A Quick Trip to the Store
| A Quick Trip to the Store | |||||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||||
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ShadowHaven Black Lodge | Black Lodge | ||||||||
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Spider Rabbit | PENITENT | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| PENITENT (somewhat) | |||||||||
Summary
Spider ran out of food. Now she works for the Black Lodge.
The Quest for the Hot Pocket
Spider was playing Stellaris 7 multiplayer, rolling over unoptimized players online, as her mind started to wander a bit. The opponents, too terrible to demand her attention, bored her, so she started to reflect on her recent actions. Having discovered horrifying new knowledge about threats facing the world, namely The Enemy, she had been scouring the matrix looking for clues, any scraps of information to give her better understanding. Even as she searched the darkest areas of the matrix though, she found almost nothing. Some group had to be scouring information from public access, silencing the truth. But whom? Null Sect? Dragons? Something else?
She didn't know, and it was infuriating.
Around this time, she finished her game and realized she was kind of hungry. Gaming is hard work. Heading to her freezer to grab a hot pocket, she unfortunately remembered she ate the last one earlier today. She was foodless. Determined to change that, she headed out to a nearby convivence store.
Luckily, as she arrived, she found that they were in stock. Hot Pockets acquired, she used her superior knowledge of mathematics to perfectly use the in-store microwave to heat her prize, avoiding a frozen center.
Heading back, happily munching on the decker food of champions, she noticed something strange in her AR display. A host for a dry cleaning business, generic and non-offensive, had a small marking engraved on its display. Hard to see, Spider only barely noticed it, but her curiosity fire up, and she went in to investigate.
Dragon Cultists, in MY City?
Focusing to examine the host in greater detail, she looked at the mark. Looking almost like a Sanskrit letter, an artistic symbol engraved in a crook of the host exterior. Spider knew this symbol. It was a mark of the Gilded Claw, a group of dragon cultists determined to spread the manifest truth of dragon superiority and help their vaunted masters maintain power. While not a powerful group, more hapless wannabe-minions, this mark was a message. Why was it on a dry cleaning host?
Spider, concerned at this symbol existing so close to where she lived, headed back to her apartment, finishing her Hot Pocket in quiet contemplation. Entering VR, she headed back to the mysterious host, hacking her way inside. The host was ultimately, not very impressive. A generic and low quality host, it showed clear signs of disuse and only basic business records. Nothing really of interest at all. The only lead she found was a service record. This host was provided and maintained by a technical consulting company, Brightview Technical Services. Unless the dry cleaning owner was a cultist hacker on the side, likely someone at the company did this.
Hacking their host and dodging spiders, a bit more difficult of a task than before, she raided the host of the tech company. Searching for interesting data, she stole several files. Grabbing a copy of their service logs, employee data, and taxes, she hoped that something interesting could be put together. There were no visible signs of dragon tampering in the host, so she'd have to find it in the data.
Checking out the tax data first, Spider quickly realized she didn't understand taxes very well. She had a lot of data, but not the context to use it. Determined though, she started reading about corporate tax law, becoming not a master by any means but learned enough to at least study the data. After a large amount of very boring study and data checking, she found something somewhat interesting. Some of the revenue streams seemed a bit, irregular? After crosschecking several times, she was reasonably sure that some dark money was heading into the firm. Following the trail, it lead to a holding company with a very vague set of information about it. Clearly a front for someone, but again, who?
Deciding to look into the other data, she learned who had been managing the dry cleaning host. A man named Anthony Stevens, he seemed like a fairly boring man at first glance. Quiet, a bit withdrawn, but a competent worker, he seemed not dissimilar to many other introverted deckers. However, he didn't show up to work yesterday. Odd for a man with a normally perfect attendance record. Following an included address, she headed to his apartment in Auburn, wondering what she'd find.
Key Locks are anti-Decker Discrimination
Hacking her way to his apartment door, she soon faced a challenge. One she was wholly unprepared to deal with. His door at a lock on it. A mechanical one. Loitering on the third floor of an apartment building in the middle of the night, she didn't want to just bust the door down. But the lock? How could she deal with such an impassable obstacle.
Eventually, she caved and asked for help. Getting contact with Rabbit, she gave a brief overview of what had been happening and invited her to join. Rabbit, curious as well, headed over. An hour or so later, she pulled up, making her way to Spider. Pulling out an autopicker, Rabbit inserted it into the door, and it clicked open.
Rabbit entered first, carefully searching for any hidden threats, astral or otherwise. Inside the dark room though, there was no lurking ambush. Just the first room in a two room apartment. It did look slightly raided though, a few things scattered around in a hurry.
Before searching in detail, Rabbit approached the door to the next room, wanting to fully secure the apartment. Opening the closed door, she heard a click, whirring and clinking bottles. Rushing forward, she dived on a pile of falling pseudo-molotov cocktails, covering the flames with her body. While very painful, she managed to stop the fire before it engulfed the building. Spider followed closely after, following the scent of charred banshee, watching Rabbit heal from the nasty trap.
Taking a moment to breath, they started to look around the apartment, finding several things. The duo inspected the trap mechanism, finding that while a bit impromptu, the quality of it was at a level that implied actual training. Next, they noticed a crumpled up brochure near the burn location, one barely saved by Rabbit's quick reactions. Taking a look at it, they found that it was a tourist pamphlet for the southern region of the Salish-Shidhe Council with a scribbled set of coordinates inside. Doing a quick check, Spider saw that the location was a small town near the Tir border, an ultimately unimportant and remote place. Finally, Rabbit noticed a plethora of tiny cameras and microphones scattered through the apartment. Their wireless capability disabled, they seemed to be recording passively, being read and scrubbed every week or so. Looking at the recent footage showed the missing worker quickly packing up, setting the trap, and running out of the apartment.
Now with a clear confirmation that something bigger was at play, the two prepared to head to the SSC to follow the trail.
A Change of Scenery
To get a way into the country, Rabbit called Yokai and cut a deal to using a Yakuza smuggling dock, if they could make it past the countries coastal security that is. Taking Rabbit's submarine boat, the two headed underwater towards the location, confident things would go smoothly. As far as they could tell, it did.
In a more general sense though, they did pass a patrol boat which had a very threatening secret weapon. Sonar.
Thankfully, Rabbit used her control over sound waves to silence the area around the ship, calming any incoming sonar signals, hiding them from the sensor's prying waves. Now in the country, they hired a ride to take them over to the town, curious about what they'd find.
Heading to the coordinates, they unfortunately found themselves in a town square, standing in small park in front of the city hall. Not a secret lair. Ignoring a few curious glances from locals out in the early morning, they tried to investigate anyway, searching for anything useful. Spider, after a bit, got lucky, noticing an arrow in her AR display, floating slightly at the top of a nearby building. Focusing on it, she saw that is was, in a few hours, programmed to turn itself off and that it had data for an AR path, one pointed towards the forest outside of town. Using this data, they started walking, unsure of what they'd find.
As they started leaving the city, Rabbit noticed a spirit approach, floating a few meters away and studying her. Humanoid in shape, the spirit had both the head of a wolf and deer antlers. Realizing it was a free spirit and also guessing that it had broken through her masking, she asked what it wanted with her. After a moment, it replied.
"So how's hunting humans? Are you about to eat her?" Pointing at Spider.
The Spirit often hunted wildlife, but seemed interested to share stories and chat some with a fellow hunter. After awkwardly trying to explain that she wasn't going to eat her traveling companion, the spirit changed topics and asked instead that Rabbit head to a certain spot in the forest around the evening. Some hikers kept littering and mucking up the area. It would be very polite if Rabbit could eat them for her. Spider looked on quietly nearby, listening to the conversation when the spirit politely materialized after learning she wasn't Rabbit's prey.