Destiny 2 – ARG Puzzle Update Plus Missing Clovis Bray Journal Pages And Deep Stone Crypt Raid Tease

Codebreakers have been working away over the past few days to solve a puzzle related to Clovis Bray Lore and Beyond Light. It appears now that enough of the puzzle has been solved to reveal the prize – the missing lore pages from Clovis Bray’s Journal, which describes just how much of a maniac he is and we’ve got a teaser for the upcoming raid in the Deep Stone Crypt. Everything ties together really nicely setting the context for Beyond Light, so the following is an update to the ARG Puzzle and a look at the missing Clovis Bray journal pages in Destiny 2.

Before we get into the detail of what has been discovered, let’s do a short recap of what’s been happening over the past week or so. This has all been happening outside the game in lore books found in the Collectors Edition, which then led to an ARG puzzle, which in turn have led to some missing lore pages from that journal.

I went over the initial lore pages the other day (and you can get the full recap here) but the journal essentially details Clovis Bray’s journey to Europa to find the secret to immortality. Clovis has a disease which is slowly killing him and he has this fantasy of seeding the entire future of the human race. He sets up a base on Europa, keeping himself alive with organs grown inside pigs and then transplanting them to himself. During an accident, he died for a few minutes and had a vision where he spoke to the Darkness (which he refers to as Clarity). Clovis had been trying to complete the Exo project, the safe transfer of human minds into Exo’s – however, all ended up going mad and ripping themselves apart. He even experimented on his own children.

He calls on his granddaughter Elizbeth Bray to join him on Europa, although she’s reluctant as Clovis killed her father in an experiment to transfer his mind to an Exo. Elsie eventually agrees to come along, and Clovis has since been instructed to build a gate with Vex technology. Stepping through the gate they potentially discover the Vex homeworld. He discovered the combination of Vex Fluid and Clarity was the stabilising element needed for the Exo project and the final lore entry of the previous journal was a letter to his grandchildren saying he’d done it… he’d found the secret to immortality.

These lore pages were found in the Collectors Edition (but helpfully published online for everyone to read). Also contained within the Collectors Edition was a small Shard of Darkness. It looked like a pyramid ship but lit up with LEDs. This led the community to a URL on the Bungie website and a code called CHOOSE. If you redeemed item found within the collector’s edition, entered the code CHOOSE on the website while signed in… you’d then get an animated GIF.

This is when the Destiny Community kicked into gear and solving the new Alternate Reality Game (ARG). Contained within the animated GIF was data. If you opened the GIF in a code editor, then sequences and coordinates were found. Loads of fantastic effort has been put in by the great folks over at /raidsecrets, so I recommend you go over there and check out the post (links down below). For me, puzzles like this and The Corridors of Time are some of the most fun times in the world of Destiny and it couldn’t be done without huge efforts from the community coming together to solve this huge puzzle.

Slowly the lore pages started to be revealed and within, there are some shocking details contained on those pages. All of this appears to be pointing towards clues for the raid, which is going to be held in the Deep Stone Crypt. We had clues before to how crazy Clovis Bray was – killing his son through experiments, thinking he’s the chosen one and the man to spawn an entirely new human race across the solar system and the desire to wipe out entire races like the Vex on a whim.

These newly discovered pages start with Clovis finding ways to stop the Exo’s going mad by giving them a combination of human traits – like eating, drinking, sleeping and dreaming – and also wiping their memory. Wiping helps them become more resilient to the breakdowns. Clovis has also discovered that the vex have followed them back from the portal and 2082 Volantis to Europa.

A paranoid Clovis starts to suspect members of his own team as Vex infiltrators. He suspects Sundaresh is no who she seems – although a leading Scientist with Clovis Bray he cannot recall ever hiring her or finding any work she’s done. Clovis also notices that something is speaking to all the Exo’s. Buried in the ingredients of the Exo’s is a mixture of Darkness and Vex, and Clovis believes they are being influenced by… something. Only a small piece of data is being given to them individually, but he can hear them all. Elsie comes to Clovis to berate him but ultimately asks to be transferred into an Exo body to help fight the Vex (although this is Clovis’ side of the story). This was the opportunity Clovis had been looking for. Clovis successfully transfers Elizabeth’s mind into the Exo body, but in the process kills her.

So Clovis tests his Exo mechanism on his own Grandaughter and by all accounts, it’s a success. However, Clovis himself is deteriorating and he prepares more replacement organs for himself and prepares to go under the operating table. He still wants to observe Elsie for a little while longer before he fully commits to transferring his mind into an Exo (the coward). However, during the next procedure to replace his organs disaster strikes as he is woken up mid-operation.

“I died on the operating table. Not unexpected.

But when I woke, I was still on the table. My body still open.

It was almost perfectly dark. I perceived that I was surrounded by medical frames, all frozen mid-movement, their cutting and suction instruments whining at standby.

I could only see because of the light_ from a single red eye.

The operation had gone terribly wrong.

Above the life-support collar on my neck, I was completely intact. Below that meridian, I had been separated into distinct braids of tangled flesh. My nerves made up one braid-my circulatory system another-my lymph nodes, my muscles, my naked bones; the glistening hulls of my extracellular matrix abandoned on the table like leftover turkey after Thanksgiving dinner. I had been picked clean and __! My head was the source of a gory river delta.

Yet all the organs were still working. I was alive, in disassembly.

CLARITY? I asked the darkness. I had no breath to speak, but I could still transmit with my sensorium. IS THAT YOU?

“No,“ said the voice behind the red eye. “It‘s me.“

Sundaresh.

Her voice was thoughtful, remote, and keenly terrific. Like the noise of an angle grinder held to my skull.

“Something like this happened to me. I was an explorer, once. One of_ hundreds of myself. Then I fell into a_ a trap, I think? And they drew me out of it with a hook, and turned me inside out to see how I worked, and then they made billions of me. All of us shouting at each other, shouting for Chioma, screaming for mother. They were looking for the right one. And when they found me, they killed all the others. I knew I was different, because the quiet made me happy. I was glad to be alone.“

VEX, I screamed at her. YOU‘RE A VEX. YOU ARE NOT REAL AND YOU CAN’T HURT ME.

“Can’t I?” She grasped my spinal cord. A frame shadowed her motions, lifting the cord like a snake. “Of course I’m not a Vex. Is there ‘a’ Vex? Is ‘Vex’ something you can be, rather than something that you do? I don’t know. I don’t know why they sent me here. I don’t know if they do either. They just __ things. Why do you think I’m here, Clovis?”

“To kill me, “ I whispered. Without a heartbeat to waver, without lungs to seize and choke, could I even feel fear? I discovered that I could. “You’re an assassin!”

“No, “ Sundaresh whispered. The red eye throbbed in time with her voice. “The Vex don’t act so directly. They didn’t know what you found here, but I discovered your secret, Clarity Control. And once I tell them, they __ come for it.”

The red light made my blood on the surgical instruments appear black. I tried to signal Elisabeth. I think that in my panic, I even called her Elsie.

Sundaresh closed her fist around my spine. One thumbnail dug into a disc, probing for the nerve beneath. It felt like nothing I have ever-“

Elsie comes back (now in her superior Exo form) and saves her grandfather from Sundaresh and he somehow survives and recovers, although tormented by his dissection. Clovis continues to hide Carity Control from Elsie Bray as he’s worried she’ll likely try to destroy the whole operation. We discover that Elsie’s memories (from her original transfer) are stored on file somewhere, which will likely come back in the game at some point.

The Vex infestation and infection has grown and it’s become Elsie’s obsession. She’s been testing patients affected by the Vex infection. Her questions to Clovis appear to have dampened – however, Clovis makes a mistake in conversation. He mentions the dreams that all Exo’s have – of a Tower and the dead. Elsie bursts into anger in the conversation with this new information that Clovis has been hiding from her, and wonders what else he’s hiding. Her mind is made up – This process must be destroyed.

Clovis pleads with Elsie not to do it. Then it appears as if Clovis kills Elsie, although he justifies it to himself by saying that wasn’t Elsie – that was a ‘twisted’ version of her. Again here he’s showing us his maniacal side with delusions and justifying non-truths to himself. Before he killed her though, it appears as if she managed to attempt to destroy his work.

Clovis continues to lose his mind. Elsie plans to wipe out the Vex, which ultimately lead to the failure of the Deep Stone Crypt and the Exo project. Clovis has delusions of grandeur and refers to himself as a God. He’s not the only one who doesn’t want The Deep Stone Crypt shut down either… The Vex are after his experiments too.

Then a sudden behaviour changes in the Vex. This is where the lore potentially points to the raid, and ‘something’ coming. I think that something might be us. With this warning of an attack coming, Clovis revives Elsie once again (for the 2nd time). Now confident of his Exo/human mind transfer he’s ready to do it to himself and rid himself of his failing body. He’s on the cusp of pressing the button and says:

“All I need do is strike a key, and the scanner will sedate me, flush me with the poisons of immortality, and rip a perfect image of my mind from the quantum information encoded in the atoms of my brain. Whether such a high-resolution scan is necessary (it is doubtful that any element of the mind is truly quantum) is beside the point. I insist upon the best.

The vials of imaging binder smell like sweet metal.

This vindicates my work! This proves I was right to continue. All those doubters, all those defeatists, all those whining myopics who bleated, you have enough, Clovis, why must you ask the world for more?” All beaten_

And now I WILL have more. I have thousands of exobodies here and thousands of connectomes in my library. I will raise an army. I will meet this invasion of vermin and turn it back. Then I will strip their senile grave-star for parts and put an end to all mortality.

I will forget nothing. One copy of my mind will go to an exo, yes, but a second copy will be installed in the Deep Stone site. He will guide me to my destiny. The gods of might and knowledge will welcome me to their table. I will be the LUCA, the beginning and the source of the way, the foundation of the long road_ “

Clovis has finally done it, he’s taken the plunge and transferred his mind to an Exo body. In doing so, gone completely mad and sending a version of himself to defend the Deep Stone Crypt, no doubt from us when we storm the place for the raid coming in Beyond Light.

The narrative then takes a twist as we appear to see Exo Clovis speaking to the human husk he’s left behind

“You meager, squirming thing. You never understood Clarity. You never will. You are bound to this husk, even as I shed it. You will die in its poisoned wreckage while I attain the perfect eternity of an angel. You will be the residue of my transubstantiation. Something left in the workings of a coffee pot, some greasy sin.
I had the strength to kill my own granddaughter. I will certainly have no trouble killing you.
Irrelevant. She was going to destroy so much of __.
Feel this, you jumped-up pond slime.

Oh. It hurts at the surface. But inside, there is no pain.”

Really interesting stuff. I’m really liking the lore we’re getting with Beyond Light so far… Clovis Bray, the birth of the Exos, Elisabeth Bray’s transformation from human to Exo and the involvement of the Vex and Darkness. It feels like this is all building to the raid and a likely encounter with Clovis at some point.

One question I have is what is going to happen after the raid. Will this be a one and done raid, or will this open up something else in the game much as we saw with Forsaken and the Last Wish Raid? I’d love to see that, but I think expectations should probably be set at the appropriate level given the limited resources Bungie have compared to the Forsaken times. We can still dream though right?

Let me know what you think of the Clovis Bray missing journal pages and the ARG puzzle.

That’s it for this look at ARG Puzzle Update, Missing Clovies Bray Lore pages found and Deep Stone Crypt raid tease.