A very ultra big wall of text incoming.

RT-2472 (means Repeater-2472, will refer as RT later) is a public group created in 2014 on a Russian social network "VKontakte". Most of its posts were sorta recordings of conversations, transcriptions of videos and some kind of cosmic signals. Sometimes it's just random gambling, sometimes complete nonsense. Each post had a different flag that allowed us to understand what kind of post is this (telephone conversations, video files, etc.). Most posts had a link that led to google maps and showed different coordinates (all coordinates were from the cities that were at the start of the post, for example, Moscow, Russia, and next to this phrase was a link to google maps). There were some posts that included audio files with strange names, most of them were ambient music with effects, like distortion, low pass filter, etc. No audio files had anything in the spectrogram.

On 21st of October, 2019, RT messaged its followers with a single phrase "Answer me". 2 days later, they sent an audio file named "084.084.052 - 63.07", a 9-minute ambient track. On the 24th of October, they sent a link to the VK conversation, and after that, the main part of this ARG begins.

The creator of the conversation was an anonymous person, who called themself "Solnechniy Udar" (will refer as "Udar" later, notice that I will use pronouns "she/her" since she talks about herself using these pronouns). After that another person appeared, Mythrill Rimto (will refer to as mythrill_sama), he is the main character in this ARG, and he contributed a lot.

Now back to RTs contents. Several posts included polls with multiple choices available, depending on whatever you chose, the next poll will be different and form a complete storyline. After doing some correct choices, there were archives found.

The first archive is called "20PRM.rar", it is locked. After searching for posts that included this word combination (20PRM) we found a post that had a picture of "black opal". Turns out, that "opal" is a password for 20PRM.rar. This archive contains audio files, none of them had anything in the spectrogram (as I stated right at the start), except audio file №19, the face of Aphex Twin was found in the spectrogram. That is a straight reference to Aphex Twin putting faces in spectrograms.

The second archive is called "20PRW.rar", it is also locked. The password for this one is related to the previous poll, where you found a strange suitcase, and next to it was a code "18044295". Opening "20PRW.rar" gives you several pictures with nothing hidden on them.

The third archive is called "RTU-074.yep", it is a very strange extension and converting it to .zip makes it no-password protected archive. Opening it gives you a new folder with a single file "Fea.12", after changing its extension to .gif we found a password protected gif. After taking a closer look at the post with "RTU-074.yep" we saw that the password is a Unicode character(s). "A man with glasses takes a mouse and opens a file "RTU-074.yep". We see the name of the file. He opens it. A password window appears. A person holds "alt" and dials some numbers. The file opens, it's the image enlarged in full screen."

Back to the message with the link to the VK conversation, the same day RT posted yandex.disk link that has a "024.jpg" file, which is a locked archive. With the link a number combination "951-753-159-" was posted, after finding out that 159 is 951 reversed, we thought that the last part of the string is 357 (357 is reversed 753), and therefore 357 is the password, but we were wrong. The password is something longer and harder.

And now, back to the VK conversation. On the 31st of October, Udar gave us a challenge. We had to vote in an anonymous poll she created (nobody could see who voted, except the creator of the poll), and after voting she isolated (kicked, but he will be back later) one person (let's call him l_arch). Those who voted were given a chance to ask her a question regarding ARG, archives, passwords, basically anything they wanted to ask. There were 4 people who voted, mythrill_sama, mesuck, atlaslost and ktolinkanettotpidr (will refer to as ktolinkanet). mythrill_sama asked about 024.jpg, mesuck asked about countdown RT gave us (RT posted a link to the countdown site, apparently they set up a date "13th of December" which is friday), melinkanet asked about the meaning of the arg and what was its purpose and atlaslost asked about why she decided to isolate l_arch. Her answers:

mythrill_sama - "The password is a group name, simple number combination in the end + some unicode symbols. After you open it, please message me, we will discuss the reward";

mesuck - "After that countdown a video file will appear";

melinkanet - "It is an experiment to see how would you react to different situations regarding those who are used to (aka other ones participating in this)";

atlaslost - "There are lots of reasons, if you want to get more information - vote in the next poll."

After isolating l_arch Udar created another anonymous poll and gave us several days. This time she wanted to completely kick mesuck (not to isolate, but to make him gone completely). 2 days later we found out that there are several votes on that poll by people who just joined to read this conversation and not participate at all, thinking that voting in a poll is a great idea. We started pinging everyone in separate messages telling them to remove their votes, but some people got angry and voted, therefore Udar removed mesuck. Udar told us, that we are not getting a reward for voting in this poll. Note that atlaslost didn't vote in that one, therefore we didn't get information regarding isolating l_arch.

The third poll is about isolating ktolinkanet, except this poll is not anonymous, which means everyone could see who voted. Even though she said there will be a reward for voting (asking more questions), we prevented isolating ktolinkanet, meaning there were 0 votes in total.

The last poll is about isolating mythrill_sama, and this is where the game goes strange ways. On 5th of November, Udar posted another anonymous poll, with a mysterious name (the sign of the Sun) and a very strange background, that turned out to be a partial QR code leading to mythrill_sama's page. The next day one of the participants received a base64 encoded string that turned out to be a partial QR code, which doesn't fit the previous part of QR. 2 days later the poll name was changed to "mythrill_sama" indicating that Udar wants to isolate mythrill_sama. The deadline for this poll was the 13th of November, meaning that we've got a whole week to not let people vote in that poll. On the 9th of November, we started pinging people once again asking to remove the votes, because we've got 7 votes. Note that this moment is when this poll turns into the war. Several hours later votes started raising enormously, raising from 7 votes to 20 votes. Someone gave us an idea, that we should create a fake poll and get more votes on a fake one. Udar noticed the poll, and gave us a challenge: if we get more votes than there is on her poll by 100, then we win. We got 120 votes, and we were fine, until the next day we saw that there were 280 votes on Udar's poll in total (note that there were only ~60 participants in conversation). After asking her what happened, she said that we have to enter the war if we really care about mythrill_sama. After that, she changed the deadline to the 12th of November, 22:55 (UTC+3), so it's the same as the deadline for the fake poll. Now, a piece of important information: Udar made several people administrators of the conversation, meaning they can delete messages and kick members. mythrill_sama, ktolinkanet and several more people (they were administrators) had a talk and came up to the conclusion that they should cheat on the poll and add fake votes (aka use bots and fake accounts) in order to win. Votes raised from 120 to 1230 in several minutes. Udar saw that and accepted her loss. Last hour she spent talking to us, giving out some mysteries of the ARG and who's behind it. Also, she sent an audio file which contained coordinates "-90.052695, 35.141533". After searching them up we got Maringa, Brasil, but that was nothing since -90 latitude doesn't exist, so we switched up coordinates and got Memphis, USA. This time coordinates led to the building, which had a graffiti that says "COME DOWR TOWN AND PLAY", after thinking what could that be we've got to the conclusion that this means "COME TO OUR TOWN AND PLAY". When the deadline hit, Udar wrote a message. This is what she said: "Friends, we have come a long way. I am glad that you got along with each other and became friends. This is personal pride. When we came up with puzzles, we focused on a solitary study for the public group. Remember this! This conversation was created only for an experiment. It has no other purposes. Those who just joined can only imagine how we got closer. Goodbye. Thank you for playing chess, 2472." After that, she kicked mythrill_sama, added him back (removed all his admin perms) and left the conversation.

This is how RT-2472 has come to the end. Of course, we've got lots of puzzles and stuff to solve, but this part of having a curator that could give us clues is finished. I will indeed make update posts regarding what we solved. Thank you for reading. There is some more info down there, read it if you want.

Honorable mentions:

1. The cosmic signal from 12th of November

RT posted a cosmic signal, which basically was a base64 encoded string, + caesar's cipher (with Russian letters). After solving it we got the phrase "They look bewildered". This was a complete reference to our confusion regarding gaining votes for mythrill_sama's poll.

1. Chess

Udar played chess with us 2 times. All 2 times she lost. After losing them she said only one phrase: "Thank you for playing chess, 2472.". She did reference this in her last message.

1. jy nna rb zi rt 2 4 72

RT posted 2 QR codes. One led to the broken link, the second led to the yandex.disk with a single archive "hope.rar". The password for "hope.rar" was "34", since they posted a telephone conversation post before, and there was a number string "8-901-304-91-". After finding out that if you remove 0's from the string you get "8-91-34-91-" and the obvious number was "34". Turns out it was a password for "hope.rar". After opening it there was a picture, that contained morse code. After decoding it we got a string "jy nna rb zi rt 2 4 72" Last 6 symbols are obvious, it's RT-2472. Reversing symbols that were not used gave us "iz br ann yj" which is a Russian word "izbrannyj" that translates to "the chosen one", meaning that the first person who deciphered it was the chosen one.

This is it for the story of RT-2472. If you have more questions, please ask them in comments, will gladly reply to all of them.