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help i'm trapped in a poll i don't know why i'm here i'm so scared someone please help

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Total Members Voted: 50

[FallacyofUrist]

First, will someone attempt RoaryStar's method for the rest of the code? And second... I have a massive theorycrafting bomb to drop.

Has it occurred to nobody that Ciro cannot be a Sibling because

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You are this guy and/or girl. You have traveled for some time from your land, the Kingdom of Haria, to the dungeon you now stand in: the Warrens of Oric the Awesome. You do not know who Oric the Awesome is, but if he's so awesome, he probably has awesome loot, too.

As you can see, Ciro came from outside the Warrens. If Ciro was a Sibling, he/she would have started within, rather than having traveled from the Kingdom of Haria.
Since The Target is most likely a Sibling, as shown in the Cain Intermission, Ciro cannot be the Target. Not to mention the fact that the first time Ciro met Oric, no lethal action was undertaken- which is odd because Oric wants the Target dead. So who is the Target, if not Ciro?

I have reason to believe it is Riltia who is the Target.

Reason 1:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Shake head.

Riltia takes your kind gesture and uses it as an excuse to worm her way into your party for now.





She's probably just going to steal all your stuff and kill you later.

Riltia joined our party very easy- enemy Siblings don't do that. Remember what it took to get Proxxy allied.
Therefore, Riltia was lying about working for Oric, and she was actually running from him. Naturally the Angel Statue sent out an alert of sorts.

Reason 2:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Oric told us that if we killed Riltia, he'd leave Ciro alive. Shouldn't that be the other way around if Ciro was the Target?

And besides, who else could it be if not Riltia?

The main argument against this is what happened during Cain's intermission.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The icons shown clearly show the Astral Influx's icon and the Reverent Savior's also. Not to mention that Ciro focused in on Reverant Savior to get to Riltia when in Oversoul. That may be a problem. The Target has the Astral Influx icon, and ? has the Reverent Savior icon. However, if for instance, the Astral Influx was displaced from somewhere else, from its rightful owner, into that treasure chest... the Target could still be Riltia- if not for Ciro focusing on Reverent Savior to warp to Riltia. If you have an answer to that... I'm still confused.

[Arcvasti]

Addressing the above theorycrafting point by point:

Ciro cannot be a Sibling because they came from outside the Warrens:

Fairly certain Ciro didn't actually enter the Warrens. She doesn't even remember anything about the Kingdom of Haria, meaning its probably an implanted backstory. Moreover, entry to the Warrens is almost impossible: Al only got in because Last Seraph and Yaos only got in because of the unique nature of their Soul Star, IIRC.

Ciro cannot be the Target because Oric didn't try to kill them when they met:

Most of the main theories we have on why Oric wants the Target dead involve Soul Charge. Oric wants the Target to run around generating Soul Charge and then, once they've killed all the other Siblings and completely filled up on Soul Charge, kill them and use the Influx to power the Warren. The current trouble in the Underside, as well as Cain's story about Oric's Hammer, confirms Soul Charge is used to power the dungeon levels. The Astral Influx is especially good at holding/gaining[<-Can't remember which] Soul Charge, so that's why the Target has to generate the Soul Charge.

Riltia cannot be a non-Target Sibling because they joined our party too easily:

Remember that no one except possibly Oric knows anything about the gray Sibling whatsoever. Riltia probably doesn't even know that much about herself.

Riltia must be the Target because Oric wants us to kill her:

This leads back to the above point: Oric doesn't want the Target dead, he wants them to generate tons of Soul Charge and then, at the end of the cycle, kill them himself. If the Siblings band together with the Target, this means less Soul Charge and he dislikes that. Plus he's paranoid about the Siblings rebelling against him. So he does stuff like chain up Proxxy and try to make us kill Riltia to ensure that doesn't happen. The reason Oric wouldn't kill her himself is because her ?? rubric would/might have reflected his Awesome attacks back at him, like she did to Ecco's mech.

Moreover, only the true owner of a Soul Star can Second Shift it, and Ciro Second Shifted the Astral Influx. The Target is the true owner of the Astral Influx. Ergo, Ciro is the Target.

[Chris the OK]

RoaryStar's technique doesn't go anywhere, I'll post why in a sec. Jolly good effort all the same, though!

I was browsing a list of English two-letter words to help with the code, and got a little distracted reading through them.

And then I saw it!

Spoiler: What lies within could change Warrens theorycrafting forever! (click to show/hide)

OK, enough of that, lest I tempt the Quality Dial. Time to go off and solve this code!

[Elephant Parade]

???? and !!!! both know about Riltia, presumably. Oric may or may not be one of the two; one of the image names implies the former.

Edit: The ??? smiley is pretty much the worst thing ever.

[RoaryStar]

RoaryStar's code doesn't go anywhere, I'll post why in a sec. Jolly good effort all the same, though!

Yeah, I was testing it, and I realized I put down an 'm' as a positive...

Well, now I'm out of ideas.

[hops]

Alaric doesn't seem very hairy to me.
We could get Al to take off his shirt later I suppose. ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)

[TalonisWolf]

  Anyone notice the convieniently coloured Orange Letters? I have a feeling they're relevant...

 I'll highlight the symbol thingys in Lime Green, but they weren't that way originally.

+>There are four walls with no doors. +>Oric must have purposed this room for ->trapping Siblings without slaying them.   You wouldn't have thought even he could have such ->control over the level randomization, but maybe he does.  >Huh? Oh. The Siblings whose names you know are Ecco, Cain, and Floe.

->You would rather not waste SP here, +>but if you ask once more time, and nicely, >you'll go along with this plan.

+>You do not know why Oric put you in here. ->Even if you knew, you would not be wise   to say something like that where you might +>be heard. A punishment such as this would be only ->for a person who was still useful alive but had >learned something dangerous, but you wouldn't know anything about that.

Ideas? Comments? Concerns?

[Dermonster]

No. Nobody here ever noticed the colored letters during an explicit puzzle mission.

[Chris the OK]

Rather than looking at merely the text, observing subtle cues in the way FFS posts may steer us onto the course for a swift solution to this puzzle.

For example, if we're going the character-counting route, the fact that FFS has chosen a monospaced font would lead me to consider approaches that count all characters including spaces ahead of any based on word characters or word and punctuation characters only.

Also, anything in Proxxy's speech boxes should be taken very seriously. This is information that was too important / sensitive to be woven into the bulk of the ciphtertext. "I'll miss half the picture whether I think positively or negatively" - this has got to provoke curiosity in someone other than myself, for sure, right?

EDIT: As an example, and again if going the character-counting route, you might try counting from the beginning of the line on lines with a plus, but from the end of the line on lines with a minus, thereby discarding half the line each time (or half the picture) but a different one depending on sign. Not something I would've thought of without the speech bubble clue.

Or it could just be that we all need to notice the orange letters, I'm not sure... 

[Elephant Parade]

I interpreted "I'll miss half the picture whether I think positively or negatively" as the positive/negative symbols indicating which half of the alphabet the letter is in, but that didn't go anywhere. Maybe if it was combined with something else.

Since this puzzle is extremely complicated to begin with, I doubt it'll have random ciphers thrown in. We should be able to figure out which, if any, conventional cipers are in place by examining the text.

[Execute/Dumbo.exe]

Hold on...
->Y
+>U
This is the shortest one we have, so if we decode this (and it should be easiest) then we can figure out the rest.
Now, assuming that the code will translate into an answer of the action we put forward, it can be assumed that that Y and U would translate into NO.
Hmmm.

[Dermonster]

pay debnts: MAN one guy got so close
pay debnts: but then missed ████████████████████████████████████████

Dermonster: Is Al a tree
pay debnts: treekin
pay debnts: spirit branches
Dermonster: It's more like an abortion birch

[Chris the OK]

MAN one guy got so close

Well, there goes my sleep.

[Dermonster]

Edit: Aww

[Andres]

pay debnts: MAN one guy got so close
pay debnts: but then missed ████████████████████████████████████████

Ok, this means that we need to look at the ciphers we've already thought of and see what happens when we add -something- to them.