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This is Room 5 of the Maze series. For those wishing to start at the beginning, click here. To go back to the previous room, click here.

As you arrive at the answer to Room 4, you realize it's the same one that you got for Room 3. With a sudden flash of insight, you go back to the keypad and scrutinize it. The faint fingerprints you see are on the keys 0,1,3 and 7. You realize with dread that you have been in this room before (0 from your unfortunate predecessor, 33 from your peer Anne whose skin is still recovering from the Itchyverse, and the rest from your previous entry. But wait! You look to the wall next to the keypad for the scratch marks that were there before and you see none. Were they ever really there? You look around, bewildered, for an explanation and you see nothing but the cold walls and the suspended platform.

Eventually you hopelessly resign yourself to foraging ahead and enter your answer into the keypad. As usual, the door disappears and you find yourself in Room 5. You don't even think about resting--what would be the point in trying, you know you can longer get any sleep in this Maze. You just walk helplessly towards the platform and grab the note. You stop before reading it and in defiant anger you rip a piece off and throw it to the ground. Before it can even hit the ground, it evaporates into thin air. You realize what you've just done and force yourself to calm down before you ruin your hopes of escaping this place. You read the note:

Welcome to Room 5! If we must say, this is our personal favorite room; it was the first one that we created. As a result, it may turn out that it is actually easier than the previous--only time will tell. Good Luck!!

Key 1: >c 8DC<G:HH! ?jan )i]! &,,+# LZ ]daY ### [jijgZ hZXjg^in# ;gZfjZcXn! i]Zc d

There is a rip in the paper after 'd' thanks to your moment of indignance. "I hope there was nothing too important on that bit", you mumble.

Key 2: ERLO GWTD ERW BLSH OFVVWWUWU ERW OLXERCSDH YRS RLAOWBN RTU OFMMBTHEWU ERW RWTQWHBG

Bad, bad test subject! We sure hope that you can complete this room without that missing information.

Did they know that you were going to rip the paper beforehand? Or did they make that information appear without you noticing? Your head begins to hurt from the constant confusion and you can feel your stability slipping. You need to hurry and escape this Maze!!!

A thorough investigation of the keypad shows only digits (with no discernible marks on any of them).

Answer from Previous Room:

117

EDIT: After a day of grueling attempts to find any significant meaning in the keys, a note appeared on the platform:

It seems that we had not properly balanced this room. That being the case, we will provide two pieces of information.
1. Key 1 has been put through one of your species' first recorded ciphers, though with an alphabet larger than the one originally used.
2. A fuller version of Key 2 is as follows: ERLO GWTD ERW NLDOE BLSH OFVVWWUWU ERW ERLDU OLXERCSDH YRS RLAOWBN RTU OFMMBTHEWU ERW NLDOE RWTQWHBG

This puzzle has now been solved. Here is the next, and final, room

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  • $\begingroup$ I seem to be having trouble with the formatting. In Key 1, the less than sign keeps wanting to turn the following into some sort of tag or something, making it disappear from the displayed version. I originally used latex $ to escape it, but now that seems to have stopped working (at least when I pull up the question). Is there a way to escape the less than sign? In the interim, all solvers please ignore the space immediately after the less than sign. $\endgroup$
    – NeedAName
    Aug 6, 2015 at 17:59
  • $\begingroup$ does the html entity work? &lt; $\endgroup$
    – dfperry
    Aug 6, 2015 at 18:03
  • $\begingroup$ Indeed, that seems to display just fine. I have removed the erroneous space. Thanks for the help. $\endgroup$
    – NeedAName
    Aug 6, 2015 at 18:10
  • $\begingroup$ Has anyone made any sizable progress? Don't forget, you can always post partial answers with information; as long as you don't commit to putting an answer in the keypad, you can't be punished. $\endgroup$
    – NeedAName
    Aug 6, 2015 at 19:52
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    $\begingroup$ Shifting ASCII values of key 1 up by 11 gives us "In+CONGRESS,+July+4th,+1776.+We+hold+...+future+security.+Frequency,+then+o"... Not sure what to make of that. $\endgroup$
    – karhell
    Aug 7, 2015 at 12:44

4 Answers 4

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TroyAndAbed decrypted Key 2 as:

THIS YEAR THE LION SUCCEEDED THE SIXTHBORN WHO HIMSELF HAD SUPPLANTED THE HEAVENLY

Using English translations of Latin names, this describes Pope Leo I succeeding Sixtus III in the year 440. The previous pope was Celestine I.

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  • 1
    $\begingroup$ This is correct. Unfortunately, it puts me in an uncomfortable position, since the actual meat of the puzzle was skipped. I'm not posting part 6 until tomorrow morning anyways, so hopefully in that time, someone--maybe yourself--will get the full solution (karhell recently made a very useful comment on the OP). If by then this is still unsolved, I will accept your answer, since technically, all the puzzle asks for is the final answer. $\endgroup$
    – NeedAName
    Aug 7, 2015 at 14:41
  • $\begingroup$ -1 Please explain how you got your answer. $\endgroup$
    – Kevin
    Aug 9, 2015 at 20:21
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It seems I did a pretty bad job on this room. After some consideration, I've decided to post the complete solution to this puzzle; while I indicated previously to f" that I would accept his answer if this went unsolved (and kudos to him for getting the correct final answer), I think it would be unwise to deprive current and future solvers the satisfaction of knowing how this puzzle was intended to be solved. Some may disapprove of this approach, but I think I'd rather leave the problem as is and post the information in this post rather than update it with, basically, instructions on how to solve this puzzle. All of that said, here goes.

First notice that Key 1 is a shifted Caesar cipher with the alphabet being ASCII instead of the usual one and the shift amount being ROT117, the answer from the previous room. This yields:

In CONGRESS, July 4th, 1776. We hold ... future security. Frequency, then o

This points to a passage from the preamble of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Using this paragraph and analyzing the frequency of each letter (every one of the 26 occurs at least once in this passage), we get the following, sorted in descending order with ties broken by "o"rder of occcurrence (hence the lingering o in Key 1 before the rip; the whole word was order).

e (134), t (109), n (71), s (70), i (70), r (65), a (65), o (64), h (59), d (38), l (35), u (34), c (26), g (26), f (25), m (24), p (18), b (16), v (15), w (14), y (13), j (2), k (2), q (1), z (1), x (1)

Lining these up with the letters in order of occurrence in the passage (also what was meant by 'frequency, then order'), you get the substitution cipher of:

e, t, n, s, i, r, a, o, h, d, l, u, c, g, f, m, p, b, v, w, y, j, k, q, z, x
w, e, h, o, l, d, t, s, r, u, b, f, v, i, n, a, m, c, q, y, g, p, j, z, k, x

This is used to decipher Key 2 to the following:

THIS YEAR THE LION SUCCEEDED THE SIXTHBORN WHO HIMSELF HAD SUPPLANTED THE HEAVENLY

Which, as f" noted, is a reference to when Pope Leo I (the lion) succeeded Pope Sixtus III (the sixthborn, though the actual etymology of this name is believed to be the greek word for 'polished') who was preceded by Pope Celestine I (the heavenly). This took place in the year:

440

Giving us our final answer to enter into the keypad.

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I'm not at an answer yet, but Key 2 can be decrypted to (as TroyAndAbed suggests)

THIS YEAR THE LION SUCCEEDED THE SIXTHBORN WHO HIMSELF HAD SUPPLANTED THE HEAVENLY

The best guess I have for this is that

This refers to the year 1189, when Richard I (the Lionheart) succeeded Henry II.

Based on a comment from OP "I should have learned my lesson on not grouping by 5 before," the number of characters in each "word" in Key 1 seem to be important, but I haven't got anywhere on the pattern

2 9 4 4 5 2 4 3 6 9 10 4 1

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  • $\begingroup$ Welcome to the site Jacob and thanks for your contribution. I'm afraid that you are on the wrong track on both guesses however. Resolving Key 1 is much simpler than you think. My comment regarding grouping by five referred to the encryption practice of writing your cipher in groups of five letters to make it more resistant to cryptanalysis, which I failed to do twice in this series $\endgroup$
    – NeedAName
    Aug 6, 2015 at 20:24
  • $\begingroup$ @NeedAName If you want to make it resistant to cryptanalysis, try to drop it into quipqiup.com/index.php first. That's pretty much the first thing anyone does with these. $\endgroup$
    – LeppyR64
    Aug 7, 2015 at 2:55
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Okay, it has been awhile since anyone posted, so I thought I'd put in my two cents (probably more like one...), but Zeus was the sixth born and he did take over the heavens. From there I have no idea, since years really don't play a part in Greek Mythology. Also, I guess he may have birthed the Nemean Lion. It was killed by Hercules and became the Leo constellation that we all know and love. But again, I don't know how to get a year from that.

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  • $\begingroup$ Ok, Zeus is Jupiter in Roman mythology, so I guess the leo constellation and jupiter? Looks like Jupiter passes through Leo this year, so is the year 2015? $\endgroup$
    – MMM
    Aug 6, 2015 at 22:49
  • $\begingroup$ Welcome to the site and thanks for the creative answer. While that is a cool coincidence, I will tell you that the subject of this room is History, and not Mythology. $\endgroup$
    – NeedAName
    Aug 6, 2015 at 23:40

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