A JSE Fanfic
Part Eight: The Final Clues
[This is part of a small ten-part series I wrote for Halloween 2019. There's a new villain in town, and Jackieboy is on his list. The group settles down to solve one last set of puzzles.]
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The time was 4:12am. Or 4:13, as Jackie booted up the laptop once more and watched the numbers shift. He sighed. The adrenaline was starting to wear off, and now there was a bone-deep weariness dragging him down. But he couldn’t stop. He had no doubt that the gamemaster had more tricks up his sleeve that he had to prevent.
Jackie was sitting in the passenger seat of the car. He briefly looked away from the screen and around at the others. Chase was in the driver’s seat, leaning on the wheel with his head in his folded arms. JJ and Marvin were in the back seat. Marvin had his forehead against the window with his eyes closed and his legs folded up on the seat. JJ looked composed, sitting straight with his hands in his lap, but anyone who knew him well could tell he was on edge by his shaky breathing and wide eyes staring directly forward.
They had to finish this.
Jackie’s eyes hardened, and he turned back to the laptop. He’d received one last email, and this one had only one thing attached: a file called 4.png. There was a message written as well: "Good luck with this one. You’ll need it :)"
“Fuck you,” Jackie muttered, opening the .png file.The image was nothing but a white screen, with lines of black rectangles. But Jackie recognized the formatting immediately: blacked-out text. And by this point he knew to plug the image into the picture editor and play with sliders. Brightening it up revealed the writing that had been blacked out: a bunch of numbers that by now he recognized as hexadecimal code. He groaned; this was an image, which meant he had to type it into the translator by hand instead of copy-pasting. That’s going to take forever.
As he was typing the code into the online translator, Jackie noticed something odd. This particular code was just a lot of repeating 30s and 31s, with the occasional 20 thrown in. That was…weird. Did that mean it was really just a few characters? Jackie clicked translate, and then immediately understood. It was binary language; a bunch of ones and zeros. He sighed. Well, at least he could copy this one.
The binary turned out to be yet another url: yourfinalset.com. Jackie frowned. “That’s not ominous at all,” he muttered, plugging it into the browser.
A loading bar popped up, and a cheerful-sounding chiptune began to play. That got everyone’s attention. JJ and Marvin looked at Jackie oddly, while Chase leaned over to look at the screen. “What kind of puzzle is this?” he asked.
“I dunno,” Jackie said, shrugging. A moment later, and the screen had loaded up. Jackie blinked. “Apparently it’s not a puzzle. It’s a game.”
“Wait, what?” Marvin pushed his head into the space between the driver’s seat and passenger seat. JJ did the same, pushing his way into an empty spot. “Oh my god, you!”
“What?” Jackie looked at him peculiarly.
“You!” Marvin pointed at the computer screen.
“Wait, bro, I get it.” Chase pointed as well. “The little avatar, it’s you.”
Jackie looked at the screen again. It showed a pixelated room with stone walls and a squiggly design on the floor, connected to three more identical rooms that were only half-on the screen. There was a character in the center of the room wearing a red outfit with a blue mask and brown hair. Jackie gaped. “Oh, it is. Shit, how long has this guy been planning this? If he had time to make a full video game.” He moved the little avatar into the next room, revealing more of the screen. And then again, only to find a dead end. “Oh, not just a game. This is a maze game.”
Marvin inhaled sharply. “I hate these.”
“Yeah, they can be annoying,” Chase agreed. “My guess is you have to make it through while taking notes of the letters on the floor.”
“Letters?” Jackie moved back to the first room. “Oh, that is a W, isn’t it? Well, can someone write this down? Cause I’ll be too busy trying to find my way.”
'If someone can give me a pen, I can,' JJ signed.
“Here.” Chase grabbed a pencil off the dashboard and tossed it to him. “This person probably won’t mind if we use their pencil. I mean, we already stole their car, I don’t think they’ll be any more annoyed than they already are.”
'My sentiments exactly,' JJ agreed, grabbing a napkin from a compartment in the side of the car door next to him.
Ten minutes later, Jackie reached the end of the maze, signified by a small golden crown of pixels in the middle of the last room. The screen turned red, with black text: YOU WIN! Enter password for next level.
“Shit,” Jackie cursed. “I think this is where the letters come in. Jays?”
JJ passed the napkin to Jackie. There were a few crossed out rows of letters, but the final circled row was another url: 73707963616d657261.com. “Why is nothing simple with this guy?!” Jackie suddenly shouted, punching the ceiling of the car.
“Because he hates us,” Marvin stated. His tone was casual, but he’d suddenly gone very stiff, as if he just remembered being in a small, enclosed space filling with water.
Jackie took a deep breath. “You’re not wrong. Gotta keep going.” He checked the time real quick: 4:27. Then he opened a new tab and entered the url.
The new website was just a white square with a play button and a download button. Jackie hesitated, then clicked play. The white square revealed itself to be a video, as the camera panned up from where it had been pointing at the snowy ground. The camera panned across, showing it was filming the city streets. And then it zoomed in on a pair of people across the road. There was no sound of the city, just a weird, distorted noise overlayed.
“Oh my god,” Jackie whispered. Chase covered his mouth, eyes wide.
“That’s…that’s us…” Marvin muttered, looking at JJ, who was significantly paler than he had been a few seconds ago. The video showed Marvin and JJ walking along the city streets, signing with each other and occasionally stopping to look in shop windows. The person filming followed entirely silently, always at a distance. “That’s…that’s fucked up.”
“There’s snow,” Jackie muttered. “How…how old is this?”
“I remember this,” Marvin muttered. “Look, we’re gonna stop outside of Gimley’s now.” The video showed them doing exactly that. “This was when I was giving JJ a tour of the city, showing him how it’s changed since he was…you know.” Marvin took a deep breath. “That was December two years ago.”
“Fuck. Fuck this,” Jackie said, pausing the video. “Two years…fuck this guy.”
JJ looked away from the screen, disappearing into the back seat once more.
“What do we do with this?” Chase asked quietly.
Jackie took a deep breath. “Well…did you hear that weird audio? My guess is we’re gonna have to look at that closer.” He downloaded the video.
Running a spectrogram on the video’s audio revealed a hidden message in the sound: The letters JCHMJ. Jackie immediately switched back to the maze game and entered those as the password. The screen loaded, revealing another level of the maze, the pixelated stone walls a darker color.
“No letters on the floor this time, “ Jackie noted. “Let’s go.”
4:39am by the time the next maze level was complete. Once again, the YOU WIN! screen popped up, but this one was different. In addition to a space to enter a password, there was a message: Password is the timestamp, followed by a date and the YouTube logo.
“We need to find a YouTube video?” Jackie asked.
“How are we supposed to know which video?! Do you know how many there are?!” Marvin cried.
“It’s 3:54,” Chase said all of a sudden.
Jackie and Marvin looked at him. “Chase?” Jackie asked. “How…do you know—”
“Trust me, I know,” Chase said. He was deliberately not looking at either of them. “It’s better than you guys looking for a video that’s not up anymore.”
Marvin looked confused, but Jackie’s eyes suddenly widened. He entered the timestamp into the space for the password, and the game instantly loaded up the next level. He looked over at Chase. “Hey…”
“Let’s just get through this next level, okay?” Chase cut him off.
Jackie stared at him a while longer, then nodded.
The last level had red stone walls, and took until 4:45 to complete. This time, the YOU WIN! screen didn’t have a space to enter a password, but instead a few lines of binary. Jackie sighed, then began typing the binary into the online translator by hand. Once translated, it turned out to be more hexadecimal code. Translating that once again let to an address: 25 Waverly Street.
“We only have an hour and a twenty minutes left,” Jackie said, rubbing his eyes.
“We could just…not go,” Marvin suggested. “What do we have left to lose if…no one else is…” He went silent.
“I don’t know,” Jackie said. “But I don’t want to find out. And honestly, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy had sniper rifles trained on us to take us out if we stop playing along.”
“Then we better get going,” Chase said, starting the car.
In a building in the center of the city, the gamemaster watched through cameras as a car pulled away from the curb and started speeding through city streets. He wasn’t about to lie; he was impressed. He honestly hadn’t been expecting Jackieboy to get this far.
But the question was if he would survive the final stage.
The gamemaster swiveled in his seat, turning his attention to another camera. He pressed a button activating an intercom. “Are you ready for the grand finale?” he asked. Though the intercom was two-way, there was no answer. He laughed to himself.
Just a quick test run of the crucial mechanisms, and then…the gamemaster glanced at the edge of his desk. A mask was dangling off the corner.
The gamemaster smiled. This was turning out to be so much more satisfying than he ever could’ve guessed.