unforum

[Leeravitz]

I'll say it again: The Reconstructionists stole the Cube? - Too Obvious!

They weren't even being touted as suspects much before the Holyoke business came up...and I know we're jumping at whatever evidence comes our way here, but if this thing is intended to be a genuine mystery by the PM's, then this is way too straighforward as an explanation. What happened? The Reconstructionists stole the Cube because of religious principles, utilising some hypothesised tech they may or may not possess to take it, and...that's it? (well, aside from the fact they lost it...).

My personal theory is that we haven't even been fed *any* substantial clues yet which might help us to properly piece this thing together - maybe the PMs are waiting to release more info. using the cards as their smokescreen??

Maybe the Reconstructionist angle is a part of something bigger, but I can't accept that it's the whole story...

[dopefiend]

[spec]: the recons recruited jessica because they knew her estranged husband's bar was linked by the catacombs to the academy- the best way to get hold of the cube. Jessica led them to the bar where they blackmailed him into allowing them to use the bar to store hi-tech gear from the academy. Bernado discovered that it was really the cube they were after and informed Fran, who slung it into the academy's prototype eath transportation device to keep it safe, but was unable to detemine where on earth it ended up because one of the recons turned up and killed Fran and Bernado.

[Violet]

[Leeravitz]

Oh yeah, sure. I suppose my earlier message should simply have said - I'd *prefer* it not to be so obvious - a really juicy mystery should, IMHO, be leading us a torturous dance through multiple dead ends, red herrings, subsidiary criminal activities that have nothing to do with the main plot per se, personal intrigues and enmities, and multiple double - crosses in order to be worth much. I wrote a few murder mystery evenings for corporate functions at one point in my life and, honestly, that's the way to do it. But maybe that *isn't* what's at stake in this game. I have yet to work out whether the 'mystery' is designed to be as complicated to work through as some of the puzzles have been, or whether it's ancilliary to the main point of the game, which is solving puzzles. I had high hopes that the 'mystery' component of the game would get really *involved* and convoluted, as a murder mystery whodunnit/locked room story, is really just a different type of puzzle...but MC could be keeping things fairly straightforward, after all.

What I really want, then, is some solution where at least three different groups were manipulating/blackmailing one another in order to abduct the Cube for their own reasons, several people in the story are masquerading under false identities (Violet is a plant for the Recons, Sente is Hesketh Zeller having faked his own death etc.), the cube actually wasn't stolen at all, but removed *itself* at a point when it came under attack, perhaps having been preprogrammed for the eventuality and well...that kind of rubbish, in short. But this does say more about my personal wishes than what is necessarily happening in game.

[Violet]

I was kinda joking, they'd be terrible candidates for having the Cube now. For one, because they're not on Earth, and for two, because it'd be like if the Second Coming happened a week last Tueaday - fabulous, but what do we all do now our prophecies are actually fulfilled? Nah, if the Recons really have it it'll be rubbish unless there are some dark and disturbing secrets we have yet to uncover about them.

[toongoon]

[Leeravitz]

Absolutely. But three things strike me:

1. 'Hard information' relating to the Cube theft seems remarkably thin on the ground at the moment. Granted, there would be little point OOG in feeding us the requisite details collectively (where would the puzzle be in that??), and, equally, granted that the Sentinel is our principal source of info. and the writers are never specifically searching for stories on the Cube theft, but, rather, reporting on stories of local interest anyway - nevertheless, I was surprised when I went back through the Archives how little we seem to possess in the manner of potential leads.

We have lots of potential speculation about the Recons, the Djinn virus, the Holyoke murder etc. If we look at this stuff closely, there is nothing explicit that *necessarily* links to the Cube theft in any way. For example, one might get excited momentarily by the fact that Holyoke was peddling stolen Academy goods, and seems to have jury - rigged items to block security transmissions. Surely then, he was somehow involved in the theft? Possibly in some regard, but not self - evidently. If we look at what we're told about the original theft, we know that the thieves were alleged to have disabled three separate security systems. Might they have been using equipment borrowed from Holyoke? Maybe. But if we look at the details carefully, the implication appears to be that Holyoke was fencing goods *already* stolen from the Academy, and jury - rigging these for use in underworld activities. So, if the Cube theft ever connected with him, then it's more likely that someone was trying to offload the Cube on him, find a storage place for it whilst matters cooled down or something. A more interesting, and immediate, question might be: how does so much Academy ware end up on the Old Town blackmarket in the first place? Is their security as good as they make it out to be? And who's stealing the stuff - the students??!

Similarly, we've gotten especially interested in the Recons. because Holyoke's wife went off to join them - but there may be no sinister motive here, merely domestic strife. The Recons. might be hiding many things about their organisation (I'm sure they are, frankly) but does this somehow equate to them being behind the Cube theft?? Seems odd to me. Besides this, we know that the 'Recon Eight' were arrested by the City Police on precisely the charge of having been involved in the theft - so why were they released if the evidence that they'd done it was so accessible to those on the ground??

The Djinn virus sounds very interesting, too, when we realise that it ran amok through the Academy systems sometime prior to the theft. But it doesn't sound like it was lying dormant in the system waiting to be triggered on the night of the theft - rather, that the thieves manually overrode three security systems on the night. Maybe Djinn was doing some earlier reconnaissance work on behalf of a criminal network, but I thought it affected key security. So, that introduces questions about what we know about how Perplexian security systems actually work...etc.

2. Building up a list of potential suspects would be a great start to cracking the mystery, but I'm wondering whether we have very many 'suspects' against whom we can hold any practical evidence at all, at this stage. As far as I can see, we can suggest feasibly:

a) that Sente may have been manipulating something on his own behalf - he's an expert cryptographer and Master of the Academy and would know how to override his own security systems. Perhaps he lost the Cube unwittingly, and is desperate to get hold of it again. Violet [or was it Scarlett?] (mysteriously) when asked who she thought had stolen the Cube replied with her father's name. Kiteway's 'official Academy residence' is situated above one part of the catacombs. and so on...

b) that the Reconstructionists are behind things. They venerate the Cube, so would have an adequate motive for seeing it 'liberated' out of the hands of the unbelievers. They *may* have had contacts via Holyoke's wife with a security cracking operation run by her husband.

c) that the Cube has 'unusual' properties, and may have been tampered with accidentally, or during the course of an experiment, transported of its own accord, and the idea it was 'stolen' is a smokescreen to save face. We have indications that Hesketh Zeller met a particularly sticky end when he tried to manipulate it.

And, beyond that, I don't see we have much, at this moment.

3. We also have a tendency to be at the mercy of the information we've been fed - it wasn't so long ago that Sente was the major suspect in the frame, partially because he was the only Perplexian we knew very much about. Recently, the spotlight has turned on the Reconstructionists, because there have been a few new revelations about them. This doesn't amount to cast iron evidence that they are central participants in my opinion. There are other stories the Sentinel has given us of equal intrigue, such as Alejo - Joya - Shockley, which ostensibly have nothing to do with the theft, as yet, and so we persist in considering these characters of less import to developments. There are associations within the City whose motives I believe we have every right to be suspicious about - the banking cartels, Cognivia, maybe even the PCAG set - up and the Academy as a whole, but they aren't being factored into our investigations because we still don't know much about them. There are highly suggestive developments, such as the manufacture of the Djinn virus, which are impossible to quantify properly because we can't link with any given individual/association. There are occassionally murky aspects to news stories about which we know nothing at all: has it not occurred to anyone else that the death of an unidentified man at the hands of a driverless vehicle could either be completely innocent or entirely deliberate, part of a much greater campaign of conspiracy??

All I'm saying in this regard is, until much more information has been supplied to us, I don't think we can be very certain about anything...

Solving the mystery appears to be still in its embryonic stages to me...

[Leeravitz]

As has been pointed out in one of the current companion threads, there is also the fact that Aiko Entrescore has gone on record as having had her artistic exhibits taken apart by the police, whilst they searched for clues to the theft. I always forget that one!

Aiko's exhibits were on display the same night that the Cube went missing, and I think it's safe to assume that means they were on display in the Academy Museum, which is where the Cube was stolen from. The basic attitude of the police appears to have been that, because Aiko's work contained technological components, these may have been utilised to aid the thieves. However, it would appear that they found *nothing*, which indicates again the likelihood that this was another false lead.

The only additional things we know about Aiko are that she is Randall Tokei's protege, and one of the Special Team that Sente has devoted to developing the Puzzle Cards, and aiding the Cube's recovery...

I guess we make of that what we will...