What a screwed up, awful, frustrating week. Happy Friday!
So remember last week when I mentioned the Lachmann memorial site having hundreds of links leading to a page that just asked “Are you Devoted?”
Well we finally “met” the people responsible this week. They call themselves The Devoted, and they’re some kind of weird cult obsessed with Brandon Lachmann’s death/disappearance. They said–
We must reassemble his final weeks, align ourselves to him, fill in the spaces that are missing. Complete the work. We believe he left a trail for us. A way to follow. A way to reach him. We have tried many times before, and failed. But now we know what we have to do.
Imagine what he has seen beyond the forest. -The Devoted
They’re trying to reach out to him using the things he had in his backpack (which we think they stole from Brandon’s parents) like some sort of seance or something, and they want us to help them.
They’re obsessed with following the timeline of Brandon’s last few weeks and frankly have been jerks about us trying to get our bearings around it all. They dumped over a hundred files on the memorial site. Drawings, pages of text, audio files… none of it makes much sense but some of the recruits (Mike, Robert, Piki, AlisonB, and Leigha) figured out the first piece of it today. A statue of Verdi in New York City.
Endri and the recruits are digging into it on the forum but it all feels sketchy and creepy to me. I just don’t see how this is helping us find the fourth fragment? The fragment that’s supposed to unlock a part of the book!
Oh! And all those pages that said “Are you Devoted” now are a not-at-all stressful countdown. To what? Who knows!
The Devoted are claiming in their weird emails to be some sort of Mountaineer-type group,
We believe what you believe and more.
And we are not the only factions.
Others are watching.
Others may be trying to reach him first.
We know this is hard.
We know how this feels.
We have been you before.
But they also seem to have ulterior motives and secret plans. Speaking of which!
After DG found the original Ackerly Green logo last week we all emailed Ascender, knowing he’d be more excited than anybody but we never heard from him. He’s either off again on some mysterious thingy or this is him handing the reins over to the recruits, like he wrote about. Either way, it’s frustrating, and Endri and I are trying to figure out who’s doing what and where we’re heading (though Endri is kind of drowning her fear and sorrows in paperwork over on the forum.)
We always had a leader, now we’re not only down an Ebenguardian (Augie), we may be down a Weatherwatcher too.
OH! And in all the crazy frustration I didn’t even notice until now that DG posted this week! Turns out she went out of town and came back with a secret plan too. Awesome! Great! Secret plans are the best!
–Eaves
At least we know for sure now that Diedre is staying.
Nice to have some bright side this week.