In order to properly "interpret" the secret rules, Lizard Boy and I decided that we would attempt as many decryption procedures as possible. Lizard Boy, the EquivalenZ guru of our duo, will take you through these methods.

Lizard Boy:

Well, the first thing I look at when doing an analysis is letter frequency. I won't bore you with the results of that, because it revealed just one thing: we weren't dealing with a simple substitution cypher. I bowled into it so blindly that I didn't notice some things beforehand that would have given me pause. Things like, the fact that there were '+'s all over the place. And numbers. And that mysterious sequence "== =" towards the end.

So, rather than mire myself further in the method of "have a computer chug numbers for me", I sat down to take a closer look at the patterns. The slashes, I suspected, would be divisions of some sort. Perhaps this could break it down, make it easier to understand. Unfortunately, it did nothing like making it easier to understand. The smallest chunks were on the order of 5 characters, which suggests an individual word, certainly not a full sentence. Some of the others, however, were as long as 3 lines. Unless the rules involve a particularly well-known Hawaiian fish, there's no way the structure for the short segments and the long segments would be the same.

Additionally, at this point I noticed that key piece of information that is conspicuously absent: the type of cypher. I was beginning to feel hopeless. For all I know this could be a one-time pad, impossible to decipher without first knowing the key. Fortunately, it was around that time that Cyber Kitty had her revelation...

Cyber Kitty:

I did try my meager cryptoanalysis on the secret rules, but found very little except that they could be arranged quite neatly into a 32 by 32 grid...

So, I decided to sleep on it, perchance to dream. Having recently experimented with lucid dreaming, I decided to use those newly learned skills to deliberately dream about this task. Later that night, I was rewarded with a dream about this task. Realizing i was dreaming, I begin to concentrate on the secret rules. Certain letters began to stand out. Then, letters began to disapear, blur, move, while new letters appeared. As the letters re-arranged themselves, the truth was revealed. With the exception of the secret word, I now reveal the truth to you:





1) Retroactive proofs are HIGHLY discouraged.
2) You may not copy anyone's previous work, including your own, with the exception of parody and the like.
3) The secret word is (?), invoking the secret word causes invulnerability to player killing.
4) Players revealing the secret rules may now complete tasks from all groups, and will receive a SPECIAL badge.




(Post Praxis: Yes, we know this interpretation does not actually glean any information that may or may not have been in the secret rules as encoded. However, we've been noticing along with everyone else that there are several rules of the community that are not recorded officially anywhere, and we decided to enumerate some of those. Rules 3 and 4 are, respectively, an artifact of grander plans that fell through, and just there for fun.)