TEAM YZMA LOG

[recollecters]

TEAM YZMA

READY: START Team Yzma roster: Carmen Sandiego, Dave Strider, Elizabeth, Emil Vasterstrom, Juzo Sakakura, Lucy/Kaede, Penelo, Seto Kaiba, Shouto Todoroki, Souji Seta, Yato. The city's been under siege for what feels like hours. It's only on August 3rd that you learn it's been a matter of days. Monsters begin pulling Retrospec users through portals left and right, large gaping holes in reality that spit you out in any given location around the city. However, just as you think you're finally getting away, a large blue portal opens and you're snatched up. No amount of fighting and struggling will free you and soon the pressure is too great to ignore. Darkness fills your vision and the last thing you may remember is the sound of thunder... This is the Team Yzma Event Log. You are free to toplevel and thread as you choose on this log, but only team members may utilize this log. Important links to mod toplevels are: Mod Questions & Participation Reporting. Please be aware you are responsible for reporting your own participation & objective completion efforts with links; the moderators will try to keep up with threads, but as we are currently running several teams with participation, we require you to keep us up to date! Please read each of the toplevels and instructions! The schedule for Team Yzma is as follows: 3RD: Objective 1 posted (9PM EST) | Objective 1 part two 10TH: Objective 1 closes (8PM EST), Objective 2 posted (9PM EST) | Objective 2 Part 2 17TH: Objective 2 closes (8PM EST), Objective 3 posted (9PM EST) | Objective 3 Part Two 24th: Objective 3 closes (8PM EST), Final city-wide log posted (9PM EST) Objectives will be given in mod toplevels to this post with instructions; please check the log currently for Objective 1 to see how this will work.

Comments

WEEK 1 | SAFE | w/KAIBA

[doitrockapella]

[So. This is...not optimal, to say the least. It's not even the spooky shit going on with the background ambiance, so much; it's the fact that everyone here is currently in a room that does not, as a matter of fact, appear to have a door.

And, well. Carmen is good at keeping a steady mask and a brave face on, but she's also not entirely able to hide the way her gaze keeps darting around to the walls and the ceiling, nor can she disguise the way that there's a tension about her reminiscent of nothing so much as a caged animal pacing the confines of its prison.

It's the safe that catches her eye, however, mostly because people don't keep safes unless they have things to put in them, and you don't bother with a safe unless you've got something valuable enough that you don't want it stolen — or destroyed in a fire, for that matter. So she's soon to wander over, crouching down expertly despite her short skirt and high heels, and starts to peer at the mechanism that might be holding it closed.]

[crushcard]

[ and guess who's following behind her? because yeah, safes like that? eye catching as fuck, and what the hell, putting a safe like that out in the open is practically an open invitation to break into it.

but for now he's kind of. standing behind her. although no really, he's just looking to see whether it's. bolted to the wall, while she's looking at the mechanism. ]

Willing to take bets on what's being hidden inside this?

[ when in doubt, deal with shit with sarcastic humour. always works!! ]

[doitrockapella]

Seek first the answers inside yourself, young grasshopper. What would you put inside a safe, in a room like this?

[She has two ideas about that, actually, and they're polar opposites because on one hand the idea is "something important" but on the other there's always "absolutely fucking nothing" because some people are just dicks like that.]

[crushcard]

To be honest?

Nothing.

[ there are two types of people, evidently. and kaiba is the second. ]

Why would I put something important in the open where it would invite people like us-- [ because technically they're breaking and entering. ] --an incentive to actually break into it? Actually important things? I would hide them elsewhere.

[doitrockapella]

[I mean. At least they both thought it.]

Making this the ideal place for a misdirection — or a trap.

[And yet that sobering thought isn't enough to actually stop her from doing it, so. She continues to look at the lock, turning the dial almost experimentally.]

How is your sense of hearing?

[crushcard]

Or maybe we're both paranoid and there actually is something in there.

[ shrugs. there are two types of people, after all. ]

... sharp enough.

[ he's not the kind to blast music via earphones so that's a thing. relatively undamaged hearing, yes.

he seems to at least catch on enough as to Carmen's intentions, and he's going to step forward and crouch down next to her - or at least, he will, when they both figure out how to squeeze the both of them into the same spot comfortably, pressing his ear to the door of the safe near the dial.

he'll gesture for her to start turning the dial when she's ready. ]

[doitrockapella]

[Good man. She's not shy about making room for him, and when she starts to turn the dial, it's with a controlled and steady hand — just right for listening carefully to the tumblers clicking, and indicative of someone who's probably done this before.]

[crushcard]

[ so! when it gets to that point, the minute he hears the tumblers click, he's going to say-- ] Next. [ -- and this is going to continue at least until they've hit three numbers.

once the door clicks open, however, that's another story altogether.

he's going to glance over at her before he moves back, just enough to give him moving room, before he eases the door open.

there's. papers? ]

... Well.

[ at least now they've established that dear old Jim is the first person, instead of the second like the both of them are. ]

[doitrockapella]

...Well, well. Not a bomb, at least — and not nothing, either.

[Or is it? She'll just reach in and take those papers, handing half (?) of them to Kaiba and keeping half for herself.]

[crushcard]

No, not nothing.

[ that much he can agree, and well, since some people are working on moving the desk? or something? they're just probably going to have to use the floor, actually. so he's going to sit down and put the stack of papers in his lap first, before picking the first one up and squinting at it. ]

... How good are you at Morse?

[doitrockapella]

Morse? As in Morse Code?

[Well, now she's interested. Time to maneuver over to crouch next to him — still an impressive feat in what she's wearing — and peer at it along with him.]

You could say I'm "dash dash dash, dash dot dash" at it.

[Yeah, Carmen, if you're making jokes in it, you're a little bit better than "OK" at it.]

[crushcard]

[ they're both in ridiculously not practical clothes for this, everything is fine!!! but yeah ok that joke at least makes him crack a smile and yeah he'll shift a bit just so it's easier for her to look at the morse code message.

and yeah because he. conveniently. has a pen in his pocket, he's going to pick it out of there. not that they have any extra paper, but then again, he has no particular qualms about working out the messages on the original document, there we go. ]

Sounds better than "dash dash dash, dash dot dash" to me.

[ woah he just!!! complimented her!!! ok i digress but he's kind of marking out a quick translation guide for reference in the margins of one paper that doesn't have a super long message because he cannot remember all the letters off hand, so he might need a bit of help with that, Carmen. ]

[doitrockapella]

All right. The vowels first — A is "dot dash", E is "dot", I is "dot dot", O is "dash dash dash", and U is...

[U is less easy to remember because it's more weird than the other vowels, and takes her a minute.]

It's either "dot dot dash" or "dot dash dash"; it'll come to me.

[crushcard]

"dot dot dash", actually. If I remember it correctly.

[ so he's just going to fill that in anyway! along with some of the more common letters. like "s", and "t" maybe, before he pauses. ]

... Do you think we'll need numbers? [ frowning, because that's the one part of morse code that he definitely did not actually memorise ever. ]

[doitrockapella]

Numbers are surprisingly easy, believe it or not. There's a pattern to them — every number has five components, of either dots or dashes. One is a dot and four dashes; two is two dots and three dashes, and so on. Five is five dots, and then it reverses; six is a dash and four dots, and so on, until you reach zero — five dashes.

[Thanks, Captain Trivia.]

As for the letters, even if we don't remember all of them, we'll certainly get enough to make a fair guess at what the missing ones fill in.

[crushcard]

[ OH. WELL. that makes a ton of sense, actually, so he's just going to nod along and fill in the numbers just in case they need it as a reference, following what she's outlined. the more you know (tm). ]

Mm. Once we figure out a few words, it should be easy to substitute those that we can't remember offhand. [ word games are fun.

he's going to show her the half completed list, anyway. ]

Anything else you want to add before we start on the actual codes?

[recollecters]

[Whether Carmen has anything to add or not, they will find a couple of things! First of all, there are fourteen sheets which is seven split between them. As they go, they will soon find their lists look like a whole bunch of nonsense!

Do these words have any sort of meaning? Who knows. But there are members of the group who could use skills like theirs.

They may wish to listen to the message after they're sorted.]

[doitrockapella]

[A whole bunch of nonsense at first glance, maybe, but luckily many of these letters are easy ones, and it isn't long before she's worked out the contents of her list:

hello / apple / person / pony / young / halo / acute]

Mine isn't a coherent message. Codewords, maybe, but it's not a complete statement by any means.

[crushcard]

[ okay so his list is a little bit harder, if only because the words are a little bit longer. but yeah he's going to look at his working file and write down her list next to his, using hers to fill in some of the blanks on his own sheets. so the paper pretty much reads:

hello / apple / person / pony / young / halo / acute

lived / long / incident / delayed / accident / yield / stop

and then he will frown because yeah, these definitely look like codewords more than actual coherent sentences. ]

There's probably another keyword that functions as a connecting thread to all these words, actually.

[doitrockapella]

[And as it turns out, there is, which seems to be the last piece of the puzzle they'd been looking for.]

Maybe that's the keyword we're looking for. H-A-P-P-Y-H.

[crushcard]

[ he's just going to. squint at the words a bit, all three lines of them, and you can tell he's thinking really hard.

a couple of minutes passes before he picks up his pen again and.

circles the first letter of each word.

then he starts writing a new line below everything, in larger handwriting.

h-a-p-p-y-h-a-l-l-i-d-a-y-s ]

Happy Hallidays.

[ there we go. ]

... Didn't Shouto say he found a resume with the name Halliday?

[doitrockapella]

...Halliday is the name of one of the staff at Retrospec, isn't it?

[It's not, actually, she's thinking of "Halloway", but such are the ways that memories work.]

Jim Halliday?

[crushcard]

No, you're thinking "Halloway".

[ of course he remembers the asshole who signs off on retrospec posts since he's Bitter. ]

They do have the same initials though.

[ if that happens to be important. ]

Seems like this room belongs to a Dr. Halliday.

If this isn't the computer's password, it might be a password for something else so-- [ maybe they should go explore more stuff? or wait for briefcase team to return from their skeleton cave expedition. ]