Monday Summary: What Happened May 18- May 24

From ARG Guide/Trail Wiki

Enter Alecia: Bombs and Spies

The last update ended with Marcus cheating death when his car is bombed. Marcus is unharmed even though he was thrown 20 feet from the blast.

And more information about Alecia surfaces, though we do not solve the code on her site, we do get confirmation that it is a "hit list" of people who she wants killed. Also, spies are uncovered. Last week, Alecia was undercover recruiting players to act as spies for her. Her efforts become visible this week. The extent of her network is not clear, but as a precaution a new site is established. People were taking information which was supposed to be out-of-game at unfiction and giving it to characters. To prevent that, this is a board that only Ideltech employees can access at www.immersionunlimited.com created by John Baxter, about whom we have more to say below. (Which doesn't keep the spies out until they are identified and booted.) Seeking out spies among players is a a painful process, we trust each other and sharing information is one of our key principles, nevertheless, Alecia wants her spies to glean information.

Two spies are identified. The first is turned in by a process that is not transparent to us. The other has set up a whole fictional identity as The Phoenix. After being identified by Thad, he first denies the truth before confessing. The confession can be read in this guide under the not too clever title of [Letter_of_ confession]. A request that OE have space for posting on the IU board is included, and, for ease of use, granted.

More information comes from Thad, who confirms the information that Elias had seperately given to Myssfitz. The bomb can be traced to Washington, presumably to Ms. Church. Thad and Melody are on a date when they run into Jude. Jude recognizes Thad from somewhere.

A small role is played by John Baxter, computer maven and hacker extraordinaire, or whatever the au currant phrase is. He chats a bit with people, sets up the Immersion Unlimited board for security reasons and then vanishes. Was he giving us clues to the hit list puzzle or to access Alecia's mail server? We can only guess. John is brought into the story by Stephen Lake, who slaps a TRO --temporary restraining order-- on Alecia based on information that we aren't privy to. Steve Lake talks to us a couple times about finding the Phoenix but also seems to fade away. (John is familiar to Acheron fans--but his use does not mean the games are related. For those not familiar, John was a bit nuts but brilliant and was brutally murdered by Jake--until Caretaker went back in time, took care of Jake and made everything good again.Well, except John ends up being a boring prig in the final iteration of the story which proves that time travel is just too uncertain.)

Who knows what next week will bring? We are beginning to understand the obvious, that we are being pushed into teams to play this game, that using immersion unlimited allows the players to interact with the characters and should help solve the information flow problem. How this will change when the game begins remains to be seen.

A concern about the guide arises, it may be impossible to give a complete picture of what is happening as information on IU is not accessible to some of us. Other than information shared by a team, the guide has no seperate access. Accordingly, the guide can be current only as to information received. Players wishing to play for OE will need to look to other sources for the current status of that team, or edit this guide as they see fit. Players wishing to play for ideltech also need to check for current happenings that may be omitted here. As for the Restorers, a recruiting effort is underway.