17
The dots in between the squares...
These can be interpreted
There are also some other ways to extract similar arrangements of letters:
The data collected:
The next step needed heavy hinting for me to find it:
Unused information [hinted to be a clue to the step I did first]:
10
The six hint are highlighted in this image:
First hint:
Second hint:
Third hint:
Fourth hint - solved by @Jens
Fifth hint: - solved by @Jens
Sixth hint:
The final solution and the logic grid is the following:
8
So, the first cipher is a
and the ciphertext decodes to
The second cipher is
and the ciphertext decodes to
The last cipher is a
which yields
Oh, and thanks for
7
Partial currently:
6
I've solved the fifth hint, but it's a bit long for a comment:
One viable solution to the logic grid occurs if we guess that
EDIT
The last comment above is wrong. There is only one solution. I leave it to you, @Annosz. :)
5
This is not a complete solution. I am going to drop some of my scratch here in case it inspires someone else.
On the subject of the cipher:
I have noticed that
Applying the decryption:
So, the answer to the question "Where is Lester?" is ...
Because
As a bonus,
4
The symbols look like
but decoded it spells
TIS A RED HERRING
but it's a clue to the steganography:
It says
which translates to
3
Partial Answer, more like initial analysis really...
Hint #2 says to focus on where the capital letters are. In the first two stanzas there is unusual capitalization. I believe it is a pattern of zeroes and ones meant to be binary.
The fourth stanza says "As the first is one".
Starting with 1 and continuing word to word, ignoring new lines I got:
...
3
First we
which gives:
So I think the answer is
Line-by-line explanation:
2
As Neo1009 already found out,
The hints in the second stanza were
So the encoding is
What we had to do according to stanza 3 is to find out
Lets do that
The decoded message:
2
The answer is
which you find by
or
1
Okay I'm shooting my shot. I'm not good with ciphers or what not, and I could be on the totally wrong trail but...
Here me out here:
OP went clearly out of their way to introduce magic into this question, but after the first paragraph, magic is barely referenced. They are meeting at a university laboratory which is pretty ordinary, even the clue that was "...
1
Based on the comments from Skynet_0 and Bananenkopp, we see that
The passcode may therefore be
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