Morning

Mal posts the player-made zine on FreeDF. You can find it by adding the URL slug /dans-des-circonstances-eternelles to en-abime.com. She has decided to visit Tati, although it is unknown where she is right now.

Since the zine mentions a twin by name, they visit it and share a PowerPoint of all the information they had about Thomas (accessible through clicking the glitch on the page.) (It is unknown where the twin is right now.) A letter in a different font (the “T” on “The Incident”) links to w-h-a-t-h-a-p-p-e-n-e-d.

Summary: This PowerPoint includes a photo of Thomas and the details around his disappearance: He was a freshman exchange student at Princeton University in New Jersey whose parents had died 2 years before of the flu. He went missing in October of 1915 – he checked into a carrel in the library and never checked out. (The footnotes note these carrels are now in Firestone Library.) He was “kind of an introvert” but an “excellent student,” so no one noticed he was missing until months later. The Works Cited page of the PPT only lists en-abime.com as well as the page for requesting visitor access to Firestone Library. Players speculate this may be the site of a geocache.

The zine page also links to Mal’s Favorite Gigs in NYC. This page begins as a blank page and populates with pop-ups addressing the reader as you scroll down, before showing a list of Mal’s bands and performance venues – potentially another geocache lead? It also features a voice that speaks in blackout poetry, similar to the blackout poetry sections of the CYOA.

Summary: The pop-ups ask the reader to record information about themselves (to presumably join the abime) – “Log on now!” “Share abundantly your photographs, experiences, and stories with your friends.” It then presents Mal’s list of gigs as “a gift.” The list of gigs lists the band and location of each performance, as well as a short description of Mal’s experience performing with them. Mal’s handwritten note at the top reads “if you haven’t got an I.D., even a fake one, FORGET ABOUT IT, DUDETTE!” Below the gig list, the pop-ups ask the reader to “Match them with the right keys to the kingdom” for an “instantaneous cure,” “but hurry, a machine for living won’t be hanging around for long.” Below this, the blackout poetry voice begins, imploring the reader to “stop feeding us.” Their requests and cries for help are similar in tone to the ones in the CYOA.

Mal’s Favorite Gigs page leads to HELP, what looks like a customer service page with a set of Q&As and a form. The page is written by (and the Q&As are answered) by the same voices from the Mal’s Gigs page (Ad pop-ups and blackout poetry). The header at the top of the page toggles between “archive” and “appetite” on hover, and “appetite” is “all” while “ARCHIVE” is “NOTHING.” The form is “for Urgent Retrieval Concerns” and asks the reader to “DESCRIBE: WHAT YOU SEE. WHERE YOU ARE. WHERE YOU HAVE SOUGHT. WHERE YOU HAVE NOT YET SOUGHT.”

Summary: The two voices describe themselves as brothers, and have very different personalities. The popup voice describes itself as our “friend,” and encourages the questioner to find “these things” and “make them happy.” The question text eventually goes off the rails: (“Why is my skin so heavy? Why are my eyeballs so dry? Why are my bones so wet?”) to which the popup text voice answers, “You aren’t there yet, friend, but you’re doing well!” In contrast, the blackout poetry voice describes itself as our “bastard creation” and says that if we are “here” it has “failed.” It begs us to “please don’t go looking for this [...] please instead forget all about this. About them. About me.” On the left side of the page are a list of what seems to be various manifestations of HEAVEN, a series of tips that seem to be for geocaching, and there is a form at the bottom that asks for location, time, name of who they are looking for, and a description of their location.

Afternoon/Evening

Players submit form responses to HELP, most of which receive unhelpful answers via email. 

Players submitting questions to the form received a response from the email [email protected] from a username THE ARCHIVE THE APPETITE. Most contained a screenshot of their question and a popup image reading “USE TOOLS FOR THEIR INTENDED PURPOSE.” Some emails contained an additional image reading “HA!HA!HA!” 

At 2:41 PM EST, player sylvan receives a reply to his email “bonjour” with the additional image “I DON’T SPEAK FRENCH” and the subject line “19/20” A minute earlier at 2:40, another player Vincent received a similar email with the subject line “20/20.” Later, Vincent receives another, this time with the subject line “18/20.” Players decide not to send more emails until figuring out more about the “INTENDED PURPOSE” so the countdown stops. 

At around midnight, player charles entertainment cheese sends a question: “We have looked everywhere. We are Thomas stretched across En Abime. I want to know where he entered from - Princeton? New Jersey? The Library? We have looked across as many pages as we have. We have found him in PDFs and websites where his past self is recorded and archived.” This receives a different response, without a countdown number, hinting that these questions are closer to the “INTENDED PURPOSE” and “for greater knowledge on more subjects, use your library often!”

Overall Theories

Players think these pop-ups and blackout text are two new characters, the Archive and the Appetite, which may be made up of the Abime itself. They seem more powerful than the other characters and may have placed the flyers around the different locations. They seem to want us to find whatever information they don’t yet know, and are interested in physical geocaches. 

Next steps from this update:

Follow these geocache leads

Crack w-h-a-t-h-a-p-p-e-n-e-d

AA: The “Artist Artificer”

AA is a Tiefling Battlesmith Artificer. He has dark goldenrod skin and bright sky eyes. He was raised by his half-orc mother and blue tiefling father. AA uses graffiti to create magic with a spraycan and stencils as his spellcaster focus and collapsible baton for self defense when times require a more upfront aproach. His “steel defender” is Primis and takes the form of metal humanoid who acts as his silent bodyguard.

His parents experienced quite a bit of prejudice for the classic stereo-types of their “species” but they both worked hard at staying out of trouble as blue collar workers. They wanted AA to live free of those expectations and raised him with as much love as they could muster even among the simpleton environment  he was bound to experience. AA from a young age was much smarter than the sum of his parents combined which was their pride and had a quite an aptitude for magical studies. 

So when AA got accepted to the “Institute of Extraordinary Arcanists” they were overjoyed and used all their savings to get him there. They knew he could do so much better than their podunk town and wanted to him to experience the outside world. AA worked hard as well to get much scholarship funding as well to lighten the burden on them as well cause he loved his parents just as much as them.

AA arrived in the city with amazement and excitement of learning magic he’d never seen before. AA did well in his studies at the Institute but as he continued to progress he began to notice something with the city. AA noticed a sort strong classist division within the city when it came to learning magic. From his town that although there prejudice when it came to race everyone recognized each of them played a role in their town. If someone showed aptitude for the farming they were taught farming. If the ability at magic they learned magic. And that was respected to a certain degree. 

But in the City it seemed that if you had talent, if you didn’t have the money to pay for it didn’t matter. AA was lucky that because he was from out of town it was less expensive. But for any lowborn citizen, the system was designed for them to never rise above their class. If you were a student of the Institute you were insured automatically to start as high middle-class. AA did profit from this system but he couldn’t stand its injustice.

Eventually AA joins the “Underhand“ an underground group of artificers that work to bring magic to those who need it to escape the system that locks them in the City’s hierarchy. They also take on vigilante work related to quelling random monster appearances that have been occurring across the city. Their mission is “To protect the growth of those beneath the foot of privilege.”

Evening