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Evan Friave-Goodlace ([personal profile] evantuality) wrote in [community profile] thehometree2015-08-11 11:56 am

Around the Tree from August 6th to 12th

[Cipher party! Third floor common area, afternoon August 9th]

Evan is sitting at one of the mushroom tables nestled beneath a fern, his two precious sheets of paper for the week in front of him. He's intermittently writing on one of them, dipping the quill pen he's acquired in one of two small acorn caps. Each has a different color of dye, and he's working with the berry pink.

Up to a point, he's content working on his own, ignoring the mild bustle of the baths across the way. But eventually he leans back on his stool of a mushroom chair and sighs, exasperated. He takes a moment to stretch out his wrists before he picks up his amber.

"Hi. I've been working on the cipher the mirror's given us and could use an extra brain or two on the job.

"It's not a rotational cipher, because that would be too easy." If he sounds a bit salty it's because he may have spent the most of the morning mired in the tedium of trying all of them, just to be sure. "I'm trying to puzzle it out as a classic cipher now, which means a lot of guesswork. This is what I've got so far."

He holds a sheet of paper up to the amber.

His face returns to the amber slice when he puts the sheet back down, explaining, "I'm working off of the likelihood that that double letter combination may be a double T or a double E given that Ts and Es are some of the most frequent letters in an English phrase, as well as the most common doubled letters."

"Of course, this is all an absurd waste of time if somehow this cipher isn't in English." Sighing, the young man props an elbow on the frustratingly soft surface of the mushroom table, and then his chin on his hand. "So if anyone wants to join me here and help come up with a list of words that conform to the pattern, maybe I'll waste less time that way."



[Eighth floor, morning August 12th]

Given that he's of a generation that's been weaned onto computers basically from birth, Evan has been going a little bit stir-crazy without. There's nothing quite like not being able to Google something when you've got a question, and that lightning has been teasing him with its promise since the eighth floor was cleared.

Now he's decided that, nevermind not being able to look up the details of how to deal with that kind of free electricity without frying himself, he can run tests using what he remembers. It's not an inconsiderable amount, after all.

The only problem is that the only nonconductive material he can think of that's easily on hand is on the soles of his shoes. So he's grabbed one of the smaller, utilitarian knives from the storage area on the third floor, and he's sitting on a little bench outside the inn, looking up at the electricity and down at the sole of the shoe he's brought with him and trying to decide whether this is worth losing a shoe over.



[Among the branches near butterfly eggs, August 6th]

That singing has drawn him out into the night air, at least in part because he's having a hell of a time sleeping while it teases him. It doesn't help that it's the first music he's heard since he arrived at the tree, and while Evan is no aficionado of choral music, he's hard-up enough for a little aural stimulation that he finds himself unable not to listen.

However, it's no closer once he flutters his way out of the tree and up among the branches. Louder, sure, but only by dint of not being muffled by the tree's walls. It's nice enough that he doesn't dodge back inside, still, and in fact soon enough he's happy that it's drawn him out.

Anyone flitting about the tree in the late evening of the 11th can find Evan sitting on a narrow treebranch among a few patches of little round white spheres glued to the bottoms of some of the leaves there, peering at them, testing them gently, seeing if he can move them about.

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