what about the hijinks of the cypher division trying to crack arashis cypher? or if it has to be specific ketsuna getting the cypher, realising it's both real and that he can't crack it
Ketsuna's staff are being strange again.
It's been going on for a week or so, all of them gathering around on their tea breaks, swapping back and forth pieces of paper and whispering.
If it weren't for the fact that almost every shinobi in the Cypher Division is a married twenty something with young children, Ketsuna would suspect that they're passing notes.
Like Academy students.
Ketsuna glowers into his own tea as he watches Suki and Takara whisper over a piece of paper. His niece has no business being close to Hoshino Takaro, considering that both of them are married and Suki is six months pregnant, but they aren't giving the impression of an affair.
More like they're working on a project.
But how, Ketsuna wonders, is it that every single member of the Cypher Division is working on a project when it isn't a project that he set?
They're at war- there's no time for distractions.
He'll give the division two more days, and if nobody fesses up, he's going to get stern.
--
On the second day of his internal deadline, he arrives at the meeting room to find his staff using the overhead projector to show a series of symbols on the wall. Junpei is gesturing with a marker at them, his hair ruffled as though he's been running his hands through it.
Ketsuna takes a sip of his coffee, looking at the symbols, and doesn't give away that he's arrived.
"What if the string is actually an on-kun transliteration?" Kenji theorises, "like, he took all the kanji, used the other reading, then put it back into kana and that's the cypher text?"
"Then where do the symbols come from? There are too many for them to correlate to a syllabary set," Junpei denies, pointing out the many little symbols on the projection, "no, he has to have somehow broken the syllables into single...parts."
"How would you even write that?" asks Suki, one hand resting on the curve of her belly. She's been angry for her entire pregnancy- as soon as the Medic Nins told her she wasn't allowed to drink caffeine- and nobody wants to draw her ire. "What other options are there?"
"Didn't Uzushio used to have a bunch of weird dialects?" offers Kenji, "I think I read something about that in one of Ketsuna-sama's scrolls...maybe it's dialect, rather than code?"
"It's both," Ketsuna says, looking at the string of symbols on the board. "This is a cypher to obscure the kana in the string, but if you count the symbols, there's roughly double the number of kana you would expect in a regular utterance."
The room is silent.
Ketsuna takes another sip of his coffee.
"Is this what you've all been flapping over? Are you trying to develop a new cypher?"
Nobody responds, and he steps into the briefing room properly, moving up to look at the cypher.
"It's difficult," he admits, "It'll take a while to break, I think. Who's been working on it- clearly not you three."
"Is this Hoshino-kun's project for his tokujo registration?" Ketsuna pushes, but there's still no answer.
"Ah, no, Ketsuna-ji- I- uh, I mean, Nara-sama," says Kenji, wilting under Ketsuna's hard eyes. Just because he's Ketsuna's nephew, that doesn't mean he's going to allow this kind of silliness in the office.
"I mean, it is technically from an exam," mutters Junpei, fiddling with the marker. Usually it's hard to tell where a Hyuuga is looking, but Junpei is watching his hands intently as he fiddles with a pen.
"Not a tokujo project," Ketsuna deduces, taking another sips of coffee, "Jounin exam?"
"No, sir."
"Not chuunin, surely," Ketsuna leans in to look at the cypher. The paper on the table, the original one (he assumes) has pen marks from every person in his division. Twelve jounin, six tokujo, even their lone chuunin has taken a run at this cypher and they have had no luck.
"No, sir," says Kenji, who sounds like he's expecting Ketsuna to beat him to death with his coffee mug.
"Well, that's a relief. It would be embarrassing to think that the entire combined work of Konoha's Cypher Division couldn't break a chuunin's code."
Ketsuna takes a sip of his coffee, and looks at the string again. It's not a long utterance, whatever it is. If each section is a single word, it's only six words, so it's a small sample to work from.
"It's from the genin exams," says Suki, just at the right time to make Ketsuna spit his coffee.
"The genin exam?!"
"Mm," Suki agrees, smiling angelically. "So, pre-genin, technically. It's some kid- Dokuso Arashi, not even a Nara. Shikayu-sama said he couldn't solve it, so he passed it on to Kenji."
"A pre-genin?" Ketsuna hisses, and watches Junpei and Kenj wilt before him in real time.
Suki doesn't seem upset at all.
"Where is he?"
"Somewhere on the front, I guess," she says with a shrug.
"No," Ketsuna shakes his head, "Unacceptable. Get him in front of my desk by tomorrow, or you can all kiss your jobs goodbye."
