unforum

[chippy]

[pre-ARG] akalesh-ascendant

[Varin]

I clicked on something and somehow ended up here...

http://www.akalesh-ascendant.com/puzzle.html

[jshall]

Looks very cool.

*keeps an eye on it*

They are being sorta OOG tho....

[Giskard]

It's... weird. The links are behaving rather randomly or not at all, it looks polished but in a "standard" way somehow and indeed they are being very OOG in an unusual way... "we have very experienced PM's" so who are Dark Elements then??

I feel so sad ARGing is more and more about this where it's all about anouncements, polished websites, trailers etc... where's the good old iron-curtained-well-hidden-subtly-discovered-rabbithole-ARG?! I miss you I miss all the mysteriousness

[RobMagus]

The meta site goes through its pages in order from start to finish, no matter what you click on. When it's done, the transitional animation blocks close and don't open again. You have to refresh to look at the site again.

Nobody knows whether the submission form works.

On the "ARGs" page, under the "on the web" section heading, there is a picture with a circle-thing. On mousover it makes a different sound than any of the other pictures. Significant?

On the "About" page, under the "answers" heading, if you click on the hidden link, you are taken to puzzle.html.

Dude, that's totally DNA. The picture is entitled "andsoitbegins.jpg". The chemical structure shown on the right side does not include nucleotides, and it does not match the length of the "scanned" part on the space-filling model on the left side.

Get to it, people; I don't have all day!

[Phaedra]

Hmm. "Akalesh"?

Derived from Akhilesh, maybe? I'm not familiar with the name "Akalesh."

[KeeperofBees]

Upon Googling the company, "Dark Element", I came across what appears to be its yet blank blog.

http://www.darkelement.net/

It may be nothing, but it may also be something to check on.

[Kender]

[spaceboy]

I'm thinking that there could be a relation between this game and [URL=http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11841]this[/URL] forum thread. There seem to be some pretty convenient links: the apparent commercial nature of this ARG, the kind of Egyptian theme.... I could be wrong, but my magic 8 Ball tells me that "All signs point to yes."

[InSoM]

[chippy]

andsoitbegins is an anagram of "ITS DNA SO BEGIN" << they are mocking us

[L.Boomer]

I noticed some faint writing on the parchments in the background of the flash, I was able to isolate it and recognized it as a Mobil Oil sign from around the 1940's (images attached, not sure if it has any bearing on the game, but thought I would post anyways just in case. ( I knew being a gearhead would someday come in handy...lol) Gargoyle could turn out to be a keyword for something later, who knows?

[rowan]

We finally solved the first puzzle:

[rowan]

We haven't solved these yet, but as ppl are going to bed in chat, I'd thought I'd post what they had gotten so far.

6[b] seems to be some sort of word search

[Ehsan]

I would just like to confirm that I did try deoxyribose.html (not htm) as confirmed by my firefox cache which shows a very nice 404 page. I took that same 404 cached page and did a hard refresh, and whadayaknowitworksnow!

So we find a site before we're supposed to and the trail isn't done, no problem.

But when you DO fix it then don't pretend nothing happened. Give us a slight nudge, change the page title to "Sorry for keeping you waiting".. or just put a link to the next puzzle and call it "oops, now it's ready".

I'm hurt.