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[classical]

Each of those numbers are divisible by 17, which leaves...

[Wulf74]

Its been an interesting day so far. We went to the panel discussion involving Bricker, and it ended up being more of an attack against him than anything else. Bunk if you ask me.

Anyway, Classical and I went to lunch with him at a local little cafe. Lots of questions were asked, answers were given - confusion abounded. Brian spoke very candidly, and answered everything he could. At this point, I'm not sure how to sum everything up, so I won't right this instant.

The important thing right now - is Bricker's tattoo. It's identical to the Chinese prayer sheet we found (photo attached). He asked if we had the Yuan with us, which of course we don't - so improvisation allowed and suggested - we printed off a color copy. Now we're off to go meet him and see how the 2 mix - and what the result is. Wish us luck.

=edit=
He told us when he got the tattoo - it was supposed to mean "Strength in Family". Whether that's what it actually says is a different story...

[Wulf74]

Ok - so we gave Bricker the photocopy of the Yuan, and as soon as that specific condition was met, he opened up the hotel safe, and inside we found another package. Classical has all of the details, which will be forthcoming in the next post.
Needless to say - we got a lot of new information, but all pertaining to Lincoln this time.
Click here

[classical]

HOLY BALLS
if the lunch wasn't information overload already, then our little package totally is.

Wulf and I pretty much asked everything we could think to ask at lunch, and now I don't even know where to begin. There were a lot of small questions answered, but not a lot of anything relevant to our current quandry.

As far as Bricker's role in this thing: he is merely the writer. He would answer lots of questions about characters, their relationships to one another, their backgrounds, that stuff--things that were supposed to be in the novel he wrote. But as far as stuff that's happened in the "game", he played clueless.

As far as the tattoo goes, Bricker had a nice story behind it all: he apparently worked as a tattoo artist long ago and in order to practice getting the shading down and all that, he'd have to tattoo himself. This symbol was one of the things he did.

He says that the tattoo originally read "strength in family", the symbol for "strength" being the middle symbol and the ones around the outside being the approximate translation for "family". BUT, as the years passed, it got old and crappy-looking, so he said that he went to someone else to get it retouched. Said that the guy who was touching up the tattoo couldn't read the symbols anymore, so he 'approximated' it.

Which is odd, considering what we've come to make of it now.

So anyway. We made our copy the yuan, as per Bricker's request. He had shown us a key earlier--one that belonged to a hotel safety deposit box. So once we handed that over, Bricker opened up #6 for us and...

There's our package.

I guess I'm gonna let the photos do most of the explaining--there's highlighted words, written letters, so much information to sort through right now that I don't really know what to make of it at the moment. All I know is that it all has to do with Vietnam, Black Beauty, Thomas Lincoln, and the ever-mysterious One.
There probably is something hidden in the circled letters and stuff, but, like I said--too much right now.

Wrapped in these papers with a rubber band was a book--Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover. Little red scare propaganda pulp full of wonderful information. The book itself has little highlighted letters throughout the whole thing, plus other goodies.

As you can see from the photos, are a batch of pictures that we assume belonged to Thomas Lincoln. Also, a torn paper that was given to Vietnam soliders with instructions about avoiding mines, traps, etc. ... so it was Lincoln's book.

Just... so much stuff. I can't even describe it.

Two main things:
1) We were looking mostly at one of the photographs inside of the book--it was a Polaroid, with one of those backings on it. Wulf decided to try peeling it off and look what was written on the inside...

[Wulf74]

There was another option we discussed, but like classy mentioned - there's been a lot of info today.

The other option we have with Rage, is to send Port in alone. We keep with the other objectives we have; gaining access to the Brightman's GPS system, setting up a conference call - the only difference being, Rage won't be accompanying Port. Port will still be getting Jenny out - but we can't risk Rage going near Lincoln. And once Jenny is out, then Rage can meet with her.

[classical]

So I spent last night with all these papers sprawled out on the floor at the hostel I'm at and my non-ARGing roomates were looking at me like I'm absolutely insane--which I guess you gotta be if you're playing this, hahaha.

Anyway. I've sorted the 25 pages in the package into seven different documents. Taking notes and writing down what I think is personally important... it's starting to look a little less complicated the more I mess with things, though, haha.

Wulf and I are gonna hunt down a scanner today and make nice copies for all. We're also apparently going to be meeting up with PinkCloud and doing some sort of follow-up interview related to the panel that she was running yesterday. Dunno what it'll have to do with this game specifically, but we'll see, I guess!

Also: this was the very last page in the wad. If you pull out all the letters that have a mark through them...

[classical]

BAM
I am on a roll.

Flipping through Masters of Deceit, I started hunting all over for the little highlighted letters that I had seen earlier when we first got the book. Which is much harder than it sounds, 'cause it's highlighter yellow on old yellowed pages and... yeah...

But then I realized there were little, darkly-drawn 'x's on some of the pages... all of which had a highlighted letter on it.
Which made this substantially easier.

Made note of which page number each letter was found on, and continued through. By the time I started getting toward the end of the book, I noticed that there was no words surfacing in the letters, no two of the same letter highlighted. In fact, it was as if every letter of the alphabet had been highlighted, only once.

So matching the letters with the page number they'd been found on, LO AND BEHOLD:

[Wulf74]

Here's the scanned images of the package we received. Ended up having to upload them to Picasa due to the size of it - but here you go.

Click here

[paperbound]

Great job guys! My brain's currently trying to pound its way out of my ears at the moment, so I'll have to look over everything once my meds kick in. I just wanted to give my piece of useless information for the day - brightman.info apparently did or was supposed to exist - the domain name expired on July 1.

Whether or not it's actually part of all this, I have no idea. But I've tried various options (brightmaninstitute, brightmanoracle, brightmanproject, brightmanportal, and just about everything in between), and so far, no luck.

As for the shin-kicking, I suppose he can get away without it...this time.

[BlackandBlue]

Reanimation

[Wulf74]

Re: Reanimation

[TTHSK]

I remembered a portal.jpg I saw once.

http://www.1407oakhurst.info/

[ironnikki]

Sounds like I missed a lot. I was out all weekend moving stuff out of my old apartment, 200 miles away from home. Ugh.

As I was reading through all of the posts, I remembered something about the house at Oakhurst referred to as "The Portal." Right as I was about to post something to that effect, I read TTHSK's post. There's no way that that's unrelated. Good find!

[E.Y.E. Spy]

[Wulf74]