Today marked the official launch of Metashima’s Phase 3 Quests after a week of hints, teasing and hype on Metashima’s Discord & Twitter…
It started with Emma Thais, posting curiously in the Discord leading us to believe she may be ADA. Even if we’re not entirely sure who or what ADA is exactly 👀
The Announcement “Imitation” — 05/08/22 @ 21:14 BST
Imitator #1: Emma Thais // ADA? // Anagram for Metashima
Our objective is clear, find the imitator and look for clues to find others. Some super sleuths in the discord had already concluded our suspicious friend Emma Thais could be ADA / an imitator. This was seemingly confirmed by the fact “Emma Thais” is an anagram for “Metashima”. We pulled up some further clues from Emma’s bio and message history:
From this we had our next directive— find ADA, and go back to where we found ADA “from the beginning”. On @AlwaysDFTC Friday twitter space, which coincided with today’s quest launch, the community theorised that we had to go back to where the first appearance of ADA was. This happened to be on video in the tweet below. The video features a Shima who later joins ADA, looking out at a burning sun/star in space.
Emma and Jake appeared to confirm the theory; a sun emoji (☀️) showed up in Emma’s discord profile and Jake told us to “Chase the Sun”. Credit to Discord user hipoly 🧬#7886 for finding and sharing the tweet first!
Imitator #2: Belinda Colis // Anagram for Obsidian Cell
In the comments of the tweet, we found a suspicious reply with a similar avatar to our friend Emma Thais. Enter Belinda Colis, our next imitator. Belinda Colis’ profile contained some useful information, most importantly this tweet.
A fairly straightforward riddle to start, from each line you can obtain a letter that is in the first word, but not the second word. This gave us the letters as below. Unscrambled this led us to Valkyrie, referencing Project Valkyrie, some client work that Dimension Studio did for NASA.
This led me and others to the “Work” section of Dimension Studio website, and specifically to the page for NASA’s Valkyrie. However something was amiss, the URL for the page didn’t appear to make sense. This was confirmed by Emma in the Discord who said “There is something not quite right about that website”. What could “robincoditiaboss” mean?
Imitator #3: Robin Codi Tia Boss // Anagram for Obsidian Robotics
Emoji clues on Discord (📸🤳❤️) from the wonderful Merghu and later on Belinda Colis’ twitter Bio, led the community to Instagram. They discovered Robin with a single post pictured below. Shoutout to Discord User ⚜Ethy-E#8208, MetaJay.16k#5056 and Nex for sharing these discoveries with the Discord!
Here, we are presented with what looks like a time. Discord User sdidonato#3124 suggested it could be a video timestamp range. This was confirmed by Emma in chat, and later with an update to Robin’s profile mentioning “Taking a second to think”. Seconds of a video?
This led us to one of two YouTube videos on Metashima’s YouTube account, titled Metashima Assemble. Credit to discord user tnw001#1818 for this speedy discovery. In the time range stated in Robin’s Instagram Photo, there is a link to a YouTube video, pictured below. Here we meet Sam Gaby Galeres.
Imitator #4: Sam Gaby Galeres // Anagram for Assembly Garage
Sam Gaby Galeres was confirmed to be an imitator by Emma Thais while also hinting we were very close to the end. The video linked was a simple 11 second clip, containing the word Meta repeated 4 times as pictured below. Strangely, Sam did not have a mysterious shaped avatar like the other imitators but an exclamation mark.
Our final clue, required a little logic and reasoning. Emma asked the Discord how many metas? Meta x 4 > Meta4 > Metaphor. This had to be significant. Coupling this with the strange happenings in the discord (The Shima Quester role appearing, Testing of commands using an exclamation mark) and the coincidence that Sam Gaby Galeres’ profile had an exclamation mark as an avatar led many of us to try !metaphor as a discord command.
!metaphor led us to the conclusion of Quest 1, the command granted the user the Shima Quester role and granted access to an #｜🔓・ imitation channel in discord. In the channel we finally find the real identity of ADA on Discord, a congratulations message, a form to claim a POAP and a graphic which was assumed symbolises the completion of 1/8 quests…
Conclusion
This signified the end of Phase 3 Quest #1, I personally loved it, and knowing that there’s more to come is so exciting. I’ll do my best to cover the upcoming quests, but for now, here’s the community’s reward for solving the quest. What is it?
Also a massive shoutout to the following people who made the quest experience extra special:
