It's a lovely Friday afternoon, and for once I have an almost empty plate at work going into a weekend, so how about a little puzzling with my remaining brain cells as the upstairs construction continues to shake my ceiling? We dive into the second card of The Enigma Emporium's third postcard series: Parabola. Spoilers ahead, look out below.
Our second card from our new penpal, Agatha Shapira, comes on February 24th, which is postmarked across three stamps (rabbit - 6, horse/pony -15, pig -18). The front is a close up of part of Dali's "The Persistence of Memory". The blue back has a series of dates (presumably to be transferred to letters), and a message - apparently the Ourobouros have been stalking us for over a decade - 2005 to be precise. On the right there is a series of what look to be overlapping blue/yellow makes green messages in alarm clock/calculator/"segmented LCD display" font. Scattered around them are what could be clock hands or semaphore, but some have three lines rather than two, or only one, so not sure where to start there - doesn't look like pigpen. The repeated phrase "watchlist" makes me think clock.
As I'm typing this up, my eagle eyed partner notices that the larger type on the front does not match the smaller messages - rather than "The Persistence of Memory" and "Salvador Dali" we get "Department" and "Cyber Crime". He works out what that says while I start on the stamps and the dates. We ignore the lcd on front and back for now.
Rabbit - 6, horse/pony -15, pig -18 becomes: FOR. The last stamp message was LOOK, so now we have "Look For." For what? I refuse to jump ahead and look at the other cards, but I really want to.
The dates on the top left of the back are below. Since some of them will vary across years, I've listed the dates that they fell in 2005, which is apparently when they started stalking us. I've put them in month-date format, but it could be the other way around.
- Father's Day, Diwali, Boston Marathon, Orthodox Easter, Mother's Day: June 19, November 1, April 18, May 1, May 8, or 06-19, 11-01, 04-15, 05-01, 05-08. F-S K-A D-O E-A E-H
- Yom Kippur ends, Pentecost, Juneteenth, Father's Day: October 13, May 15, June 19, X, or 10-13, 05-15, 06-19, 06-19. J-M E-O F-S F-S
Other than realizing a lot of things fell on June 19th that year, not seeing anything.
I try to decipher the yellow and blue lcd bits.
- First line: Yellow: 3 5, Blue 1 2
- Second line: Yellow: _ _ 2 5 8 _ 0 _, Blue: 6 1 2 1 1 9 2 5
- Third Line: Yellow: 9 6 5 8 0, Blue: 1 1 1 1 2
- Fourth Line: Yellow: _ 9, Blue: 9 1
- Fifth Line: Yellow: 0 _ 4 4 _ 9, Blue: 2 5 1 1 9 1
Alternatively, if we treat each character as two numbers, we get:
- First line: 13 25: MY
- Second line: 06 01 22 15 18 20 05: FAVORITE
- Third Line: 19 16 15 18 20: SPORT
- Fourth Line: 09 19: IS
- Fifth Line: 20 05 14 14 09 19: TENNIS
Using this same logic on the image on the front gives us: 18, 13? Maybe just telling us that yellow + blue = green?
My puzzling partner goes down the tennis scoring rabbit hole while I compile an animal alphabet from the cards we've done so far. I suspect that we'll eventually get letters for all of the animals in Agatha's pictures, and they'll spell some sort of message. So far we have:
- Rabbit - 6 - F
- Bat - 11 - K
- Duck - 12 - L
- Horse - 15 - O
- Pig - 18 - R
From here we get a bit stumped, and my puzzling companion checks for hints on what we've missed. It turns out that we were making the date puzzle too difficult. If we only take the dates, rather than the months, we get: SARAH MOSS. Who's she? Another FB profile? Can't be only one in existence. Nope, there are several.
We got a little cheaty on the clock hands - I didn't get a chance to try the puzzle but we read ahead - The Brothers Karamazov. Next time I'll be better at communicating with my puzzling partner where I have and haven't worked on a puzzle yet!
So, that's it for Card 2: We're looking for something, possibly Sarah Moss. Someone (Sarah, Agatha?) favorite sport is tennis. Something about The Brothers Karamazov. Cyber Crime Department.
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