MathGwyson
Artisan
Math had a very short sleep. Some combination of too many glasses of that peppery drink at the tavern, the lingering effects of the fudge cakes he ate after he got to his room, or the fact that there was an unsolved puzzle waiting for him to obsess over made him lie awake in bed hours before dawn.
He got out of bed and pulled the notebook out of his green leather bag. In it were two pages of the text from the map, a page with each of the character letters with a number 'code' for ease of remembering them, and a crudely drawn idea to help him remember the map.
He remembered the gypsy saying that
was more of a 'punctuation' mark, or represents a space.
He also remembered that he thought that
, which appears in two places at the end of a map key, resembled the word 'here'.
On a new sheet, he made a page with spaces with the numerical codes for each letter, placing "!" underneath the #3 slot for the 'punctuation' glyph, 'H' under #16, 'E' under #10 and 'R under #5. Then he looked around for some more patterns...
At this point
was showing as "E_R_H" .. which looked strangely like 'EARTH'. However the 'A' was the 'punctuation mark' placeholder, and there were several places where an 'A' didn't make sense (for example, where T_A was a word, if we assume 'EARTH' is correct) After mulling and musing for a bit, he reasoned that the punctuation mark could be sort of how an apostrophe is used in common - which would make this "E'RTH" - but nothing else that was on the page made a lot of sense (especially one spot that came out as a double "T" in a context that didn't work, and another that was coming out as " 'RR' ")
He had a vague notion that maybe the language was read right to left instead of left to right, and rewrote everything with that in mind (he was glad at this point that he had perserved the line separations so he could reverse each line rather than the entire section.) After analysing the result, he decided that didn't make much sense because the inverse of 'here' appeared at the beginning of one line (that was all one one line) and at the end of another (which was on two separate lines). That and he couldn't think of many four-letter words where the first and third letters were the same.
He then played around a bit with the letters around the 'village' drawing on the map. He noticed that the number of letters matched "Parson Breach" and tried various combiations with those words, but didn't result in anything satisfactory.
He then noticed a few two and three letter words that seemed to use similar letters - and wound up creating a page for each of the more common letters with all the words that letter appears in, hoping to draw inspiration.
After doing that (and having worked on it for 5 hours after only about 2 hours worth of sleep) Math threw up his hands, and decided to head out for breakfast and let it mull in the back of his mind for a bit.
He got out of bed and pulled the notebook out of his green leather bag. In it were two pages of the text from the map, a page with each of the character letters with a number 'code' for ease of remembering them, and a crudely drawn idea to help him remember the map.
He remembered the gypsy saying that
He also remembered that he thought that
On a new sheet, he made a page with spaces with the numerical codes for each letter, placing "!" underneath the #3 slot for the 'punctuation' glyph, 'H' under #16, 'E' under #10 and 'R under #5. Then he looked around for some more patterns...
At this point
He had a vague notion that maybe the language was read right to left instead of left to right, and rewrote everything with that in mind (he was glad at this point that he had perserved the line separations so he could reverse each line rather than the entire section.) After analysing the result, he decided that didn't make much sense because the inverse of 'here' appeared at the beginning of one line (that was all one one line) and at the end of another (which was on two separate lines). That and he couldn't think of many four-letter words where the first and third letters were the same.
He then played around a bit with the letters around the 'village' drawing on the map. He noticed that the number of letters matched "Parson Breach" and tried various combiations with those words, but didn't result in anything satisfactory.
He then noticed a few two and three letter words that seemed to use similar letters - and wound up creating a page for each of the more common letters with all the words that letter appears in, hoping to draw inspiration.
After doing that (and having worked on it for 5 hours after only about 2 hours worth of sleep) Math threw up his hands, and decided to head out for breakfast and let it mull in the back of his mind for a bit.
