Team Striped Horse: The Conquest of Ginger

Andrew Wazowski
Lets rewind a bit.

Gadfly had been in touch off and on over the weeks, though more off than on as time went by.  The messages were also increasingly cryptic.  Ginger, it would seem had taken on a life of it's--her own.  At least in Gadfly's head.  Their little project became less of a venture into cyber vandalism and more of a romantic gesture until, just before the weekend, he sends a final message.

Gadfly83 says:  Ginger has been under the yolk of oppression for far too long now.  Tuesday, Aurora, Applebaum road between seventh and eighth.  Six o'clock is the hour of liberation!

Cut to:

A pleasant looking middle class neighborhood just separated from the major hustle and bustle of the city proper.  The houses stand several feet away from the sidewalks, separated from the concrete walkways by expanses of green, some spotted with children's toys and bikes.  Some manicured to nearly a sharp edge, bordered by hedges of non-organic dimensions.  The street itself is lined on either side by trees letting in the sunlight only in dapples of warm yellow and orange as evening approached.

Should Grace decide to join in (she has been preparing for this herself, after all) she might notice how much the area differed from the city, from her own university-adjacent apartment with her university-noisy neighbors.  Here she actually hear birds.  Somewhere there were children laughing.  it was like looking into a completely different world.  Applebaum road was the kind of neighborhood you wished you'd grown up in, the kind you want for your kids.  It is, in a word, safe.

Grace
Grace had grown up in a place like this. Not exactly like this, of course, because the non-organic forms were mostly rock gardens and carefully manicured cacti and succulents, but of course, even in a place that forbids such things as 'suburbs' by climate, people find a way to force them to exist. They'll put fountains with little concrete cherubs in the desert, just to show it how little they care.

It was partly this kind of thing she was trying to get away from in her university life, in Colorado, even. She didn't really hide the sneer as she had to wait for a child to bound out of the way of her old red Toyota, and she used the time to look for Applebaum road and seventh street.

Applebaum... 4th... 5th... 6th... It's a good thing this place is all numbered and orderly, or else you'd never find your way. Everything looks exactly alike.

Andrew Wazowski
Just there, between 7th and 8th, is a throbbing red sore thumb.  That might as well be what the car is called, if you could even call it a car in the first place.  Its too small to be a sedan, too small to even have the self respect to take up a complete parking space.  And yet it has the gall to sport a glossy red finish like a coat of candy over chocolate.  Perhaps that's what makes the few kids still getting in the last of their mid-street tag and scooter pushes in, run up to the teensy little smart car at different moments and press their faces right up to the window, or sneak around the bag and peer into the rear glass or leave tiny little fingerprints on the paint job.

Grace crosses seventh and the car flashes headlights in greeting.  There was someone inside.  Someone with wild hair and a patchy beard dressed in an electric blue track suit.  Someone with bright neon yellow glasses (or sunshades?) stretched wide across his vision.  He sits low in the drivers seat, his electric blue collar pulled up as though attempting to hid his face.  Make himself inconspicuous.

He doesn't seem to be very good at it.

Grace
Grace, meanwhile, is the epitome of inconspicuous. There's something almost odd about the way she blends in, and indeed people in this safe suburb (even the bratty little kids on bikes and just out playing in the middle of the road) don't seem to take notice.

She's just another person. Not too flashy, not too dull. Jeans and tee she wore today, with tennis shoes. Just plain normal.

She parked her car up next to Gadfly's tiny little red thing, and waved at him through the windows between them.

Chimeric1 says: Nice to see you.

Andrew Wazowski
He watches her as she drives up, even makes eye contact as she pulls up next to him.  Then, his attention flicks in a different direction and he's reaching toward his central console.  A moment later he's has his phone in his hand, flipping open the tiny keyboard and letting the thumbs fly.

Gadfly83 says:  Right back at ya.  I've got pizza and gear.  Your car or mine?

Grace
Chimeric1 says: Mine's bigger. No offense.

She started to set up her laptop then, getting it ready for the night's 'liberation'.

Andrew Wazowski
Gadfly83 says:  None taken.  Coming over.

And he does.  He steps out first, all short and dressed like a Russian mobster stereotype, and runs comically around the car.  He opens his own back seat and wrestles with a large pizza box, peering over the top of it as he carries it over to Grace's and deposits it in her own back seat.  He goes to his own passenger side and pulls out a gym bag and a backpack, and waddles over under the weight of both of those toward Grace's passenger seat.  The gym bag is lowered gingerly on the floor, which he then steps over to park his butt in the seat, arms loaded with the bulk of the backpack.

This doesn't stop him from straining to reach over a hand open in the gesture of handshake greetings.

"Um...Hi again."  He says in that shy, slightly high pitched voice.

Grace
Grace saw the hand, and took it in her own ungainly way. Handshakes, why handshakes always everywhere? It certainly isn't a universal custom. Personally, she would rather do the whole bowing thing.

"Hi to you too," she said, and the last time they had met like this came to mind. The last time they met in the real world, she had been a Sleeper on the cusp...

"So, ah, I've got my tools prepped. Got a packet sniffer, vulnerability scanner... And of course the encryption for when it's over. You think..."

Of course it'll go over well. Unless they're being watched.

"Hey, Gadfly, how have you been doing lately with the whack-a-molers?

Andrew Wazowski
"Um...mm...all clear on the western front"  he says with a smile.  He was rooting around in the backpack, trying to get out a smaller pouch from which he takes out several small, black, plastic pucks.  He turns one of them over in his hands, showing grace a small switch on the underside in the middle of four tiny suckers on the underside.  He flicks it and presses it to the passenger side window, where it sticks.  He does the same with another on the windshield and hands Grace two others.

"That's umm...from a book.  I never umm...never read it.  Nazis, I think.  They go cra--"

He stops himself there, twisting his lips in consternation.  Conversation, however, seems to be the least of his concerns.  Andrew struggles through the backpack, this time pulling out his own laptop before reaching down into the gym bag for yet another laptop, a beaten up and scratched looking thing, and an eight port hub and a coil of network cables which he begins pealing apart.  Three were all they needed for today, it seemed.

"The thing to umm...the thing to keep in mind at umm..."

He stops himself, eyes racing back and forth before he finally squeezes them shut.  Andrew takes his glasses off, folds the arms, which Grace can now see are rather bulky and played around with, lined with rough soldering and a few streaks of copper circuitry, and almost reflective from the insides.  He opens his eyes when the glasses are securely tucked at his shirt collar.  And then, he takes a breath.

"The thing to keep in mind at all times is that conventional consensual reality is always the reality that applies first and any investigation into tampering usually begins and occasionally ends with conventional methods if you hear a a stampede its most likely horses not zebras."

He's done that before, that sudden blurting out of words as though they were the most imperative thing to get out.  As though it required all of his attention and effort just to say something straight.  Only this time its worse.  He's clumped his sentences together in that one data dump.  He doesn't wait for her to respond to how weird that might seem.  He's finding a spot for the beaten up laptop to rest while it boots up, and he's wiring the hub to the available cables.

"This is um...our Vanguard.  Its a um...a scanning bridge.  Picks up networks from...umm...from the neighborhood?  Yeah.  And cycles data through.  We get um...we get one network...um...from about five um...five locations.  So um...any trace...um...any regular trace...um...goes to those five um...five houses."

Grace
It does take her a while to parse the meaning of that long drawn-out sentence, but she gets it in the end.
"I feel like a horse with some stripes halfway painted on, man. My skills are all conventional when it comes to this."

She dug into her laptop bag and retrieved some cat-5 cable for her own rig, something a bit newer and shinier than Gadfly's (but then she herself is new and shiny at that).

"I was thinking, you know. Maybe you should lay off of the shouldersurfing for a while," she paused a bit there, unsure. "It's just... I figure even I can see that. What if they are out there looking for your wormholes, tracking you?"

Andrew Wazowski
"That'll change."  He shoots back at her mention of her skills.

He shakes his head as though shaking off flies (or a schizophrenic shaking off a thought).

"I'm careful.  I'm um...I'm careful.  Targets chosen carefully.  And I'm...I'm fire-walled and warded.  Um...Usually.  Usually."

Another laptop, equally beat up but a bit more loved sat in his lap.  As it booted up he reached for his glasses again, putting them on clumsily over his face.

"How much do you um...how much do you know about um...about non-verbal communication?"
Andrew's fingers flew over the keys in steady, gummy thumps.

Grace
The clicking of her own keys had filled the car with soft staccato clicks, and while the smell of pizza kept knocking at her consciousness, she tried to ignore it like everything else.

Everything except for Gadfly, whose verbal text was a challenge to parse.

"Non-verbal communication? I take it you're not talking body language."

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm-hm."  He says without looking at her.  though, from the look of things, he wasn't looking at anything.  Gadfly's hands and fingers danced over the keys and his eyes stared straight forward, not at the laptop screen.  Not at anything.

"That's a part of it.  But um...deeper still.  Unconscious ticks.  Variations in circadian rhythms.  Breathing.  Heart rates.  High-frequency brain waves.  Think of it as...um...psychic network protocol.  I've mapped it, mostly.  Um...Mostly.  I call it 'Soulseer'.  I mentioned um...I mentioned whispering?  From over the shoulder to into the ear?  Yeah.  That's the output."

Grace
"So, like you're developing the bluetooth for the brain?"

Interesting... little creepy, but interesting. With that, one could do so much. Turn the mind into a remote control, or just... direct brain to computer interface.

The port forwarder she had was giving her fits, until she sent a glare at the Vanguard, and simply disabled the forwarder. Ahem, yes. Of course.

Working with another's gear was going to be interesting. Already she was feeling out the setup, trying to accustom herself to the interface.

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm-hm.  And right now I'm setting up a um..diversion program.  Any conscious mind that comes um...comes across the car immediately gets a command to go um...somewhere else."

Like the wind, this guy was.  Of course, the vanguard was his set up.  His connection to it was running smoothly.

"So I'll um...set up the non-conventional protection and um...you can set up the um...conventional security."

Andrew Wazowski
(Look away!  Arete diff 5-1 for distracting resonance, extended roll)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (4, 7) ( success x 2 )

Andrew Wazowski
Roll 2
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (5, 6) ( success x 2 )

Grace
"Gotcha. Just working out the kinks. I think I've got it ready, though," she said, the clicking of her keys not stopping however.

Of course, the other's stuff was homemade, the interface non-standardized... But oddly familiar. Like, this is the way she might have done it had she actually... you know... done it. Users would be stymied, but nerds of their caliber had a tendency to think alike.

"It's actually not that difficult, I can see where you've got the data routing through, hasn't been too hard to set up a little interface to my stuff, I just have to not get in its way..."

Andrew Wazowski
He smiles at that, apparently thinking the same thing.  "Great minds", he says and keeps on typing off into space.

There's a tinge in the air.  A slight change in the feel of the car's interior.  Gadfly's gummy thump of keys pauses for a moment, just a moment, and then immediately continues as he's on to the next.  All the while he mutters things like "Temporal scramble" and "Blind Spot" and "Always the hardest part."

The little plastic pucks he'd produced before light up and produce a barely discernable hum.

Grace
"Or similarly twisted minds, whichever the case.."

And, she started prodding at Ginger. Softly at first, just trying to find some obvious easy way, then with increasing insistence. You will be mine.

[Liberating Ginger! diff 7 - 2 (cracking software) -1 (ability aptitude: computer) Specialty: Creative]
Dice: 8 d10 TN4 (1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 6 )

Grace
"I'm in. Looks pretty clean," she said, voice almost monotone.

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm-hm"  comes his only response.  Meanwhile, whatever Gadfly was working on, he was still working at it.  While the activity led on the vanguard showed Grace's set up flickering madly between input and output, on Gadfly's side he was still just barely connected.  Still, the more he worked, the more that odd feeling filled the car.  That erratic and nervous feeling that she perhaps now recognized as the reality hacker doing his thing.

"Temporal scramble in three...two..."

(Arete diff 5-1)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (1, 5) ( success x 1 )

Grace
[Finding Ginger! diff 6-1 (cracking software) -1 (ability aptitude: computer) Specialty:Creative]
Dice: 6 d10 TN4 (1, 2, 2, 4, 7, 10) ( success x 3 )

Grace
[rerolling 10]
Dice: 1 d10 TN4 (2) ( fail )

Grace
The dense flavor of distraction filled the air -- Gadfly's Work, and Grace tried to tune it out. The less distracted she got, the better. But his resonance pounded at her skull with that buzzing...

It wasn't enough to stop her.

"Think I found her. Listen," Grace said, and turned the speakers up on her laptop. The sound of the sexy voice recording didn't exactly fill the car -- tinny speakers -- but it was enough to know she was on the right track.

"-- Love is only a dial away," said her laptop, sultry and smooth as honey.

"Love you too, Ging," she replied, with a smarmy edge.

Andrew Wazowski
"Bee-yoo-tee-ful!"  He exclaims, punctuating punches of his keys as he does so.  He was smiling now, the curve of his lips becoming the norm.  And finally he looked down at his keys as he did.

"Coming in.  Where am I headed?"

His voice is still soft, but something about it seems more confident now, and its noticeably lacking the starts and stops of before.  He is, apparently, fully focused.

"That voice.  That's a great voice."

[Incoming! diff 6-2 (Cracking software), Creative Specialty]
Dice: 8 d10 TN4 (2, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 8, 8) ( success x 6 )

Grace
"They're not labeled like we'd hope, just numbers and letters really. The one you're looking for is ILS_56"

The change in Gadfly doesn't go unnoticed. Apparently hearing from his lady love was exactly what he needed to get his mind sharp. Grace suppressed a giggle.

"You got it, now I'm going to try escalating privileges. Wanna help?"

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm-hm" he intones, fingers still jabbing rhythmically at keys.  "Everything else seems pretty vanilla.  Standard operating system.  Could use an update.  Just like I thought.  ILS_56...there you are.  You're good.  You're quick."

The smile brightens at the last comment.  His fingers pause over the keys a moment as he looks over to Grace.

"Race ya?"

Grace
Her eyes flickered over to Gadfly for the rare meeting of glances, and she grinned. "You're on," was the only thing she said before going back to work, feverishly.

[Race to the Root! diff 8-2 (Cracking Software), -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer) Specialty: Creative]
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )

Andrew Wazowski
And he's away!  Punching at keys, issuing commands, scouring file drives for hidden files with important security information on them.  Other people sparred in gyms or had extended games of chess.

They did this.

[I'm gonna get ya!  Diff 8-2 (Softwares), int specialty]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7, 8) ( success x 5 )

Andrew Wazowski
[Re-rolling for the race]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )

Grace
Her fingers flew, her eyes pinched, and she looked for vulnerable spots in the architecture... Unpatched holes... Her scanner was running, but she was also trying more interesting routes than the scanner.

Come on, can't let him beat me!

[Noooo, I'll win! diff 8-2 (Cracking Software), -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer) Specialty: Creative]6
Dice: 6 d10 TN5 (1, 1, 5, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Andrew Wazowski
Andrew, in this moment, was absolutely zen.  That is not to say that this wasn't requiring concentration on his part, just that he seemed so used to the concentration.  What other way does one utilize these sort of mental faculties if not to identify weaknesses in networks and use them to advantage.

That, in essence, was the meaning of life.

[DICE DON'T FAIL ME NOW!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )

Grace
Grace pumped her fists in the air, and let loose a wild "Yes!" uncharacteristically loud, before realizing she was in the middle of a suburb at night committing a felony...

"I've got the roooooot. Got it gooooood," she said, softer.

"Come to mama, Ginger."

Andrew Wazowski
"Huh."  Huffed Andrew, apparently knocked for a loop by the loss.  Its a moment before he finds his stride again.  In the meantime he says "You um...you really are fast."

Still, that 'pleased to be here' smile persists.

"Alright, lets umm...lets stake our claim.  Secure this baby for 'team striped horse'."

Grace
"Oh hey, don't beat yourself up. I was sniffing out the place while you were covering for me with your... ah... hockey pucks. So I had more time to figure out what was up is all," she said, trying to give him back a little boost of confidence.

"Mmmhmm," she said, returning to the flying keystrokes. "Team striped horse. I like that."

Andrew Wazowski
"Don't you think that's umm...a little demeaning?  Making um...Making excuses for me?"

There it was, the security and permissions for the nebulous space of potential data they had come to call 'Ginger'.  Now the real work began.  Well, the real work before the REAL real work at least.

"I'll get the t-shirts made soon as we're done."

just then, there is the sound of thudding keys under Gadfly's fingers, and then there is the undulating, squishy sort of moan that comes from one's abdomen after hours without food.  The thudding stops.

"Pizza break?"

Grace
"No, I don't," she said, a little sadly. But he seemed to forget about the slight, going on about t-shirts and pizza breaks.

At which point her own focus entirely fizzed. Pineapple pizza smell invaded her senses instead...
"Mmm yes... I'm starving."

Andrew Wazowski
How to describe this pizza?  Hot?  Cheesy?  Loaded?  The pizza itself was less than what it represented at this time.  And at this time, this very moment, having expertly pierced the targeted defenses, having located their quarry within minutes and having moved into position for the final kill....

This pizza was a battle cry.

"Salute"  Says Gadfly, raising a slice to her in honor, before folding it and taking a large bite off the point.

Grace Evans
Free pizza has got to be that holy grail of college students everywhere, and Grace was no exception to that particular rule. And this was no ordinary pizza. This was victory pizza.

Victory tastes like pineapples and cheese and freedom.

She raised her own slice to Gadfly, her mouth already full, with a muffled "smmoot".

Andrew Wazowski
"Mm.  Um.  Okay so.  We set up the umm...the environment and um...keep it hidden from the uh...from the sysop.  And...and we also set up umm...a back door for umm... for future access...and keep that hidden from the sysop.  After that its umm...just sweeping up and umm...and locking the door behind us."

Chew.  Chew.  Chew.  Bite.  Chew.  Chew.  Chew.

"So much easier doing this with another person.  Oh um...I gotta um...I gotta check out the wards."

Teeth hold the warm pizza firm as his fingers sweep across the keys.

Grace Evans
"Well, that and a decent interface. We'll be using this for comms, so gotta lace our new secret data store into our phones and such... But I'm getting ahead of myself," she said, holding her pizza slice aloft like a conversation piece.

And then, she decided to eat while he was 'checking out the wards' so as to not distract.

Andrew Wazowski
"it'll take umm...It'll take a lot of work in the um...in the long run.  But that's the long run."

The window Gadfly had open at that point was not the window they were using to 'liberate Ginger'.  It was hardly human readable, filled with quickly alternating characters appearing and disappearing on a screen, and he apparently navigating and contributing to the erratic action taking place there.

He hesitates a moment, and then strikes another key with a sense of finality.

(Time Ward 2, diff 5-1)
Dice: 2 d10 TN4 (6, 9) ( success x 2 )

Grace Evans
Grace peeked. In her mundane shouldersurfing, she saw the code and knew it for what it was -- at least the basics of what it was. There was coding and then there was Coding, right?

"So what's that do?" she asked when it seemed he was finished, her mouth half-full of pizza. "Looks interesting."

Andrew Wazowski
"Ummm..."

He squirms slightly.  Not uncomfortably, just confused and excited all at once, like a baby who's just learned to walk needs to now learn how to walk faster and isn't sure which foot to start off on.

"So there's this umm...this clay tablet they found in um...in Italy somewhere and um...it's got these um..."
And there he stops, twisting his mouth again in that 'This is the wrong leg to start on' look.  Then he takes a breath and tries again.

"When I realized that everything around me was constantly sending and receiving data I soon realized that everything stored data too and I could retrieve past copies of it and if I could so could others so now I---"
Stop.  Breath.

"I'm hiding any evidence of us being here."

See?  That wasn't so hard.

"Sort of."

Grace Evans
Grace stopped mid-chew as he started going on about the clay tablets in Italy, and cocked her head. Gadfly. Always a bit difficult this one.

And then, when he went in another, more understandable direction, she forgot to chew for a whole other reason. Everything stores data, like a universal backup.

"The tree falls in the forest, no one's around to hear it, except for the rest of the universe, and it remembers the noise."

She gnawed crust for a bit, thinking.

"I'm glad you're here. I didn't even know something like that was a thing."

Andrew Wazowski
He nods at her summary and solution of the age old question, and keeps nodding, with a slight smile at her final statement.

"Stick with me kid, you'll go places!"  he says in what one would suppose passes for a 1920's mobster voice.

Gadfly chomps down the rest of his pizza, reaching in the back to deposit the uneaten crust and comes back with some napkins.  "It was Vesuvius."  He says between wiping his mouth and squeezing pizza grease off his fingers.  "On the tablets.  They um...they digitally reconstructed the audio.  The clay must have um...must have been hardening at that exact point.  Market chatter and um...and then...Boom!  Everything's a thing.  You just gotta um...gotta figure it out."

Grace Evans
"Ahh... such a morbid record. But then, Pompeii is one of those weird places, like someone decided to take a snapshot in time -- of what has to be the worst picture ever -- via volcano."

Grace accepted -- or just plain took -- some napkins from Gadfly, and started cleaning up. The crumbs would get in her car, but she didn't much care. She did, however, take great care with her hands and fingers and fingernails, even. It wouldn't do to get the keyboard dirty.

"We ready for the rest of this?"

Andrew Wazowski
"Yeah.  Lets umm...lets wrap this up."

Back to the conventional screen, and apparently back to work.

"I'll set up our back door."

Andrew Wazowski
[Backdoor access, Int(creative)+comp, Diff 8, aiming for 10 Succ]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Grace Evans
"I'll start sweeping up the records," she said, and again the clicking of those sharp keys ramped up.

To maintain the illusion that nothing had occurred at all that night, it was necessary to do the mundane version of what Gadfly had done to Time itself. Messing with the records on the server, deleting their strange access times and account activity, and keeping the server from recognizing that they were there in the future. Something only an Admin with root access could do... And she was all this, as far as the network as concerned.

[Data Cleanup! Int(creative)+comp, Diff: 8 - 1 (Data Cleanup Suite) -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer), Also aiming for 10 success]
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8) ( success x 4 )

Grace Evans
[Again! More Successes! Int(creative)+comp, Diff: 8 - 1 (Data Cleanup Suite) -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer) + 1 Extended]
Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (4, 4, 4, 4, 6, 6, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 2

Grace Evans
[Again! More Successes! Int(creative)+comp, Diff: 8 - 1 (Data Cleanup Suite) -1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer) + 1 Extended]
Dice: 8 d10 TN7 (1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 1

Andrew Wazowski
[More backdoor action! (don't google that)]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 6, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 ) Re-rolls: 1

Andrew Wazowski
[Hit 'em again!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (4, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 2 )

Andrew Wazowski
"Its official."  Gadfly says, still hard at it after the music of their collective keyboards shifts to a Gadfly solo and the sound of Grace possibly reaching for more pizza, content with her work.

"You've got more skills than me.  You were made for this."

[Lets wrap this up, Andrew.]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 1 )

Andrew Wazowski
[Oh, my count was off.  One more, Andrew!]
Dice: 8 d10 TN8 (3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 6 ) Re-rolls: 1

Grace Evans
Compliments are so... tricky, aren't they? At least, to Grace they are. It feels not quite right to gloat, way not right to rub the other's nose in it. But Gadfly thinks anything else is just demeaning, so...
Ignore!

"Hey, still got to set up the encryption protocol. Got that thing coded for a reason." The reason, of course, is to give Ginger some camouflage, so that their future message-storage-station doesn't end up human-readable. Not that their messages would likely be understood anyway, but still.

This is just an install, though, something saved for the last because it's easy...

[Installing encryption stuff! You can't see my files!  -- Diff 6 - 1 (Ability Aptitude: Computer)]
Dice: 8 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 7 )

Andrew Wazowski
There's a clap of his hands, an excited gesture.  He checked the vanguard, checked the hockey pucks, checked his own rig.  They were as good as there.  Now when the blocks all came tumbling down, there wouldn't be messages linking one phone number to another.  There'd just be an awful lot of calls to a sexy 1-800 number.

Hey.  Whatever knocked your socks off.

"So um...maybe voicemail by end of week?  And um...routing calls after that?  This'll be um...this'll be my new main number.  At least as far as um...as far as your friends are concerned."

Grace Evans
"I won't tell them to reach you at 1-800 FAT GIRLS... will have to translate that into numbers heh," she said, reveling in the glow of triumph a bit herself.

"Oh, what do you think about some like... broadcast capability, secure messaging for the others? Could set them up a phone app or something..."

Andrew Wazowski
"Hm.  Yeah.  Yeah, sure.  Call in, leave a message, and the group gets an alert?  That kinda thing?"
Now what was he up to now?  They had won, more or less.  So what was it that had Andrew running through clicks and key-presses?

"Just like the uh...like the drop.  I have something like that.  Need to uh...need to piece it together."

Grace Evans
"Hey, what you up to now? Chatting up Ginger?" she grinned, stretched -- sitting in the car, cramped in the driver's seat... it did a number on the body after a while. There were multiple audible pops.

"I imagine she's quite happy to be freed from under the yoke of oppression."

Andrew Wazowski
"Just um...just...retrieving that voice.  And a few other matching audio files.  And...we're done."

And there it was again, that look of satisfaction.  Conquest.

"Lets bug out."

Grace Evans
"Do I want to know what you're going to be doing with those?" she asked, a bit of exasperation in her tone. Seriously? Was he going to try tracking the poor girl down who happened to be the voice of his new server?

Something creepy, had to be...

"Well... In any case, ah... Great work tonight. And you know you're going to have to teach me all of that stuff you did, right?" she smiled in imitation of 'eager student', the fakeness calculated to be an obvious joke.

Andrew Wazowski
"Audible User Interface".  He states rather plainly.  The other comment grabs his attention and he smiles.

"Sure.  That'll be our next project, right?  Alright.  I'll umm...I'll get my stuff."

Because he'd almost forgotten he was in her car and not his own.  When they were sure it was safe, he starts packing up his own rig, and the vanguard with it.

Grace Evans
He packs, and Grace realizes this is it. In the glow of victory, there is that bitter finality too. He's taking all his pretty equipment, the hockey pucks, the vanguard...

And she didn't ask enough questions.

"I'll hold you to that promise. I'll keep in touch, Gadfly."

She laughed, a kind of giddy thing, and then, "Oh yeah, and Go Team Striped Horse!"

Andrew Wazowski
It'd be nice to be remembered this way, with a smile on his face.  The moment seems lost on him.  Chalk it up to the continued discomfort of social interaction.  He's smiling in this moment, exceedingly glad, to put it biblically.

He's also scrambling to get his things packed and get out of there as soon as possible.

"S-see you in cyberspace!" he stammers as he slams her door shut, bustling with the bulk of bags toward his own micro-machine.  The only thing he leaves behind is the pizza box and a couple crumpled napkins.

Oh, and the memories.