Ackerly Green’s Secret Society

5. The Ackerly Green Book Shop

5

The Ackerly Green Book Shop

Saberlane: February 3, 2018, 4:41 PMAll right, so this is . . . weird.

I’ve spent the past twenty-four hours on calls and email with i********: and on support threads for a tech security forum. I even paid a guy $20 on a freelance site to try and explain how this could happen unless someone hacked my account.

Sorry, backing up . . .

This photo:

The photo was a flat lay of the book Ojo in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Though this post has since disappeared from the Ackerly Green i********: profile, the original post featured the book in the center, with what appears to be broken shards of pottery in the bottom left corner and the edges of other similarly antique-looking books featuring on the opposite sides of the frame, all laid on a backdrop of dark brown wood.

The original caption read:

{Ojo in Oz is book 27 in the staggering Oz series. Though lacking a bit of the spirit of Baum’s original works, it is widely considered the best of Plumly’s entries. Note: The dancing bear on the cover is called Snufferbux, but his full name is Snuffurious, Buxorious, Blundurious Boroso. -A.G.}

Saberlane:I didn’t post this photo. I posted the first one on our feed, the quote from W. B. Yeats. That photo was taken in our office. But not the Oz book.

Instagram says there was no suspicious activity on the account. No weird sign-ins.

After the bio changed to “The Ackerly Green Book Shop” last week, I added two-factor authentication to make sure nobody was messing around with the account. I should’ve gotten a text on my phone, but I never did. Support at i********: said that the new photo had similar hashtags to my previous post so I should check to see if someone else in my company had posted it (they are unaware that Dev and I are the company at the moment.) So where did it come from? Listen, if it was one of the Mounties, I don’t mind AT ALL. I just want to know, because this, combined with the bio change, and some other weird things that have been going on lately (will post about soon), it’s got me all kinds of sort of freaked out.

It soon became evident that the Mountaineers shared Saberlane’s concern over the apparent i********: coup. After confirming that none of the Mounties had been behind the mysterious post, theories started to abound. Saberlane presented the possibility that the post was the work of the Council of 18 Gates, who may have hacked the account similar to the way they put The Book of Briars up for preorder. Yet as much as everyone wanted to believe the Council was still out there somewhere helping behind the scenes, it seemed unlikely that they would reappear on i********:, of all places, and this post felt strangely personal as well. Saberlane admitted that the Oz series had been a favorite of his growing up, a fact that few people could have known.

Cj_Heighton, also known as Chi, brought up the possibility that the Herman pins may be exerting a powerful effect on the physical world, which seemed in line with the strange happenings that had begun occurring ever since their discovery. Almost all of the Mountaineers had reported a kind of hypersensitivity while wearing the pin, as if magiq had been pulling the strings all along but they were only now aware of its influence.

When the second post appeared three days later—a photo of an old Payson, Dunton, and Scribner’s Penmanship workbook on a bed of handwritten envelopes—Viviane was the first to notice that the mysterious poster had left the same signature, signing the caption “–A.G.” within curly brackets. Though Saberlane’s first thought was that it was merely a reference to Ackerly Green the company, Robert suggested the possibility that it was the signature of an actual person. The only “AG” anyone could think of was Aisling Green, Deirdre’s mother, though why and how Deirdre’s late mother would be reaching out through i********: was beyond anyone’s reasoning.

A.G. was now the first lead the Mountaineers had to the identity of the mysterious poster, and they seized the opportunity to conjecture and theorize together. It was then that Saberlane mentioned for the first time that he had been hearing strange goings-on in the Ackerly Green offices: faint voices, and sometimes, the sound of typewriters. The sounds were definitely coming from inside the Ackerly Green office, not from any of the adjacent ones, which seemed impossible, given the size of the space, but the Mountaineers were no strangers to seemingly impossible situations. While a few of the Mounties laughed about getting the Ackerly Green office onto one of those ghost hunting shows, Grimangel53 was the first to draw the connection between the current iteration of Ackerly Green, and the original, from the Book of the Wild. “Maybe the residual magiq connecting the old and new is affecting things?” he wrote. “Names have power, and taking on the mantle of AGP probably has let the magiq be released and used.”

In the midst of all the uncertainty and improbability, the idea that the two Ackerly Green offices may be connected through the shared magiq of their name seemed like the first piece of solid ground the Mountaineers had to stand on in a rapidly evolving reality. Meanwhile, the posts kept coming, and the Mountaineers started looking more deeply into the captions, the backgrounds in the photos, and pretty much any detail they could get their hands on. No detail was too trivial to investigate, no rabbit hole too absurd to fall down. They tried every approach to make meaning out of the posts, searching for patterns in post times, references to the familiar paths of Wool and Silver that they had come to understand during The Monarch Papers, and even drawing associations to the six guilds and their positions on the chronocompass, all in an effort to understand more about the mysterious A.G.. The photos were almost always a classic or vintage-looking book with a note about the book’s history or the condition of the particular copy. However, no amount of hypothesizing seemed to bring the Mountaineers closer to an explanation of why they had suddenly begun appearing on the Ackerly Green account, or who may be behind them. Any other reasonable group of people would be understandably frustrated or even discouraged after such prolonged mystery and confusion, but the Mountaineers seemed to thrive on it. “Everything unexplained is a puzzle.” Robert posted in the midst of a frenzy of far-fetched questions and theories. “That’s the fun in life.”

It was a relief, then, when in the middle of the i********: madness, the Mountaineers heard from a friendly face. Martin Rank was back on the Forum, with an update on the Kemetic Solutions trio and a few words of encouragement for the Mountaineers.