A poster is put up outside City Hall. On it are strikingly colorful characters alike those seen around town recently, but also accompanying the ciphertext is a body of regular, plain-common text. The poster reads as follows:
The earliest made poster reads "wanfyh, aloooa, sltruh" which may be translated to "was all not for you hah" or perhaps "hah! not all was for you" … It is unclear. The rule to accomplish this translation is simple and based on the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—the code author must be some nature of scientist!). Take the characters printed in red (w, a, s) as their own word, then orange (a, l, l) and so on, to form the message.
Someone else around town noticed this easy pattern, and with their own poster, remarked: "arscdyt aioooh tmdnui hpe'n eltk re", which follows the same rule as the first and translates to "a rather simple code don't you think". How cheeky, we definitely agree! Keeping with the wit, the second line changes the rules a bit and writes "peosgispue tn tl na uc cthshi". Instead of grouping letters red to violet, the reader must group violet to red. However, we think the author of this second message is just being obnoxious, because after grouping, the reader needs to solve an anagram for each word. This most tedious exercise yields the following message: "let us spice things up a notch".
Catching on to these patterns, yet a third poster adds to the action, or rather continues it—"iete!iaomsrhttkl', ihviaeesrsenntkeespxe" follows the same reverse rainbow anagram rules as before and inevitably reads "that's more like it!" noting on the second line "these inks are expensive". We definitely agree with the second part of the statement… how these code writers afford such exotic inks is beyond those of us here at City Hall.
Neither of us much care for these ciphers, as they are troublesome and expensive to write, and without good rules to solve. We personally think the authors can do better, but in good spirit and in the interest of fun, we add our own last comments to the Jishrimites who pen these infernal ciphers:
"
miiunhh lg y ags
cpxphog yyffyf qyrchl ptcy y
Signed,
CM Ardaric Tideborne
CM Lewis Doggett
