Ch4 Full Moon

[dalby2020]

'63 is 1863.
It appears to be from perspective of Abraham Lincoln.
Battle referenced is Gettysburg.
The was indeed a full moon on July 2 1863.

I haven't really found much else in this chapter.

[dalby2020]

I hate to be rude and crude, but I realized this whole chapter is describing a bowel movement.

He is struggling to discharge his duties.
He hopes his actions generate some comfort.
He desperately needs an event to pass.
His stomach is churned and he is all bound up.
He has not felt right for some time.
He gets up to pace the garden and this makes him feel a little better.
His need to regain regularity is pressing.
The greatest estuary will be fouled with immense waste created by a movement.
He must move to where he is above smells and toxic gasses and the bowels of hell.
Where he can drop his load.
He needs relief and must forcefully move.
He needs solitude so he can concentrate.
He presses his backside firmly down.
Soon, there are ripples in the water and he feels better.

Again - sorry to be crude but that seems to be the theme upon closer reading.

[theo]

Almost all the sentences in this one start with either "I" or "T." Seems like it could be Morse code or something.

First letters: TITIH IITI TIT TI ITII ITIIIT TSI

[theo]

It seems very likely that capital letters are the key to this particular story.  Something like a route cipher or a railfence cipher might give us a hidden message, but the first challenge is in finding the right letters to use.

If we just go with the first letter of every sentence, we have 27 letters:

T  I  T  I  H  I  I  T  I  T  I  T  T  I  I  T  I  I  I  T  I  I  I  T  T  S  I
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

The only rectangular grid that's possible is 3x9.  Given the toilet humor of the story, it seems like a route cipher must give us "SHIT" somehow.  Here's one that would work:

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 01
16 19 20 23 24 27 06 07 02
17 18 21 22 25 26 05 04 03

I I T T I T I T T
T I T I T I I I I
I I I I T S H I T

The problem is that there are many different routes that would give us a single 4-letter word.  It seems like the correct grid should be distinctive somehow, like by separating out the I's from the T's (but I haven't been able to find any continuous route that would give us such an outcome).

IIIIIIIII

IIIIISHIT

TTTTTTTTT

The other problem is that there are words in the story that seem to deliberately have strange capitalization, suggesting that we are supposed to use those letters as well.

This bit seems particularly important: "...the once golden Wheat Field, The Peach Orchard, and the countless damaged men..."  There's no way that Lincoln would capitalize any of that.  The wheat field and the peach orchard were just ordinary battlefield obstacles in 1863.  And even if Lincoln wanted to give them some significance, he certainly wouldn't have capitalized "The."  The sequence WFTPO obviously has some meaning.

If we just add in those extra five letters, we now have 32 letters: TITIH IITI TITWFTPO TI ITII ITIIIT TSI

The grid could be 16x2 or 4x8, but how would we know which one is right?  What words would we be forming?  ("HOP IT SWIFT"?)

If we go for all the capitalized letters in the whole story, we get 46 letters: TJITEIHIIIIIIITIMTITWFTPOTIIIITIMIIIPTIIIITTSI

A grid of 2x23 is the only option there.  The route options are very limited, but I'm not seeing any words to indicate that one of them is correct.

Anyone getting some inspiration here?

[theo]

Dec 18, 2023 16:38:23 GMT -5 theo said:

Almost all the sentences in this one start with either "I" or "T." Seems like it could be Morse code or something.

First letters: TITIH IITI TIT TI ITII ITIIIT TSI

It makes sense for this to be Morse, because it's short enough to still be solvable and the author is giving us a little help with those two letters.

Assuming that T is the dash and I is the dot (which would make sense), the TITI before the H can really only be a C.  That gives us CH, which seems like a solid start, but the possibilities die pretty quickly after that.

I've been using the Remorse solver and there just isn't anything promising.  "Cherry" isn't possible, unfortunately.

[theo]

It didn't occur to me until yesterday, but if you take out the H and the S from those 27 first letters in Full Moon, you have a great setup for a Bacon cipher.  It's 25 letters long (a multiple of 5) and it's binary (made up entirely of I and T).  In fact, the very next chapter of the book (Winter Land) even includes the word "bacon" and puts it at the start of a sentence, so it's capitalized!  It's such a perfect setup, how could this not be a Bacon cipher??

And yet...

Decoding TITII ITITI TTIIT IIITI IITTI only gives UKZCG in Baconian.  Reversing the string gives MITKF or NIULF, depending on which version of the cipher you use.

Unless there's a tricky step I'm missing, this seems to be another dead end.