The Mare That Time Forgot: post-mortem · 3:03am Mar 20th, 2019
I've been waiting to write this blog ever since I reviewed the story at the start of the year.
I just hadn't been planning on the title being so relevant.
To recap, The Mare That Time Forgot was a very strange story, starting off with a long chapter detailing Twilight living in a world where time moves for nothing but herself, and following through with a long series of chapters covering the world's reaction after she kills herself to break the cycle. (And, judging by comments, apparently one of the chapters was over 100k words or something ridiculous at some point.) It was apparent that there was more going on, some kind of ARG, and so I and a number of other (much smarter) folks around Fimfiction set about trying to tease out the details and solve the puzzles.
This... took some turns. I honestly don't remember the whole thing, and I urge my collaborators to come forward with their stories.
What I do know was that Auspicious Author got wind of us working together and tried to use that as part of the game. A long string of clues sent via PM -- including waiting a week and a half for him to get back to you after one particular segment -- led to an extremely erudite cipher. I, not being the puzzle-solving sort, bowed out of the direct method and was rewarded with a single question. I used it to ask for a hint as to how to go about solving the cipher, which, as I recall, amused AA to no end.
But after the cipher was cracked, it seemed like maybe we had moved too fast for him. I don't know. You got the sense that he wasn't quite prepared, flying by the seat of his pants, occasionally sending out confusing signals. There was one point at which he was trying to convince PaulAsaran and I that another individual known as "Jack" was using his account and trying to drive us apart. Which, y'know, that was a very, "Uh, no?" kind of moment. It honestly seemed like AA was either lost, without any path to follow himself, or losing his mind.
After a while, things seemed like they would be coming to an end finally. TMTTF was updated with another chapter, which included more potential puzzles and no real clues or other content. And then today, I logged onto the Discord server where the collaborators have been, well, collaborating all this time, and...
He's left. The Roman numeral calls back to that last added chapter, but it doesn't actually mean anything, since apparently he's nuked his account and gone. I have no idea what to make of this. The last code contained in that chapter was Morse code saying "ERROR PLEASE HELP".
So what can we take away from this? Not much, I'm afraid, especially since the story itself is no longer on the site. I still say it's worth searching your standard archival sites for, if you like dark sci-fi and can handle character death. But if you're into solving puzzles, playing ARGs... I have to admit, it was disappointing. I can only assume AA was in over his head, that he'd either been too ambitious or pulled the trigger on posting the story too early. Maybe he didn't expect people to crack his codes so quickly; this has happened in other ARGs.
Whatever it was, what started looking like a fun ride became a lesson in frustration and confusion. Some puzzles were too easy (I was pleased with myself for decoding a long string of codes, but that was mostly just me being able to identify them and google "X decoder"), and some were too hard. And in the end, we're left with nothing.
Well, I guess that's it, then. :/
I was involved in this collaboration, and one thing of note is that he didn't just adapt to us working together: he outright required it. I had an alternate version of the final challenge, in which I simply needed to gather eleven people to organize a group message. Upon completion; however, he simply asked that I wait for the cipher to be solved.
I came in on this only at the very end, when Paul reached out to me saying he needed numbers. Then it all tanked and... yeah, PP laid it out pretty well. All I can really do add sorrow over a deleted story that much fewer people will be able to enjoy now.
Aww. The ARG had its up and downs, but I was enjoying it overall. It's a shame we won't get that final resolution.
I sent him a message after the added chapter disappeared, which he read but didn't respond to.
It was fun while it lasted.
Wow. This really is a step beyond leaving a story abandoned…
Aw man. I added it to my Read It Later shelf after your review, but I guess that's become Read It Never.
This makes me relieved that I didn't get the time to follow up with the ARG. It would be cool if some of the collaborators pieced together a narrative about what was lying inside that rabbit hole.
Dang. I had planned on reading this.
5030524
To call it an ARG is somewhat overstating it. We were given a bunch of puzzles and riddles that weren't really related to each other nor the story - there was no clear sense of direction to it, unfortunately. It was fun, but there wasn't really a "narrative" to go along with it (aside from the strange things happening with Paul and PP, but that didn't end up manifesting in any meaningful way).
If you're interested though, I could share the puzzles we were given through PM.
Disappointing. It sounds like exactly my sort of House of Leaves thing that would tickle my fancy to no end... but like HoL it ends with you being left holding the bag and wondering what the fuck just happened.
Darn. That's a letdown. There was definitely a sense of something going on under the surface of that story.
The fact that he deleted the story is frustrating. But there are other aspects as well. I mean, if you want people to play the game and solve the puzzle, it's important to make the puzzle self-containing. TAA made his puzzles such that you had to interact with him directly, which was foolish at best. TAA wasn't going to maintain the game forever, which meant that eventually there'd be a story out there with no solutions except to ask other people what happened. That's not how you do it.
And then there's the fact that the puzzles gradually meant less and less for the story in and of itself, to the point that the last few were random and completely unrelated. Those of us who got invested in the mystery wanted to know what Twilight's alternative ending was going to be, not wade through ridiculously complex cyphers with vague and largely unhelpful clues containing nothing whatsoever regarding Twilight. We were promised one thing and instead got an author scrambling to keep the game going, as if he'd forgotten the whole point. I mean, kudos for some interesting and fun puzzles, but rewards are expected.
This is all made more frustrating by the fact that TAA directly contacted me a month after I reviewed the story (extra frustration: I now have a review for a story that no longer exists). I was prepared to let other people solve the mystery, and he went through the trouble of pulling me back in. Later, when the mystery was getting winded and we were basically told to wait for developments, he posted an entirely new story. Then he took that story down. In a PM, he explained to me that he took it down because he wasn't satisfied with how it was turning out and wanted to make improvements. He offered to let me read the current copy.
I declined, wanting to wait until he had a more complete version. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe if I'd gone in and pursued that direct line of communication, we could have hammered out the problems with both situations and we'd still have a TAA. Don't get me wrong, I'm not taking the blame for it, I just wonder if the reason the guy is gone now is because he felt like he was failing and just needed some proper encouragement. He did ask for help, after all.
5030583
Yeah, I kind of got the feeling he was looking for something he wasn't getting. The role-playing aspect alone suggested he was way more into the 'game' than the rest of us, and I can't take his disappearance as anything but an attempt to save face. :/
I have no idea what that's like. :V
(Pre-emptive apology for the word wall, but it all needs to be laid out)
Hello, world!
I'm one of Present's collaborators, and one of the ones who was behind the major pull to get us all together. I'd like to take this opportunity to walk you through the puzzle sequence, so you can get an idea of what we had to go through.
The first two puzzles were in plain sight, so to speak. The author's notes for the early chapters contained fragments of Emily Dickinson's poem, "Because I Could Not Stop For Death--" This becomes important in just a moment. Later on, fragments of gibberish were littered through the author's notes, and in the final chapters (specifically, in the chapter that at one point had 100k words to conceal this), we were advised that there was a cipher in the author's notes, whose key was five letters -- a name, to be precise.
Due to previous experience, I immediately identified the cipher as a type called a Vigenere cipher, which is at its core an interleaved Caesar cipher, each one using a different letter from the keyphrase to control the rotation. It didn't take me long to identify "EMILY" as the key, calling back to the fragmented poem. (If you didn't know you were looking for a Vigenere cipher, his author page did identify it as his favorite.)
On decoding it, the cleartext announced that the decoder had taken the first step, and invited them to play a numbers game, asking the prime factors of some large number.
This led to the second puzzle, back into the story where the text invited the reader to play a numbers game, followed by a paragraph of gibberish.
Taking the prime factors revealed in the last puzzle and extracting the indicated words revealed a cleartext message, advising that one needed to look at the author's page for some sort of code, which should be sent to the author on a particular day and time.
At this point, respondents were put through a word/logic puzzle gauntlet.
First: We were asked to continue a number sequence based on the syllable content of the foregoing numbers (seven was omitted, indicating that the numbers we needed were monosyllabic).
Next, we were given a string of binary code, which converted to an ASCII representation of Morse, which converted to hexadecimal, which then asked "What measures time, uses hands, but no numbers?"
After a couple of false starts, I had a flash of inspiration in the shower the next day, and solved the riddle with "An hourglass." The cover art for the story was Twilight trapped inside an hourglass, nearly buried by the sand, which provided all the confirmation I needed that I was correct, in addition to a novel interpretation of "uses hands."
Ten days later, I was advised that I had passed the penultimate test, and was given a choice between asking a single question, and facing a new test.
I opted for the test, and was presented with a devilish puzzle called The Riddle of Alphabetia.
This is an excerpt from the riddle, which represents all I was given in terms of ciphertext.
I was also given two verses in English which purported to provide clues to the riddle's decoding; I will include them here in their entirety.
I'll bring up the solution when I learned of it.
At this point, I was stumped, and Present had been faced with his own choice, after I provided him with the hourglass solution. It was at that point, four days later, that I advised him to use his question to help me solve Alphabetia. The author noted this -- Present had no way to know what the puzzle was, since he opted for the question -- and provided a minor clue. Unfortunately, it was a clue we had already sussed out, and so provided no benefit.
Seven days after that, Present and another of our number, PaulAsaran, became embroiled in some sort of subgame surrounding "Jack," which Present mentioned. It was really weird, and not at all helpful in solving the puzzle, and overall seemed to be going nowhere.
For the next week, we spun our wheels, taking random stabs at the riddle to no avail while Present and Paul chased their own tails with "Jack." Occasionally, we'd feel like we made progress, but nothing ultimately came out.
On 31Jan, I raised the white flag and asked the author point-blank to help me solve the puzzle, laying out the facts that I knew about the Jack puzzle, that we were working together in Discord, and the general dissatisfaction we were feeling as aspirants.
He admitted then that the Jack subplot was not meant to be solved, and was a result of overextension:
I won't bore you with the rest of the back and forth, but the upshot is this:
The core element of the Riddle is the character triplet <A> <X> <B>. Depending on the verse, <A> and <B> can swap roles, but one denotes the ordinal of the word, and the other denotes the ordinal of the character <X> within the word. That is, "AOB" could mean "Second word, first letter is 'O.'" However, not all verses would decode the same, and it could be necessary to switch the roles, or the direction of sorting -- it was a mess.
After a lot of back and forth, and brute-forcing the sorting (thank you, Google Sheets!), I extracted the riddle:
"Silent 'Whiskey'" refers to the fact that the riddle's solution has a silent 'w,' making the solution "The answer." I was then advised "I just need you all to be patient, the puzzle is over, the reward is coming."
At this point, the story was updated to reflect the solving, and asked us to wait until 3Mar.
On or slightly after 3Mar, a new chapter was added, which offered no conclusion to the story. We were advised again to wait. Morse code at the bottom of the new chapter said "Tomorrow."
The next day, the Morse was updated to read "Error, please help." I sent a message to the author, cheekily asking in Morse "What do you need?" I was answered with:
which I interpreted to mean interaction is over, and we're just waiting. That interpretation was confirmed, and we returned to radio silence.
And now, it appears to be done. We've reached the end of things, and I have to say, I am not pleased.
Does The Mare That Time Forgot stand on its own? Yes. If a puzzle was not included, it would stand as a dark, compelling story, a well-written (for the most part) tragedy. However, puzzles require answers; we were promised one, but it was never delivered.
My biggest pet peeve on this site is authors deleting work.
5030635
Hear, hear. :/
Howdy, folks; little late, here, but I was another member of PP's motley crew of puzzle-solvers. I want to get my account off my chest so I can lay this thing to rest.
I came into the game late; only about a month or so before the end, after seeing Present complaining about Alphabetia in a mutual Discord server. My experience, however, was very different from most everyone elses'. Upon solving the Numbers Game (by, er, reverse engineering it; I never fully solved the puzzle that gave the hint for it), I was not given the next puzzle in the series, but was instead given a message to pass on to Present himself: "Jack is waiting."
Personally, I think this was the biggest flaw of TAA's game: the need for him to run it. Every puzzle after the Numbers Game required messaging TAA directly, and him giving the next puzzle to you. If the ARG had been more self-sufficient, it might not have gone off the rails quite like it did.
Regardless, after passing on the message, I was invited into the group. Without a puzzle of my own to solve, I instead jumped onto Alphabetia.
This may be a bit of a controversial opinion, but I actually think Alphabetia was a really well-designed puzzle. All the pieces needed to solve it were either given to us in the riddle or buried within the puzzle itself; it was just a matter of finding them. I'm pleased to be able to say that I cracked the secret to it independently at almost the exact same time ToxiClay did—and I had a lot of fun doing so.
Frankly, I had a lot of fun with the game in general, for what little of it I actually got to participate in. I've always enjoyed puzzles for their own sake, and despite how disappointed I am in what's happened at the end of things, I'm still glad I got to be a part of all this. TAA, if you ever end up reading this—let's play again some day, yeah? You still owe me an explanation for S-C-A-R-E-C-R-O-W.
-RB
5030635
Truth. It really grinds my gears when shit is deleted.
5032645
If you did, it was in blanking your account. Now no one can appreciate what you've done, for better or worse.