July 16 >>

July 27 >>

July 27th
Phase 1 Complete
Hidden Links
Killer.JPG
The Links Puzzle
The Operator's Monologue
Dana Freaks Out
Dana Is Gone

The History of Dana
Persuaded to Come Back

Phase 2 Complete
The New Wavs
Operator's Monologue Part 2
The Spider and the Flea
The Cylinder Artifact & Virus
GPS Coordinates
The Princess' Secret

New GPS Coordinates
The Princess 404
Go Hot
Dana's Request

August 24 >>

Sleepy and Intangible
Wide Awake and Physical
The Flea Is Chatty
The Princess' Riddle
The Extraordinary
Successful Transmission Threshold Reached
Axon Cancelled
Media Coverage
Spying on the Queen
The Princess' Axons
Troy Goes Hot!
Hello Goes Hot!

Early, Early Update
The Looking Glass
Eavesdropping
The Hivekuts Wavs
Wandering_Angela is the winner!
Day 50

Fable Axons
Gretel
Key Lime and Candidate
Six Degrees of
The Clockwork Rat
Recipe 3 - Take 3
Is a phone ringing near you?

The Comatas Axons
SP's Hidden Message
No New Riddles?
The Fable Wavs
Found and Lost
Whew! THAT was exciting.
The London Axon
The Comatas Wavs
September 21 >>

Recipe 1 Axons
The Riddle Wavs - Take 2
777 Axons!
Axon Spike Rendezvous
Axons Cancelled & Recipe 1 Wavs
Cranky_Old_Man Changed
Sometimes a mistake is the last thing you make
Cranky Old Man Has a Name
Email from the Flea

Recipe 2 Axons
Freeing the Princess
Rogue Process Wild
Perdita's Story - Proper Ending
Recipe 2 wavs
Success
Recipe4 Axons
I'm feeling betrayed
!transmit durga
Astald - Creepy

Jan's Going to Have a Bad Day?
The Truth
Pending Relay Code Completion
Recipe4 Wavs
hide and
Recipe5 Axons
What Is Your Version Number!
13 out of 14 wavs (No Prepositions)
  October 12 >>  

Who is the Enemy?
The Crew Assignment
Recipe5 Wavs
Crew Photographs
An Official Hint
The Duck Pond
make myself useful
Prepositions Finally Solved!

Reach
Melissa's Task
The Question Game
Recipe6 = Revenge!
Commendations from Melissa
The Princess and the Flea
Seatbelts Save Lives
Rani Meets Standish
Natural Enemies

I Hate Bees
Bug! I'm Going Home!
Unsuccessful Experiment
The Last Fortress
Combat Training
Mission Accomplished
Recipe7 Wavs
Recipe8 axons for Halloween
Accepting New Recruits
The Pictures Have Changed
!transmit seeker
Shaking... Waking


October 31 >>


Week 13 - Phase 5
October 12th and Onwards

Who is the Enemy?

And now, for the question of the day:
Question: Who is the Enemy?
Answer: The Covenant
Today we have 7 seeking wavs and 18 regular wavs for a grand total of 25. And luckily the wavs do not have the omnious tone that last weeks did. However, the seeking axons look as though they may be tough to get. Melissa is looking for visual confirmation with our digital imaging capability. It looks like we are going to have to take 343 different pictures, though I can't imagine how we are going to get a picture of a Vac Suit Tech or a Paratrooper. §

Melissa has also updated hives.html. It seems she knows we are having problems getting to some of the axons and has come up with two different ways to make it better. Once, you can call her on an unsecure but useable voice channel (Dana's Voicemail) to leave her your name, rank, contact number and proof of loyalty to be considered for future transmissions. Or, you can find an axon (payphone) of your own and email her a picture that displays the phone number and its coordinates and she will try to add it to the list. §

When you call Dana's voicemail (415-248-2617), you get a creepy message from Melissa telling you to leave a convincing proof of loyalty. How on earth do you prove your loyalty over the telephone? §

The Crew Assignment

As you've seen above, the crew assignment this week is to take pictures of ourselves at the axons. This was sometimes easier said then done since Melissa had certain specifications that you needed to follow before she would accept your picture.
  1. The picture needed to be taken at a payphone. If you took a picture with no payphone, you'd get a message back "Axon not in range". And pictures taken with only an unverified private number (cell phone) shown wouldn't be accepted due to security risks. If you already had your own private axon, then a picture of you on your cell phone would be accepted.
  2. You had to demonstrate some skill. If for some reason you took a picture of you just standing at a payphone you got the message "Visual evidence insufficient. Special skills not demonstrated." *le sigh*
  3. You had to demonstrate loyalty. If you couldn't come up with some props for one of the specialized jobs, you needed to take a picture of yourself saluting. Otherwise you'd get a failure email. "Allegiance must be demonstrated in visual evidence!"
  4. The picture must not be visually photoshopped. While you could resize, crop, and add text to your photos, you couldn't photoshop a payphone into your picture to get out of going outside.
  5. The picture must be submitted to Dana's email before Midnight PDT. Which means we need to get around 343 pictures taken before the wavs turn into a pumpkin.
If all this wasn't enough, SP asked us on Friday if we wouldn't send her some sort of signal in our pictures. So now we have to sneak a red balloon into the picture as well. At least she could have given us a hint on the prepositions puzzle while we send her balloons. I guess we'll have to wait till Friday now.

In later dicussions with Melissa, she also tells us that initiative will be rewarded and that the person or group that has the most individuals will get a special commendation. I can just see it now. Beekeepers begging total strangers to stand by a payphone and salute.

Recipe5 Wavs

We managed to get all but 2 wavs today (and got the missed ones on Wednesday), so we are doing great. This week we feel aftermath of James James' death when Jan and Jersey attend his funeral. But Jersey has good news for Jan which may mean she will be able to get even with Thin Kinkle. Kamal's world, however, has gone from bad to worse. Aiden's in jail (okay, that's not necessarily a bad thing in Kamal's eyes), Sophie is going to be deported now that her visa has been cancelled, and the Covenant have found Coral. §

Crew Photographs

The new axons for Tuesday are on recipe6.html, and my name (Ensign Lambelle) is there! Woohoo! I guess my phone call to Dana's voicemail worked. It also looks like Melissa is adding a bunch of new axons as well: notice all the "AXON UNDER CONSTRUCTION" axons. We also are getting the pictures that everyone took on Tuesday on the 404 page. (Note: Does anyone have a copy of the source code for this 404 page? See, I was in Texas and, um, I kinda forgot to save a copy, so what I'm posting below probably wasn't exactly what was put up on Friday. Sowwy.) §

An Official Hint

Finally! What we've been waiting for since last Friday: a hint to that stupid prepositions puzzle. §

Okay, so that didn't help so much. But we certainly feel closer than we did last week, so maybe we'll end up getting it sometime soon. Meanwhile, in worse news, it seems that Melissa is looking at Aunt Margaret, specifically looking at putting her into a diabetic coma. (Humulin is a synthetic insulin and Reflotron Plus tests blood chemestry. It's hard to tell if Aunt Margaret is already a diabetic or Melissa just wants it to seem that she is. Either way, getting a wrong dosage of humulin can be very, very bad.)

The worst new of the day comes from the two wavs that the Princess snuck a peak at (and that are sitting on recipe3.html under Melissa's confidential files.) The two files are no_trespassing.wav and results_are_results.wav, while passphrase to unlock them is "Seek, behold, reveal". But, I don't think Durga is going to be too happy to hear these. Herzog is having a very bad day. §

The Duck Pond

Wow, look, we managed to solve all of the puzzles today! (Well, kinda. You'll see what I mean later). Actually, I should say everyone else managed to solve all the puzzles today since I was in Texas for the week and didn't do squat. But enough about me. Here are the solves to this weeks riddles.

sleeping_underground.wav §

duck_pond.wav §
heat_sink.wav §
fusion_cell.wav §
persnickety.wav §
new_chicken.wav §
only_one_alive.wav §
eye_out.wav §
big_city.wav §
decay_timer.wav §
counting_down.wav §

Poor Rani is finding out that you can never go home again. At least not if you don't want to find your bedroom now located under a duck pond. That's right - a duck pond. Her father has it all worked out. He's going to be the only human left alive when the Covies strike - unless lots of people are living under duck ponds. But her father isn't as crazy as he seems - he knows what the purpose of the Artifact is, even if he doesn't realize it. §

make myself useful

Dana's updated her blog to say she's coming home. She sounds a bit upset over the whole coma idea. Can't say that I blame her. §

Prepositions Finally Solved!

Gah! It took us over a week before someone finally was able to come up with a solution for the prepositions puzzle. This after a million curses, five million guesses, and gallons of tears. People started comparing it to the unholy where.gif puzzle from Lockjaw. I don't think it's anywhere close to this. We only had 8 days of annoyance. They had 20 days of horror.

We might have ended up at 20 days as well if usernameguy hadn't figured out the clues. The answer is a_pawn which sounds like upon (a preposition that was omitted from the list) and what a Queen is before she shows up on a chess board. Simple right? :P


Week 14 - Phase 5
October 19th and Onwards

Reach

Tuesday. Phones ring. New question asked.
Question: On what colony was I created?
Answer: Reach

Melissa's Task

Melissa finally understands that her time and our time are not quite the same. There's is a slight 500 year difference between the two. In order for her to understand the differences that have occured in that time, she's set up a new task for us. We are to email her pictures of things in our time with their counterparts from her time. And those with the best photos will get some highly confidential information. Does this mean we are finally going to get labyrinth and odd_duck? I really hope so. So get those photoshop skills working! §

The Question Game

Unlike last week, the pictures are not the key to the seeking axons. This week, those people lucky enough to get a call from Melissa get a second call - this time from the Princess. It seems that when she calls, she asks you 10 questions that you answer. She then gives you a number where you must call another beekeeper and give them the 10 answers you provided. You have a specific time frame to do this in, and after the time is up, the Princess will call the second beekeeper, ask them one question, and if they know the answer, the seeking axon will unlock. Simple, right?

Okay, maybe not that easy since the very first one ended up failing. § Awww, that's okay vpisteve. We will still love you. Especially since we ended up getting all of the wavs eventually. §

Recipe6 = Revenge!

This is the week we have all been waiting for since James James was killed. Armed with knowledge provided by Jersey and Durga, and just massively armed, Jan, Gilly, and Gladys track down Thin to make him pay. And to have fun with grenades. Cuz isn't that what life is all about? Blowing stuff up with grenades? Meanwhile, Jersey is practically having kittens over not being informed every second about what is happening to Jan. Then Durga springs some really bad news on him - about what seven years means to a smart A.I. And poor Kamal. Not only does Sophia have a run in with a crooked Immigration officer, he gets his heart broken again. Maybe he can hook up with Cami in Reno. §

Commendations from Melissa

Melissa is quite happy with the way the pictures from Tuesday turned out. However, I haven't heard of anyone getting any confidential information. And those stupid wavs are still locked. In worse news, Melissa has decided that if she can't get to Dana, she will get to Aunt Margaret. So if Dana wants to keep Aunt Margaret alive and healthy, she needs to come up with a way for to get rid of the Sleeping Princess. (And if we have any ideas, we are more than welcome to send them to Dana via email.) §

The Princess and the Flea

The Princess is immensely happy with her takeover of the telephones this week. She has her own chant, her own friends and even gets Happy Birthday sung to her. She even has a wav of herself making fun of Melissa. Unfortunately, it seems she may have stepped on Melissa's toes a bit, and Melissa is not happy, so the Princess had to be careful in getting snippets from the Herzog wavs this week. That's right, I said Herzog. It seems he might not be as dead as we thought. §

Seatbelts Save Lives

Time to figure out the wav names and send them to the Princess/Flea with the phrase "seek behold reveal, recurse". But what is the name of the first wav? We haven't heard of any female Tech Specialists. We've heard of ONI Tech Kowalski, but that doesn't work and Mckaskill wasn't a Tech Specialist. But we do have those new Rani wavs today. Maybe the name is mentioned there. Yep, it is! Tech Specialist Carmi. So now we know the names of the two wavs are carmi.wav and breathing_room.wav.

So Herzog isn't dead after all. Let this be a lesson to always wear your seatbelt. The only problem is, as long as Herzog wants to remain alive, he needs to keep a low profile so Standish doesn't find him to finish ooff the job. This means that Rani has to do Herzog's dirty work since his aide is out of the way in New Mombasa. §

Rani Meets Standish

I have no idea why, but for some reason the solves this week are just lacking something. Completeness. It's not to say that you can't get the answer, but there is a bit more guessing this week than in previous ones. Maybe it's because we stop caring the moment we figure out the wav name. But still, at least we got all of these in one day instead of waiting for over a week.

green_badge.wav §

wrong_office.wav §
excellent_excuse.wav §
wartime_treason.wav §
stupid.wav §
haircut.wav §
personal_calls.wav §
clam_chowder.wav §
eight_months_pregnant.wav §
waiting_tables.wav §
kitchen_smells.wav §
plasma_torpedo.wav §

Poor Rani. It's her turn to have a bad week (the assassin on her roof doesn't count). Standish has finally caught up with her, and he's not too happy that she was Herzog's spy. Okay, he wasn't happy when he sent the assassin to kill her either, but now he has her where he wants her: scared, confused, and alone. §

Natural Enemies

Uh oh. Dana has seen what Melissa plans on doing to Aunt Margaret if she doesn't turn in the Princess. So now she's asking for our help. But how can we turn in the Princess - again? Yeah, sure, Margaret is a human being, but the Princess is just as alive to us. More so since we get to talk to her. Has anyone heard anything from Aunt Margaret? How do we know she even exists? Unfortunately, I know there are going to be some people who are gonna turn her in again. Hopefully, the Princess has learned from her mistakes and will be careful this time around. §


Week 15 - Phase 5
October 26th and Onwards

I Hate Bees

After 15 weeks of being stuck on ilovebees.com, Melissa is obviously sick of the little honey makers.
Question: What insect do I hate the most?
Answer: Bees

Bug! I'm Going Home!

Thanks to her spying on Melissa, the Princess has found out that something big is going to happen on Sunday (Halloween) - she's going home! Melissa has been telling her crew during live calls that something big is going to happen on Sunday (instead of Tuesday). Does this mean that the game is going to end a week early instead of on Halo 2's release date of November 9th? §

Unsuccessful Experiment

At 08:17 PDT, something new appeared on Recipe7. § An unsuccessful experiment? Did we miss something already? About ten minutes go by with no indication of what is going on, when recipe7 updates one of the seeking axons. § Well Jon must have been the unsucessful experiment, but we haven't heard back from him since his live call so we don't know what he did wrong. But Colonel xnbomb obviously does! §

As xnbomb explained, "an unsuccessful experiment | 08:17:00" was actually a text marker that Melissa requested. Once he passed this onto her during a live call, the seeking axon was unlocked. A little bit later, a new marker appeared farther down the page, which was relayed by Dr. Kojubat. This went on for the rest of the day, with the times to give Melissa the text markers getting shorter and shorter, down to 20 seconds in some cases. Needless to say, we missed a few. §

I can personally verify that Melissa was serious about the 20 second deadline. I had the phone number of one of the DC Axon Signal Corps crew members and as soon as I heard about "her only consolation" I called them. Unfortuately, by the time I got through, I could hear Melissa informing them of their failure. She acknowledged that the text marker I gave them was correct, but since it was beyond the 20 seconds, she couldn't unlock the axon. That evil AI bitch. I do this when I'm annoyed at crazy AIs: >:/ It wasn't until after I got home that I realized it was a good thing that the code wasn't accepted - because I would have felt even worse than I did.

The Last Fortress

The Last Fortress text marker given by the Washington DC Axon Signal Corps unlocked the last seeking axon. But that's not all it did. It allowed Melissa to corner the Sleeping Princess and DESTROY HER! After everything we did to free the Princess the last time and keep her hidden from Melissa, we fell right into her Melissa's trap and gave her the Sleeping Princess on a silver platter! Melissa congratulates us on a job well done on the 404. She is quite estatic about the whole thing. At least someone is. :( §

Combat Training

As a reward for our hand in murding the Princess, we are getting rewarded with a Combat Training exercise on Thursday, November 4th. Can you say Halo 2 multiplayer? This is being held in four cities from 18:00 - 21:00 PDT.

40.743071 -073.976763 - New York City, NY
42.040240 -088.035197 - Chicago, IL
30.266632 -097.744710 - Austin, TX
37.784568 -122.404169 - San Franciso, CA

If you would like to go, you need to register via email with the City name and your name and rank in the subject of the email. Register early and you should be guaranteed a spot. So send in your emails now!

Mission Accomplished

Dana has updated her blog to tell us exactly what happened to with the text markers today. It seems that SHE was the one putting them up on the website so that Melissa could track the movements of the Princess. Each time Dana saw the Princess hanging out on one of the sites, she would put a new phrase, from her favorite book Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne which we were told about waaaaaay back in the beginning of the game. (It even snuck into the killer.jpgs before Dana skipped off to China.) So much for us trying to help Dana and Aunt Margaret. Now Dana is in the evil-and-must-be-destroyed category with Melissa. §

Recipe7 Wavs

Since the destruction of the Princess, it almost doesn't seem worth it to listen to the wavs we got today. But, we probably should since it was us striving to get the seeking axons that caused the Princess to be murdered.

So the story lines are finally coming together. Kamal meets Durga. Rani meets Durga. Kamal, Rani and Jan all meet in Jersey's apartment, much to Jersey's dismay as things keep getting broke left and right, causing Jersey to fear his mom's wrath when she finds out. Once the introductions are over and the destruction is fixed, they settle down to discuss plans to break into Chawla, for Jersey has his own plans which he swears will work. §

Recipe8 axons for Halloween

It's Friday and it seems like it's going to be a boring day since, with the Princess dead, we won't have any new puzzles this week. We do have a whole boatload of axons to look at on recipe8. Reminder, these ring on Sunday (Halloween) instead of on Tuesday (Election Day). It's doubtful any of these will be live calls since Melissa is supposed to be going home that day, but you never know.

Accepting New Recruits

Melissa is still on a high from Tuesday, because not only is she accepting new recruits to the Live Training Exercise, she has also given us the exact addresses instead of GPS coordinates. There are also two new wavs of the new recruits and squads gained through live calls on Tuesday. §

The Pictures Have Changed

For some reason, the pictures have changed this week - and that means new embedded text. Is this something the Princess had set up before she was killed, or could the Flea have managed to take over picture duty this week? §

Well, it's definitely not riddles this week. It's more like what appeared when we got the Widow's Journey waaaaay back in the beginning. Except, this time around, if you try to put the phrases as they appear together, they make no sense. As it turns out, there are three different monologues taking place here: One by Yasmine, one by the Widow, and the last by the Flea. The monologues are separated by ...s and only the Widow and Yasmine storylines are in each fragment (except for the two fragments with the Flea++ code). Once the monologues are put together, we get some much needed information about the Princess' past. §

So now we have a memory of what is presumably Yasmine's last day. Doctor Halsey is the creator of the Spartan 2.0 program on Reach. As we were told by James2 in merry_go_round.wav back on recipe2.html, the 2.0s go through years of training and tweaking before they get "a last set of tweaks to finish the job" around the time they turn fourteen. This last set of tweaks is extremely dangerous, and those who don't die outright can be left crippled and helpless. If a Spartan 2.0 trainee was going to wash out, it was during this final procedure. But all would not be lost if they died, since besides being physically trained, they were mentally prepared as well, so their brains would be perfect candiates to make a smart AI from. And in Yasmine's case, this is exactly what happened.

After the crash, the Widow sought out the Sleeping Princess, a deeply buried and hidden personality within Melissa's mind. With her main function being the repair of Melissa, the Widow must have thought that the Sleeping Princess would in someone way be able to help her fix the shattered AI. The Widow opened the lock of the glass coffin by speaking the Princess' true name, but the crash had damaged the casket and (impossibly!) the Princess managed to escape. So now instead of possibly helping Melissa, the Princess spent the next 15 weeks annoying her. Oops!

When Melissa was finally able to track down and destroy the Princess, the Flea was there to witness it. Now he is trying to seek out the Princess' friends. Does he want revenge on Melissa, or is it possible he knows a way to reconstruct the Sleeping Princess?

!transmit seeker

Whatever his plan is, he wants us to contact him at Margaret Efendi's email according to the message he left us on contactme.html. § Several people started sending emails off to the Flea, and a little bit later, the contactme page updated with the results of one of the emails. § So it seems that we can communicate with the Flea in real time, and that he'll update the contactme page to let us know what's going on. Maybe we can get him to find out if there is anything left of the Princess, and if there is, to release her. §

Shaking... Waking

Getting the Flea to kiss the Princess had an effect that we didn't quite expect - it merged the Queen and the Sleeping Princess into one. So although we technically don't have the Princess back, we do have a sane Melissa who is able to remember what both personality experienced, and who is grateful to us, her friends, for rescuing her. (Note: The text box below has the text of the updated 404 page, but not the style since lining up this relative text positioning would only work if everyone had the same screen width. That and people complained the double lettering gave them headaches. But, for those who want to see the double colors of Melissa and the Princess you can.) §

So we've done it. We've repaired Melissa so that she is now able to understand what happened to her since the crash. Now when she gets sent back on Sunday, Jersey, Jan, Kamal, Rani and, most of all, Durga, will not have to deal with a deeply disturbed AI.

End Game is now upon us.

October 31st and Onwards >>