Experimental Magic ✔

Fruits of the Poisonious Tree

The five saboteurs planned to strike at 7 pm sharp. According to Scottie, The Assembly had dinner precisely at that time every night without fail. Thomas's office was on the complete opposite end of the dining hall, so with some agility and a little invisibility spell, it'd be easy enough for them to sneak in. While the Tarby siblings looked for the key in Thomas's office, Scottie would attend dinner as he normally would. The Assembly's nightly dinner was a three-course meal. Soup or salad, entree, then dessert and coffee. Scottie was to keep them entertained and to make things seem as normal as possible. He needed to ensure no suspicions were aroused during the meal to give the Tarbys enough time to crack the code. Then, when it was time for dessert and coffee, he would make his move.

It was 6:58 pm and the five of them sat in Scottie's bedroom waiting for the clock to hit 7:00. The minute hand ticked forward and they all looked to each other. Scottie didn't want to be late, so he decided it was time he headed to dinner. Once he was in the dining room, he carefully counted every member, making sure everyone was accounted for. When he was positive everyone was there, he shot Misty a quick text to let her know the coast was clear.

Markos, Misty, Millie, and Meadow snuck down the hall as quickly and quietly as possible. With Scottie's direction, they found Thomas's office with no problem. Misty made a beeline for his journal and splayed it open. She scanned over the pages vigorously searching for clues. At first glance, there wasn't much to look at. Thomas was just going about his day, blathering on about basically nothing. It was just normal everyday stuff, nothing really stood out to them. There were certainly no indications of a secret code.

"He could be lying to us, you know," Markos said. "This could be a set-up."

"It's not," Misty said confidently. "It's in here somewhere. We just need to look harder."

The siblings sighed and leaned in to take another look. All four of them read over the meaningless words again and again and still, nothing jumped out at them. Markos was starting to lose hope when Millie inadvertently gave them a much-needed clue.

"Omg, he is such a weirdo," Millie said. "I mean look at this, he capitalized an H in the middle of a word. Who writes like that?"

Markos and Meadow chuckled at her jab but didn't give it much thought. Misty, on the other hand, took Millie's comment to heart. Millie was right. It was strange and anything that is strange deserves a second look when you're trying to decode a message.

"Wait," Misty said, her eyes searching the pages for more potential clues. "You might be onto something. Every other H is lower-case. So why that one? That can't be an accident."

Seeing where she was going, Markos started to look for patterns. Sure enough, he began to notice that there were a bunch of seemingly random letters capitalized in the middle of words.

"You're right," he said, flipping back to the first page. "It can't be. No one writes like that. It's got to be a clue."

Starting from page one, Markos began writing down every misplaced capital letter. What he was left with was a jumbled mess of letters. He was disappointed it didn't immediately spell something out, but he was sure that those letters had to mean something.

E C S N O D M R O F H ET T E F L

"Okay, now what?" Millie said.

Millie and Meadow weren't convinced that these letters meant anything, but Misty was as sure as Markos. She wracked her brain as she tried to think of something that could lead them closer to unjumbling the letters.

"It's too many letters to be a word," Misty said. "It has to be a phrase."

"Yeah, definitely," Markos agreed. "But what though?"