I re-listened to Drew's radio interview and found myself if anything more in the wilderness. Drew had two basic points:
- Salome's story is likely more complicated than Girl sees clue, girl finds clue, masses follow girl to mystery spot
- We've missed things in Galnet
I've personally read every Kahina related galnet article many many 10s of times, pouring over potential meanings so I decided to start fresh yet again with the above factors in mind.
Salome's Story and It
Maybe early on Kahina is just being Kahina and not explicitly looking for It. Viewed in that light the Galnet posts take on a different tenor.
- In the first post she's sent to Sol by Blaine, not on her own. She doesn't want to be late but possibly not late for a meeting set up for her.
- Similarly in the second post (be nice to know which is correct date, 6th or 9th of March 3301), so maybe it's not the equinox and a coordinate but an intersection with another thread
- There's a fair bit going on in around then. A lot of civil unrest, particularly around Lugh and in the Empire. I've read all the surrounding articles though and came up empty-ish.
- Maybe she's initially embroiled in the Empire and Federation intrigue and that's what makes her throw in the towel (I really suspect it was Drew's frustration with PP).
So given the above possibly we're not looking for a clue to IT, we're looking for a clue to where to pick up the thread and follow. That just opens up a whole 'nuther can of worms because it could point back into the bubble and not out in the rift. If anything it increases the problem space, at least until somebody finds something and we're already floundering.
For what it's worth I've visited every system in book and in Kahina articles looking for missions or USSes, I've even panned around in the debug camera looking for grafitti clues scribbled on docking bay walls. Zip zilch nada.
Galnet Mysteries
In addition to the standard ones I've read and re-read every Galnet article posted within weeks of the canonical Kahina articles. I've poured over the canonical ones till I'm pretty sure I can type them from memory. I've run them through filters, I've counted commas, looked for keywords. Other than the EasterEgg a few weeks ago I never found anything.
If there's a hidden clue in them I have the following problem, who put them there ?
- If it's Salome herself then that suggests she wants us to follow and the clue would be in what she says. I haven't seen a lot there.
- If it's in the text then that suggests there's some external agency trying to send a message. If so what message and why. Is it the Dark Wheel ? if I don't know the point of the message I don't know what to look for. Coordinates have a pattern, word messages have a different one. If it's some double layer thing like find the letters then run them through a cipher then good luck without a major hint (see eb,p)
- If it's just Drew putting in clues as author then all bets are off. They could be of any form and I have no way of guessing the intent or the agency and therefore I have no way to tell if the pattern I see is a clue or just random characters.
On a side note it's particularly annoying that system galnet messages only go back to October 6th 3301. Any clue that was hidden in a local system news feed is now long gone.
So after spending yet more time mulling over all of that, following up on a few leads I've come to two conclusions.
- I find it interesting that 2 days before the first Kahina article Jaques made a grand return to the bubble. Now, once things are spinning up, he's returned as a point of focus after a hiatus that mysteriously overlaps Salome's. If there's a connection then it's potentially as much a real world one as an in game one (e.g. Jaques is also somehow a Drew Agent)
- I have squat. After all the above I have more questions than answers.
Certainly all the major powers and all the other books are hinting that somethings out there and something's coming. The major books all set the stage for some major conflict with an external entity. It's been building up all year with both the Empire and Feds building big new ships and now the Engineers. So quite possibly the ship has sailed (or is in the dock and weighing anchor in about 3 to 4 weeks) and we'll just have to hop on and sail away with it. More simply we just have to wait for new clues because the chance of getting ahead of the story is now gone.
What I find most frustrating about the whole thing is it's like the BGS. I can't tell when a false trail is simply because there's a bug and the mission isn't triggering or galnet borked up a post or whether I'm just wrong. I do know that those bloody Diamond-Eye missions don't spawn a lot of the time and when they do spawn they don't complete properly 90% of the time.
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Edit: In no way shape or form should the above post be viewed as negative commentary. I love this mystery, it's my way of trying to break the pattern we're currently in (and have been in) and possibly grasp at some straws.
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