Anomidae/Project Skybox
INTERLOPER: Half-Life 2's Greatest Unsolved Mystery
YouTuber Anomidae documents a discovery made on the old Half-Life 2 forum halflife2.net. In the first map of the chapter We Don't Go to Ravenholm, going into one of the alleys reveals a modified version of the Umbrella Man graffiti found throughout the game. Opening the map in the Hammer map editor reveals that the full graffiti image extends below the map, with the hidden portion appearing heavily corrupted. Opening the image in a text editor results in the usual mess of gibberish you'd expect from opening any image in such a way, with the exception of one section containing a hidden message:console: INTERLOPE
>>"Unknown Command: INTERLOPE"
console: get s.interlope.pull:27015
During his investigation, Anomidae managed to generate two Type 5 demos in Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2, labeled as CSTRIKE and FORTRESS respectively. In CSTRIKE, an armed Terrorist is wandering the map Dust II when they spot an "Interloper", a figure which resembles the Umbrella Man. Startled, the Terrorist shoots at the figure until it disappears. Suddenly, the Terrorist is flung into an out of bounds region of the map. Dropping their gun, a static sound plays as the Terrorist flails around before the demo ends. In FORTRESS, a Scout is peering around the corner of the RED intelligence room in 2Fort, where they notice an A-posing Heavy. Looking behind to see another A-posing Heavy, the Scout peers around the corner again to find the initial Heavy now facing towards him before the demo ends.
At approximately 6 AM, the INTERLOPE command ceases to function, and the Umbrella Man graffiti in Ravenholm is now gone. Declaring the mystery still unsolved, Anomidae vows to keep investigating. The video was originally supposed to end here, however, Anomidae includes a last-minute addition: right before the original video was to be uploaded, a recording of the lost SPOOKYCOAST demo was found. In it, a citizen is seen walking up to the cliff-side house located near the bridge of the Highway 17 chapter. Looking inside, several other "corrupted" citizens can be seen wandering around. One of these corrupted citizens notices the outside citizen and stares at them with glowing, white eyes. As the citizen reaches out to them, the corrupted citizen lunges at them and pushes them into the water, where they drown amidst several Interlopers.
INTERLOPER 2: Source Engine Mystery
A year after the first INTERLOPER video was recorded, Anomidae discovers that the Umbrella Man graffiti has returned. Knowing that he only has six hours to use the command again, he quickly restarts his investigation. Anomidae explains the five types of demos generated when using this command:- Type 1: The most common type, consisting of a 1-2 second playback of the player moving around erratically.
- Type 2: The second most common type, consisting of the player standing in an out of bound region of the map before dying.
- Type 3: Slightly longer demos consisting of the player moving around aimlessly across the map and performing random actions.
- Type 4: Demos consisting of the player actually playing the game properly. Anomidae notes that this type of demo is disproportionally frequent in Portal.
- Type 5: The most rare type, consisting of a first-person perspective of what appears to be an NPC within the game.
Anomi establishes that the INTERLOPER command only works within older Source engine games, with more recent titles having limited compatibility. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive appears to work, but frequently crashes. The current Source 2 version of Dota 2 fails to work at all, while a 2015 build doesn't appear to properly generate demos. Present-day versions of Garry's Mod also don't work, though older versions do.
Anomidae notes that attempting to replay the CSTRIKE and FORTRESS demos results in them still functioning, but appearing glitched, and has them released to the public. He also remarks that several viewers have sent him a screenshot of a cut Source tool known as DM Editor, thought Anomidae regards it as likely a hoax due to finding no evidence of its existence. While using the INTERLOPE command in Portal, Anomidae is able to generate a Type 5 demo just as the time limit is reached. When that happens, he now has control over the camera with the NPC left behind. While exploring the map, which appears to be a slightly altered version of Test Chamber 16, Anomidae is confronted by an Interloper. The Interloper approaches Anomidae and causes his game to crash. When attempting to start Portal again, the game places him in an empty, checkered floor room before crashing.
INTERLOPER 3: The Ever Deepening Source Mystery
Anomidae showcases several discoveries made by him and several volunteers within the maps of the CSTRIKE and FORTRESS demos:- In CSTRIKE, the Interlopers are named CAPTURE_ followed by some random text.
- In FORTRESS, the map contains no lighting and a broken skybox. Attempting to go the RED's intelligence causes the map to build cubemaps until it crashes.
- Also in FORTRESS, in RED's barracks, the word "FSKY" is written on the wall and triggers the demo to start playing when approached. "FSKY" is also present within CSTRIKE's map
- Both NPCs are referred to as "DMNPC" in their model name, and while their models load properly within the map, they do not appear when loaded in Hammer, Source's map editor.
When searching "FSKY" on YouTube, Anomidae discovers a channel reuploading old videos made by Eidam0na, a Machinima creator who began making videos about "Mona" after an apparent mental breakdown before deleting his channel in 2014. It's shown that Eida knew about the Interloper mystery back in 2011 and made an 8-part series investigating it himself, though only part 3 has been uploaded. Unlike Anomidae, Eida takes a paranormal approach in his investigation, believing the Interlopers to be ghosts. In the intro to episode 3, a Type 5 demo is shown consisting of a citizen wandering in the area just before the mines of Ravenholm before spotting an Interloper. Eida also claims that after starting his investigation, the Interlopers have begun appearing in his games.
In this video, Eida uses an oujia board-type map containing a ragdoll to communicate with the entity, showing that Eida could force the INTERLOPE command to load specific maps. The first map, asking the Interloper's name, ends in a failure. Eida simplifies the map to have yes and no answers and asks the Interloper if it can feel pain. This also fails, so Eida asks them if they are human, to which the Interloper seems to answer NO. When Eida asks the Interloper if they are trapped, a strange Type 5-like demo is generated. In it, the ragdoll glitches out as the camera travels outside the map. The camera continues in one direction for 2 hours when a different map suddenly appears in the horizon. As the camera approaches it, the demo ends. Anomidae ends the video with a final discovery; he's able to load Portal RTX into the same empty map without the game crashing.
INTERLOPER 4: The Live Investigation | Source Engine Mystery
In a YouTube livestream, Anomidae reveals a significant discovery he's made. While Portal RTX is running, he's able to run Half-Life 2: Deathmatch as well, something the Source engine normally prevents from happening. In the LAN tab of the server browser, an empty server is listed that he is able to connect to, deducing that this empty server is actually hosted by the Portal RTX game whenever it is running. Joining the server takes the user to an alternate main menu with the option to 'Disconnect' instead of 'Quit'. Within this server Anomidae is now able to use the INTERLOPE command again to generate demos.Initially starting with Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, most of the generates demos are either Type 1 or Type 2. One notable exception is a demo consisting of an unknown map with incomplete textures and strange diegetic music in the background; Anomidae classifies this as a Type 5 demo named "WHITEROOM", but unlike most other Type 5's it does not appear to depict a player's perspective. After demonstrating that GoldSrc games don't work with the INTERLOPE command, Anomidae moves onto Team Fortress 2. Anomidae is able to connect to Portal RTX through Team Fortress 2 and generate demos; doing this takes the user to the same alternate menu as with the previous game, but this time with a corrupted game title. Not much of interest is found in this game, with the most noteworthy demo being a clip that appears to feature the same player movements as those in an official Source Filmmaker tutorial.
Soon, he moves onto Left 4 Dead 2. It is observed that a large number of clips in Left 4 Dead 2 consist of the player hanging from a ledge as their AI teammates ignore them. Anomidae then manages to generate a Type 5 demo. Named ELLISFLOOR, the demo takes place in the Hard Rain campaign and feature an incapacitated Ellis attempting to crawl away from something. As he crawls, several common infected run past and completely ignore him. Ellis watches as several A-posing common infected approach him before he clips through the floor and falls into the void. Anomidae not only cannot find the demo file, but the game crashes when he attempts to play it.
Moving onto Portal 2, the game generates what appears to be Type 4 demos at a high frequency similar to Portal, except the player performs rather poorly: Appearing to have an incomplete understanding of the game's mechanics, and frequently falling into the goo and dying at the end of each demo. Meanwhile, the player in Portal RTX has begun moving on its own. In one demo taking place in Test Chamber 10, the player falls into a hole and enters a maze normally not in the map. While navigating the maze, the Portal RTX player comes across a doorway. When the Portal 2 player falls down a hole, the Portal RTX player enters the doorway, which causes Portal 2 to generate cubemaps until it crashes. Anomidae's stream goes down, and he is forced to end it as his network connection is being interfered. In a follow-up video, Aminodae reveals that attempting to join the Portal RTX server only leads him to the checkered floor map.
INTERLOPER 5: Searching In the Dark
The video begins with a short segment that appears to predate the initial Interloper investigation, showing that Anomidae instead planned to explore something named the Flashlight Nuke glitch, an oddity only seen in the Xbox version of Half-Life 2. By performing a series of inputs, the player is able to glitch out the game with random effects. While recording a scene in the first Ravenholm map, Anomidae goes into the alley with the Interloper graffiti to check for its presence, confirming its absence. It appears to be this moment which inspired Anomidae to look into that mystery instead.The video then shifts back to the Interloper Investigation, with a brief rundown of the situation. It's revealed that a new Type 5 demo recording was recovered from a hosting server. This demo, named HELMETCREEK, takes place in Day of Defeat: Source on the map Argentan, with a 3D axis line display in the left corner. In it, an Allied Soldier is inside a building when they are suddenly flung into a creek. The Allied Soldier notices a figure in the sky and begins approaching several HINT blocks being placed. When approaching the last hint block, the Allied Soldier is seemingly deleted with their helmet flowing in the creek before falling through the map.
Anomidae explains that he hasn't been able to get Portal RTX to function properly, as all it shows is a white screen, and puts the investigation on hiatus. Eventually, he accidentally discovers that by recording and playing demos in a Source game, he can manipulate Portal RTX. Using Spectator mode, Anomidae has Portal RTX move out of bounds in one direction, but either finds nothing or crashes. He gets the idea to make the player in Portal RTX fall through the map, and after six and a half hours, the Portal RTX player lands in a new zone. Using Garry's Mod as a launchpad, Aminodae travels through several sections of Portal RTX, eventually finding four new zones. With these discoveries, his investigation is revived.
Near the end of the video, Anomidae explores one of Eida's videos where he encounters a odd-acting BLU Scout in Team Fortress 2, which he refers to as a "Crasher". Being the only one to be able to see this entity, the Crasher flies out of bounds, which causes Eida's game to crash. Another video, titled "It's Inside my Computer here's proof 2014.11.22", plays the same demo through an unknown Source tool, albeit slightly different and ending with the Crasher flying directly into Eida's camera before crashing the game. While playing back the demo, Anomidae points out an Interloper watching Eida in the background.
INTERLOPER 6: Misty Has Been Found
In this short update, Anomidae announces that the long-lost 'Misty' Type 5 has been discovered in a compilation of classic Source Engine videos, where it was labelled as a creepy beta cutscene.The video features an NPC dragging a 'Cheaple' ragdoll into an apartment while it is emitting an unusual looping sound file. In the room, they throw a pair of cinderblocks at the corpse's head, the second causing it to stop speaking. After a moment, the model suddenly moves to look at the NPC, accompanied by the windchime sound effect. The NPC is dragged out of the room into the void, where multiple Umbrella Men surround and act erratically around it, accompanied by dissonant piano music and several missing sound files (represented in the Source Engine by Dr. Kleiner's "Oh fiddlesticks, what now?" voiceline). In the last few frames before the end of the demo, the NPC model is thrown towards the camera, seemingly showing that it too has been changed into the Cheaple model.
INTERLOPER 7: Following the Light in Source
This update is primarily presented by another member of Anomidae's Project Skybox team named Lucy, who recaps their progress in the investigation over the past few months. Presenting an image of a seemingly random set of colours on a textureless wall, Lucy begins to explain the history of the Source Engine. Developed with the intent of supporting large, deeply immersive and dynamic worlds, the version eventually released to the public in 2004 is a significantly scaled down version of the original ambitions for the project.Following on the discovery of the "Demo Void" in INTERLOPER 5, Lucy mentions several viewer suggestions that have led to promising leads. The team has moved on to using Garry's Mod to develop autonomous drones that can explore the void at a much greater frequency and speed than the previous method. Anomidae discovers that these drones can be observed even outside of Garry's Mod while watching demos in other games. Lucy reveals that by ripping the assets of Portal RTX, it is possible to obtain a map file for the immediate surroundings around the player in the void, making analysing the void's geography easier. Finally, the team has looked into Eida's "Weird Crash on TF2" video and attempted to follow the map and coordinates presented on it in the void. This leads to a discovery of a cube structure after just three minutes of flight time. Analysing its geometry reveals that the cube is hollow, with a raised pedestal on the ground and the letters 'HJEM' protruding out of a wall.
Attempting to record a demo inside this cube suddenly results in a missing 'ERROR' model rushing towards the player, running a VRAD script before crashing the game. VRAD is a Source Engine raytracing algorithm intended to bake light into maps in a less resource-intensive way. A day after this discovery, Anomidae has an incident in which a completely separate void demo is also accosted by an ERROR mode, who behaves the same. In the code that appears within the VRAD script, the game attempts to save the lighting data to a file named 'v_test.bsp' on a desktop belonging to 'Jan'. By recreating this file directory path, they are able to capture lighting information about locations within the Demo Void.
To investigate where the source of the light that the VRAD is reacting to originates from, the Project Skybox team build a pinhole camera-type device in the map editor. This works by allowing a tiny amount of light to enter a dark room with a reflective surface, which scatters the light across the room and creates a low-resolution image that should represent the origin of the light. After triggering VRAD, the resulting image reveals the light to originate on GM_Construct, accurately reflecting the location that the demo was recorded at. Repeating the test on Dust2 confirms the hypothesis that the 'void' has textures that are not rendered during typical demo recordings, and running the test on the previously discovered 'Demo Sites' gives the first glimpse of what the areas should look like when fully textured with color, albeit at a very low resolution.
Project Skybox's next lead is to wait until the Umbrella Man graffiti reappears and they can start generating demos. However, despite checking every day since November 1st, it has yet to appear. Running a VRAD test on the graffiti spot produces an image with an inconclusive origin.
As a quick edit before the video is uploaded, Anomidae reveals a new discovery: When generating a new VRAD file at the 'Arches' demo site, a new, red object has appeared compared to the previous scan of the area. Taking several more images across the span of an hour reveals movement within the void, completely unrelated to the actions of the Project Skybox team.
INTERLOPER 8: The Tuesday Incident
During an unrelated streaming session from Anomidae, the topic of discussion turns to the Interloper investigation. Anomidae mentions that one suggestion they received was to create a custom Sourcemod specifically designed to make research easier. They reveal Project Skybox, a barebones game that uses the map of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast as a way of adding new features that could help with the investigation, showcasing that the model of "Lucy", the previous video's narrator, has been placed within this game. Anomidae is suddenly called to attend to real-life work stuff, and leaves the stream running.About half an hour later at midnight, the automated check for the Umbrella Man graffiti is performed, finally revealing that it has returned. In Anomidae's absence, a new autonomous system starts up capable of generating demos in multiple Source Engine games at once. Though not without teething issues, the system begins generating demos in Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Day of Defeat: Source, Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The stream cycles through the multiple games, with a few noteworthy things happening:
- A new recurring type of demo, nicknamed by observers as a "Type 2.5", appears to depict the player rapidly flying between points on a map and tracking various NPCs and props, accompanied by a distinctive sound effect. Outside of Half-Life 2, this demo appears to have the ability to kill or delete players and scenery.
- The Half-Life 2 stream works normally at first, but it generates a demo in Ravenholm that appears to be corrupted, featuring the player simply staring at a wall for an extremely long time after an initial bit of gameplay.
- Episode 2 is capable of generating demos that appear to have been first recorded in Half-Life 2 and Episode 1.
- Several of the Global Offensive demos play with an extreme amount of lag, while others fail to load at all. A Type 5 demo is generated in this game, but is only briefly seen before the stream cuts away.
- Among the games tested is the Source Filmmaker Beta client. This 'game' appears to be capable of generating demos, but is unable to play them back live.
- Portal with RTX is also being tested, and initially appears to be loaded into the void as in previous videos. Partway through the stream however, the developer console appears to have been opened within it, but a drop in the stream's bitrate makes it near-impossible to see anything in detail. Later, the game has returned to the main menu with no explanation.
In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, a Type 5 demo is generated. On a sunset beach map, the player approaches the water and spots an Umbrella Man far away above the water. They attempt to communicate via a repeated "Hi" voiceline, before a radio is spawned in next to the player, causing it to start dancing. After several minutes, the Umbrella Man plays its windchime sound and suddenly begins to move towards the player in a zig-zag pattern, capturing it as it attempts to run away. This moment results in the stream crashing.
The next day, Anomidae provides an update on what happened afterwards. Throughout the whole incident, 465 demos were generated alongside 12 data maps. Anomidae provides public access to this data within a .zip file named "The Tuesday Manifest", encouraging viewers to research the demos for themselves. Anomidae also elaborates on what happened with "The Portal Anomaly", confirming that Portal with RTX has reverted back into the classic game but that no files or evidence of what happened remains. With the ability to generate demos without Portal with RTX in-doubt, Anomidae opts to leave the games running to see if anything happens.
As one last thing, Anomidae shows the video of what they saw when they returned to their computer. Within Project Skybox, the Lucy model's head now turns to always face the player. Team Fortress 2 also crashed after building cubemaps. Viewing the last demo it generated reveals that it was playing a Type 3 demo when the Interloper command disconnected, ceasing movement within the demo. After a minute, a deformed Heavy model emerges and begins to traverse the map, with the player following it in a manner very similar to the new 'flying' demo type discovered earlier, before appearing to drag it up into the sky.
The Tuesday Manifest
Full detail of the Tuesday Manifest provided from episode 8 is difficult to give both due to it's unstructured nature and sheer breadth of content. Though the majority of it's 465 generated demos are largely uninteresting Type 1s, 2s, or 3s, there is still enough of interest and note that providing a full structured and linear walkthrough of the Manifest is nigh-impossible. For the sake of simplicity, the most notable information and demos will be provided below in listed order.- Of most significant note is CS:GO demo "data43", a Type 5 very briefly glimpsed during the stream. The demo takes places in the CS:GO Office map, where a Counter-Terrorist NPC cautiously walks around for roughly a minute before they enter an elevator and spontaneously fall through the floor. They land with a thud in a dark and largely untextured version of the Office from CS:S. They begin to explore this map just as cautiously as before, but at one point a strange large black head can be seen wandering through a hall in the corner of the NPC's vision. Travelling further, the NPC finds another one of these head entities and flees from it, returning to the middle of the map. There, they seem to act lost and confused for a moment, before the head entity lunges at them, screaming "HELLO" as loud string instruments play. The player then says either "hello" three times or "goodbye" once in chat depending on how the map was loaded, and the game crashes to cubemaps.
- Opening this map in Hammer reveals the black head NPC is known as "ent_undef" and that there are several around the map.
- Of additional note in the CS:GO demos is that several are infact CS:2 demos, in spite of the fact the INTERLOPE command is supposed to be non-functional with Source 2.
- Half-Life 2 doesn't contain anything of significant note but does have several oddities: demo9, the frozen demo from the stream, acts as it does due to a hidden message embedded in the replay file itself.note demo13 takes place on a generated map and behaves oddly, seemingly being a Type 2 that ends with the player moving sideways instead of dying. demo44, a Type 2.5, features the player in Ravenholm attempting to delete the spot with the INTERLOPER graffiti. After this, the only further notables demos here are the ones with embedded messages: data71note , data84note , and data99note .
- Episode 2 features a few demos of note outside the streamed Type 5. data32 is a Type 4 where the player acts like a Combine, data49 is a Type 2.5 where the player becomes very fixated on Kleiner, data76 is a Type 2.5 where the player becomes fixated on an out-of-bounds untextured cube, and data79 is highly bizarre. It is a Type 2 that takes place in a custom map known as "Fear Inc.", which itself wouldn't be that notable if it hadn't previously appeared in a video on Anomi's old channel. The video in question was recorded in 2015 and uploaded in 2021, and its description asks if anyone knows where to download the map, as Anomi wanted to play it again but no longer has it and can't find it anywhere. It is also apparently only the first map in an entire fangame consisting of several maps. Hitting the trigger to go to the second map in the demo version will cause the Combine dispatcher to say "Immediate amputation", followed by a game crash. The video features a playthrough of the first two maps and ends at the beginning of the third.
- Exploring data64 (the Type 5 seen on stream) out of bounds reveals that above the map there is a cube shaped room with the words "HICON" written on three of the walls.
- Team Fortress 2 contains the highest density of notable demos, even outside the final one shown on stream. One of the most notable is data11, a demo which initially seems to end early, but can be fixed by removing the message embedded within the filenote . Doing so reveals this demo to be a recording of two players having a chat, Jman and an unidentified party, most likely Eida. The conversation seems to be the moment that Eida decided to delete his channel, with Jman telling Eida to stop his obsession with INTERLOPER and that he won't be helping with the channel anymore, which Eida responds by saying he'll just delete everything. Eida says goodbye and one of the two noclip out of the map.
- A similar demo to the above is demo43, which is also cut off early by an embedded messagenote . Removing the message shows it to be a Type 2 demo where an off-screen scout uses the voice chat. It plays the infamous distorted trumpet song from Half-Life 2 with an aggressive thumping overlapped.
- Another demo of extreme note is demo52, a Type 2.5 which appears to show the perspective of Eida's crasher in Steel. It will also crash your game once flying off due to an embedded message again. note
- Other, less notable but still interesting demos include data17, 23, 27, 30, 47, and 65, which all take place on generated maps; data58, a Type 4 featuring a lone Engineer playing MvM rather poorly until the robots suddenly start vanishing, data7 and 70, which are Type 2.5s where the bots all seem to mass die in a single moment; and data74, a type 3 where the Medic seems to linger underwater until they nearly drown. Data74 is notably similar to the HL2 demo data52, a Type 3 where the player idles in fire.
- Day of Defeat only features 3 demos of significant note. The first is data21, which lines up exactly with a screenshot in Eida's video of the Umbrella Man stalking him. The second is data89, taking place in a generated maze map where the AI moves around in a very jerky manner and fails to solve the maze. The final is data104, an extremely long Type 2.5 where, upon deleting a single ally, the player suddenly noclips out of the map and sets their speed to 100. Several minutes of flying later, they interact with something out of bounds and the demo ends.
- Source Filmmaker demos are odd and generally come in two types: Demos specific to the mechanics of SFM itself, and normal game demos generated using SFM. Every demo contains internal commands relating to Fsky and several of them have some rather explicitly worded insults directed at the player. Beyond that, none of the demos are highly notable except demo35, a SFM Session demo taking place in the Half-Life 2 coast map. An assortment of Half-Life 2 props fly in from various parts of the map into a house and assemble themselves into one of Anomi's void drones seen in INTERLOPER 5.
It should be noted that even beyond all this, most custom maps also contain embedded messages and yet more demos are strange and notable in little ways, just not to the extent they warrant mention here. These are simply the most notable and strange of the demos provided, examining them all yourself or viewing a community spreadsheet is a much more in-depth fashion of exploring these files.
Eida Machinima - Video Archive
A YouTube channel dedicated to archiving and reuploading videos originally posted by Eidam0na Machinima, a Machinima channel which was active from 2007-2014 until it was suddenly deleted by its owner, Eida, following a mental breakdown. The archive is seemingly maintained by somebody who was an acquaintance of Eida's. The videos depict Eida's evolution from making silly Garry's Mod videos to their discovery of the Interloper phenomenon and their descent into madness as they attempt to research it.The self-explanatory "gary man eats tacos and DIES" claims to be the channel's first machinima, also by Jan.
"Garrysmod Zombie Slayer" is a machinima featuring Eida as himself as he protects a woman named "Mona" from a horde of zombies. Mona thanks Eida for his heroics with a hint of romantic affection, and the very end of the short shows that Eida created the machinima using the demo feature. Eida would continue to make machinima featuring himself and Mona as a series named Garrymans.
In 2012, Eida uploaded "Weird Crash on TF2", featuring gameplay of him and a friend named JMan playing Team Fortress 2 on the map cp_steel. The video's description mentions that the game has been frequently crashing, and that this is the first time Eida has caught a "crasher" on camera. Eida spots an unusual entity spawn in and shuffle between several models before settling on a deformed BLU Scout. From JMan's reaction, it appears that only Eida can see the entity. Also, JMan's accent (alongside some other details revealed later) appears to indicate that he is the narrator of Eida's ghost hunting series. The BLU Scout wanders through the map, capable of phasing through walls, before pausing in front of Eida and JMan. After a few moments, it takes off and flies out of the map. Eida goes into spectator mode to try and follow it, but the game crashes once it reaches the skybox. The video ends with an insert of a map with the Scout's flight path marked on it, with the description mentioning that this confirms a hypothesis Eida has.
In 2013, the eighth and seemingly final ghost hunting video was uploaded. Eida mentions that the 'Interlope' command was removed from the Source Engine the previous year, and that episode 7 of the series involved using a program called "Boxrocket" (the Working Title of Source Filmmaker) to trap ghosts by using the Interloper command and disconnecting it before the end of the demo. Placing props within the world shows that they can be interacted with by the invisible entity. In a callback to the third episode, Eida tries asking for the spirit's name by creating a Ouija board-style map with letters as props. After a while of the entity scrambling the alphabet, Eida takes note of the word 'Mona' being readable from a certain angle, and elects to name the ghost that. In a separate video, "Correcting the record", the channel archivist reveals that an uncut eight minute clip of the alphabet scrambling was submitted to them by an anonymous viewer who apparently obtained it through trickery two years after Episode 8 was uploaded. In this video, the alphabet appears to have been arranged to spell 'Olive', a name that has been incidentally seen several times throughout the seriesnote , before being scrambled into the jumble that 'Mona' was picked out from.
Next, Eida tries to communicate with the ghost by placing a ragdoll alongside it and a 'trigger_hurt' variable within the cage, and leaving it for a few days. This results in Mona 'possessing' the ragdoll and having its arm flail around erratically, accompanied by an occasional beeping sound. Eida expresses his desire to talk to Mona more in the future, before ending the video with the reveal that Mona has somehow escaped their prison. In a recording of the beginning of Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Alyx suddenly disappears before the player begins spinning around until the game begins generating cubemaps.
Eida's final video appears to have been 'I'm Done. Goodbye'. A clearly distressed and angry Eida writes that he is quitting YouTube and deleting everything, and that he has also deleted 'Mona'. As proof, he shows a clip of a textureless, legless model twitching on the ground. After selecting 'delete', an ERROR model appears and moves towards 'Mona', turning it into a ragdoll.
The archive features one more video, 'It's Inside my Computer here's proof'. The description, unlike the rest of the channel, is written by the archivist and reveals that it was sent to them in a DM conversation between them and Eida a day after Eida's goodbye video. The conversation features Eida cutting off contact with the archivist, only asking that they check a certain set of coordinates 'in a year or two and make sure it's gone'. The video features the events of "Weird Crash on TF2" as viewed with slight differences from within an external program. From the spectator camera, choosing an alternate perspective from what the parent video settled on, the Scout flies into the camera and freezes with a glitched scream. An '#UNDEFINED_BEHAVIOR_WARNING' error appears before the program closes, revealing a 'Source Sample Tool' logo.
