Adventures Beyond!

Chapter 50: The Wandering Snivy

---

Sapphire Plains, Sinnoh

In the middle of the day, Sophie secretly took Oliver to the small library room within Mark's base. She managed to get the Oshawott away from the rest of their friends to talk to him privately. Oliver was a bit confused, as the Snivy only gave him a single statement; she needed to speak with him.

Walking into the book room, Oliver was only left with questions bouncing around in his head as she closed the door behind them. Sophie looked at him with her normal unchanging expression.

"I need your help..." Sophie spoke quietly.

The Oshawott was even more confused, "What? What's going on?"

The Snivy walked over to a pile of books, and pulled out a familiar notebook. The same notebook that she had been studying prior to her outing with Jacob and Akari. Oliver noticed the date on the cover.

"A book from thirteen years ago?" Oliver grabbed the book, studying its cover.

Oliver's right paw scanned the rough, obsidian colored cover of the notebook. His eyes looked at the damaged rings running down its spine, barely holding the notebook together. He could see a few pages had already been ripped out, and others were hanging onto the rest of the notebook for dear life.

"There's this strange message on the page. It looks a bit like a cipher... But there wasn't any key anywhere..."

He handed her the notebook, "Let me see."

She opened the notebook before showing Oliver the page that she had found the previous day. The Oshawott looked at the words above the cipher.

"Right below the top floor, lies the second. Over your head lies the top. Think about the future that was stolen from you between those floors. Floors one through three."

"Vg nccrnef gung gur zbfg cebzvfvat yvxrf gb pnyy vgfrys–."

Oliver began to think, "A key is always required to be in the same general area of the cipher given... But between the actual cipher and the sentence before it, that's all this page has... Which means..."

The Oshawott's ears perked, "The key is in the text above it."

"What?" Sophie, who couldn't read Oliver's mind, was intrigued by his thinking.

She had always known that Oliver had a strong head on his shoulders when it came to logical thinking and strategy. While he was the weakest battler between her, Logan, Jacob, and Oliver, she was always amazed with how his mind worked.

Oliver looked at the Snivy, "A key always has to be around the same area the cipher is. When a notebook is filled with information similar to this, you have to have the key on the same page so that other people don't get confused when information is shared between the writer and the others around the writer."

"So it's in the writing..." Sophie put a hand on her chin, "Maybe the first letter in the sentences? It's the most common..."

Oliver sat down, "Let's try it."

Sophie sat next to him as Oliver ripped out a blank sheet of paper from the notebook. He looked around for a moment before seeing a small can with a few pencils in it. He grabbed the blue pencil and began writing things down.

"First sentence starts with R..." Sophie told him as he scribbled down the letter, "The second with O, and the third with T."

"R...O...T..." Oliver's eyes widened, "An ROT cipher!"

"What is an ROT cipher?" Sophie asked as she looked at her intelligent companion.

The Oshawott thought for a moment, "Here's an example... Let's start with the word... Sophie."

He wrote down her name below where "ROT" had been written. He then wrote "Tpqijf" beneath where he had written her name.

"And how exactly do you go from my name, to a bunch of letters using this cipher?"

"This right here, is an ROT-1 cipher."

"Mhm?"

"I take the letters from your name, and shift them a single letter down the alphabet. That changes 'Sophie', to the amalgamation of letters that you see here. What do you think?" After he finished explaining, he looked up at her with a faint smile.

"So we need to find the right ROT in order to get the right message, right?" Sophie raised an eyebrow.

The Oshawott nodded, "Exactly."

"Then what about over here?" Sophie pointed at the page within the notebook, "Floors one through three. Could this stand for thirteen?"

Oliver looked at her with amazement before putting the encrypted message on the separate piece of paper. He then shifted each letter thirteen letters down the alphabet. Whenever it would reach Z, he would continue from A.