I write like an accountant. It's not a bad thing, sometimes.

-- (had this idea pop up when i was back home)

Holed up inside his room, it seemed inside here, reality stood still, save the regular but swift expeditions outside for food, and water. He's a skinny, scrawny person, with pale white skin that has almost never tasted the heat of the sun. Sitting on a plastic chair, cushioned with a soft pillow, he was on the prowl again, his eyes fixated on the multiple LCD monitors, glancing at each one with the acuteness of a hawk searching for prey.

He fit every definition out in the world of a geek, a nerd, and every other noun, syllable, verb used to describe or insult one of his kind. But what did they know?

It started some time ago, when he was looking through codes and tracking traffic online. What for? Well, just say he was bored, and back then, the net was just blooming out of it's shell. Then he started to notice an odd message in the middle of a pile of seemingly pointless gibberish, which the net was so infamous for. Out of harmless curiosity he did what the message say.

It was a key. A set of instructions on how to decode the pointless gibberish. He could tell encrypted messages from non-encrypted ones, but this wasn't. It was not electronically encrypted, but instead it was a code made by hand, or at the very least, not in human-readable form in the first place. That, was his key into the dark back-alleys of the internet world. The deep, unreached pockets, hidden from conventional internet addresses and locations.

His timing back then was perfect. He was watching at the right place, at the right time to witness the unfashionable birth of the guilds, the transition of normal occults to the net. It seemed as if as the internet grew, these long-existent puppet-masterminds were out to establish their presence in it too, not to miss out on the boom to come.

Soon, a hobby of spotting such secret messages became an obsession, but as internet traffic grew, shifting through the junk to spot those special codes encrypted in non-conventional ways became much harder, as their encryptions began to escalate in depth and complexity.

The codes had a purpose, a similarity tying them together. It was then he realized that these messages, these codes itself, staggered over such period of time also meant a message. The time of each message, the location, all was designed to hide a larger, deeper message.

It seemed insurmountable, at least to him, alone.

And so, 1337Puzzl3d was born.

Picking on visitors innate sense of curiosity and love of puzzle solving, the codes were broken into pieces letting each a little into the action, but not knowing what those puzzles together meant.

He knew he was baiting the guilds, knowing that if the guild-members ever saw the puzzles, they'd seem similar to their encodings. But he counted on their pride, their aged belief that there was little to no flaw in their system.

He counted on that if somehow, someone found out about the existence of the guilds, they'd do something about it. Though, it soon seemed his faith in the character of his visitors was misplaced.

He lost. But it wasn't over.