The house of Dracos

[Rezantis]

And Rez promptly nicks a browser window again to see if he gots a reply.

[Rezantis]

Finding one, Rez spends a few minutes typing as he (A) replies to his reply, and (B) subscribes himself to a mailing list.

Hmm.

[Brian]

As unlikely as it seems this early into the brute-force, you've gotten a notification from your program that it's completed.  Completed, you'd expect, finding the encrypted key's location.

However, it has, in fact, found the key itself:

"My name is Ozymandius, king of kings, look upon my works, you mighty and despair!"

[Rezantis]

Rez stops, bursts out laughing, and goes to skim through the CD.

[Brian]

After decryption, you are left with some interesting data.  You can read it raw, but it looks like it's using some compression your unfamiliar with.  While you can find bits of plain text floating within the files, the majority of the system is a mystery to you.  It seems like what you thought was dummied data was actually some kind of mini-database (each chunk), though you don't know what reads them, or what they contain.

[Rezantis]

Rez does a quick search of the Raw, on the tokens 'Pax Arcana' and 'Seventh Cabal', to see if they're mentioned in the plaintext anywhere.

[Brian]

You do, actually.  'Cabal' 'seventh' 'Pax' and 'Arcana' all show up, though you do not find any whole-word consecutive matches of either on a casual perusal.  There are hundreds of megs of file to sort through, however....

[Rezantis]

Rez gets on to downloading and installing the view file that Ayame linked him to (onto his laptop) . . . and once this was done, tried browsing the contents of the CD again - this time with the correct (hopefully) tool!

[Brian]

The interface is about as pretty to look at as raw Crystal Foundations Reports pages, and about as user-friendly as Clarify, but it seems to be letting you browse a database.  As soon as you attempt to open any entry, it generates the following error message:

Code Select Expand

Damaged archive.  To restore, run 'cypher'.

It then links you to a copy of the file nested in the database itself.

[Rezantis]

Rez makes a copy, then deletes that file, and tries running the program again.

[Brian]

The original remains where you moved it.  However, a new copy (matching filesize) appears when you attempt to run the application again.

[Rezantis]

"Gah."

Rez digs around for an error log?

[Brian]

Code Select Expand

<Rez> roll 3d6
<Chibi-Suu> Them bones was tossed for Rez ... :3d6 --> 10

You manage to find the error log without any trouble.  The program isn't so great, because it doesn't save the error log anywhere except for in resident memory while the interface utility is running.

Once opened, you see a reference to a missing database file, and then a complex string that seems to indicate some form of linear algebra.

[Rezantis]

Rez grabbed his laptop and set to uploading certain promised files . . . and after a few more minutes of tinkering, went off to see where Drac and Ginrai were.

[Brian]

Thankfully, the upload only takes about twenty minutes with the connection at Dracos's.