[dashcat]

Ok another thought.

The two marks, we are speculating, are pointing west to a third point. We speculated that the third point might be where the next event will be. It probably is where the next event will be but whoever is doing the ritual is also "drawing" a tringle. Is it possible they are making a Solomonic triangle? Once the three points have been made maybe they will conjure something into the center circle. So maybe we should be looking for the location in the center circle?

What kind of confuses me is that in a Solomonic Triangle the edges are inscribed with words of power. How are W. Wallace and Enlil and Ahasaurus words of power?

[mortality]

I'll catch up with you all later. I'm not quite as lost as Borges' character about where the real and the fantastic disappear, yet. Time to go associate with non-work reality.

[Typoxic]

I was just trying to figure out what connections the rest of the messages might have with punishments, and what sprang forcefully to mind was that Ring poem. Everyone who took a ring, especially the humans, sort of sealed their own fates, as it were. They got greedy. Maybe "the ring was not a ring", but greed. We could be dealing with someone who thinks someone else is being overzealous and/or selfish or myopic (depending on how they see William Wallace, that is; maybe they're English).

MSG2 references the Tlön story twice - the other messages have a reference to their number in the form of a shape, but maybe that was the instance of "two" in that one. It's about a lot of things, but the overarching plot is that society becomes obsessed with a fake world, and because of that, the fake world begins to reshape the real one. It has a lot to do with rejecting objective reality, and the main character sits by horrified. If this connection is valid (it seems like a bit of a reach), is the sender issuing a warning about someone's reality-rejecting behavior? Sounds an awful lot like ARGers, to me.

Since the fate sealing thing keeps coming up, maybe MSG4 isn't a code after all. Maybe "the executed one" is an object - you can execute a plan, right? But if that's the case, we have to make sense of this Duke of Manchester confusion stuff.

Quote:

Typoxic, I think it's an anagram, not a cipher, given how Ethan explained it. The HTTP and COM were part of the original set of letters Ethan provided us.

That makes sense. There were just a lot of double letters in the other comments. Of course, there's no reason why they would be related; the other ones are on 0701.

[mortality]

Fair enough, Sylvia.

Typoxic, I think it's an anagram, not a cipher, given how Ethan explained it. The HTTP and COM were part of the original set of letters Ethan provided us.

Ethan wrote:

I guess Frank has some pretty cool tools, because he thinks he actually may have recovered most or all of the characters from the originating URL. He says he can't be sure he got then all, though. Anyway, here are the characters he recovered abeechwelitplymytownrot

So, if Spearmint is IG, then we're looking for those letters to anagram to a site on a free web host.

...man there's a lot of stuff to keep track of and not enough people to do it.

[Typoxic]

mortality wrote:

letters to use: http com abeewelilyywnrot

Looks Welsh. I'm not making a connection here (I don't have any faith in that anagram), I'm just saying, you know, it does.

Think it's the same cypher as the other comments? Has anyone been working on those? I would be doing more on it myself, but I'm hopeless at that kind of thing.

[Sylvia]

thanks casa for the link and the explanation. I am looking at it right now.

mort wrote:

If you could explain some of the numerology stuff in more detail

I don't know anything else about it. I just noticed that way back whenever that the two phrases had the exact same number of letters. The 23 theory never even crossed my mind until Ethan mentioned it. That's when I started to look a little closer at it. I haven't even done the research yet, I've been so busy.

[casablanca]

The Endless

[mortality]

Sylvia, no offense taken. If I write something that's confusing, then I'm more than happy to explain.

The Endless: I looked it up after Casa brought it up again. It's a Neil Gaiman graphic novel about Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, who is freed after being imprisoned for 70 years by a ritual. Shares a lot of the aspects of myth and fantasy used by some of the other authors our PMs have referenced.

Who's performing the rituals: I thought it had to be the author of our document or someone else as well. But part of the story our PMs are weaving for us involves the WF Board of Directors thinking Open Cases is a bad idea because it might cause people to copy cat the subjects of the cases.

This theme is carried through by Kennedy thinking OC:0701 should be turned over to the police because of a possible threat to WF.

Part of our job as players is to prove to Ethan's superiors that open, collaborative research projects can be productive.

Since the Directors think OC might have inspired the St. Petersburg events, it seemed like a good idea to provide a logical explanation for why that was unlikely. It's a bit arrogant to assume we can change their minds, but they don't seem the sort to just accept assumptions without reason. That's why I sent that message.

If you could explain some of the numerology stuff in more detail, I think that would be appreciated as well. It's a really broad topic, and hard to know where to dive in without some direction. One note on it, Ethan seems to have indicated that the solve to msg2 uses the word "commands" not "was," which alters the letter count.

ETA: Earlier Ethan had also dismissed the idea that someone at the Hawthorne Group had something to do with the cipher. In the response above, it sounds like he's changed his mind, even if Shannon hasn't.

[Sylvia]

mort wrote:

they would have had to both crack the cipher and get/make the metal object two days before you posted the cleartext.

Mort, every time you post something I get so confused. Maybe my post do the same to you. Every time I read something you write, I'm like, "What, what is he talking about?" I end up taking 10 steps backward and forget where I'm suppose to be currently. I'm not being rude, just explaining how confusing your ideas are to me. On this one for example, I had always assumed that who ever wrote the code in the first place was also the one performing the rituals and therefore they already knew what the code said. We were the ones who had to decipher it. Our next step, the best I can understand, is to find out Who and maybe Why, and I believe OC 0701 will help us with that.

I'm just so confused, please don't anyone take any of this as offensive.

Because, there seems to be a few of you who take it for granted that the rest of us should know what the hell you are talking about. It would help if you gave some links to explain your sources better. For example "The Endless from Sandman." Maybe everyone else is familiar with it but I'm not. So please explain.

[mortality]

Not that off the wall. Anything alchemical is as plausible as the rest of what we're tossing around. If The Endless references are pointing to summoning something trapped by a ritual, then maybe the Triangle of Art is important since it's used to contain summoned entities.

Oh, Ethan also said he doubts that Spearmint has anything to add, but if we want to try tracking Spearmint down, we should probably check free webhosts...

letters to use: http com abeewelilyywnrot

[dashcat]

This is just an off the wall observation. Ethan wrote:

Quote:

The thing is, though, that I'm pretty sure that on 1/9/08 there's just going to be another oddly shaped check mark outlined on some street in St. Pete.

Yesterday when I was reading about John Dee I saw a page that showed an illustration of some of the symbols Dee used. It was a square root sign which is an oddly shaped check mark.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22062/22062-h/22062-h.htm

And this is a site that has some familiar looking triangles on it. Its called Triangle of Art (Solomonic triangle). hmmmmm

http://altreligion.about.com/library/glossary/symbols/bldefstriangleart.htm[/b]

[mortality]

Casa, where could Ethan be leading us with all these references to The Endless?

Stray Thought from Mort wrote:

Ethan, Sandra's post was on 12/12. The event she saw occurred on 12/8. You posted uC's cleartext for the cipher 12/10. That timeline just doesn't seem to make it possible for someone to have performed--or pretended to perform--the ritual based on Open Cases. The current feeling remains that Sandra saw the second ritual. Given that we think each ritual needs to be performed on nights separated by a lunar month, that means whoever is doing this began about a month before you posted the cipher. If Sandra's was the first ritual--unlikely because of the event at 1200 Cherry--then at the very least, given the date of Sandra's ritual, they would have had to both crack the cipher and get/make the metal object two days before you posted the cleartext. If you want to narrow the possibility of these rituals being a result of the ritual being posted to OC, then maybe you could have Frank check to see if anyone from a FL or St. Pete IP address dropped by the site between 12/6 and 12/8. Still, it's kind of weird that a document found in England would lead to a ritual in Florida. You'd think Stonehenge would make for a better place of power. Probably a shorter drive, too. -Mort

Reply from Ethan wrote:

Dear Mort, That's not a stray thought at all. I've had that talk with Christopher several times because I had the same thought. Personally, I think that whoever is running around in St. Pete is not working from the Scarpelli document or the OC info. I think they are working from a different copy altogether. I don't have any proof of this, but I agree with you - why leave England with this and go - to of all places - St. Pete, Florida. Unless Cherry Street is 'powerful' in a way that no one realizes. Or unless this all has to do with old people. If they are related then there has to be a connection to Hawthorne, and Shannon absolutely does not buy that. So who knows. But I think it is possible that someone out there has an entirely different copy of the document. Ethan

ETA: So maybe we're heading back towards the whole Hawthorne Group conspiracy pointed out a couple weeks ago.

[casablanca]

The mind of Ethan

[mortality]

I dunno. Really seems like we need the PMs/Ethan to drop another hint before we start on Arthur. And probably the Grail. Mind you, I've been wrong way more often than right. Other than the John Dee reference, Rosicrucianism doesn't seem like any better of a bet.

I do like the ring=roundtable, tho. And Arthur might fit with the "symbolic king" that Ethan mentioned.

I'm not sure what the best source for historical Arthur is, but the most well-known fictional version is probably Mallory's Le Mort D'Arthur. He gets credited for the first written version of the tale, but he essentially plagiarized several strands of medieval oral history/legend/storytelling and wrapped it all in a King Arthur burrito.

Lots of other conspiracies/legends get tied to Arthur as well, mostly through the Grail story. There's the whole thing about Merovingian kings. The book Holy Blood, Holy Grail (basis for Da Vinci Code), says they were descended from Jesus. Other people say they were trying to bring the antiChrist. And maybe King Arthur was one.

It's really messy.

ETA: It does seem like John Dee might be tied to the Arthur legends, too. Dee was the one who coined the phrase British Empire and he labelled Arthur as the father of British Imperial Christianity.

So maybe we're on the right track.

[casablanca]

SPEC: Arthur?