Applebloom - 4th of Snowfall - Evening
Things had gotten pretty hectic around here, what with Sombra apparently coming back to life and all. This meant two things for the three of us. First, we had a good opportunity to get some information we wanted while every pony including Phoenix's was busy working out battle plans just in case. Second, we could get the other half of our plan going and gain access to Phoenix's astrometrics sensors.
"Alright... I'm in her dataloop..." Scootaloo whispered.
"Find anything that looks like plans?" Sweetie asked quietly, in case extra security had kicked in.
"Not yet... wait, here we go!" Scoots twitched slightly as she did something to the computers. I never really could understand how she worked them without a tool.
A few secoonds later and our replicator hummed. A thick stack of parchment pages appearing on it's shelf.
"I told the computer to print it as a text file." Scoots said with a smile. "Now we can just read it without working about security systems!"
I trotted over tot he replicator and looked at the top page of the stack. "Uh- Nope." I said in a frustrated tone.
"What do you mean?" Scoots asked as Sweetie walked over to look.
"Scootaloo, you printed the program's code! Come over and read this for us." Sweetie exclaimed.
"What? No I didn't!" She objected matching over to the replicator.
Her eyes caught the groups of random letters and numbers and widened in surprise, "Well, I didn't print the program's code... But I'm pretty sure I printed a code."
I groaned and leaned into my hoof. "Great! Now we need to dust off our Cutiemark Crusader Codebreaker hats!"
"Yay!" Sweetie cheered sarcastically as she flopped onto her plot in a huff.
"I'm sorry! I didn't think to check and see if it was encrypted..." Scoots apologized.
I took a deep breath, "Okay... here's what we do. We scan this into our omnitools, do our best to break it, but we also mail it to Celestia so somepony actually good at codes can look at it. That way we can start scanning for her instead of taking forever to figure out what these bunches of numbers and letters mean."
Scoots sighed and nodded. "That's a good plan... everypony make a copy. I'll stuff this in with mother's reply to Celestia."
Enigma Breaker - 5th of Snowfall - Morning
“Enigma!”
I jumped half way out of my fur, knocking quills and parchment off my desk as the angry and urgent bellowing of Sargent Apparently-Doesn't-Know-I’m-Not-A-Military-Stallion jerked me out of a post-migraine snooze.
“Huh yeah what?” I asked incoherently.
Sargent Way-to-yellow-to-look-good-in-bronze rolled his eyes at me through his helmet. “It’s oh three thirty hours. What by Discords Horns do you think you are doing asleep?”
“Being a civilian contractor in the espionage sector and not say, Dirk Ironhoof, badflank extrordinair.” I responded in my best go-the-buck-away-I-don’t-work-for-you voice.
His horn glowed a bright pink, both lifting a thick scroll from his saddlebag and changing his nickname to Sargent Pink. He held the scroll out to me with an evil grin. “This just came in for you! Your friends up at Canterlot couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and the Princesses need it yesterday. You get me?”
I smiled condescendingly at Sargent Pink. “Oh please. I’ve been cracking codes since I was three.” I pulled the scroll open with my forehooves. “Stick around so you can just take the deciphered text back when I-”
What the bucking hay was this pile of horse apples?
After three seconds, Sargent Pink began to laugh. That mean, jock in the locker room laugh. The sort of laugh which makes you immediately hate somepony that much more for laughing like that at you.
He finally wiped his eyes and shook his head. “Guess that just teaches you what karma is, nerd.”
“Buck off to your calorie wasting exercises, jock!” I shot back.
Sargent Pink trotted off down the barracks hall chuckling smugly. Fine, good, let him go. I needed silence for this one.
The code was groups of two characters, either a numeral and a letter, or two numerals. No letter-numeral, or letter-letter pairings. According to my translation spell, the numerals expressed were the language’s equivalents of zero through nine, and in the entire code only six letters ever appeared.
The code itself was fifty sheets of parchment long, and composed of sixty six thousand, four hundred, and thirty two grouped pairs. It looked to be entirely random, and my enchanted glasses couldn’t make out even one bucking word.
“This is going to be awesome!” I exclaimed completely sincerely.
It had been a long time since I cracked a completely new code.
*looks at code.
NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE
6098766 Don't worry, I'll post the decrypted version later... but it's really not that hard *coughs* till the last layer.
Where are the hints? I know what type of encryption it is, I just need a bit of information to decrypt the plans.
Edit: I have no idea what the encryption is, since I just saw a C in the code, and ADFGVX doesn't have C's.
6098824 After the first layer (which you claim to know what it is) there will be a hint in plane text above the rest of the cypher text.
6098833 I now know not what the encryption is, I was wrong for assuming that just because it uses 6 letters, it must be ADFGVX.
6098884 What layer are you on?
Hmm, at first sight I get a hex dump, of 64 k byte block, with 512 + 256 + 128 extra symbols. C,9,0 If its the key?
Wish i was using my older computer, it can read ascii buried in hex while keeping hex so easy.
thn again, its so old, it cant run decryption.
Oh well.
Have fun guys.
6098902 There are no extra symbols :P PM if your intrested and I'll give you the encryption.
6098886 I'm just throwing this mess of code into every cypher I have at my disposal, specifically Caesar shifts. I honestly have no idea what I'm doing. can I have the encryption?
6098912 Check PMs
It is way to early for this. But I got a few hours to spare.
-----
Extra space between I & said.
Oh boy, her true plans
dis gon b gud
I got it. Only took me 1.5 hours and the use of 1 hint and a lucky guess. Go me!
6099104 Yeah! ^.^ /)(\ ^.^
nope fuck that
6099124 It's okay the decrypted version will be posted later.
... Is this hexadecimal?
*EDIT* Nope, not hexadecimal. Nor viginere, ceasar, affine, or any other online code breaker I've run it through.
My first thought was hexadecimal, but... I'm not sure.
Some of you are going to hate yourselves later based on your comments.
What's 'txt six four'?
I've got a golden ticket
doodoodoo dee doo doo
I may or may not know the broken code
6099813 Run home popmannn! Run home as fast as you can!
6100519 Um... Where do you think they got all that gear.
6100519
It's a changeling old age disease, like Alzheimer in humans. Except instead of you forgetting everything, your body instructs itself to self destruct. Since it's a psychosomatic illness, it cant be tested easily, and in it's more advanced stages it caused a changeling to disassemble themselves faster than Phee's nanotech can replace parts. Also since it's part of the consciousness, it will be transferred into other bodies so you cant just pull a body hop.
Shapeshifter diseases are weird. For example there is one where all the motor neurons change at once so you can only walk to the left. Fortunately that one goes away over time.
Well... I did say that Phee sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID2BEXJ4IKc
And the data they are accessing is in Subprocessing unit 43893. Then again I dont think they would make that particular mistake AGAIN, so we should be good.
I wonder how many people know those are the rules of physics which modern day spacecraft work under?
I was so tempted to have her chalk it up to a bad bean borieto and then go back to bed.
6100533 Not from Phee
For me it's usually Thai food.
6100865 Wwaaaaiiiit...
How many people don't know how flight like that works?
I mean, if they know that literally any void craft exist, how else would they imagine it working?
Hell, it's also how some bugs fly. Kinda.
Look, bees are weird. Their flight method kicks ass, though.
6102364 Bees are awesomely weird yes.
6102376
Oh hey, said nature, why don't we make it drag itself upwards?
Cool idea, nature replied, then we can let it thrust vector by using its body and its own turbulence as control surfaces and counterweights!
6102382 Bees, natures attempt at Kerbal Space Program Physics.
6102395 With lower crash rates, and... y'know, swarms. And hives. And automated resource collection and processing.
Nature is better than us at Kerbal.
6102404 Heh. Don't say that until you see my Kerbal. Deorbited Eloo right into Duna! Ahhhh yeah! Suck it Duna! (Mods helped obviously.)
6102407 Nature crashed Thea into Terra and we got a freakishly large moon out of the deal.
No mods.
Lacking time warp sucks though.
6102425 Yeah but it didn't get visceral glee out of it.
6102428 Interesting directions that can go.
One, consideration of Nature taking visceral glee in things, and all the odd implications that might have.
Two, the fact that the visceral glee you experienced was a wholly natural phenomenon.
Three, yeah those mods rock.
6103097 Yeah, if you have to go, how about a literal blaze of glory?
6102425 Don't forget the extra large iron core that provides us with an extra strong EM field. That is very beneficial. Also it stabilized our axis's wobble.
6103984 It's actualy not that hard. You should get it easily enough :3
6104246
Well yeah. Think bout it, pony tech is somewhere between 1911 and 1980 in canon. I lean towards 1970s. Sure they ave magic, but if the other side reverse engineered magic and has counters for it well... The Equestrian-Arc war was their X-COM. They barely won. They went from 11.8 mill to 3.4 mill. This would completely destroy most nations, but well magic is helping a lot.
Also very true but well, Celestia is one major, huge thing which could screw that up. A fool. Yes, I know, that seems mean, but she is. Why? How? Triek. "We must rid ourselves of our magic before Triek has a chance to steal it from us!"
*reads title*
"How about a nice game of Chess?"
"Later. Let's play Global Thermonuclear War."
6105606 Hey! Someone spotted the Wargames Reference there! Have a cookie!
6105633 *noms cookie*
6105642 Oh damn, I hope your cookie isn't actually juicy, cause that can't be healthy...
6105893
6105906 I'm gonna assume that made sense to you.
6105982 Juicy.... Blood and gore is juicy....
Time to save the world again.
This song sound very heroic.
Doh, the plans are encrypted! So much for my hope that they might be able get moving on the alliance far shorter than a year hence, though I suppose that still might depend on how quickly Enigma or the CMC can get a move on themselves.
6105633 Number of players: zero.
6113314 Three people did it actually...