Happy Thanksgiving from the Portal. The Gathering, a harvest cipher maze, is free to play until 30 November. Enter The Gathering

3 stages · Medium · free · no account needed

THE WIRETAP

📜 Briefing
Someone inside Zion is talking to the machines over an old copper line, and you have clipped onto it. Nobody is going to hand you a key. Every call you pull off the wire, you break yourself.

Three calls. Each answer unlocks the next, and the last call needs a word from the one before it.
  1. 1 Tap One - The Count
  2. 2 Tap Two - No Key 🔒 opens with stage 1's answer
  3. 3 Tap Three - The Moving Shift 🔒 opens with stage 2's answer

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Stage 1: Tap One - The Count

The first call is in a shift cipher: every letter moved the same number of places along the alphabet. Nobody will tell you how many, and you do not need them to. In English, E is by far the most common letter, so whichever letter turns up most in the ciphertext is almost certainly standing in for E.
WHAT TO DO
1. Scroll down to the workbench. The Caesar Cipher step is loaded and set to Decrypt, with the message in the Input box.
2. Scroll to the Lens under the workbench. Choose Frequency Analysis and point it at "Input". The top row is the letter that appears most often.
3. That letter stands for E. Count how many places it is after E in the alphabet (E to F is 1, E to G is 2, and so on). That number is the shift.
4. Type the shift into the step. The Output becomes readable English and tells you a word to say on the line. That word is your answer.

Input: AOL ULEA JHSS JVTLZ AOYVBNO AOL VSK LEJOHUNL HA LSLCLU. DOLU AOL SPUL JSPJRZ ADPJL, ZHF AOL DVYK JYVZZAHSR HUK DHPA. AOL VWLYHAVY DPSS UVA YLWLHA OLYZLSM, HUK ZOL DPSS UVA DHPA MVY FVB LPAOLY.

    Unscored guest play: take your time, hints are free. A member solving this stage scores up to 360 points.

    Full tool pages: Caesar Cipher ↗ Frequency Analysis ↗

    🛠 Workbench

    The stage's ciphertext is loaded with a suggested tool. Chain more tools, point the lens at any step, then press “Use as answer” below the result. The server alone checks answers.