User:Mr. Pengy/Works In Progress

A page for my current works in progress.

The Internet Story (transcribed)
This is a true story about the internet. Please, don't go.

It's also the story of a treasure map, and a murder.

And it's a story which I stumbled upon just as anyone else might.

Let me show you.

On the twenty-second of April 2005, an entity going by the name of Al1 publishes a website, claiming that he's buried £9,000 somewhere in the UK, and that it's anyone's to find.

I say he, as although the name could be short for Alexandra as much as Allan, or pronounced in a variety of other ways, we'll assume for convenience, and um… probability's sake, that this particular user is male.

So, Al1 tells we're racing to solve his clues, and locate the treasure before anyone else. And his only link, takes us to a kind of broken comic strip. Lines of simple pictures - some of which are repeated, and some of which aren't. At this point, the majority of viewers must have found that they could go no further. Not that many people were paying attention anyway.

But one person at least, was watching. And three weeks later, he begins a video diary that will show his attempts to track down the money. The man goes by the name of Fortress. A fairly active user of YouTube, and other popular forums. Fortress explains that as he gets nearer to the treasure, he'll be adding a video every step of the way.

"Yeah, any of you wanna comment on like, catching me up or whatever, no way. I'm always one step ahead, like, at least. So."

If you allow the digression, solving Al1's puzzle is made much easier with knowledge of an old folk story. Thanks to Chaucer you may know it as the Pardoner's Tale. It goes like this.

[insert video]

The simple tale concludes that if you go looking for death, you'll be sure to find it.

"Yeah, so, I thought about it, and all these little pictures reminded me of some old kid's story. Couldn't find it. Fuck it."

But what he'd realized was that each of the pictures on Al1's puzzle matched up to a specific moment in the tale. Put those moments in order, and you can start building an alphabet. With the first scene standing for A, and the last scene standing for zed.