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 Forum index » Chaotic Fiction » QU13E
[Trailhead] Splinternails.com 2014
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punkbass
Boot


Joined: 23 Apr 2008
Posts: 56

 		Before I start work, running on 3 hours of sleep:

Here is the response from splinternails (qu13eSPLATqu13e.com)

Qu13entrances
Quote:

Unremember do we, the answer to your enQu13ery.

All ghosts here have a name, and their names keep secrets, and their secrets hold the key.

If you're looking for someone, before the at their lock will free...


It's like my best nightmare come true, there's still a chance to solve Qu13e Smile

Quote:

I messaged HR and to my surprise received a response immediately:


Great job, supersekretsrsly! If this guy is not RM, or associated with him, he probably thinks you are now! Smile Very interested to see where that goes.

Quote:

Is a man elusive if he wants to be found?

Interesting thought. I'm not actually sure if Random wants to be found. But [url=http://www.qu13e.com/039/]DM[url] wants to find him. I believe DM stands for Deterministic Martin (or some other word that is the opposite of random that starts with a 'D'), and it was speculated that he was a part/personality of Random Martin that wanted to be found, or knew he needed to be for some reason.

Quote:

So who am I and how do I know him?


Yeah, I have been asking myself this a lot the last couple of days. I think my answer has become "Obsessed stalker." Probably not the best answer for someone who might be Random though... Very Happy

Quote:

The thumbnails on qu13e.com seem to have changed. The top 3 are all from the same picture now....


I'm not seeing this? Is this still happening for you, no_moon?

PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 9:52 am
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		[redacted]

PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 10:14 am
Last edited by no_moon on Sat Sep 06, 2014 3:43 am; edited 1 time in total
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64
Quote:

I'm not seeing this? Is this still happening for you, no_moon?


Actually sorry... it changed again. I think the pictures move. Now I'm seeing "do not enter" written in Japanese in the middle square. But refresh the page, and I get a different set of thumbnails. I think it's random.

The 3 of the same I saw looked like they were part of a roman numeral IX, painted in brush ink.

Anyway, the riddles rhyme from the emails like him. I'm sure he wrote them, but I'm not sure who's sending them. They seem to come from different email addresses, too.

I think at this point it would be good to decide what we hope to achieve? What do you think might be at the other end of this puzzle?

By the way, I think he wants to be found, perhaps by the people he left behind. But probably not by anyone obsessive. Best think of a good reason to contact him, or keep trying to solve possibly unsolvable riddles....

PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 10:25 am
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supersekretsrsly
Boot

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 54

PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 1:43 pm
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punkbass
Boot


Joined: 23 Apr 2008
Posts: 56

 		ditto on the time thing:

Quote:

Is it possible there are separate images each consisting of 9 tiles that are jumbled and randomly displayed? In that case, it should be possible to reform each image by refreshing the page enough times to collect each set of tiles and place them in the right position.


This is exactly what they are, and they have already been put together on the old trail here

Some of the urls to the individual squares are out of date, most of them only have a 3 digit number in the url, not a alphabetical character followed by a three digit number.

Quote:

I think at this point it would be good to decide what we hope to achieve? What do you think might be at the other end of this puzzle?

By the way, I think he wants to be found, perhaps by the people he left behind. But probably not by anyone obsessive. Best think of a good reason to contact him, or keep trying to solve possibly unsolvable riddles....


Ok, I know I said it first, but now it just sounds creepy to hear it back... Smile

I'm not sure what you're getting at, though no_moon. I mean, I thought we were here to find Random Martin, and in a way, it seems almost as if he was at Qu13e all along, and it seems we've found him. Although, his last message before he disappeared has me questioning if it's really him or not.

But you're right, we may have found him, and to what end?

I guess for me, it's because I want to know what Qu13e is. Is it literally all futile randomness? Or is there a deeper meaning behind it. Who is Clock Stop The Whyse, and splinter*****? I even want to know what happened to Melpomene, she somehow seemed the most sane thing of Qu13e. At least the only riddles she told were repeated, they didn't seem to come from her.

But I guess that's why I am here, is to find out what Qu13e is. I want to ask Random that in our next correspondence, but I already have two e-mail threads going with him at the same time, so I will wait till he responds so I can condense it to just one. But now you have me questioning, no_moon. You seemed to have known him the best out of all of us. How would he react to such a question? I don't know. It's almost as if all this time he has been waiting for us to ask the right question. Almost more so that to have the right answer.

PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 2:44 pm
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supersekretsrsly
Boot

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 54

 		So as an update, HR sent me two additional messages following his last, without initiation from myself.

###

HR - Do you remember the v a m p i r e s ?
S p l i n t e r n a i l s does,
and he knows they come around in october and november.....

beware, and heed this warning.

you can't be s i l e n t forever.


HR - Does "BP feat. JH" mean anything to you?

###

After an arduous search that took longer than it ought to have I discovered that he's referring to Beautiful People featuring Jimi Hendrix, a British one-hit-wonder circa 1992 who released only one album - "If 60s were 90s".

Unfortunately I have the musical knowledge of a malfunctioning trivia bot so it doesn't mean anything in itself to me - though I doubt that's what he's referring to.

HR removed all his previous posts and published this single, cryptic passage:

Quote:
In analysing complicated variations one must examine each branch of the tree once and once only

An old face with the same dark edges. Different speech using the same words. Hiding behind a mask because you're too scared to be noticed.


I have a few ideas on what this refers to.

The picture that's emerging seems to be that splinternails is an entity that can possess people, hence the divergence in HR's recent posts from his usual posts.

So the question now is - why should Beautiful People feat. Jimi Hendrix mean anything to me? Might be a reference to the ARG history although HR's recent post may imply this is not the case. I'll fire out a response soon, input welcome.

EDIT: Oh I forgot, HR was specifically referring to the song "Rilly Groovy".

PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 3:56 pm
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		Sorry this is going to sound stupidly cryptic, but if you ask the right questions, you get the right answers....

PostPosted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 8:22 pm
Last edited by no_moon on Sat Sep 06, 2014 3:45 am; edited 1 time in total
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punkbass
Boot


Joined: 23 Apr 2008
Posts: 56

 		Thalia
I was exploring qu13e tonight... hoping to find something I hadn't seen before. I came back to a thought process I had gone down before, not sure if it was the right train of thought, but it always leads me to this image. And when you find yourself staring at that image, you find yourself always trying to decypher the apparent text under the text.

The only thing I can ever clearly make out is 345. And I usually always realize that it's under the word me. The end of the letter clearly states "I am the key", which always leads me to believe that 345 is a clue to the key.

345 happens to be part of the url for all the images in the middle bottom row, so the clue must be in that row. The only thing the images have in common in that cell are that in their image info description they make up the phrase ""Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside."" from the book "Naked Lunch" by William Seward Burroughs, and the Greek muse Thalia. I haven't been able to find a common pattern in the phrases in those pictures that I could pic out what might be a unique clue from the phrase, or book, or author, so I went with the greek muse and tried to email ThaliaSPLATqu13e.com (not the first time I've ever tried, but the first time I tried it was a mass email to all of the muses, Random Martin probably never responded because he didn't appreciate being mail bombed...):

Subject: Not brute force
Quote:

I followed a trail that led to you, but are you someone I haven't met before?


twenty to thirty minutes later, I get a response:

Subject: 9starspill
Quote:

Oboenai


With the following image attached!



Surprisingly, this is the same image that is used in the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalia_(Muse)]Wikipedia article on Thalia[/url]. So I looked for alterations on the image itself, and couldn't find any, so I opened the image in notepad and midst all the encoded data I saw the following text:

Quote:

B e w a r e s e c r e t s !


I downloaded and compared the original image, the one I got from Random Martin is 120KB larger! Looking at it again this morning, the one I downloaded and compared to was not the original source of the image. The source is in the metadata of the original image is [url=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thalia_from_Villa_Adriana_(Prado_E-38)_01.jpg]here[/url] according to the meta data in the file. It's actually larger, both in bytes and pixels. This was obviously edited before being sent, but I don't know how.

I tried destegging it using this online tool, but I'm not sure if you have to use the same tool it was encoded with to decode. I tried the following passwords, including no password:

Quote:

oboenai
Oboenai
9starspills
starspills
thalia
Thalia
345
comedy
iriguchi
jitensha
sparkrent
Sparkrent


It seems strange to me that he would include a reference to Oboenai. Must have something to do with how to access the data, but it's not the password itself. I do know that Oboenai was an important person the first time they were looking for Random Martin, but I don't know anything about him.

Another thing I found was the library used for adding the additional data to the jpg: XMP. So this is just a code library that a third party tool could use to add meta-data to an image. Random Martin seems to know a thing or two about web design, and maybe a bit of programming, but I'm guessing he would have used Photoshop to add the date, so I just need to figure out what tools are available in Photoshop for either stegging data, or any other way to add data. Then I will have a better idea of how to pull it out.

Edit: See text that was striked and corrected.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 1:27 am
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		Re: Thalia
punkbass wrote:
The only thing I can ever clearly make out is 345. And I usually always realize that it's under the word me. The end of the letter clearly states "I am the key", which always leads me to believe that 345 is a clue to the key.


That really draws your attention, doesn't it? I noticed it too. But I also noticed that part of several of the words are kind of crossed out, and a number written underneath. I wondered if it was a cipher, or if it was to draw our attention to the numbers.

I'm sure RM is a busy man. Avoiding inundating him with emails would probably be wise. Wink

Re: the image of the muse, did you try blowing it up, or trying to find the extra pictures in the image? RM is indeed very good with code. Would not be surprised if he had added something in there for you to find.

He also seems to like to write both forwards and backwards. Did you try those keywords backwards too?

PostPosted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 10:40 am
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supersekretsrsly
Boot

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 54

 		Great job Punkbass.

Not much to say on my front - received two additional messages from HR. The first confirming that there's a time limit of 2 months to solve this ARG once and for all -

Quote:
There is only a 2 month window. This time, the end really is the end.

"Can you KEep a secRet? CAn you sECret tHRee?"


And finally -

Quote:
Beware! Secrets need to be kept.


I wonder if this means that we may need to keep certain discoveries to ourselves and not share them on this forum.

HR also updated his LJ profile, the tags are 31/10, meaning the 31st October.

The section "Can you KEep a secRet? CAn you sECret tHRee?" refers to the following page and I take it as a nudge in a particular direction. I also take this as confirmation that the below site remains relevant to this ARG.

http://www.qu13e.com/619/

I was reading about this image on the wiki and it was never solved. The words 'Eye Hide Hear' are hidden in the bottom right.

The image size is relatively large suggesting a strong possibility of stego. This coupled with the clue above lead me to suspect a sound file has been embedded in the image. I've never used stego tools before but I'll see what I can do.

In addition, on your lead Punkbass I figured that it would be worth contacting one of the 9 muses at random and seeing what happens. Mnemosyne was their mother whilst Thalia is amongst their number.

Quote:
Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania


So I contacted calliopeSPLATqu13e.com and received a response that contained a 4.4mb file from qu13eSPLATqu13e.com. Unfortunately, I can't actually open that file nor read the email's contents due to file size constraints on the email provider I was using. I've asked to be resent the email on another account but have not received a response so far.

9 muses, 9starpills...



PostPosted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 10:51 am
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		[redacted]

PostPosted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 12:16 pm
Last edited by no_moon on Sat Sep 06, 2014 3:52 am; edited 1 time in total
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supersekretsrsly
Boot

Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 54

 		 
no_moon wrote:
That picture looks like the capital letters by themselves have another message....

But why are there capital letters in that can you keep a secret bit, is what I'd like to know.


Well you tell me - you met the Splinterbitch Wink.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 2:10 pm
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		If he put emphasis on something then it may be a whim or it may have meaning. More likely what he wants to say is hidden in either the capital or lower case letters somewhere. An anagram, a word jumble.... He's a little Nabokovian, I think, sometimes.

PostPosted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 2:39 pm
Last edited by no_moon on Sat Sep 06, 2014 3:52 am; edited 1 time in total
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no_moon
Boot

Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 64

 		[redacted]

PostPosted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 2:43 pm
Last edited by no_moon on Sat Sep 06, 2014 3:53 am; edited 1 time in total
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Syke
Decorated


Joined: 28 Aug 2004
Posts: 258
Location: CA

 		ok ill bite....
after reading through what you guys just posted...i went through that image with the capital letters.

some of the actually make sense...others dont.

heres what i got per line:

SHEGRIEF
WEREDUST
INKISEE
SELL
GOHERE
DODGIVEGET
UNDOFALL
SOULIAR
CONLMNTIS
FREE YOU SHUTUP!!!
WHKNESIE
CKERCAECHR

not sure if ANY of that makes sense....

but there it is.

ill be back...

*goes back to lurking*
_________________
-Syke (AKA Fazer)
NowPlaying:
NUNYA
Lurking...AlwaysLurking Shifty Eyes

PostPosted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 4:30 pm
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