The Post-It

Possible Blue Prince game spoilers (including images) up ahead. I'm not done playing it – only in Day 6 as I write this post – so I don't know how much of a spoiler it is to write about this little fun language-based scavenger hunt.

Reader-player beware!

I walked into my 36th room and there were colored Post-Its with mathy-looking diagrams everywhere. This was my first time in the laboratory room, and I was going to take my time anyway, but phew, I might need to just take a plethora of screenshots instead of copying all this down in my physical notes, just in case any details I didn't want to miss come up later.

I started going around the room counter-clockwise, mainly because I spied a letter on the counter. Look at that, take some screenshots of the wall posters, move around, look at something else on another table, screenshot that.

Oh hey, it's the periodic table! They put lutetium (Lu - 71) and lawrencium (Lr - 103) in with the f-block, though, that's not quite right. It's also missing everything right of 111 roentgenium. Maybe it's accurate to the setting, which is '90s ?? English-speaking world as far as I can tell.

I check on Periodic Table (Wikipedia) – yeah, Lu & Lr don't go there in the modern table. I know lutetium has a stable f-orbital, so it doesn't react like the f-block does. I click though some Wikipedia rabbit-hole links to check myself on this. Lutetium was discovered in 1907, and lawrencium was discovered anywhere from the 1950s to 1996, depending on who you want to believe synthesized it first between the United States and the Soviet Union. In lutetium's sidebar is listed Block: d-block – I wonder if that describes why it's there in that block. Scrolling down to the f-block, I find:

The two 14-member rows of the f-block elements are sometimes confused with the lanthanides and the actinides, which are names for sets of elements based on chemical properties more so than electron configurations. Those sets have 15 elements rather than 14, extending into the first members of the d-block in their periods, lutetium and lawrencium respectively.

The lab's periodic table is fine, actually. Good to know! I'll screenshot the game's table just in case they use that instead of the modern-day one. It's been a while since chemistry class for me. I'm surprised I still remembered even some of the element names by symbol (like lawrencium, but not lutetium).

I continue around the room. Oh wow, there's an entire wall here. Let me screenshot all of that, and then go one bit at a time taking close-ups. One, two, three – oh, hey, look, it's an empty periodic table with some numbers in some elements with a Post-It pointing to... I will look at that in a second.

I pull up the screenshot of the game's periodic table, and copy down the coded table with relevant symbols. I look over where the pointer leads to, and it's a machine, but I want to go back and look at other parts of the wall before I get lost in whatever that puzzle is.

I return to my middle section, and see one of the drawings I've been tracking. PLANET / PLANE. I've seen that pairing before. Still don't know why or what it's for. I have just newly been taking screenshots of those, so I add PLANE to my collection (I already have PLANET).

I return to the beginning of this wall, and inspect the smaller and less-legible Post-Its some more. One looks like handwriting, and I can't quite make out which cursive name it might be. One has – oh, hold on, that looks like Cyrillic letters.

I pull up DeepL in a tab, and Russian alphabet on Wikipedia in another. I type the letters I think I can type with my US-QWERTY keyboard and copy-paste the 'backwards R'.

"Bpemя".

It returns the anglicized Bpemya or Bpemia in the DeepL box.

Hmm, guess it's a name? Lawrencium was discovered jointly by the US and the USSR, so it's not too strange to imagine there might be a Russian native in this fictional laboratory.

I turn to move on, and walk that way, but then I stop. I think again. No, it can't be a name. I walk back.

Look: this "Bpemя" is on a pink Post-It by itself, but then it's also in two graphs with an arrow. That has to be a physics concept.

There's a trick I do sometimes when I can't find a German word in one of my German-English dictionaries, especially if it's a compound word and I'm not sure where to split it. I search for the word in German Wikipedia. If I have a hint of what it might mean, I put that meaning into English Wikipedia, and if there's a page specifically for it, I swap the language to Deutsch if available to find their page for it. Sometimes I throw the foreign word into English Wikipedia anyway, just in case I get a translated-from-the-[language]-Wikipedia stub.

I put "Bpemя" into English Wikipedia, and it comes up 1 result. It looks like a reference, though?, on a page for Yerkin Gabbasov. Shrug, "i'unno", let's see who that is. Oh, neat. A paralympic rifle shooter from Kazakhstan. I read the full reference. "BPEMЯ" looks like a reference source. I click the reference link.

It leads to a news article.

My browser asks me if I want to translate the tab from Russian to English, and I click yes (please!) because I don't know even the sounds of the different letters let alone any actual Russian words. (Fun fact: Kazakh can use a script like Arabic or it can use the Cyrillic alphabet. Out of curiosity, I scroll to the K's before translating. Dang, only Korean in the browser translation tool.)

I don't think it will translate the logo, though. (It doesn't.) Hilariously, the top article blurb reads "Translation tax? Reform can turn conventional banking operations into an expensive pleasure".

As I'm hovering over the logo to contemplate looking for more information, I realize two things.

One, the B in the logo is actually slightly bigger than the other letters. Despite what looks like all-caps to my English-speaking eyes, the B is capitalized and the rest are normally lowercase. Ah, that's why the Russian alphabet Wikipedia page had them seemingly "all in caps" instead of uppercase/lowercase in all the digital renderings. That is the lowercase. My English Wikipedia search only caught my initial rendering because the source was listed in all QWERTY caps, "BPEMЯ".

Two, as I hover over the logo, I catch the URL in my lower left window. Of course, the URL has been in the big, center, top URL box the entire time, but now I'm reading the domain more than the article slug.

https://time.kz . Time. Yes, of course!

Really, I should've just put "time" back into English Wikipedia and flipped the language to Russian, but I went the longer way. I put "period" into English Wikipedia, and then after finding the "Period (physics), the duration of time of one cycle in a repeating event" option, I get shifted to a page on "frequency", which is where I flip the page into Russian. Hopefully, they use bolded key concept words, too. (Sort of? Not for the "period" later in the page.)

Frequency is Частота, and judging by how one row of the table is the inverse of the other, I can gather that period is Период. And then, just below the table, "Частота, как и время..." It's hyperlinked already, so I go to find Время, or Time in English.

Does it help me solve the puzzle awaiting me in the corner? Probably not.

Will this show up later anywhere else? I don't know.