Story (Full) 4
Johnisdead shares many elements with Ben Drowned - an ARG created by Alex Hall in 2010. The first few sections of this story recap will be dedicated to covering the story of Ben Drowned so that readers will have full context required for Johnisdead.
The story so far...
In the previous section, the ARG's creator, Alex, seeming stepped out from behind the curtain and announced that the story was on hiatus. However, during this period that was supposedly meant to be out-of-character, the players noticed several oddities. This culminated in "The Glitch" - an event that corrupted YSHDT.net, allowing the players to access various hidden files. Here, it seemed as though several characters such as Alex were trapped and asking for help.
One of these files was a message from Matt warning that someone named "Kayd Hendricks" was in danger. Kayd was actually Ryukaki - a player who had received the login information for "The Truth" from Rosa before her disappearance. After this, Kayd uploaded several videos to his YouTube channel showing that he was being chased by BEN. At one point, he attempted to hide out in a mysterious location called "The Orchard", though this attempt was short-lived. Unfortunately, the players were unable to save Kayd as he was presumably killed - though not before giving the players a piece of the login information for "The Truth".
After this, Alex teased that the final part of the ARG would coincide with the release of a video game. Unfortunately, this game's development was very troubled and was repeatedly delayed. Eventually, Alex created Within Hubris - a canon message board where the players could cooperate more efficiently. Within Hubris also contained Wayward Horizon - a strange board that seemed to contain the souls of ascended Moon Children. This seems to imply that ascension results in the soul of the participant being trapped within digital environments or technology - much like how Ben was trapped within the Majora's Mask cartridge.
Eventually, the ARG was placed on hiatus once again as Alex moved onto another project - a film titled "Methods of Revolution". After a while, Within Hubris was deleted, forcing the players to create their own version called "Newbris". Over the next few years, all was quiet on Within Hubris. That is, until 2015...
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