Maximum Ride Unofficial Community

Protect the flock! From JP and Hachette!

ARG --- Alternate Reality Game

A project to recreate Itex-era documents showing the rise of Itex as a company, and the creation of the Maximum Ride characters. Initial discussion on "What are you doing" thread starts HERE.

The story will chronicle Elena Mueller (known by her internet alias "Valentine") after her return from a trip to Germany, and the discovery of the various Itexicon files.

(I'll start updating this OP over the weekend to start compiling the files)

Views: 283

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

So, because I am a good-for-nothing, I am creating a LiveJournal account to be used by the fictional person posting our ARG documents. Figure we can set up some plausible backstory...
Actually, before even that, can we set up a private, throwaway version of this? We need to be sure that we understand the system inside and out, we don't want people discovering it too early, and we need a way for us to be contacted if some Hachette rep is deciding whether or not to castrate us.
Sure. Like, a free website?

I've been drafting backup documents for her discovery -- college student starts a blog bored in the airport, comes home from vacation, posts a few idle things, and then out of curiosity plugs in a flash drive she found in her bag...
Sure. See below.
In the meantime, let's flesh out the rest of the backstory.

Our person is a girl (a guy wouldn't know how to set up an effective social network) who has received in the mail a package. A package with an Itex symbol on it. In it are, say, two or three items, a recording, and a clue towards getting additional items (that's how an ARG works, community involvement).

While this is going on we, the writers, know that the person who left these document behind is actually Roland ter Borcht, who hoped to have some good evidence to be used against Itex to lower his sentence. The reason why he's sending it to this girl though is...ANY IDEAS?

The ARG will follow the girl as she gathers more and more data, while trying to figure out who sent these items in the first place, if she should turn the documents over to the authorities, and should end naturally with one last letter or recording from ter Borcht explaining why he put her through so much suffering in the first place.
Idea: The last box had a pressurized retrovirus mixture in it. By opening it, she is now the carrier of a genetic strain, which she must now get to Dr. Gunther-Hagen to examine. This allows us to tie up the loose end, and make her vanish at the end of the series.
I've been going with 'he is her uncle', but I can change that...*

Let's say the items are manila folders full of papers; the recording is a cut-together tape of phone calls, autopsy reports, etc. ; the clue for additional items is "call this number" or "email XXXXX" or something...

* Incidentally, the logic behind that is that she's his closest living relative, no one important in Itex knows she is visiting him / who she is for certain, and she lives far away in the United States.

For this, the retrovirus should induce alarming, but relatively harmless symptoms that do not respond to common treatments: she coughs blood, has abnormal fever, whatever.
We can't exactly do, "Call this number" but the e-mail thing is workable. We could set up an e-mail with an autoresponse that has, say, a password to be passed along to the ARG character.

So... let's say.

Related
Roland, Otto, Alice ter Borcht who marries...
Gary, who has our Protag as a duaghter. So the guy is just an odd uncle, mom doesn't mention her side of the family tree much (or is otherwise conspicuously absent, killed by a plot device, etc,)
Or a revision thereof. Because she knows she has German roots, she went to Germany as part of a school trip for sympathetic reasons. You can open the blog with "Lolz, here's the pics from Germany."
and then have her go through the rest of the stuff.

Those aren't exactly good symptoms to be traveling under. Probably best to stick with a fever, and one thing that is really unusual, but hide-able.
I believe Skype allows you to set up a phone number... but yeah, email w/ autoresponse sounds better.

Mother fled East Germany, and that's why protag has never heard much of Uncle. So, after her first year of college, Uncle Otto invites her to come spend a few weeks up in scenic Lendeheim to relax after exams.

Blood coughing can be concealed by hacking into a tissue / resisting the cough. She could also manifest, say, unusual tonsillolith growths (she wouldn't notice, only a dentist would know what they were, and anyone in breath range might only notice bad breath), or spots on the back of the throat... perhaps a sore throat that doesn't respond well to antibiotics.
The Uncle Otto schpiel sounds good to me.

Yeah, but she can't see those, or others would see those.. I'm thinking something truly freaky, that she'd want to hide, but that she'd notice and that would affect travel plans. I'm thinking scales-or-feathers-freaky. Besides, do you know how difficult it is to get on or off a plane sick? I threw up once on an international flight and had to spend an hour at our destination waiting as they ran scanners over me looking for SARS.
I flew to Hawaii immediately after a bout of tonsillitis (as in, 103 degree fever the day before we left) and there were no questions or worries. It depends on when you fly, really... and if you just have a wet-sounding cough, people will probably just dirty-look you so long as you cover it with a tissue.

Scales / feathers... ooh. We can go with fast-developing scaly patches on the legs and upper arms. Concealable, rather alarming, and something a young woman would rather not show off.
Exactly.

So what's the case with the trial sites?
Any luck on the scans?
Anything I can do to help?

Do you have a preference for the name of the main character, or should I start powering up the name generators?
I can set up a site to use for ARG planning like that.

Scans... as soon as I stop hissing about having lost my credit card and get downstairs.

Help... unless you know a major internet history cache that would have things from blogspot around 2005 - 2007, and it isn't archive.org. And in that case, I will bake and mail you a cake.

Elena is the first name I've been using, last name Valentine.

RSS

© 2024   Created by Z.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service