So, here’s my summary to date. Yes, this is probably obvious to most people, but I like to start small.
So, the story tells of Beyell’s journey to escape Junk Town. This is a parallel to Brandon own’s journey to escape our world, and New York City in particular.
Beyell has to find and solve 4 beacons in order to find the way out.
The devoted believe Brandon had to do several things in the weeks leading up to his escape.
If these stories are parallel, then Brandon believed he had to find 4 beacons, in New York City, before he could find the way out.
We need to find these 4 beacons Brandon wanted to ‘activate’.
The first beacon is fortunately also the best described.
It’s described a statue of a bearded gentleman surrounded by four jets of water running over 4 smaller statues surrounding it. Each of the smaller statues has a plaque, which is likely represented by the 4 plaques found in the documents.
I’m guessing we need to find this parallel in our world to solve the first beacon.
Excellent find @TheBellsAreRinging! The subway station Where Brandon’s body was found is underneath City Hall.We’re gonna need a closer look at this fountain.
I’m liking that fountain. The best guess I’ve made so far is one of the flagpoles outside the New York City Library. We know Brandon visited there cause he sketched the lions outside.
I like it because it features 4 statues surrounding it each holding a separate object. One is a sword, one appears to be a book and I can’t figure out the other two yet.
Yeah, I don’t think this is the right monument. That definitely looks like a sheathed sword so we have 2 swords and book and we’re already too far from the 4 images on the plaques I think.
Wait a second, don’t give up on it so easily. One of the images on the plaques is a scimitar, My first thought when I saw that sword is that it was curved a bit like a scimitar.
What font would you all say was used on the plaques? I think if we can figure that out making sense of the marks on them might be easier. I think the first letter is an ‘I’ and the second to last is a ‘T’.
I am completely overwhelmed by all of this but it seems like we’re meant to solve this part first, since we have the most detail about it. Are the numbers on the plaques supposed to help? I assumed they were dates but I haven’t found anything yet.
The plaques look to me like something you would find on a door. Could the numbers be something as simple as an address? The missing words are the streets? I’m not familiar enough with NY to know if most or all of the streets are named after numbers, but are there any with words for names? Elm, State, Pinewood, etc.?
Just stabbing in the dark. I tried to tweak the plaque images in photoshop to see if the missing letters left an impression but came up empty. This feels like trying to put a puzzle together without the picture on the cover to know what it’s supposed to look like.
EDIT: The game notes mention that Lady Barleywade runs the Towers. Could these plaques indicate room numbers of important guests?If so, who lives in what room?
Well I’m pretty sure the flagpole isn’t what we’re looking for. I’m going to concentrate a bit on Central park.
My theory here is that if we take his game story and assume Brandon was living it out. The first thing he does is run across a nice, helpful person named Professor Green. Or as someone smarter than me in the other thread pointed out, probably Sullivan Green. Sullivan probably knew all about magic and explained to Brandon how to escape this world.
If that theory holds, then the next step is he finds the first beacon right outside Professor Green’s room. Sullivan Green lived in Central park. If the beacon is that close in the real world, then it has to be near Central Park.
Standard disclaimers of “I have no idea what I’m talking about” apply. But gotta try something. And I have absolutely no clue what to do with any of this otherwise.
It’s in the Central Park Conservatory.
It contains a single statue with water cascading down onto a platform that houses 4 smaller humanoid statues.
It commemorates the Croton Water system which brought clean, fresh water to NYC. (Kinda a filtration system…if you squint)
Cons:
It’s a statue of an angel, and not a bearded man on top like the story.
As far as I can tell there are no plaques on it, and the 4 images on the plaques in our story have no correlation to the fountain that I can find.
Still have no idea what the numbers mean.
Been trying to work out the connection between the images: a scarab, a castle, a scimitar and dagger/knife, and a ring. I think @AlisonB is onto something with dates. Assume as this is in NY (is it?) the dates are in the US fashion - MM/DD/YY?
I think we can be certain that it’s in New York. The problem is, the fountain is inside a building, making it much harder to find. We have to find the research tower before we can find the fountain.
I’m feeling like we’re at a complete dead end here. And if this is the first thing we’re supposed to be doing (and it’s certainly possible I’m wrong about that) then we’re just spinning our wheels going nowhere.
Rereading this thread I think one underlying question we really need to discuss is how closely do we think Brandon’s story and description of Beyell’s world matches our own?
Are we expecting to find the exact thing he describes in his story in our world?
Are we assuming he got the general gist of the object, but the details differ?
Or are we assuming this veil between memory and imagination is really cloudy and out of every 10 details maybe 1 or 2 match between worlds?
I’ve been assuming it’s the middle one. If he gives 10 details about a thing, maybe 5-6 match it’s counterpart in the real world.
How closely do any of you think we should be looking for a parallel?
Or as a different question if you rather. Is there any point looking for a parallel at all?
@Robert, that’s what I’ve been thinking about all night. I don’t think it’s all literal, it feels more like Brandon was painting over the real world, which means it A) opens up the options but B) makes it harder to nail down. I agree with @Mike that we probably have to send The Devoted finished “tasks” (they mention sending more when they’re assured that we are moving along) but there are things in their emails that we haven’t figured out… elements and entities? We need a step back to look at all this and see what’s noise and what isn’t, but it’s hard to gain perspective when we have four hundred countdowns ticking on the Forest site. We need to figure out the first step, and all we know is that we have a lead on one beacon. The statue and the plaques.
