ARG: (Mnemosyne and) The Widow's Son-New

The man behind the curtain

addlepated@forums.unfiction.com — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 21:49:08 +0000

While I was checking my livejournal today, I noticed that I'd been friended by a new person, puppetsmaster. I went to look at his journal, and realized that it's the creator of this game.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/puppetsmaster

Apparently, he's hoping that working out in the open will draw a little more interest to the game. Well, I'm interested. *waves to Mr. Puppetsmaster*

Update: LiveJournal May 25

addlepated@forums.unfiction.com — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 21:36:23 +0000

If anyone cares any more, Ewan posted a new entry in his livejournal:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/hugh_inn/

SOLVED: Munin's Note Puzzle, and beyond

obeq@forums.unfiction.com — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 21:04:28 +0000

The coiled message in Munin's note at http://www.geocities.com/hugh_inn/ is as follows:

"Find YHS in the Land of the Mumu. Be wary of Dr. Morice. The Sharing Patrol fan could tell you more. Munin"
The message starts at the Alpha, ends at the Omega, and the the three "mu"s are indeed part of the message.

See the other thread at
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1304&sid=01f81679c89cca9cbad397356fa2b285
if you're interested in the process of how I got here. Major props to Ewan at LiveJournal for helping us get this far! :-)

How do I know that's it? I've found MuMu Land and within some evidence of Munin's presence! It turns out that MuMu land is a "talker", a Telnet site that you can find linked at various folks' websites, including this one:
http://mordeth.pankurokku.com/links/

"Telnet" is a primitive terminal (communication) program that's part of Windows at least. If you don't have it, I can't really help you. A "talker" is a apparently a primitive ASCII-based chat room accessed via Telnet.

The rest is kind of a spoiler for what you'll find there, you may want to try it yourself first.

If you can follow the link & connect to MuMuland (other links besides the pankurokku may be obsolete, or maybe it's not always up), you'll be asked your name & password, then be thrown into a retro world of computing in the 1980s. ASCII-only descriptions, and a command line interface!

Anything you type is presumably broadcast to anyone in your "room". Commands are preceded with a /, the most important command is /help, which gives you a list of other commands.

It turns out that MuMu land is more than just a simple chat room, but it's actually a small fantasy realm of several dozen areas, with room descriptions and a geography of sorts. You might run into other visitors (Muvians) while there. It's all basically a simple little text adventure game, although I think the main goal is to chat with others.

Anyway, each room has a public "scroll" message board. When you enter a new room, you're told how many public messages it has in it. Most have none (0), 'cause the world was only restarted a couple of weeks ago. If you are in a room with a message, type /read to read the message(s). And if you do this at the starting location, you immediately know you've come to the right place, as Muninn has left us a message:

"Let your subconscious lead you to the right room, little bird."

Ok, but there are dozens of rooms in this world! Which is the right one? The /map command shows you the layout of the world, and SOME (but not all) of the rooms. You move around like in a text adventure game or MUD, for example "/go crossroads". Each room tells you what other rooms in connects to. One special room is the labyrinth, which lets you quickly travel to any other room. Some rooms like the city and pyramid, have many hidden sub-rooms that you won't find on the map.

So I ran around for quite a while, looking for rooms with public messages, and found some, but none from muninn or anything else that seemed game related. Keep in mind this is a public chat room / game, it's not controlled by muninn, or the PMs, I'm almost sure. So you find messages from other players. There were even some other players around, but I didn't talk to them.

I eventually felt I'd been almost everywhere and found nothing. The most obvious place my subconscious led me was the "inn", but nothing there. The other rooms didn't ring any bells either. The I discovered there's a /ROOMS command, which not only lists every room, but also shows how many msgs are there! If I'd known this at the start, I would have saved myself a lot of running around and typing. So I checked the other rooms with msgs. 2 turned out to be "private" and I couldn't get in: Palace and Underworld. I don't know what's required to get in there, but they have messages.

One room immediately stands out though: MEMORY. It's Memory Lane, and I'm not sure that there's any way to get there normally without going through the labyrinth first. Anyway, this was the ONLY place I was able to find more evidence of Munin. What was it? The message said only:
"hahahahahahahahahaha"

Well, I wasn't laughing... If that's it, I'm rather disappointed. Perhaps there's something that I missed however. So feel free to visit the fabulous land of Mumu and see what your own explorations reveal. It should be noted that we still have no idea about the rest of Munin's message: who Dr. Morice is, and who the Sharing Patrol band fan is. Perhaps if we chat up the regulars, they'll know them, or munin. If we can find the fan, Munin promised who can tell use more... The band is now based in Denmark, so maybe ask the locals if anyone they know there is Danish..

PM?

lucky_starr@forums.unfiction.com — Sun, 30 May 2004 16:24:03 +0000

Did anyone decode the audio clue to get the PM's name for this? I tried but wasn't able to.

Where is he?

lucky_starr@forums.unfiction.com — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 02:15:30 +0000

I've been trying to figure out where Ewan is from his last map and known position. My best estimate at the moment is Grant's Pass, Oregon.

SPEC: Back to b100d

lucky_starr@forums.unfiction.com — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 02:09:30 +0000

Time to revisit the unsolved second e-card...

Mu-ninn's hints in the Land of Mu seemed to be slapping us in the face - we must be able to solve this!

There is something going on with "b100d", I know not what; you can
see for youself if you crack her second ecard. Red is not very
creative; any new code would be essentially the same as the last.

Anagrams, even, would be too much for her I'll wager. She's used to
reading from narrower parchments and in different directions though.
Take that as you will.

The binary, arranged into sets of five digits, and decimal equivalent:

11000 24
10101 21
00010 2
10000 16
01111 15
10011 19
01010 10
01110 14
10110 22
10000 16
01101 13
10001 17
10101 21
10101 21
10001 17
00101 5

Using the same code as in the first card gives us

xubposjnvpmquuqe

which is pretty useless. Shifting this back one letter gives

wtaonrimuolpttpd

which is more anagrammable (plump twit tornado?) - but munin has told us *not* to expect an anagram.

Any ideas?

What is his name?

lucky_starr@forums.unfiction.com — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 02:05:15 +0000

I have found some of the names for: http://www.fivesided.com/name_him/

Here they are with their locations:

Hermes
Psychopompos
-
-
Mercury
-
-
-
-
Anubis
Anpu
-
Thoth
Puck

META: Guide by Grimace

lucky_starr@forums.unfiction.com — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 02:02:06 +0000

Okay - a guide of sorts is online here .

Excuse the lousy formatting etc. Is anything missing?

PS Should we give this game a name?

UPDATE: thoughtscapes.com/mute

lucky_starr@forums.unfiction.com — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 11:03:07 +0000

If you go now on site, smile pop up appear repeatedly, and then kick you out to homepage.

Most important, if you see the google cache of site, you can see a link to www.thoughtscapes.com/main2.htm
http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:a81ClHUh9_AC:www.thoughtscapes.com/main2.htm+thoughtscapes&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
On this page there's a photo (attached) of a person (Ewan?)

If this photo is old for you, please don't trout me, i haven't follow this game accurately. :-)

Sort of a denouement....

lucky_starr@forums.unfiction.com — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 10:50:58 +0000

http://www.livejournal.com/users/puppetsmaster/

Tangent...

Rowanbranch@forums.unfiction.com — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 17:24:49 +0000

Hi there everyone, just looking through the wiki-trail or whatever guide you guys have here and have found numerous references to Donnie Darko.

I suggest you all take a long look at the explanations of the Tangent Universe, black holes and other interesting parts that are discussed in the IMDB-forums.

Could find something useful

DD references on a glance: Sparrow, flying through the Tangent, "leaps in time", rabbits (preferably the walking talking kind).

If I am incorrect, atleast I tried.

New email from Spock Vulture, Sept 27th

y2kbozo@forums.unfiction.com — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 19:04:45 +0000

Subject: A new test

I pains me to consort with you lot; in the past, I've found deception to be the best method. Unbelievably, I find that I need the help of your kind once more. By our shared nature I cannot speak his true names, and so you must name him for me. Only the brightest of you need apply; these have surely already puzzled out the 'where', but require a 'when'. Those who can pass my test will learn it.

UPDATE: LiveJournal for September 28th

y2kbozo@forums.unfiction.com — Mon, 29 Sep 2003 01:50:14 +0000

Sunday, September 28th, 2003
4:48 pm I called the number again, to see if the sequence had changed. In my secret little fantasies I imagine that it's actually a covert gambling hotline, masquerading as a wrong number.

I got a strange email from Muninn. I know where to meet him, but have not figured out the when.

I think I have the correct password now ("the sequence"), but am still getting blocked. Is anyone else having trouble, or have I still got it wrong? :(

UPDATE: LiveJournal for September 27th

danman_d@forums.unfiction.com — Sat, 27 Sep 2003 17:47:14 +0000

Saturday, September 27th, 2003
10:04 am In an antique store today I came across an empty soda bottle. It wasn't a brand I'd ever heard of, though apparently it was enough of a Generation X artifact to merit a $5 price tag. The label bore a haunting black and white drawing of a face that seemed to me (ironically given the two-character name of the soda) completely without hope. There was a 1-800 number on the back. I couldn't very well afford to buy the bottle at that price, but I copied down the 800 number and called it from a payphone back in the train station; the woman who answered said that the number was out of service. But it made the perfect password. I've been needing to change my password, now that I'm remembering things a little better.

I did buy an ancient postcard for a nickle; judging from the stamp it came from Greece, and there was something familiar about the Post Office mark.

Current Music: "Clocks", Coldplay

UPDATE: LiveJournal for September 23rd

Caterpillar@forums.unfiction.com — Wed, 24 Sep 2003 00:27:10 +0000

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003
5:16 pm There's so much still that I don't understand, but I think I'm starting to remember the questions...
These are not our faces; this is not what we look like (is not who we are).
I see twin snakes, mirror images of each other, coiling around Constitution Avenue.

Current Music: "You're A God"