The Lost Chalkboards

12/28/2022: A M#5122 was the first to notice the strangely named gif at the end of the recently posted ARG Guide-rails blog which can be seen below. It had the name “animal_well_dot_net_slash.gif”, hinting that a new animalwell.net subpage would be used.

1/2/2023 11:04am PST, Beat#2324 noticed email from Animal Well mailing list with the subject line “??????” and containing the following image:

1/03/2023: A M observed some strange punctuation in the ARG Guide-Rails blog post. They reasoned that it could mean 14 factorial, but nothing else came of it.

1/5/2023: A user by the name of Darknoddy#4691 discovers a new link from the most recent blogpost of the Animal Well Devs, posted on December 28, 2022. Called ARG GuideRails, it goes over some ground rules for any ARG going forward. https://animalwell.blogspot.com/2022/12/arg-guardrails.html However, it was also hiding its own secrets.

“Billy and I started to put together a list of guidelines of where puzzles would or would not be, but the system got overly complicated. At one point, the list got up to 14!.”

This particular line was noted as odd, but wasn’t dug too deeply until Darknoddy combined the mathematical answer of “14!” (87178291200) and the “animalwell.net/” discovered earlier in the description of the gif that was posted in the blog itself. The resulting link, https://www.animalwell.net/87178291200 , leads to a secret Gallery of Animal Well gifs, some never before seen.

At the bottom of the webpage, the picture of the two rabbits hid a function that when clicked on, summoned a scrambled image with 8 input values (both letters and numbers).

At the same time as that discovery, it was realized that each gif had a letter hidden within it, and combining all those letters together, resulted in the word, “kingbird”. (Most difficult to see letters circled in white)

The resulting image, first found by alexsmith531#1738, ties into the most recent email sent to the users subscribed to the Animal Well newsletter, as the face in the image appears in the kingbird unscrambled image as well. So far, users are trying to piece together what this could mean.

01/06/2023: Dudeman#5355 checked the Animal Well Mastodon page to find a new post with the description “uoıʇɔǝlɟǝɹ”.

Blue#8174 then found that you can input the description as a subpage to animalwell.net to get a new webpage. They then found that clicking on the image on the new webpage downloaded a suspicious file. A M realized that the contents of the file were all reflected. alexsmith531 was the first to properly reverse this file into an executable called MilkFish.exe, which turned out to be a playable Animal Well room.

01/07/2023: Musterd pointed out that there was a strange event scheduled for the next day at 12:30pm PST. It had question marks for both the title and the description with nothing else provided

01/08/2023: Once the event began, A M was the first to post the new Dunkey video showcasing Animal Well as a part of Bigmode Games. Svenyx#0397 then posted about the Animal Well page on bigmode.com, and a screenshot of the buttons on the page. These could be easily brute forced revealing a new video.

While this was being discovered AngeryBall#4938 found our final chalkboard in the announcement video at 1:26, with the equation shown below. Badewaxter mentioned that the tilde likely meant the bitwise operation “not”.

Jumping back to Svenyx, they found that the correct button sequence revealed a new video of a bunny hopping around, hidden within was our final sequence required for the equation.

Axeran#6663 along with others began to put this equation together, using dog = 975340907209, bird = 2639 (dog), fish = 36154230552 22760376337, and rabbit = 10865354153. Nighthawk#8658 discovered that multiplying all 4 numbers together resulted in a number that looked exactly like a binary number: 101111101010110110111000110100011011001010100111. Badewaxter then converted the inverted version of this number into ASCII, giving us the link below.

This redirected to a google form that contained the message: “If you are among the first 10 people to find this, fill out the form below, and you will be added to the credits and sent a copy of the game at launch.”