Oh man, sorry! I meant to actually write out the clue and forgot, sorry for the cryptics:
Mutineer = 8 letters
Amidships = 9 letters
Figurehead = 10 letters
And unless Eaves tells us otherwise, that’s the order they were in the quote from the codex.
I know Sabes doesn’t control the codex directly, but maybe the codex itself is giving us what’s basically a clue that we’re on the right track about the “relative shift”?
We got this, Mounties.
But, Sabes created the codex, and I feel fairly confident in imagining he might have had some level of foresight into it’s creation?
But there’s also a reason I am staying very quiet on this thread, and that’s because puzzles like this are total kryptonite.
I had about an hour to work on this.
So I’ve tried assuming there are 3 steps here (in no particular order).
reverse the string
apply the first cipher
perform some sort of logical ‘shift’ to each letter. I refer to this process from here on out as ‘Aetherizing’ the string.
For included with the goal of getting to qiuqeggy
I’ve tried reverse → cipher → Aetherize
reverse → Aetherizxe → cipher
cipher → Aetherize → reverse
cipher → reverse → aetherize
Aetherize → reverse → cipher
aetherize → cipher → reverse
And then I realized I no idea whether to Aetherize forward or backward, so I did all that another time in the opposite direction.
All I’ve got out of it is a headache and a bunch or random letters. I guarentee you I did some of those above steps wrong. It was all just a mish mosh of letters after a while and my brain lost track constantly. I’m not going to do all those again though.
I think the bones of the idea is decent, reverse, cipher, Aetherize. But I can’t figure out what Aether shift to use to get where we want to go.
Maybe someone can use any of this to help their own ideas.
This is exactly where I was headed with my ideas. I worked on this all last night and didn’t get anywhere really, but my brain feels more ready for it today
Well I hope you have more luck than I did. I tried and got the same resulting headache.
ETA: I don’t know if I’m doing things wrong, but…
The resulting code doesn’t have any 'G’s…
Now to try cipher/reverse/aetherize
ETA2: okay…
So, don’t shoot the messenger, but I wrote in Mutineer last night, and today we have:
nzbusghr
@Aether, does this help with your theory?
Thanks Eaves,
If the codex is taking requests I vote the next word we do be a palindrome. Because having to do every step twice depending on whether we reverse or not is just killing me. Is ee → gh or is ee->zb? No idea and neither make sense. I could try to deep dive and force a meaning down one path, but knowing I’m 50% likely to be going down a path I’ll never get an answer depletes my energy.
It actually does, @Eaves!
So we’re assuming right now that there are three levels of encryption because just assuming two (reversing and then shifting the letters based on location) didn’t work on any of the clues so far.
The GH in “NZBUSGHR” has to be the double E in MUTINEER, just shifted by their placement in the word, because the same letters back to back, but shifted by their location, would always be consecutive letters.
And it gives away WHERE the letters were when they were encrypted because the first E is shifted twice to G, the second E is shifted three times to H, which means they were the second and third letter!
Location 2 and 3 of the word, which means it IS reversed first!
I think we can crack this from this clue. Going analog on some pencil and paper, brb.
Anyone up to beat me to the answer? 
We can noodle this, @Robert. If you can spring me from the brain prison of the-even-more-evil Colonel Sanders and his pet hurricane, we can definitely crack a word problem together.
(I know, I know, Fallon didn’t control the Storm.)
I’m trying @Aether. I just can’t wrap my brain around it.
I get that you can say ee - > gh my shifting the first letter twice and the second one 3 times.
But…if you reverse it once shouldn’t the ‘gh’ be in positions 2 and 3 of the ciphertext…are we reversing it twice? How did they go from positions 2&3 and back to 6&7? But then wouldn’t it be ‘hg’ in the final cipher?
Okay let me try this. I’ll show you two paths I just went down. Maybe you can see where I veer off into obscurity.
mutineer
==> reversed
reenitum
==> Aetherized
sghrnzbu
==> reverse back?!
ubznhgs …and we’ve fallen off a cliff
Try two. Let’s ignore reversing…I know, I know you say do it first but that makes no sense to me.
Let’s work backwards this time.
NZBUSGHR
==> De-Aetherize
mxyqnaaj
now if I decide to totally brute force this and say
m=>m
x=> u
y=>t
q=> i
n=>n
a=>e
j=>r
I guess I come up with mutineer…but I literally just said 'If I make this be “mutineer” then it turns out to be “mutineer”. I could have turned that ciphertext into literally any 8 letter word following what I just did.
No, I think you’re on the right track, or we’re both on the wrong one, but now we gotta figure out how the EE/GH ended up back where they did.
Re-reverse doesn’t work because it, well, doesn’t work, cause like you said, GH would he HG. So the word gets chopped up and moved around in a way that doesn’t reverse the letters.
I’m looking back on the other clue words too, to see if the shorter ones help. But hey, we have two parts of what I hope is only a three part encryption! Go us!
Excellently done, @Erinyes
https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/pymb02.htm
Source is from Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of which I have no additional information
Man, I take two days off to go run a tournament and you guys solve it! Amazing work!!
Weirdly enough I read through the wiki on this work a while ago while researching mutineer/survival cannibalism trials, which is a bit strange to admit.
The story itself is theorized to be at least partially autobiographical, as well as drawing from other accounts of sea life and mistrials. It inspired Jules Verne, and drew upon the Hollow Earth theory!
Wiki tells me it took a long while to get published, and in the London print was printed without the final paragraph. The London print was also unauthorized, weirdly enough. It wasn’t well received and its legacy is mixed at best.
It’s noted on the wiki that it has over 300 editions and various translations.
The word “mutineer” showing up again is awfully strange. The words given don’t have anything to do with the text, do they? Did the word for the prior puzzle have any connection?
I’m not sure about the first text, but this one does deal with mutiny, and there’s no way it doesn’t include the word ‘ashore’ somewhere in there. Less certain about snarl, though. Would us choosing a different starting word mean we ended up with a different text, or does it all lead back to this one?
Sourced from Project Gutenberg’s copy of the 1838 New York publication, the final paragraph that is missing in the London publication would either be:
March 22. The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but, upon touching him, we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
Which is the last paragraph of the story itself, however it appears to be published with a ‘note’ that continues the narrative as if this were a real story and someone were commenting on it. There’s a lot of notes on Ethiopian language, which considering the time period and Poe’s background I’m inclined to believe is made up wholesale. In this case the final paragraph is:
“I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.”
Interestingly enough, the story ends with Pym in Antarctica/searching for the south pole. This is years before the first successful expedition to the south pole which happened in 1911 by Roald Amundsen.
I’m not sure if it has bearing on anything or if I’m looking for meaning in a magical captcha but it is interesting!
I was pretty sure the word popped up in the last one! We only chose one word (sunshine) before solving the first cipher set, and the other two words from that triplet (rainfall and snowdrift) didn’t appear in the de Quincy piece.
I was also reminded in reading over my post above that de Quincy was an inspiration for Poe and his work. Are we maybe following a line of folks who inspired each other, or is there some larger connection?
Oh, I like the idea of following through inspiration lines. Like ripples, with our original work cascading out to effect so many authors through the years. It’s very neat imagery when compared to the effects of magiq on our world.
While I personally doubt we would have gotten a different text with different choices, considering how specific the cipher was, I have to say it would have been magiqal as all hell if that had worked out. Now that @Remus raises the point I do remember sunshine being just a weird one off in the text.
With that out of the way, wasn’t someone looking for something in Antarctica? I’ll have to go digging through the forum to see what I can find but that’s also an interesting point to arrive on.
Edit: Forgive me, I must be mistaken or thinking about something different, given the rarity of “Antarctica” as a text item on this forum