A rewrite of a video by Adam Butcher. Give him the credit and attention that anyone you don't know deserves.
http://vimeo.com/13780892
This is a a story that could have been stumbled upon as easily as finding a website on the internet. You could have easily posted this story yourself.
On the 22nd of April, 2005, a person using the name of Al1 posted a website claiming that he has buried 9000 British pounds somewhere in the UK. Anybody can find it and claim it for themselves.
Al1 could be a name for anything, or anyone. If his name wasn't Al, it could have been short for Alexander, Albert, or Allison. If you remove the L, it becomes A1 which is the name of a steak sauce brand, in which he could be a manufacture of. Although the name possiblities are almost even, the gender of the name is undecidable. Polls on different sites claim that a man is most likely to do this kind of stunt.
The only clues left for the treasure were a couple strips of drawn pictures, some showing up more than once. You probably would have stopped there, concluding that the clues were too linear. Of course one man, out of the 24 that have seen the site, was aware of the riddle that Al1 was showing.
3 weeks later, the man starts a video diary about his journey of unsolving the riddle. This shows his desire for not just the money, but for the publicity, as because he is risking his chances of gaining the treasure if he creates an easy walkthrough for how he does it.
The man goes by the name Fortress, the usual Youtuber, Redditor, or anything else that has to do with internet. Except, of course, the internet and it's more "unknown" sites. There are, of course, more than a million sites out there.
The puzzle is easily solved if you know an old folk lore, now known as the Pardener's Tale. It goes like this:
3 men enjoy their beer at a table together. As you may have guessed, this was back in the medieval time. A local slave child carries a dead body using a wheel barrol. "Hey, that was my friend, who killed him?", one man at the table asked. "Death did.", the kid replied. "Why that guy again, lets make an oath to find Death, and kill him!" "Yeah!" So they were off. They find an old man that could easily be confused with a witch. "You're looking for Death? You'll find him in the forest over there." They ventured off to the forest, and after a brief survey, they discover three bags of gold. "We should wait till sundown before we take this, you, go get us some drinks at the pubbe." He went to the nearest store and bought three beers. He added poison to two of the bottles, hoping to take the gold for himself. While he was doing that, the other 2 soldiers were planning a surprise attack to kill him when he comes back. They notice the other soldier behind them, and then they mercirlessly sliced him with their sword. "Drinks to that, my friend!" They chug down the two poisoned bottles and die within seconds of drinking it. This simple tale concludes that if you go looking for death, you will certainly find him.
What does this have to do with the treasure? Fortress discovered that in every picture on the strip was a scene from the tale. If you put the pictures in order, you could build an alphabet from it. If you make the pictures into letters, you get this: FIND OAK TREE BY YELLOW HOUSE LONDON ZONE TWO.
Fortress posted the video, even with the lack of views. He finds out that the Yellow House is a bar, and outside of it, there is an oak tree. There is a yellow box by the oak trree, which he opens with his trusty pen knife. When he opens the box, he finds a note that has a poem verse at the top, and on the bottom is "the house on the beached Wale's tail" , underlined.
Fortress takes a whole two weeks before he finally figures it out. "So the house on the beached "Wale's" tale. You see how misspelled whale? So he's actually talking about... SHEEPS SHAGGER LAND!" He finds by Wales, the country, there is actually the shape of a whale at the end of the it. Using a site like "Google Maps", the answer would seem obvious. A wierd shaped yellow area around where the whales tail would be.
In just two days, he sets out on a trip to Wales and on the way, reminiscing about life after obtaining the large sum of money. Yet he doesn't realize something. As in the color of the Al1 website. Yellow. Or the name of the location of the mystery box. By the Yellow House. Or name of the city he is traveling to. Yellowstone. Or the fact that he is traveling to a bright yellow area.
In the poem, the letters of the words are in a variety of colors, as in green, red, blue, and yellow. If you delete all the letters that are not yellow, another message appears...
ive been alone so long But youll find me noW
Two days later, a farmer finds a body of a man, probably the ages of 18-20, with a fatal stab wound in his body. Around the body were two sets of footprints. Yet, they could not identify the murderer, or even the victim. There were signs of a struggle. Which one survived, Al1 or Fortress? No one knew either of them.
Of course, they were both just random people from the internet. This story will surely not effect your life in any way. Even if the author of this story was Fortress, or Al1.
