Interestingly, the villain bios themselves also have unique colors, in a different order from the page numbers. Biomancer is yellow, for example. Given the deliberate coloring of the page numbers, I could see that being significant in a puzzle like this—thoughts?
I don't have any cards in front of me—and the cardbacks are surprisingly hard to find good images of online to check fonts that way—but I could see letters using that coloring to map somehow. That said, the fact that the Es are all yellow, but in different fonts, seems curious—if they just act as an index to a letter from Biomancer, for example, where would the font choice come in? So maybe it is just the fonts mapping to specific decks, and someone with the cards in front of them just needs to check them. I would think the last squiggly E would be an easy one to confirm (or not) quickly, as there can't be many decks with that sort of uneven font.
See my post above for the colors of “Intervene” converted into Villains rulebook pages: 679142171. (There was a suggestion that the “r” is red, not orange, in which case the 4 changes to 5.)
To your suggestion about indexing both the page and the letter in the villain name, I think that we would use each index only once. If we had to use it twice, it would mean that this puzzle’s planning goes all the way back to character names - in your example, not only did they place La Capitan on page 7, but they had to know that the 7th letter of her name completes their clue. For one name, that’s not implausible, but for nine? I think they would use a second index.
I'm thinking it's some combination of the page numbers colors and bio colors. For instance, something like use the page# letter of the bio name with color. I tried that and didn't get anything sensical, and taking the page# word from the color bio, I got
hired ansel in with learned twain with ansel with (depending on how you count hyphenated words anyway, if you count them as separate, then its)
hired star deep with learned twain with star with
Stringing together the first letters of those words didn't get me anywhere, but then none of this uses font as a clue, which hasn't been helping yet.
No, the idea is that the font gives you the name of a deck, and the color gives you a page number that you'd use as an index to pick a letter out of the name. It's just happenstance that La Capitan's bio is on the same page as the color of her letter.
Mind you, I can't seem to find any useful matching decks for those fonts.
As for looking at deck backs, someone posted the VotM rulebook a ways back, and the names of the Villains on page 0 (where it has the difficulties listed) is the same as the font on the backs of the card. I think from there it's relatively clear that very few (possibly none) match. The second n looks a bit like La Capitan as Andy said, but the rest don't seem to match anything.
Okay, so I looked at the order that the villains appear in the rulebook, and matched up their colors with the page number colors, and got 716453289, with Sgt. Steel being purple and not matching a number.
This matches with what's below the Harbinger comic's barcode. And it's also the key to solve the Tim Cosing anagram. So I guess that was another way to come up with the number 716453289with only the rulebook for reference.
edit: I think we solved the anagram without the number key, and only ever found the number below Harbinger's barcode. This number was, in fact, available to us all along.
In case it's relevent, I sorted the letters based upon the comic as well, starting with the highest, left to right, and got "Veinrenet" which may be something that other code stuff needs to be applied to.
Hmm, that makes me wonder if Intervene was just an invitation to look at the colors of the bios and pages then, because otherwise we'd be use that phenomenon twice to solve something, which (aside from morse code) hasn't really been the case so far. Does this mean Intervene is solved?
its hard for me to follow this (and so this may have been mentioned already), but a lot of the bolded words in these have been useful. Termination had the bolded words of 'Up' and 'Bright Ideas' in the comic panels - Bright Ideas is Idealist's signature card, have those two words been investigated?
I don't think what I posted is really connected to Intervene, as we could have easily solved what I posted as the very first clue, with only the rule book to go on. We just sort of skipped the first step, and solved the Tim Cosing anagram without a key.
So the only thing left to do is finish the timeVtime puzzle out right? We were missing a few names of the sound clips. That would wrap up our loose ends.
<!--
Ah; looking for more? I like it, new foe.
For nothing comes easy, or how would we grow?
My first is in Flay, but never in normal.
My second’s in you (if we’re being informal).
My third is in most words - three times in your base.
And my last’s in the past and a place out in space.
The timeline is broken; before you go mend it
Take the fruits of your labor and simply append it.