Duplicated lines of text appear across documents from different authors. Too deliberate to be coincidence.
UnsolvedSetup: Multiple in-game documents contain phrases that are repeated verbatim or near-verbatim, sometimes within the same document, sometimes across documents by different authors. One or two instances could be literary devices, but the sheer number and the egregious nature of some (entire sentences duplicated in the Curse of Blackbridge novel) suggests intentional encoding.
Cross-author pattern: The repetitions span Mary Jones (Red Letter 5), Herbert S. Sinclair (his will), and Redford Ewling (The Curse of Blackbridge). Three different fictional voices all exhibiting the same anomaly makes coincidence unlikely.
Possible purpose: Repeated lines may mark key text to extract (as bold words do in the music sheets), or the specific differences between near-duplicate phrases may encode information. The game has established that textual anomalies are always puzzles.
The novel contains two nearly identical sentences: "If there was ever a time when that lock had been resistant to brute force, it wasn't recent" and later "If there was ever a time when the old man had been resistant to brute force, it wasn't recent." The structure is identical, only "that lock" changes to "the old man." This is the most egregious example: no author would accidentally duplicate an entire complex sentence with one substitution. 📜 Full text
Mary's Red Letter 5 (November 8) contains the phrase "holding hands and throwing stones" twice within the same letter. First as part of a sentence: "The thin wire we stood upon, above the world, holding hands and throwing stones." Then immediately repeated as its own standalone line. This mirrors the Blackbridge pattern of deliberate textual repetition. 📜 Full text
The will contains internal spelling contradictions: "lake house" (two words) then "lakehouse" (one word) within the same paragraph; "grandnephew" used three times then "grand-nephew" (hyphenated) in the final clause; and "timely manor" instead of "timely manner" (a homophone substitution referencing the house itself). In a game where every letter matters, these look deliberate rather than accidental. 📜 Full text
Spotted a repeated phrase we haven't listed? Help the community by reporting it.
Like bold words in the music sheets spell a message, repeated phrases across documents may be the "key text" to collect. Reading only the duplicated lines in document order could form a coherent instruction or clue. The pattern mirrors how the music puzzle works: identify the anomaly, extract it, read in sequence.
In the Blackbridge example, the only difference is "that lock" becoming "the old man." If each pair of duplicates has exactly one substitution, those changed words might spell something when collected. The substitutions could be the actual cipher: what changes between otherwise identical sentences.
The Music Room's Layer 2 puzzle yields "endnote revised", suggesting a document has been altered. Repeated phrases could be the revision markers: the original text and the revised version sitting side by side. Identifying which version is "original" vs "revised" across all documents may reveal the intended reading.
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