The connection is then encrypted, and the data is then sent along.

Included are two reports on Ida and Dr. Severinson:
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Subject: Ida Riccetti
Public Records: No public birth certificate found. No public marriage certificate found. No record of children found.
Media Information: Found an outdated brochure with a picture caption listing Ida Riccetti as one of the participants in a tour of Ngorongoro crater (now closed to the public) in 2055. Found a tabloid article from 2052 about Ida Ricetti being the new girl on the arm of multi-millionyen Rick Strussle. Found another tabloid article in 2057 about an Ida Ricetti involved with the moderately famous blind sculptor Ian Odingo. Found an article about Ida Riccetti being the 5,000 woman to make the overland trip to the south pole in 2061.
Current comcode and address information: Matches information provided by optical chip.
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Subject: Dr. John Severinsen
Public Records:
Official records show Dr. John Severinsen is deceased. Date: January 7, 2066. Cause of death: vehicular accident. Born C.A.S, emigrated to U.C.A.S. 2058.
Previous Practices: Employment records indicate employment at several hospitals, starting with Atlanta (2040-2044), then Little Rock (2044-2053), followed by Tulsa (5053-2057), lastly in Kansas City (2059-2061). Opened a private practice in Sioux Falls in 2061, which closed upon his death in 2066.
Media Information: Picture enclosed, dated August, 2064.
Four blog-style posts indicate that Severinsen has performed euthanasia at least twice recently. One of the posters believes he is operating out of the Loveland area of the Puyallup barrens district; perhaps operating from a vehicle rather than an office.
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The picture is a bit grainy, and 2D. But it is easy enough to make out the doctor’s face – graying hair, sharp cheekbones and nose (though his skin is starting to sag and soften these features), and a thin mouth.

There is also included whatever information was on Dirty Jimmy's chip.

You ask for Dr. Stromwell before the picture has fully come into focus.

A slightly slurry voice replies “Doctor? Ha! Doctors are licensed, and that makes me just a hack.” By now the picture is focused, and before your virtual vision stands the sparse frame of Dr. Stromwell. He is still wearing his white lab coat – or rather, a lab coat that used to be white. His eyes seem to focus on you slightly slower than the screen focused on him. “Ah! Dual!” he says a little too loudly. “What can I do for you? – and call mi Richard, none of this ‘doctor’ stuff today, I’m just not in the mood.” Looks like he’s been hitting the sauce again. It’s still early, and you hope that means he’s only a few bottles into his latest binge.

When you ask about Dr. Severinsen, his eyes narrow with an obvious alcohol-induced belligerence; but his countenance again reverts to only slightly glum when you quickly explain that you aren’t looking for business from Severinsen – in fact, you distinctly want to avoid his business.

“Doc Severinsen you said his name was? Sorry Dual, it doesn’t ring any bells. I haven’t been working out here that long, so I don’t know that many of my, ah, peers as it were. Anything else ya need? No? Well, ya’ve been a good distraction from my other distraction” - here he taps his glass with the index finger of the hand holding it – “but I’ve got to get back to it. I’ll be seeing ya.” says Richard, who then switches off his comlink.

"Thanks anyways... um, 'Richard'. I thought you might have heard what was up with him. Take care, I've got buisness to attend to as well."
Damn. Before I go under the knife again, I'm gonna have to make sure he's... stable.

Snapp hits a smooth section of highway, and you feel this would be the ideal time to check in on Ida’s comlink – no rough bumps to distract you. Accessing the ‘trix, Alhena performs the lengthy lookup sequence for a comlink of uncertain position. Lengthy is a relative term; and in this instance in the 2070’s equates to roughly 87 milliseconds.

Running your exploit program with a practiced hand, you quickly cut through the dense undergrowth of security subroutines, and burst forth into a clearing. Immediately upon stepping through, you find yourself in the sluggish quagmire of a CMT Clip. The Vector Xim OS greets you with it’s ugly interface superimposed on the background and acknowledges you as its rightful security operator. Security level access? You had only been trying for basic access. This thing is even more crude than you had first suspected!

Around you stands a pleasant, if poorly rendered meadow high in a mountain. The air tingles with the security level power you’ve been granted, and a light breeze ruffles the grass.

Hrmph, thinks Dual to himself, I'm gonna be done with my parts before we even get there. Oh well, I'll just be able to do a better job watching Snapp's back. I'd hate to fuck that one up on my first mission.

In his AR window, he sees the Vector Xim OS laid out for him, with a low-res wallpaper image of a mountain-meadow. Let's see....

Programs->Accessories->Address Book
Dual fires up the application in a background thread (to keep it invisible to the user, if Ida happens to be using the commlink) and searches her contacts for anything mathing the words "Doctor" or "Severinsen".

Not wanting to put too much stress on the system, he waits until his search is complete, and the relevent information is downloaded to his commlink before starting the next process.

Programs->Email
Dual searches over her stored emails for keywords "doctor" "severinsen" or "disease", copying any relevent matches for later use.

Programs->Accessories->Planner
As the image of a calender appears on his "screen" showing the month of march, he selects the dates between Wednesday the 5th and Wednesday the 12th, and copies any appointments or reminders that he finds - even if they don't seem to pertain to the mission (yet). If we end up taking her away for the weekend, it might be a good idea to see what else she'd be missing.

You pick up the leather-bound book from the rock in the center of the meadow, and begin thumbing through it. Briefly, you wonder if you had been using VR, would the cheap Xim OS would have even added an equally cheap, pleather-like feel to the book? You flip through the book with the practiced hands of a skilled data sifter, and then frown.

Well now, this was unexpected – at least to Dual’s computer-savvy personality. The comlink was empty. No phone numbers, no appointments, and an e-mail box that seems mostly to consist of items that slipped through the spam filter. Apparently, Ida doesn’t use her comlink – no wonder it’s a cheap CMT model. It must only be used for making calls.

There was one noticeable exception – an appointment listed for tomorrow. 2:00 pm, no location given. It seems to have been automatically inserted via an e-mail. The sender of the e-mail is listed only as a numbered account.

Dual locates the email that created the appointment, and saves it to his own commlink - ripping a page out of the book he had been searching through. He then tries to disambiguate some of the header information about the sender of the email, or locate other emails coming from that same numbered account, by flipping to the 'index'.

Realizing that she probably doesn't use this commlink as a computer (and as a cellphone instead) he tries to locate any logs of incoming or outgoing messages. I hope the old lady isn't particularly popular.

You examine the page of paper torn from the book more closely. The watermarking shows the name of an internet service provider with the ambiguous name of XConnext. XConnext, upon closer examination, looks to be a “pay by the amount of data sent” anonymous e-mail and comcall service. Their matrix node advertises “no server records kept.” Looks like a dead end on that front.

Carved in one of the trees ringing the clearing is a list of incoming and outgoing telcom calls. The call list only goes back two days – probably the thing is set to auto-clear the list every so often. It has two calls from a number you recognize as the comcode Dirty Jimmy had given you. Both are mid-morning calls, yesterday and today. There are also three other incoming calls. One from a number you trace to a pharmacy chain; it was received yesterday afternoon. Another came from a local number yesterday evening. Lastly, a call was received from a Denver access code about two hours ago.

There are no outgoing calls listed.

and scribbles down the two unrecognised numbers, although he thinks he knows that the Denver number will be as much of a dead-end as anyone tracing where his connection came from.

Quickly loosing interest in a mostly empty commlink, he pauses a moment to load a new program and then scribbles over an entry in the book with a feather quill that appeared. He then reaches up into a tree and pulls down an acorn, which he takes a moment to plant in a nice sunny spot in the meadow.

He then fades from view.

"Looks like she has a reminder about an appointment tomarrow at 2:00. Was automatically generated by an email from a throw-away account. Found two incoming numbers I might checkout if I get the time - one of them is local."

that place being the stuffer shack down the street from my apartment

The gear in question being his armor, his regular clothes, the predator with accompanying gear, the flashpack, the medkit, and the welder... pretty much everything, just in case it is needed.

In a short amount of time, you’ve again hacked your way into a system un-authorized – it’s been a busy couple of days. This one was cutting it close – the AR window shows a classic styled brown-brick apartment building, and the door had nearly closed on your fingers when you tried to slip inside. But you’d been just quick enough, and now you are virtually positioned in a well-lit entryway facing a bulletin board with several postings - most of them advertising features of the various apartment complexes that the owners of Ida’s building also run. To the right is a set of apartment-style mailboxes.

Dual takes a look around the room, checking for any other icons, and then moves closer to the mailboxes. He leans in and begins to examine them, to see if he can determine their function.

The bus back to your apartment is noisy, crowded, and unpleasant smelling. The worst of the ride is a small dwarf child that kicks the back of your seat through half a district. At last, the bus reaches your area, and you get off thankful for the ride to be over. At least, you’re thankful until the Puyallup air hits you. After your brief stay in Renton, the air in Puyallup seems that much worse – burning garbage, plastics, a distinctly sewer smell. . . your eyes begin to feel a bit puffy and you pull your respirator on tightly. You’ll be glad when you can get into your chem-sealed clothing to keep the sooty local air off your skin as well.

After a short walk hastened by the aggravating pollution, you return to your apartment, and head to your meditation room. It appears that the robo cleaner has wedged itself under some furniture after only vacuuming up half of last night’s spent ritual materials. No matter, you won’t be needing a clean workspace. You take the time to kick the cheaply made drone clear, and since it senses your presence in the room it scuttles away, preferring to do its cleaning out of sight.

With none of the elaborate setup of the previous night, you proceed with the summoning. The time between heartbeats stretches for what seems like a very long time as you reach past your body, and past this plane of existence. Today, there is no distraction from the rain, or from candles, but the musty feel of earth remains. You reach down once more, this time stopping long before the domain of the Man on the Dark Throne, and spread your ‘fingers’ into the rich soil far below you.

You feel the life and energy within the rocks and buried concrete that long ago provided the firm support underneath the teaming life of the city. You mold this life force into a solid, sustainable shape in an act that is half sculptor, half musical composer. Feeling the threads of energy begin to sustain your work, you re-open your eyes, finding only mere seconds have passed. If you squint just right, out of one eye, you can just barely see the air shimmer before you.

The question forms in your mind, more like a memory of long ago than an overheard interrogative: “What task shall I perform?”

*Edit* -- somehow, yours got replaced by spook's when I edited his. This system doesn't like spoilers very much.

Guess it isn't the spoilers, copy and past didn't work. I've lost the origional post... sorry about that.

Listening intently to the background noise in the virtual apartment with the aid of your analyze program, you don’t detect anything unusual. Moving on to the mailbox, you inspect the names on it closely. The names on the lower boxes are apparently derived from the names in a tenants database, whereas the upper row of boxes are pulled from a staff database. You can’t quite make out the names on the plates with user-level access though; they remain just out of focus.

Spook and Codger arrive at the location suggested by Spook at approximately the same time. It is a small stuffer shack located on the corner of a commercially zoned block in Puyallup directly south of Loveland, which is about 15 minutes away by car. The troll, Bubbles, is already out front, drinking a strange looking concoction from a large cup and leaning against her Yamaha Growler. The block the Shack is located in has only one other open business: a Bail Bond and Check Cashing service. The Stuffer Shack itself is small and squat-looking, with thick, armored windows and a plain concrete structure that looks quite sturdy and has a remarkably low amount of graffiti on it. Atop the building is the usual SS logo, glowing dimly in the mostly abated fog. Inside you can see a small, somewhat rowdy crowd, but there are two tables free near the back. The cashier, a grease-covered ork teenager, is taking orders behind what looks to be almost two inches of reinforced plexi. Looks like life as usual in the barrens.

Dual scans along the lower mailboxes resting upon one marked "Ida Riccetti." Opening another AR window, he begins sending a number of commands to the server, attempting to query the database the mailboxes are drawn from in order to find a listing of staff assigned to care for Ida Riccetti. He then examines the mid-level mailboxes more closely, and attempts to open Ida's - expecting there to be some sort of lock (encryption) on the box.

Damn. Dual pulled his hand back before attempting to access the mailboxes. He noticed, amid the lines of code and packets of information streaming across his new AR window that not only were the mailboxes encrypted, but there seemed to be program guarding the data - a data bomb. Suddenly this little jaunt has become serious, he thought to himself and he loaded up a defuse program.

He wasn't worried about the encryption. Given time, and liberal application of his skill, Dual knew he could pull the important data out of any encrypted file. This databomb was a different story. One wrong move, and BOOM. Alerts sounded, files destroyed, and his icon would probably take a pretty nasty hit.

Well, might as well get this over with. As hsi defuse program comes into working memory, Dual starts to work on rewiring some of the network traffic that would allow him to circumvent the databomb.