Warning: There's a trap in this one. I won't say what it is (and it doesn't break any of the established rules), but it may make things more difficult if you don't spot it. It was created by accident, and I debated changing it, but decided that it made things more interesting so I left it in.
As part of Dark Watch, Expatriette takes a bit more time with her actions, having to consider her moves more carefully as she is now responsible for not just her own life, but for those of her teammates.
"Ryan Frost died that night, too. His body lived on, but his spirit was torn apart. He would always blame himself for her death, questioning what he could have said to keep her from going, regretting fighting over something so stupid."
I got his name first, since those letter groups were obviously a name, and they fit a specific name in the Multiverse - that of my favorite character.
Patterns make it easy, especially given all the surrounding punctuation. Words like “too,” or “it’s,” or phrases like “I am” stand out quickly. Only so many possibilities fit those combinations!
I always assume e is the most common letter, that will normally give me t an h as well, from there I look for puncuation (namely anything that has a ' in it) and words starting in th, from there I can usually make out most of the block and with most of them being from SotM or the website can figure it out.
Hmmm ... I've noticed that the Xs are evently spaced. Taking them out, I tried rearranging the letters as if each block were its own anagram, with words possibly being split between blocks. A few of them seem to converge into some words, but I'm not making much headway yet. I think the following words have a good chance of being in the result: Goals, delineate, reason, beyond, saving, ruin. Also, since it seems unlikely that the plaintext phrase has exactly enough chracters to make a set of even blocks, I'm guessing that the leading TTE and trailing ETT may be some sort of filler characters.
Well I think this whole thread has melted my brain. Sod trying to solve cryptograms, lol. I suppose I could have a go, if I could be arsed, but it would take me aaages longer than you lot seem to be needing :P.
For some insight on the lingo of what they're talking about, read Simo n Singh's "The Code Book." It's a great history of code making and breaking from Queen Elizabeth's time up to the present day (as of when he wrote it).
As much as I'm a proponent of audiobooks, this is one book where the various illustrations are key to understanding some of what he's saying.