20th Day of Spring, 513 AV Wright Memorial Library was busy with students, all trying to find specific books for their own course. It seemed that the workload had already been thrown at them at the beginning of the new season, and the more determined students had decided to get it done sooner rather than later. It was an impressive resolve to have, but inevitably brushed aside soon after starting on the basis of enough time. Still, the intentions were there, even if the motivation wasn't. Erekez returned to his workstation. There had been many students that had asked if he could help them find a specific text. Some of those students had found a new journal or book in their hands that Erekez had previously worked on. He did not believe in special treatment for the most part, but Erekez did believe on getting the best out of what is available to you. It just so happened that students who had asked for help probably got better material. As he sat down, Erekez returned to looking at the journal he had picked up today. It was taking longer than usual. The hardest part of any code was trying to find the key to break it. Normally, it just required to notice patterns within the text you were reading for shifts. In other, slightly more complicated ones that Erekez could do, a word had been used as the key, taking each character's position in the alphabet as the number to shift by. This journal wasn't like the others though. Each new page had a new key, so Erekez was reduced to finding the new key on every page. The codes were very simple, but that had been covered up by the repeated changing of the key, which was practically written at the top of each page. What the writer had done was list a few words at the top of each page, seemingly random in their selection, but there was always one word that connected all the words at the top. That was the key, and it had been made into a puzzle. Very clever. Erekez looked back at the list of words at the top of this page: Sand, Blowing, Spy, Worker |