Can someone tell me briefly what the story behind the section 3 arg is? I thought it was only finding codes for xp and armor so I didn’t follow it because I’m not in to things like that. But I now realize there seems to be a story developing behind it and it’s starting to catch my attention. But as I am very late to the party and wouldn’t know where to begin following at this point I am wondering if someone could fill me in on the story, a detailed explanation would be great but you can just give a brief overview of it if you don’t want to go through the trouble.
ViolentORKid - One of the Section-3 handlers, the most relatable of the group, she does not use official military capitalisation when corresponding.
She was rescued by the efforts of Section-3 when she was trapped within a self-destructing base on Requiem with SEC0OP4243.
More recently incapacitated following an engagement with a rogue remnant of hydrAi referred to as aquAia leading to her being infected with ‘robotic cells’.
emergent/interference - These two entities appear to be the product of the ‘robotic cells’ meshing with ViolentORKid’s consciousness. It would seem that enabling emergent to survive interference will help us save ViolentORKid.
Sec3OP36516 - One of the Section-3 handlers CODENAME RED, instrumental in the saving of ViolentORKid and slaying of hydrAi.
His loyalty has been called into question many times but he has not failed us yet.
Unfortunately, he is subject to termination within the next 30 hours (as of this point in time) without our intervention.
SEC0OP4243 - One of the Section-3 handlers CODENAME BLUE, survived the assault on the base with ViolentORKid.
Not heard from since the destruction of hydrAi.
hydrAi/aquAia/fa15e - An intelligent AI and major antagonist during the Little King operation. Initially a force for ‘good’ - hydrAi was corrupted by fa15e, a failsafe virus.
This necessitated the termination of hydrAi which went on to survive as the subroutine aquAia.
aquAia tried to gain favour with Section-3 operatives in order to obtain glyphs for its own aims but was eventually terminated. It may live on within ViolentORKid.
tetraRai - A dumb AI that took over when hydrAi went rogue. It was able to help us recover many data nodes before it was destroyed during our assault on hydrAi
I enjoyed the time with hydrai the most. We played games, I asked riddles for him/her to solve. We actually had a fair amount of corresponding PM’s. My fondest memory would be the first month we started. Opkei, oplynx, opsepheus, optoasty, all of the ops that worked for many sleepless nights to unlock the raider set. The ups, the downs, the mysterious air of it all. Proud to have been a part of it.
> I enjoyed the time with hydrai the most. We played games, I asked riddles for him/her to solve. We actually had a fair amount of corresponding PM’s. My fondest memory would be the first month we started. Opkei, oplynx, opsepheus, optoasty, all of the ops that worked for many sleepless nights to unlock the raider set. The ups, the downs, the mysterious air of it all. Proud to have been a part of it.
Great to hear! I invite more operatives to tell their stories!
I know I’m a late comer to the ARG as well, but I am partial to the times when we played the Haunted Mansion games with the AIs. I don’t remember how many AIs this spanned over because we destroyed HydrAI, TetrarAI and AquaiA all pretty fast in hind sight.
It was fun watching other operatives trying to figure out which moves in those little text adventure games were the moves that wouldn’t get you killed, eaten, slimed/goo’d, or otherwise ‘game end’-ed.
> I enjoyed the time with hydrai the most. We played games, I asked riddles for him/her to solve. We actually had a fair amount of corresponding PM’s. My fondest memory would be the first month we started. Opkei, oplynx, opsepheus, optoasty, all of the ops that worked for many sleepless nights to unlock the raider set. The ups, the downs, the mysterious air of it all. Proud to have been a part of it.
As Seph stated in his synopsis, the next 24-30 hours or so will have some action because one of our handlers is scheduled to be terminated. And we don’t really like that.
> > Are those AI’s and their stories now canon in the halo universe?
>
> Correct. When this is all over we will likely go back through our many months of logs and document things properly.
I will look forward reading up on them all, I hope it is mysterious and deep like ILB or Iris ARG’s.
> > Is the whole thing over now?
>
> You may join us any time!
>
> As Seph stated in his synopsis, the next 24-30 hours or so will have some action because one of our handlers is scheduled to be terminated. And we don’t really like that.
> Great to hear! I invite more operatives to tell their stories!
I got left behind early on in the solving process. I followed the story but trying to solve the puzzles left me scratching my head. I was able to help somewhat with Datanode 1 by scouring a couple of the forum threads looking for Halo: Reach emblems and their corresponding service tags of people who were active in the forum thread during a certain period. I still have nightmares of scouring through the SECRET TERMINAL MEGATHREAD forum looking for likely candidates.
On to more recent activity I did get to participate in solving “Melatonin” and the text based adventure that subsequently followed. I found it amusing that our contact kept hinting that my guess “time” was right by creating different versions of my name. (running pistols nearly 50 times) Also, when you need something clean just touch the glaffy hindle on the puctator - Vrrroooooommmmm!
My laptop has been switch on and logging IRC since last November, my timezone has shifted to somewhere between PST and EST (i’m in the UK) and what little sleep I used to get before this ARG started has dwindled away further each passing month.
Wouldn’t change a thing though. I’ve learned so much over the last few months, met some great friends and kept myself busy with a few side projects. There’s also the Grollo’s, but that’s a whole other story
My favorite time was when nDOC went all HAL9000 on the comms channel and nuked 11 of out operatives include me, and the subsequent actions of the other OPs to recover our data, good times.
Lastly,
Rest In Peace radialsim
