#META: bill and lanette are really good with codes and ciphers, which makes me assume you have at least a minor interest in that kind of thing yourself (especially because it took you approximately 1 minute to figure out the ASCII rot13 ask i sent!). my question would be, how do codes and ciphers relate to your interests as well as your characters’?

{First and foremost, thank you for the puzzle! 😀 That was a lot of fun~

That said, though, I fully admit I am cool with puzzles, and this really comes from two sources:

1. My fascination with ARGs. Not to date myself, but I first got into that kind of stuff with Eon8 and the Cloverfield viral marketing. Like, the super weird stuff. Then I just kinda stumbled across things like the Unfiction forums (which I’ve never been a member of, but hoooo those threads), Year One, Marble Hornets, Wham City, The Sun Vanished, preeeetty much any video analysis of the weird puzzle-like sites and creepy interactive things and videos out there. I admit I don’t think I’m clever enough to analyze these things or dig around myself (or, in the case of Marble Hornets, I’m too chicken to do it), but it’s always fun to see these things and see other people solve them.

2. My fascination with old point-and-click escape-the-room games. Like, anyone remember Mystery of Time and Space? Or Crimson Room/Viridian Room? Or My Diamond Baby? Samsara Room? All those Flash games where you’re locked in the room, and you have to solve all these series of puzzles to get out? Those I could do, and they were often fun. Like, a fun mix of challenging and absolutely bizarre. (The real-life equivalent—you know, escape rooms and whatnot—would probably be a different story. Let’s just say I don’t actually like being locked up in places, haha.)

Long story short, though, between these two things, I’d pick up things, like the full understanding that hiding messages in images that can be converted to binary that can be converted to map coordinates that can be rearranged to form a URL with a poem to decipher for said message is what the cool kids do.

As for Bill and Lanette, believe it or not, Bill’s not that much into puzzles. There’s something about being asked to do them to prove your intelligence that makes the whole lot of them boring, you know? (The same thing could be said of chess, of playing classical music, of being randomly quizzed or given difficult physics problems on the spot, and of doing all those other stereotypically “genius” things short of being asked to hack stuff or build robots or, well, go on about his fields of expertise/interest, all of which are still the few pleasures he gets out of the whole genius thing. Other than that? It’s really tiring to have to prove you’re smart when you obviously are.) But that isn’t to say he won’t use code, of course—like, obviously, since he has right on the blog. Mostly, he uses it to avoid talking directly about what’s on his mind because he’s actually a pretty terrible liar. Or to send messages only meant for Lanette … because he is, again, a really terrible liar.

Lanette, meanwhile, is the exact opposite. She can’t get enough of puzzles, and she doesn’t even care too much if people shove them her way to make her prove that she’s smart. Incidentally, she has indeed had to prove that she’s intelligent, and she’s had to do it as often or even more so than Bill, given that, you know, she had been a teen genius and a female one at that—because, you know, yay sexism. It’s just that Lanette doesn’t quite get as bored with things as easily as her partner, and in any case, she’s always eager to flex her mental muscles with a good challenge. And anyway, mysteries are awesome. So she’s probably the sort of person who eats up Sherlock Holmes (hence all her deducing), grew up with Nancy Drew, would totally be down for an escape room, and secretly loves Scooby Doo to this day. But to her, puzzles and codes are still a lot of fun, and she’s a lot like me in that she absolutely eats up analysis videos and stalks the Pokémon world equivalent of Unfiction.

Bill, of course, will play along with her to make her happy. As in, if she shares a puzzle with him, he’ll help her out with it. If she watches yet another Sherlock Holmes special, he’s probably right there with her. And if she insists on trying out that new escape room … well, he’ll probably go but just sort of sit off to the side until he absolutely has to pitch in and help the group. I mean, ultimately, it’s Lanette who’s having fun, so he’ll, you know. Totally just let her have all the fun. Until she asks, of course.}