Figured I'd say it, in light of recent events.
A few days ago, about 35 agents of KRAKEN attacked AMU. They didn't expect much resistance, since they keep up with Avie's blog and realized that the Martyrs were away. They had one armored car, a few agents with powers, and a lot of pistols.
I got my hands on one of their 9mm Glocks.
Those who went in had cheap, PASGT kevlar vests, and that was if they were wearing armor at all.
And, unfortunately, those doesn't hold up well to closely spaced shots at a very close range.
That's all I have to say on the matter.
Friday, July 26, 2019
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Someone's been stealing more than books from AMU...
I mentioned that there was a photo in my last post, one with Doctor Eiffel holding a printed copy of the first volume of the tablet translations. The one that, if you've paid attention to Avie's blog, shouldn't have actually existed.
See, that's the strange thing. Everyone assumed that there was only one, handwritten copy of each volume of the translations, or at least fully up-to-date versions. As the most recent members of the team, Jonas and I'd considered the possibility that it could actually a printing of the e-book, since that's the only digitized copy available, but it didn't get a wider print release because it wasn't fully up-to-date. A prototype of how a wider release would have looked, both for the formatting and for the design of the cover sleeves. Until Doctor Eiffel noticed the photo, and asked where it had come from.
She has no memory of ever having that photo taken, and none of the other team members remembered taking it.
Now, that was strange, but didn't conclusively prove any shenanigans. For instance, someone could have used an image editing program like Photoshop to create it. We'd still be unsure as to the why until we could find who had made it, but it was one possibility. One that got a little harder to believe we found there were several more photos of the other team members with the volume, all in different poses and angles. Not all of them showed this volume open, but there were enough shots with legible text for us to start cross-referenced Avie's e-book version with the excerpts in the photos.
Several of them were from sections that they hadn't digitized. Sections that the rest of the team is fairly sure are part of their translations.
Given the fact that it was accessible in the campus library for some time, it's still possible that the photos were doctored, and that they were working with the handwritten copy as a reference an not the e-book version. It would still leave the question of why someone would go to all of that trouble to create those photos and then just leave them scattered throughout random files.
...but, at the same time, it was possible that the photos hadn't been doctored at all.
I mean, think about it. The power to erase memories isn't unique to the Blind Man - some of the people I know for sure had that ability are dead, like redlight, but that doesn't rule out the possibility of others cropping up. Doctors Ferris and Grave might have created their Extractors, and thus hypothetically have access to that ability, but at a bare minimum that also includes members of the SMSC.
Or people who worked with them in the past, and removed the memories of ever working with them to gain those powers in the first place.
Of course, that doesn't mean this hypothetical memory thief would even have to have gotten their powers from an Extractor or an Enhancer.
Speculation about where this hypothetical memory thief came from aside, it's possible that actually had been a completed version of a print volume, but both it and the memories of its existence were gone. And that implies someone erased memories of that knowledge, but didn't want to erase every copy of that research altogether. Which, when you have the power to erase memories, it's a lot easier to make things disappear altogether.
Maybe not to the extent of, say, a small town... but several cuneiform tablets wouldn't be as much of an issue. Or these photos, for that matter. So either they were hidden in the event that the team lost their memories, or whoever took the memories wanted them to be found.
So. Tl;dr, we needed to check absolutely everything we had on the project, in case our hypothetical memory thief made off with more than just the team's memories. Some of the tablets, for example. And considering the fact that Doctor Eiffel's team brought back hundreds of them intact...
Or, perhaps even more likely, that complete printed version of the translations. So yet another copy could be out in the wind. Potentially a set of copies, even.
What's worse is that Jonas' notes suggest that the team was even further along in the translation process at some point after he had joined. Because remember how I mentioned those referenced a third volume? The second volume, at the time of the break-in, was only about a third of the first volume's size.
Suffice to say, after we explained our hypothesis to the others, it was met with understandable skepticism. Until we showed them the point where Jonas' "third volume" notes actually matched one of the tablets. And they were, in fact, at the point where the team would have ended the second volume. Ones that had only one copy, in that document lock-box where he keeps his backup copies. Ones that Jonas didn't remember writing.
Notes were dated six months ago.
The rest of the translation team was pissed.
See, that's the strange thing. Everyone assumed that there was only one, handwritten copy of each volume of the translations, or at least fully up-to-date versions. As the most recent members of the team, Jonas and I'd considered the possibility that it could actually a printing of the e-book, since that's the only digitized copy available, but it didn't get a wider print release because it wasn't fully up-to-date. A prototype of how a wider release would have looked, both for the formatting and for the design of the cover sleeves. Until Doctor Eiffel noticed the photo, and asked where it had come from.
She has no memory of ever having that photo taken, and none of the other team members remembered taking it.
Now, that was strange, but didn't conclusively prove any shenanigans. For instance, someone could have used an image editing program like Photoshop to create it. We'd still be unsure as to the why until we could find who had made it, but it was one possibility. One that got a little harder to believe we found there were several more photos of the other team members with the volume, all in different poses and angles. Not all of them showed this volume open, but there were enough shots with legible text for us to start cross-referenced Avie's e-book version with the excerpts in the photos.
Several of them were from sections that they hadn't digitized. Sections that the rest of the team is fairly sure are part of their translations.
Given the fact that it was accessible in the campus library for some time, it's still possible that the photos were doctored, and that they were working with the handwritten copy as a reference an not the e-book version. It would still leave the question of why someone would go to all of that trouble to create those photos and then just leave them scattered throughout random files.
...but, at the same time, it was possible that the photos hadn't been doctored at all.
I mean, think about it. The power to erase memories isn't unique to the Blind Man - some of the people I know for sure had that ability are dead, like redlight, but that doesn't rule out the possibility of others cropping up. Doctors Ferris and Grave might have created their Extractors, and thus hypothetically have access to that ability, but at a bare minimum that also includes members of the SMSC.
Or people who worked with them in the past, and removed the memories of ever working with them to gain those powers in the first place.
Of course, that doesn't mean this hypothetical memory thief would even have to have gotten their powers from an Extractor or an Enhancer.
Speculation about where this hypothetical memory thief came from aside, it's possible that actually had been a completed version of a print volume, but both it and the memories of its existence were gone. And that implies someone erased memories of that knowledge, but didn't want to erase every copy of that research altogether. Which, when you have the power to erase memories, it's a lot easier to make things disappear altogether.
Maybe not to the extent of, say, a small town... but several cuneiform tablets wouldn't be as much of an issue. Or these photos, for that matter. So either they were hidden in the event that the team lost their memories, or whoever took the memories wanted them to be found.
So. Tl;dr, we needed to check absolutely everything we had on the project, in case our hypothetical memory thief made off with more than just the team's memories. Some of the tablets, for example. And considering the fact that Doctor Eiffel's team brought back hundreds of them intact...
Or, perhaps even more likely, that complete printed version of the translations. So yet another copy could be out in the wind. Potentially a set of copies, even.
What's worse is that Jonas' notes suggest that the team was even further along in the translation process at some point after he had joined. Because remember how I mentioned those referenced a third volume? The second volume, at the time of the break-in, was only about a third of the first volume's size.
Suffice to say, after we explained our hypothesis to the others, it was met with understandable skepticism. Until we showed them the point where Jonas' "third volume" notes actually matched one of the tablets. And they were, in fact, at the point where the team would have ended the second volume. Ones that had only one copy, in that document lock-box where he keeps his backup copies. Ones that Jonas didn't remember writing.
Notes were dated six months ago.
The rest of the translation team was pissed.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
I realize that I've been quiet for the past few weeks.
And despite the fact that I've been at AMU for the vast majority of that time, there's a good reason why I din't immediately post about arriving there. Or, for that matter, how I got the job.
See, I managed to arrive in town a few hours before the break-in.
So I spent a good two weeks under investigation. I understand that they wanted to make sure that I wasn't the one who'd done it. But at the same time, what kind of idiot would steal from an organization the night before their job interview at the same place they was just robbed? Even better, for a position in which they would have been given inside access to the very information that they just stole?
Then again, the thieves weren't particularly bright. They stole the physical copies of the tablet translations, or at least the volumes that had been made. On the one hand, it made it painfully obvious how much the contents of those books meant to them. On the other... based on photographs, both volumes are individually thick enough to stop low-caliber bullets.
Of course, it's just as bizarre that AMU only had one copy of each book put out by the project so far. Given their lack of funding, though, maybe those were the only printings that they could afford.
I am being provided with food and board, so there's at least enough funding for that.
I did ask around about the manuscripts, and any ways that could help figure out what those translations actually contained, and why anyone would steal them. For a start, what happened to the copy of the translations they used for the printings? See, one of those photographs I mentioned earlier in this post had Doctor Eiffel posing for the camera while reading one of the volumes.
And it was printed. Not handwritten.
So we're trying to track down what happened to the files that were actually used for those editions. In the meantime, I've been going through what notes that were left behind on the subject of those translations. Though they didn't grab everything, they did manage to grab some of the notes that would have made it into the third volume.
Fortunately, they were Jonas' notes, and he actually keeps several copies of his work. We've been using those for cross-referencing which pages were actually taken.
...I've also been catching up with the blogosphere the past few days. Apparently the ARC has both volumes of the books, so at least we know that they're intact.
Considering that KRAKEN had their hands on them for over a month, it's likely that at least one of them thought to make copies. Even if they didn't have access to a photocopier in their safehouses, or couldn't spend time and money doing so at a library... at a bare minimum? All they would have to do is keep a steady hand and use a camera. Then they'd have digital copies of the text, and so long as that was safe then they wouldn't have to worry about losing the physical version.
But, again, see the note about the thickness of the books.
I admit, for the other three weeks, I was just caught up in trying to sort all of this out with the rest of the team. But hopefully I can explain a little more about what's been happening here soon.
See, I managed to arrive in town a few hours before the break-in.
So I spent a good two weeks under investigation. I understand that they wanted to make sure that I wasn't the one who'd done it. But at the same time, what kind of idiot would steal from an organization the night before their job interview at the same place they was just robbed? Even better, for a position in which they would have been given inside access to the very information that they just stole?
Then again, the thieves weren't particularly bright. They stole the physical copies of the tablet translations, or at least the volumes that had been made. On the one hand, it made it painfully obvious how much the contents of those books meant to them. On the other... based on photographs, both volumes are individually thick enough to stop low-caliber bullets.
Of course, it's just as bizarre that AMU only had one copy of each book put out by the project so far. Given their lack of funding, though, maybe those were the only printings that they could afford.
I am being provided with food and board, so there's at least enough funding for that.
I did ask around about the manuscripts, and any ways that could help figure out what those translations actually contained, and why anyone would steal them. For a start, what happened to the copy of the translations they used for the printings? See, one of those photographs I mentioned earlier in this post had Doctor Eiffel posing for the camera while reading one of the volumes.
And it was printed. Not handwritten.
So we're trying to track down what happened to the files that were actually used for those editions. In the meantime, I've been going through what notes that were left behind on the subject of those translations. Though they didn't grab everything, they did manage to grab some of the notes that would have made it into the third volume.
Fortunately, they were Jonas' notes, and he actually keeps several copies of his work. We've been using those for cross-referencing which pages were actually taken.
...I've also been catching up with the blogosphere the past few days. Apparently the ARC has both volumes of the books, so at least we know that they're intact.
Considering that KRAKEN had their hands on them for over a month, it's likely that at least one of them thought to make copies. Even if they didn't have access to a photocopier in their safehouses, or couldn't spend time and money doing so at a library... at a bare minimum? All they would have to do is keep a steady hand and use a camera. Then they'd have digital copies of the text, and so long as that was safe then they wouldn't have to worry about losing the physical version.
But, again, see the note about the thickness of the books.
I admit, for the other three weeks, I was just caught up in trying to sort all of this out with the rest of the team. But hopefully I can explain a little more about what's been happening here soon.
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