ghostwheel
[a secret NPC roll.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
ghostwheel
[another secret NPC roll.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (3, 3, 9) ( success x 3 )
ghostwheel
[and one more secret NPC roll. +1 diff.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (1, 6, 8) ( success x 2 )
ghostwheel
A window of light blinks open between Grace and her screen. A window of light - a rectangle: a floating hologram - futuristic smoke and mirrors. The window of light binks open but no that isn't quite accurate: it shatters into being, floating there in the van - hovering, weightless, and both Grace and Kalen can see through it to Grace's screen. What does the window show?
The window shows the old classic moving-through-stars here comes the Star Wars theme screensaver. Then: skip, scratch, like a record fuzzing, and it's back to the screensaver just a little bit faster and are those words in the distance scratchfuzz kkshhh kshhh the whole hologram skips grainy like it's an antique and then the screensaver's back faster and faster and faster andfasterandfaster
until
boom. Words.
I want to play a game. :) I want to test L. Marshall's mettle. I am L. Marshall after all. L. Marshall is nothing without mettLe. Who is your friend?
Grace
Hologram. On her laptop. Holy fuck that would be nice to know how to do. Grace's eyes go wide, and she whispers, "Coool..."
But then, this is a test, huh? And he/she/it is asking her questions. Okay. Stay cautious. Stay cool. She starts experimentally typing in a response:
My friend is the kind of friend who when you tell them you're facing potential bad guys offers to pick up some hummus and falafel and be there for morale. What kind of game we playing?
Kalen Holliday
Kalen has been described in many ways to many people, but that one is new. He smiles a little as he watches Grace type that.
He returns to watching outside though, as they wait for a response. He cannot do much with whatever the computer things are. It is possible his presence will help with morale. But he came here to watch for signs of danger. Whatever or whoever Grace is talking to may be dangerous, but Grace can handle that. Ambush from another direction, perhaps less so.
ghostwheel
[Dum-dee-dum.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (7, 7, 8) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Grace
[Awareness! Perception!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 9) ( success x 1 )
Kalen Holliday
[Per+Aw]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
ghostwheel
The words that were already typed on the holographic free-floating window-to-faux stars pixellated and - 80s? 70s? clunky-looking, except for the occasional shiver: they start to dance.
Then they shatter. Each word. Visual. Three-dimensional, little made-of-stars worms rooting up and slow-motion-out toward Grace's face. It's like looking at a representation of a drop of water falling into another drop of water, frozen. And music kicks in -
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWsdD3R9Wo0)
- music to transform, to change, mutability. Mind magick. Touches Grace, but washes over her. Touches Kalen, and does not wash over him. The urge to dance is, briefly, irresistible.
Your friend sounds like a very good friend. We're going to play a game of recovery.
But maybe it would be fun if it was Black Hats and White Hats. Cops and Robbers. Cowboys and Indians.
Moo Ha Ha. As a potential bad guy, I volunteer to play villain.
Another explosion of words, rain-falling down; the screen flickers, dull, dulling.
Sound fair?
Kalen Holliday
[Does he remember anything you tried teaching him about dancing, Kharisma? (For the LOLs....)]
Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (1, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 3 )
Grace
She can feel it doing its thing, trying to shatter her firewall, but it doesn't fall. A sigh, then. Some relief that. Until she realizes that perhaps she wasn't the target after all. Kalen, what the hell?
She looks over to the driver's side, nudges her laptop away lest he begin to outright flail uncontrollably. But hey. Dancing. Could be worse. With a gun in the car could be a lot worse. Someone's playing, but they're not being outright violent about it (yet) so hey.
Somehow you don't strike me as a Black Hat. Met one once. They weren't much for games. And I think you know as well as I do that the point of the game is to cheat. Fairness hardly applies.
Especially when you're dealing with someone who can string you up like a goddamn marionette. With the music of Queen. Fair? WTF are they talking about?
Kalen Holliday
You don't live with a dancer without being forced to dance. Sometimes in quiet moments in the living room. Sometimes when at five-thirty in the morning when most of the other people have gone wandering off or settled down when she takes it into her head to dance until sunrise and drags you out of a tangled mass of humanity and onto dew-soaked grass. Barefoot. Bottle shards. Neither of you cares.
And so when he is compelled, again, to dance, Kalen shows off again a little of the way he once moved. Graceful. Feline. Unreserved. It is both entirely like and entirely unlike the way he moved with a staff in his hands.
Once he is no longer compelled, he does stop dancing. And he leans over Grace's shoulder to type: 'Cute. But you could have just asked. I'm easy.'
ghostwheel
Ha Ha, Slick, Falafel Boy.
The window brightens for a moment and this
[http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/blog/blog-images/gandhi-ascii-text-photo.gif]
image appears. 2-dimens in a 3-dimensional space, and it begins to spin, slowly, like a snowflake, ravelling in on itself
until it's just this slender, slender, condensed not of letters and symbols, which highlight red to read:
Then let the games begin.
And then the window blinks out.
Nothing, again.
Grace
"Oh. Oh God. They're playing Gandhi? We're gonna get nuked," Grace says, and where the girl who does everything and never sleeps found the time to play Civilization is anybody's guess, but there it is.
She begins her part of the 'game'. The window's gone, but they're likely still watching (interfering? Perhaps.) And Grace goes, not to any of the fake L. Marshall's sites, but to that password protected forum called "L. Marshall's Fallacy". The one she wasn't pointed at. Related, but tangential. And honestly? A password? This should be easy.
They, whoever they are, speak of testing her mettle, speak of Black Hats, work their Work with chiptune music, so it's not too hard to guess what kind of mettle they're talking about. And she meant every word about how the point of the game is to cheat. That's what hacking is, you see? You don't exactly break the rules, because the rules are math. You just work them lose, sliding through the cracks in the facade like water.
The first thing she does? Runs a vulnerability scan on that sucker using her 'special' web browser. The black one. The one with a hundred different controls and buttons and menus for entering every conceivable bit sequence known to man as input, and automated scripts to enter them with, until the site just... gives in.
Maybe she won't even have to find out the password. Maybe she can just convince it that she is authenticated already and doesn't need no stinking password. Maybe she can confuse it by trying to get the poor database to run 'true = false' and crash, giving her names and clues and areas to explore in the resulting error message. Maybe her adversary is a bastard and doing this will cause her to start singing the Macarena at the top of her lungs, who knows?
[int+computers = 8. Specialty in play: Creative. -1 diff (Ability Aptitude: Computer) = 6. Hackin']
Dice: 8 d10 TN6 (3, 5, 5, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9) ( success x 5 )
Kalen Holliday
"At some later juncture, you'll have to explain the significance of that statement, Kit," he says quietly. Because even while they're being contacted by a potentially hostile force that enforces dancing with the Ars Mentis he is curious about everything.
Not so curious that he doesn't let Grace work now. He scans over the area again, then looks back to where Grace is typing.
Grace
[Awareness+Perception!]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 5, 8, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Kalen Holliday
[Awareness!]
Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 3 )
ghostwheel
As Grace does what she does best, perhaps better than most, and sneaks her way (I belong here [You want me to be here] This is perfectly natural) into L. Marshall's Fallacy [restricted access] forum, there is - just a hint, just a whiff, of that same mercurial resonance -
Not very near. Not in the car. No, no. But near-ish.
(More Mind Magick.)
A moment goes by. It touches neither of them.
And then the moment has ended, and a door opens to a near-by house. A man is standing in the door, staring toward Kalen's car, and he is frowning. He looks: slightly gone to seed, but with a military cut. He is dressed for outdoors work, although it is too cold for real outdoors work, so he was likely just hanging around the house.
He has a dog with him: a bull mastiff.
Also, a hockey stick.
Grace
Okay, so this is how it's going to be, eh? Quickly quickly do we run the web crawler -- the thing that will auto-download all the things on this forum (every message, every picture, every file) according to their places, and store it. Offline-available. A snapshot of the now. Before, say, her adversary can come in behind her and clean house.
Because, you see, "Ka-len, guy with a stick, guy with a stick!"
But there is a grin on her face now. Score one for... Nebuchadnezzar or whoever. The White Hats? She got the forum.
Kalen Holliday
Glorious and noble battles are the things of legend. Knights. Quests. Heroism.
Given the right circumstances, Kalen is all about being the very embodiment of a legendary knight. Shooting some compelled bystander and his dog...efficient, but hardly heroic. And Kalen, for all he may try desperately to pretend otherwise, cares about that distinction.
"You aren't overly fond of this spot, I hope?" He asks Grace, reflexive and unconcerned, the way one asks about the weather. The car is already moving before he has stopped speaking.
Driving the hell away from a fight is perhaps not the most heroic thing either. But it is preferable to killing a man and his dog.
ghostwheel
The man doesn't look maddened. He just looks mad; like he is trying to be threatening - perhaps he even is threatening, in and of himself. He shakes his hockey stick. He yells things, too:
Get off my lawn.
Get away before I call the police.
Perverts!
That's ri -
- but anything else he says is just a smear of sound. And soon, they're where-ever it is they need to go. The signal breaks.
Let the games begin, indeed.
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