After Action Report: NYC Special VIA NOIR Storyline Mission

It all started out with this post on the investigation board: A Clue For Tomorrow?

Aside from containing the usual daily passcodes, what it announced was much more intriguing.

It’s not too difficult to find the actual portal, but notice there has been a clock added to the portal image, indicating – combined with “evening” mentioned – a time frame between 17:00 and 19:00 local time (Sat 22:00 to Sun 00:00 UTC).

Ground teams were assembled.

Decoders and portal hunters were standing at the ready.

Then, suddenly, at 21:11 UTC the message came through: “@all Puzzles in New York missions”

(See here the original versions of the North Puzzle and South Puzzle)

Fortunately, one trick Niantic played was identified very early.

Out of the self-organizing chaos and information flood that ensued across Hangouts and Google Docs, the answers and resulting passphrases emerged:

North Puzzle

TYCHO
HULONG
PERSEPOLIS
ENOCH
LIGHTMAN
OBSIDIUS
ABADDON
TECTHULHU
AFGHANISTAN
LOEB
JOHNSON

YUSCAINBDOP 1..2...3...

South Puzzle

JOJO
KATALENA
RESISTANCE
JAHAN
ACOLYTE
CHAPEAU
CAMPBELL
DETECTION
BOGDANOVICH
ROLAND
NOMAD

OYAROAEICTN ..A.....B.C

Shortly after 22:00 UTC the mission passphrases could be relayed back to New York.

What came back provided another challenge (but also not too little amusement):

(North Portal Clue and South Portal Clue)

Focusing the search on the immediate vicinity of the ground teams, those clues were quite quickly found to imply “The Magical Garden” and “Rainbow in the skies”.

Media hacked from those portals lead to the puzzle (the right side is North and South combined):

(North Colours and South Colours)

Carefully trace which colour is “flowing” into which box on the bottom and use subtractive colour mixing. (So Yellow mixed with Blue becomes Green.)

Resulting in:
BGYRPYROBP ..4..D.E5.

Split up in interleaving halves again to get the passphrases for the mission to continue,
BYPRB and GRYOP.

The mission could move on, tasking decoders with:

(North Code and South Code)

Dissecting the task, it became clear, that all bits of information retrieved so far had to be used at this point.

The nature of the New York missions so far had been strongly interleaved, with each mission giving clues needed to continue the other.

In addition, agents reported back all descriptions encountered, among those:

“Keyword R: pac — Enter Keyword Q to proceed”
“Keyword Q: olw — Enter Keyword R to proceed”
“the sum of all things unlocks what comes next”

Structurally, the provided puzzles can be divided into 3 parts

– 3 letters Q and R, superscripted with digits
– 5 symbols from 1-5 and A-E
– a portrait image

Now, the information gained from the missions is:

– Keyword Q is olw and keyword R is pac
– Collecting all the indexed fields from the previous puzzles yields this mapping:
12345ABCDE ycbybacnyo
– Those are images of Susanna and Klue

Ergo:
– take “3 over R”, for example, to mean “take the 3rd letter of keyword R (pac)” and similar.
– change the 5 following characters according to the mapping
– add the name

Resulting in the passcodes (which are fully redeemed by now):

payyyncsusanna ocwcabboklue

The two resulting passcodes produced media items pointing to the following enciphered texts:

(Message 1 and Message 2)

Around 23:30 UTC, after a quick OCR – and a little less quick fixing of OCR errors – the final message could be decoded:

Note how word lengths and spacings of both messages match perfectly.
Using one message as a Vigenere key to decrypt the other yields the message from TECTHULHU:

I HAVE EXISTED IN POSSIBILITY FOR ALL TIME. I AM THE SUM OF ALL POSSIBILITIES. I AM THE NEXUS POINT BETWEEN THE PLANES. I AM THE ONE TO BE SUMMONED. I AM THE ONE WHO SUMMONS. I GROW IN MINDS AS AN IDEA. I CAN BE EXPRESSED IN A MILLION DIFFERENT WAYS IN A MILLION DIFFERENT TIMES AND SPACES. I AM UBIQUITOUS AND I AM VOID. I AM THAT WHICH BINDS. I AM THAT WHICH DIVIDES. I AM IDEA. YOU ARE TO MAKE ME ROCK OR WOOD OR FLESH OR WIRE OR LIGHT. I AM AGNOSTIC TO MEDIUM. YOU MUST BUILD ME. YOU MUST KNOW MY POWER. KNOW MY ANGELS. KNOW MY OPERATIVES. YOU MUST KNOW THESE THINGS TO KNOW ME. I AM THE TRANSLATOR. I AM THE VOICE. I AM THE EARS. IVE BEEN KNOWN BY MANY NAMES. I HAVE BEEN SEEN BY THE ANCIENTS. I HAVE BEEN BUILT BY THOSE WHO HAVE YET TO LIVE. I HAVE BEEN ETCHED ON THE WALLS OF CAVES. I HAVE BEEN DRAWN BY HANDS DRIVEN BY MINDS OF GENIUS. I HAVE BEEN FASHIONED BY APES. I HAVE BEEN FASHIONED BY RANDOM CHANCE. I AM FRAGILE AND I AM ETERNAL. I AM OBDURATE. I AM FRAGILE. I AM AN ENIGMA TO MOST. KNOWN TO FEW. I AM A BLESSING. I AM A CURSE. I AM PILGRIM. I AM DIETY. I AM TECTH- ULHU. I AM THE MEDIUM. I AM THE MESSAGE. I DO NOT EXIST IN TIME. SOMETIMES I DO NOT EXIST AT ALL. I AM AN IDEA WAITING TO BECOME MANIFEST. I AM MANI- FEST WAITING TO BECOME AN IDEA.

Thanks and congratulations to all teams on the ground in New York and those assisting with decoding, portal hunting, collecting, filtering, and relaying all information involved.

Be sure to read, among others, the publication of the message
and the Project Isthmus report.

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