The Copycat Files - Wish You Were Here IV - Blue Card

 While still awaiting the next season of Wish You Were Here by Enigma Emporium, there is still one set of cards left to unravel. It seems that, having solved the riddles of the first three seasons, our puzzling skills have earned us a bit of celebrity, to the point where the ‘FBI’ receives all kinds of (you guessed it!) copycat postcards. Unlike those from the Ouroboros, our friendly Agent Jasper Meeks informs us, these cards don’t appear to be connected to each other, but are all expected to have at least a name, location, and a confession.  

We decide to start with the blue card, which depicts on its front a wool-coated gentleman smoking a cigarette against a blue and white snowy background. On his coat there are a series of dot sets, which at first guess I take to be Braille or Semaphore. The message reads “Do not go gentle into that good night.” It is bordered with snowflakes. On the back is a short message about climbing and feeling the rotation of the earth, it is bookended by two ‘peaks’ of code - presumably a step-up Caesar Cipher. More snowflakes border the card, and there are two stamps, postmarked June 21, 2019, with the symbol of the Ouroboros, white against a black background. We dive in. 

I start with essentially a brute force Caesar decrypt of the text pyramids. However, it soon turns out that it’s pretty straightforward: the bottom is a +1, the next is a +2... all the way up to the top. The trick is reading them backwards essentially. Below is the solution, spaces added.

• +10: I
• +9: WO
• +8: RK A
• +7: LL AR
• +6: OUND T
• +5: HE WORL
• +4: D BUT AM L
• +3: ARGELY BA
• +2: SED OUT OF P
• +1: ARIS AND OUR HQ

• +9: I
• +8: AL
• +7: SO R
• +6: ECEN
• +5: TLY MA
• +4: DE THE A
• +3: CQUAINT
• +2: ANCE OF YO
• +1: UR FRIEND JC

I work all around the world but am largely based out of Paris and our HQ. I also recently made the acquaintance of your friend JC. 

While I’m doing that, my puzzling companion notices that there are 26 UNIQUE snowflakes on the front... guess they’re the key to the frame on the back. He works on that while I work on the Caesar. I am an expert in pain and I torture the truth out of folk.  Charming. So now we have a confession, a location, and the name is probably in the dots on the guy’s back. Which I’m having trouble matching up with semaphore or Braille.... 

And then my brilliant puzzling companion points out that the same dot patterns are in the letters of the quote themselves. Todd Hill. We have a name! 

So, Todd Hill, torturer of people, based out of Paris, probable torturer of the guy we saved in the last series. 

Tada!