The "THISISNTPARTOFTHEARG" ARG

I'm Not Mollystars

Hello! My name is Camille, though I go by Chillin online. I'm the creator of the ARG that you either just solved or that you found the last step of after-the-fact and clicked the attached link. If you have been solving the ARG, then you'll probably recognize me as someone who was partially active in the #_mintcafe_ channel in Molly's Discord.

And you all thought Molly was the one tearing her hair out watching you guys try to solve the ARG.

A Brief History

Back on July 2nd, 2024, Mollystars reached out to me and some of her other friends, asking if we'd make pages for mintcafe.garden, a website she'd made to host part of an ARG related to third part of her Device Theory video series, which was still in progress as Molly was locked in.

As someone who loves to make things, I immediately started... well, making things. The first thing I made was a song called "I Fell in Love on Mint Cafe," hosted at /869074. I knew that people might see this song and go "is this lore?" so I decided to try dispelling any idea that this song was ARG-relevant by making the first letter of each lyric spell out "this isn't part of the arg" (albeit with different letter spacing and a lack of punctuation).

I made some other posts soon after that too, like both /57 and /125687z. (Yes, both of those drawings of Mint-Chan were drawn on the same day, despite how far apart the publication dates of both posts were.) Since then, and outside of the ARG, I've made a bunch of posts, but I'll keep which of those posts I've made a secret as to not to ruin the magic too much.

However, you might be confused. "Chillin, you just said you made I Fell in Love on Mint Cafe with the intention of it not being part of any ARG. What happened?" What happened was a STROKE of GENIUS.

So, on July 7th, 2024, I sent Mollystars several Discord DMs, giving her a bunch of text and media for posts. The idea was that I'd make a quick ARG for Molly's community to quickly solve, and the end page would be that I Fell in Love on Mint Cafe page; that "THIS ISNT PART OF THE ARG" page. They'd solve it and just go "ah, we've been had. I knew that was too easy."

The Solving Order

The community starts with /420 and /69. Those pages were sure to be found almost instantly. (I actually initially pitched /66 as /420's page number, as a reference to W. D. Gaster, but Molly suggested /420, which worked better.)

Text on /69 talks about a failed upload of the same audio, but with corrupted audio. Using this knowledge to think to check /68 reveals a new page with that corrupted audio. Reading that audio through a spectrogram reveals two hidden messages, one of which reading:

The text in one channel of the audio reads "420? NUMBERS TO LETTERS TO THREE LETTERS TO NUMBERS." This leads you back to /420 to investigate that post.

On /420, there's a video upload from an anonymous user showcasing their new song. In the opening seconds of the song, there are a collection of old-school YouTube-style annotations mostly advertising the user's other endeavors. One of those endeavors is a performance at Net://Con, which would be taking place "14/07-18/07" in ‍ ‍ ‍‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ City.

That number, 14-07/18-07, can be entered into a cipher sequence outlined by the above spectrogram image, an A1Z26 cipher, Caesar Cipher, and an A1Z26 cipher again: "NUMBERS TO LETTERS TO THREE LETTERS TO NUMBERS."

Taking the numbers and converting them to letters gives you "N-G/R-G". Following that, you use a Caesar cipher to shift the letters three letters to the left, turning the sequence to "K-D/O-D" which, when converted back into numbers, gives the number sequence "11-4/15-4."

Punching those numbers (without the excess symbols) into a URL, brings up /114154, a page containing an audio with lyrics, like I Fell in Love on Mint Cafe's page does. This is because this audio is written by the same musician, both in universe and in real life.

The first letter of each line in this post spells "FIFTEENHUNDRED," but going to /1500 reveals nothing. However, looking at the lyrics further, you can see "fifty" and "five" very naturally fitted into the lyrics.

Going to /1555, at a glance, seems to reveal that, too, there's nothing there.

However, this post's text isn't actually text, but an image instead. Opening the image in a text editor would reveal that at the bottom of the image, text reads "IQMOMTQQBXRVZXFFWMBLGGWNF".

This is where the other channel of the spectrogram comes in clutch.

This one is a little strange, putting an A1Z26 code in the front of the message was a bit obtuse on my part, but, translated, the message reads "FONT? NUMBER. LETTERS. ONE WORD. ONE KEY."

However, the font is 8-Bit Operator, a font that people assumed UNDERTALE used when that game first released and a font that consists of a "NUMBER" and "LETTERS" in its name. Making the font name into "ONE WORD," you get a "KEY" for a Vigenère Cipher. Inputting EIGHTBITOPERATOR as a key for decoding the jumbled text from the "No archived post exists under this ID" image, you get EIGHTSIXNINEZEROSEVENFOUR, writing that out as numbers — since Mint Cafe page URLs are comprised of numbers only — you get the URL for "I Fell in Love on Mint Cafe", /869074. Congrats, you solved it!

At fifteen-to-midnight (EST) on July 10th, Molly's video, /monitor/, went live, acting as the announcement of the mintcafe.garden website. Not even an hour later, over in Molly's Discord server, in a channel, #_☒_, whose symbol has a name, but I didn't know that, so I'd just been calling it the Xbox channel, Catishcat found /69 and Snrona found /420.

You also have people talking about the other posts: the blue dog who got a new fish tank and Mint-chan, who is suspiciously a GIF... Well, I don't think it's that suspicious, but the people of the Xbox channel sure thought so.

Immediately, we hit the first issue of solving the ARG: "brute-forcing." A few users in the Discord began running code to automatically check pages sequentially to see if there was anything there. This was an issue because it'd totally work and it'd ruin the ARG. Two pages from the ARG were found through brute-forcing: /68 and /1555.

The executive decision was made that this strategy — "brute-forcing" — was now a bannable offense. It was a little lame, but remembering that the G in ARG means "game," it was more so thought of as a "rule" of the game. This was generally honoured, as most people discarded the finding of /1555, keeping it in the back of their minds, knowing it hadn't legitimately been found yet so they'll ignore it until it has been.

Though, remember when I said that "Mint Cafe page URLs are comprised of numbers only"? Well, that stopped being true as a secondary response to brute forcing. Yet-to-be-revealed pages were changed to be alphanumeric, sometimes containing symbols. The honour system of "don't bot the search" was great and all, but Molly didn't want the Device Theory-relevant ARG pages to be found too early. The only problem is that every page in my ARG could not change. It's purely numeric and that established what felt like a "time bomb" until someone found the final page through brute forcing... y'know, before I guess getting banned.

With Nick in the server having shared the spectrogram image produced from /68, a lot of theorizing as to what everything could mean began.

"420" could mean a lot of things. Plug 4-20 in an A1Z26 cipher wheel and you get "DT". What's DT? Well, it could be Determination, like the "DT Extraction Machine" from Undertale suggests, or it could be the Device Theory. Or, y'know, 420 is just the funny weed number.

And 6-15-14-20... Well, that's "FONT"... What could "FONT" mean? Well, assumedly, it's referencing a font. Hey, wait a minute... there's text on this website! What's the font? Can anyone inspect element?

This was the most ruinous oversight of my whole planning process. I made everything for the ARG in a bubble. I wasn't focused on the font(s) Molly was using for the website, and I hadn't even considered there might be confusion there. However, because of this blind spot of mine, one of mintcafe.garden's main fonts, W95FA, was on the Xbox channel's radar. Too, for some reason, one of the people trying to solve the ARG, Spiny, was adamant that, actually, the font used in the spectrogram was W95FA.

But, in all fairness, this was a breeding ground for new ideas. Everyone was spitballing — one user suggested plotting numbers from page URLS onto a 10x10 grid. Fun Behind-The-Scenes Fact: the 10x10 Grid thing was the funniest shit ever to those of us in VC with Molly when the website went live.

Another Fun Behind-The-Scenes Fact: I was losing my mind. I was expecting this to take a few hours — a few days at most. Like I said, this was designed as a quick ARG. Everyone in the aforementioned call can attest that I'd probably lost it. I can't remember what I was saying, but Molly reminds me that I, at one point in the call, said "Molly, I don't hate your fans", so I must've been saying some insane shit, so I'm sorry, Molly's fans. Suffice to say, I figured this'd be over soon, and when things like the 10x10 Grid emerged in the chat, I couldn't comprehend it. When my buddy Roni said to just wait until after the first few months, I'd responded "MONTHS?!"

This one night was so harrowing, I, after having slept, while outside on a nice summer afternoon enjoying ice cream, still felt I needed to post about the effect the ARG had on me alongside posting about the ARG being mine on both Tumblr and Cohost. It hadn't even been 24 hours yet.

In response to many of the late-game pages important to Molly's actual ARG being found through DuckDuckGo search results by a YouTube commenter, the website was taken down for a few hours while Molly stayed up, late into the night, trying to figure out a fix.

In this time, luckily, Catishcat had posted a downloaded version of the video in /420 following a question from Snrona about the annotations in the video.

With this on hand, and no mintcafe.garden to check for pages on, discussion regarding the date of Net://Con became prevalent. The main focus was turning the numbers of the date into letters: N/G-R/G. Perfect; they're already on-track to get to the next step. Now, they just need to shift it three letters using a Caesar cipher and... wait, what?

Oh boy, that's not what the "THREE LETTERS" in the spectrogram message means. I hope misconstructions of the spectrogram message don't continue to be a pattern...

Anyway, there were other points of discussion. There's a theory that two of the numeric IDs of the pages revealed on Day 1 are colour codes, maybe a bit of text acting as a deterrent for brute-forcing is actually encoded in Base91, perhaps we need to use steganography on Mint-chan because it's apparently still confusing as to why that's a GIF, and, luckily, we've moved away from W95FA. Spiny, despite everything, has brought it back around and we're finally talking about the font of the hour: G... GNU Unifont? Uh oh. Guys, maybe let's bring it back around to that N/G-R/G thing. Let's not lose sight of the bigger picture here.

Also, Ancade and Snrona were saying something weird.

Huh? "What was it?" Well, they were talking about the dates on the annotations in /420. Something about how Net://Con is... uh, tomorrow.

I should probably have had something planned, shouldn't I have?

Yeah, I didn't think about that. I really should've asked when Molly was going to reveal the website. I figured it'd be, like, August, but alas, it was early July. With people expecting something for the Net://Con dates, I figured I'd make some stuff. Nothing helpful for the ARG though. I'm sure they'd appreciate the hints, but really, I can't just solve it for them.

Day 1 of Net://Con

I essentially used this day to stall. I had ideas for the next three days (which is problematic when you realize it's a five-day event, but I didn't. I eventually did; stay tuned), but I needed time. In the meantime, we get the introduction to some kind of musician. Assuming we're talking about the composer behind /420, there were a few tongue-in-cheek nicknames for the character: John 420, and, in case they composed /69 as well, John Music. Other contributions were Blazetune and MC Nutsaq.

Day 2 of Net://Con

I figured I'd take this opportunity to introduce people to the composer behind /420 and /69. Named after the 10x10 Grid theory mentioned earlier, Decio "Gridley" Tenant was created, his appearance based on The Living Tombstone's Yoav Landau as they looked when attending BronyCon 2012. I think I'd seen Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony, the BronyCon documentary a bit before making all the Net://Con stuff.

I did really enjoy putting everything above and below together for Net://Con, but it did create an issue: an expectation of new information. Snrona, after the release of this page, admitted it was waiting for new pages to drop. In reality, the ARG was solvable from Day 1.

Day 3 of Net://Con

This was the first public appearance of the composer of Failure, a later song in the ARG, and I Fell in Love on Mint Cafe, the final song of the ARG, but, obviously, this is the third time I'd picked up a ukulele to play the character.

Additionally, I had no plans of writing any kind of interview with a "Jon from ViewSpace" but it was after this page went live that I realized: the 14th to the 18th is five days, not four, so I figured it'd be a good thing to write to fill in the missing day. As for why the previous link to the interview is a dud: Gridley could have linked it wrong or Jon deleted the post and reposted it to fix some error or something. That's my headcanon to fix that "plothole".

Day 4 of Net://Con

The four other pages for Net://Con (bar from the first one) were focused on "worldbuilding", connecting the two musicians I had introduced with my ARG, alongside connecting it to the canon creator of Mint-Chan from /57. This post was focused on ARG guidance in a handrails kind of way. I mean, this marked the end of Week 1 for solving the ARG. Snrona's theory that new posts are required is debunked through Gridley's dialogue. The idea that, since they'd already turned "14/07-18/07" into "N/G-R/G", "one person has gotten close". After publishing this post, I agreed to myself that this was too hands-on. No post past this one would be this explicitly helpful.

Day 5 of Net://Con

This was my way of revealing that, yes, Gridley made /420 and /69. It's not really much of a reveal. I'd put it up there with Undyne saying "King ASGORE Dreemurr" in Waterfall as in "sure, it's a reveal, but I've never seen anyone blown away by it."

Also, this is just BronyCon footage of Yoav Landau performing. One person, Freya, called me on it. But whatever. Who cares. Freya solved the whole ARG in three minutes. Of course she figured out who "portrayed" Gridley was.

Oh, I didn't mention that? Yeah, Phie sent Freya the mintcafe.garden link and she solved it in three minutes. Though when Freya ended up joining the server, she did agree to not give the game away. (Though when the people of the Xbox channel realized the font of the spectrogram message was 8-Bit Operator, that was thanks to her.)

Recently, in VC, Niomi noted that the URL for that page, /2b2b2b, is clever because, since it features a mashup, it's "back 2 back". I have to come entirely clean about this: all five Net://Con posts were the hexadecimal colour codes for my "sona" without my jacket hoodie. That cool wordplay thing Niomi accused the author of the post ID of doing was, as the author of the post ID myself, not intentional. Just a reference to the hexadecimal colour code theory from before Net://Con.

There were a lot of contemporary references to ARG theories in the Net://Con pages. The name of the drawings of Gridley was (supposed to be) a Base91 string as a reference to literally only one person suggesting Base91.

I want to preface this section with a reminder that, for a lot of people, this was their first ARG they ever solved. Freya got that shit in three minutes because she's some kind of a cryptographic freak, but the main crew in Molly's Discord trying to solve this joke ARG were not experts. I, as well, am not an ARG expert, which is why I thought it would be solved immediately. However, the biggest problem and the most tragic realization was that, despite my knowledge of cryptography beginning and ending with anything Alex Hirsch and the team behind Gravity Falls did, people assumed this mystery was penned by some kind of genius who knew how to do more than just open up the dCode website.

With that out of the way, allow me to channel my mentality from this era of the ARG:

Snrona, do not say "Gridley is a LIAR" because he said it's not that complicated. You are eating a fish dinner with the amount of red herrings you've accrued. Spiny, you cannot just say "idk if we exhausted 8 bit operator enough" and then continue to W95FA it up for the next fifteen days of the ARG. What are we doing here?

The following is an excerpt from my personal documentation of the ARG solving process, during the peak of my insanity.

And, as an apology to Snrona and Spiny, it would be misleading to not admit I am also at fault here too. They've been tasked with a poorly put-together ARG with an underwhelming and confusing end point. Around here, I knew there needed to be something else as a reward, so I got to work on a song named "Thank You." Like Failure and I Fell in Love on Mint Cafe, the secret is hidden in the initial letter of each line. If you're curious about it, check the Rewards page, but essentially, the secret message was "Molly's actual ARG awaits". Ideally, people would have solved this ARG before Molly's ARG, related to The Device Theory, dropped. However, The Device Theory's release was right around the corner, and, with everyone in the server being there because of Molly and her video and less so this ARG, focus shifted, and suddenly, I realized that this ARG cannot be the one they solve second.

I've built a nothing ARG. It's a poorly made bridge so you can go check out the better-made bridge Molly built once you've realized the first bridge had a troll under it the whole time. Here's hoping that this is the order both ARGs are solved in.

Worried that my anxieties would become reality, I began working on a hint post. Handrails-style, like Net://Con. Fittingly, this hint was formatted like a screenshot of a Net://Con poster.

Now, if you weren't there, you might be a little confused as to why I'd make a post drawing so much attention to this date. The people of the Xbox channel (now inhabiting a Mint-Cafe-specific channel named #_mintcafe_) already turned 14/07-18/07 into N/G-R/G. And, while that's true, we were more than three weeks into the ARG. Yeah. Time has passed. They got to "N/G-R/G" on Day 1, and after 25 days of ARG theorizing, the last time it was mentioned was Day 1.

Hell, on Day 26, when this post released, nobody cared! It released alongside two other posts, and both of them got more attention. One of them was this:

Molly, who was honestly the main person pushing me to make something like /14071807, the Net://Con poster page, was not gonna let people just ignore the hint post.

Every day that the post would go ignored, its link colour on the mintcafe.garden homepage would change and so would the actual image file used in the post.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of the first day version versus the fifth day version. At a glance, maybe you might miss it, but in the green, you might spot the insane scribblings of a Gerald Robotnik type: me.

Luckily, after Freya spotted that the character name "Dapne Czrcl X." was, when run through a Caesar cipher, "Spect Rogra M.", people started considering the post more.

On Day 29, the 8th of August 2024, Snrona, in spite of my critiques of it from days past, found /114154. You nailed the exact right level of complexity, whether or not you believed Gridley.

If you're curious how I reacted, seeing progress after four weeks or a lack thereof, it was nothing crazy. It was in VC with Molly, REP, "YOU." and some other Smish Team friends. I reacted fairly calmly. Here's an audio file of the moment I learned /114154 has been found.

For no specific reason, you should turn your volume down if you want to listen to it.

From here, analysis of the lyrics began, and, without brute-forcing it this time, Snrona and January both found /1555 and the string of text now being explored from /1555, "IQMOMTQQBXRVZXFFWMBLGGWNF" (nicknamed the "IQ MOM" puzzle based on its first letters), was now being thought about in tandem with the spectrogram. Everything is going according to plan. Hopefully, no big release will distract people from solving my ARG.

Day 31 of the ARG solving process, the 10th of August 2024, was the day Mollystars published and premiered the third part of the Device Theory trilogy. This is what Mint Cafe was actually building up to, as far as I was aware, and I had to grapple with the fact that the people solving the ARG thus far, Molly's fans, were probably going to focus on the ARG pieces tied directly to the big new video from the creator they like rather than my less-relevant-to-anything ARG, even if they didn't know it was mine.

This section isn't gonna be as in-depth as the other ones since, while my notes for previous days had been message-by-message summaries of discussion — for instance: my personal notes for Day 32 reads like this:

It's actually a majority of the time exactly like that. Text is bolded when it's ARG-relevant and is italicized when it's just kinda funny. The little text blurbs I've been showcasing are few and far between. That being said, my personal notes for the entirety of Day 32 read like this:

So, y'know. I'm probably not the greatest choice for narrating this section, but, nonetheless, here were the highlights.

The third part of the Device Theory, or, as it's usually shortened to, "TDT3" (which I'll use for brevity's sake), had a number of secrets hidden within it. Some were secrets requested by Molly's patrons, and some were ARG-relevant — as in Molly's ARG. The people of the Xbox channel were working full steam ahead to figure that shit out. Looking at the channel, I really mean it when I said "full steam ahead." This shit is cluttered... Everything is spoilered. I have to click every message to read this channel... Hmm... Skipping the boring shit... Ah, here we are. After four days, the people found something! That something: every secret in the video and every Mint Cafe page related to Molly's ARG.

Hey, What. What the fuck. Come the fuck on.

Okay, sure, you guys figured that shit out ASAP. Whatever, but if you remember: they're one step away from the end. Using everything they have now, it is entirely possible to get to the final page of the ARG.

I'd like to reintroduce you to something I've minimized the prominence of until now: a font called W95FA and a font called GNU Unifont.

W95FA is a font based on a Windows 95 system font. It's also, as mentioned before, one of the main fonts that mintcafe.garden uses. GNU Unifont, a similar-looking font with a lot of different symbols for a fuck ton of languages, also gets used on mintcafe.garden.

So, when asked for a font by the spectrogram, the people of the Xbox channel focused on W95FA and GNU Unifont. I mean, they're the most prominent fonts of the Mint Cafe archive.

From the start of the ARG to the release of "TDT3", W95FA was run through A1Z26 to pull 23-[95]-5-1 out (Day 1), thought to be the font used in the spectrogram image (Day 1), this claim was doubled-down upon by Spiny, the one who initially made it (Day 2), this claim was disputed by Freya (Day 7), still suggested to be important (Day 7), W95FA was run through A1Z26 to pull [W]IE[FA] out (Day 30), and almost everyone is convinced it's relevant now (additionally thanks to 9 and 5 also appearing in the image file name for /1555 which is a whole other thing.).

It was actually so joever for 8-Bit Operator. It was out of the public consciousness. By this point, across both the Xbox channel and the Mint Cafe channel, W95FA was mentioned 40 times, GNU Unifont was mentioned 14 times, and the actual font, 8-Bit Operator was mentioned just 3 times.

"Oh, so, Chillin, what happened after the Device Theory dropped if you're treating it like a cut-off point for these statistics?"

I'll let my personal notes speak for themselves.

To say it was dire would be an understatement.

The people needed a hero.

An ULTIMATE HERO!

On Day 1, during the initial spitballing phase, a curiosity arose about what game xylophonefinal.mp4 from /420 is based on. Obviously, they were looking to see if there was a real-world game that they could draw a parallel to (which is a fruitless endeavor; the song is based on nothing), but I realized I should probably figure out what game it really was. After answering the question in /7a95463, I wanted to see the game; hear the music.

Oh right, this was Day 95 of the ARG for those whose eyes have been glazing over any time a day counter has shown up. And it wasn't until Day 96 that people actually even paid attention to the new post. Luckily, when they did, they caught on (even if it took Molly changing the link colour to match the colour of the last hint, /14071807.

Or, as it's listed in my notes:

But hey, now people know about this hint. They understand what it means, and with enough determination, this could easily be solved before Day 100.

Oh shit, someone's interested in solving it again.

Mars actually immediately spotted several metadata fuckups I'd committed. Since I'd edited the audio from /68 and /69 in the same Audacity file, each file has their non-canon metadata such as one being "Track 1", the other being "Track 2" and "Mix 1". Too, there was the name of the song matching with the original Musescore project title for the song "MINTCAFE (Prequel).mscz" and not the canon filename, "Spy Theme.wav". However, after this, she got pretty busy, meaning Mint Cafe's new strongest soldier, following unusualArtistic, Ancade, Snrona, and Spiny, was, too, no longer solving the ARG.

I don't want to fault anyone for having a life (or even just no longer giving a shit) by the way. I've come across as very salty and angry, but as someone who was also extremely busy during the past few months listed, I'm no stranger to prioritizing other shit. As the game developer, I'm just a little biased. With that out of the way...

Enter Stiqqery: a newcomer to the Discord server who wanted to see the ARG solved. Re-enter unusualArtistic, bringing with them Mars and Spiny. This collection of faces, both legacy and new, in one place would make the perfect team for solving the ARG. Since the Switch 2 trailer for Deltarune, I've hidden away many of the channels in Molly's Discord server, muting them to avoid seeing too much from Chapters 3 & 4. As a result, the Xbox and Mint Cafe channels became two of the only channels I looked at in Molly's server.

Spiny filled Stiqqery in, talking about the spectrogram and the Ultimate Hero post. (IT PAID OFF!!) The spectrogram still had yet to be solved. Looking at /1555, Stiqqery felt the puzzle wasn't anything like Molly's work from the Device-Theory-related ARG. I wonder why that is. Anyway looking at /1555 further, Stiqqery began theory-crafting, looking at the fucking FONTS USED ON THE WEBSITE GOD DAMNIT—!

Stiqqery, having not experienced the last ~215 days of momentum-squashing nothingness, was all-in, getting to work on a doc of their own, compiling information and strategies.

On Day 1 of the ARG, I remember a lot of people wanted a "master doc", something I had but couldn't provide for obvious reasons. When I suggested the Smish Team Wiki be the home for ARG cataloguing, it got use, but barely. I did end up making a lot of the pages myself, using my personal notes to make sure I only wrote about what was theorized. With full props to Stiqqery, this was the most well put-together version of a (public) master doc this ARG had seen.

Stiqqery was throwing down theory after theory; question after question: Are there alphanumeric keyed ciphers that would allow W95FA to be the key — perhaps a 36-character key with numbers 1234567890 preceding ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ? Is "font" a key? Is there an instance of a page or comment of video or image using a weird recognizable-or-inspectable font? (I bolded that one in my notes.) Is it possible to identify a font by image recognition and have we used that on the image from /1555? Do we need to decode it backwards by encoding it? That feels like some fuckery Molly might do." I think what a lot of people needed was fresh eyes because after the drought, unusualArtistic's cavalcade of Mint-Cafe-ARG-heads were back into the thick of it. They were talking about the ARG again.

Stiqqery decided, then and there, that they would spend their weekend exploring every crevice of the Mint Cafe website, writing everything down. The last time someone said they were gonna do this, it was Snrona. Though Snrona did ultimately never end up doing this, it did solve /114154, so any criticism is retroactively pardoned; they're redeemed.

Theorizing got so high-brow that I started feeling a bit dumb. (Still don't really know what "run[ning] strings" means.) When I joined the conversation to make a joke about Mars' username in relation to what she was speculating, unusualArtistic replied to me with the following:

Now, with the momentum had here, you think my answer would be an easy "yes", but, like, look. First, it was Day 316. If maybe this was the end, the ARG solved, then yes, I would be able to, without-a-doubt, admit that I was very proud. Second, allow me to provide you a record of my reactions to the Mint Cafe channel on Day 316.

It has been very cool to see people engaging in a thing I've made. It's one of my favourite parts of making art; seeing people interact with and react to it. Nevertheless, I was obviously not in a mindset conducive to gratitude so — and I apologize unusualArtistic — I just fucking told the biggest lie of this entire hunt, a bigger lie than when Spiny said W95FA was the font used in the spectrogram message. And this lie was on purpose!

I have a 45-page Google Doc documenting everything anyone in either the Xbox channel or Mint Cafe channel has done regarding this ARG. To even claim I've missed a few messages would be a lie.

Eventually, Mars realized and drew attention to the fact that the spectrogram message read "NUMBER. LETTERS" with a singular number. Wait, that's true.

Also, they were positing that there's no way the URL is just the raw output of decoding the IQ MOM string... Wait, that's true.

There was also this idea that, since Mint Cafe puzzles have used Base91 and ASCII85 and Base64 before, it could be those. It's obviously not Atbash, and are we even sure it's a Vigenère cipher? Damnit. Two outta three ain't bad.

But, after finding another font used on the Mint Cafe website, unusualArtistic called it a night, and, as the discussion slowed to a halt, I called it a night, logging off.

And I shouldn't have. A few hours later, I logged back in to see several pings from my friends in both DMs and a Comet-exclusive channel in Molly's Discord. I knew what this meant.

As it turned out, Spiny wasn't done for the night. Spiny was just getting started, remembering the Ultimate Hero post and finally letting go of W95FA. It's 8-Bit Operator time. It's EIGHTBITOPERATOR time.

If you wanted my reaction, here it is. It's not as loud as the last one, so feel free to set the volume however you see fit this time, because this was less hype and more shock. They found it.

On Day 317th, the 24th of May 2024, Spiny, in spite of my critiques of his font-based focus across this entire ARG, found the final page, /869074. I'm so glad it was you. The reason for my gladness is because of the "story" of it all. Spiny, you were a ride-or-die since Day 1 of this thing. Sure, I've given you a lot of shit throughout this for the W95FA stuff, but I figured that, well, you solved it in the end. Any criticism is retroactively null and void; you're redeemed. You fuckin' found that final page. If anyone is reading this and you were any part in solving the ARG, from directly helping make progress to even just suggesting plotting points on a 10x10 grid, you got us to where this thing ended up by Day 317. And now it's solved. Give yourself a pat on the back, all of you. After 317 days. We can all do new things now. I know I certainly will.

And, yes, unusualArtistic, I am proud of everyone who helped solve this ARG.

However, let me make one thing very, very clear: I'm never making another ARG ever again.

If you're looking for a more straightforward game than the one I just explained (but still a little mysterious), check out my video game, Traversal. Its demo is available on Steam, Itch.io, and GameJolt if you have twenty minutes to spare.