Spooky Month Lore! AGAIN!
Oh yeah, we're doing this again. For those not in the know, last year I did a basic summary of an ARG that was taking place last spooky month. And this year? I'm doing it again! So, strap in folks, because it's more complicated than last time. And like last time, spoilers for Spooky Month 5.
Alright, so at 3:48 on the last Spooky Month, the TV static hid a familiar looking pattern.
Here we go again. Scanning this code brings you to this image.
Now this image is blurry as all hell, so to change that you got to look at the URL and see that it's a '.webp' image. changing the URL so that it ends in '.jpg' gives us a clearer view.
Aright, we got three links to go to and one incomplete imgur link. For now, let's focus on the patient file. Typing that URL in gives us this.
Now, if you look back at the TV image you see 'Patient #__'. So, it seems that the patient is '#RN'. But then what's the deal with '5f6-7s2'? Well, here's the thing. If you google 'RN 5f6 7s2', the first few results show that it's connected to the chemical 'Plutonium' or the abbreviated version 'Pu', giving us our current answer 'Patient #Pu'.
But that isn't the final answer. I'll explain in a bit, but for now let's go back to the tv image and type in the imgur link for the picture frame.
Now as it turns out, SrPelo tweeted out that the font for the image was a bit confusing and led to people not being able to get into the image. He corrected it on twitter, but incase that tweet gets deleted, here is the link.
www.imgur.com/vMTf01K
Amazin. Now when I first saw and messed around with this image, I think I got the wrong message out of it. Changing the light values of this image took out some letters in a peculiar way.
YOU ARE ERY N
Now, I was on the right track, but I thought that this was like, a name reveal for Skid, with his name being Eryn. Maybe that was intentional, but that wasn't the main thing I was supposed to take out of this. Changing the values in a different way gave me this.
As you see, the letters that disappeared: E, V, T, H, I, G. They all had a different color compared to the rest of the text. But even within the disappeared letters, the letter V stands out as being a slightly different color. But where does that take us? Let's go back to the TV image and focus on the picture frame.
"#_lowcase". This implies that we are looking for a number and a lowercase letter. Taking the letters and rearranging them gives us:
'E, I, G, H, T, V". The number 8, and the letter V.
And putting that in the format that the phrase is demanding, we get '8v'. So, the solution to the picture frame imgur is '8v'.
One more link, and it's a YouTube link. punching that in gives us a security cam video.
Security_Camera_VIDEO_131518190503150405 - YouTube
Now if you watch the video, the security light in the bottom right goes bonkers around halfway thru. This is morse code. I'm not going to show you the beeps and bops as I don't have it off the top of my head, but all you need to know is that it translated to something like this.
"B . U P C A S E C . Y "
There was more that it translated to, but it was kind of random compared to what we have here. Assuming that the periods indicate a new letter, turning that phrase into a three-digit input gives us this.
'bCy' And that's what we take away from that video. Back to the TV image!
We are now going to try and construct that imgur link on the red book. Seeing that # sign on the 6th digit gives us a clue that '8v' are the last two digits, as 8 is the only number that can fill that numbered slot. But where does that put 'Pu' and 'bCy'? Well, to figure that out, let's look one more time at the patient file.
See that undercase p at the very beginning of 'pATIENT', a seven letter word? Seven letters... Seven needed imgur digits... That lowercase p not only indicates that 'Pu' goes first, but it also says that the P needs to be lowercase. And that only leaves one place where 'bCy' can go.
Plugging this link in gives us this.
Oh god,
LATIN.
Don't worry, you don't need to translate it, we're only working with individual letters. Though, to be completely honest, I'm not sure how well I'm going to be able to explain this. But I'm going to try my damned hardest!
okay, so...
I circled 9 different looking red symbols. The bottom right one is hard to see, but if you zoom in enough, you'll see. Some symbols have just dots, one of them has just a line, and some of them have dots and a line.
This is a numbering system.
Maya numerals to be exact. Basically, if you have a horizontal line, add 5 to the number of dots that are above it. We have numbers 1 - 9 here. The exact number of digits that are missing from the YouTube URL at the top of the image. So, presumably, if we had each digit that each numeral related to, we could fill in the YouTube URL in the numeral's order! But what does each numeral correspond to? Let's get the easier ones out of the way.
We have 4 numerals that are directly correlated with a digit. 5 is right underneath an uppercase K. 6 is underneath an uppercase V that was edited to make it an uppercase W instead. Same with 9 but lowercase. And 7 is correlated with a lowercase z. So right now, we have this for our YouTube URL.
____62KWz_w
Great start!
...But now what? The rest of the numerals are floating in dead space with no obvious correlation to a specific letter, and it would take forever to try and brute force it. So, what do we do? I now take your attention to the key to this entire puzzle.
A melting candle. Looking into the melting wax, do you see what seems to be drops of red surrounding what appears to be a red circle? Here's what you have to do. By taking a low opacity version of this pic and overlaying it so that each of the remaining numerals sit inside the red circle, we would see that at least one of the drops of red overlays on top of certain letters, correlating a letter to its numeral value. 5 red drops, 5 remaining numerals. Here's what it would look like when it's done.
(Btw, I was in a spooky month ARG discord server when I was trying to figure this out, and it turned out I was the first person to get the URL correctly! This is the image that I shared with the people there. We wouldn't have been able to do it if we weren't all in the same server sharing our different strategies for this puzzle, so shout out to all of them!)
Reconstructing the URL with the values that we got, with the numerals giving us order, gave us this video.
Spooky. Taking that audio and putting through a spectrogram gives you this.
However, if you listen closer to the audio, there is more morse code. Translating that code into words, and thus the final answer to this ARG gives you this.
"DON'T HIDE IN THE DARKNESS JOIN WITHIN MY BRIGHTNESS FOR THE VESSEL HAS ROTTEN YOU WILL BE NOT FORGOTTEN"
And that's the end of the ARG! The last ARG had a result similar to this, with a rhyming passage to finish it off. So, it's safe to assume that at the end of all the Spooky Month ARGs we will have a completed poem through all the rhyming passages.
That'll be cool to figure out, but until next time. Stay spooky!
