[IC] [SR4] What I want to do when I grow up, High School builds character Options

[Koekepan]

In due course the image search starts to bear fruit, picking Melinda Xavier out in several pictures which pop up, one by one, in Liara's AR.

Melinda is reliably in the company of various people, all of whom are identified as members of the Lone Star Controlled Population Management Team - in other words, the prison wardens who keep bad people away from the civilised world. Given the nature of her research, this is not a terribly surprising group of associates.

She does seem to be on quite good terms with them, laughing and dancing and drinking as befits Mardi Gras.

[Twitch_]

The apology from Zoé calms Rio down. (Being referred to as a 'digital goddess' doesn't hurt either. Rio firmly believes that the blinkies are a meritocracy; she's the best Matrix jockey, therefore she should be the leader. The others don't always see eye-to-eye with her on this.) She doesn't always mean to be brusque with people, but social skills don't come easily to her. She takes a closer look at Zoé's icon, whistling quietly to herself as it pings back with impressive speed.

(Matrix Perception: 3. She's looking for Zoé's icon's attributes, to get an idea of the kind of setup she's running. Same test for Colt, 2 hits.)

Rio's own stick-figure icon waves cautiously at Zoé through AR. What does my clothing have to do with the degree of attention I pay to the meatworld? she messages back, genuinely curious. No, I do not know this guy. He is unusually large. She lets Lobo do his thing in Wonderland, eyeing him warily but not making contact.

Distracted by her game, Rio just now learns what everyone else already seems to know: there's a new low to the career opportunities test, and she's in it. Okay, she spends most of her time screwing off and does her classwork via automated scripts, but... the kitten guy? Really? A quick Matrix search confirms that this appears to be legit, and not a prank pulled by another blinkie. She has a meeting with a counselor. She's one of the no-hopers.

She'll have to do something about that appointment. Maybe later, though. For now, she crafts a text response to Papa Gotcha, suddenly more motivated to be seen as something other than teenage trash. I'm reliable. And I'm good. And... She minimizes her World of Wonderland window for a moment and actually looks at Zoé, taking in the datajack and expensive clothes. I think I might have access to some resources as well. People who take jobs like this have to start somewhere.

[Koekepan]

There is a delay of a short while before Rio gets a response from Papa Gotcha.

You got brass ones, kid. Lucky for you, I kinda like that. Unlucky for you, it don't prove drek. If you aren't just blowing smoke, bring your chummers to ... His eyes glance aside for a bit here while he apparently checks a map, or a calendar, or a practical joke list. Bring 'em to the parking lot of Logger's, in eastern Tacoma. You'll find it on a location search, anyways. Four o' clock, sharp. Gottit? I gotta smell the food before I buy it. But tell 'em drinks are on me.

His tone was a little less jovial this time, a bit harder, but clearly businesslike. The face of a man who gets things done.

Logger's is easy to find in a conventional location search. It's a registered eating and alcohol sales establishment in a downmarket, blue collar industrial zone. The security rating is listed as D, which pretty much means that Knight Errant and their colleagues don't care about bar fights, stabbings, or rape as long as it wasn't anyone important and no news crews are around. On the other hand, panoptic surveillance in that area is highly unlikely.

School lets out at around 2PM, nominally, with many extracurriculars extending the day to 3PM or later. Making it to Logger's by 4PM would be possible by bus (it's on a couple of routes) or very easy by private vehicle, with time left over to drop by somewhere else on the way.

Local weather reports suggest that the weather there, at 4PM, is likely to be around 12C, light rain, 5m/s wind gusting to 10m/s from the SW.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Zoé isn't running stealth, so probing her icon isn't hard. She's running something hot: Response 6, Firewall 6, Signal 6, and System 6. It refuses to report back its exact make/model/OS... But she doesn't appear to be wearing a commlink, or using AR goggles/glasses.

Hey, are you probing me? Zoé's avatar pops up in Rio's AR display, sticking her tongue out, and Zoé responds with a probe of her own.

Matrix Perception: 2 hits. Crap roll, but it should suffice to get Rio's attributes and find out what she's playing.

I thought the blue space alien was supposed to be the one doing the probing.

Zoé's avatar giggles at Rio, in their chat. That jacket costs 500 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) - I figured that if you spent that much on a jacket, you liked looking good and being noticed for it. Zoé shifts a fraction of a moment and an inch in her beanbag chair as she composes the reply, lightning fast. You do, you know - look nice with it on, in this light. Your hair's crazy and wild. It'd look fierce if it fluoresced under UV light. She's not quite tactless enough to suggest that Rio might want to spend some time in a tanning bed, though.

World of Wonderland, huh? I used to play it, but I deleted it and let the account go fallow when I heard word they were going to start banning people who were using nude patches and the like - did that ever happen, or was it just talk? It would've been pretty pointless without those patches... And I found out I prefer sci-fi MMOs anyway. Hey, do you play Miracle Shooter? It's one of the AR games I play - maybe Pokémon? Ultraviolet/Infrared, or maybe Radioactive? As she sends that query, she pops an icon of a classic red and white Pokéball, an icon of youthful gaming for over seventy years, up in the chat window. What about full-sim VR games, you've gotta play something.

As she makes that query, the AR pet she was carrying on her shoulder unloads itself, and those watching her PAN or running any current-gen Pokémon AR game (such as Ultraviolet, Infrared, or Radioactive), would see an iconic character of classic gaming appear at her side; a bright yellow Pikachu, wearing Super Mario's cap, a rare promotional, cosmetic item available primarily by hacking the game stats (or theoretically, from certain promotional events held primarily in Japan,) with glowing, radioactive-green stripes and cheek spots, indicating that this particular Pokémon is both powerful and has been trained up from an egg. (Or has been edited.) Those running the game would see that she has hers set not to allow spontaneous combat initiation, but is accepting challenges from all and sundry.

And about Lobo... I dunno about him. He's huge. I'm not sure if he was hitting on me or not, but if so... Yikes. He's definitely not my type. Then again, maybe he just has weird standards of friendliness. Did he hit on you, or ambiguously greet you, or something?

While she's at it, she probes Daiyu's rig, and Lobo's, querying them for their Matrix attributes and any games they may be running, but she fires up her Stealth 6 program for just the time it takes to do so, to conceal the probe without going invisible.


Probe Daiyu: 3 Successes
Probe Lobo: 4 Successes

[Vegas]

Even if she had been fully submersed in her AR, there would have been no way to miss Zoé. From her hair to her boots she was a riot of color in the chair before her. Daiyu blinked a couple of times putting two and two together to realize this must be the “new girl” some of the other Washouts had been harassing the other day. While she didn’t appreciate the fact that Zoé had decked one of her clan, she could respect that the girl had stood up for herself and in turn she nodded to her in acknowledgement.

I’m Daiyu, welcome to SouthEast Tacoma High. Seems like you’re already creating quite the reputation around here.

Daiyu was about to continue her conversation when Colt’s message popped up into her field of vision. She held up a finger to Zoé to hold a sec while she fired off a response that wasn’t a complete blow-off to Colt, but at least put him in his place. Colt was easy on the eyes, but hardly her type.

Original pick-up lines. Come back at me when you’ve got something more creative than a kindergartener would come up with.

She turned all her attention back to Zoé, picking up on their conversation back in the meat as she didn’t particularly like spending any more time in AR or VR than necessary.

“So where were we?” Daiyu’s voice is soft, almost melodious even when she speaks only a few words.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Zoé had been about to fire off a message in response, when Daiyu held her finger up. She blinked, waiting while Daiyu shot a reply to Colt, monitoring her ongoing image search, before looking back to the pale elf when she speaks again.

"Well, I just realized I don't know how to pronounce your name," Zoé says. "Daiyu? Die-yu? Day-yu?" She got it right the first time, unbeknownst to her, as she chews over the name; either way, she smiles, leaning forward.

"I'm glad someone can just say hello to the weird girl, though," she murmurs, her voice high and friendly. She extends her right hand to Daiyu, her skin clearly visible in the dark room, light pale blue with brighter, dappled spots on the back of her hand, vanishing up under her jacket at her wrist. "I don't suppose you're into any AR games? Do you happen to know who Melinda Xavier is? She doesn't appear to be a member of the staff here."

[Vegas]

She politely took the proffered pale blue Elf’s hand and shook it firmly, a hint of warmth touching her blue eyes though a smile never touched her lips.

“Not really into the gaming scene, not my thing.” Daiyu shrugged slightly before her face darkened ever so slightly at the mention of Melinda Xavier before she shook her head.

“Don’t have a clue who she is actually. Never heard of her before today. Did you get one of those invitations as well?”

Even if in any other circumstance, Daiyu might not have given Zoé the time of day, the sheer fact that she might be in the same boat as herself and some of the others intrigued her and warranted further conversation with the uber bright new girl.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Zoé seems a little crestfallen as Daiyu admits to not playing any VR games, but she shakes nontheless. Her grip isn't very strong, but she seems most of all pleased by the contact, shaking with a smile. Her own hand feels cooler than Daiyu's.

"Yeah," she admits, with a shrug and a sigh, parroting, "You have an exciting set of career options before you. An appointment has been made with a special guidance professional for you, next week." She rolls her alien-like eyes, a visible gesture of contempt. "Horizontally, maybe," she derides the notion. "But I don't even think Seattle's depraved enough to arrange a guidance counselor to explain that, so... I wonder what it's about? From what I gather on the school's social media, it's the... Well... Did that guy really... On the admin's desk? And a kitten, in a bucket?"

Zoé shakes her head, and lets go of Daiyu's hand, but she tugs the beanbag chair close, tucking her legs alongside Daiyu's, leaning in to conspiratorially converse with her. "I've been running a deep search on her. It's not good," she murmurs. "I was half-expecting her to be a ghost, an alias, but it's worse; she's a headshrink with a degree in kids growing up - developmental psychology," she explains, with another roll of her eyes, "and she likes to do research on convicts. She's also been doing research into early identification and treatment, presumably of criminality... And now she's working for the Tacoma education board as a consultant, listed as working in 'a joint delinquency reduction push with various other departments and Knight Errant.'"

Zoé gives that a moment to sink in. "It gets worse, though. I found a pic of her in New Orleans in 2061, at Mardi Gras, and I've been running a deep background search on that time, looking for any media with her face in it." Zoé shrugs. "I was hoping for some drunken topless selfies courtesy of the vodka fairy... And I'm still holding out some hopes for that," she admits, "but I quickly got clusters of hits on team snaps with a bunch of goons called the Lone Star Controlled Population Management Team."

Zoé sighs. "My guess? They've singled us out those of us they expect to be incarcerated and this is a scam cover for some kind of study." It's honestly hard to say that Zoé can look anything but angelic, as there is something simply breathtaking about her that could tug on the heartstrings of a sociopath, but she looks adorably rankled by that.

"I don't like it," she says, pouting. "Something's fishy." Her eyes change, going from black with white flecks to a crystalline blue, with inhumanly tall, catlike irises, surrounded by flecks of gold. "Something's fishy, and it makes me nervous," she admits. "I just got here, I don't even have a record, so why are they singling me out? And why would they single you out, either," she asks, with a shrug, glancing down Daiyu's body. "You don't look much different than any other, uh... You know, girl into your style of fashion," she says, not wanting to say 'Washout' aloud, lest Daiyu take offense.

"I mean, it's not like we're doing anything heinous with small, defenseless animals or helpless desks or anything."

Zoé starts another search on the school's social media, as well as that of outside social media linked to the school, actively searching to alert her and save anything with the text of the "exciting set of career options" line as well as anything with Melinda Xavier's name or face. "I'm gonna keep watching out for it all. I have a bad feeling about this," she admits to the taller, older elf. Then she bites her lip, and leans back, composing a comm-message to her aunt.

Hey, Cynth? I just got some weird-ass B.S. by the school's career guidance questionnaire. Most kids got something about vocational training or academic training, a few got poached by the UCAS military and five hyperventilating artistics got singled out for art studies stuff... But I got a load of crap: "You have an exciting set of career options before you. An appointment has been made with a special guidance professional for you, next week."

I thought it was fishy, like some kind of corp or shadowy thing, so I did a deep background search on the counselor... I'd almost rather it was a company man recruitment drive. The lady's name is Melinda Xavier. Zoé copies Cynthia anything she has thus far and ongoing updates; if nothing else, she knows her aunt would get as much of a kick out of any drunken selfies by the headshrink as she would.

Evidently she's been at this a while. Have you heard of her, or maybe know of anyone who's heard of her, or seen her? It's not urgent, I don't think - it's probably just some head-shrink who's going to try and give me a load of bulldrek, probably targeted me as being at high risk of criminality on account of, well, you, and mom and dad being incarcerated. Some of the others they've targeted are real hard/headcases; one guy likes to file his bodily excrections on the admin's desk (I mean, who hasn't been tempted, but actually fucking doing it?!); This other guy's a fucking psychopath who set a kitten on fire in a bucket on school grounds, someone should probably just put a bullet through him now, dump him down in Puyallup and save his future victim's lives now; Then there's some Ork girl who got pregnant so she could raise a stink about metahuman rights and ork culture when the administration tried to talk to her about it... But there's also 'normal' girls, like this goth Elf I just met.

Anyway, it's probably nothing and it's not urgent; I'm just in for an uncomfortable talk, and they've probably pegged me for participation in some kind of study, given her background. I just thought you'd like to know, and I'd ask if you'd heard of her before. She looks like she's still your type, and definitely was back then.

Thinking for a moment, Zoé encrypts the message, contents and data stream, then data bombs them, before she sends it.


Encryption: 5 successes
Data Bomb: 2 successes

[NeVeRLiFt]

Colt see's the girls for what they are and gets up and walks away leaving out the class room.

Colt ends up heading outside the school and gets on his Indian Pathfinder and rides off.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Zoé's attention is drawn by movement, and she turns to look up at Colt as he leaves. Raising her eyebrow, she sends him an AR message, Lobo? You late for a class or something? but to her consternation, she finds he's blocked her messages.

Frowning in puzzlement, she looks back to Daiyu. "That was weird," she murmurs with ambivalent shrug. "He just blocked me."

To Rio, she sends an AR message; Did Lobo just bail on us? He blocked me. What'd you say to him; did he block you?

[Aria]

Hop moved casually through the corridors, vaguely wondering where he was supposed to be. In the periphery of his vision Beth floated like a ghost, watching what he was seeing through his comm feed.

@Pulse [Hop]: Look at this shithole they’ve dragged us to! I’m struggling to imagine something worse! I know you can’t tell me where you are but it’s got to be better than this hasn’t it?

@Hop [Pulse]: I guess, we spend most of our time in VR so I suppose I don’t notice much.

@Pulse [Hop]: I mean, look at this juvenile crap… indicating some of the prevalent AR graffiti I know we used to tag stuff but frag!

@Hop [Pulse]: Chill sweetie, it’ll be ok! I’ve got to go static begins to fill the line love you…

@Pulse [Hop]: Love you too… but she was gone. Damn, now I need to deal with this on my own! Let’s see if I can find the other newbie, can’t be that hard to find a glowing blue girl.

When he eventually tracked her down he was dismayed to find that she was talking to one of the washouts! He had no time for their dreary outlook or morbid obsessions. Still, nothing ventured and all that

Hi, I’m Hop…

He's average height and build, dark, messy hair but the key detail for the observant is the chromed datajack behind his left ear (trailing a cable to an otherwise unremarkable 'link). The job looks custom, good quality, with engraved sigils that on the face of it make no sense at all...

[Twitch_]

Rio stares blankly at her hands. Did I just promise a guy who's at least strongly rumored to be a Shadowrunner a... team of some kind? Today? Even for someone used to thinking fast, this takes a moment to sink in.

She gets over her shock quickly, though. This is an opportunity, much more than she was expecting. Sure, she's making everything up as she goes along, but that's always worked for her before.

First things first. Rio shoots a quick message back to Papa Gotcha: We'll be there. She takes another moment to craft a reply to Zoé; suddenly it's important that her subpar social skills not anger the blue girl. They did ban the nude patches, but if you're any good it's easy to get around. I don't know what's up with that guy. I didn't say anything to him. I'll take your team on, but maybe later? I've got to take care of something. Finally, she activates a farming script for her World of Wonderland character and minimizes the AR window, instructing it not to bother her.

Rio stretches and runs her hands through her spiky inch of black hair, checking the positioning of her trodes. She sinks back, resting casually against the prone body of another blinkie as, with a mental command, she sinks into cold-sim VR. The sudden vast white field overtaking her visual field is as comforting as ever. This is where she belongs. Another command, quick as thought, pulls up her Stealth and Exploit programs. In her current minimalist Matrix theme, they're white origami structures, Stealth a hat and Exploit a throwing star. Rio puts on the hat, and her stick-figure icon fades to white, disappearing against the plain white background of her reality filter.

She's already subscribed to the school's node; now to get a proper account. Rio pulls a blank white wall out of the material of the node. Seen up close, the firewall appears to be made of origami sections as well. Rio sets to work with her paper throwing star, working it between the folds of the wall and cutting. She moves quickly, trusting her own Stealth program and the ultra-quiet throwing star to keep the node from noticing her efforts until she gets what she needs.

In the meat world, she hums quietly as she works, smiling. Presumably there are others who got mistakenly put onto the guidance list. They're as likely to listen to this crazy half-plan as anyone.

(Exploit tests for Rio's first turn (three initiative passes): 3 hits, 6 hits, 6 hits vs. the school's Firewall. Rio's Stealth is 5, and she has the Mute option on her Exploit program.)

[Koekepan]

The school's firewall is state of the art, top notch equipment by the standards of 2065 - which is to say that it folds like a cheap chair before Rio. Moments later the origami firewall bends open and affords her access. Behind it is a mess of nodes, with drifting strips of paper talismans repesenting programs, inscriptions of data hanging as scrolls, and tangram-like figures which seem to be teachers and agents carting around data or inscribing scrolls.

[Twitch_]

Rio's stick-figure icon has no face, but there's a certain triumphant cast to its stride as it steps through the wall, still shielded by the Stealth hat. She pulls a scroll from nowhere and opens it partially; text runs continuously across the open surface, constantly updating as her Analyze program catalogs its surroundings. She sends a command to the now-open node, ordering it to bring her the results of the career assessment from earlier.

[Koekepan]

A talismanic paper sheet wafts off on an unseen virual breeze and returns in a mere moment after drifting through an origami pagoda's open structure. On its way back it trails a scroll which it deposits in Rio's white paper hands, and its data drifts in columns across her scroll. The columns are in black, brush drawn characters, except for the Incipient Sociopathic Criminality column, which is in scarlet.

Rio sees her own name there, and Colt's, and a few others.

At the bottom of the columns are the protocols:
Artistic training ... academic training ... institutionalisation.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Zoé assumes that Daiyu must be mulling over what she told her, and leans back in the chair, blinking.

@Rio: Weird, that Lobo guy. I dunno, though, he kind of - oh my god. I just got it... Her avatar appears in VR next to Rio, as a ghostly image, facepalming for a moment. I think he got upset because I left him to speak with Daiyu. I think that means he was interested in me... All of a sudden, I'm kind of relieved he is gone... Anyway, I see you just went VR, so if you're up to some shenanigans, I wanna hear about it later, maybe when we get a chance to battle.

As she finishes sending her message to Rio, Zoé starts to wonder what she should do when her conversation with Daiyu is concluded, hoping it concludes well; weighing the merits of dropping into cold sim to track Rio down in the 'trix and join her in getting up to no damn good, dropping into cold sim and cranking through some course-work, or heading out in the meat to track down Eden Madsen for the express purpose of antagonizing the bitch and her honeybee squad, or dropping into VR to antagonize her over the trix.

Her consideration is interrupted as Hop appears, though, and she blinks up at him. He's considerably smaller than Lobo was, but the tiny blue girl still shies a bit from him, snapping his pic and sending it to Rio. Know this one, too? He just came up to me, she sends to Rio, as she looks up at Hop.

She pushes herself up on the beanbag chair, as the ARO that is her Radioactive Pikachu climbs up on her back, to her shoulder; an open invite to anyone running a Pokémon game, and visible to anyone who simply scrutinizes her PAN. "Hi... I'm Zoé," she responds to him, raising a hand. "Do we know each other? From a 'trix game or something?"

[Twitch_]

Rio quickly makes a copy of the scroll, grabs a copy of the school's master schedule just to have it, and leaves the node before any of the tangram agents notice her. There will be time to goggle over what she's found when she's safely back in her own comm.

Back in the meat world, she opens her eyes slowly. Institutionalization. Can they [do that? All the students were SINners, after all. They had to have some rights. She shakes her head slightly, trying to clear her thoughts. Specific fate aside, it's clear the school has no intention of treating them as though they have any kind of future. For some reason, the knowledge stings, even though she's spent the last four years cultivating precisely that image.

Don't know him either, she sends back to Zoé. You could charge for sightseeing. Let's... yeah, we'll talk. Hang on a second.

Rio goes through the 'Incipient Sociopathic Criminality' list, cross-referencing each name with a photo from the school's public database. Should have pulled disciplinary records while I was in there. Even without the benefit of records, there are some names that can be excluded by reputation alone: Kittenburner, Excrement Guy, a few others. Some of the remaining names have to be considered more carefully, but Rio errs on the side of caution. In her expert opinion (cursory knowledge of Shadowrunner trids), you didn't want more than a small group anyway. Colt she considers, but eventually decides she'd rather have Zoé, and they don't seem to get along.

The remaining handful of names get an unadulterated copy of the list, an explanation of where it came from, and a short message: Meet me in the parking lot of Logger's at 4:00 if you want to be more than this. Rio settles back into her pile of blinkies, pulls up her World of Wonderland window, and waits for the school day to end.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Zoé reads the information she was given, and has to try hard not to snarl at the boy who just introduced himself to her, and snaps off a response to Rio.

@Rio: Institutionalization? They're just taking it for granted we're going to wind up in jail - or are they actually planning to put us there preemptively?! This is bulldrek!

Anger flares within her, and she fights to keep control of her emotions, even as her commlink automatically parses Hop's face from the list, matching it to the picture she just took, and she blinks at him; she's sure he's just gotten it. Daiyu's on there too.

"What the actual fuck," she asks, aloud, shaking her head and turning back to Daiyu. "What the fuck," she asks, sounding and looking all the more adorably compelling for the simmering anger. "They profiled us? As sociopaths - for... For what?! Can you believe this?"

[Koekepan]

At this last outburst, including the word: "sociopaths" a few heads turn. It is more interesting than ploughing through a series of planning tools or banal announcements on school policy. A couple of shadowcrawlers like the word, and start a mock fight over who is more sociopathic, but the fact is that on the whole most of the kids just don't seem to find the topic all that remarkable, and their attention drifts quickly back to their own eternal teen drama.

[Vegas]

As Daiyu digested not only the information that Zoé was spitting out at her a mile a minute, but the message sent from Rio about the list they were all on and now someone else introducing themselves out of the blue, it was enough to make her sick to her stomach. How was she going to explain this to her parents?!? All she could do was shake her head at Zoé and spare a glance up at Hop that probably appeared far too suspicious than she meant it to.

“Who are you?” As she studied the boy in front of them with her head tilted slightly, she chewed her lip.

It wasn’t long before that thing happened again, where her normally grey and drab world flashed with color for an instant. She was getting more and more convinced she was going to have to get a new pair of contacts, or have someone take a look at her commlink and her VR filters. Shaking it off she fired off a quick message to Zoé.

@Zoé [Daiyu]: Are you going to head over to Logger’s this afternoon to find out what this is all about?

[ShadowDragon8685]

"Sorry - am I going too fast? I can do that sometimes," Zoé apologizes to Daiyu. She shrugs, looking up at the boy who came over to her, and whom Daiyu rather bluntly queried, wondering the answer to that herself, but then looks back to Daiyu.

@Daiyu [Liara]: I don't know. 4 PM is smack in the middle of when I'm supposed to be delivering pizza shop stuff. My aunt got me the job, and I don't want to disappoint her. I think it's her equivalent of chores... But maybe if we could arrange for a pizza delivery to Logger's from the shop I work slinging subs and putzing around with pies...

[Vegas]

Daiyu shrugged at Zoé over the speed of her conversation as an acceptance of the situation. She got the impression that Hop was just another new kid and not someone to be overly worried about so her guard dropped a few levels and she actually softened her expression.

“Sorry for the attitude, it’s been a weird morning. Everyone’s on edge with the assessment results coming in. Are you new around here, I don’t think I’ve seen you before?” Her attention is pulled towards the shiny datajack behind his left ear and the contemplation that there are a lot of new students at SouthEast this year. At least she was vaguely aware of who Rio was and given her rep amongst the Blinkies, she was pretty comfortable with the idea that this wasn’t some big hoax.

@Zoé [Daiyu]: I think we can make an order to Logger’s happen so you can crash the party. Want to toss me the contact info so I can place an order later?

[ShadowDragon8685]

Zoé nods at Daiyu's shrug, and looks up at Hop when Daiyu asks if he's new, wondering the same herself. He seems to be carefully considering his response to them, however, and she frowns.

"It's so weird," she murmurs. "Why would they tag me like that - I just got to this school. Surely punching one person isn't enough to get you labeled an inveterate hard-case, even if I did punch her in the pussy." Zoe shivers softly. "She was really freaking me out," she admits, and climbs off her beanbag, sliding forward, to the side, and turning around.

The tiny, glowing elf slides up next to Daiyu, frowning. "I'm going to see if I can get to the bottom of it," she whispers, in the taller elf's ear. "And I need to crank on some classwork anyway, before lunch rolls around." She unties her dressCODE CYBERPIRATE boots, taking them off and setting them aside, then rolls up her sheer fabric dress socks, stuffing them in the boots. Even her feet glow, are blue, and bear the same dappled pattern of spots straight down the outsides of her ankles. She tugs the beanbag chair close, into her lap, and leans straight into Daiyu's side, closing her eyes. "Watch my back, I'll try and get us some answers."

The glowing elf closes her eyes, her head leaning on Daiyu's shoulder, as she goes into full (cold) sim VR. She activates the disposable commlink upon her person, foisting onto it her main commlink's matrix ID numbers as she scrambles her main's AIDs and goes full dark, firing up her Stealth program, and adjusting her suite of active programs. As she's become unnerved by the information Rio revealed to her, the first things she does is go into full paranoia mode, loading the following suite:

Analyze 6 (Ergonomic, Mute); Browse 6 (Ergonomic, Mute); Command 6 (Ergonomic, Mute); Edit 6 (Ergonomic, Mute); Purge 6 (Ergonomic); Reality Filter 6 (Ergonomic); Stealth 6; Decrypt 6; Defuse 6; Disarm; Spoof 6; Armor 6. [Response does not degrade: 6 programs running + 6 Ergonomic Programs running.)

Zoé turns off her transmitter entirely, and cuts her disposable commlink (which is connected through her datajack) off at the 'jack, so she may scan her commlink very thoroughly and in private; that is, twice, first giving her commlink a basic, semiautomatic scan (Buying 2 hits,) and then proceeds to give a more thorough search.

If Zoé finds any such virii, she uses another shot of Analyze to determine (in order,) what it does, when it was installed, and by whom/what. Then, assuming she found a virus, she mercilessly Purges it. (If she found more than one, well, we'll have to get to them when we get to them.)

Matrix Perception to detect Viruses: 5 Hits
Matrix Perception to Discern Facts About Viruses: 4 Hits
Purge: 2 hits. (That Purge is likely insufficient, but if there are any viruses, I'll know that and will nail them again until I successfully purge them with fire.)

In her VR world, of course, this all looks quite different. Zoé's present reality filter reigns supreme as her own node's sculpting system, so it activates without contest. The world vanishes, even the soft sensation of Daiyu's body against hers, the coarseness of the beanbag chair above her bare feet (and the coldness of the tiles,) the dreary day. The only thing remaining from the real world is audio, as her cyberears remain on, functioning as microphones to let her observe the outside from within.

The world vanishes, and in its place Zoé's avatar materializes, stepping out of a door into a brightly-lit city-scape; last week it was a human free-runner, but this week, after the advent of her new handle, she appears as a tall, dark blue Asari, curvaceous and large breasts, all things Zoé herself will never be. She went whole-hog with this avatar; initially it loads nude, in glorious, fully-working simsense detailed, but clothing materializes around the avatar as she steps out; pale red hotpants and a matching tight tanktop with a matching glove on her right hand and tabi on her feet, but they're quickly overwritten by her Armor program, which materializes as a set of medium-weight, full-body science-fiction armor.

When her Stealth program loads up, the avatar blurs, and then cloaks out of sight altogether; the rest materialize in aggregate as individual functions of a left forearm-mounted bracer computer/tool. This was Zoé's own domain, and she was queen here. She walks to the edge of the rooftop she's on, viewing the city. With this being the inside of her own commlink, the city was a freerunner's playground, entirely open to her; programs were represented as gigantic, science-fiction installations, either on rooftops or as entire skyscrapers unto themselves, data files were enormous computer archives, contacts were an enormous, pulsing, science-fiction transmission array from which she could send or receive conversations. And all of it was hers - and now, spooked as she has been by the information Rio gave her, she's worried.

She begins her run, dashing to the edge of the building from which she entered the metaphor and leaping, the glass-sided building she leaps past reflecting her avatar from the many facets of its windows, and as she runs, the holographic tool on her arm lights up, playing golden scanlines across everything she passes, green nonsense symbols raining down them as she scans, the rain turning gold if they're safe; red if a virus or malware is detected.

[Koekepan]

Zoé's search, thorough as it is, does not turn up any virus code or activity. As a matter of fact, aside from the debris of various Matrix games which might still drift around her commlink, there's nothing particularly remarkable there at all. It looks as if the school is either a lot less sophisticated about its intrusions than she thinks - or a lot more.

Somewhere the cost versus liability calculation was doubtless done in a committee meeting, and they decided not to pursue the viral infestation alternative as regards pupil computing devices.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Satisfied that her commlink hasn't been intruded upon, and no intrusion attempts were made and automatically defeated by her firewall, Liara turns her attention outward, to the school's nodes. She's angry, more than a little scared, and wants to get to the bottom of this...

And with any luck, even now Kittenburner and Drekboy will have read the stuff about being singled out and are setting off to commit some activities of not-so-passive resistance to the Man. That would create a hell of a distraction.

Zoé summons an air-car taxi from the top of a gigantic library archive in her home node, taking it towards the portal to the outside; far from being the subway tunnel that would take her down her datajack's fiber-optic cable, this enormous thing on the roof of a skyscraper looks like a combination of antenna, hairpin, and modern art, with rotating rings in the hollow at the base where its two tines expand. It was not lit up, but it does so as her aircar approaches. Normally, it glows a steady blue, but now it lights up in coruscating oranges, greens, and reds; she has activated her Nonstandard Wireless transmitter, operating on frequencies outside those normally scanned for.

With the relay active, Zoé flies the aircar directly into the relay as the rings in the middle began to rotate. She's sent in a blur of light from the aircar, zooming through the digital aether and landing in the school's Nexus, its primary access node. Her reality filter easily asserts itself over the school's sculpting, and the system renders itself as a city like the one she just departed. She emerges from the similar relay, flipping over and landing on her feet at the edge of the building, walking out along an overhanging metal pole, leaning down to look around.

Zoé detects six active, non-stealthed icons on the school grid which are IC, tagging them as targets Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot. In the school's own sculpting, they're rendered as chibi hall monitors, but they flicker for a moment, coalescing into hovering drones with long arms, various attachments, and spotlights, with images of their chibi hall monitor forms on their dorsal hulls. They hover over and between the rooftops of the city, shining their lights occasionally.

They may not necessarily be here to look for what she's about to do, but Zoé needs to make sure they don't get a chance. She starts by assessing their potential, determining the rating of their Analyze programs, their Firewall ratings, their System ratings, and their purpose.

[ Spoiler ]

Alpha: IC
System 2 / Firewall 2 / Signal ? / Response ?
Analyze 2

Bravo: IC
System 2 / Firewall 2 / Signal ? / Response ?
Analyze 2

Charlie: IC
System 3 / Firewall 3 / Signal ? / Response ?
Analyze 2

Delta: IC
System 3 / Firewall 3 / Signal ? / Response ?
Analyze 3

Echo: IC
System 3 / Firewall 3 / Signal ? / Response ?
Analyze 3

Foxtrot: IC
System 4 / Firewall 4 / Signal ? / Response ?
Analyze 4

Of those, Foxtrot is by far the most dangerous; therefore it's most vital that Foxtrot gets as few opportunities to detect what she's doing. She isn't concerned with the hundreds of students jacked in; of them, only Blinkenlights would have any hope in hell of detecting her, running as high a rating Stealth program as she is, and those that would see her are those least likely to snitch. Those students with low-rated comms blink into existence as their avatars, on the streets below, whilst those with higher-rated comms (Blinkies, primarily,) blink into existence as fellow rooftop goers.

Of all the icons in the node, Foxtrot is the largest and hence, scariest. It manifests as a huge hovering drone two meters in diameter. She dashes along the side of the building she manifested on, leaping down to the next, and climbing up a crane on the top of the skyscraper. Dashing out along the crane's boom, she takes another leap, this time at Foxtrot itself; landing on the hoverdrone's dome, a spike of golden, holographic energy erupts from her left fist, and she drives it into the dome-like top of the VR thing. This is her Disarm program, and it goes to work against the IC, specifically, its Analyze program.

[ Spoiler ]

IP 1: 1 Hit
IP 2: 3 Hits
IP 3: 1 Hit
IP 4: 1 Hit
IP 5: 3 hits

5 IP

That took way longer than it should have, Zoé thinks to herself as she finally completes the work, and leaps down from Foxtrot's dome. The drone's Analyze program hasn't been crashed, of course; its spotlights, rather than having broken and busted out, still cast light. It's simply that that light neither illuminates Liara, nor casts a shadow from her; she is completely invisible to it. In short, Foxtrot is literally incapable of perceiving her.

She moves on to the drones in descending order, then; her leap from Foxtrot's dome took her to a rooftop, which she crosses easily owing to its openness, and pauses. She analyzes the main node, to determine if a trace is running, and its alert status; if both are not worrying, she leaps onto Echo. Smaller than Foxtrot, she can barely balance atop the drone, stabbing it with her spike.

[ Spoiler ]

IP 1: 2 Hits
IP 2: 3 Hits
IP 3: 1 Hit

3 IP


That was precisely average, Zoé thinks to herself, turning and leaping away, landing on some pipes in a side alley between buildings, clinging on to them. Echo passes by, as Delta comes up the other way, and she repeats the procedure, checking alert/trace status first.

[ Spoiler ]

IP 1: 2 hits
IP 2: 3 hits
IP 1: 1 hit

3 IP

Second verse, same as the first. Liara leaps from Delta's dome, landing atop an elevated maglev, riding it in a whisk around the square city, taking the opportunity to determine alert/trace status, and if all are good, leaping for Charlie. Charlie was an odd duck, an IC with its Analyze program running at a lesser rating than its System. She wasn't sure what to make of that, but decided not to chance it and disarm it anyway.

[ Spoiler ]

IP 1: 5 hits
IP 2: 3 hits

2 IP

The pace picking up, Liara leaps from the third of the mid-ranged IC drones, onto the side of a large building, landing on a window washer's platform. She slaps the switch that raises it rapidly to the roof, and proceeds to look around, swapping her spike for her scanner, and checks once more for alert/traces.