Iamofcourse/Doc Frost's ARG Summary
So... a summary of the events of iamofcourse's ARG (which frankly needs a better name)? This could take a while, so I hope you're prepared to read. But hey, why not? Maybe it will attract some more people to play Tidebound (part 2!), which we DESPERATELY need. *ahem*
After the events of Sbarg, we'd all lost our memories of the events leading to our planet being un-destroyed. However, whatever wiped our memories (Horrorterrors? The Scratch? The game's coding itself?) did a pretty slipshod job, since around what I'd guess to be around a twentieth of the people who played (and given how many there were playing, that's quite a lot) were experiencing odd phenomena, such as classpect related things happening to them at minimum (ie. lights randomly flickering out for void players, a sense of not remembering something for Mind players, etc.), and even FULL memory recovery in some cases (guesses as to why this happened to some ranged from classpect related powers to "they just wanted to be the special snowflake who remembers everything"). Some people (especially myself) were skeptical about this, but since we'd all had the exact same "dream" (or at least dreams with striking similarities), and reports of it were all over tumblr, I figured that SOMETHING had to be going on, as did many others. Keep in mind this is all before Doc Frost even showed up.
Of course, then he did show up, and when asked who he was he responded that he was there to give advice to those of the session, OUR session, in which our first guardian was "conspicuously compromised". He explained that he was a First Guardian for a doomed session in another universe, and his goal was to keep the events The Horrorterrors set in motion (either knowingly or unknowingly) on track. At some point, Chronos had apparently destroyed our First Guardian. Being omniscient, Doc Frost decided that would be an opportune time to contact us, seeing as how we were now without a guardian (and he while he couldn't do anything about his own universe's doomed session, he COULD help our universe, since our struggles were not as over as they seemed).We do not yet know how Doc Frost and our First Guardian came to know each other, but he did say that they met via the "quirks of Paradox Space", and that he would tell us later.
It's necessary to explain that his "quirk" held some answers as well- he capitalized certain letters of his sentences, which when put together often held a second, underlying bit of information, sometimes even parts he specifically avoided answering in the text of the answer. It was through this that we discovered both his name (Doc Frost) and that he looked like a dolphin (likely due to dolphins being highly intelligent sea creatures; if you remember my last ask the universe he came from was populated by highly intelligent underwater lifeforms). Via a later ask, he stated that he was approximately Doc Scratch if he had a white, dolphin shaped head, a blue color schema suit instead of green, was over six feet tall, and wasn't all puppety.
In another ask, he stated that in a few days, an event would occur that would destroy our session in it's entirety (the one we'd already played- blame weird time shit) and force us to become players once again. When asked why he could not tell us everything about this now, he responded that he needed to be careful about his words, as choosing them unwisely would attract a certain someone's attention. Though his message referred to his butler, whom we later came to know, he revealed through his quirk that the actual person he was concerned about hearing was Chronos, who was emphatically NOT as dead as we'd thought. Doc Frost also started offering peppermint candy to everyone, which may or may not have been important.
While I wasn't part of ARG's planning, I think it necessary to add my own "experience" here, AKA what I went about doing in this ARG. At this point I still hadn't found/heard of Doc Frost's tumblr yet, and was investigating everyone's dreams/experiences on my own. No logical conclusion came to me; each one I came to was thrown out the window in turn. There was seemingly no reasoning behind everyone's dreams, and those who I thought had believed the dream had actually happened I discarded as just having very vivid dreams. Whilst expanding on my nonexistent and/or stupid theories (AKA being completely puzzled in a text post), Doc Frost reblogged me, stating that I shouldn't hold on to my skepticism and alternate theories, as the events that people claimed happened truly DID. Naturally I was skeptical- yes, a First Guardian (keep in mind we've all read Homestuck) contacting us through tumblr, THAT makes sense.
This marked the beginning of a long "information gathering" process. Gaining a few moments in which he was safe from being overheard by Chronos, Doc Frost posted an explanation- the Horrorterrors lied to us. Our session wasn't over, but they'd made us think it was. By corrupting/persuading 12 lords (one of each aspect) from the session (out of thousands of players, mind you, so it's not like we would have noticed them missing), they altered what we believed happened. I shall link to the post itself here, as it explains far better than I just did. I challenged him, pointing our flaws in his logic, in order to see if he would "slip up" in what I suspected to be an act of trolling. At the time I did not realize the significance of his quirk, and therefore did not yet know that Chronos was still alive. His response was gibberish, which of course turned out to not ACTUALLY be gibberish later on. A group of those who had read his tumblr started to form, while I tried multiple other posts questioning his legitimacy. At this point he started posting codes (and lost his quirk), which the group of players eventually figured out. Said messages explained the direness of the situation both he and all of we were in, particularly this one-
“The Horrorterrors lied because, like all sentient beings, they have fears. They intended to use the combination of your attacks to weaken to the point where he could be captured and used to combat Lord English. They failed. He broke loose and has captured me. He is not yet powerful enough to take me over, and thus I am able to contact you. My help is necessary, for he is still working to find your session’s ultimate reward. To prevent this, you must enter with a corrupted copy in order to avoid double titles.”
The reasoning behind avoiding double titles (which in theory would have made us more powerful, much like Chronos himself) was to avoid the breaking down of our bodies, which (if you've read my updated Sbarg Explanation post) you may know is what happens when you do not have the body a first guardian to conveniently take over.
More codes were given, one of which hilariously led to players following the wrong route entirely and discovering pictures of cats and topless women, rather than the actual "download" for the corrupted Sburb copy. After much deliberating over it, we were finally led to this. By this point I had finally "accepted" that it was real, as the evidence (from everyone else as well, not just Doc Frost) was too strong to suggest otherwise.We were given this message as we entered-
"The time has come. Your enemy has left my abode, taking with him several items which will speed his progress through a session in which he will kill all players and both armies in order to gain the Ultimate Reward. That is their alpha timeline, and thus cannot be altered. The session he goes to has enough players that he will be distracted for a time.
We have a short window of opportunity in which we must make serious progress. Proceed. Enter the game. Once you have, I will continue to aid you in a more direct manner, now that your foe is no longer listening in."
Of course, that still left us all wondering why we were floating in the void of Paradox Space rather than on our respective prior planets, and were stuck floating slowly towards a small asteroid. The answer we were given is that the corruption of this copy of Sburb was specifically designed to prevent land generation, as a land would have also created another title for us, which would not have ended well for the reason outlined above. This also left us with our previous session powers locked, at least for the time being.
Once we arrived on the meteor, it was explained to us that within lied technology we could use to save our lands from the previous session, which you may remember as having been destroyed by Chronos (though even then there were time and space players saving their lands through team ups). By saving our lands (and consorts/denizens, by extension), we prevented Chronos from gaining the grist hoarded by our denizens, which he needed in addition to grist of the session he was currently slaughtering to construct an Ultimate Reward for himself and become even more powerful than Lord English by doing so. The technology was powered by grist, which was gained in much the same manner as Sbarg's grist was (random acts of kindness such as drawing things for others, title explanation, real world kindnesses, etc.), and submitted to Doc Frost's butler for confirmation. It was much harder to gather the necessary grist than before, as there was nowhere near as large an amount of people playing this time around (97 at the time this was explained to us, as opposed to the thousands that played Sbarg).
While this was going on, Doc Frost first explained it was a plea for help by a Lord of Hope that alerted him to our plight. With that out of the way, he understood we might get bored whilst gathering grist, and thus decided to tell us the tale of Sglub (the doomed session from whence he was spawned) in the interim. This is probably the important part leading into Tidebound, so make sure to read this.
Having accomplished almost nothing in terms of grist gathering three days later, Doc Frost went through the misfiled drawings/writings/explanations/acts of kindness that people had stuck under the sbargrist tag (when they should have been going under landsave or submitted to his butler), bringing the grist count up to around 50%. This FINALLY spurred everyone into action, slow as it may have been. In response to a question about the Horrorterrors and whether their whispers could be trusted (as we still had Skaia, Prospit, and Derse around), he advised us to discern their desires, but not follow any instructions they gave us. He also made a post explaining Hussie's role in all this, which was a pretty cool bit of info.
After finally obtaining enough grist (just in time, or we would have sacrificed a great deal to retrieve our planets), we were given an image of a captchalogue card, which, when used in conjunction with a clue given much earlier, led to this, it representing the recovery of our planets. With that came the recovery of our God Tiers and powers. We were instructed to go to our lands, get back together with our sprites, do a few quests, and other such things, while he prepared the next step, which was to ectobiologize ourselves, a step oddly left out of the Sbarg session. How those who did not follow us out of the falsehood that was placed upon them were created/born, I do not know. We needed to gather ecto-grist at this step, gained by submitting a "revelation" we had once gone through that had changed how we see the world or ourselves. It was very personal, and many were reluctant to do so, resulting in another race against the clock as some of us (particularly the Skype group set up for this) desperately tried to convince others to submit something before our time ran out.
While this was going on, Doc Frost published a summation of events up until that point that was only one paragraph long, and yet was and is probably a better/more efficient explanation than this huge detailed post.
Seeing as how it was Halloween, Doc Frost also published a little more backstory for his universe's version, so also read this. These posts are all we know of his universe, after all.
Again, we got in the required amount of grist JUST in time, leading to this video which frankly is sort of creepy, and led to many hilarious asks of "WAIT SO WE'RE ALL JUST VERSIONS OF DAVE AND ROXY?!" This was Doc Frost's response.
Next step was to finish our land quests, which he had advised us to do earlier but was now a required step. I feel like finishing this up soon so here's the explanation of our task and the explanation as to why it was necessary.
After once again this task resulted in a lot of people doing nothing (this is why we so dearly need more people), an anon (who was actually me) suggested that since we were doomed at this rate, could we not simply fight Chronos, or at least attempt it? Doc Frost's response was... confusing, at least at first...
Apparently, Chronos had not left our session as alone as we'd thought, and had corrupted Doc Frost's transmissions. This led to us having to skip our land quests in favor of alchemizing new gear. We needed 36 sets of a specific kind, which was explained here.
But lo, even an interesting and extremely panic worthy turn of events such as this was not enough to spur our players into action (again, PLEASE join this nest part, kinda desperate here). Even with everything explained to us, no one stepped forward to be the first, and we were left with next to nothing, despite having 143 hours to do all this.
Now for where I come in, for I was a more important part of this ARG than you may know. At 24 hours left and only 1/6 of the necessary alchemizations (this one was mine), I decided to take matters in to my own hands. I went to literally every tumblr account that had ever posted under the Doc Frost, iamofcourse, or landsave tags, as well as anyone who had asked him ANYTHING on his or his butler's tumblr before, and asked them to draw the necessary items. FINALLY everyone got moving again and submissions started pouring in, thank God. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for that, honestly. :)
While we gathered the final necessary sets, Doc Frost talked to one specific Muse of Light, that being the tumblr user ChaoticPeace. He asked for help from them in making a weapon that would defeat Chronos, and CP accepted.
Funnily enough, we ended up with an EXCESS of alchemized sets after one person posted nine sets at once, within the last four hours until a rather... ALTERED Reckoning. This led to a plan which was described to us as swiping a HUGE magnet over a video game cartridge, whilst we stood on a smaller, equally powerful magnet that would hopefully keep us alive while the session Scratched around us. Just read the previous link, it explains it better. :p
We briefly got to be CP, who was picking up the pre-ectobiology frog necessary to create a normal genesis frog. Doc Frost needed him for some reason, so he was delivered to him. What Frost needed him for was only discovered later.
A few minutes after the frog was delivered, The Reckoning happened, and Chronos arrived along with it. Using the unimaginable power he already had, he reverted our Genesis Frog back into tadpole form (good thing we were no longer inside it...) We had escaped from Chronos, and we now had the Genesis Tadpole. So what now?
At this point Doc Frost himself arrived with CP in tow, and asked who had the largest Sylladex capacity. We each needed to give a sylladex description with three different statistics (size, ease, security), which needed to add up to 8 altogether. Once he had enough he would pick the one that best suited his needs.
While this was going on, we had some time for celebrating our escape (holiday break), and thus had a SPACE RAVE, using the tadpole as our strobe light and other people's powers to join in, as well as some alchemized food from earlier. Presumably a platform of some sort was conjured, though it was never explained. The time players created dilation bubbles so that we could spend much longer inside than was actually passing. Whether this was canon or not, I'm not quite sure, as it was treated as such despite being clarified as non-canon in an OOC comment (time bubble still existed despite party not actually happening?).
Knowing Chronos would be coming for us, we prepared ourselves for the worst as the party wound down.
That's when explosions started happening.
Chronos, while not actually here, was using his time and space mastery to teleport the largest meteor impacts that ever happened on Earth and send them flying straight at us. They exploded on the outside of our bubbles, but even with them we were losing people, especially our time players keeping the bubbles intact. People were either being knocked unconscious by the impacts, even when in 1/1025th time, and several heroic deaths occurred. Even when the rest of us rallied behind them to support them, two bubbles were destroyed and the players inside along with them (though thankfully most revived, although many were still unconscious).
As the revived and injured-but-still-mobile fled to the surviving bubbles (and the life players attempted to heal the injured), Chronos threw the Chicxulub meteor implicated in killing off the dinosaurs at us. Unable to move the bubbles away, and unable to escape to anywhere we wouldn't get hit, we sat and waited for our doom. However, Doc Frost left the bubble, went over to a surviving Alchemiter (apparently in the bubbles with us), pulled a padlock out of his pocket and snapped a key off inside, and then phased himself and the Alchemiter away, somehow leaving the hand with the padlock behind (though not severing it- think of it like there being a portal between himself and the hand). We didn't really think in depth about this though, since that's when the meteor hit.
We survived, thanks to the efforts of the space players bolstering the bubbles. However, it turns out there were at least THREE meteor events BIGGER than the meteor that supposedly killed off the dinosaurs. Then we panicked. But Doc Frost reappeared, a mirror in his other hand in addition to the padlock. He used the sylladex he'd taken prior to this, captchalogued both items, took the cards out, and captchalogued the modus itself. For the next part, I think it best to just quote the post:
"He goes to the Alchemiter, and inputs the code for the mirror and the modus, creating the REVERSE GUITARHERO MODUS. Now, rather than playing a song to retrieve an item, you play one to captchalogue it.
He then imputs the code for the new modus and the lock, creating the MUSIC VAULT MODUS. Once the tune has been played and the item captchalogued, the item can never be deployed. It is permanently locked within the card, never to be used again.
Off in the distance, getting closer this whole time, you can see another fireball. Both Space and Time players brace themselves for an impact as big as all previous combined."
When it hit, the bubbles flickered, reducing many in the front to naught but ash. As they reconstituted, the player Valuan attempted to go back in time so that he could set Derse's moon on a collision course with the asteroid. This failed, seeing as how the location he was attempting to get too (apparently the Genesis Frog) had been erased in all timelines, resulting in him "glitching" and freezing in place, unable to save himself. (Note: This is the only part that makes no sense whatsoever- sessions lie outside of the Genesis Frog, and therefore saying the location no longer exists makes no sense unless Chronos erased our session as well). We desperately prepared our bubbles for the next, inevitable impact. An alchemized item called the Coat of Souls was used by a Sylph of Blood to summon ghosts, which rallied everyone towards a single bubble to strengthen it as much as possible. It wasn't enough. The meteor struck, our shields crumbled, and every one of us was incinerated (ghosts included). We revived, but we were completely spent.
Chronos arrived, riding the Theia meteor, a rock the size of Mars whose impact created the moon. As we looked on in horror, Doc Frost took up the Coat of Souls and summoned more ghosts. From somewhere, they were all given instruments, and began to play, which Doc Frost as the conductor. We then realized that there was only one card inside his Music Vault Modus, and if it wasn't big enough to fit what he was attempting to captchalogue then we were doomed. Our instructions were to merge our remaining cards with his, and at the last second we finally managed to make a card large enough to contain the meteor.
Only seconds away from reaching us, the music died down and Chronos disappeared, meteor and all. He had been captchalogued, never to be removed from the card. We inserted it into the gristwidget and gained way, WAY too much grist, which was then absorbed into the genesis tadpole. We recombined the tadpole with the unectobiologized genesis frog and got ourselves and infant genesis frog who would rapidly mature to full size, and had NO possibility of spawning Chronos.
After either a presumed mourning period for the dead/possibly reviving them through Life player efforts, we needed some way to celebrate our victory, and we had some time to kill while the genesis frog grew anyways. What did that mean?
ANOTHER SPACE RAVE-
Which was quickly requested to become a ball instead, since the our victory deserved some CLASS.
To fully allow the frog to mature, we needed to submit a submit pictures of something so key to our homes that we could not imagine our house without it. This was to ensure that the frog grew quickly, so that a Chronos from before he was destroyed (TIME POWERS) could not attack us. But once AGAIN we grew complacent, forgetting that our enemy has time powers. Once AGAIN, I took matters into my own hands, and went through pretty much the same process as I did the last time. It wasn't as effective, but it worked in the end, and our frog grew back into our universe. We reentered it right where we left off, and settled back into life... with all our God Tier powers intact, including immortality.
A while passed...
And then he announced Part 2 (Tidebound), and we need player characters and command givers. The full explanation on this NEW part of the ARG (which you are now caught up on) can be found here, here, and here (and also on any page of the blog on the sidebar). Player characters can be new blood or have been in the previous part- it's up to you.
Congratulations, you are now UP TO DATE ON THIS ARG. :D
Now as you may have noticed, our key problem in the last part was lack of players who actually PLAYED- I had to go around reminding people this existed multiple times. SO we REALLY, REALLY need new players.
That would be you. Come, follow iamofcourse and join with us, whether as an integral part of the plot (there's room for six player characters) or as a command giver. Come on, you read the whole way through this; you're obviously at least interested. :) It's gonna be fun, so sign up!
EDIT: Sadly, Part 2 has since been abandoned due to lack of interest. Thankfully, part 1 can stand alone, so the storyline remains well made and complete as is.
