Well, 'departed' could maybe be 'deployed' -- that didn't come up in any of the possibilities, but it sort of looked like it could have. The others, I'm very sure of -- they're all part of sequences that decode multiple words using the same alphabet.
Decode method:
Similar decryption technique as puzzle #4:
Take each segment of the circle pattern
lkj--------------------------------------------
---BCD-----------------------------------------
------LKJ--------------------------------------
---------IHGFE---------------------------------
--------------ihgfe----------------------------
-------------------dcb-------------------------
--------------------- aXWVUTSRQPONM------------
-----------------------------------Axwvutrqponm
Put them together to make a key
lkjBCDLKJIHGFEihgfedcbaXWVUTSRQPONMAxwvutrqponm
Put that under an a-z alphabet
nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm
lkjBCDLKJIHGFEihgfedcbaXWVUTSRQPONMAxwvutrqponm
Look up each letter, while rotating the top row
hSSJOUHcXm
conspiracy
The actual alphabets I used are:
XWVUTSRQPONJIHGFEDCBAonmlkji-gf-d-ba--------h--e--c-
which gives "nuclear" (with an initial offset of +41), "mistakenly departed quintuplej" (+24), and "conspirbcy started" (+8). I then played around with words that looked 'sorta' right, and rearranged the alphabet to:
XWVUTSRQPONJIHGFE----------------DCBAonmlkjihgfedbca
which gives "quinttplet arrived" (+34), and the very-mangled "gslheagi" (+13) or "sextqmsu" (+25) for the second word, which could maybe be either 'warheads' or 'sextuple'. Didn't search for the pattern further, since those possibilities both match the thread I found.
There's probably an elegant, simple way that the shifting and rotation all makes sense. Heh, why is that always found after the fact?
