Hogwarts text was sufficient for the History of Magic classroom. Plus, Quinn knew more about the History of Magic because he had read about said history from the perspective of various communities.
He was playing with his pen, his mind lost in thought about the cipher. He had hit a bit of a snag with his decoding of the ciphertext. There were only twenty-five (25) symbols in the cipher, but Quinn's initial assumption that the plaintext was in English, and there were twenty-six (26) letters in the English alphabet.
Quinn knew the plaintext was in English because he had been getting solid results in the form of proper words and coherent sentences, but there sizeable gaps in the text where Quinn couldn't make sense of the terms.
The legible parts and paragraphs didn't help Quinn to the vault's location or its content. From what Quinn had deciphered, the text was religious sermons from a group known as the Order of Solomon's Temple.
He felt a shake from his side and snapped out of his thought to look at the side, ”Yeah, what is it?” He asked, looking at Marcus, who sat to his right side.
”You should seriously join Muggle studies. Professor Potter is genuinely fun. Her class is on its way to becoming my favorite,” whispered Marcus. ”If you ask Professor Flitwick, he might allow you to add another subject to your schedule.”
”I am not joining. I already all too much on my plate,” Quinn whispered back. He had no interest in joining the Muggle studies, no matter how fun Lily Potter's classes were.
”Really?” He smiled and continued, ”Let me tell you something fun that Professor Potter told us in her class today. Maybe that will motivate you to join the class.”
Quinn gave him a 'go on,' chin jut, and Marcus began,
”Did you know scribes used interchangeably 'I' and 'J' to express the sound of both the vowel and the consonant? It wasn't until 1524 when Gian Giorgio Trissino, an Italian Renaissance grammarian known as the father of the letter 'J' distinguished between the two sounds by creating the letter 'J.'”
Quinn's eye almost popped out from their sockets when he heard the juicy piece of information from Marcus's mouth.
'J didn't exist?!' he thought. 'Holy shit, this makes so much sense. There were only twenty-five before 'J.' Of course, now it all fits together.'
Quinn stilled for a second before another thought occurred to him. He looked at his hands and thought, 'Maybe I have plot armor... because this timing was definitely plot armor... heh, plot armor~.'
He turned to Marcus and hugged the dude, ”Belby, you magnificent ball of sunshine. If you have any problem, come to me. I will fix it for you free of cost. Next time someone calls you something mean, holler me, and I will beat the crap out of them.”
”... Okay,” responded Marcus. He felt weirded out because he saw Quinn's eyes pop out before he looked at his hands and chuckled strangely. Not to mention he wasn't expecting the hug from Quinn.
He untangled himself from Quinn before beaming, ”Then will you join Muggle studies?”
”Huh, no way. Why would I do that?” said Quinn, as he swung his legs under the desk. ”How about you join Care of Magical Creature?”
Marcus made a face, ”Eww, no way. Those creatures are gross.”
”Yeah, but it is fun when you get to look at others squeak in fear or groan when touching something that you eloquently called as gross,” laughed Quinn. ”Yeah... that is always so much fun~.”
”... You are weird,” was Marcus' to-the-point reaction.
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- (Scene Break) -
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After Marcus told Quinn that 'J' didn't exist before, Quinn ran to the Room of Requirements and entered the room.
Inside, he unpacked a regular-sized version of the entire ciphertext and applied 'J' and 'I' to the text, and finally, he had the full deciphered text that Quinn thought was the correct interpretation.
”Yes! Let's do this,” said Quinn, and red English lettering floated from the paper. Illusion magic did its job as the English plaintext of the ciphertext floated just above the page.
The deciphered full text was from the Order of Solomon's Temple's sermons about religion, and just as he expected, there was nothing about the vault in the text.
He pounded on the table and yelled, ”What in the world is this?! Are you telling me that all of this was for nothing?!” The illusion of the deciphered text flickered away because of the bout of anger.
Quinn angrily paced in the room before stomping his way to the table with the text. ”No, there must be something in here. I just have to look closer.”
Taking a deep breath, Quinn focused all his attention on the deciphered cipher that reappeared as an illusion. His eyes roamed all over the English text, looking for anything that would stand out.
”Maybe, there is something hidden in here,” mumbled Quinn.
He hunched over the table, and with his hands supporting his body, he concentrated, and seemingly random words turned from red to blue. The blue words would string together to form sentences before going back, and another set of words would turn blue and form another sentence.
The process repeated repeatedly, the speed of formation of blue sentences sped up, and the words flashed faster with Quinn's pupils moving over every word.
Then there was a sharp intake of air before Quinn stood straight as another set of blue words floated above the red words before the red words disappeared like sand in the wind, leaving behind a string of blue words.