Iwt Hnhitb Egxbtg

One's got to make the best of things (right?).

So Bob had decided to put the trapdoor and the wooden key out of his mind.

That enlightened decision may or may not have been preceded by a vigorous attempt to cut open the trapdoor with the hunting knife. Unfortunately, if there was a trapdoor there, which there probably wasn't, it was fronted by a metal shielding and he'd had no luck forcing it open.

Bob was standing in front of the fire, panting and looking about him with a hunted, desperate sort of air. His heart wouldn't shut up and his stomach was all butterflies.

He wasn't going to end up trapped in this room, was he?

Bob swallowed and glanced gingerly around. The darkness had a strange living quality to it. It lapped playfully at the tongues of his bright fire. Like it was just waiting for the moment when it would swoop down and gobble them all whole.

Bob breathed out, trying to calm himself.

You can't solve puzzles scared out of your mind.

Bob's mission was to escape the room. He was looking for a key. The key to the padlock on the oak door. Where might a maniacal system hide a key?

Bob sketched himself a rough map.

The room was basically square, four ninety-degree walls, each ten paces across. To the north was the doorway, to the east the fireplace, to the south the bookcases and to the west... Well the west was just blank stone wall. And in the centre of the room was the island of paradise: Mrs Armchair and her finicky little husband, Mr Side-Table.

Detective Brown jabbed a finger at the bookcases. The obvious suspect. A key was just a thin strip of metal. It could be tucked between two pages and the book would look just the same from the outside. A man would have to flip through every last page to make absolutely sure he hadn't missed it.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Detective Brown and Bob Brown looked at each other. They both nodded.

Bob was going to have to remove the books anyway to secure the shelves for firewood. So while he was at it, he would skim through each book looking for the hidden key. To be extra thorough, he'd also map out the books' arrangement on the shelves. Some things you could only see when you had the whole picture in front of you.

Executing the plan was excruciatingly boring. It took Bob a full hour and a half to trudge through every last book in the shelves. And for all his effort, for all his sweat and suffering, Bob had found...

Nothing.

Or not quite.

For one, he had a large and intricate diagram of the bookcases, as well as an impressive collection of statistics. Who doesn't enjoy statistics?

There were three hundred and forty books. Of which only fifteen contained text. Of these, there had been three in each of the five bookshelves. Or done by rows: four on the top row, six on the second, four on the third and just one on the bottom.

Detective Brown understood the grave significance of arbitrary numbers.

His second acquisition had been a little pamphlet. A jamphlet if you will.

He'd found it stuffed inside an empty volume in the lower, right section of the bookshelves. The pamphlet was vividly coloured in green and purple splotches (think trippy leopard print) and was absolutely bursting with text—no margins, no spaces or new lines, no indentation. The difficulty was that the whole text, without exception, consisted of the single letter J printed over and over. JJJJJJJJJ... You get the picture. Hence "jamphlet" (J-pamphlet).

Lastly and most annoyingly, there had been no key.

Bob had been pretty thorough checking, if only because he hadn't wanted to go over all three hundred and forty books again. He'd even done a sweep of the shelves after they were emptied, but no key was lying on the ground or trapped in a corner.

There had been a little red spot on the wall behind the bottom row of the second bookshelf that looked suspiciously like dried blood. But he tried to avoid thinking about it. He was already pissing himself as it was.

Aside from that, nothing.

No, the only real discovery had been learning that dust and mud stuck together beautifully.

A happy surprise.

The absence of a key stumped Bob a little. He didn't quite know where to look next. He searched the side table, top, bottom, inside and out. He got down on his bare knees to peer beneath the armchair. He ransacked behind the cushions. He doubled back to the west wall, patted it down, stepped back, crossed his arms and searched the blank stone, but saw nothing, save perhaps an oddly mocking expression in the stonework.

Where else was there to look?

Bob's heart rate was starting to rise. The walls were leaning in on him. The darkness smiled. And he couldn't escape the feeling that he'd missed something. That he'd already made some kind of terrible mistake. And maybe, maybe, it was already too late...

Bob latched onto his final lead. His last chance.

The encoded texts.

How Detective Brown wished he hadn't skipped code-breaking class. But nobody had warned him about these system-criminals with their snarky messages and their alice-in-wonderland challenges. Still, ninety percent of police work was legwork. So the detective ferried the stack of encoded volumes over to the fireplace and got to work.

All of the books had exactly the same spacing and punctuation. The capitals were in the same places. The lines divided into the same groupings. The page broken up into the same set of paragraphs. That seemed to imply that all the books were just different encodings of the same base text.

Bob's job was to discover the mapping between letters in the alphabet that would let him go from an encoded word to a decoded word.

And just how many possible mappings could exist?

Was it worth wasting time trying to figure out how long and painful the task would be?

Yes, yes it was.

The first letter could get mapped to any of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, the second to twenty-five, and so on. That meant twenty-six factorial (26!) or 26 × 25 × 24 × ... × 2 × 1. Bob didn't have his phone on him and he wasn't about to do that multiplication in his head. But even roughly, there were going to be at least 20 zeros on that number...

It had been a long day, and another hopeless, unending task was just the icing on the cake.

Bob's mind started to wander.

His eyes were drawn to the armchair. It looked especially comfortable with the warm firelight dancing over its cushioning. He might be sitting there now, stretching his feet out and letting the warm air bake over them, his toes wiggling happily.

Bob rose to his feet.

Mrs Armchair was beckoning to him and Bob obeyed with all his soul, his eyes already beginning to glide peacefully shut as he prepared to drift off into a long and enjoyable slumber, into happy dreams of far away places.

"Wake up!"

Bob slapped himself hard on the cheek. Mrs Armchair was an absolute siren and it took all Bob's strength to avoid slipping under her spell. He needed to focus, so he fished up one of the scattered apples and bit down.

The sugar did wonders. Bob saw that he'd been going about the decryption process all wrong. Trying to guess the mapping was a fool's game. He was looking for patterns, shortcuts, loopholes, anything he could exploit.

He quickly copied out the first page into his notebook:

Iwt Hnhitb Egxbtg Ktghxdc 19.0

Xcigdsjrixdc Ltardbt id iwt xcitgktght! Lt pgt staxvwits id wpkt ndj. Ndj pgt iwt 73,926iw xcwpqxits eapcti id qt xcrdgetgpits. Bpcn Rdcvgpijapixdch.

Eatpht jht iwxh egxbtg id prfjxgt qphxr upbxaxpgxin lxiw iwt ldgzxcvh du iwt hnhitb.

Iwgtt htpih hipcs detc pi iwt qpcfjti du phrtchxdc.

"73,926iw" — A number followed by two letters. Suspicious. "73,926th" i → t, w → h

"Iwt" (th_) — First word in the title beginning with "Th-." "The," anyone? t → e

"id" (t_) — Aha! A two-letter word beginning with "t-." "To" d → o

Things were going swimmingly. He wondered why he'd thought this was going to be hard.

"du" (o_) — That had to be "of" u → f

"Lt" (_e) — Could be "Be" or "We," but coming at the start of a sentence: "We" l → w

"qt" (_e) — Which meant this must be "be" q → b

"lxiw" (w_th) — "with" x → i

"iwxh" (thi_) — "this" h → s

"jht" (_se) — "use" j → u

After that, it was only a matter of time.

There was a reason Detective Brown graduated top of his (imaginary) class.

The System Primer Version 19.0

Introduction Welcome to the interverse! We are delighted to have you. You are the 73,926th inhabited planet to be incorporated. Many Congratulations.

Please use this primer to acquire basic familiarity with the workings of the system.

Three seats stand open at the banquet of ascension.

Interesting stuff, if a little mundane. Bob drew out an alphabet to aid with further decoding.

A → L | B → M | C → N | D → O | E → P

Hold on there. Detective Brown sniffed. He had caught the scent of a pattern. All the letters had just been shifted around the alphabet. Yes, rather a simple pattern this. He probably should have figured it out a tad quicker.

Nah, it had been super difficult.

"A" needed to be moved 11 spaces to reach "L" so this book was an eleven-shift. Bob took up another volume and compared the first lines. This one was an eight-shift. All the others followed the same pattern—identical base text with differing shift numbers.

Bob took up his exercise book and the little rubber from the pencil case. He carefully updated his bookcase schematic, writing in the encoding number for each book. Bob liked to do things properly.

On the next page was a table of contents:

1. Stats
2. Classes
3. Companion Objects
4. Skills
5. Achievements + Titles
6. Quests
7. Levelling
8. Evolution
9. Settlements
10. The System

Classes, oh yes, Bob liked the sound of that. He wanted something appropriately epic and destructive. Inferno Master or Volcano Berserker. The kind of class that commanded instant respect and background dread. He flipped to the chapter and started reading:

So you think you're an adventurer.

At the end of the system initiation, sentients are presented with class options based on their performance. Each class is a blueprint for growth, dictating stat increases per level and unlocking a specific ability tree.

Bob closed the book and groaned. Class options based on performance...

Bob wasn't going to end up regretting that first E, was he?

Of course not. He was sure to do splendidly in upcoming challenges. This is Detective Brown we're talking about here.

Now where the hell was that bloody key?

Because—though a system primer documenting the world outside was great and all, much appreciated—here and now, on the clock, he needed a key! Not some system textbook. A physical key. A strip of metal with the right shape to open the padlock.

There went Bob's only lead.

Detective Brown was stumped. And Bob was starting to panic a little. He was starting to think that he wasn't getting out of this room. That maybe the system only wanted select, intelligent subjects in its brave new world and he just wasn't making the cut.

But Bob couldn't think of anything else to try.

Had the moment finally come?

The moment when the hero throws himself willingly into the siren's arms.

The moment when the hero sinks himself into a comfortable armchair and wallows in self-pity?

Screw it. Screw it all.

Bob plopped himself down in the chair, leaned back and...

Frowned.