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[Adah]

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
I: Mini-FAQ & OTP22 Dictionary
II: The Phone Numbers
III: The Characters
IV. The Timeline pt. 1
V. The Timeline pt. 2
VI. The Drops [you are here]
VII. The Books

THE DROPS:


Retrieving drops is a major aspect of the game, even if it sometimes seems like we go long periods without anything to find at all. The items we find at drop sites range from CDs, books, small metal components, weird black boxes, creepy stuffed animals, to laminated index cards. Most drops, when recovered, give us clues on how to proceed in the game, but there are some whose purpose we still haven't determined. This is a list (with in-depth descriptions) of all the drops we have retrieved. Drop sites that were visited but found empty, such as the Grand Canyon or Fort Lauderdale Airport sites, are NOT included here, but they are included in the timeline when appropriate.

[drop item inventory]


Lake Oswego, OR (Lake Oswego Public Library): The very first drop we received, alluded to in the first message quoted above.

[Adah]

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
I: Mini-FAQ & OTP22 Dictionary
II: The Phone Numbers
III: The Characters
IV. The Timeline pt. 1
V. The Timeline pt. 2
VI. The Drops
VII. The Books [you are here]

THE BOOKS


Molds and Lichens of Nova Scotia, published by the Atlantic Mycological Union: The first "book" we received, which isn't technically a book. Only the cover of the book was found, with some codes written on the back. This was found at the Knights of Pythias Cemetery drop.


Global Response Codes, by Dr. J. Marvin Blackweather (Pink Book): The second book we received, and the first to actually be a book! One of our members received this book in the mail after leaving his information with the Message Desk for a copy of the "pink book". The book consists of three sections: A list of special inquiry codes to be used with the Message Desk, a list of codes labeled "Group", "MLPL", and "C", and an appendix listing location codes for a huge amount of cities around the world. The barcode of the book is the ISBN for the First Ladies book again. We have used the location codes to contact specific "stations" through the message desk, and have used some of the special inquiry codes in specific situations.
[transcript] (missing location codes) [images]


Designing Compelling Worm Sanctuaries, published by the North American Helminthological Society (Green Book): We have received three copies of this book. The first was recovered from Secret Beach on Kauai, placed there on J's orders for it to be out of reach of the counter-operation. The second, found from an agent code in the first copy, was picked up under a bridge in Idaho. The third we found much later on a bookshelf in Sofia, Bulgaria. All copies are identical save for the handwritten field notes in each. This book contains a ton of new codes, phone numbers, and mysteries. Unlike the previous book, this one has quite a bit of content beyond just the numbers. Much of it remains unsolved to this day, but here is a short list of important information from the green book:

Publishing Info/Dedication:
- The phone numbers listed under "PTO Publishing" are all Agent System mirrors.
- The dedication to "SF" is likely a reference to the woman who crashed into the Blue Hill phone booth shortly after the drop was retrieved, as those are her initials.
- The ISBN is, again, for the First Ladies book.

Reviews:
- The code on the left page, when entered into the Agent System, gives a "friendly code".
- One of the reviews is written by J (Marvin Blackweather). Another is by a man named Nibelung, likely a reference to the mythological family that settled Worms, Germany. The reviews also make little sense considering the text of the actual book, but that goes without saying.

Prelude [1, 2]:
- This history of worms is entirely made up even when it isn't concealing a secret code. It implies that St. John's University is in St. Johns, Newfoundland, even though this is false. Who knows?
- The numbers referring to worm species on the first page form the (709) phone number.
- The numbers referencing the growth of wormeries on the second page, when combined and entered into the agent system, give a message with coordinates for additional green book drops.
- The last two paragraphs where the text devolves spell out a message in the capital letters: AI BOUERGES BE CAREFUL.

Chapter 1:
- This list of "worm ordering codes" was referenced later in the game in both of the calling card drops. The worm colors may have something to do with other books, as we've had references to "slate" and "clear" books before. We were instructed to use "chartreuse" at the message desk at one point, although it didn't seem to work with either the color or the number associated with it.

Chapter 2:
- The QR code decodes to a series of 5grams corresponding to particular letters or numbers.

Chapters 3 & 4: These chapters give a lot of technical information about the systems WORM is using, provide some new phone numbers, and explain the system status check on agent code 33330. ZEUS is also explained in a bit more detail here. At the end of the chapter, the text of Global Response Codes appears, without the location codes at the end. The second to last page of the book is a message about worms, solved for us in the third copy, followed by a page that has been "unintentionally left blank".

Field Notes (Kauai Book): These field notes appear to correspond to Message Desk inquiries. Giving the Message Desk any of those 3xx numbers will give us coordinates around the corresponding location in response. Some refer to drop locations (El Paso, Oswego), while others have yet to be used in the game. Handwritten on the very last page of the book is a series of letters that we have not yet found a purpose for.

Field Notes (Idaho Book) 1, 2, 3: The field notes from the second copy of the book are slightly more cryptic. They consist of what appears to be ABISM login information, an agent code that leads to a voicemail box prompting you to report temperature or rainfall anomalies, and some acronyms. Cochliobolus heterostrophus is a fungus that causes Southern Corn Leaf Blight. Paired with the mention of a disbursement vector, it seems likely that Project MLPL has plans to spread blight.

Field Notes and other Handwritten Notes (Sofia Book): These notes provide solutions to a lot of the puzzles that we never solved with the first two books. One page seems to spell out the solution to the message on the inside of the calling card, while the field notes explain the process of accessing maps and give us a few new agent codes.

[images]


1979 Tide Tables of Lake Superior (Blue Book): We found this book at the Well Springs Cemetery in Hermiston, OR after discovering its location from the ISBN of an ExcitingBooks cover. It consists of a long series of codes organized into "tide tables" containing tide information for many different locations.

Publishing Info: Geoebic Publishing is obviously not real, and Geoebic isn't a real word or location. There are a few hits referencing what appears to be Gogebic, MI (which would fit the Lake Superior theme), but they may just be typos. Annelida is not a real town - it refers to the phylum for segmented worms.

Dedication: The name "Maj. DS Wagner" was mentioned before in response to an unknown QX on (234) 222-0004, but we don't know anything more about it. The dedication underneath is from the Hávamál, an Old Norse poem, which translates to:

[Xkeeper]

[Pixiestix]

Did you SERIOUSLY just copy your whole game wiki here!?!?!?!?!

[Adah]

No, I wrote and compiled this myself to start the new thread. We have a previous thread here, but it's very old and we get a lot of people confused by the misleading title/lack of info in the OP. Our wiki is pretty outdated and I didn't think it was really the place to put this.

I have a link in the very first post to skip the wall of text and start from the first "update" post. If you'd prefer we move the information someplace else, that's fine! Sorry for any inconvenience, I know it's a crazy amount of information. It's just that all of this info was disorganized before, and it was very difficult to find any specific thing.

[Pixiestix]

No no, it's fine. I wasn't posting as a mod I was posting as a user. However I shoudk probably lock the other thread then and post a link to this one on it.

[GuestUser17]

Wow! One day I will have to read it all. Thanks!

[L0j1k]

Thank you. We can finally link potential players to this excellent summary instead of saying "go read 75 pages of UF forum posts". Thanks, Adah. Awesome.

[Adah]

New messages!

18450:

[TonyTwoFish]

AS27 40.82

[Smugtrio]

Wow awesome new thread. HUGE thank you to those that contributed, and special shoutout to Adah for taking on this project

[L0j1k]

So here's a little update about the black book. In #ARG on Freenode, counterops agent Meki has been hammering away at training Tesseract OCR against the pictures of the black book. It was slow going at first, and personally I've had a lot of experience using OCR (or trying to) and had very little faith that it was going to work. It seems 10 years is an eternity in OCR software development. Meki has achieved OCR scans with about 0.5% error rate, and perhaps 90-95% of the errors in OCR are transcription errors with the letter "B" and the number "8". This is profoundly good in terms of OCR, and Meki deserves a lot of praise for his hard work and dedication. I had been shopping around for outsource transcription services (like India or the Philippines where this kind of labor is relatively cheap), but using this method, we could do this ourselves, since the task has now become proofreading instead of transcribing. I have no estimates for this workload, but I think the future of this encrypted text has just gotten a lot brighter. Thanks, Meki!

[Adah]

New messages:

18454:

[Adah]

More new messages!

18460:

[morningcoffee]

New black OTP message.


18463 -