Update?

[mattwestwick]

Yeh, sleepy times. cya tomorrow

[Synthecism]

I'm told by a source (who I would like to assure anyone watching from Frictional Games is dead and not anyone to worry about) that "tva meningar" is very important.

[Francis York Morgan]

Ow, my brain...
Curses, FG monsters!

---

WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME LARRY?

[Francis York Morgan]

[Slack Mesa]

I want to clear the basement, I really do. But nothing I try seems to be good enough. It's hard for me to think, because someone has put a hex on me. I removed CLAR1CE from the basement. There were a lot of other suspicious characters wandering around down there, and I removed some of them too, but the place ended up looking no less perplexing than when I'd started.

Is it sufficient for me to clear the basement? Do you want me to rearrange its contents too? Please, give me a clue!

[Francis York Morgan]

We must be careful, Slack Mesa, they are watching us.

[Anxt]

I could be wrong, but I believe Slack Mesa is another clue for us. He has one post, and his post is as cryptic as anything Harold has told us. It's worth looking in to.

[Francis York Morgan]

Slack Mesa is NOT a clue for us...Trust me, he is trying to HELP our friend.

[Francis York Morgan]

Zach and I need a break, we'll rest up for tomorrow.

[Slack Mesa]

I could be wrong, but I believe Slack Mesa is another clue for us. He has one post, and his post is as cryptic as anything Harold has told us. It's worth looking in to.

I was trying to be purposely cryptic to stay within the spirit of the ARG.

The file 003.pdf (obtained from 003.rar) contains some text, followed by two lines of hex digits at the bottom. The theory on #ValveARG2-AMNESIA is that the "basement" mentioned in the text is the hex at the bottom of that page, and that clearing the basement means removing some of the hex digits so that the remaining digits are the ASCII codes of the password for 004.rar.

If that theory is correct, the crucial question is: what are we supposed to remove ("clear") from the hex ("basement")? I interpreted "Clarice" as "clar 1ce": clear 1, c, and e from the hex. That, tantalizingly, causes the first 4 digits of the remaining hex to become the ASCII code for "${" - which looks like code, thus possibly matching the mention of "if executed" in the PDF's text. The removal of 1, c, and e, though, leaves the remainder of the hex digits looking like nonsense when converted to ASCII. I tried removing other combinations of hex digits. In fact, I wrote a program to try all 2^16 possible sets of hex digits to remove. And while 33 of those sets yielded a remaining hex text that mapped entirely to readable ASCII, the readable ASCII was mostly gibberish.

And so I'm stuck. Am I on the right track by trying to "clear" the "basement" like this? Do I need to change the order of the hex digits instead of removing some of them? And is it even supposed to turn into ASCII at all, or should the hex become a sound or an image when properly decoded?