Mountaineer Recap: The Week of July 30th

Last week ended with Mountaineers now and sometime in the 90s unlocking a new piece of the Book of Briars’ Thirteenth fragment.

Early in the week Augie sent word that the ’94 Mountaineers had solved half of the clock face nursery rhyme puzzle by assembling the following stanza:

Hickory Dickory dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
And down she run
The mouse was not yet done

Using the remaining letters the modern day Mountaineers assembled the second half and sent it back to Augie:

Hickory dickory shut
The mouse began to cut
The clocks did chime
She split down the time
Right the longest line

Using the finished rhyme as a clue, Viviane pointed out that a fully twisted mobius strip, when cut down the middle, created two interlocking rings.

Mountaineers cut the mobius strip down the middle and fastened the two clock faces inside each ring. Past and present, interconnected.

Meanwhile Augie replied midweek with a terrifying story. Ascender, who had been attending to mindswept recruit Missouri had been attacked by a group of commandeered mountaineers. He barely escaped them and The Storm with the help of fellow Mountaineer, Knatz. Augie was reeling from the realization that he’d almost lost another friend, and that part of Ascender’s mind had been wiped by brief contact with The Storm. Augie cryptically told us he had to take a trip, that we wouldn’t hear from him for a few days, and that the only way to protect others from a storm was to become a lightning rod.

We had nothing to do but wait. After a few days of trial and error it was discovered that the two clock faces could connect, and when connected, arrows from one side pointed to letters on the other when certain words were correctly matched. The letters spelled the word “Inlaudetus”.

We sent the word to Augie, who plugged it into the book’s site and it returned a new clue:

Inlaudetus. More commonly referred to as The Obscured Age. A time known in classical magimystic parlance as The Book of the Hidden.

40.7038 – 74.0108

Fragment 13 was solved, and the numbers led us to a spot in lower Manhattan called The Portal down to Old New York.

We reached out to Deirdre, hoping she could take her father’s journal to the portal, but a day later we heard back from Cole instead. Deirdre’s Aunt Monica had died and Deirdre and Cole had flown back to Ireland.

We sent Augie the spell we used to retrieve his own lost memories, hoping it might help with Ascender or possibly the other recruits.

We’re now waiting to hear from Augie, Deirdre and/or Cole, as The Storm gets closer and closer to wiping out the ’94s.

Endri