#criminal law lecture whomst?

[iliyad]

""Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly." – Mary Howitt, The Spider and the Fly

guess who’s back, back again. @fieriframes is back, tell a friend! just over a year after the guy fieri-inspired ARG took over my life, tumblr have brought us back to where it all began with a brand-new puzzle to solve.

our first puzzle was tagged with “et in arcadia ego”, which translates literally to “even in arcadia, there am i” and is mostly associated with the 1630s painting by nicolas poussin. our new tag, “i tego arcana dei” means “begone! i conceal the secrets of god” and just so happens to be an anagram of our beloved former tag. both phrases also were used initially in the maranatha puzzles, hence why i’ve taken to calling the ARG a “puzzle.”

last time, we took just over a month. we decoded, analysed, googled. we had to play a game to work out a key, we had to unlock different blogs with different passwords and we learned to recognise voynich manuscript text by sight. @significantfoliage, @puwumats and myself all created conspiracy theory boards. (it was a Choice)

and now, here we are again.

mars (@prettyokayray) was the first one of us to notice that a new gif, inscribed with voynich, had been posted yesterday. going back, we realised that the blog had been posting several other gifsets with the tag “i tego arcana dei” over the past week or so, each one containing a hidden tarot card illustrated by leonora carrington, who was an important person in last year’s puzzle. each post was also given a caption from a poem written by leonora titled “The Cave.” In order, earlier to latest, these were:

the lovers (VI) - "albino raven"

the high priestess (II) - "drink all darkness from heaven"

the lovers (VI) - "dark, dark buzzards"

the high priestess (II) - "sign to the mask that once belonged to life"

the emperor (IV) - "albino raven"

the chariot (VII) - "you are the antidote"

the empress (III) - "the hanged one"

the hierophant (V) - "pours images"

the magician (I) - "into saturated eyes"

the fool (X) - "two ink spies"

after checking through the cards and making sure all of our ducks were in order, mars and gabriel (@ijustwannabeavampire) worked out that what we had was a phone number.

so we called it.

at first, all we had was some spooky and atmospheric piano music. we knew it had to be something important, but we were stumped because we couldn’t identify it. signi eventually worked out that it was a piece called “Who Is The Dreamer?” by ‘Midnight Caller’, both of which sounded connected to the first ARG where we spent time talking to someone called the “Midnight Caller” while we tried to work out who the “dreamer” was (@amithedreamer​). obviously this was promising.

the song was from an album released 17 february 2022 called, get this, arcana, an album which also features bangers like “hořčický”, which just so happens to be the name of 17th century bohemian man who was rumoured to be connected with the voynich manuscript, the script from which being the cluemaster’s favourite cipher for us to decode. further, the composer for the songs as they were published to YouTube was listed as “oneiro grant alcorn”, and oneiro had once upon a time been a password we’d deciphered towards the end of the original flavortown ARG.

yes, you’ve heard that correct. tumblr created and published a fake music album. you’ve got to admire the dedication.

anyway, while we were trying to work out what to do with all of this information, signi realised that there was a portion of the album artwork (commissioned by an artist on behance) above the head of the left figure which looked like some form of code.

it clearly wasn’t morse (the dashes were just too long), and after ester cleaned up the code we were still confused, only this time because it looked familiar–almost like a QR code, except those usually have squares in the corners...

right?

yes, of course, we decided to put squares in the corners and see if that led us anywhere. and it did! reed got there quickest, and scanning the code led us to a blog with the url i tego arcana dei – clearly we’re getting somewhere now.

except the blog is password protected, and we’re still working on cracking it based on what little we have and what guesses we’re able to make. the background image for the blog appears to be from the voynich manuscript, but all of the voynich has been removed and so have the page numbers.

shortly after we worked out the album clue (sorta), we thought to check one of last time’s connected blogs, and worked out that the voynich previously on the page had changed. it now reads “the world has shifted.”

both myself and mars messaged the blog with the translation, but for now we’ve had no response. and thus, with most of us either needing to sleep (ignore the fact it’s currently around 3.30am for me) or fulfill real-world obligations, the curtains have fallen on what has arguably become day 1 of the flavortown ARG 2: electric boogaloo.

if you made it this far, congratulations! this post (and the subsequent ones) will mostly be for me to keep track of how we’re doing, but if it’s interested you in wanting to help us solve our latest puzzle, feel free to message me for a link to our Discord server, courtesy of ester!