In this episode, CJ and Simon discuss Fragment 10, Gladitor. This was, according to CJ, by far the longest of the fragments. It was the culmination of a lot of things they had been trying to do. This was the first time a puzzle was completely related to a character. Everything puzzle-wise that happened in this fragment happened because Aether was trying to reach out from Kemetic Solutions. Nobody was creating a puzzle for you to solve. The “puzzle was people,” as CJ said. In other words, the story was taking increasing precedent over the puzzle mechanics which had dominated earlier fragments.

Martin Rank played a big role in this fragment. Though CJ and Simon knew that Kemetic Solutions would be featured in Fragment 10, Martin’s role in the infiltration was expanded, once he became a fan favorite. CJ also noted that he and Simon had always been big fans of the ‘evil organization infiltration’ scenario from movies and TV shows, and were happy to be able to include it in The Monarch Papers.

Martin went to Kemetic Solutions to take photos of the outside of the KS building, and the readers pulled apart the images for clues. There were a lot of clues hidden in the images themselves. This was so complicated that even CJ hardly remembers how to solve it, now. One image was a gif, and hidden in the photo was the word ‘zip.’ When they converted the file to a zip and put in a password, it turned into a rich text file called “patience.rtf.” The text inside only said “63 minutes.” Also, if you went to the Kemetic Solutions website and watched their animated logo for 63 minutes, it would redirect you to their creepy promo video.

Simon’s big project for this fragment was the promo video. He said he just found a lot of stock videos of sciency things and wheat fields, and overlaid some vaguely 70s-ish music over it. Then, CJ’s voice was overdubbed with some creepy effects. CJ and Simon agreed that it was very important to make the video eerie, yet believable. Maybe if you were an innocent person stumbling across the promo, you would genuinely believe that they were trying help people. The video was also very influenced by films such as Scanners.

Meanwhile, Deirdre was in Istanbul, trying to figure out clues from her father’s journal, to follow the Path of Wool. Deirdre told the readers that she needed help with various art-related clues. Simon was influenced by the BBC 4 show, Only Connect, which is about trying to find obscure connections between seemingly unrelated clues.

After this, CJ explained that the two of them were having trouble remembering a lot of this fragment, because they were simultaneously working on three others. Simon said he looks forward to reading the book, so he can appreciate it in a new way.

Going back to Deirdre, these artistic clues were triggering emotions in her, which unlock different parts of this volume of the Monarch Papers. Meanwhile, back on Basecamp, a user named Aether was editing some of the Mountaineers’ posts. From these edits, the Mountaineers were able to find another clue in the Kemetic Solutions promo video, which temporarily changed. It was arranged so that he could only communicate while being experimented upon by Teddy Fallon (the most hated TMP character). Teddy kidnapped Aether and has been experimenting on them ever since. The Mountaineers by this point understood that Kemetic Solutions was experimenting upon magically inclined individuals for some malevolent corporate purposes.  

Eventually, the Mountaineers discovered Constance, a friend of Aether’s. They found her Tumblr account, and made contact with her. Constance told them she would only talk to them if they safeguarded their forum. Constance then told them about the Joradian Non-Material Safeguard, which became a very popular spell for the remainder of The Monarch Papers. In the spell,