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Our story begins with Aftermath08.com. This website is under the guise of a social networking site that centres around photos and footage of nights out. The site is run by 
Karen and Mike.
A month or so into the the site's life Karen goes missing. At around the same time our other rabbitholes are launched. Hundreds of posters looking for Karen are placed in public areas: Dublin, Dundalk, DKIT, Trinity, DCU, Dublin Airport, Belfast.... On the same day envelope drops are made to hundreds of houses in the Dudalk area and flyers are placed on cars in Dundalk and Dublin, all asking the reader to phone David's number 0833563498 and to 'HELP!'.
We also bluetoothed messages [1] [2] [3] out for a number of hours on Campus at DKIT and had our message relayed on screens throughout the college. This number and some additional information is also posted in the graphics[1] [2] [3] [4] on the Aftermath08 website. There is also a bulk targetted email sent to people asking where Karen is. The number was also placed in classified ads in various places.
Meanwhile on Despoiler.org an article about Mysterious Space Monkeys appears. A number of established ARG players also have targetted messages left on their livejournal [1] [2] sending them to AdoptaSpacemonkey.com.
The targetted ARG players took the bait and [
massive] opened a topic on the game in the unfiction forums. This began a discussion on whether this website was part of an ARG or not. As they delved further into the website they began to confirm their suspicions that the website was indeed part of an ARG.
There was also some discussion as to whether Jen, who had left the initial message was a character or a rather incompetant puppetmaster and they do some investigating on her website Jen's Literary Nonsense.
When Chronus_Valtiel, Esteed, jelloarm collaboratively figured out the clues embedded in the site this gave them David's email address and the link to Aftermath08.com.
On Aftermath08.com some chatter was going on and boredoutofmytree had discovered David's Youtube account. On emailing David's e-mail address the players received an autoresponse.
Players are now aware that 1) Karen is missing, 2) There is a voicemail and flyers 3) David has a video blog 4) In the video blog David says he is going to call Karen.
Players wonder if David is Karen's husband. When we realised that many of our players could not access voicemails from outside the country we had Mike post a recording of the message to the Aftermath08 forums.
jelloarm figures out through these videos that David had found something at work that he shouldn't have and that he was afraid that something would happen to him and others because of this.
From David's YoutubeBritishBen also finds a viral video for Aftermath08.com on Youtube.
Even so, there is still speculation as to whether this was an ARG or not.
Further investigation by hyprmolly unearthes more information about Karen. They discover her full name: Karen Stapleton and find her Bebo [here] and MySpace [here] pages. hyprmolly also e-mailed Jen - the original poster on livejournal - and received messages that confirmed both that this was an ARG, that Karen and David are missing and that Jen was an in-game character.
A wordsearch is posted on Aftermath08 forums by a mysterious character with the alias 'Alice'. Once unscrambled by Arcas this clue leads players to Alices Evidence.
Alices Evidence has a grid layout with space 40 pages to be uploaded; however when players first arrive there is only 2 pages [pg 4] [pg 17] uploaded. Players begin to analyse these pages. Information that they gather here which they feel may be important includes: An address in Rio - as Rio was mentioned in David's blog- A memo with an IC logo on it which they feel looks really familiar - as it should- they realise the logo previously appeared on the Adopt a Space Monkey website. They come to the conclusion that this may be the logo of the Company David works for.
Jain transcribes all of David's blog in the hope of finding extra information.
Players decide to hit up Mike on Aftermath08 for some info on where David works. There is also a prevailing theory that David caused a system crash to get back at a co-worker and that this is related to the trouble he is currently in.
More pages appear on Alices Evidence; the reappearance of the IC logo lends creedance to the theory that it is the company David works for but players cannot find further information on the company.
Another new page on Alices Evidence is discovered: Jain discovers text hidden in a black background that says Tiny Prediction. When players email Alice about this clue Alice replies with "It may be more of a Dirty Inception". The players realise that Dirty Inception is an anagram of Tiny Prediction but get somewhat stuck on working out what it means.
Mr Toasty also discovers an image that Alice uploaded on Aftermath which is image 8of8 of a jigsaw image which pancito works out has the words of the Grimm Brothers Fairytale Rumpelstiltskin in it.
Alice posts a new riddle on the Aftermath08 forums. The players realise that the I see is a play on words related to IC but they still have problems getting further.
Meanwhile hyprmolly discovers image 1of8 of the Rumpelstiltskin jigsaw on Adopt a Space Monkey. They realise that when all 8 images have been collected and assembled the highlighted letters in the text will spell out a clue.
New pages [pg 6] [pg 22] [pg 24] are posted on Alices Evidence. Including some references to Jennifer O'Sullivan. They do not immediately make the connection between the Jen of livejournal or the Jen in David's Video blog but think the name is of significance.
They also discover and invert a list of names for a staff party which includes names perviously mentioned: Jen, Gary and Sean. At about this stage they make the connection between Jennifer O'Sullivan and the Jen in the game. When they e-mail her they get links to her livejournal and her flickr. They look further into Jens Literary Nonsense which they discovered earlier in the game and hyprmolly finds image 7of8 of the rumpelstiltskin jigsaw. This gives them enough to work with to guess that the finished image will spell out the URL to a website.
Players realise that Alice is someone who knows what is going on and is leaking out clues. They begin to try to work out who Alice is.
Alice posts a new riddle on the Aftermath08 forums. This leads the players to find Identicryption.
