SoulStorm ARG - Piece 3

[Snukm]

The only thing that pops to mind are bees xD

Which remind me of Elum and his honey problem:

From the Wikia:

They are summoned by ringing an Elum-Bell and help Abe traverse the dangers of Scrabania and Paramonia, aiding him in jumping large gaps and running faster to escape enemies.

If an Elum spots honey, it will immediately start eating it and completely ignore Abe. To proceed, the player must use bees to chase Elum off and get it moving again.

[Connell]

I wonder if Ed likes honey?

[Michael]

Nice find on the Navajo clues! I was stuck trying morse code and anagrams for ages, which must be wrong- but even if sheer coincidence, still got something interesting.

Ed's tweets I looked at were;

bzzbzzzzz* ** - dibeh -

I took the bzzbzzzzz to represent morse code, .- or 'A'.
Then, the '. .. - dibeh -' to represent E I T dibeh T

So overall letters being a,e,i,t,d,i,b,e,h,t

For the 'na-zz-tso-zz' tweet, I assumed the '-zz-' indicated blank letters, so na_tso_. This gave nothing, but in reverse is _ost_an. I put this through a crossword solver and the only result was 'postman', so I added these letters to the sequence from the previous tweet, which gave;

a,e,i,t,d,i,b,e,h,t,p,o,s,t,m,a,n

So as I said, I was playing with anagrams for various relevant words and noticed the 'banished to' someone mentioned some posts back. But here's the funny thing- you can rearrange this sequence, using every single letter once, into 'mate banished to pit'

So there I was assuming 'pit' was referring to the Necrum mine, and that there's another mudokon other than Ed to discover. Oh well never mind!

[Connell]

na-as-tso-si - -

— ed (@edmudokon) April 8, 2016

Finally another clue from Ed. Still baffled. So it definitely is Na-as-tso-si, but what about the hyphens? Does this indicate that they are unaware that we figured out the Navajo code, or that the hyphens are important to the other tweets. This one's getting a bit crazy for me, I can't see a pattern in the hypen and asterisks placements in the tweets.

[Tomc0]

Posts that contain these "bzzbzzzzz* **" sequences gave us Navajo words that can be extended with "-yazzi". This alters SMG to LMK.
(We aren't really closer, but it may help...)

[Connell]

Posts that contain these "bzzbzzzzz* **" sequences gave us Navajo words that can be extended with "-yazzi". This alters SMG to LMK.
(We aren't really closer, but it may help...)

Well noticed. I wonder if that is what they were trying to point out?

[Tomc0]

Well, by highlighting the only one that can't be interpreted in multiple ways they might be trying to hint us. But this whole SMG and LMK thing doesn't really make any sense to me..

Edit:
This might be interesting:

na-zz-tso-zz = M
- dibeh - = O L L
- - klizzie = U C K

But it's just playing with letters.

[Connell]

Is it possible the bzzz's are Navajo words that got lost whilst he was sending them to us, and the amount of letters is accurate, with the asterisks representing how many hyphens there are. E.G:

bzzbzzzzz* ** - dibeh -

— ed (@edmudokon) April 7, 2016

This Navajo word would have 9 letters, and 3 hyphens at various places

Believe it or not, the only Navajo word in the standard alphabet that fits this bill is... Na-as-tso-si, which we know gives the letter M The next tweet:

bzbzzbzbzzz**- - klizzie

— ed (@edmudokon) April 8, 2016

11 characters with 2 hyphens, again only one word that fits that bill this time it's NASH-DOIE-TSO which gives the letter L, as it's literal translation is Lion. Hopefully it's not a coincidence that there are only 2 Navajo words that fit those bills. And it still doesn't explain what the hyphens in the actual tweets are doing.

EDIT: I think this is a coincidence. It still produces gibberish, as the full string of letters from all his tweets in order would be msmlgm which doesn't produce anything from any methods.

[Manco]

OK, I think I’ve got it!

We have three Navajo words confirmed: dibeh, klizzie, and na-as-tso-si. We’ve also had four tweets in various configurations. If we look at them all:

bzzbzzzzz* ** - dibeh -

This was our first hint towards the use of Navajo. Also note the placement of the asterisks, the dashes and the buzzing.

na-zz-tso-zz

This is obviously an obscured na-as-tso-si.

bzbzzbzbzzz**- - klizzie

Asterisks and dashes again in a similar arrangement to previous. We also get our second clear Navajo word.

na-as-tso-si - -

There’s those dashes again, and the unobscured Navajo.

I think that this is all supposed to be one string that’s been broken up into several messages, with different parts missing or obscured each time. I think the punctuation is meant to hint at the placement of each word in the full message.

In two cases, we have one long obscured part followed by two asterisks, and then followed by two dashes. In one case, there’s a word between the dashes, and in another there’s a word after the dashes.

Now look at the second obscured component (bzbzzbzbzzz). If we assume each buzz is a syllable, then this matches the number of syllables in na-as-tso-si. I think these are one and the same.

I think the full unobscured message is meant to be:

na-as-tso-si ** - dibeh - klizzie

Ignore the punctuation, and we have:

M S G

Aaaand here’s where it leads: http://www.oddworld.com/soulstorm/ed/msg.jpg

Edit: I’m pretty sure the green symbols are a jigsaw of some sort, stitching them together now to see what comes out.

[Connell]

OK, I think I’ve got it!

M S G

Aaaand here’s where it leads: http://www.oddworld.com/soulstorm/ed/msg.jpg

Amazing work Manco Now, what do we do with the photo!

To think we only had 1 letter switched around. I even realised in my last post that the initial tweet's "bzzbzzzzz" had the same amount of letters as na-as-tso-si. That was such a bizarre way for them to communicate the order in. I think I must have tried smg.jpg and mgs.jpg and mgms.jpg about 100 times, but not that. Ha, so close! Glad we're getting somewhere.

EDIT: It looks a bit like a pigpen cipher, something I came across researching Navajo.

[Albino Slig 509]

Okay, I might be completely off, but the picture kind of looks like it has some sort of visual Morse code in it. The dashes, the slashes, and the dots sort of resemble it, but I tried decoding it and... Well, I'm just awful at decoding Morse. I notice there seems to be two kinds of dots, though.

Dash: -, Slash: /, Dot: ., Long Dot: ;

- / ;;-;
/ . .. . / . .. ..
--- / -- (Looks upside down?)
>;. ;;; > ; ;; ;;.
>; .. . > . .. ..
/ ---/ (Upside down)

Both of the upside down ones have the dashes and slashes changed, so maybe it's supposed to be read backwards?

Edit: Literally in the time writing this someone else figured it out. XD

[Manco]

Here’s how the stitched together version appears:



Edit: If it’s pigpen then I make it out as:

T O G E T H E R

Edit2: Clearer version:

[Connell]

Is that "> E (something) O > N O F" ?

Wait I think it is pigpen, which would be TOGETHER

EDIT: Manco you speedy shit. Ed also Tweeted "Together" yesterday. Together with what?

[Connell]

soz double post again plz dnt infract meh

[Manco]

We’ve had “together” before:

t́o̗͞g̛e̴̤̝̻̗̤t̵̫͔̗̦h̢̫̲̩̞̖̰e̖ͅͅr̴͇

— ed (@edmudokon) April 6, 2016

So what does it mean?

[Connell]

TA-BILH is the Navajo word for together. Doesn't come up as a .jpeg on the site though.

EDIT: The picture bears a striking resemblance to Ed's profile picture? Perhaps we have to combine them "together"?

Just tried the profile picture but it doesn't seem to display anything. But perhaps it is combining images?

[Manco]

Together has been mentioned a few times by Ed, it was previously assumed he was referring to working together to get the screenshots:

maybe we have to work together. we need more.

— ed (@edmudokon) April 5, 2016

Does this have another meaning that we aren’t seeing, or was this just a diversion while we wait on enough screenshots coming in?

[rzil]

notice the numbers
14 15 19 19 10 16
in the picture

EDIT : (or maybe the first is 415 and 3 at the end)

[Connell]

notice the numbers
14 15 19 19 10 16
in the picture

Where abouts are they? I can't see them.

[Manco]

I don’t see any numbers, can you point them out?

Edit: Keen eye rzil! They’re on the left of the grey horizontal bar in the middle.

[Connell]

Dear lord they're so strikingly obvious now! Ha. Is it decimal code? Not sure how it works but it's something I saw again yesterday.

[EJ Prime]

Guys I found a set of numbers in the picture, if you look on the left side of the greyish bar in the middle you can see: 14 15 19 19 10 16 17. Don't know if this mean anything yet but it's there.
Edit: Nvm, didn't see that it was already posted sorry.

[rzil]

there is a dot before the last 3 numbers which are
10 16 7
i think is translated (by letter order) to
.jpg

the first part is translated to noss,
oddworld.com/soulstorm/ed/noss.jpg leads nowhere
maybe we need to find something to replace the hyphens before

[Connell]

/noss.jpg returns nothing. Here's a table for reference.

Which other images have had numbers in them? Or potentially had numbers we've missed.

[Manco]

I’ve got it!

rzil is totally right, there’s a dot which makes the message end in .JPG

The numbers are 14 5 19 19 10 16 7

When switched with the corresponding letter in the alphabet, you get:

N E S S J P G

There’s also a series of dashes before the numbers, difficult to make out, but there.

So...

TOGETHERNESS.JPG

[rzil]

can "no ss" mean "number (No.) of Soulstorm brewery"?
EDIT: nevermind

[Connell]

Well done Manco, you've cracked it! Again we're fiddling round being one letter off, ha. Well done to everyone.

I was really hoping the task was going to be something active we could get involved with though, like a task within N'n'T or Exoddus. Bit disappointed, but glad we've got another one down

[Manco]

On the plus side, at least we’ll probably unlock another task after this.

[Connell]

Very true! I never realised how much I could enjoy an ARG on the whole. It's exactly my sort of thing. It's great to see them put so much effort into it as well.

I wonder if they can tell when someone has accessed the .JPG? Or maybe they just come and check here to see if we're done yet The website hasn't automatically unlocked piece 3 on the site so I'd assume it works on a manual communication.

[Manco]

By the way, they currently have 43,649 likes.