Journal 3 Question
Hey, so for those of you who have Journal 3 and have successfully decoded the letter than Blended left in there, can you tell me what I’m doing wrong? Because I drew out a Vigenere Square last night and started copying out the encoded letter and writing the key word (PINES as the book clearly tells us to use) over it, but when I try to decode it with my Vigenere Square, all I get is more gibberish. I’m following the directions for how to decode Vigenere Ciphers that I researched before doing this and I also triple checked to make sure that I wrote out the Square correctly and I did, but I still can’t seem to get the message to decode properly. Everyone I’ve seen who has decoded it says that you only need the Vigenere key word to get the letter to decode properly, and that a second run through a different cipher is unnecessary, but when I do what everyone says I should do, I just get this:
(encoded text, first line only): WMI, HAEXRV SCL ZETTT!
(decoded text, first line only): LUV, LSTFEZ KRT MILIB!
??? Why is basically everyone else able to decode this letter correctly? Have any of them done so by hand? Because everyone whose explanations I’ve read have used a website that decodes it for them and I don’t want to do that.
And just to be clear, DO NOT POST THE SOLUTION. You will be hated unapologetically. I want to solve this by myself, not just be handed the answer. So if I’m solving this wrong or missing a step, just correct me and point me in the right direction. I’d really appreciate it.