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vitriol-and-alcohol · 5 days ago

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Now that Meet the Real Medic has raised nearly double its goal, it's probably well past time to finish this write-up.

Did you catch the ARG?

Medic.tf was brought to the public's attention nearly two weeks ago on June 7th when Medic's voice actor, Robin Atkin Dowes, tweeted a short video and link to the site.

This is what visitors found when they visited.

The Internet did what it does when presented with a mysterious image and a Reddit user found this hidden in the image.

A puzzle? That's exciting.

Metadata was picked apart and a handful of people shared what they found over several Reddit threads. It was still 50/50 in my mind as to whether this was an ARG or not. My sister used to hide things in the filenames and metadata of our school's website because she and her friend were often left unsupervised when asked to update it. These might have just been fun Easter Eggs, not meant to be seen by anyone outside of the project designers.

It seemed like we got our answer the next day though

Now that we were looking for them, we found a secret pretty quickly.

The @ and . gave away that what we had was an email address. A few combinations of TF2 and mtm were tried, finally [email protected] went through without bouncing back.

It seems that anything that was sent to the address received the same response

Just as a photo, that's beautiful. I love the composition and use of colors. But we're here for puzzles. This one was solved while I was at work, so here's what Reddit user Ragemydreams86 found.

So, I did it. You failed to mention the filename, which in morse code translated to "BACKWARDS". I tried many unnecessarily complicated stuff... WIth the help of my pal we even wrote the script that grouped the pairs of signs in couples of three, turned it into a hex color map, hoping to get an image ":) But the solution was stupidly easy. You just had to take the whole line and (no way!) turn it BACKWARDS as is! Then I translated it into ASCII which resulted in morse code. Which then translated into:

AN EVERY DAY OBJECT SEEN IN A NON EVERY DAY SETTING. STEMMING FROM A PLACE OF RESOURCEFULNESS. HE CARRIED IT WHEN WE MET HIM, YET WE DO NOT REMEMBER. THE OBJECT IS THE KEY. TELL US AND WE SHALL SET HIM FREE.

And that's kind of where most of the summaries I've seen end.

Because I was the only one lucky enough to guess correctly...

I didn't notice until coming back to the game this year that Medic doesn't have his stock medigun in Meet the Medic. This one has that weird third handle.

I spent way too long digging in wikis to figure out what it was for. It's not near either trigger! Does it hook onto the backpack when he uses a syringe gun or saw?

It's a blender! An everyday object in a non-everyday setting. How resourceful.

After not hearing back, I hedged my bets and sent a few more guesses, but it was the blender email that got the response. I was asked what my second favorite class was and way overthought that, looking for any puzzle I was missing.

And that's when things really took a strange twist.

Shork revealed that there hadn't actually been an ARG. At least, not initially. I've played a 42 Entertainment ARG for a major company that was less coherent than a thing put together for fun in a few days (RIP Human Preservation Project, I haven't chewed 5 Gum since.) He said they made the game in response to the way people were treating the website like a puzzle.

I initially wanted to write about this to bring other people into the puzzle solving, then, after it ended, to reveal what the answer and aftermath had been. I wanted to let people know why I had so much faith in the project, but it was funded in under 24 hours, so no one needs my opinion.

Maybe the only conclusion is that communal puzzle solving is just fun. Maybe I played too many little ARGs in my Unfiction days that just fizzled out without closure and I wanted to make this available for anyone who was looking.

Maybe I'm just kind of grateful for this community. I know I don't interact much with the rest of you, but I'm glad we're in this together.

#tf2

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vitriol-and-alcohol · 20 days ago

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Hey, I ran across this post again!

I reread both original novels and I have some ✨thoughts.✨

I'm assuming the match is between the novel versions of Drs. Frankenstein and Jekyll and the comic/gameplay version of Dr. Ludwig.

Basically, there's no version of this fight where Ludwig doesn't win. Getting a bit pedantic, he benefits from a century or two of advances in agriculture and medicine out of the gate.

Ignoring that, let's look at our fighters:

Victor Frankenstein is a wealthy young man from an influential family in Geneva. He was an intelligent child, though he didn't have a lot of guidance in what he studied early on. He consumed a lot of debunked and pseudoscience, for which he was teased by his professors later in life. He finds the natural sciences interesting as well, and to study further he enrolls in the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. Before he leaves, his mother dies.

While in Germany, he claims to have discovered the secret to animating the inanimate. He's not very clear about his methods, but it seems to involve quite a bit of chemistry and, if I remember correctly, electricity. He spends long nights in his workshop afterwards assembling a giant man. Because it is relevant to his fighting statistics, I want to note that, from what I understood, he does not go grave robbing for this endeavor. He says he visited charnel houses for his materials. He designed his creature, his Adam, to be beautiful. Something goes wrong the moment he completes the process, however. He's revolted by the very sight of what he's done and goes to sleep in a churchyard over it.

That becomes a bit of a theme for him. He's disgusted by his Adam, and for a long while whenever he sees him, Victor sleeps outside about it. He's so messed up after the first time, he's incapacitated for nearly nine months. He then returns home to find that his younger brother has died and their family maid, a childhood companion named Justine, has been accused of his murder. He's sure that somehow, Adam is the true culprit. He reassures his beloved cousin/fiance Elizabeth (a much more important and awesome character in the story than I've given her credit for here) of their friend's innocence and guess to find the scene of the crime. He sees his creation in the distance and sleeps outside over it.

At the trial his brother's murder, Elizabeth speaks eloquently as a character witness for Justine. Victor, who saw an 8 foot tall man at the crime scene decides to keep his mouth shut. I know it's not CSI Geneva, but the murderer left a handprint on William, and I assume Adam's hands are much larger than Justine's. The only reason they suspect her is because she had a cameo in her pocket that William was wearing. Elizabeth points out that she wouldn't have had to kill him over it if she wanted it, she could have just asked. The court has literally no other evidence and Victor never says a single thing. So she's executed after being coerced into a confession in order to receive Last Rites.

In the meantime, someone else has inadvertently taught Adam French, so he's able to eventually have a conversation with Victor. He asks for a female companion. Victor agrees, then changes his mind, then a lot of other people die. Adam figures out guns at one point. They chase each other as far North as they can go. He's kind of a dick to the one guy who's nice to him, the captain of the boat who rescued him from freezing to death, then Victor dies too. Adam finds his creator lifeless on that boat and goes to live in solitude.

IN CONCLUSION:

Victor does have a bit of raw strength and endurance. He wasn't building muscle by digging in graveyards, but moving around human bodies isn't easy. He's generally healthy when he's not worked himself into hysterics over the uncanny valley existential question mark he created. He's intelligent, but incredibly cowardly. The disaster he finds is largely of his own doing and obsessions.

We know much less about Henry Jekyll. Like Victor Frankenstein, however, the act of creation he's best known for is also largely chemical, though it seems to lean a bit more into alchemy and medicine.

We know he's a well respected doctor in Soho and from his large house and serving staff, likely well off. He spends a lot of his time trying to live up to that image of the philanthropic doctor and makes a potion to try and help him repress those urges. He later writes that if he'd been trying to enhance his benevolent side, the resulting split person might have been more like an angel than the evil person that did emerge.

And... That's kind of it. He tries to stay himself eventually, but he loses control of himself in his sleep and eventually can no longer make the potion. He dies as Edwin Hyde.

IN CONCLUSION:

I'm not including Hyde in this equation. We know Hyde is incredibly strong, but we only ever see Jekyll sickly. They have very different physical forms, with Hyde the younger and stronger one. Henry's smart, but again, he brings his disaster on himself with his obsession. He keeps Hyde's memories, but it's not like Edwin's a skilled fighter.

Finally

A lot of Herbert Ludwig's early life is also a mystery. A retcon of his origin gives him the hometown of the "vaguely European" city of Rottenburg, Germany. The blurb also, interestingly, hints that he comes from a long line of mad doctors who swap townsfolk's organs until they get carried away and are run out of town by a torch and pitchfork wielding mob.

He ends up, eventually, in America in the employ of Team Fortress Industries where he's hired as the team Medic. Between fleeing home and the end of Comic 7, he 1) steals a box truck containing wedding doves from some Prime Minister's wedding, 2) absconds with one of his patients skeleton mid-surgery (they survive), 3) invents a fluid that can heal nearly any wound on the battlefield, 4) brings back a teammate hours after his death, 5) sells his soul to what looks like the devil, then later performs soul transfer for the inevitable reckoning with that devil where he negotiates himself into five more decades of life and a soul left to bargain with before he has to start worrying, 6) invents or at least uses several weapons where he is able to shoot health into a teammate from afar.

As far as in-game stats go, he's tied for second fastest base speed (average gay walking speed) with pretty average health. Like most TF2 classes, he has a melee attack, but not an unarmed one. He does, however, tend to keep his weapon of choice, a surgical saw, nearby.

I think that gives us enough information to set up this fight.

There's one stat I didn't bring up until now, one Drs. Jekyll and Frankenstein have that Dr. Ludwig does not, and that's shame. If you set this fight in Geneva, the man who could not even speak up to save Justine's life is going to be too busy holding the weight of his family reputation to swing at two other mad scientists. Similarly, set in Soho or not, Dr. Jekyll had to invent soul alchemy to wriggle out of the societal expectations that are placed on a doctor of his status. Neither is going to do well in a fist fight in public. So, let's say you put it in Dustbowl.

I can see why Henry Jekyll came in second, but the question did not bring Edwin Hyde into the equation. He loses on general health over the appearance of his novel and, given that he has like half a dozen degrees, probably age. He does have those dark desires that he worked so hard to quell, but it's not exactly clear what those are. Is he violent in his Jekyll persona, or just horny? I think he's going down first.

Victor is close behind him though. Even alone, he does not seem to show much more courage. Given the time, both novel scientists might be able to come up with some interesting chemical traps, but they do not show the inclination to do so in their stories.

The real advantage Dr. Herbert Ludwig has, besides the lack of crippling societal expectations, is that he starts where we typically picture the other two. Medic is a B movie horror antagonist that escaped containment. Not only that, but he has a whole found family's worth of equally unhinged support network. He's not hiding his experimentations, he's sharing them with the other mercenaries and getting feedback to improve them. That's important, because like Henry Jekyll, he uses his experiments on himself.

Final analysis; it's not a fair fight. Switch out the scientists for their creations or their own B movie selves, and you might have an actual scuffle.

Bonus: I was trying to come up with a more balanced trio by using more modern iterations of the characters. I got as far as Dr. Frank-N-Furter and the Glass Scientists version of Henry Jekyll.

I don't know if they'd fight exactly, but I'd read the hell out of that crossover.

#victor frankenstein #herbert ludwig #henry jekyll #Do yourself a favor and read the glass scientists #i need to redo it now that I've recently reread both books #did i misinterpret your favorite mad scientist? let me know #i misunderstood charnel house as slaughterhouse in Frankenstein and that very much changes the makeup of the creature #sorry for hijacking your post but it's an interesting premise

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