The Mystery of the Lost Legion

[Anonymous]

A place for wild speculation and conjecture about the storyline. Let your imaginations run riot!

[Anonymous]

I reckon the Romans eat a bagel

[Anonymous]

Really hoping it’s something to do with artifacts and ‘legion’ is the first keyword for any of the difficult ciphers!

I can definitely see Harry getting kidnapped by a historian.

[Anonymous]

I don’t usually dig much into the story line, but I’ve decided I might as well this year.

It has been too long since we last worked together and many ships have passed through the Bosphorus since, but it is possible that my current case may give us an opportunity to work together again.

I can’t see much in here, but they mention Bosphorus. The rest appears to just be chatting.

The 2-4-7 network has picked up a lot of chatter recently concerning the shadow antiquities market, and my superiors are worried that this might be part of a deal supporting a terror network.

I’m unsure what the 2-4-7 network is. It is possibly something made up for the challenge but I’ll look more into it. The mention of an antiquities market market is very interesting and links to something I’ll talk about later.

We are not sure what the target is but the amounts being discussed are beyond anything I have seen before, so someone is either arranging to sell a very large stolen collection or they have found a particularly unusual item.

Again, a lot of this seems to just be talking. We are, however, told that there is a lot of money involved in this transaction. I believe that it is just one item not a collection though (I’ll elaborate later).

A lot of the traffic is coming out of Egypt and landing in Turkey, which is why I was brought in to investigate. Have you heard anything? London is usually the clearing house for these things and someone there with the initial J has been mentioned.

Interesting. We are given three new places (Egypt, Turkey and London) and we are told that there is someone with the initial J who is likely to be a key part of the plot.

Reading between the lines J seems to be connected with one of the major London institutions and I wondered if your network was picking up the same signals. On the basis of sigint analysis Cairo seems to be the best place for me to start looking. Let me know if you are interested in joining me there. Either way, if you hear anything could you pass it on?

More place names. Nice. We can add Cairo to our list. I think the rest of this is fairly lacking in info though. I also get the feeling that for almost all (if not all) of the challenge, they will be refering to this man as J so I don’t expect there to be much to learn there.

Sooooo… Now we’ve got a list of places and we know it’s an antique that’s worth a lot of money. I skipped over it, but we are told it’s probably a particularly unusual item. This intrigues me. Although more unorthodox, I decided not to stop at just the published challenge. I went over to the official twitter account and had a scroll back through the history. The Antikythera mechanism is mentioned at one point and I think this could quite possibly be the antique they are taling about. I had a look on a map, and the location looks almost perfect: https://botter.doesnt-have-a.life/du10rk2.png (A is Bosphorus, B is where the mechanism was found and C is London.) Cario is also right next to that area.

From this, my current speculation is that there is a man/woman (J) who is either buying or selling either the whole, a part of, or a fake Antikythera mechanism. Although we have not been clued, I think it is highly likely that it is a fake because that’s what the challenge writers like to do :P. Sadly, Part B only contains As a historian, ... which is not particularly useful. I’m unsure if this is intentional or if there was a mistake when copying the two in. The name Deathbed Confession doesn’t seem to give many clues without the content as well.

Anyway. That’s just me speculating. Chances are, it’s all wrong 😀

How’d I do Harry?

[Anonymous]

You did extremely well, which is not to say you necessarily got something or anything right (or, for that matter, that you got it wrong!) But I really like the way you are analysing it! Wonder what ideas others might have. By the way, why tag this bagel? Or are we supposed to work that out for ourselves?

[Anonymous]

The bagel tag confused me too. bagel, challenge, disappointing, roman, story are the default tags for this thread so I just left them as they were 😛

[Anonymous]

Our team has done a fair amount of digging, but we’re very intrigued by Part B, it doesn’t say anything, but I’m sure lots of meaning will come from it!

[Anonymous]

More may be made clear when 0B gets published on Wednesday or Thursday this week. Or perhaps not 😉

PS I have killed the bagel. Sorry.

[Anonymous]

The mention of the Bosphorus could be due to the fact that the traffic is landing in Turkey which is the location of the Bosphorus (thank you Google)

[Anonymous]

2-4-7 network sound system like some form of monitoring network because it sounds like 24-7 also because they were talking about a lot of chatter (maybe Project Echelon?)
Also I think it quite likely that it is a part of the Antikythera mechanism not a fake because of the fact that it would still go for a lot and not all the parts have necessarily been found because it does say that all the known parts are at the museum in Athens
Nice educated guesses Bottersnike

[Anonymous]

I am assuming that the lost legion is the ninth legion, which mysteriously dropped off record in the 2nd century, with various theories as to why it vanished. I guess that the story will be an investigation into what happened to it.

[Anonymous]

Okay.. Well.. I redact my entire previous theory 😛
Oh, also, will “Imperial Cipher” happen to mean caesar for the first few 😛

[Anonymous]

Rosemary Sutcliffe wrote a good book called The Eagle of the Ninth about what could have happened to the lost ninth legion.It’s a great story! I’m looking forward to trying the challenge!

[Anonymous]

It appears from 0B that the story is about someone writing about something and hiding it in an encrypted state so I guess it is all about what ‘actually’ happened to the ninth roman legion

[Author]

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