I've spent plenty of time pondering how the encryption runes should work. I think it's time I'll try to describe that, and while at it describe some related worldbuilding.
Encryption Runes
An encryption rune has three inputs: information, key, and mask. Its functionality is simple: If the observer holds the key in their memory or submemory, they will observe the information. Otherwise, they observe the mask. Out of these three components, key is mandatory, and while both information and mask are optional, the rune must contain at least one of these in order to make sense. While usage of either of those is relatively cheap though, combination of both is a lot more expensive, making encryption runes with all three components exceedingly rare.
Both mask and information are based on illusions created by the runes, using sight, hearing, smell and taste, touch, temperature, and northcall. You can't encrypt something that's already written down, though you could cover it up with a new encryption. If the encryption lacks a mask, someone who doesn't hold the key will perceive the rune's drawing, as well as whatever it's covering up as a white noise, or its equivalent in the senses that the information is conveyed in. If the encryption lacks an information, whoever doesn't possess the key won't perceive rune's drawing nor the effect it's supposed to present.
Key is an input written in the same format as a detection rune would be. It can be about any range or combination of physical sensations perceivable through sight, hearing, smell and taste, touch, northcall, and temperature. Time on its own doesn't work here, but it can be used to determine the durations of these sensations when combined with them. Understandably, if one wishes to make these sensations complex enough to be perceived by more than one person, they would have to cover a lot of wiggle room. But people have come up with a different way to do this too.
See, if two people look at a white piece of paper, what they'll see is slightly different. One could maybe have the Sun or other light source bounce off of it, while the other could be looking at its darker side. There's all sorts of factors that can skew our senses, which in the past required plenty of wiggle-rooms, making encryption runes so impractical they weren't used. That was until someone came up with a genius idea of using illusions as passwords. After all, illusions are easy to reproduce and convert into/from detection runes, so they make for ideal passwords. This discovery has revolutionized the encryption services ever since.
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| Finding an artwork depicting an encryption rune in action was hard. This should suffice. Made by yours truly. |
Submemory
People and machines can both memorize things. There's a strange advantage that people hold over machines when it comes to decryption. This trait came to be called by the scientific community as the "submemory", shortened version of subconscious memory. In layman terms, submemory is an inaccessible record of all experiences that the humanoid has ever experienced, including those that they do not remember. Machines do not seem to possess submemory, which means that they can decrypt only things, for which they hold a key in their memory.
The exact details of how a submemory works are unfamiliar even to the best of mindlore scientists. How the mind could increase its capacity in such a way, and keep it up all throughout an individual's life is seemingly impossible to comprehend. The best guess for an explanation is that the mind finds the most efficient way to encode memories all over the brain, although it's difficult to know how exactly it's doing this, if at all. A far easier (although more convoluted) explanation that they have formulated is that the brain is only a channel for something beyond the physical world. This "soul" of sorts could hold any number of memories, and be the actual source of the submemory. This explanation however opens a whole new can of worms and brings up more questions than it answers, so it's not generally accepted within the scientific society. For all they know, this theory could be completely false, but at the moment it is the best guess they have.
Arunia
Much like mutations happen in our world, something akin to this can happen in Runehack too. One mutation that's so wide-spread that it has its own name is called "arunia", and it's an inability to be affected by the runes. While the detection runes can detect things about them, these people are oblivious to the illusion runes, and in case someone would attempt to move them using the telekinesis runes, they would fail.
Due to the fact that an encryption rune becomes much more expensive if it were to contain both the information and a mask, and due to the fact that an encryption rune can be created on top of an already existing image, one easy way is to have someone who's not affected by the illusion runes (and thus also outputs of the encryption runes) present in a group of people to see if they spot something different. Arunic people are sought after by various governments worldwide, and accepted into jobs as law enforcers, intelligence agencies, investigators, as well as for the other jobs. However, such a life has its downsides, for it's impossible for the arunic people to ever experience the wonders of Mistweb, virtual realities, and other wonderful benefits bestowed by the illusions.
If two people are conceiving a child and at least one is not arunic, the child has only a 0.1% chance to be born arunic. If both parents are arunic, this probability increases to 99.9%. Due to this, the condition is quite rare, although not unheard of worldwide. This won't ever come up in any of my future articles, for sure. (It will.)
Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!
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