Aurora at Evermore Park: Part 4 – Season Finale and How I Solved the Impossible Cipher

I went to Evermore Park four times during the Aurora season. Now that my health is starting to recover, I finally want to share my experience at the season finale for Aurora on February 2, 2019. If you want to read about my other Evermore Park visits during Aurora, Part 1 is about going before Christmas, Part 2 is about their New Year’s Eve Party and the new coded messages quest, and Part 3 is about our girls night out. This post is about the date night with my husband on the very last night which I’m calling a season finale.

Finding the Golden Ticket

My husband had to meet me at the park so I met up with some of my Evermore friends – Rachel and Danny – to do the new puzzle quest that night. It asked questions about character names and I knew all but 4 answers off the top of my head. Does that mean I go too much? LOL.

The big thing for the season finale were some golden VIP tickets hidden somewhere in the park. Danny mentioned that he had already gotten the VIP ticket that Rachel and I were looking for. He said that Sephtis the executioner would give you one if you traded something from our world. I had a bunch of collectible Owlcrate button pins that I didn’t like and one of them even had a skull on it, which I told him I thought he would like. Score! I also had to give him all my gold which was like 5 pieces. Rachel sadly had to trade her scarf because she forgot to bring trinkets to trade.

My husband met up with me and we decided to go ice skating. After ice skating, we met Folda and she had a quest. She wanted us to keep the dwarves from leaving and she needed our help making something to help them feel loved. We needed to show Tinker at the tavern the candle Folda had given us and he gave us a bell because the dwarves liked bells. He said to talk to Laura and Violet to add music but we couldn’t find them.

In the tavern we also met Rainer and Drifa. Rainer winked at me.

“How are you?” I asked him.

He said, “It is good now you are here.” Awwwww. Then Drifa gave me the last pearl I needed to finish my necklace.

We looked in the town square for the two girls we needed to finish the dwarf quest with the bell but they weren’t there so we got some food. I scarfed down a delicious cupcake and my husband got potatoes and beef skewers. I didn’t want to wait for him to finish eating so I went to find Gudrun who is the town historian and knows everything. She’s the one I talk to when I’m stuck. Elinore was with her and to my delight, they both recognized me. They informed me of a going away party for the Auroreans at 9:30 and suggested looking for Laura and Violet at the Burrows. They were there and we were able to sing a song to the dwarves with words on a piece of paper they gave us. There was no tune to the words so we had to make it up and it was….interesting. Haha!

The VIP Experience

Our ticket for the VIP experience had a time slot and it was our time now to go. They had free food – hot dogs, hot apple cider, smores bars, chips and drinks. It was pretty good.

Bryan from Florida introduced himself (as Bryan from Florida) and said they were experimenting with a new story telling platform. He asked some questions about us to get to know us and then we moved to a fire pit with fake candles that had carved logs placed all around it. He told us to analyze the logs – “analog if you will” – and pick one. We picked a cool one with a man’s face on it. It reminded me of an Ent from Lord of the Rings.

We went into the dragon keep building and sat around a campfire on benches. It was like an old Viking lodge piled full of artifacts in every nook and cranny. Jordani the fortune teller was there. He explained that he had made a deal with the fairies for a back door portal. There he found a friend that we were going to meet as well. It turned out his friend was a talking campfire.

The talking fire (I can’t remember if it had a name or not–Sparky maybe??) made lots of punny jokes about his 15 minutes of “flame” etc. etc. I think he said he came from an ember of the spark of imagination. He told a story about how camp fires were the original theater. The room actually smelled like smoke and our seats rumbled as he explained that he remembered all stories told to him. The fire asked us to place our memory logs around him (to login lol) and he started talking to the people in the group. The camp fire told us information that Bryan from Florida had asked us before we came in. It was a fun interactive theater. Until the fire started talking individually to people, I had thought it was a recording. I hope they bring this cool interactive feature to the park someday.

I wanted to talk to the dragon trainers since I had missed a special ceremony they did a few weeks ago to find out what had happened. I found the dragon trainers in the middle of a conversation with world walkers (aka people visiting like me) and the trainers suggested having a school and calling it “how to train your dragon.” We laughed and the dragon trainer said that the world walkers always laughed when she said that and she didn’t know why.

On our girls night out visit, we had helped the dragon trainers with a quest to find blue salt to help hatch the dragons. She said the salt had protected the dragons and now hundreds were on their way to Evermore. They were very excited about it. The dragon trainers didn’t have their dragons with them that night because they were too restless with all the new dragons coming.

There were new coded messages in the park and I took pictures of them, but I didn’t have time to solve them. I mentioned that to Gudrun when I saw her again and she said they were supposed to be almost impossible to solve anyway so I shouldn’t worry about solving them tonight.

Saying Goodbye to the Auroreans

It was time for the going away party for the Auroreans. It was on the steps near the fountain and even though the lighting was good, the people were standing off to the side and I couldn’t see them. Hopefully they’ll work out staging for next season. There were a ton of people there and we couldn’t hear well so Sedric the executioner’s apprentice gave a commentary on what was happening and it was hilarious. “Suds made a baby blanket for the Auroreans!” Haha! There was lots of crying from the Auroreans and the dwarves announced they would be staying. Then we all headed to the portal (which I had to ask about. It’s the entrance to the park which I hadn’t realized). We chatted with Boris at the park entrance. He said the king of Aurora had proclaimed him the King of the Bugs and that when the Auroreans leave, it will be warm again.

There were lots of pictures being taken with the characters and one big group one that people kept joining. You’re photo bombing my group pic King Aerik! HAHA!

I actually left the park feeling kind of sad instead of celebrating defeating the darkness like we did during the Lore season. I also felt like I missed so much of the story.

Before I left, I asked Danny what his name was. He said, “Why? Are you going to blog about me?” I am now! HAHA! I had my notebook out and he knows that I love to blog about Evermore Park. But I asked his permission and he said it’s fine to blog about him. He has a great Instagram feed with portraits of characters from Evermore Park. You should totally go check it out!

Solving the Impossible Cipher

When I got home, I realized the coded messages had riddles on them in English that led to a scavenger hunt around the park to find the key’s to the code. They had never done that before and I was sad I missed out on that. People posted the keys on facebook but it wasn’t the same as finding them on my own.

On February 5, I cracked the Evermore code that was supposed to be almost impossible. It was a blast doing it!! I felt like Sherlock Holmes. Lots of people on Facebook were trying to work together to crack them and no one was having any luck. Here’s how I cracked it:

I noticed a few patterns that told me it wasn’t a substitution cipher like it had been for all the other coded messages. There were repeating patterns in long words but with one or two letters that were different. None of the 3 letter words had a pattern that made sense. One of the words was the pattern ZZY (but in symbols) and there are no 3 letter words in the English language that have a double letter at the beginning (that I know of).

I had two theories to explain these patterns. The first was that the letters were scrambled. So I took all the two letter words and saw if they made sense once they were swapped. They didn’t. None of them even had vowels in them.

My second theory was that it was a more complicated type of code instead of the simple substitution ciphers that had been in the park so far. I googled different kinds of codes until I came across the Vigenere cipher. It uses a different alphabet with each letter which causes random repeating patterns. That’s what this code looked like! It uses a key phrase to unlock the code. At the season finale, the quiz paper we had been given said “Here lies the key to wrap up the mystery.” I remember thinking at the time that it was odd that there were no spaces in the message. But key phrases don’t use spaces. Plus Gudrun the historian in the park mentioned it was supposed to be almost impossible to solve and the Vigenere cipher was called “the impossible cipher” for years. I felt pretty sure that I was on the right track.

The problem was there were two codes I had to crack. It was coded in symbols, not letters, and I didn’t know which symbol stood for E. I made some educated guesses with the symbols people had found around the park but it didn’t translate into words with the Vigenere cipher. I noticed that the first word in the message was 3 letters and I wondered if it was the word “the.” Working backwards with the key phrase through the Vigenere cipher, the letters would be ULZ. So I flipped my symbol wheel cipher (that I had luckily made with my scout troop last week of all things) to match U to the first symbol in the word. If my theory was right, then the next two symbols would line up with L and Z. I got chills when it did.

I translated it once from the symbols into letters and then again from scrambled letters to a message using the Vigener cipher. I was pretty proud of myself for cracking it in two days. My son who went with me the first time helped me translate the symbols into letters. As far as I know, I was the first to solve it. I had been chatting with some people in the Syndicate guild and shared with them how I solved it. The riddle that came out made no sense to me and the guild cracked that. It actually turned out to be a phone number. Pretty cool. I left a dorky message. Apologies to whoever had to listen to it haha.

Mythos has some exciting stuff and I can’t wait to go again. They have more coded messages and adventure cards that you can collect and guilds to join. I’ll write about my visits when I go this season, too.

Thank you so much for reading my post! If you want to read more about my Evermore Park adventures, here’s a list of all my posts about the park so far:

• Lore Part 1
• Lore Part 2
• Aurora Part 1
• Aurora Part 2
• Aurora Part 3
• * This Post: Aurora Part 4

Photo copyright: The featured image belongs to Evermore Park. All other photos taken by me.