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You work for an organisation that has been tracking a malicious hacker, attempting to get a copy of the code she has been using so as to reverse-engineer a counter-hack. You tailed her to London, England, and after a successful sting operation, you have gained access to her computer and email account, but there is no code present on the hard drive, nor any records of file operations pertaining to it.

Looking through the email inbox, you see hundreds of spam emails, most of them unread. Towards the top of the inbox, there is one email that has been read, and received recently, but the body of the email appears to be some kind of ... love letter?

dearest,

this is a release i have needed for many years

i can't wait to have you Back In My Arms Again. you know that I Love To Love - you're my Disco Lady and If Loving You Is Wrong I Don't Wanna Be Right. It's Not Unusual that because of you, my Brown Eyed Girl, only At Seventeen i already wanted us to Come Together to be married

Come On, Eileen. i'm Burning Up here. we'll be together One Way Or Another. For Once In My Life i feel like i've been Blinded By The Light. before i met you i was just Damaged Goods - Could It Be I'm Falling In Love?

I Got You, Babe. we're the Love Cats and i'll always be Right Here Waiting for you. I Was Made For Lovin' You. in fact i'm Crazy For You

i can't believe It Started With A Kiss. someday i hope we'll be Happy Together. You Take My Breath Away. If I Can Dream tonight, i'll Put A Little Love In Your Heart

come meet me soon

--tarot16


Decipher the hidden message within the email, and tell me:

Who or what should we be looking for next?

Where are they to be found?


Context:

This was originally written for some community-made levels of an ARG, but I experienced a hard drive corruption and lost a lot of files which disheartened me from finishing it. This and a couple of other puzzles were backed up elsewhere, or written down in hardcopy notes, so I was able to save them. This one's fairly simple, but I enjoyed composing it and hope it's appreciated.

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1 Answer 1

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There are hints in the message showing that

Sequences of words starting with capital letters are the names of famous songs, all of which were released in the 20th century.

If you

subtract 1900 from the year of release of each song, convert the resulting number to the corresponding ASCII character, and then concatenate all the characters,

you will get

ALLHACKERSODINHASYOURCODE

Which probably means that you need to find

Odin

The answer to the second question seems to be

The Tower, because it's "the 16th trump or Major Arcana card in most Italian-suited Tarot decks"

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    $\begingroup$ True to form, that's absolutely the correct solving solution for the first question, but there is a second question to be had, too! $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 28, 2017 at 12:54
  • $\begingroup$ @NinjaDuckie: I added an answer to the second question, but I'm not sure it's correct $\endgroup$
    – vaultah
    Commented Sep 28, 2017 at 13:07
  • $\begingroup$ It's nearly there, I'd just like a little more specificity as to where exactly the target will be found. I guess the answer might lie under the Trivia tag, actually. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 28, 2017 at 13:10
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    $\begingroup$ Odin is the name of one of the ravens at the Tower of London. I have the stuffed animal version from their gift shop right on my desk. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 28, 2017 at 14:52

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