Cycle of Learning - The Enigma Emporium Season Two - Veritas - Card Two

 After a lovely holiday away, we come back to the Enigma Institute, ready to decipher more of the secrets their other agents have uncovered from the cosmos. It doesn't bode well when my partner, responsible for sending me the images of our quarry, starts with 'Oh god, this is going to be irritating.' It turns out that this is because the entire border of the back of the card is teeny-tiny numbers. Thankful for image editing software so I can zoom in - I'd go blind otherwise. It turns out, however, that the numbers are a count, from 1 to 210. 

On the front of the card, we have a skyscape with a man on a hill, and a poem. On the back, tiny numbers circle the border, we have a message in plain text, a series of nested triangles, a coded message on the right, and three stamps of space launches with dates on them. Presumably different space shuttles? There's also the word 'sunk?' on one of them, and the website at the institute/triangle? going down the center. 

We tackle the stamps first:

• August 12, 1977 - ALT 12 - Shuttle Enterprise's 1st flight
• November 26, 1985 - STS-61-B - Shuttle Atlantis 2 flight
• May 7, 1992 - STS 49 - the first mission for shuttle Endeavor. This one is the stamp where it says 'sunk?'. The HMS Endeavor was the first European ship to reach Australia, Botany Bay. She was eventually scuttled, per the Wikipedia article, 'in a blockade of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island in 1778. The wreck has not been precisely located but is thought to be one of a cluster of five in Newport Harbor.' Not sure what to go on there, unless the location is its scuttling, or Botany Bay, Australia. Alternatively, the Department we're looking for could be Botany?

Staring at the front of the card, the first letters of each poem line spell AURORA, not sure what else to get there, yet. 

Poking around on the triangle, we make our lives a bit too hard - rather than trying to solve for all the sides, which we can't without then angles, we only need the area. The area of the triangle in question? 51. Yep, AREA 51. 

Couldn't resist. Moving on... The institute website for triangle? doesn't exist, but it does for /51. Off we go! The website gives us information on the 'world's first xenobiologist', whose name and details have been redacted, presumably for their safety. Their first name was neither Alice nor Aurora - we keep looking (well, to be precise, I go down an Endeavor rabbit hole, my partner keeps looking...)

The cleartext message looks odd to us, and, given the math, we pick out the words right, mean, zero, jump out. The sum of all the numbers between 1 and 210 is 22155, its mean is 105.5... not sure where we're going here yet. On second glance, several numbers are missing: 29, 34, 78, 102, 153, 164, 191.  Letter to number gets us 

I start digging on the weird letter math. 

• 13+L = 13+12 = 25 = Y
• N-M+L-8 = 14-13+12-8 = 5 = E
• 9+J = 9+10 = 19 = S
• C+E+1/9 + L-Lx11/11 = 3+5+1/9+12-12*1 = 9/9 + 1 - 1 = A? or are the / meant to be dividers of letters?
• 13-L+L-K+21-R = 13-12+12-11+21-18 = 5 = E

Eventually we feel stuck, and check the clues. We were correct on the Aurora, and on the Area 51. However, we were supposed to focus on the 'Atlantis' as part of the sunk clue, and not go down the Endeavor rabbit hole, for all that that was the stamp the word was on... We look back at the plain text, and a clue takes us to counting the missing numbers. Ooops. One letter per line, or, I play with excel... the Mid(text,start,numberofcharacters) function is VERY handy. ROSWELL. ffs. I guess we're supposed to ask the person, name still redacted, about roswell? 

The weird letter math is harder than we were making it. Each integer/letter is a character, which then is acted upon. So, 13+L is both 13 (m) and 13+12 (y) = MY

• 13+L = 13, 13+12 = 13,25 = MY
• N-M+L-8 = 14-13+12-8 = 5 = NAME
• 9+J = 9+10 = 19 = IS
• C+E+1/9 + L-Lx11/11 = 3, 3+5=8, 8+1=9, 9/9=1, 1+12=13, 13-12=1, 1*11-11, 11/11=1 = Chiamaka
• 13-L+L-K+21-R = 13, 13-12=1, 1+12=13, 13-11=2,2+21=23,23-18=5 = Mambwe

His name is CHIAMAKA MAMBWE. Ok, I loved and hated this puzzle. Clever, but makes me feel like an idiot. We put his name into the website, get an email address, and ask about Roswell. That gives us a bit of a discourse on Americans' interest in Roswell, belief in aliens, and just general weirdness, then sends us on to another website, using the other codes - atlantis and aurora - to gain entry, whereupon we are gifted with the first page of an alien autopsy.

While I love the Enigma Emporium's overall concept, I wasn't that taken with this card, or the previous in the Veritas series. I feel like the Wish You Were Here series had a better payoff in terms of reward, and the puzzles were less... fiddly? Still, a pleasant way to spend a Friday night with my puzzling partner.