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.