ARG Report

The ARG report for Connection Report, which I will refer to as Pathos.AVI from this point on, since that's where it lead. I won't give a direct link, you can either solve the puzzle, or take it from my screencaps or Penny will post it. Here's my screencaps. After solving all the puzzles we got...more puzzles. Yay.

https://imgur.com/a/OEBKA

Let's first round up everything that's necessary. The two relevant topics here are:

https://newarcana.forumotion.com/t5825-connection-attempt-5 which contains the relevant ciphers proper

and

https://newarcana.forumotion.com/t5826-information-supplement which gives hints as to how to solve said ciphers.

Since the Information Supplement is reasonably what you'd need to solve everything, let's start by listing that thread's encoded text, the way they were encoded, and their solution.

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100100 01110101 01110100 01101001 01100110 01110101 01101100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 00100000 01100011 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110100 01100101 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101000 01101111 01101101 01100101 00101110 00100000 01000001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01101000 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101110 01100101 01111000 01110100 00100000 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110000 00101110

This is obviously binary and translates to

"The dutiful bee creates a home. As such should you to decode the next step."

This hint refers to beehives and their hexagonal divisions, hinting that the next encryption will require hexadecimal.

4a 75 6e 65 20 32 33 20 31 39 39 36 2e 20 54 68 65 20 72 65 64 20 6d 61 6e 20 68 6f 6c 64 73 20 61 20 62 61 73 69 63 20 6e 75 6d 62 65 72 2e

Seems like hex alright. This translates to

"June 23 1996. The red man holds a basic number."

This hint refers to the release date of the Nintendo 64 and its launch title, Super Mario 64. Both of these are hints towards the next encoding method, being that the Basic Number is 64, hence Base64 encryption.

VGhlIGtleSBpcyB0byBiZSBnaXZlbiB0byBhIGJldHJheWVkIGtpbmcgd2hvIHJlamVjdGVkIGhpcyBjcm93biB0aHJpY2UuLi4gDQoNCg

I'll admit I mostly bruteforced my way through this one but Base64 is indeed correct, I only actually got the hint after I had already solved it. Either way it translates to

"The key is to be given to a betrayed king who rejected his crown thrice..."

This is a hint towards a later part of the ARG and will be explained when it's relevant.


Now let's move onto the actual ciphers we need to solve.

01101000 01110100 01110100 01110000 01110011 00111010 00101111 00101111 01100100 01110010 01101001 01110110 01100101 00101110 01100111 01101111 01101111 01100111 01101100 01100101 00101110 01100011 01101111 01101101

L2ZpbGUvZC8wQjR3a3E1a0dLUVE2UQ==

54 68 49 4d 6d 6f 30 57 6b 56 4f 5a 58 63 2f 76 69 65 77

Spoiler alert, these form a Google Drive link and are solved using the exact same three decryption types as before. The first one is binary, the second one Base64 and the third one hexadecimal. The messages are already in order and are arranged into this link when decoded correctly:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4wkq5kGKQQ6QThIMmo0WkVOZXc/view

I'll give you the time to visit the link and watch the video before advancing. This is when the ARG really starts going nuts, as a LOT of cyphers start flashing rapidly and you need to be really quick to catch them. Props to Moogle for screencapping them for me.


Onto Pathos.avi now, then. Now is when we return to the third hint given by the Information Supplement, referring to how a key should be given to a betrayed king who rejected his crown thrice. This is a reference to Julius Caesar, and the key part refers to how the decryption we should use is a Keyed Caesar Cypher. Said key was found in the video itself.


By inputting "existance" into a Keyed Caesar decryption tool (you can find this online really easily, it took me less than a minute to do so), you can solve every single one of the cyphers in the video... except for one. Admittedly I actually put existence instead of existance because I automatically corrected it but it works nonetheless. I'll list each cypher as well as its solution in the order I have them on my notepad, which should be their order of appearance in the video except for the hex one, which was the last one Moogle caught.


And that's it, that is the full report we have to give so far and that should be everything necessary to understand how the ARG works up until now. When other things come up and if we solve them, we'll update this thread to explain how exactly they were solved. If someone else figures it out before us, by all means, we invite you to also share your findings here.

"I knew they had potential"

only reason this took so long is because I didn't notice the Keyed Caesar was set to encrypt instead of decrypt. Same key as before. -facepalm-

https://newarcana.forumotion.com/t5851-connection-finalized-access-granted-awaiting-further-action

yay junction is starting, guess we can scrap thi-- wait what's this

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4wkq5kGKQQ6aFpNZXFCLTlWeDg/view

Oh. OH.


Oooohh... key, as last time, is Existence. Keyed Caesar like usual. Well, have fun reading these, there isn't much else to say about it! Props once again to Moogle for grabbing the screencaps so diligently, I honestly wouldn't have ever had the patience to do this without him.