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A strange man in a bow tie with a serious comb-over left you this:

Mysterious piece of paper...

Second half of mysterious piece of paper...

"A simple cipher," he says, "and I leave it to you to find out what has been lost." Can you?

On an OOC note, I have no idea how hard this would be…? Also, sorry for the bad image quality.

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  • $\begingroup$ This looks like an abugida of some sort... $\endgroup$ – Deusovi♦ Feb 5 '16 at 3:04
  • $\begingroup$ Is the text on the back of the paper of any importance? Is it the decrypted text? $\endgroup$ – Daedric Feb 5 '16 at 7:36
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    $\begingroup$ The text on the back is completely insignificant, sorry about that... $\endgroup$ – AJL Feb 5 '16 at 11:25
  • $\begingroup$ What looks to be punctuation (e.g., some commas, the question mark at the end) - can we assume that that is in fact punctuation? $\endgroup$ – question_asker Feb 5 '16 at 13:18
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, it is in fact, actually punctuation $\endgroup$ – AJL Feb 5 '16 at 21:38
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Transcript

Z- AT-Z (R_N) D_TOETJ-, B|C STO LY, STO ETF Z- Z_TO-Z-O (R-Z)F LT G D|TV O_BQ T|Z D|TV V|T- KB S O_ZA JR*DO STO S W_LZ Z_Q L() ET GU_(RQ) EW W*Z-D*VR() LT Z*T(FZ) J|DO STO ZR*(F), @Z LT (R-) T D.F QU.T (Z*D*)() R|CZQ EW F_ZDB (CJ)A-O CUK-OQ

LT OZ|ZQB Q.H~FZ T*VR() (B_D) B|C STO LY LT QDF~U Z-T() O|ZT (E) UF~() F_JR E(R-Z) (R-Z-), B|CZ O_ZA R_LZ ET B|CZ ZR*(F) T*VR(V|Z)T STO H*T- Z_Q (ST)VD-O W_LZ?

Key:

  • A: weird curly A
  • B: beak pointing northeast
  • C: curly spiral
  • D: delta
  • E: @
  • F: flower
  • G: γ
  • H: horseshoe
  • J: curly J (maybe a cursive T?)
  • K: ampersand
  • L: weird lambda
  • N: dome character
  • O: circle
  • Q: double circle
  • R: manta ray-ish shape (ginkgo leaf, maybe?)
  • S: integral sign
  • T: treble clef
  • U: backward ampersand
  • V: spark on top of Aries symbol
  • W: waves
  • Z: zigzaggy 3
  • -: bar through previous symbol
  • _: cup under previous symbol
  • ~: tilde over previous symbol
  • *: asterisk over previous symbol
  • |: vertical bar through previous symbol
  • .: dot under previous symbol
  • (): dome over enclosed symbols
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  • 2
    $\begingroup$ line 7 character 1 should be E $\endgroup$ – Fabich Jun 2 '16 at 12:21
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Out of curiosity, I tried to extract the text from the back of the papers, in case there's a clue. The pictures are pretty noisy (probably a cell phone camera) so it's difficult, here's the best I could do:

enter image description here enter image description here

It appears to be a letter of some sort. I can read the date (January or February 28, 2016) on the top of the first page; I can see a fragment "-ing our" at the end of the third or fourth line on the same page; and I can see a signature in the middle of the second page.

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