Contest CC · The Two-Hundredth Sitting
The Letters Close
Sealed against the night of 13 August 2026
❧ ❦ ❧
Four letters were written before the night — each player's Letter of Nemesis and his Secret Scout Report — and each was closed with a seal that genuinely is one: the wax bears the SHA-256 of the very text folded inside. The hashes were exchanged and set down here while the letters stayed shut. When a seal is cracked, this page re-derives the hash from the revealed text, in your own browser, and pronounces the seal true or false. Nothing is taken on faith; the arithmetic is the notary.
i.
Each player wrote his text in canonical form — the Nemesis list
alphabetized, lowercase, comma-separated; the Scout Report one prediction
per line, stake prefixed — and ended it with a salt word of his
own choosing.
ii.
Each computed his own SHA-256 of that exact string
(
echo -n "…" | shasum -a 256) and sent the other player the
hash — never the text. The hashes are the seals below.iii.
The Nemesis letters open before Round I; the Scout Reports open
together, after Round III. Nothing opens early — not even to the
chronicler.
Round II · The Nemesis Draft
The Letters of Nemesis
Five picks each — the cards the other man least wants to face. Unsealed before Round I.
The Overlay · Stakes of 2, 3, 5 and 7
The Secret Scout Reports
Four predictions each about the other player. Unsealed together, after Round III.