Smallville

Now, let me clarify here, I say "stranded in oklahoma" and you immediately think of a broken down old car steaming on the side of a tiny road in the middle of a corn field. That's not where we were . It was a smallish town. There aren't that many freeways now without towns along them. So, we found ourselves in Smallville USA without any gas in our car. We Weren't exactly sure what to do, so we asked around to see if anyone knew where to find short-term work in the area, just enough to afford some gas. Basically, there wasn't anywhere like that. We spent two nights sleeping in our car before Allen figured out how to solve the problem of money. It was absolutely insane. Allen had decided to rob a bank. The way he looked at it, we were already fugitives, and as long as we had a supply of cash, we could keep running forever. We resisted at first, honestly, I swear. But, there's something about crazy that is incredibly persuasive. We decided to pick off cash from a national branch, one of the big ones that got the bailout, that way we wouldn't be hurting the town specifically. Plus, as Kieth pointed out, that way it was more like reclaiming our own money. He was a funny sort of guy. Anyway, that was our plan. We spent the next week dumpster diving for food, and sleeping in the car while we planned our strategy. It was actually pretty good, to be honest. I'll fill you in more soon, I've got to keep moving, and it is hard as balls to type on a touch-screen.

Like the Arrow, Off in a Shot

     We sat in our hotel, Staring at the collection of stars on the wall, and trying to understand the constellations that they made. Non of us were chemists, so we had no idea what any of it meant, and it was still warped in places, like, none of it fit on the walls, but it was fascinating to look at. Allen stayed up all night scouring the walls, looking for an indicator. Kieth and I went to sleep, but he wandered around the room all night looking for a sign, maybe a signature. He didn't find it. The formula, while interesting, was another dead end. We really only had one option: look for more clues in the photographs. Unfortunately, we had run out of pictures with gps tags. the rest of the pictures we had were scanned photographs. so we started scouring them for any information we could pull from them. We poured over the photographs for a day, and I sent them back to my friends at the bank, to see if they could get anything, but it didn't seem like there was anything to be gotten. To this day, I'm not sure how they figured it out, but about two days after we started, the guys at the bank sent me a link to a google maps location. Unfortunately, it was back in california, Thunder Road, in 29 palms.
     Kieth and I wanted to wait another night, and grab some food and crap before we headed off, but Allen was over that. He packed up and shoved us into the car as soon as we had a destination. That was that. We started driving immediately. It was somewhere in Oklahoma, just past tulsa, I think, that we ran out of gas. It was somewhere before that that we ran out of money.
     Suddenly, without knowing it, Kieth and I had let a madman strand us in the middle of Oklahoma with no money, and no transportation.

The Arrow

The next place that we had any GPS coordinate on was this graffiti covered bar called the arrow, in new york. This place kinda rules. I actually had a stupid hard time looking it up just now. It's listed on google as "The Rook" which makes a lot more sense than the arrow, when you think about it. I see why Greg chose it. Allen didn't waste any time. He started tearing the place apart. We showed up during the afternoon, so there wasn't anybody in there, just a bartender, and us. Allen walked up to him and started asking all sorts of questions, I don't remember half of it, I mean this was a year ago. It's hard for me to remember a lot of this stuff, honestly. But I do remember what he did next. He pulled his gun on the bartender. He was nuts, I swear. The bartender was, of course, freaked, and lead Allen downstairs. In the basement there was a painting on the wall and behind that was a safe. It was full of cash. The guy thought we were robbing him. Allen just started laughing. dude was dark. Finally we convey to the guy what we're looking for. He sighs, like he's relieved and takes us to one of the booths. Says something that tells me we're not the first ones to come looking for this crap, and asks to see the knife. I don't know what Knife, but allen pulls this big old thing off of his calf, the bartender smiled. Then he takes the mirror off the wall this time, upstairs in the bar. He hands us a sheet of steel about the size of a sheet of paper. He basically says that the first people to come asking were cops, but his instructions were not to give it to anyone with any badges. Only to the person with the knife. he asked what the knife said and allen replied "Dead End Drive" that chilled me, the way he said it. I think it spooked the bartender, too because he suddenly remembered the gun, and tried to get us the hell out. We obliged, but not before Keith shoved a twenty into the tip jar.
We got a hotel, which wasn't cheap in new york, and we sat down to study the plate. it was hard to make out what was on it. It was clearly punched through all over, riddled with tiny holes, and if you held them up to a light, you could see shapes, but they were so small that we couldn't make them out. Allen decided we had caught the middle of a trail again, until Keith made a connection. Well, it was half of it, anyway. He pulled the shade off of one of the bedside lamps in the hotel room and stuck the metal next to it. Suddenly, the room was darker, and across one wall was a scatter of specks of light, connected by weird lines. It still didn't make sense, but it was clearing up. The metal was a formula.