This old classroom looks as though no one has properly used it for 60 years. It has been cleaned up however, and all of the dust is gone. Bookshelves filled with books on Arithmancy, abaci, extra chalk and many other Arithmancy tooks fill the room. On top of one of the bookshelves is a rather smart looking raven, who seems to clean its feathers every once in a while, otherwise it simply quietly watches the room. Blackboards line each wall, and there are smaller blackboards separating the room into four distinct sections. Each section is labeled in Professor Fox's distinct handwriting:

Section One: Slytherin
Section Two: Gryffindor
Section Three: Hufflepuff
Section Four: Ravenclaw

Furthermore, there is a large note pinned to the door saying the following:

[OOC: This is not a chat thread. Spam will summarily be deleted, along with pointless posts and anything I find to be not consistent with the Hogwarts and Harry Potter RP.]

Erica entered the classroom and noticed the sections before heading off toward the one labeled for Hufflepuff. She was glad Fox had decided to open up the spare classroom as she hadn't been able to find anyone else in her house trying to solve the puzzle. She hoped others would find the place and start making actual progress.

Selecting an empty chair in the middle of her section, she pulled out the parchment with both puzzles and started.

There was some hesitancy on using the room Fox provided. Nadia found a place, in the far end of the Slytherin section and sat down. In a way, it wasn't different from the Study Hall and probably had no different use to her. She prepared her notes, about 5 pages of puzzle-solving tries, every and each futile.

A look at the board, and then back at the papers and started to work. First thing on the list, find an English Dictionary.

Noel walked into the empty classroom, a slip of parchment with the puzzle written on it in hand. She sat down in the Slytherin section and began to scratch away with her quill, barely looking up from her notes.

Lily walked into the classroom looking at the parchment on which she had written the code on the arithmancy bulliten board. She sat down in the Ravenclaw section and stared at her own writing.

ali walked into the room and saw the section for ravenclaws. sitting down, he starts to work out possible solutions for the puzzle

Lily looked up and saw that ali had come in. Walking over, she said to him. "Hi, I'm lily. Are you working on the first puzzle or the second one?"

Ali saw his housemate and friend Lily come over and sit on the same table.
'Hia, im not working on any puzzle in particular, im just giving them a go, do you have any ideas?'

Alex made her way into the empty Arithmancy classroom and read the note that was posted there. So Section One was for Slytherin. She had already noticed that Nadia and Noel were there, although there was no sight of Ganymede.

With a heavy sigh, she walked and sat down beside Nadia and gave Noel a small nod. There was a loud thump as she placed her bag on top of the table. It was full of mostly useless stuff that no one would ever need -- but there were also some books. Carefully not to drop anything out of it, Alex took out about five books, one of which was an English Dictionary. She placed them in front of her and Nadia.

"Where do we start?"

Nadia looked up to find Alex in there. "Ah, hi there," she turned around at the mention of team work, narrowing her eyes and looking around all paranoically as if fearing someone would hear. "Well, um, right. I'm not sure. Do you know what is a space holder, Alex?" she finally asked the younger girl, frowning.

Alex pondered for a second. Nadia was asking her? She blinked at the Slytherin girl and spoke slowly.

"I was hoping you could tell me that. How about we write down everything that we know first?" That would make sense. Althought they probably had the same information, perhaps if they wrote down everything, it would make more sense.

She glanced at Noel who was a few feet away freom them, but still at the same table. Well ...

"Care to join us, Noel?" she asked with a weak smile.

"No," Lily said. "Sorry."

Patrick walked into the room mumbling to himself. He read the rules then found the Gryffindor area. Now there was two of those puzzles to work on. Space holder...what did that mean.

Professor Fox entered the room and walked quietly to one of the main blackboards, keeping his hands in his pockets. He then began writing a note to the classroom, and when he had finished simply left.

Slightly saddened at the still empty Hufflepuff section, Erica continued to press on with trying to solve the puzzles. She had decided, against good advice, to just continue working with the first puzzle. She didn't know why she wanted to do it like this, perhaps it was just stubbornness on her part, but she didn't care. These puzzles were driving her mad anyway, adding a little stubbornness to the mix wasn't going to make things worse.

She continued working silently, scratching her quill against parchment, when Fox came into the class and wrote something on the chalkboard. After leaving, Erica glanced up at the board and read what was on there. When she finished, she read it again, and when that was done she read it once more. She had the funniest feeling in the pit of her stomach, the feeling that she shouldn't have put something off for so long. Quickly, she stood from her desk and scanned the bookshelf before grabbing a book and returning to her seat. She flipped it open and read the pages, feeling increasingly stupid with each line. She then glanced back at the board, specifically at the example, and stared at it for a very long time, before gasping with complete surprise.

Knowing she was on the right track, she went back to the puzzle with renewed vigor and soon enough ended triumphant. Scribbling down the answer she had come up with, Erica stood from her table, replaced the things she had borrowed and gathered all of her things before heading outside.

Nadia snaped her fingers at the same time she mouthed, "I knew it!" Crossing out indeed. But she still didn't have a pathern. And the added numbers were indeed a classic, hence why she had tried the PUZZLE option. With 44 letters and splitting into two gruops failing, she had almost given up. Actually, the hint seemed to imply she had been on the fight track when she first started and as well was as lost as she had first tried...

Nadia pouted and tried again when-- she saw Erica standing. Her heart beats stopped and she gulped as she wrote something down. Nadia blinked. Then groaned. Ouch, indeed. Ah, she also pouted.

(ooc: *headesk, headesk, headesk* Fox, I ask you to take a look at the Study Hall at the Slytherin Common Room, just to point out the obvious...)

Out of curiosity, which by this time was killing her, Nadia went over to read Erica's answer. At first she thought the board had responded to her or something, the why of the line. But then she noticed something... the patherns. She quickly brought quill and parchment, and when she was done, she wanted to takes her eyes out.

FOUR. The bloody answer was FOUR!

She had known the answer all along-- Girl, it had been her first try! And she tried with all different patherns but she could have never thought... could have never dreamed... if only she had kept trying different options!

C R L O O V N N O P T
O A A N U E T T U O S
N T T S H W W Y S I
G U I Y A O E H E N

Not 11, four. She should have known, with the space holder hint, and had only begun to suspect! Not only that, she had been ENcoding instead of DEcoding and hence why the answer never came. She felt oh so stupid...

Steph: *petpetpetpetpet* Don't feel bad... I was too impatient and never tried this particular option.

"Is the second puzzle similar to the first?" Zekke murmured to Nadia as he set his things down to work.

He grumbled something about blasted Arithmancy and started wondering what sort of a cipher code the second puzzle was.

Easing her whinning a bit, Nadia turned to Zekke, though she still looked as if this had exahusted her more than it should have. She chuckled. "The method to decode is one that is used to encode war messages, but usually they come with a "key" word that rearranges the puzzle to be even more confusing."

Message: I Don't Like Dogz Too Much (20 letters)
Codekey: Cat (3-letter word) -rearranged: ACT (abc order)

C A T

I K O
D E O
O D M
N O U
T G C
L Z H
I T X

"Read that vertically. The last letter is added only to complete the circle. The encoded message is: I K O D E O O D M N O U T G C L Z H I T X, read horizontally. Then you group the letters randomly. Iko deo odnm out g cli--- etc."

Here she turned to Zekke, "So, no, I would dare guess not."

She stared at the "odggmvanvxctqptncoacxqxanuxokvp", trying to find patherns again and failing, then sighed. "Well, at least I tried."

"Sure," Noel said, hardly looking up from her work. She saw Nadia solve the first puzzle, so she spoke up about the second one, "Alex, do you think it might be some sort of a Caesar box?"

Overhearing Noel nearby speaking to Alex, Nadia leaned down a bit and said, "The first puzzle has already been solved. And about the Ceasar box... maybe in the second puzzle... but no. It should be "simetrical" if so." She shrugged.

"Ah yes, didn't think to count the letters. I don't think it would be a perfect Caesar box," she stopped talking and thought, normally she preferred to do these things alone. odggmvanvxctqptncoacxqxanuxokvp? She had the letters written across her parchment.

Nadia stared back at her parchment, then frowned and looked back at Noel, "Perfect Ceasar box?" she was starting to think they were talking about a different thing.

Speaking of boxes, it wouldn't be a complete box, yes, in the previous encoding. Out of amusement, Nadia wrote down a small code in ceasar ciphering: guh c'g vux un nbcm. It was just obvious the ceasar wouldn't help them here. Which reminded her, inverting letters would be as futile.

Rosa walked into the arithmancy classroom and found the ravenclaw section. she noticed on the bulletin board that puzzle one had been solved, so she got out an empty scroll of parchment and scribbled puzzle two on it. she got out two other scrolls, one with notes on codebreaking and one with puzzle one on it, and, looking at the notes, started to do puzzle two, counting the letters and frequency.

Professor Fox stepped in quietly so as not to disturb th students and wrote quickly on one of the main blackboards.

Clarification of Arithmancy Concepts:

• Arithmancy vs. Charm Theory
  • We represent spells in this class using numbers to examine advanced and foreign concepts. We do not create magical 'number spells'.
  • There is no '7' spell. '7' is a property that certain spells may or may not contain. A spell which has an element represented by a '7' may very well have an element represented by a '6' or a '4'.
  • Hence, it does not make much sense to discuss 'does a 0 beat a 4?' or 'which works better, a 9 or a 6?.' There are no single spells, potions, or anything else which are represented solely by a single one digit numeral.
  • It is easier to discuss properties in terms of numerals because it is easier to represent a spell as 90978374671 than to attempt to explain how and why it works and is affected by other spells in terms of language. Furthermore, many spells do not use Latin, English, French, Chinese, Russian, or Spanish. Think, 'How does a British wizard understand a spell cast in 1,500 year old Quechan? And how do they set about bypassing it?'
  • Again, any given single numeral is not more potent, or less potent than any other numeral. The idea is how their properties combine in certain orders to produce a magical effect.
• Zeroeth Law
  • All magic left unattended tends to decay in potency.
  • There is no magical universal "power of zero" spell which causes all magic to decay. This only means a spell left to its own devices for a time period will slowly decay in potency, i.e. depending on the spell it's potency will decay quickly, slowly, or infinitesimally, but it will decay unless it is seen to properly.
  • The characteristic time of decay varies with the spell but may be as long as thousands of years.
  • I repeat, there is no magical "nil" spell which causes other spells to decay.
• Time Independence vs. Irreversibility
  • Something which is independent of time will have a longer lifetime as a spell left unattended than a spell which is dependent on time.
  • A spell which is dependent on time or has a dependency on time will as a result change over time, independent of decay of its potency (which again is not noticeable in a human lifetime).
  • An irreversable spell simply means a spell which cannot be easily reversed. Said spells may or may not have a lifetime of their own. The irreversability of a spell is separate from its dependency on time.
• Why do we bother learning this junk?
  • Once one knows all the properties of all the basic numerals, one can discern how to represent a curse that say makes a person drool.
  • Once that is discerned, then by knowing the number a wizard can know what numbers add to get that number.
  • Once that is known, one can discern what spells are represented by those numbers.
  • Once that is discerned, one can set about bypassing the original spell.
  • But without knowing the basics of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, the whole attempt is fruitless.

Nadia walked by and got a look at a note the professor just pinned. She chuckled to herself. Well, way to make a reaction, she was impressed with herself. This seemed to respond only to her doubts. Strike that, it was, not just seemed.

In a way, man she was stubborn, but she just wanted to know if there was a spell represented with zero and therefore which helped decay of spells though time. She had been sure the professor hinted the decay could be speeded up... but maybe she just misunderstood it.

Well, if that was the case, and spells could not be forced to decay, then the rest of the train of thought was void and the rest of the note wasn't even appliable.

Wonders if the professor understood what she meant.