Temple_of_the_Square

Now you’re in trouble again! You just wanted to steal the mighty trophy from some ancient temple with your friend Cindiana Dones, but you seem to have lost your way. There are puzzling sentences written on the walls: “Don’t trust the ancients, they can only think and not speak” - “Drink more tea” - “Hail the Platypwny” - “The best passphare is pure randomness” - “The lord will save you” - “Cyber cyber” - “Speak WTWSACLCRYCRQESUVUMETN if you want to succeed”. You find the last one especially confusing. After all, who would want to speak WTWSACLCRYCRQESUVUMETN, that does not sound like anything you know.

After some time you reach a large, circular room. It has holes in the walls and several corridors leading to different directions. In the middle is a square inscribed in the floor. As soon as you enter, all the corridors collapse, and you are trapped! E A C G U F M O Z Y K D P W S L Q R V N B H T X I

Cindiana Dones immediately recognizes it and begins to take out his endless scroll of Wikipedia pages. Because it is only a scroll, he can only scroll in one direction. You immediately start thinking about how he could optimize his search for the right Wikipedia page.

But there is no time to think about that right now! Because a trapdoor just opened under Cindiana Dones, and he falls into a bottomless pit. He only has time to throw the endless scroll of Wikipedia pages to you. “You must find the cipher” - he calls - “it starts with a P”.

You feel a bit lost, all alone in the room. What should you do? Should you try to optimize Cindis linear search in the endless scroll of Wikipedia? Maybe some hash table approach could help? And what was that word you were supposed to speak? You sit down and decide that you can’t really do much. Hopefully the cipher is not too complicated, and you can solve it just in your head.

Note from the author: To build the flag remove any X from the secret, as they are padding. Then use the usual format PP{...} where the dots are replaced by the secret words. All words are separated by _ and written in lowercase. The PP{} are the only characters in uppercase.