Hey! This is mostly a personal headcanon, but there are a few things that lend itself to the idea!

The most interesting thing is this dialogue from Juror No. 5 (Telegraphist Woman) that mentions Ashley's received the top prize at the Cipher-Cracking Convention 5 years in a row.

I feel that in order to be that good, that consistently he's got to know way more than just single-alphabet substitution ciphers, right? Even with those, to be quick at it, a person would have to be familiar with probability and statistics for frequency analysis (common letters or sets of letters(words) that are most likely substituted based on how often they appear in the english language).

Once you get to ciphers using multiple alphabets, which require solving functions or matrices to decode, you get into the field of (Linear) Algebra which is kinda crazy! I think this is really fascinating to think about, considering Ashley lived an impoverished childhood. I am not sure if this level of math would even be taught in telegraphy schools, so I really have no idea how he picked it up.

As a telegraphist, he would have basic knowledge of circuits and electrical theory (more algebra). There's a cute nod towards this in his design since his belt buckle is the "Omega" symbol, which is the assigned letter for the SI unit for electrical resistance, the Ohm.

art dump (more + suggestive under cut)

In Jan-Feb 2026, I made a papercraft omnibus modeled after the one from TGAA case 1-3. Progress pics and other below.