Hollyshadow the medicine cat: No, nothing happy will ever happen. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Don't worry. Things will turn out for the better...eventually...:D But you have to wait!

Guest: Well, since it's similar to my plot, it has to be good XD no just kidding. One tip I can give you is never let your story become as convoluted as this one. As for destroying mankind, well, it's fun. To me at least. To the readers...not so much.

Shimmering-Sky: Descole's gonna burn unless someone gets him outta there...FORESHADOWING PERHAPS? HMMMMM...I WONDER! And those firefighters have their work cut out for them...thanks for the praise! I didn't think I did a great job, but thanks :D

Chapter 23: This chapter serves no real purpose. Well, its composition is 80% filler and 20% trash, so enjoy!

Chapter Twenty-Three

Of Plain Truths and Hidden Secrets

"Am I dead?" Descole questioned the inky blackness around him. "Where am I?"

The more steps Descole took, the less distance he seemed to cover. There was nothing and no one around him, just darkness.

He could hear his brother's voice from many years ago, so full of life and excitement. He could hear his faithful servant Raymond. But louder seemed to be the silence that was omnipresent.

"I suppose it goes to show," Descole murmured, "that memories are, after all, only memories. That they really can't help you, in the end."

"Descole!"

"So I suppose this is how it ends for me. No sense of direction, no sense of purpose, no sense of anything, really-and all alone..."

"DESCOLE!"

Descole, surprised by the shout, abruptly sat up before experiencing a sharp pain in his arm and leg and everywhere else and falling back onto the bed he was in.

Wait...I'm in a bed?

Eyes adjusting to the bright light, he instantly realized where he was.

"Oh! Descole! You're awake!"

...and who was sitting by his bed.

"...So..." Descole grumbled, "why am I in a hospital?" He knew full well why already-that Hellspawn was no easy opponent-but he was curious as to how he was found.

Emmy and Bronev both seemed to fidget. It was Bronev who ultimately spoke. "Due to the fire created by the Hellspawn, firefighters were called in. Police forces, led by Chief Inspector Grosky, also reached the area where you and the Hellspawn fought. Of course, though Hanna no longer chases Grosky as persistently as she used to, her knack for noticing police movements is still uncanny. She relayed this information to Bloom. Having worked for the police before, Bloom decided to see what had happened...and then he saw you..."

"You were in a terrible state," Emmy said. "Part of your cape was torn, there were huge cuts and gashes all over your body-the doctor says you could easily have died from shock or blood loss, though thankfully you are quite resilient."

"Hm. Where are the Hellspawn's remains?"

"Interestingly enough, the Hellspawn was missing an arm. The rest of it has been taken by the government for study. I assume that the Hellspawn fought you with both arms intact, so someone must have taken the severed one."

"An arm...? Who would want a Hellspawn arm? Is it possible it burned up?"

"No. Hellspawn are fireproof-not surprising, considering the conditions they usually live in."

Descole briefly winced as another jolt of pain coursed its way through his body, then promptly closed his eyes. The sound of faint snoring could be heard.

"Well," Bronev explained to a surprised Emmy, "he was always quick to fall asleep. By the way...what did you talk to him about?"

He noticed Emmy's downcast expression. "Did he-"

"I'd rather not talk about it, Uncle," Emmy whimpered. Whimpered. Emmy never did that unless she was in a truly unhappy mood.

I'll talk to her about it later, Bronev decided as he turned his attention back to his sleeping son.

Hershel Layton stared long and hard at the photograph in front of him. Indeed, he'd found a truly challenging puzzle.

The Akbadain cipher...it's impossibly complex. I can't even get past the second ring!

The professor had tried a variety of typical decryption techniques, but all of his efforts seemed to be for naught. He even called Dr. Schrader, who just so happened to be sick. It wasn't as if his mentor would be particularly helpful, either; Dr. Schrader was by no means an expert on the Azran. Randall, who was also trying to decipher the message, was equally frustrated. Each time, he ended up with nothing but gibberish. It was no surprise he was frustrated at this lack of progress.

Sighing, he perused an extremely long document about advanced code schemes when something caught his eye.

"Polyalphabetic substitution..." What is this? Intrigued, the professor read on.

Polyalphabetic substitution is far more secure than monoalphabetic substitution. While monoalphabetic substitution is a simple system of setting one letter to mean another through a predetermined substitution alphabet, polyalphabetic substitution has many substitution alphabet, meaning a single letter in the original message can be encrypted in many ways. The most famous polyalphabetic cipher is the Vigenere cipher.

In a Caesar cipher, each letter of the alphabet is shifted along some number of places. The Vigenère cipher consists of several Caesar ciphers in sequence with different shift values.

To encrypt, a table of alphabets can be used, termed a tabula recta, Vigenere square, or Vigenere table. It consists of the alphabet written out 26 times in different rows, each alphabet shifted cyclically to the left compared to the previous alphabet, corresponding to the 26 possible Caesar ciphers. At different points in the encryption process, the cipher uses a different alphabet from one of the rows. The alphabet used at each point depends on a repeating keyword.

The person sending the message chooses a keyword and repeats it until it matches the length of the plaintext to make a key string. Each row of the tabula recta starts with a key letter. The remainder of the row holds the letters A to Z (in shifted order). Although there are 26 key rows shown, you will only use as many keys (different alphabets) as there are unique letters in the keyword. For successive letters of the message, we are going to take successive letters of the key string, and encipher each message letter using its corresponding key row. Choose the next letter of the key, go along that row to find the column heading that matches the message character; the letter at the intersection of [key string letter-row, message letter-column] is the enciphered letter.

The professor closed his eyes. There are infinitely many possible keywords. If polyalphabetic substitution is what the Azran used, then I'll be sitting here for a while, especially since there are 264 letters to work with...

The keyword must be hidden somewhere.

Professor Layton sat up and called Randall.

"Hello, Hershel! What do you need?" Though Randall sounded cheerful, one could detect traces of fatigue. Of course, only Randall would stay up as long as I did on something like this.

"I think I've figured out how to solve the second ring. But I'm not sure. I need you to test my theory."

"Really!? Great! I'm assuming you need my computer for it, since otherwise you wouldn't need me."

"How astute of you. Yes, I do need it..."

After an incredibly long time, the professor managed to explain polyalphabetic substitution to his friend. "So I need you to write a program to translate the second ring given a keyword. We can find the correct keyword through educated trial and error then."

"I think I can have it done by tomorrow...it seems pretty complicated. But I'm pretty sure this theory of yours is correct. Call me tomorrow, then." Randall hung up.

"Everything's arrived. We can begin now."

A chuckle. "Excellent. We still have over two weeks-more than enough time."

"Why do I get the feeling of deja vu?"

A tense silence followed. "I'm-"

"I know you are. Calm down-it was merely a statement. We should begin assembling the machine now-two weeks passes by faster than you think."

"Agreed." The figure stood. "The creation of the impossible..."

Another filler chapter guys! I love you all too.

Please follow, favorite, or review! Of course, if you hate this story, this doesn't apply.

For those who are curious, I merely took the information about the polyalphabetic cipher from Wikipedia. (You didn't think I was THAT smart, did you?) For anyone who's curious (I mean, seriously, cryptography is really cool), you can read the Wikipedia article about Vigenere ciphers.