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885 checks

Easy. The Pitol Tract -- an industrial wasteland devoid of people or signals.

Ocean, probably?

That Renotel technician you met earlier was carrying a device. Must be that.

You're looking for an intercom, not a phone -- there must be something that differentiates them.

Must be the faulty intercom.

That Renotel technician you met earlier was carrying a device. Must be that.

Whoever's using these isn't trying to get better at writing poetry -- they're trying to get better at reading it.

This is the cheat sheet of a complete amateur.

Really you just need to be able to count to ten or so.

The pack of cigarettes on the desk. You missed something about them.

Your hoisting must have compressed his lungs somehow... Unless...

He was trying to smooth out creases with shower steam.

Likely belonging to the man splayed, with much less care, in the nearby chair.

Your double's. They appear to have been here for some time.

Why would EMTERR care about a couple of impressionable old men?

The ones on your face.

For all neurological intents and purposes, he is deep in REM sleep, in the throes of an permanent nightmare.

He must close shop at some point. That'll be your chance to sneak in and do the job properly.

Two numbers -- quick to hand and scrawled in rage -- for people called frequently from in the depths of distress.

You have just enough time, before it hits, to realise this is what going into cardiac arrest feels like.

Doesn't look like anyone's been selling kibble here for years...

He seems like a reasonable enough man. You can probably talk sense with him -- at least moreso than you can with Dr. Gonza.

The labelling and sorting is as meticulous as it is uniformly disdainful.

Behold, the crown jewel of the technofascist Mass Culture programme.

The band logo is an illegible scrawl allegedly composed of letters in a human script.

Alpha males of his species are visually distinguishable by their large cheeks. He thinks you fuck.

Where else would it get this stuff?

Legwear? A mask?

You're talking to a monkey. You're going to have to ask specific questions if you want helpful answers.

What could possibly happen?

Alpha males of his species are visually distinguishable by their large cheeks. He thinks you fuck.

A puppet, there's someone hiding in the pile beneath it.

The GM was right, there really is a monkey in here -- and it's stood on a pile of stolen junk. It must be the dock thief.

Don't think yet. Just solve.

It also doesn't make sense... Karolina was the one who was uncovered in the EMTERR-backed dream study...

Oh look. A fresh rung on the 'abject mental illness' ladder. Down we go.

Suddenly you realize the eight displacements you have found are all of them: an eight letter keyword that encodes the cipher in cycles: E S C H A T O N.

The Opera have a secret camera. Through that camera, they watch you flail in an ocean of miscommunication. As they watch, they laugh.

Strip away the romanticism. Codebreaking is about rigour. Nothing else.

Take 'H' as an example. In a text with 291 characters, that's about 7%, which is more than double the number you would expect to get if it were entirely random -- 1/26th, or roughly 3%.

You have not the remotest idea what you are meant to do with this information.

Three in 145 character-pairs is 2%, which corresponds to the frequency for the most common bigrams in the regular alphabet -- TH, HE, and IN.

The median of the chains is thirteen.

No pattern discernible.

A piece of paper and a notebook is all you need to go insane.

An old lesson, hard-learned: in the developed world, money is always the way forward.

885 skill checks - ZERO PARADES field manual - Page 6 of 18