#and on phone the standard us keyboard that i use has most of the common ones and at the end of the day you can always google them

[alpinelogy]

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[uhohdad]

EXPERIMENTAL - Konig Fic Part 2

Summary: Konig helps Researcher!Reader with a new technology they’ve been developing.

Part one: X

AO3 Link: X

Warnings: Flirting, Sexual Content, NSFW, Reader x Konig, talk of standard war stuff, Reader is a bit of a pervert. Non-con Voyeurism. Reader has anxious thoughts/low-self esteem-ish? No use of y/n, abduction, bondage, blood and injury.

Word Count: 7.2k

Reader gender/sex is incomprehensible cause I do it for the girls, the gays, and the theys

NSFW under the cut

It probably didn’t mean anything, right?

How common is your name, really? He probably was just thinking about his girlfriend or wife at home who just happens to share the same name as you, the same wife he didn’t happen to mention during your introductions - even if it would have been a really good icebreaker.

Yeah, that’s it.

It couldn’t have been about you.

Could it?

Your thoughts are spiraling now, not giving yourself the room to dissect one detail before your brain throws another at you. You still haven’t moved, wide eyes watching warm light reflect on his skin as he basks in post-orgasm bliss.

He’s still for a while, and you’re wondering if the finish had tired him out enough to lull him into a nap.

After a few minutes of watching the rise and fall of his chest, you decide the show was over and closed out of the software. There was some part of you, some part you’d hoped wouldn’t ever come to light, that decided to keep his feed connected.

You’ve crossed so many lines already. In for a penny, in for a pound, right?

You feel like you’ve ruined whatever chance you’ve had with him, violating his privacy like this. This was a man that wasn’t even comfortable showing his face, how did you think he was going to feel knowing a stranger has not only seen him fully naked but watched him jerk his cock to completion?

He doesn’t have to know. No one has to know. It’ll be our little secret and we’ll just pretend it never happened.

Yeah, you acted real casual today when you hadn’t done a horrible, awful, perverted thing. I’m sure you’ll act real casual the next time you have to look him in the eyes.

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

You rest your head on your keyboard not-so-gently, accidentally booting up an ancient mail software that was sure to kick your laptop’s fans into overdrive. An audible groan leaves your mouth.

Who knew non-consensual voyeurism would leave such a horrific feeling of guilt in the pit of your stomach?

That and the arousal that sits right underneath. Your underwear now had a wet stain from watching the show, unconsciously rubbing your thighs together as you had.

There was no way you were going to be able to focus on work now. You had been planning on staying late, but there’s no way you can analyze today’s data. Review his feed. Replay your conversations. Hear his breathing…

No, you just can’t do it right now. It’s too much.

You do a quick round of the lab, performing a sloppy iteration of your closing procedures, pack up your things, and head out for the day.

Before you do, you decide you might as well round out the horrific deed by doing one last terrible thing.

You pair your personal cell phone to the software and send yourself the erotic recording of Konig.

You’ll start fresh tomorrow, you decide.

————————————————————-

You most certainly did not start fresh tomorrow.

The next few days are a vicious cycle.

Go to work. Review Konig’s simulation footage. Fantasize. Feel guilty. Review raw data. Think about Konig touching himself. Feel aroused. Feel guilty. Rewrite codes. Go home. Watch erotic recording. Feel aroused. Get off.

Feel guilty.

Feel guilty.

Feel guilty.

You can’t help it. You’re out of control, an addict desperate to get their fix, ashamed of their actions but lacking the willpower to quit.

How are you supposed to stop thinking about him when all day at work you’re watching him fight his way through the shoot house, strong hands gripping his gun, and hearing to that laugh?

How can you go home and ignore the recording of him finishing while moaning your name?

You must have replayed it a thousand times. He moaned it like he was begging you, pleading with you. Such a powerful man choking on your name. Even after a full week had passed, it still had the power to excite you in ways you haven’t felt in ages.

Your next meeting with Konig was scheduled for today and if you had to judge solely by the feeling in your gut, you would’ve guessed you had eaten rocks for breakfast. Your brain tells you to flee and fast but your body is promised to these four walls. Your leg bounces as you pick at the fingers that beg for something to do besides type code.

You wanted to call it off. Tell Konig you weren’t feeling well and you’d try again next week. Or maybe hit the bricks entirely. Just walk out of the building and never look back. Forget about everything.

You’re reconsidering your career choices as a steady knock on the lab’s swinging door rips you from your thoughts.

Your wince before you look up, quickly plastering what you hope is a convincing smile on your face.

He catches your eyes through the glass and you notice them crinkle, unable to place an emotion to it. You’d been dreading this moment all week. Even going so far as to avoid looking at his live feed after the incident, just in case you weren’t able to feign the natural responses of hearing his recounts for the ‘first’ time. That in addition to the intrapersonal understanding that you couldn’t handle carrying anymore guilt-rocks in your stomach.

Looking him in the eyes was as hard as you imagined it to be. He pushes open the door and steps in, standing hesitantly near the entrance like he did last week. You notice he has a notepad in one hand, and it looks so comically small compared to his size. Like a giant holding a sticky note. In the other he holds your earpiece in an open palm, as if hesitant to wrap his fingers around it.

It doesn’t help that the first word that left his mouth as he entered the lab was your name. Flashbacks to his sweaty body, shuddering in pleasure as he came all over his rippling muscles grab your attention.

He had followed it up with something, but you had been too distracted to catch it. You close your eyes, touching your hand to your forehead.

You were not doing a very good job hiding your fluster.

“I’m so sorry- what’d you say?” You give a small laugh, partly to ease the tension in your chest and partly at the situation itself. It’s not funny, you know that. It’s terrible. So terribly ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh at yourself for getting yourself into this mess. Your hand follows through the rest of your hair in an effort to soothe yourself before falling back down at your side.

“Good to see you.” He repeats, tilting his head, taking just a few careful steps closer to you. His eyes dart to the side briefly before returning to you, “Is everything okay?”

You give another weak laugh, “Yeah, sorry. Just still in the zone.” You gesture vaguely at scattered papers and devices on the table. You don’t give him a chance to pry further, “How was it?”

He takes a moment to eye you carefully, and you are sure he’s about to call your bluff before he responds, “Remarkable.”

You swallow, breaking eye contact with him again. It’s always been hard for you to accept a compliment. You're hoping he doesn’t notice the warmth creeping up your cheeks, but you know you have absolutely no right to such a request after what you’ve done.

He clears his throat before he continues, “I promised you I would have feedback. It wasn’t easy.” He holds his notepad up briefly as he steps up to the table to carefully set it down along with your earpiece. You can see from across the table he’s got a few scribbled sentences spaced out on the notepad. You take note of his sloppy handwriting from across the table, before realizing he didn’t write in English.

He looks down at his notes and you’re thankful you have something to stare at that’s not Konig’s eyes or intimidating frame. You’re trying hard not to think about the body filling out his gear. You’ve grown so accustomed to seeing him naked that it’s almost strange to see him with his uniform on.

You can tell he takes a deep breath before continuing and you wonder briefly if he’s nervous about sharing his feedback, worried he will hurt your feelings. “You mentioned before that it scans objects?” The end of his sentence lifts, almost like he’s asking you a question, “I think it would be good to make sure that the user is always made aware of landmines. I’m positive it will save lives.”

“Yes, absolutely. That’s a great idea.” You nod as you jot his ideas down on your laptop, a reminder to update your code.

You’re happy to be talking shop. Even happier to be talking about defensive designs instead of offensive ones.

The way he rubs his bicep with his opposing hand triggers a realization. You finally look at his eyes, his still staring down at his notes, and watch him for a moment.

The idea didn’t come from thin air.

You wonder what he saw, what traumatic memories are being replayed behind the downcast eyes to inspire such an idea.

You feel an ache in your chest for him, the desire to alienate his discomfort but unequipped to do so. Instead you look at him, your eyes swollen with sympathy and the corner of your mouth pinched in a frown.

He takes a moment before looking back up at you. He notices your warped expression but misinterprets it, “Am I overstepping?”

Your voice is low and you press a hand to your heart, “No, Konig, not at all. This is very helpful.” You’re not sure what else to say to him. What do you say to a man haunted by the violence he’s witnessed?

The only thing you can do is make sure it doesn’t happen again.

You’re not working for the government anymore, you decided. You’re going to work for Konig. To tailor your device with the purpose to save and protect him.

So you stick to the topic at hand. “Any other ideas?” You ask, voice still soft with empathy as you glance down at the notes written in German.

“Uh,” He clears his throat again and touches the back of his neck over his hood, the fabric pulling a bit on the front, “Sometimes when we’re in the heat of things, I can’t always get to my remote.” He gestured to the band on his wrist. “Do you think it would be possible to have voice command?”

Your brain’s mulling over the possibility. You’re surprised you haven’t thought of it yet. You could eliminate the remote entirely, you’re sure your supervisor will be elated with the big savings on material costs. The earpiece already has a microphone for the comm, it wouldn’t be hard for you to configure it to an additional feature.

“Absolutely, voice control. That’s clever.” Your brain is already running with alternatives to the wrist remote as you type his ideas, “Do you go on a lot of missions that require stealth?” It’s easier to make eye contact with him when you’re discussing work. He nods, and you continue, “In addition to voice command, I could also add hand controls, able to identify and respond to the signal you give it - totally silent.” You tap your fingers on the table twice, “The only draw I can think of is having to memorize control signals.”

He thinks it over for a moment and shifts in his spot, “That’s even better.”

“I think it’ll be best to have both.” Your keyboard clicks under your fingers as you enter the ideas coming to you faster than you can get them down.

This is great. I’m not even thinking about-

Stop it.

“These are great, Konig, really. Anything else?”

Your encouragement makes him look away. You follow his stare as it darts to the side and then down to his notes. He places one hand on the table next to the notepad as he leans his weight onto it.

You briefly picture yourself between him and the table, his arm pinning you in as he towers over you, hunched to watch you like you’re his prey, chests so close they’re almost touching.

You quickly push the thought to the side, moving your attention back to your laptop. The only way to survive this meeting is to repress.

Repress your memories of what he looks like with his cock in his hand, arching his hips into the thrusts. Repress the sound of his moans and your name echoing clearly in your brain. Repress the guilt from the breach of privacy to the highest degree.

Please, just until we get through this.

You close your eyes and take a breath to collect yourself while he’s not looking.

He’s got other things written on the notepad, you’re sure. Unless the two ideas he’d already pitched managed to take up the whole page. “No.”

Your brows furrow, the question leaving your mouth without thought, “You’re sure?”

He pauses. You can tell he’s sitting on a thought, but you don’t know what.

“It’s okay. Like I said, it’s just a prototype. You won’t hurt my feelings.”

He straightens his posture before he speaks, “No. That was all I could think of.” He swallows, “If you feel I didn’t make good on my promise, I can fix it.”

“No, no!” You say with urgency, a hand shaking in his direction, “Those ideas you gave me were perfect. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t holding back on me.” A weak laugh escapes you. “I can’t stress how helpful this has been. I’m glad we’re doing this.”

Konig looks at you, those intimidating eyes staring at you from across the table. You wish you could see his face, hoping it would give some insight on what was going through his head. Even if you could you don’t think you’d be able to maintain eye contact.

He knows.

No, he doesn’t, shut up.

“I’ll keep thinking.” He says definitively, like he’s trying to right a wrong.

“You’ve only had it for a week,” you reassure, “Besides, you’ve given me plenty to work with.” You force a smile at him, not even caring how it’s coming off because you’re just hoping not to choke on the tension suffocating the room. You wonder if he feels it too, or if it’s all in your head.

He nods, and you look to your laptop in a futile attempt to thwart the dread suddenly pooling in your stomach. You’re reminded of what you’ve done when he crosses his arms, and your eyes are drawn to the same bicep on the arm that he used to pleasure himself. You’re picturing how it looks under his uniform, comparing it to your filthy reference. Your heart quickens and you can’t help but take in his build, even from across the long lab table. You feel extra small sitting on your stool while he stands, arms still crossed, staring.

The air between you two is definitely weird. Him getting off to probably-not-you and you watching but him not knowing that you know will certainly fill the room with a tension unlike any other.

These drawn-out silences are smothering you, not knowing what goes on being his hood.

He looks disappointed in you.

He knows.

“How can I help you in the meantime?”

You can’t help but breathe a small sigh of relief. You were planning on taking him back out to shoot house, running a few more simulations, and having him give feedback on a few more overlays.

You scrap that plan, looking forward to expanding on his ideas while your synapses are still firing.

“Well, here’s my thoughts so far. Landmine identification, the coding for that will be easy. The device already has the scanning capability for obscured objects. All I have to do is enable the specific object for full-time recognition. The hard part will be testing. I’ll have to meet with weapons development to develop prop landmines for simulation.”

You glance at the notes on your laptop, “Voice control - easy. Mic’s already installed and all I would have to do is add speech-to-text recognition, repurpose the wrist control coding, and then…testing.” Your hand finds the side of your face as you think it over, “Well, I may need to sample voice lines from you and a couple of your friends…” You loosely gesture with the same hand as you continue, “But there may be workarounds to that. Put a pin in that.” You’re on a roll now, “Now the hand controls - that might be more complicated. I’m thinking I’ll have to start fresh with the hardware.” You look up, “Then again… it already has the scanning capacity. I could probably just teach the current model with software alone. But the coding will take some time to figure out.”

Your eyes find him again. He’s staring and as per usual you can’t decipher it.

“Y’know,” you continue with a smile, “You could help me come up with hand signals?”

He nods.

He doesn’t give you much to work with, does he?

“I’ll need references of your hands. To teach the AI, is that okay?”

He looks down in a way that makes you feel so, so ashamed. If he is hesitant about recordings of just his gloved hands, how would he feel if he found out about what you did? About the video living on your phone?

After a moment he looks back up at you, “I’ll do it.” His voice is stern as usual, always treating everything with importance, with determination.

You give him another shaky smile, “Might be awhile. Wanna sit?”

He pulls up a stool to his end of the table and you instruct him to put his earpiece on as you return to your software on the laptop, trying not to trigger the memory of the last time you watched his feed. You pretend to resync your devices, glad he can’t see your screen. A wave of shame washes over you.

You’re both collaborating for some time, you offering a prompt and him stiffly coming up with a corresponding hand command. You supervise his feed, having him tilt his hands so the AI has references from multiple angles.

The rest of the meeting is professional and you manage to steady your obsessive thoughts as best you can. It’s hard to observe his hands and not think about the video, about what you watched those same hands do.

About how those hands would feel mapping all of the curves of your body.

How they would feel gripping onto your hips as you rode him.

How they would feel sneaking up your thighs, teasing you.

Somehow, you make it.

Once you decide you’ve covered enough references, Konig heads out, and you hope to continue staving off your thoughts by wasting no time on incorporating his ideas into your design. You’re hoping to have a least one rough draft done before next week’s meeting, so you plan on hunkering down and forfeit your Friday night to work overtime.

—————————————————————-

It’s late in the evening, you can tell by how your eyes are burning, strained from staring at your bright screen. You don’t bother to check the actual time. It would just bum you out. Spending your Friday night working. Not that you would have been doing anything partially exciting if you hadn’t. You probably would have just spent your evening analyzing footage anyway, just of a more perverted genre.

When you finally call it quits, the base is barren. Everyone’s gone home or retired to their quarters by now. It’s quiet after the base door shuts behind you, automatic locks clicking into place.

You’re feeling better after today’s meeting with Konig. Somewhere in the previous week you’d convinced yourself that he knew, that at any moment he was going to report you, and at any moment security would bust in the lab to escort you out.

Seeing him again, even though you couldn’t always figure out what he was thinking, reassured you that he hadn’t somehow telepathically figured out your terrible deed. You don’t think he would have bothered to keep helping you, or even be able to look at you without disgust if he did know.

The meeting also re-sparked your feelings of arousal and excitement. The knot in your lower abdomen made its presence known again. So much more desirable than the spiraling guilt. You’ve come to lean into the highs, enjoying it while you can, knowing soon you’ll be feeling nauseous at the thought of yourself.

You don’t know how much longer you can take the rollercoaster. This week has been exhausting. You can’t believe you’ve allowed this man to root himself into your life, seeping into every facet.

Career, personal, sexual, and - well, you’re still in denial about the romantic feelings - but it’s incredibly impressive how this man was capable of fucking your entire life up for the small price of a couple of hours and a few exchanged words.

When you finally get to the privacy of your home, you let out an audible groan. Loud enough to carry but quiet enough to not disturb the neighbors. You just needed to let something out, it was getting frustrating.

You didn’t want to think anymore, you didn’t want to think!

“Long day at work?”

You freeze, and the sound of heavy footsteps fill your ears. Two armed soldiers with fully equipped gear stride from the depth of your home, meeting you at the entrance.

The sight of them alone is enough to intimidate you. You instinctively back against the locked door, your trunk obscuring a hand moving towards the doorknob.

“Tsk, tsk. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”The taller of the two soldiers wears a black balaclava with a skull stitched in, his unimpressed stare drilling into you. You hear a click, and your wide eyes lock on to the gun in his hands, pointing right at your core.

You slowly release the doorknob, raising your shaking hands so they could see your palms.

“That’s good babe,” The other soldier speaks, but you’re too busy staring down the barrel of the gun to worry about it.

“I have to admit I’m a little upset with you,” Skull-face, as you appropriately nicknamed him, speaks as his eyes bore into you, “You kept us waiting a long time.”

He’s got some sort of thick accent laced into his grave voice, they both do, actually, but you’re too busy trying not to piss your pants to be able to place the region of origin.

A lump forms in your throat and you don’t think you‘ve taken a breath since you heard the unfamiliar voice in your home.

It’s violating. Them being here. Where you go after a long day of work to relax. Where you eat, sleep, shower, and just be.

How dare they defile and taint your safe place, where you hide away and pretend the exhausting world around you doesn’t exist?

You’re stuck, unsure of your next move and paralyzed with fear.

“We think you have something we want.”

You’re not sure what they mean, but you nod in compliance anyway. Not much you can say no to against two heavily armed men. You finally break your gaze away from the gun and take turns making frightful eye contact with them. You speak after a failed attempt of swallowing your fear, voice soft and broken, “Take it.”

They exchange a knowing glance with each other, the man with his face exposed bears an irritatingly smug grin.

Skull-face approaches you threateningly, sending fear down your spine and making your skin crawl as you push yourself further into the door. He leaves no room for pleas as he flips his gun around, the stock coming down on your forehead with enough force to knock you out cold.

————————————————————-

Your splitting headache was the first thing you registered when you came to. You can’t seem to concentrate, the fog in your brain so extreme your thoughts are incoherent. You let out a meek whimper as you attempt to open your eyes, the lights in the room stunning you and intensifying the throbbing pain in your skull. You wince, closing your eyes again to block it out.

A few moments pass - and the next thing you notice is the dryness in your mouth, unable to manage a swallow from the dehydration.

Water.

The only intelligible thought you’ve had after registering your discomfort, the instinctual desire stronger than the dizzy haze clouding your brain.

You lift your head, trying to move but your weakened muscles fail you.

Your muscles are weak, yes, but what’s really keeping you in place are the restraints.

You wince again, eyes scrunched to block out the brutal light as you tug to confirm you’re secured. Your wrists were bound behind you, your shoulders overextending around the back of the chair you were planted on. Your ankles bound to either leg of the chair. There’s another restraint wrapping under your arms and around the back of the chair, keeping your upper half upright. There’s a rashy burn underneath the coarse ropes that dug into your skin as your unconscious body leaned into it.

You let out another whimper from the back of your coarse throat. While you weren’t alert, every instinct within you notified you of the danger you were in.

Gotta move.

You try to squint one eye, but it still doesn’t save you from the flash intensity of your headache. Your eyes are stinging on top of it and you realize you’re partially blinded, vision blurred and doubled, stained red with your own blood.

You grit your teach, determined to figure out where you are. You try to concentrate your vision but to no avail.

Even so, you can tell you’re not at home, and you’re not on base.

Once you make your discovery, one that expended what little willpower you had, your eyes clench back shut, desperate to alleviate the migraine.

A secondary location, you thought to yourself through the pain, I’m fucked.

You can’t hear anything, the ringing in your ears deafening you.

You let out one more defeated whine before resting your chin on your chest, pinching your eyes closed.

You have no idea how long you drift in and out of consciousness for. During the brief moments you come to, you’re so disoriented you can’t make sense of your thoughts, and that coupled with the debilitating pain in your head is unnerving enough to make you cry tears of pure confusion.

It’s your neck snapping back to follow the hair yanking on your scalp that jolts you awake, and try to open your eyes to find the threat but they’re still not working as they should. Underneath the debilitating ringing, you can hear the sound of muffled male voices, unable to make out what they’re saying.

You gave up.

You were wounded & trapped, and in nature that meant a death sentence. You were in no shape to properly defend yourself. Couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t move, couldn’t think.

You were as done as the toast made from your own designs.

After wincing, your eyes screwed shut, you go limp and give in to the man physically controlling you like a sadistic puppeteer.

The muffled voices are louder, you still can’t make out their words but you can tell they’re having some sort of argument. They’re yelling at each other, and your scalp becomes collateral as the one tightens his grip on your hair to match his escalated volume

He’s right in your ear now and it’s not helping with the headache.

Just hurry it up, You manage through the haze, just hurry it up and put me out of my misery.

He throws your head forward to the position it was in before, slumped over as much as the ropes would allow with your chin pointed to the ground. The force rattles your skull in a way that makes you see a searing white behind your eyelids. What little water you had left in you was escaping through your swollen eyes lids and down tear-stained cheeks.

Just kill me, please.

——————————————————-

When you come to again, you’re no longer sitting. You’re flat on your back. Your neck secured so your head is in line with your spine. Your headache takes the front stage but the pain has noticeably subsided. You try to open your eyes again, but the lights above you are still excruciating.

You let out a low moan and shut your eyes again.

Your ears still ring, but a good portion of your hearing has returned to you. You hear your name, followed by, “are you awake?”

You grunt in response, unable to form sentences.

“Can you open your eyes for me?”

You wince, trying to shake your head but unable. Instead, you grunt again before parting your lips. You tried to say, “Lights,” but your voice is so hoarse it comes out broken and cracked.

“What is it?”

You try and clear your throat, putting all your power into your strained voice, “Lights.”

They understand, and while you still can’t hear the flick of the switch, you can tell from behind your eyelids they’ve been shut off.

You try to mutter a “Thank you,” but give up a quarter of the way through.

You slowly open your eyes, still burning but blood wiped away from them. Your vision is still blurry, but no longer doubled.

“Do you remember what happened?”

You try to shake your head, but can’t. So you force a weak, “No.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“No.”

“Do you know what today’s date is?”

You just grunt, closing your eyes again. You didn’t know the answer but you were too fed up with the questions to respond.

“Can you see?”

You grunt again.

“Okay, how ‘bout this? Can you wiggle your fingers for me?”

You try to lift your arm in the direction of the voice but your action is cut short, your arm jerked still by a restraint on your wrist. You open and close your fingers slowly at the maximum range the restraint will allow.

“How ‘bout your toes?”

Your toes move slightly, your calves aching at even such a mild movement.

“Good, thank you. How’s the hearing?”

Kill me or leave me alone, you think.

You eventually freeze the owner of voice out, finally leaving you alone to rest.

The next few days are a miserable, confusing blur. Somewhere along the way you’re informed you’re in medical, being treated for your extreme concussion. No skull fracture, thankfully, but they suspect the bruising is severe if it was enough to knock you unconscious.

The concussion had scrambled you good, and you were not nearly as sharp as you usually are.

It took you a whole five days, not that you could keep track of the passing time, before you realized that you were not at medical on your base.

You were in medical, restrained to a hospital bed-

in enemy care.

————————————————————

There was nothing you could do. Restrained to your bed, sedated with painkillers when they thought you were becoming too active.

“To help you rest.” They told you, but you couldn't trust a word that came out of their mouths.

Medics are supposed to be neutral, bound to an ethical code to heal the injured, enemy or not. That didn’t stop some medics from harboring grudges after years of patching up their own soldier’s brutal wounds of war.

The next time the medicine wears off for a long amount of time, with no medics in sight, you conveniently get visitors, the soldiers that had visited you in your home.

The events had been beaten out of you, but the traumatic event had seeped somewhere deeper into your psyche, and you knew deep down you were in trouble at the mere sight of them.

Skull-face especially, you don’t know how or why, but your intuition tells you he’s responsible for this. “Ready to answer some questions? Or do you need me to put you back to sleep?”

You can tell by the sharp edge in his voice he doesn’t mean the painkillers.

“Maybe I’d be able to answer your questions if you hadn’t given me brain damage.” Your patience is running thin, and an ember ignites a flame inside you, “Who knows what information you knocked out of me.” You stare directly into his eyes, brows furrowed, the tone of your voice inviting trouble in.

He already took everything away from you. At this point you don’t care if he puts you under. You’re begging him too. Every time you wake up you just want to go back to sleep. You don’t want to deal with it, any of it.

Skull-face makes a move to advance but the maskless soldier stops him by putting an arm out, laying it firmly across his to hold him back.

You don’t flinch, eyes now staring down the soldier with a stubbled jaw and a mohawk that ended in a widow's peak. It’s a haircut you find highly unusual for a soldier.

Your face doesn’t crack, but you squint at the pair, “What do you even want to know? I don’t even work on the field, I have no information.”

Skull-face looks down at you, “Oh, we know.” That stupid accent and that stupid mask. If you weren’t restrained you think you would have launched at him, risking it all to get a few good scratches in with your fingernails. He reaches into his pocket and your eyes widen and your brows retract at what he pulls out.

Not a weapon, no.

It’s your design, the AI-powered earpiece, and your wrist remote.

Skull-face notices the realization that sets across your face, “Awh, looks like your memory is working fine after all.”

The flame inside you laps at your skin, your features flushing with anger. A lot at Skull-face, for being such a cocky prick, but mostly at yourself.

You did this yourself. You figured your day of reckoning would come eventually. That karma would bite you in the ass, and those who are affected by your designs will stand by and laugh at your demise.

You should have just stuck with redesigning kitchen appliances.

“Why don’t you show us what you’ve been cooking up, huh? We know you’ve been busy.”

The pair share another knowing glance, Mohawk snickering at your expense.

“How did you get that?” You ask through gritted teeth, knowing there’s no way they could have gotten into the highly secured base.

“What is it?” Skull-face asks.

“It’s an intercom.” You grit, the ache in your head pulsing. You miss the painkillers.

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.”

Mohawk steps in, “It’s okay, we all get embarrassed about our porn.”

You furrow your brows at him.

What the hell was he talking about?

Skull-face elbows him in the side, but it doesn’t keep his partner from smiling, “What is it?” He asks again.

“It’s an intercom.”

He’s getting sick of this game and he goes to step to you again but Mohawk cuts him short. “Ghost!” He says firmly.

Ghost, that was Skull-faces name. Or call sign, at least. You hated him, but you’d wished the other soldier would just let him at you. You didn’t care anymore.

Mohawk looks at you, “Look, there’s only so much I can do,” gesturing to Ghost, “Can’t we all just get along for a little bit, yeah?”

“How about you get along with deez nuts.” You laugh at your dumb joke, a laugh influenced by the daze of concussion and painkillers. You’re in hysteria, the laugh spills out and doesn’t let up. A release of built-up stress and frustration and anger that seeped out uncontrollably. Cackling at yourself for ending up in this situation. Only you would be capable of such hijinks. The laugh leaves you out of breath and with eyes full of tears. You don’t even care how it exacerbates the headache, or how you’re coming off as insane. It feels too good to let out the pent-up emotions, one way or another.

Your elation is cut short with a squeak as a gloved hand cuts harshly into your trachea. Ghost squeezes, roughly lifting you by the neck before shoving you back down on the hospital bed, his grip tighter than before. His voice is low and filled with caution, “I am getting sick of you.”

If you could breathe enough to talk, you’d tell him the feeling’s mutual. Instead you gag and sputter, which he takes as a sign that you are still getting air, and forces more of his weight onto your neck.

Your hands fail to defend yourself, the restraints holding you from fighting back. You’re getting close to blacking out, your laugh having already knock most of the wind out of you, but Mohawk pulls Ghost off of you, his hands firm on Ghost’s shoulders, “Stop! Stop.”

You involuntarily gasp, desperate for air, trying not to choke on your own spit. For a moment all you can hear is the blood rushing in your ears, flowing desperately to replace what Ghost restricted.

“Come on, last try.” He warns, and you can tell in your voice he means it.

You eye him carefully, still heaving for air. When you collect yourself, you speak, “I’ll show you.” You say, voice weak and breathy. You try to hold out your hand, but get stopped by the restraints.

Mohawk glances at Ghost, but Ghost keeps his stern eyes trained on you. He stays still for a moment, studying you with his arms crossed.

You roll your eyes, your chest still huffing as you reclaim your air, “Don’t trust me? Fine. I’ll walk you through it. Put the fucking bracelet on.”

He stares for another moment before taking the device from Mohawk. Must of handed it off so he could strangle you better.

He puts it on his wrist.

“Now tap the top.”

He follows your instructions, the wrist remote’s projection displaying above his wrist.

“Go ahead and open your settings.” You guide him through it, activating a few select overlays. “You got it. Now put the earpiece on.”

Ghost hesitates, looking over to his companion before he slowly reaches up underneath his balaclava, attaching the earpiece.

“Yep, and while you’re in there, go ahead and hit the button on the base.”

You watch as your design activates, displaying the transparent overlay over his eyes. He’s taken aback, unnerved by the unidentified design being so close to his vulnerable eyes.

“Ta-da!” You say sarcastically, showing off the full range of the restraints as you offer weak jazz hands. “So I’ve given you some information. Maybe you can give me a little information, yeah?”

He doesn’t say anything as he removes his hand from his mask.

“Where am I?” You ask.

“You know where you are.”

“How’d you find me?”

“We tracked your cell phone.”

You squint, “Why were you tracking my phone?” It doesn’t make any sense, there’s no way they would have been able to pin your cell phone information back to base. You don’t use it for work and there’s no way you had connected to the private Wi-Fi. It’s apples and oranges, you think.

Mohawk steps in front of Ghost and holds out his phone in your direction. It takes a moment for the image to come into view, your vision still impaired. When your eyes adjust, the screen shows you something that makes your blood turn cold.

It’s the video of Konig jerking off.

“Okay! Okay.” You wave your hands, “Just put that away, I get it.”

When you connected your phone to your software to transfer the recording of Konig, it briefly connected to your laptop.

Base internet has state-of-the-art firewalls and encryptions to prevent surveillance, hack-in, key logs.

Cell phones do not.

So they’ve been tracking you all week, and who knows what kind of information they were able to pull from your software? From your laptop, containing dozens of government secrets?

No, you think, they wouldn’t be going through the trouble of keeping me alive if they had the information on my laptop.

“What’s the matter? Embarrassed that gettin’ your rocks off caused a security breach in confidential information regarding warfare development?” Mohawk mocks.

Well, yes you were, now that he mentions it. You’re actually very worried your perverted little stunt will somehow end up forever immortalized in history books.

In the moment, though, your main concern was making sure that Konig wouldn’t find out, as you had started transmitting the device’s feed to him as soon as Ghost turned the earpiece on.

Part Three

[nickgerlich]

Charged Up

One of the most frustrating things that happens to consumers, especially when it comes to tech products, is to find out that something you own is now obsolete. It happens all the time, but one company—Apple—has been notorious for doing it. Worse yet, the obsolescence affects one of the most mundane aspects of the product, yet also one of the most critical: the charger cord.

It was eleven years ago that Apple introduced the Lightning connector for its iPhones, leaving the much clunkier 30-pin connector to fade away. While it was a net improvement, it meant that all of our household and car chargers were done. They also did a similar move with charger cords for their MacBook line of laptops. And don’t get me started about when they eliminated the headphone jack back on iPhone 7 in 2016. It was clearly a move to bolster sales of their wireless AirPods.

Now they have done it again. At their big media announcement earlier this week, Apple announced iPhone 15 among other products, but also had to tell us that—here we go again—the phone’s charger cord would now be USB-C. It’s just that this time, Apple is not trying to pull another fast one, because they have been forced to change.

While it is convenient to think that the US rules the world and we set the standards, we are quickly waking up to the fact that the EU—European Union—has significant clout. The General Data Protection Regulation that was passed in 2018 ensures that European users have much higher expectations of data privacy online, and while they can opt-in to cookies, they are not the de facto setting. We can thank the GDPR for all those annoying questions we face on many websites today asking us if we would like some cookies.

The EU is at it again, with charger cords the next item to come in their cross hairs. Starting next year, all devices sold in Europe must have a common connector. USB-C was chosen as the standard. In both cases—the GDPR and charger cord—American firms have decided to go with the flow, and not fight it. Rather than have two websites, one for the EU and the one for everywhere else, they opted for one. As for Apple, it had no choice but to yield, if it wants to sell phones there.

Of course, this once again puts consumers in a bad place, because we still have legacy products that require the Lightning cord. At my office, both my keyboard and mouse are charged by—you guessed it—the Lightning cord. And my two Apple MagSafe external batteries also require that connector. Even when I upgrade my phone from 12 to 15, I will still have to keep some of these old cords around, while also changing out my home and vehicle charger cords.

Lovely. I will be using two systems at the same time. I see a tangled mess of cables in my future.

It can be argued that Apple should never have stuck with proprietary connectors in the first place, that it wasn’t being a good corporate citizen. But there is a monetary explanation. On Wednesday’s Morning Brew Daily podcast, they reported that Apple makes $5 billion a year either selling its own cords, or licensing their manufacture to third-party companies. That is a significant revenue stream that is now gone.

I am also perplexed that Apple had already adopted the USB-C standard on its own for MacBooks and iPads. It’s enough to make me pull out my hair. Well, if I had enough to pull.

Yes, I am an Apple fan boy. I made the switch in 2005, and have not looked back. While I do not own an Apple Watch or AirPods, I have phone, laptop, office iMac, and tablet, and I love the eco-system. Everything plays well together, which makes it a powerful bundle not replicated elsewhere. I’m good with paying the so-called “Apple tax” to own these products.

Sometimes, though, I admit to the frustration you get when you feel like someone is just yanking you around. This time Apple is getting yanked around. It lost the battle in Europe, and had to concede the world. I’m happy, because there really never was a good reason to have unique connectors other than extra revenue. In fact, this is something that has been going on for years in tech products, from cords to batteries. I can show you a bunch of incompatible camera batteries within both the Sony and Canon lines.

It’s just that Apple is the one getting the black eye for it now. It’s going to be a wobbly transition period for a while until we wear out all of our older products that still use Lightning, but we’ll get there one day.

And we can then add those old charger cords to that box everyone has in their home. Heck, mine still has Cat-4, RS-232, RCA, and land-line phone cables in it. Just in case, you know.

Dr “Of One A Cord” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[nefola-real]

the name change discord thing

big ole post i made for their support forum, might was well also post it here. tldr expression on the internet is dying, and i am complaining in hopes to slow it down in one specific area Today the discord blog and in app update notifications discord announced a change to how user names work. This change will cause a number of negative effects. Most for users, but a handful for discord itself. I am going to go over each subtidal thing in the blog post in order. This is kinda an open letter to discord, thus the use of YOU.

"The biggest problem: our current usernames can often be too complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily."

This statement and its supporting details are wrong in a number of ways. hear is an address of the post's subpoints about this

Remembering the discriminator isn't the biggest deal. Its a bit of a paint at times, but remembering less than half a phone number is not hard.

Case sensitivity is an issue, however most users with weird name casing will tell you their weird casing.

Common name usage will be a problem under your new system as well, and will likely be worse. this is an inherent flaw of usernames. your current system almost fixes this issue even. this point does not make sense.

People who change their name a lot live with this. Your new system prevents any changes at all. You are making the supposed problem worse here.

Ok special characters are an issue. This is the only thing that you would be improving. However the extent that you propose limiting special character usage is a bit much.

Most people call it your tag or end numbers. Not knowing the technical name isn't a problem here.

Half of all requests failing is an issue, just not one warranting a redesign of a core feature.

"But we realized that then we would have an even more complex system with both a Display Name and a username that still included the four-digit discriminator."

This is the core issue with your approach. The problem is characters users can't type (easily) in user names. You are trying to address this and the obtuse process of verbally communicating letter case. Discord has elected to solve a problem that was minor and a problem many users don't have. This means that the solution will cause issues. We now get to the main bad argument you make here, the section title. Discord profiles are already very complicated. Simplifying them means removing entrenched features. Four digits and an ampersand at the end of a user name is the smallest thing you could have done to simplify discord profiles. Bios and custom statuses are relatively redundant and both take up more profile space. Notes are about as entrenched as the current username system and removing them would also simplify your profiles. Discord is already a complex and over featured software; and that is a good thing. You were able to spring into an established software market because of this. Doing everything other messengers do, but better and also a something nobody else does is why I and other users switch to discord. Removing complexity goes against why discord initially succeeded. In the past you have streamlined advanced features rather than removed them, which prevents new users from being overwhelmed and lets old users keep their toys. Rate limits and complexity are not worth the damage your solution will cause.

"How We’re Improving Usernames on Discord"

Ok so your actual solution isn't the worst. Separate display and user names is fine. Its clunky but it is fine. The changes to user names is where the issue lies. Usernames are now alphanumeric plus period and underscore. This is the core issue. While you did remove font special characters and emoji overuse you went overkill. Spaces are inoffensive, same with other standard keyboard special characters. Verbalizing usernames is not an issue most people care about. People who care make their usernames easy to verbalize. The fact that you are implementing unique usernames this late into your software's lifespan is the biggest problem for you.

"we will be assigning priority to choose your new username based on when you registered for Discord."

The user name gold rush this late into a platform is a problem. My account is old; I will probably be able to snipe my username during the rollout. My current username will turn into my new one. I suspect most users with accounts from 2018 and on will run into issues getting the exact user name they want. Outside of people who's users have had special characters for years, newer users are likely to encounter someone else who wanted their special username. This will cause feel bads. Where the solution is to get someone else you hardly know to give up a user name.

Next up is that all the names of prominent figures are going to get snipped. Malicious actors are going to take ever @discord, @twitter, @ninja, and @mod they can.

You are going to upset most ordinary users who made accounts in the second half of your program's life, many streamers, and maybe a brand or two. A random roll out wont solve it either, you will still have streamers and brands getting snipped.

Just stick with the old system and ban special fonts. This wasn't a problem and your solution will make it worse.

[wastefulreverie]

“no one has brown eyes in amity park”

The DMV just outside of Amity Park was a small, red-bricked building with poor air conditioning and a waiting room full of broken chairs. Eva stood by the wall, stiff, waiting with her uncle for the results of her driver's permit test. After almost twenty minutes, the woman at the counter called her name and she followed her uncle with bated breath.

Oh God, what if she didn't pass? Then she would have to wait and take it again and she wouldn't be able to get her license when she turned sixteen and she'd be the last of the A-Listers to drive and—!

"You passed," the woman said. "You were one point from failing."

Her uncle clapped her on the back. "See, I told you it would be fine."

The woman at the counter began entering in more information into the computer, having her sign a few papers here and there. She paused on the question about organ donation—sending a pang through her heart. It hadn’t been more than three months since her mom passed. Died on the list for a new liver.

Her uncle’s eyes softened in understanding. “Eva, you don’t have to—”

“Yes,” she hissed. “Yes. I’ll do it.”

The rest of the questions were standard.

"Height?"

"Five-four."

"Weight?"

"One-hundred fifty."

"Eye color?"

"Brown."

The woman stopped typing and looked up from the screen. She met Eva’s gaze with her own light teal eyes.

"Pardon?"

"I have brown eyes?"

"What, so you wear colored contacts?"

"Uh, no. My natural eyes are brown. The most common eye color?"

The woman blinked a few times before turning back to the keyboard. She squinted at the screen, a little put off.

"How strange," she murmured. "Brown eyes."

Later, she left the DMV with a temporary paper driver's permit in her wallet. Her hair was frizzier than she'd like because of the heat and her pupils were constricted from the camera flash, almost lost to her caramel-colored irises.

—

Her uncle needed his eyes dilated. She couldn’t remember what for, but she was more than eager to get more experience behind the wheel.

She found a chair near the corner of the waiting room and settled down with her phone.

One of the optometrists walked through the waiting room and stopped in front of her. His brow furrowed in confusion.

Had something gone wrong with the dilation? How did someone mess that up?

“Um,” he said, “I couldn’t help but notice your eyes.”

She raised a brow. “Aren’t you an eye doctor?”

“Yes. Well, I mean—” he stopped “—I noticed your eye color. It’s peculiar. Is it real?”

“You’re asking if my brown eyes are real?” she said slowly. It wasn’t the first time she’d gotten a comment like that in Amity Park and it was starting to weird her out. No one in her old town had spared a second thought about her eyes. “Yeah. They’re real.”

He paled. “I’m sorry if that was a rude question. I just, I’ve been working here for almost two decades now. I don’t see many people with brown eyes.”

“How’s that? It’s the most common eye color.”

His lips formed a straight line. “Maybe outside. Amity Park is different, though. I had a patient eight—maybe nine—years ago. He moved here from Vermont. His eyes were brown too, the first time he came in for an appointment. I saw him a year after that, and his eyes had faded to hazel green.”

“And this was an adult?”

He nodded. “The strangest part was that he didn’t remember. Insisted his eyes had always been hazel green. Spooked out all of us.”

“I just moved here a few months ago,” she admitted, a little shaken. “That won’t happen to me, will it?”

The optometrist shrugged. “Stranger things have happened in Amity Park.”

His phone went off and he fumbled for it, swearing.

“I’m sorry, I have to take this.”

He ran out of the waiting room, giving Eva far more than she would like to think about.

—

On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Eva’s uncle let her drive them both to the DMV. They got breakfast on the way there, sharing fast food breakfast sandwiches in the parking lot.

When it came to the actual driving test, she passed with flying colors. She adjusted her mirrors and her seat, buckled up, drove a circle around the DMV, checked her blind spot before she merged lanes, and showed the instructor she could parallel park.

When she went inside to officialize her license—her actual, full-fledged driver’s license!—the woman at the counter confirmed all her information. She’d gained an inch in the past half-year and she insisted she was still the same weight, even though she was a good five pounds heavier. Although, what confused her was her eye color.

She frowned at the “BRN” stamped on her permit.

“My eyes are green, though.”

The woman at the counter hummed. “Must be an error. I’ll change it.”

“Hm. Yeah,” Eva eyed her photo from her learner’s permit on the counter, bright green eyes and all, “don’t know how I didn’t notice it before.”

[tazwren]

My two cents on the devolution of fandom spaces...

As a former mod of a fandom space and a woman of colour, I do not feel safe.

Seeing what has been done to so many in this fandom, by a particular group of white American women, in the name of moral policing is both abhorrent and demoralising. As it also is to repeatedly see the same narrative being shoved at everyone as the gospel truth.

A narrative that very conveniently either becomes about fic or has nothing to do with fic, depending on how people want to swing things. A narrative that will accuse a person of Jewish heritage of anti-Semitism, a person of colour of racism, a practising Muslim of being an Islamaphobe. A narrative that will define for you and me and all of us comprising this myriad of multitudes in the world what generational or personal trauma includes and what induces the same.

Those of you who know me, know what I’ve been dealing with the past few days & why I haven’t spoken up before now. Before I logged out a couple days ago, I saw what looked like more of the usual nonsense by the same group of people I’ve kept my distance from once their true colours were revealed. What I didn’t expect is that they would think themselves so above the norms of human decency and accountability that they would go after not one but two women of colour this time around in their rabidity. And many others who spoke up, as it turns out.

It hurts to see what these women, that I know of, have had to endure and to see the passivity of the community, save for a few voices, in sitting back and letting the circus rampage through town. It hurt when I was at the receiving end of it and it hurts now.

Why? Because it shows me a microcosm of the world that I don’t really relate to, that makes no sense to me with the values I was brought up with, and which reduces basic human decency to a commodity to be trampled upon and for you to be seen as weak for having. Because people who willingly laud you for your art / writing / wit, meet you with effusive claims of love and affection and friendship, who have no qualms in taking your help when it suits them, will throw you under the bus and let the wolves ravage you when it doesn't.

Before I get into that, let me talk a little bit about what has transpired over the past few days to a week, and what has been systemically taking place over perhaps the past year in this fandom.

One thing is that everyone who makes a statement about anything suddenly has people in their mentions demanding they show what gives them the right to hold that particular opinion. A critical thing people forget about fandom is that it is a place where people hide their identity for a variety of reasons, all valid, and this approach to fiction and conversations where everyone has to reveal every part of their past and identity as a means of establishing their "credentials" in order to present their views comes in direct contradiction with how fandoms operate. It violates people's rights to privacy.

The other is that there has been an increase in the voices that purportedly stand up to “speak for” the marginalised, the abused, those discriminated against and those who belong to minorities who “need to be protected / kept safe”. An admirable sentiment, to be sure. If it weren’t for the fact that none of these groups of people needed saving, speaking for or the protection of this particular group of voices.

Voices who only want to define and use these people as "model victims" to hurt other white women and establish their supremacy over both them and other POC. Voices that will present their "truth" as they see fit and sans context or present you with screenshots of snippets of conversations held in supposedly secure spaces that they have no qualms in violating in the interest of the "greater good" and claim offense / silencing if the misdemeanour is pointed out or action is taken against them, Voices that will conveniently categorize you as a "token POC" or "white adjacent" when you do not support or align with their narrative. Voices that belong to a predominantly white American group of women, whose real agenda, as is evidenced by their modus operandi, has nothing to do with real altruism or a drive for justice or indeed to right wrongs.

No, their agenda is purely power.

To hold sway over groups of followers, to shepherd them as though they are sheep who cannot think for themselves, and to set themselves up as white saviours who call out those who step out of line, or are deemed to be problematic and toxic and unsafe. To be the owners of the only "safe spaces" in fandom and to drive other groups and spaces to be boycotted or worse.

Now, I've long wondered, who indeed are these women to decide that for anyone? In a world comprising multiple cultures, religions, groups, subgroups, genders and which contains multitudes, who are these women and what gives them the right to foist their puritanical standards on everyone, very conveniently disguised as concern for the moral well being of everyone and the consumption, of all things, of fiction?

Certainly, there are many things in this world that people regard with justifiably equal dislike / horror / sadness. At the same time, there is much that is not shared, that is particular to a culture and to a person’s background. There is a multitude of perspectives that make the whole. And the white women of the United States of America have not cornered the market on what those are, or indeed even own any curatorship or censorship of the same. They cannot, because each person’s culture and background and joy and trauma is their own, as are their ways of dealing with it all.

That being said, let’s talk about their pack behaviour and the devolution I’ve witnessed on social media as basic human decency is bartered for clout.

I’m all for standing up for someone who doesn’t have a voice or a platform, or maybe afraid of repercussions to voice dissent. I’m all for being there for our fellow human beings as they face struggles of often unconscionable and unfathomable proportions. I’m all for holding people accountable for their negative behaviours as they impact the larger community.

What I am unequivocally NOT for is treating such situations as an opportunity to preach, to virtue-signal, to shame and to put on blast the alleged wrong-doers. I say alleged because that’s what most accusations are on these platforms—allegations to do with things that disturb our sense of balance or make us wrinkle our noses or that we deem bad, and therefore make the accused deserving of the full force of the community’s misbehaviour and censure.

I ask you if you were found guilty of a crime in real life—you know, the one away from your phones and keyboards—would you not have an opportunity to retain a lawyer, to plead your case in a court of law, to acquit yourself? Or, if found guilty, would you not have the opportunity for correction and rehabilitation? Yes, you say? (If you say no, then that explains the spate of state-perpetuated injustices across the USA, but that is a different matter).

Why then are people treated so abhorrently in this court of public opinion? What gives you, me, any one of us the right to judge people so vilely and with a metaphorical gun to their heads? What gives anyone the right to say you better agree with everything I say, retract everything you said and grovel for it or we will eviscerate you in public, shame you, force you to change or delete the content that offends us and still ostracise you and in some cases even threaten you with bodily harm or death, or doxx you?

Why is there no grace in how people are approached or dealt with? Whatever happened to allowing people to learn from their mistakes, where applicable, or hearing them out and giving them a chance to explain their side of something we may not fully understand?

Why is there no accountability for such behaviour on the part of the accusers?

What makes the rest of you sit back and allow this to happen? What makes you think this is in any shape or form okay to watch? Today, it is a virtual stranger at the receiving end, one you can distance yourself from quite conveniently saying Oh, she just mods a group I am in, or I only read their fics a couple times or I only followed them for their art or jokes or whatever flavour of excuse you choose. Tomorrow, it will be one of your own - or it may very well be you. And you'd better hope there's someone left to speak up for you.

The irony is you will have allowed it to happen by letting the wolf in the fold. By letting these white women manipulate you, and the community you claim to be a part of, so unapologetically, so maliciously and so unashamedly that before you can do anything about it the cancer has taken hold.

If this was happening in the world outside of social media, they would have to follow due process, to present real evidence based on facts (not based on emotions, rumours or perceptions) and would have to allow the person they are accusing to present a counter-argument, to defend themselves or be defended. Failure to do so is a miscarriage of justice and, depending on whether this is a professional or legal proceeding, they would either seriously risk their jobs or have the case thrown out of court. If not face action themselves for attempting to derail the process of justice.

Why then are they permitted to range so freely through the landscape of fandom, snarling and biting at who they please, or who displeases them?

I have no shame in saying I was at the receiving end of their behaviour for defending a friend they put on blast and I will tell you right here and now, I am a woman of colour who feels unsafe and attacked by these so-called self-appointed white saviours of your social media experience, these so-called upholders of the common morality—whatever that means—who will fight for you the evils of problematic and toxic writers who dare to have an opinion not aligned with theirs and who do not bow to their clout. Not that they care, so long as they can ignore this fact since it doesn’t fit their narrative. So long as they can ignore what has just been done to so many people in the name of cleansing the fandom.

If any one of these women were truly interested in alleviating the troubles and pains of the discriminated, the marginalized, the trauma-affected, I invite them to please come roll their sleeves up and help in the multitudes of troubles that wrack this world, not just in the backyards of their minds. My country is amidst a struggle for the basics of human life in this horrific pandemic and, prior to that, for basic constitutional rights for religious minorities. Do not patronize me and lecture me on trauma and racism and discrimination. Do not marginalise me in your attempt to pontificate and set your pearl-clutching puritanical selves above the rest, or assuage your white guilt.

A largely American audience or fanbase in this fandom is purely a function of access and interest—other cultures have vast followings for things you couldn't begin to fathom—and it doesn't mean you are entitled in any shape or form to be spokespeople for the rest of the world. We have no interest in being colonized again by white oppressors.

If you disagree with what I have said, I congratulate you on being a part of their coterie and wish you much joy in being the sheep in their fold. Kindly unfollow or block me on the way off of this post.

[avaritia-apotheosis]

Phantom Children Ch.4

In Which: exposition for exposition's sake exists, and Vlad looks way more suspcious than he ought

| AO3 | Prologue | 3 | [4] | 5

VLADIMIR MASTERS. Human male in his mid-forties, and most notably the founder and CEO of VladCo, a billion-dollar industry that mostly specializes in manufacturing weapons and technology. Graduated summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin despite having to drop out due to a lab accident in his second year, landing him in the hospital. Despite being based primarily in Wisconsin, he made an unexpected move to Amity Park Illinois shortly after reuniting with his college friends Drs. Madeline and Jack Fenton.

Not even a year later, Masters ran for mayor of Amity Park and won the election by a landslide. Suspicious, considering Masters being an unknown and the former mayor Montez being quite popular. It’s during Masters’ tenure in office that reports of ghost attacks to the Justice League steadily died down.

“Why?” Damian asked.

Barbara shrugged, pulling up a few files on the screen. “I originally had a theory that related to VladCo’s buyout of Axion Labs—a technological research and manufacturing company that’s mostly local to Amity—being a factor. Within the last couple of years, they had been experimenting with highly volatile chemicals with hallucinogenic properties. Amity had always been known for being extremely superstitious with its ghosts, and if Axion Labs had somehow accidentally released that chemical into the city, well…” She leaned back into her chair, hand twisting in the air. “You could bet how that ended up. The hysteria around ghosts only grew worse in the last two years, with suspected sightings from once every few weeks to multiple in a single day. Early attempts to capture sightings were unsuccessful, and soon enough Amity Park was just written off.”

Much like the mass hysteria surrounding the urban legend of the kuchisake-onna in Japan in the late 1970s, Bruce thought. He pulled up some news footage from Amity Park dated a few years back of citizens being interviewed about their ghostly encounters. Beside these videos were a few photos taken by a shaky camera, showing bright blurs of light streaking across the sky or vaguely humanoid shapes rising from the ground.

“So VladCo., bought out Axion Labs, improved its security, and slowly helped detoxify the town?” Damian shifted his weight onto his other leg and crossed his arms.

“That’s what I thought, but—”

“But the ghosts ended up being real.” Bruce pulled up a video of a field reporter-slash-weatherman taking cover as a figure dropped from the sky, breaking through the walls of a building. The figure—features distorted by an eerie glow—shot out of the rubble just in time before a green blast hit it.

Oracle enlarged other news footage with a few taps on her keyboard. Beings zooming through the air. Massive plants erupting from the ground. Technology coming to life. Each video more worrying than the last, and most showing some footage of a figure bathed in a white glow. “I’d be hard pressed to call any of these faked.”

It begged the question as to how Amity Park survived this long unscathed. Since, if he remembered correctly, even the Dark Leaguers tended to avoid Amity Park like the plague. “They have their own heroes, then?”

“Think along the lines of vigilantes with unofficial support.” A few more files popped up on screen. One showcased a female in a full-length black and red body suit on top of a hover board. The other was a male; young, perhaps a teenager, with white hair and a black and white suit. Hazmat? “The Red Huntress and the Phantom of Amity Park.”

“Partners?”

“More like enemies working on the same turf. Sources place Phantom as appearing first, though it seems Red Huntress has more government support in the end despite there being no official statement. They seem to be the most effective ghost hunters in town, though far from the only ones. The Fentons of Fenton Works are also acting as ghost hunters, though their track record of success leans more towards their anti-ghost tech than any hunting. The town’s even attracted visitors from the Ghost Investigation Ward; a side branch of Cadmus though a now defunct organization.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Damian said. “If anything, this should be more than enough reason for a League intervention. Why the Justice League didn’t come sooner is the real question here.”

Bruce’s lips thinned. “That’s because we were warned off it.”

“What?”

While there was no rule against heroes entering another hero’s city, there were certain unspoken rules that demanded that JL members avoid claimed cities or stay just outside of city lines until given permission to enter. Some were especially strict about it such as Batman’s ‘no metas or outsiders’ rule. Others were more lenient, simply requesting a warning before entering.

Amity Park, despite having no listed heroes in the database, was marked with heavy ‘Do Not Interact’ warnings for humans and metas alike.

“Justice League Dark said that under no circumstances should the League interfere in Amity. The situation was never explicitly laid out for us except to say that everything was being handled.”

“Oh yeah,” Oracle chimed. “Constantine even had it bolded, underlined, italicized, and in all caps. The occult community was very clear about everyone staying away—and apparently this decision had support from Amity Park too.” She pulled up another document. “That’s probably what led to the decline in their ghost reports, actually. Amity’s claims were considered bogus and brushed aside. No one outside their town—not even their sister town of Elmerton—believed them, so they simply stopped asking for help.”

Strangely, it reminded Bruce of Gotham. Both cities existed in its own isolated sphere, unwilling to let any outsiders interfere in its business.

“It’s safe to assume, then, that whatever Ra’s al Ghul wants with Amity, it has to do with these ghosts. Do we have anyway to contact the town’s vigilantes?”

Oracle shook her head. “Ghost attacks within the past few months have slowly died down along with sightings of Phantom and Red Huntress. Your best bet is asking Masters directly.”

Damian glowered. “Masters blatantly sent out an invitation for Batman to my father. How do we know that Masters hasn’t somehow found our secret identities?”

“Unlikely,” Bruce said. “Vlad Masters, despite his wealth, has done well to keep a low profile. He’s met Bruce Wayne a total of three times within the last decade and Batman not at all.” That, and with the kind of spyware Batman has, he’d be able to tell when, where, and who was trying to dig deep into Batman’s past. Masters hadn’t even registered as a ping.

“Besides, there’s always a few rumors of Wayne Enterprise’s involvement with Batman. All this tech has to come from somewhere, no?”

“How long is Masters staying in Gotham?”

“Umm…” Oracle leaned forward in her chain and flipped through a half-dozen windows. “Going by his reservations at the Gotham Royal Hotel, he’s leaving tomorrow.”

Bruce pivoted on his heel, heading deeper into the Cave. “We better make this count, then.”

------

According to Oracle’s intel, Vlad Masters was staying at one of the executive suites in the Gotham Royal Hotel. A titanic structure with forty-eight floors, two towers, and the gothic aesthetic that never seemed to leave Gotham’s architecture.

Scaling the building as well as entering the suite proved no challenge for Batman and Robin. But upon entrance, it was abundantly clear that the room was vacant.

“Are you sure you guys are in the right room?” Bruce could hear the clicking of Oracle’s keys through their comms. “Masters had reserved the suite on the west tower.”

“Yes we’re in the correct room, Gordon,” Robin hissed.

“Codenames only, Robin.”

Robin clicked his tongue, sweeping the common room for any hidden bugs or cameras as Batman scouted out the rest of the room. The bed was made to hotel standard and the bathroom towels all completely replaced. There were no clothes in the hotel closet or dresser.

The only thing left that indicated occupancy of the room was an unmarked manila envelope unsubtly tucked within a pillowcase.

Robin tensed at the sight of it. “A detonator of some sort?”

Batman rotated the package, holding it up to his scanner. “Doesn’t seem to be. Regardless, it might be better to take it back to the Batcave and locate Masters ag—” The envelope started ringing. A standard ringtone found in most phones. Quickly, but carefully, Batman opened the manila envelope and dumped its contents onto the bed. A ringing burner phone and a flash drive came tumbling out.

Batman threw the flash drive at Robin before answering the phone, holding it up against his ear but saying nothing.

Silence. Then, Masters’ voice filtered in through the phone with a strange echo-like quality. “Good evening, Batman! I’m so glad my invitation managed to get passed along.”

Batman growled into the speaker, “What do you want, Masters?” He signaled Robin to do another sweep of the room for any signs of Masters they might have missed.

“I sincerely apologize for not being there to meet you myself; incredibly rude of me, I know. But it cannot be helped, the shadows are growing ever bolder.”

“So, you are aware then, of the League of Assassins’ presence in Amity Park?”

“A league of assassins? What a terrifying notion that is.” Batman frowned. It was unlikely that they had misread his words at the gala, so why was he acting unaware now? Could he be watched? “Why such a group would appear in my little town, I wouldn’t even dare to guess.”

Robin came back into the room and signaled back ‘negative.’

“Why did you call for us, Mayor Masters?”

“Do you know what is so very tragic, Batman?”

“This is strange,” Oracle said. “I can’t pick up his signal. He’s not appearing on any of my cameras, either.”

“When someone so young dies much to soon.” A pause. “Could you even imagine such a thing? A parent burying their own child.”

Batman could. He had no need to even imagine it because he lived it.

“Some very close friends of mine have been weighed down by the shadows of death and I require help in providing them the closure they need.”

“Are the Fentons the targets, then?”

Masters paused. Then let out a breathy laugh over the phone. “Oh, if only it were that simple.”

“So a different target.”

“Everything you need to know is in the flash drive I’ve enclosed in that envelope Whether you take up the case is entirely up to you—though I do hope you take it. Regardless, if he is not returned soon then I assure you that a disaster unlike any you have seen before will arrive.”

Batman narrowed his eyes. “Is that a threat, Masters?”

“No,” He laughed. “That was no threat. That was promise.”

The phone line disconnected just as Oracle exclaimed that she finally found Masters boarding his flight back to Amity Pak.

[kinglazrus]

Not Your Danny – Ch 6. Obsessions

Previous | First | Next | FFN | AO3

Word count: 3109

Eventually, Dani has to go back to Fenton Works. She stays with Sam and Tucker at the mall for a few hours, enjoying their company; but, as the afternoon wanes and evening draws near, their hangout time comes to an end.

"I can't believe my parents are making me stick to a curfew. I'm eighteen. I didn't have a curfew a month ago," Sam says when she notices the time.

"A month ago, they didn't know you part-time as a ghost hunter. I can't believe they made your curfew eight," Tucker says.

They manage to hit a couple more stores before Sam has to go, and even swing by the food court again to grab some food-to-go. By the time Dani goes home, she has four bags of new clothes plus a box of pizza all to herself.

"Here." Tucker leans across the passenger seat and holds something out to Dani.

When she takes it, shuffling the shopping bags around her arms so she has a free hand, she notices that it's a cellphone. Basic, with a touch screen.

"It's pre-paid. I have a bunch, so don't worry about it. Mine and Sam's numbers are on there, so you can text us if you want to hang out again."

Dani clutches the phone to her chest. "Thank you."

"No problem."

Dani waits until Tucker has pulled away before turning toward the house. It's hard to tell with the curtains drawn, and the harsh glow of the Fenton Works sign splashed across the building, but it looks as if the lights are off inside. A quick scan of the street shows that Jazz's car is gone, although she could have parked around back, or by the garage instead. Dani heads up to the front door and tries the knob. It doesn't budge.

Rather than trying the doorbell or knocking, she goes intangible and walks right through the door. Inside, the lights are off, just as she suspected. She doesn’t bother turning them on. With her enhanced vision, she can see perfectly well in the dark, albeit in dark, muted shades.

In the kitchen, she finds a note from Jazz: Mom and Dad out testing weapons. I will be at Spike's. There's food in the fridge. Dani doesn't know who Spike is.

When she peeks in the fridge, she finds a tin-foiled plate of meatloaf waiting for her, as promised. She doesn't bother with it, though, taking her pizza up to Danny's room instead. The house without the Fentons there feels... pretty much the same. Without the ambient noise of Jazz's typing or Jack's distant footsteps, the house is far quieter than Dani has ever heard it. Even at night, Maddie's chainsaw snores—which surprises Dani more than it annoys her—keep the house from falling completely silent.

Now, there's nothing but Dani's soft breathing.

It's quiet, and yet, the house feels no less empty than it always does.

She deposits the shopping bags at the foot of Danny's bed and takes her pizza to his desk. Since arriving, she has cleared away enough clutter that the box can fit, although it's a tight squeeze. One side of the box rests on top of the keyboard. She looks between the greasy cardboard and the keys, wondering if it might wreck them. There shouldn't be enough grease that it will leak through, but she decides not to risk it.

Dani lifts the box and shoves the keyboard aside. It smacks into the base of the Challenger's display case, sending it toppling over the edge of the desk.

"No!" Dani throws herself out of the chair, reaching for the model. Her fingers skim the glass but miss. Blind panic fills her and something in her chest bursts. A bright glow launches from her palms and surrounds the case.

The model jerks to a stop a mere inch from the floor.

Dani's heart hammers in her chest. The horrible realization of what would have happened if she missed drains the blood from her face. Careful not to make any sudden moves, she pushes herself onto her knees, arms still outstretched. A thin thread connects the light surrounding her palm and the display case. It tugs on her, like a sixth finger, each movement sending an unfamiliar ripple up her arm.

Telekinesis is not a rare ability among ghosts. A common power, like intangibility, invisibility, and flight, more than half of all spectral entities have some form of it. But unlike those first powers, telekinesis can rely heavily on a ghost's power level and general skill. Where one ghost may struggle to move a toothpick, another can uproot a whole tree with nothing more than a thought.

Dani, until this moment, could not use it at all.

When she flexes her fingers, the model drifts toward her. The moment she has it in hand, the light disappears, and the model's weight hits her. Heavier than expected, enough that her arms bow under its sudden presence. She holds the model in a tight embrace as she rises to her feet. With her elbow, she pushes the keyboard out of the way to clear space and returns the display case to the desk.

After a moment's consideration, Dani nudges the model closer to the middle of the desk. Even if it makes things tighter, she doesn't want that to happen again

She returns to the chair, but rather than eating her pizza, her focus stays on the model. It looks undamaged inside the case, still fixed to its wooden base. At a glance, it seems sturdy enough that it could hold up to a bit of knocking around. A hard smash to the floor would probably do it in, though. The thought makes her stomach twist.

With most of Danny's things, their importance still eludes her. Now that she has her own clothes, and a phone, it's starting to dawn on her why people like things. It's nice, to speak frankly. Being able to have something, to keep it somewhere and return to it, is a nice feeling. But then there are feelings attached to the items, too.

Jack said this model was Danny's favourite. Dani has no way of knowing if she is right about why it was his favourite. It was only a guess based on what she knew of her cousin, what he thought of his parents. Danny didn't smile a lot when it came to them, at least not as far as Dani saw. Maddie and Jack rarely came up during cousin bonding time unless they came after Dani and Danny while they were hanging out. But, sometimes, Danny would smile so bright at the mention of his parents.

If he had done well on a test and they congratulated him. If they took him to the planetarium. If they went stargazing recently. None of these things happened often, but when they did, and Danny told her about them, his smile would be so bright Dani found it hard to look at.

Thinking about her new clothes, Dani wonders if the smile she can feel on her face is just as bright as Danny's had been.

"I'm sorry I lost the music player you got me," she says to the Challenger. "I didn't realize how important it could have been." She shrugged it off at the time. Even now, what little guilt she feels over it stems from losing something that could have been dear to her rather than something that wasdear.

How many things has she lost that could have been important? She already knows the answer: far too many.

—

Jazz was distracted during the funeral. She tried to hide it, but Jack knew his daughter all too well. As she gave her final goodbyes to Danny, she kept wiping her eyes and looking over the crowd, her gaze searching. Jack looked over his own shoulder a few times, trying to see what Jazz was searching for. He couldn’t find it, obviously.

There weren't many people in the crowd. Immediate family; Sam and Tucker, plus their parents; Valerie came, as well, along with Casper High's vice-principal. Jack had no other family to speak of besides his wife and children—now child. And the only relative still in contact with Maddie, her sister, could not make it in time. Jack understood although it hurt.

Over the past few months, Danny had grown closer with his aunt. Jack wasn't sure when it happened, and it took him a while to catch on. Maddie and Alicia spoke on the phone at least twice a month since Alicia didn't have a cellphone or internet. It was standard practice for Maddie to drag one of the kids into the conversation to say hi. Jazz always went willingly. Danny usually complained.

However, at some point, his complaints stopped. If Danny caught Maddie on the phone, he would eagerly jump into the conversation. He even started shooing out whoever was in the room. Jack blamed it on teenage antics. It wasn't until Jack caught the tail end of one of their conversations that he realized something had changed.

Danny sat at the kitchen table, phone to his ear. When Jack entered, he sat up straighter.

"I'll try and bring it up next time I see her. Not sure when that will be, but her birthday's coming up." Danny paused as the person on the other end replied, then nodded. "Cool. Bye Auntie Alicia, love you."

"Alicia? Don't you think your mother would have liked to say goodbye before you hung up?" Jack asked.

Danny set the phone down on the table. "That'd be weird since Mom didn't call her. Is she even home right now?"

Now that Jack thought about it, no, she wasn't. Maddie went to the store nearly an hour ago to buy cookie fixings. "Good point!" Now that Jack was paying attention, he saw the phone on the table was Danny's cell and not the house phone. "Was she leaving you a message for Maddie?"

"No, I called her."

"Plans for your mom's birthday next month?"

"Nope." Danny stood up and pocketed his phone. "I'm going to Sam's. See you later."

Jack paid more attention after that. There were other phone calls, always the same, where Danny would find somewhere private to talk. Sometimes he clammed up when Jack walked in and quickly ended the conversation. Once, Jack thought he caught Danny crying. It was late. Jack himself had only gotten home a little while ago thanks to a particularly nasty ghost attack that day. For nearly twenty minutes, he and Maddie had chased the ghost boy, trying to catch him while he was down. Phantom was a damn good flyer, though, even when injured.

The first thing Jack did when he got home was check on the kids, and that's how he found Danny curled up beside his bed, his phone cradled against his ear. Every blanket in the room was pulled tight around him.

"I don't know if I can do it anymore," Danny had said. "It keeps getting harder, and today I just–" his voice cracked.

The moment that followed was quiet. Not a single sob escaped Danny, but his shoulders shook. Jack was about to step inside when Alicia's voice, strong and steady, so loud in the silence, came from the phone.

"You're gonna be okay, kiddo."

Jack didn't go inside. Maybe he should have. Danny asked several times when they would be visiting Alicia next after the phone call. Every time he asked was like a punch to the got, but Jack never spoke up. If Danny wanted to come to him, then he could. If he was more comfortable talking to Alicia about this mystery problem, that was fine too.

He'll come to me when he needs to. Jack kept telling himself that until the day Danny died.

—

Jazz hoped she might see Dani in the crowd. A small part of her whispered that maybe she had missed Dani, glanced away right as she appeared. But, considering how few people were in attendance, that seemed unlikely. Beyond that, if a halfa did not want to get seen, they would not be seen.

Which brought Jazz to another guest she expected, although did not welcome: Vlad. Her worrying proved pointless, though, when he never showed up. As the lingering crowd thinned, Danny's friends and loved ones saying their final goodbyes, Jazz searched the heads once more. No red beanie or glowing white hair, and no pompous ponytail.

At the first opportunity, Jazz pulled Sam and Tucker aside. "Have either of you seen Dani?"

"Uh... is this some kind of joke?" Tucker asked. He glanced none too subtly toward the freshly filled grave. Sam at least had more tact and waited for Jazz to elaborate.

"Dani-with-an-i."

"Oh." Tucker shook his head. "No. We've been trying to contact her, but there isn't a great way to reach her. Left some messages with some ghosts, but that doesn't help if she's not in the Ghost Zone right now."

"She isn't." Jazz checked on the whereabouts of her parents. They were nearer the grave, speaking solemnly with Angela and Maurice Foley. Most importantly, they were well out of earshot. "I saw her at Fenton Works last night, but she ran away."

"Damn." Sam lifted the black veil hanging from her hat, revealing red eyes and smudged makeup. "I hope she's okay. Did she say anything before she left?"

Jazz hesitated. Although the whole exchange only lasted a few seconds, it had yet to leave her mind, for reasons she was ashamed to admit. And yet, no matter how guilty she felt about her initial reaction to Dani, she could not forget about it.

"No," she said. "Dani saw me and bolted. She might have thought I was my mom since it was so dark."

"We'll have to keep an eye out for her. I don't if she would stay without Danny here, but it's not like she has anywhere else to go, either," Sam said.

"I will, too. I thought she might show up here, but..."

"Sammykins!" Pamela Manson called from the cemetery gate. She tapped her wrist, although she wore no watch. "There's a crowd forming, dear."

Jazz grimaced at the sight beyond the funeral gates. A small gathering of Danny Phantom fans stood on the sidewalk, some bearing signs, all dressed for mourning. It was the most inappropriate display she had ever seen. None of them had breached the cemetery, but Jazz suspected that was because of the hired security standing at the gate and not the onlooker's own sense of morality.

She dreaded what the crowd might do as soon as she and her family left.

Sam scowled. "I can't believe them. I get if they want to mourn the local hero, but this is such gross behaviour." She looked remarkably like her mother as she hissed those words, her lip curling in disgust as she glared at the onlookers.

Jazz agreed wholeheartedly.

"I'll text you as soon as my mom takes me off house arrest," Sam told Tucker. "Jazz, let us know if you see Dani again. I'll sleep a little easier knowing she's alright."

Jazz nodded and gave her guarantee.

—

Vlad has lost obsessions before. Most well-balanced ghosts have. Any experienced ghost knows to have a few central obsessions and a handful of smaller ones. Latch on to a passing interest hard enough and all it takes is a little dedication to turn that into a full-blown obsession. Then, once it becomes tedious, let it go and move on to something else.

There have been some obsessions that he lost against his will. He once had a bonsai tree, a nice juniper, that he loved dearly. It went up in flames with his Wisconsin mansion the first time Danny destroyed his home. Vlad felt the loss like a bitter sting. At the same time, his determination to capture Danny for himself only grew, overwhelming painful prickle. Every slight against him only fuelled his desire more. Never had he fought so hard for something without immediate success. It made the game that much more fun.

And it was a game. Danny learned fast, but there was so much he didn't know, couldn't do. It was so easy to toy with him, egg him on, guide him to new abilities. The potential within him was limitless. Vlad could have overwhelmed Danny in seconds but there's no fun in that.

Perhaps that's why it was so easy for his other obsessions to slip away without him noticing.

He drifts through the halls of his mansion, familiar yet alien at the same time. On the landing, he drags his hand along the bannister, dust gathering against his fingers. His limb flickers, wispy blue, jumping sporadically in and out of intangibility. He designed the balustrades himself, inspired by the first twisted haunts he discovered within the Ghost Zone.

The wood cracks and splinters as his fingers solidify while passing through.

Before him, the front hall looms. Vast, open, a point of pride in every mansion he has owned. Better to impress the guests with a grand display upon entry. Now he finds it suffocating. All his hours of work, his obsessions wasted. Where simply looking upon his walls once filled him with pride, now they sicken him.

There is nothing for him here.

He went to such desperate lengths. Threats, bribery, manipulation, cloning. Nothing ever worked. Each new failure cut him deeper, made him more desperate, more eager. No. No, that wasn't right. He was subtle, clever, controlling an oblivious pawn in a cruel game. The winner, the mastermind. The cloak, not the dagger. The cat, not the mouse. But still always losing. Surely something he had to work this hard for, harder than anything in his life, had to be worth it.

And then, in an instant, in the span of an ectoblast, his obsession died.

"Maddie." Vlad moans, voice breaking. "Maddie. Maddie. Maddie." His please reach no one who cares. All his attempts to reach out, reforge that connection they once had, have been rebuffed.

"Maddie." Once, not so long ago, the sound of her name alone was enough to light his core ablaze.

But when, when, when, how, somewhere along the way that warmth died.

"Madeline, I need you." Please, please. Don't leave me to this. Don't go.

The cold wind whips against him, not unusual for an October day, but it startles him, nonetheless. He hunches halfway down the drive, the empty halls of his mansion long behind. He could return home, but... no. Home won't help him now.

Previous | Next

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[wefixtech17-blog]

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[fordarkisthesuede]

The Tolls of Justice - Chapter 1

Thank you for all your kind words so far!!! （*’∀’人）♥ I'm slowly reading that nice pile of new TT works you all made! ♥♥♥ 

(And I’m sorry for the delay,

Important Spoiler Tags:  more talk of dead bodies, blood mention, mental illness

{Prologue} {Next Chapter}

Read on AO3 or continue below:

[Chapter 1:  A Different Ceiling]

John Doe stared wide-eyed up at the whitewashed ceiling, feeling his breath catch in his chest and release too fast. He could practically hear his heart thudding in his ears like the world’s worst wake-up call.

Where am I? He asked himself.

He turned his head as he tried to breathe slowly. Dull light streamed in through the thin chicken-wire over the window - a standard of mornings in Gotham. There was flat blue paint on the walls, a familiar photograph sitting on a nightstand, a clock (oh, it was 7:20, that was helpful) and a phone there that he wasn’t technically supposed to have.

He snatched the phone off the surface and swiped up, barely paying attention to the illuminated rollercoaster that was his lock-screen. A selfie of himself and Bruce Wayne greeted him, only partially obscured by a couple of icons. He’d taken the picture three days ago, during their last visit; he could see the phone’s little timestamp in the corner, underneath the clock. He took a deep breath and focused on Bruce’s face.

Bruce had worn that really good cologne that day. He could smell it lingering on his own shirt for hours afterward, bringing to mind memories of his short stay at Bruce’s house.

He felt his panic start ebbing away. He wasn’t in Arkham Asylum anymore. He wasn’t in the Old Five Points, either, or the abandoned Funhouse, or Ace Chemicals. He wasn’t dreaming or being delusional or…

John pinched himself and winced slightly at the sharp sting it made in his wrist. Nope, he wasn’t under any kind of drug-based hallucination, either. Just like the day before that, and the week before that, and the fortnight before that.

But his subconscious apparently hadn’t caught up with reality just yet. He kept dreaming of everything else. Everything that could have gone wrong, or everything that did go wrong, but amplified by twenty.

Things should be different now. They were different now. Bruce was fine. John was….well, here.

The halfway house he was in was one of the better ones in the city. It wasn’t the best, of course, considering John’s past...difficulties, but it was better than where he’d ended up last time. There weren’t any bars on his window, his room actually had some color in it that wasn’t just a stain, and the only rat he’d seen so far was outside of the building.

His thumb hovered over the messenger icon on the screen, and he looked at the little digital clock in the corner. Was it too early? Bruce had been on patrol, and he’d already bugged him after one nightmare.

But it was a different one. He’d only dived over the railing towards that bubbling vat of chemical waste before. He’d had that dream before, always feeling like he’d fallen onto his back on the mattress afterward; he was almost used to that one.

This time he’d been covered in blood. He could only see the Funhouse floor, the countless bodies there, forming a grotesque ring around him, staring at him with unblinking dull expressions...

John rubbed his forehead. He really didn’t want to think about it anymore. He wanted a distraction and comfort and Bruce’s soothing voice in his ear.

His phone buzzed in his hand, and the first line from Bruce’s text dropped down from the top of the screen.

John hit it like lightning and let his brain simulate Bruce’s voice.

I’m close by. Can I come see you before work?

Bruce was heaven-sent, surely. A gift from a god of some sort. An absolute treasure John didn’t deserve to even look at.

He hovered over the keyboard. Should he wait a minute? Should he just say yes with all the exclamation points he felt in his heart?

No, no - Bruce might want to see him to get comfort of his own. Which meant he needed to loosen up a little.

Ha ha, I knew you couldn’t resist me ;)

John waited a moment, his brain buzzing that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to joke with a man that might have stayed up all night again… Maybe he should amend it with a ‘j/k’?

What can I say, your raw animal magnetism has a tendency draws in bats.

John laughed to himself.               

Ha ha ha! I bet I can amp up the magnetic power to get you here *faster*!

No need. I’ll be there in 5 mins.

…you’re that close already?

How’d you know I’d say yes?

I had a feeling you would.

Plus this is important.

Important. So, a nine-out-of-ten chance it was about Bruce’s stakeout last night. John pushed aside the budding worry that something had gone horribly wrong - Bruce was talking to him. If he wasn’t fine (or at least Bruce’s definition of it, which was ‘alive and secretly hurting somehow’), he wouldn’t be speaking to him.

Unless someone had found out about his secret identity, knocked him out (or worse), stole his phone, discovered where John was staying, and was coming to kill him and taunting him about it by masquerading as Bruce...

...but that was a preeetty low chance.

Ok. Drive carefully, there’s a bunch of lunatics out there.

And I would know! Ha ha ha!!

I’m always careful.

I’ll see you soon.

Ten minutes, five minutes - hell, John could be ready to see Bruce in one minute. He threw on the closest things from the drawer, smoothed his hair back, and paced over the tiles a little, darting his eyes out the window towards the mediocre parking lot. It was funny how different it looked compared to Arkham. He still sometimes felt like he’d wound up in a different wing of it rather than a whole new place...

He blinked, remembering that St. Dymphna New Life Home had a somewhat different set of rules and that he could leave his room. And unlike Arkham, he didn’t have to ask or do someone a favor or play innocent. (Most of the time, anyway…)

He was already out in the hall, feeling like he should rush even though he knew he didn’t have to, passing other rooms, other snoozing patrons, turning a corner, and smacking right into Mickey.

Mickey Williamson had a serious case of ‘resting bitch face’. Well, that coupled with paranoia and aggressive issues.

“You trying to start somethin’, clown?” Mickey grunted, staring down at John.

From anyone else, it would’ve been a threat, but John had helped Batman take down Bane; this guy was a limp noodle in comparison. Still, picking a fight - even a verbal one - wasn’t a good idea. Neither was shrugging it off. “Only part one of my plan to brighten your day,” he joked. “I know you don’t like loud noises. How else am I going to get your attention?”

Mickey gave a short hmph, clearly satisfied. “...what’s the plan?”

He definitely wouldn’t buy that it was a secret. “A joke! Why are lawyers buried ten feet underground?”

Mickey looked up at the ceiling for a brief moment. It was hard to tell if he was rolling his eyes or thinking about it. “Okay, why?”

“Because deep down, they’re not that bad!”

Mickey gave a short, boisterous laugh that was definitely genuine-sounding, despite the smile slipping off his face shortly after. “Okay, that was much better than the one about the rotisserie chicken you told Chuck yesterday.”

“Yeah, I guess when there’s more than one meat that cooks like that it kinda takes away the punch…”

He crossed his arms. “So what’s part two of ‘plan’ of yours?”

“What, and ruin the mild surprise? Mickey, how long have we known each other?”

“Four weeks.”

“Exactly! And have I ever done you wrong in all that time?”

His jaw shifted slightly. “That green sauce you told me to use the other day made everything too spicy.”

“Okay, honest mistake on my part, I didn’t think you’d use that much… But that aside?”

“...no,” he admitted with a slight shrug.

“Mm-hm! So trust me - it’ll put a smile on your face!” John emphasized with a click of his fingers towards his bulky neighbor and a grin of his own as he slunk away. “Probably,” he muttered to himself, completely unsure of what he would do next. Mickey might not have been as scary as Bane, but John was constantly trying to be on his best behavior, so getting on Mickey’s good side - along with everyone else’s - was for the best.

John glanced briefly the camera in the corner of the open stairwell, seeing it still pointed down the hall. He knew from the angle and shape of the lens that the corner of the stairs was a safe place to talk if Bruce didn’t want his lips recorded.

The thought made him giggle a little to himself. It took two flights of stairs to get down to the welcome area, where’d he’d no doubt have to wait as Bruce signed more pointless pieces of paper and -

And there he was. Bruce Wayne, standing there, signing away another visitor’s form and chatting up the easily-charmed nurse for the sake of his public image.

He was radiant, even under the fluorescent lights. A gorgeous demigod - no, a hero, a warrior of the highest class, out to mingle amongst the common criminals without his armor. John felt like the atmosphere had shifted and grown warm, and there was something about the way Bruce’s flirtatious smile wasn’t reaching his eyes that made John’s stomach feel all light.

The real smiles were all his. His, his, his.

He knew he had to wait until Bruce passed through the little security check, but for what felt like for the hundredth time he just wanted to walk over it and ignore everything that stood in the way of them. His fingers itched to touch Bruce, grab his hand, his wrist, anything, and he couldn’t. He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels, waiting, waiting, and smiling wider as Bruce caught his eye.

It didn’t matter how small the little smile back on Bruce’s face was, it was genuine. It made John chuckle:  that silly girl at the front desk thought she had half a chance with Bruce? Ha!

John barely heard the guard talking about how they should go to the visiting room a-s-a-p. He knew the rules - visits were a maximum of sixty minutes, they had to be conducted in the visiting room unless a doctor signed off otherwise, and if a therapy session, work, or a meeting with the social worker was scheduled John would have to go to that no matter what.

Blah, blah, blah. There was no rule on how long they could take to walk to the visiting room. And John was willing to bend and break rules into tiny pieces for Bruce any day.

“Hey, John.”

“Hey, Bruce,” he echoed back in the same tone, grinning just a little wider. “You’re earlier than I thought you’d be.”

“I drive fast,” Bruce shrugged with a small smirk. They left the guard to pretend he wasn’t listening or watching them leave in his peripheral vision. “You doing okay?”

“Is our new mayor crooked?”

“...possibly?” Bruce answered tentatively.

“Exactly!” John joked.

Bruce wasn’t keeping his eyes focused on the stairs. Cautious concern worked its way onto his face, which John felt simultaneously annoyed and relieved at it. It was amazing having him for support - every doctor he’d ever had stressed how important a good support system was - but sometimes it made John feel like he was being babied. “I’m not sure how to take that.”

“Take it any way you want! Doesn’t change the fact that I always feel better when you’re here.”

Bruce frowned slightly. “Is something wrong?”

John rolled his eyes. Bruce was toeing the line of babying. Why could he not take a good dark joke? “No, Bruce. I’m not being mistreated, I can take care of myself, and I’ve taken my meddies like a good boy.”

Bruce’s frown deepened, and he got that stern look that made John’s brain give a little burst of adrenaline. His more dominant side always made John want to challenge him...and swoon, usually at the same time. Bruce took hold of his arm, his grip firm but not entirely threatening, and pulled him discreetly underneath the camera so they wouldn’t be seen; both stood side-by-side with their backs against the wall, Bruce’s grip on his arm loosening. “You’ve texted me in the middle of the night several times this week. I know you’re not sleeping well.” His too-blue eyes searched him. “I won’t say anything if you’re not okay, John. I just want to know what’s wrong.”

John thought briefly about retorting with ‘you’, but that was so incredibly untrue that John couldn’t even try to lie with that sorry excuse. He couldn’t say he was ‘fine’, either, despite the habitual urge to. He wasn’t, Bruce knew it, and they did make that promise to be honest with each other...

“It’s just...you know, my brain, being...rude to me.” He knew that wasn’t a good enough explanation, but Bruce was giving his ‘I’m taking you seriously’ face. John always liked that expression. He didn’t see it enough on people. “I just keep having, you know,” John fumbled, rubbing the back of his neck to try and dispel some of the awkwardness, “bad dreams. I mean straight-up barbaric ones, Bruce,” he felt his lip curl in a sneer at himself, “My brain compacts all my garbage memories and twists it into something worse.”

Bruce took hold of John’s hand so smoothly it actually took him by surprise. John stared at him, wondering if he’d said something wrong. He should explain, shouldn’t he?

“I think… I’m still adjusting. Like, I know you’re here, and I’m here, but...it’s like my brain secretly doesn’t like the change and is punishing me for it,” John continued, giving a short, nervous giggle, “Which is ridiculous, because this is more than I could’ve hoped for in a lifetime!”

“Have you mentioned this to Dr. Song?”

“Umm…sort of?” John gestured with his free hand. “Sans graphic details, but, uh, yeah.”

“Is it why you’ve been texting me so late? You wake up from them?”

He didn’t quiiite want to put it like that. He didn’t want to keep thinking of those stupid dreams. “That, and I miss you,” John answered with a sly smile. Their fingers were entwined - he stroked the Bruce’s thumb with his own, feeling the old tiny scar there, slightly smoother than the rest of his warm hand.

The reaction was more of what he wanted to see right then - Bruce had that sweet longing look in his eye.

“I’m literally counting down the days, Bruce,” John purred, feeling much more confident as Bruce’s face flushed a delicate shade of pink. “I’d do anything just to kiss you right now.”

“We shouldn’t,” Bruce replied, looking like he was trying to talk himself out of doing just that.

“That’s not what you said last time,” John teased quietly with a grin, turning to lean his shoulder against the wall. The delicious aromas of expensive cologne and hair conditioner clung to Bruce’s collar, bringing to mind the more sordid details of that last visit. “In fact, I remember you pinning me to the wall and kissing me until you couldn’t breathe.” He’d give anything (any mild luxury, a whole week of visits, all the good night’s sleeps he had left) just have a room alone with him for a while. “I’ve had a hard time thinking about anything else since then.”

He could almost see the struggle between reason and desire in Bruce’s mind. He tried to hide his little shudder as John leaned in a little more; oh yes, John had him right where he wanted him. Bruce might as well have licked his lips.

“Or do you want me to do the pinning this time?” 

John considered just pulling him forward and kissing him anyway, but that would ruin their little game. He liked seeing how far he could push Bruce. He watched Bruce’s baby-blues flicker slightly between John’s eyes.

The admonishment in his voice was gentle, like the squeeze he gave John's hand. “We really shouldn’t.”

“Alll-riiight,” John said with a playful pout, “If you say so, Bruce.” He pulled away and crossed his arms, wanting something else to do with his freshly-warmed hands. “You got spooked when that door opened last time, huh?”

“It’s more like ‘I don’t want people to think you got out because of my influence’,” he retorted quietly with a slight smile.

“Well, they’re not wrong, Bruce. I wouldn’t be in here without you,” John pointed out with a shrug in the general direction of their surroundings. “But I get it. So, if you’re not here for a good ol’ round of canoodling, it must be work-related, huh?”

He looked slightly embarrassed. “I actually just wanted to see you.”

John felt his heart skip that middle beat. “Oh! I mean, when you said ‘important’, I thought… Oh, geez,” he blustered, tapping his thighs with his fingers, “You sure know how to make a guy feel special.” He brought his hands together, looking up at Bruce with his best puppy-eyed expression. “But you’ll tell me how last night went anyway, right?”

Bruce had that cute little smile perking on the corner of his mouth. “Of course.” The smile slipped away just as soon as it appeared. “Not well. The shipment coming in was sabotaged before it came into port; I found all the crew dead.”

“Uugh,” John grunted, putting his hands in his pockets. “Did you at least get B.M.’s guys?”

“No. Their van combusted not long after I boarded the ship. G.C.P.D. found three dead, the last one’s presumed missing. We think it’s a rival gang - C.S.I. was still examining the wreckage when I left.”

“Sounds like a rough night.”

“It was. I barely got a power nap in before-”

“John?”

He glanced down the stairs, towards the voice - Devi, one of the few women staying there. She’d been there for three months already, coming out of her second stay at the county clinic.

“What’re you doin’? We got work in five minutes.”

“...we do?”

“Yeah, it’s Tuesday, man. You comin’ or what?”

He didn’t want to, but he should. “If I don’t make it down there, hijack the bus to wait for me,” he joked.

Her face lit up. “Hey, an upside:  I can finally get one of Peralta’s Boston cremes in you.”

John grinned and gave a dramatic gasp. “Devi, you scoundrel, that’s dirty!”

“You’re the one makin’ it dirty, man!” Devi laughed, “I better see you down here in five, or I��m tellin’ the warden,” she teased as she turned the corner, her ponytail of tiny braids shifting as she walked.

Bruce had that calculating look. “I’m sorry, John, I didn’t know you had work today, either.”

“That’s okay, Bruce, I forgot entirely!”

Bruce looked far away, like he was thinking through something.

“Um, you okay?”

“...she didn’t question us standing here.” Bruce turned his gaze to him again. “Do you think she knows something?”

“Devi? Nahhh, she’s on the level.” Weeell… “Our level, I mean. Even if she ‘knows something’, she’s no rat.” Bruce still looked concerned, the big worry-wart. “Look, it’s fine - I’ll go get on the bus with the other crazies, go sit in a back-room sewing den where no one sees me for half the day, and text you if she tries to blackmail me so your other half can pay her a visit.”

Bruce’s little smile returned, making John want to just reach out and caress him like the treasure he was. “You don’t need an excuse to text me, John. You can do that whenever you want.” The sincerity made John’s stomach twist a little. “Just be careful. And have a good day at work.”

John wondered if everyone else in a relationship felt a little burst of joy at the simple well-wishing phrase. “Right back at ya, Brucie,” he said, nudging Bruce’s shoulder with his fist. He leaned in a little, lowering his voice just so Bruce could hear. “You know what I’ll do if anyone hurts you.”

Just as soon as Bruce got that complex look of desire-in-denial and mild alarm that John had wanted to see, John tossed him a wink and whirled around, leaving him to puzzle it out as he descended the stairs.

He grinned to himself, feeling much more relaxed and in-control than before. “Don’t stay too long, Bruce, or you’ll start thinking you live here!”

*~*~*~*~*

The Eastern harbor was one of the more seedy places in Gotham. Batman often fenced the place as part of his patrol, and John could name every mob that made a hit on the infamous 13th Street.

So naturally, it was one of the few sections of the city that would think of employing former Arkham inmates. It was a twenty-minute bus ride every morning to get to their respective jobs. Most of the residents in St. Dymphna were leased out to the laundromat or the incorrectly-named Lucky Hotel down the street. Occasionally one would go to the weird fish market to work in the back, gutting and descaling whatever was brought in. John was so far the only one to be placed in the Stitched Up Alterations joint next to the laundromat.

The bus was discreet, looking more like a white van with the city logo than a repurposed short school bus. It made John long for the flair of Lil’ Puddin’; it might have just been a stolen car he’d had repainted, but at least you knew who was coming.  

He gave a little wave to Devi as he passed her heading towards the laundromat, leisurely making his way to the back alley around the place. He passed the always-smelly dumpster and the brick wall covered with graffiti - grinning slightly at the ‘fuck the agency’ tag someone had made with a decent imitation of his clown-smiley-face - and entered through the back door.

It was a small space, crowded with giant spools of various fabrics in all kinds of colors and patterns. There was a little group of headless dress forms in a few different sizes that he had recently cleaned the dust off of, one of which had what might be a burnt-orange off-shoulder dress pinned to it, likely for prom. Or was it homecoming? John never really knew which was which, but summer was only a couple of weeks away, which meant it was likely for whatever the last dance of the year was, and it was definitely new.

Though the color really wasn’t in season. It put him in mind of the fall, of the range of makeup he’d been eying in his few hours of freedom in Gotham half a year ago... He touched it, feeling the synthetic satin under his fingertips. It hadn’t been there yesterday, but it was real.

He passed the shelf of jars filled with colorful buttons, and the rolls upon rolls of fabric, taking a moment to run his hand over the beautiful purple broadcloth he’d half-hidden in a stack, and checked his lonely workstation. A pile of pieces to work on, all folded and tagged, sat at the table by the sewing machine.

He flicked through the pile. Boring, mildly interesting tack job, ooh nice pattern, boring, and

S.Townsend. Beautiful calligraphy, almost like it was from someone with years of practicing their signature. (John would know – he had roughly eight years of practice and he knew his wasn’t anywhere near that pretty.)

“Why does that name sound familiar…?”

A quick search turned up a few results, but nothing recent stood out… There were too many famous S.’s with Townend, apparently – a musician, some newscaster miles away, a convicted murderer ten years ago, some yacht owner…

“Ah-haaa.” One of Gotham’s one-percenters. Sonja Townsend, the chairwoman of Wayne Enterprises. “Why would a member of Bruce’s round-table go here?”

The ticket was recent, made yesterday at closing and wanted in half an hour. An easy enough job - just adding a ticket pocket to a very new purchase. The tag for the jacket was still attached to the sleeve - on sale for fifty bucks, marked down from two-hundred.

“A big-wig who doesn’t always buy big, huh?”

That was...definitely strange. Suspicious, even, considering Wayne Enterprise executives made so much it was a surprise they didn’t try to declare themselves kings.

He unbuttoned it and checked the lining - there was a ticket pocket already there.  It was certainly a man’s jacket, just...very small. And they didn’t want it taken in or shrunk?

Hmm.

He took the seam-ripper and tore through the thin stitches holding the pocket closed, wondering if there was something inside.

Nothing.

“You’re being paranoid, John. Dr. Leland warned you about looking too far into things,” he muttered to himself, “Even if it isreally weird… There could be a decent explanation! But… Ugh, what would Bruce do?” his arms and staring at the annoying tag.

Bruce would question it, look at it from every angle… And research it.

John snapped a photo of the tag where The-Mysterious-Person-S had scribbled their signature and sent it to Bruce.

Hey buddy, does this handwriting look familiar?

  I can’t check right now. In a meeting.

Fair enough. Looking at it from other angles it was.

John pat the sleeves, the collar, turned the inner-pocket inside out, thinking about the tiny packets of drugs he’d seen exchange hands at Arkham when he found something in the outside pocket.

An ordinary USA Express. No signature on the back, and the black stripe was very worn, but the card wouldn’t expire until next month; the unlucky name on the front was Michael Hodgson.

Huh. Well…no, it wasn’t finder’s-keepers, and John had already been told off for petty theft during his trial, but…it could be useful. Door locks could be picked with a card. As long as he didn’t buy anything with it, it was fine, right?

Right.

John stuck it in his back pocket.

Just as soon as he did, the door to the front opened, and John sat and moved the shirt like he was doing ordinary work as usual, pulling out the boring fabric that someone wanted to turn into a very boring pillow.

The manager came through, hauling a grocery bag of more fabric.

“Oh, John – can you…take a walk for a bit?” The smaller man asked, his mild Thai accent slightly more prevalent than normal. It only seemed to happen when he was nervous. “I have a special order I need to do back here. It will take up the bench.”

“Uh, sure, if you want. How long will you take?”

“A while. Just make sure you’re back in half an hour; the social worker’s dropping by then,” he said with a wave of his hand, moving in John’s way to force him back up.

Mr. Prinya definitely wasn’t supposed to tell him that. Those were meant to be surprise visits, to see how John was coping. “This isn’t some kind of test, is it?” John asked with a nervous little laugh, “Like you’re seeing if I’ll take the opportunity to skip out and report me?”

“You ask a lot for a man who wants this job.” Mr. Prinya put the bag by the stack of orders. “You leave, be back in thirty, both of us live to work another day.”

Ah. He was moving something. His accent came in a little thicker with the light threat, and his little show of bravado made John think it was probably against his will. Probably. But John knew the score – he had more than his share of experience keeping secrets in Arkham. And time away was beneficial for both of them.

“Hey, no worries,” John answered with his best understanding smile and a raise of his hands, “I get ya. I’ll just leave this one on the outgoing rack, ‘k?” He emphasized, picking up Townsend’s jacket.

Mr. Prinya gave a stiff nod, taking a seat in John’s chair and fiddling with his phone as John put the jacket on the wire hanger and threw it on the ‘outgoing’ rack by the door. He clearly didn’t want John to know what was in the bags. Probably for the best.

John left through the backdoor and stepped back into the alley.

He wasn’t far from the harbor. He could easily go have a look at the crime scene from last night by warehouse twenty-two… It was best not to get too close to it, though, so strolling by the actual docks wasn’t the best choice. He could go the roof of one of the buildings close to it instead. John had managed to get a close-zoom lens for his phone’s camera a little while back; it was a tiny thing attached to the back of his phone’s case, plugged into the audio jack for safe-keeping - all he had to do was clip it in place and he’d be able to have almost-binocular vision.

He took a quick look at the back of the laundromat. There was a camera by the door, but if he went juuust wide enough, he wouldn’t be seen by it’s all-seeing-eye.

The wire fence was a little difficult to climb in his shoes (he missed those ankle boots Bruce had bought him last year, the slight heel dug into crevices nicely) and he was never a fan of the feel of metal digging into his hands, but he managed to climb over the fence with a swing over the top and a hop to the ground without any injury.

John straightened his shirt, feeling a little accomplished, and set off for the sets of buildings closest to the docks, passing by graffiti in the twisting litter-coated alleyway - there was a poor imitation of the bat signal that someone had scribbled over and written ‘fuck batman’ next to, standard gang tags, non-standard gang tags, an anarchy symbol, a giant cartoonish bat chasing people…

Actually, that was one for the album! He had to stop and take a picture; one of the people looked like the Mayor. He didn’t even care it had a few of the tags in it - it was part of the charm, really.

He passed by one of the partially-repainted dumpsters, wrinkling his nose and walking faster when he smelled rotting fish parts, and spotted the ladder for the fire escape next to it dangling down partway into the alley. John was tall enough to tug at the ladder, but it wouldn’t budge.

The windows were mostly blacked out by something or other. If anyone lived there, he doubted they were home. It would be a damn good view, and close enough that the journey back wouldn’t make him late.

“Hm, to use the smelly abyss as leverage, or risk a minor injury?” He muttered aloud.

The dumpster was ancient and rusting. Not worth it.

John bent and jumped up, grabbing hold of the bars on the ladder and swinging his legs out to keep balanced as he climbed the first few bars. He checked the window by the landing and wiped his hands on his pants for good measure. The room there wasn’t as empty as he thought - the window had been darkened by thin film, like the kind they used for quick-fix window tinting, and the inside had some bare battered furniture. He could see a duffel bag half-hidden by a table leg.

Probably another runner. It was no use pondering about what they were running from. In  Gotham, there were far too many choices.

The next two windows had curtains (or in one case, sheets that had been clumsily tacked on the panes that let John see someone watching bad on-demand porn) and the last one showed nothing but an empty room with an open doorway. “Man, how hard is it to get a little bit of human interaction around here?” He grumbled to himself. He’d at least like to see someone else properly for more than a minute. Or get an idea of them at least.

He looked out into the street below - three passers-by in matching grey-and-black hoodies, seeming to laugh it up as they passed. A street gang, maybe... They weren’t very observant, if they were; there was a perfectly good motorcycle just sitting at the end of the alleyway there. It couldn’t be too difficult to hot-wire. At least compared to a car.

There was one more ladder going to the rooftop - and upon poking his head over the top, John was unsure on how to feel.

Tiffany Fox stood near the edge of the roof, doing exactly what he was planning on doing - only she had a pair of real binoculars. And that tablet she used for her drones.

She looked different from the last time he saw her, too; she was dressed fairly professionally, making her look a little more mature despite the dark blue streaks littering the thick curls on the one side of her head.

He wished he had her number so he could just text her he was there. Sneaking up probably wasn’t the best thing to do, despite the little urge to spook her; she was being trained by Batman, after all.

Weird situations like this surely called for some playful banter. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” He asked with his best film-noir-detective voice.

It certainly got her attention. She whirled around looking like a frightened cat, reaching for her hip like there was something useful there. A taser, judging by the shape in the pocket. (John always wondered why women’s slacks had those terrible form-fitting pockets.)

The wary look on her face didn’t quite diminish when she noticed it was just him. Despite the better terms they ended on in the ambulance back in October, he didn’t completely blame her for distrusting him - they had matching scars, after all.

“John,” she said simply, “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“Ha, now you’re sounding like Bats, at least!” He chuckled, moving towards her to close some of the gap. He knew better than to get too close, though. He’d be the same way, if things were reversed; you never really knew what someone had hidden on them. “I would’ve thought you’d have developed that sixth-sense of his by now, after all you’re training, Tiff’.” (He made sure to keep of the ‘y’ he wanted to add. He remembered she’d said not to call her that; ‘Tiffy’ was reserved for brain-talk only.)

Tiffany’s expression shifted. She wasn’t just wary anymore, she had that little frown on her face that meant he’d crossed some unseen line. It couldn’t have been her name - was her training not going as well as Bruce had said? Or was it just one of those secretly-sensitive subjects?

“So… What’cha doin’?” He asked casually, stopping at the edge several feet away from her to look down into the street. “People watching, or crime scene watching?”

“Crime scene watching. Aren’t you supposed to be in that halfway house?”

He couldn’t decide whether the tone was accusatory or curious. It kinda sounded like both… Well, best to be nice about it. She had Bruce’s number on speed-dial, after all. “I am; I’m technically on a break from the mandated work. What about you, Tiff’?”

She raised a brow, and her tone was instantly recognizable; the same rebellious sort that came when someone nosy asked Harley what she was doing. “What about me?”

John fiddled with his phone, clipping on the magnifier lens to cover the camera. “Are you skipping work entirely, or just going in late?”

“Late. I would never skip.”

Really? Never-ever? He doubted that. “Eight hours a day, five days a week - and that’s not even counting your night gig. Doesn’t it wear on you?”

Tiffany didn’t quite seem focused on that tablet screen. “Sometimes. But last time I took time off, Bruce scolded me.”

“Do you mean he actually got angry, or he was he just like ‘Don’t be irresponsible, Tiffany. Just because my double-life allows me to up and leave work for as long as I can’t walk doesn’t mean you can take a break,’” John said in his best imitation of Bruce’s smoother-but-stern voice.

Tiffany gave a noise that might have been covering a laugh. He could see the smile on the edge of her mouth. “That does kinda sound like him.” She made a swiping gesture on the screen and looked over at him. “But it was more like he’s worried I’ll get too into the night job and go work on stuff without him.”

That wasn’t quite right. Bruce cared about people - more than likely, he just didn’t want Tiffany to get hurt or be in danger when Bruce couldn’t be around. John had caught sight of Batman staying outside of Arkham some nights when Bruce hadn’t stopped by in a couple of days, as if he was just checking up on things.

That was the type of person Bruce was - clearly it extended further where Tiffany was concerned, and she was clearly tired of hitting that ceiling.

“So, like you’re doing now?” John grinned, focusing the camera on his phone to try and zoom in as far as he could on the remains of the van in the distance. They were just high up enough to see most of the scene.

Tiffany was finally smiling. It was small and smug, but it was a definite change from the last time he saw her. It reached her dark eyes, lighting them up like a little candle in the dark. “Yup.”

John squinted at the image of the wreckage on his screen. “Yeesh, that was some firework they planted. Looks like the whole thing went up in smoke.” He zoomed in as much as he could. “Wow, the back doors are either open or gone on that thing.” The strangeness of it seemed to click the second he said it. “Or the explosion came from the inside.”

“That’s what the C.S.I. think, too,” Tiffany answered. “The glass all shattered outward; I think someone planted it there. That, or the dumbasses left the keys in the van.”

John giggled at that. “Mobsters leaving their keys behind? In Gotham? No way.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the more lunkheaded ones was in charge of driving.”

“No, no, you want the people with quick reflexes to drive, not the muscle. It’s why I was the designated chauffeur for the Pact,” he said somewhat proudly, “That, and Harley liked being driven around. Said it made her feel all fancy.” He scowled to himself as he felt his gut twist at the old memory. “Though Dr. Leland thought that was just another example of her using me for her own gain...”

“You don’t still miss her, do you?” Tiffany asked, the accusatory tone lacing in between caution.

John thought. He kind of did. Not the same way he missed Bruce - not by a longshot - or the same way he missed Dr. Leland.

He shot a look at Tiffany. Were they at the point of bringing up ‘personal’ stuff yet? They’d worked together before, and they were on the same team now… He supposed that there wasn’t a better time to find out than now.

“It’s...more like I miss the fact that I could talk to her. Being in her company was easy, you know? That sort of ‘natural connection’ thing. In hindsight, there were some red flags about our whole relationship...but I can’t just pretend everything that happened between us just never happened.” He breathed out through his nostrils, already angry even though there wasn’t even a Harley there for him to be angry at. “Even if she did try to hurt Bruce.”

“And left you behind several times, tried to kill me alongside Bruce, and took advantage of you at every chance,” Tiffany said pointedly, a sardonic sort of smile perking up. “You shouldn’t just value Bruce’s life that much - you’ve got your own, you know.”

John snorted. She sounded a lot like Leland, in her own way; neither of them really quite got his relationship with Bruce. “Not much of one.” Though… “I guess it is getting a little better.”

She had that sort of pitying expression on her face. He wasn’t really a fan of those. Sympathy was fine, empathy was better - but pity? He didn’t need that. He really, really wanted to just change the subject rather than deal with any conversation pertaining to that.

“Speaking of lives, though - any idea what happened with the ship? I can still kinda see it in the harbor.”

“...how did you know about it?”

“How else? Bruce dropped by this morning.” He saw the mild bewilderment there, and decided he might as well drive the point home and make her jealous at the same time. “He always shares his case details with me. Among other things,” he added slyly. “But I had to go to work, so the conversation got cut before I could hear the juicy details. You were on patrol with him, right?”

“I wasn’t there in person,” Tiffany grumbled, going back to tapping her tablet. (What was she doing on it, anyway?) “I was using my drone from the cave, before some trigger-happy asshole took it out.”

John remembered her father had made those; no wonder she was upset. He should offer comfort. Better comfort that the last time they’d spoken about her father. He’d learned what to say since then. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he echoed with all the sincerity he could.  

She looked more puzzled at that than anything, but she didn’t look more upset, so that was probably a good sign. “Uh, thanks… Anyway, Bruce saw everything - I only got the data feed from his drones.” She tapped something, and seemed to think. “You sure you wanna see this?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t.”

“They’re pretty bad.”

He didn’t care. It wasn’t the blood or wounds that got to his head the last time he’d seen carnage second-hand; it was the ferocity, the terror on the people’s faces, the familiarity of it all that brought back the memory of the manic episode that had spiralled him to his worst point, and it made him feel very...displaced. But it wasn’t video, and John’s curiosity and his drive to help Bruce overrode everything else.

He wanted to squeeze something. He settled for putting his hands in his pockets and feeling the back of his phone case. “I can handle it.”

Tiffany turned the screen towards him. “There were eight victims. Most of them were stabbed.”

There were two men sunken in plastic chairs in the ships kitchenette, each with one of their eyes gouged out.

It was the kind of thing to put a sharp thrill in his gut and made the neurons in his brain fire away; enough to make him smile. No weapons in the wounds, and from such fun angles! “You know, I’ve always wanted to see a knife-thrower in person. I wanna find out how they do that.”

When he looked back up, Tiffany’s nose was wrinkled in the kind of stern disgust that Bruce displayed at the sight of dead bodies - only she lacked the spark of intrigue he always had. (Guess she wasn’t as far along in the training as he thought…) “Knife-throwing, huh…”

“Yeah, with reeeally long blades - I mean, I think some butter knives are big enough to hit the brain, too, but they’re probably harder to aim just right.”

Her frown deepened. “I don’t want to know how you know that…”

“It’s kind of obvious,” he answered anyway, unsure of how else he would know, “I mean, look-” He spread his thumb and forefinger to measure and held it up against his head, “it’s at least three inches to the temporal lobe; butter knives aren’t that long! Unless it’s for the world’s largest stick of butter.”

He was clearly close… Just a scoach more, and she’d surely crack. Her frown turned upside down for a little bit, there. The wall was dropping, further and further - he had to time these things just right…

Tiffany swiped on the screen, her expression souring at the sight of whatever-it-was, and his tiny hope died like a butterfly caught in a snowstorm. That was too serious a look to run with.

So he dared to scoot a little closer and peer over her shoulder, catching sight of the overhead image of the ship’s storeroom.

Four unfortunate men were laying on their backs, positioned so their arms crossed their chests like they were newly-buried pharaohs. Their heads all touched, three nestled snug together at forty-five-degree angles while the last one touched them all in the middle; a three-to-one ratio.

John itched to just grab it out of her hands to have a better look. He clenched his hands once and released halfway, forcing the impulse to pass. He didn’t want to be rude, even if they weren’t on the best of terms; and she was clearly in a rebellious streak, so acting demanding was right out. “Can I see that?” He asked instead, as politely as possible.

“Please?” He continued, seeing the morbidly-curious look in her weirded out face, “Just to check something?”

She was more guarded than ever, looking straight at the tablet in her hands...

At her right hand, just briefly, thinking back to the knife he’d plunged into it that day months and months ago, debating on whether or not she could trust him with even holding one of her tools when he’d trusted her completely back at the skyrail station -

“Alright,” she said finally, holding it out to him and letting him take it without another word of protest. He could see the faded scar on her palm, not quite identical to his. Like fraternal twins. Just how deep does that parallel go, he thought. “What are you checking?”

“The shape,” he answered, pulling open the editing menu.

He started doodling over it, first in pink - red was too close to home, in this case. A large inverted triangle...

No…a trapezoid on top of a pole, perhaps?

He switched to neon yellow. A miniature upside-down triangle, with a point down. That looked better.

He switched to green, tracing a line over each body. A trident, maybe? Maybe.

It was… Something. He’d seen it before. Somewhere, sometime…

“Have you ever seen this before?” He asked, keeping the tablet flat in between them so they could both look.

“I dunno, gang symbols? There’s a lot of weird ones around,” Tiffany said. “I know someone in the Cauldron uses some weird triangle as their tag…” She looked at him, no more wariness or caution or anything negative in her expression. Just simple curiosity. “Does it look familiar?”

A phrase he’d heard a hundred times before. Always a no. Always followed with ‘are you sure’ and more no’s and follow-ups of ‘well what can you remember?’ in that same insulting tone that tried so hard to appear inquisitive...

John drummed his fingers against the tablet, feeling the material of the reinforced case under his short fingernails. He was talking to Tiffany Fox, on top of a roof, both of them taking time out from work to look into a crime scene.

He laughed at the ludicrousness of it - she could push him off the roof or tase him or escape with a grappling hook, and she was just here talking to him, like things were actually changing.

(They were, though. He could smell the smog and the harbor. It was real.)

John let the short laugh die out with a little cough as he saw the look at Tiffany’s face.  

“Sorry,” he said, being used to apologizing for causing any level of ‘disturbed concern’, “But, no, it’s, uh, more like a nagging feeling.” She didn’t seem to understand that; her brow was raised, almost skeptical instead of curious, and still unsure of him as a whole. “Déjà vu with no direction.”

Tiffany actually looked like she was thinking about it, pulling apart the words in her head… “That’s...a different way of putting it. So, you might have seen it, but you don’t know where or when?”

He rolled his eyes slightly at her. He wasn’t going to dignify that was a proper response.

“I guess I’ll look into gang symbols,” Tiffany said, carefully taking the tablet back. “I’ll go back a few years, see if someone revived an old gang or something…”

“Or they could’ve just stolen the logo,” John pointed out.

“True.” She stared down at the tablet, concentration furrowing her brow. “You know, you might be right… It is kind of that nagging feeling.”

“Speaking of nagging, you haven’t found out anything new about those Black Mask guys, have you?”

“Only that one is still missing. There weren’t any tire tracks or bullets casings left behind, so whoever killed them made a clean getaway…” She cast a look over at the crime scene in the distance. “At least until I get the footage back from the broken drone. It might have picked up something.”

John hummed. A rival gang on the hunt - they would likely send whatever pieces were left to Black Mask. “Were they found the same way?”

“No. The members we found were all shot.”

Interesting! “Head or torso?”

“Does that really matter?”

“Depends on how sloppy our killer was!”

“...I don’t know how you’re so enthusiastic about this,” Tiffany grumbled, eyeing him scrupulously.

“Oh, come on, Tiff’, crime’s my specialty! We’re investigating a potential gang war, here - if it’s mostly headshots, it’s professional executions, which means a rival mafia sending a message; if it’s torsos it’s more likely to be newbies.” he thought for a moment. “Unless it’s the Corazón troupe, of course. But I’m pretty sure they’re all dead. Or really old.”

It was clear to see she hadn’t thought of that. “I’d say it looked like upper-body shots from the pictures I saw last night. I don’t have those handy, though. I’ll bring it up with Bruce.”

Hm. Hm, hm, hm. The van exploding, the crew ending up dead with only one missing as a hostage or informant - it sounded too much like a professional job. Someone planned it carefully. So why did one group get stabbed, and another shot? And why were the knife marks so precise when the shots were… Well, they could be precise. He’d have to see the pictures. Or at least hear of it.

“Speaking of him, I gotta go. I don’t want to be too late,” Tiffany said, tucking her tablet away.

“Ooh, before you do-” John quickly opened a new contact page and pushed the phone at her - “here, I don’t want to have to surprise you every time I see you.” There was the small chance she’d take it and throw it over the building, or slap it out of his hand, or just give him that weirded-out look she got sometimes or -

Tiffany defied the anxious conspiracies his brain was spinning; she took the phone and dutifully punched the number in, handing it back without any kind of strange look. “I better not find myself added to any weird listings,” she said jokingly, offering a small smile. A peace offering.

“Not even cute cat videos?” He teased, adding the fox and computer emoticons to the end of her name.

“I’ve already got a playlist on UBox for that,” Tiffany shrugged, heading back towards the fire escape. “’Bye, John.”

“’Bye, Tiff’,” he echoed, thinking for a second, “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

She blinked, turning for a moment, her hands already on the ladder railing. “You think you can find something from the inside of the halfway house?”

She was underestimating him. It was an advantage sometimes, but mostly it just annoyed him. He wasn’t anywhere close to Bruce – a man of the world in every sense – but he did have some physical power and brains and could put things together when they interested him enough. “You think that could stop me?” He answered, thinking back to every little secret he ever learned within the padded walls of his former home. “I’ve got my ways, Tiff’ – I have access to stuff you and Bruce could only dream about.”

He saw the wariness return on her face. She was unsure of what he knew and how he knew it, and just what he did to get people to talk, or what he did to take.

But like hell he’d tell her. She wouldn’t get it. Not now, at least. Maybe someday. “Be careful out there,” he added, letting the seriousness sink in before turning back into something more optimistic for both their sakes, “and have a good day at work!”

Tiffany left his view, and John cast one more look out at the crime scene in the distance.

At least he had some new things to think about at all hours of the day. Two groups of filthy criminals pitted against each other over their petty toys, unaware that Batman would be hell-bent on stopping it, using his loyal assistants who were waiting and watching from the shadows for help…

But the questions were what their precious toys were, and when and how Black Mask would get revenge – and figuring all that out would be easy once John could pinpoint who the rival group was.

How fun!

Notes:  Yes, Bruce might be the main character, but relationships work both ways - John is his own person regardless of what their relationship is like, so we get to see his life, too! (Yes, that means even if he’s a villain - though he’d probably start at a hideout rather than the halfway house, considering TT wouldn’t be likely to let him have any kind of redemption arc. But we have nothing to hold us back anymore! No bars, no chains, no gods, no masters!!! So villain!John can have a redemption arc too if you want, probably starting back in season 3 and continuing on here, because he’s an ill man who needs a support system and you can make it however you want!! Fight me, TT!!!! Oh wait, you can’t! Ahahahahahahaha!!!!!!)

(You’ll still be missed by us all. Thanks for the fun and new beginnings, TellTale… I hope you know my teasing comes from [mostly] love.)

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to have some new mechanics, so “drawing” and “photography” are now things “the player” can do practically free-style! And of course a big new addition is also “character perspective swap”, to focus on John for some of the time so “the player” can experience different sides of this story. And of course John’s choices affect the story, too! And depending on what you do with him…wait, that’s spoiler territory…I can’t tell you yet... You’ll have to wait along with me. But I pinky-swear it’ll be worth it. (｡•̀ᴗ-)b✧

I try to provide updates on tumblr/my Ao3 profile but nothing is guaranteed, so subscribing/bookmarking would be ideal for you to keep current! I hope to see you April 17 for our next look into this case!  (･ω´-ゞ)^☆

[weboftime]

Time for another dumb retrospective of stuff I used to own! This time: cell phones. This is mostly for my own benefit because every now and then I wonder what they used to look like.

This was my first cell phone, as far as I can tell? A Qualcomm QCP-2760 probably. It looked like this but silver. Long and large by today’s standards, definitely made more for talking than browsing the internet, though it could do that too, sort of. You could check movie times and visit certain specially-designed mobile sites, anyway. Great use of 4 lines of text. IIRC when I got a new one this was donated to a women’s shelter, at least according to the store.

This wasn’t technically a phone, at least without an accessory that plugged into the back, but it fulfilled a lot of the same functions of a modern smartphone. A Handspring Visor Neo (Blue) running Palm OS. I actually still have this and it still works, but it uses AAA batteries & is hopelessly outdated so I don’t use it. I used to type fanfic on it by rapidly tapping the on-screen keyboard with the stylus. Even though I also have a really nice folding full-size keyboard for it. It also capably ran free Gameboy-esque games like Tetris and LoZ clones, which had to be transferred on by USB. Because I have ADHD and find using a planner almost impossible, the calendar/alarm functions were absolute lifesavers.

At the time I got the Samsung SPH-N400, camera phones were popular but out of my price range. At least this one had a colour screen! I liked this one for its unique shape. Flip phones were already common but most had the screen in the flip part, and I was worried the cables would wear. The guy at the phone store was horribly offended when I told him I wanted a bigger phone so it wouldn’t get lost in my bag. It wasn’t THAT big and the antenna was fun to fidget with. This had sufficient calendar capabilities that I stopped carrying the Visor. I had the X-Men cartoon theme song as a ringtone and eventually gave this one to a friend & she used it for several more years with the same ringtone.

Finally got a camera phone! It was called the LG Lotus in most of the world but something else here in Canada; I forget what. I really like phones that look a little different. This one was easy to use, had a nice little texting keyboard, media controls on the front, and just absolutely garbage firmware. Loved the hardware but... Well, one time there was a firmware update and the 1/W button stopped working for several months. Just try living without the number 1 or letter W. Other problems kept cropping up to the point where it froze frequently and became unusable. I just recycled this one a few weeks ago but haven’t used it in years.

Lil baby Android LG Optimus Net. A capable and tough little phone that lasted me 6 years. Its only real drawback was the lack of internal storage, meaning lack of space for apps. Still works but so outdated that it has trouble with the Play store and stuff, so I had to upgrade. I’ve been keeping it around as a media player.

So, I don’t know if you know this, but most cell phones have an FM radio built in but it’s disabled. This drove me crazy, so 2 years ago I went hunting for one with a functioning radio. I found a few import options but settled on the Doogee Mix. It’s a pretty powerful budget phone, except the camera is awful and the internal speakers are incredibly weak. It’s got a pretty glass body and big screen that makes it seem fancier than it is. It’s heavy as heck. Unlike the previous, it’s capable of running Pokemon Go. And that’s the main thing.

Anyway I was wondering how long I keep my phones for and it looks like, excluding the Visor, I’m averaging about 4 years each.

[raymondsecurityadventures]

Lecture 6

I just remembered that professionalism was part of the portfolio marking criteria so I’ll try to keep it PG in these posts. Meaning that I’m allowed to drop one and only one F-bomb somewhere. 

Avalanching

Recall that the Merkle-Damgard hash construction looked like this: 

The reason the hash function is segmented into the various f’s you see above, is to allow avalanching to occur; the property that causes good cryptographic hashes to be drastically different from one another, even if the edit distance of the inputs if minimal. This allows for the semantic meaning of relatively similar inputs to be obfuscated, as one would otherwise be able to perhaps glean information pertaining to the information that had been hashed, through observation of the structure of the hash string and comparison with other similar hashes e.g. if hashing 12345 and 12346 produced hashes of 0xaa0geb212r3r3142q and 0xaa0geb212r3r3131w, then an attacker could probably guess the structure of the input at the very least and perhaps interpolate the inputs by generating other hashes. 

Passwords Part II 

From the exam, we might have found that the # of bits of security that we get from a random password using the Elephant Apple Golfing principle (or some shit I don’t remember the stupid name) isn’t as many as we would like. It’s naive to say that a password has as many bits as it is long, unless those bits are truly random and the full complement of ASCII characters are actually utilised, such as \0. Indeed most passwords aren’t that many bits, given that they’re based largely on quotes, names, birthdays etc. etc. and it’s only a matter of time before increases in computing power renders them obsolete.  

So yeah, the answer to that question pertaining to the Homophobic Dog Shagger principle is 40-49 bits i.e. the smallest choice. Congratulations if you got it right. 

This kind of segues into why WEP keys are terrible: 

They’re consisted of a shared 40 bit key, that everyone connected to a network knows, and a 24 bit initialisation vector that was randomly generated locally by the receiver that were combined to form a ‘64′ bit key and this key was used to encrypt every frame.  The obvious issue with this is that it’s trivial to brute force 24 bits, and it’s probably trivial to brute force 40 bits, and it wasn’t too difficult combining all the brute forced combinations to obtain the purported 64 bit key. 

Mixing Control and Data - Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit 

http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html

Mixing control and data is bad, don’t do it.  C lets us do it and although most modern compilers such as gcc and clang have several countermeasures for stack smashing, it remains a useful case study and a common issue in modern software. 

Buffer overflows can occur when someone writes shit code and rather than fixing declaring a fixed array size in their loop iteration, they end the array loop once the program hits NULL, allowing a third-party to use a function such as strcpy() - that doesn’t check buffer size - to stuff more in the buffer than has been allocated to memory. There are other methods too but this is the most intuitive to understand. 

The Stack and Return Addresses: 

Computers switch context lots of times a second to allow them to deal with interrupts from a multitude of sources. When something interrupts them, such as a keyboard entry perhaps, the computer will execute the interrupt and then return to whatever task it was completing before. How it knows where to return in the code, is by adding the address of that particular point where it stopped - the return address - as well as the miscellaneous parameters that the code needed to execute, onto a LIFO structure known as the stack. These miscellaneous parameters, such as our array, are stored before the pointer and as such, by overflowing the array, we are able to overwrite whatever return address was in stored at the pointer(’s address) which paves the way for all sorts of shenanigans.

Most common of these shenanigans: - Actually writing code into an overflowed buffer and addressing the pointer to the location of this code - Getting a shell open 

Overflowing the array is most commonly done with a NOP Sled, which is simply consisted of a bunch of NOPs (no operation commands) that serve to pad the buffer up to the memory/stack address containing the return address and your payload which can be either a memory address pointing to your code or pointing to whatever would open up a shell.  This requires us to know the # of NOPs to place into our sled, which can be done in a variety of methods that the course doesn’t require us to know.

*will add more to this section as I read more on it* 

NIST and the History of Ciphers

Even after WWII, ciphers were not particularly powerful and for a while there was a ‘crypto black hole’ where no new cryptographic methods were being devised and nobody was aware of any principles one should follow. This changed with the advent of computers and eventually, groups concerned about security put out a standard known as NIST. Except noone knew what to put into the standard and so a competition was held which noone except IBM entered into and they won by default. And so IBM’s DES was adopted and had at the time, only 56 bits.  Then the NSA comes along, looks at DES, breaks it in two seconds using their differential cryptographic methods and says ‘yeah it’s okay keep using it XD’. 

Except everyone was like HANG ON, and eventually a successor AES was built. AES was predicated, much like DES, on performing many permutations, transposing and other obfuscating measures, which created an encryption method that was difficult to break feasibly, but had significantly more bits than AES.  XSS (Cross Site Scripting) or why Javascript is awful Cross Site Scripting 

Involved placing Javascript on a webpage, for example in a poorly secured forum, where you know unassuming people would visit. The Javascript will execute upon that page opening and whatever was in the JS will proceed to wreak havoc.  Common attacks include stealing your cookies to impersonate you.

SQL & Command Injections 

Webpages that require you to enter your username and password into fields will typically take the characters you entered as your username and password, stick them in an SQL query and execute said query to check your username and password against a preexisting username and password database. 

Instead of entering our usernames and passwords, we can enter actual SQL code which will actually execute, due to the nature of PHP converting your input into code. This wouldn’t work in any other language. For example:

Here’s an example query taken off https://www.acunetix.com/websitesecurity/sql-injection/

# Define POST variables uname = request.POST['username'] passwd = request.POST['password'] # SQL query vulnerable to SQLi sql = “SELECT id FROM users WHERE username=’” + uname + “’ AND password=’” + passwd + “’” # Execute the SQL statement database.execute(sql)

Now, we could easily input as the password:

password' OR 1=1

which would cause:

SELECT id FROM users WHERE username='username' AND password='password' OR 1=1'

SELECT id FROM users WHERE username=‘username’ AND password=‘password OR 1=1′

to execute, which would return the first ID of the first user in the database table due to that 1=1 is always true and the query is made complete by the ‘ appended to the word password. 

We could easily modify this query to print out the entire table if we wanted to write more code. 

Command injections rely on the same concept of writing code into input boxes, but instead we write shell code and grep our way to sensitive data. 

Cryptocurrency

Wasn’t really paying attention to this part, I’ll fill it in later

Block Modes 

How we combine individually ciphered blocks of a ciphertext, like we did in the Merkle-Damgard hash (recall that the input was split into blocks), to get a whole ciphertext:

- Can concatenate them like in WEP - Or more commonly, we can use CBC which is really convoluted: here’s some reading if you’re interested, but basically each unciphered block is XOR’d with the previous block. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#Cipher_Block_Chaining_(CBC)

Authentication - WIP 

How? What decisions?

Humans are bad at looking at      faces

No point in confidentiality, if there is no authentication

Defence in depth 

Something you know

Have: let's send someone an SMS when they type their PW WOW.

2FA worked well initially, however, SMS is easy to intercept.

Have single point of weakness, in your phone

Are:

Requires secrets to be     confidential, keyloggers, shoulder surfing etc.

Naïve but easy to implement

[lauriecenteno84-blog]

Greatest 10 AAC Audio To MP3 Converter Online

Melody Scanner is probably the most highly effective instrument to automatically transcribe your favorite songs to sheet music. MP3 to MIDI conversion does not simply mean a conversion of audio format. MP3 is the popular audio format by any music player. Musical Instrument Digital Interface (in brief MIDI) is a technical standard not like MP3 (an audio format). MIDI may be specified utilizing pitch, velocity, www.magicaudiotools.com notation, cues, clock indicators, midi To mp3 converter Free download tempo and so on. MIDI was invented to unite musical instruments and make every musical instrument suitable. Basically you possibly can't import Midi music straight into Audacity. Midi is just not an audio format like WAV or MP3 - quite it is sort of a set of directions: play this note for therefore lengthy, then this different observe for therefore lengthy and many others. (just like the difference between a recipe and a meal). So what yo have to do i s to play it it some sogtware that may play MIDI - while on the same time recoirding it in Audacity. CloudConvert is a free on-line file conversion device with help for over 200 file types, including 20 of the most popular audio formats. The free plan limits you to 5 concurrent conversions with a maximum file size of 1GB. It additionally limits you to 25 whole conversions per day, and free users are at the bottom of the priority checklist, so it might take a long time to convert files during peak utilization hours. CloudConvert is easy to make use of and out there as a Chrome Extension and iOS app, in case you do not want to use the web instrument. We researched and evaluated 15 audio converter software options that vary in price from free to $39 - narrowing that record down to one of the best choices obtainable. We examined the conversion pace and ease of use for each converter, and examined every unit's features. We believe Swap Plus Edition is one of the best audio converter for most people because it has all the most important import and export codecs, and it may well convert sooner than any software program we examined. If it's worthwhile to convert numerous files quickly, this is the most suitable choice. MIDI is the abbreviation for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. This file format is basically used when enjoying devices like electronic keyboards. In truth, MIDI is completely different from audio file formats such as MP3 and WAV. Instead, it comes as a file format that's primarily based on music notes. Changing MP3 to MIDI or MIDI to MP3 is a reasonably simple task when you've got the perfect software. To transform MP3 to MIDI, you need to use on-line instruments or an installable software program application. I use photoscore to create midi recordsdata( with lyrics) from sheet music. Then Musescore to edit them if obligatory and eventually midisheetmusic to play the midi recordsdata. The midi recordsdata are distributed amongst choir members. They'll use whatever participant they choose, however most use midisheetmusic for its ease of use and the power to show lyrics. On this instance the MIDI file "Zodiac - Provincial Disco" has been converted into MP3 file. The file is splitted into four part, 30 seconds each one. The primary and the final sections were created utilizing the sound font "FluidR3_GM.SF2", the second section was created utilizing the sound font " Timbres Of Heaven GM_GS_XG_SFX V 3.0 Remaining !!!.sf2 ", and the third part was created with the sound font " SGM-V2.01.sf2 ". Note the excellent sound quality in comparison with the Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth. The Normal MIDI File (SMF) is a file format that gives a standardized manner for music sequences to be saved, transported, and opened in different systems. The compact size of those recordsdata led to their widespread use in computers, cell phone ringtones , webpage authoring and musical greeting cards. These information are meant for common use, and include such info as be aware values, midi to mp3 converter free download timing and monitor names. Lyrics may be included as metadata , and might be displayed by karaoke machines. 38 The SMF specification was developed and is maintained by the MMA. It is a authorized to convert your mp3 information here. Not like many on-line converters, there is no copyright or any declare on this platform. It's possible you'll be changing your data legally right here. On this tutorial we'll take a look at this comparatively simple process from identifying the melody you need to extract, proper by to utilizing the new MIDI file with a software program instrument. It actually goes with out saying but sadly the strategies demonstrated proper right here do require the consumer to have Cubase 6.

In the Midi2Wav Recorder from the issue is solved by running a test of the computer sound gear throughout the first trial of the program. The program is playing again MIDI notes and concurrently recording them into the Wave file. Then the acquired data are being analyzed and it chooses the optimum configuration of tunings for mixer and sound units.

[almarolleston8-blog]

AVS Audio Editor Record Audio, Reduce, Combine Audio Files, Delete Audio Parts, Edit Mp3

Dont know something about APE. APE audio format (also known as the Monkey's audio format) is a popular lossless compression format supported by varied Windows-based mostly media gamers. APE achieves prime quality with a 50% file dimension discount in comparison with many common lossy codecs. Meanwhile, this format allows you to create excellent copies of your CD tracks with zero detriment to sound quality. As to the downsides of this format, it poses difficulty encoding as a result of it uses a CPU-intensive compression sample. One other shortcoming is that it's platform-dependent and works on Windows solely. APE, the Monkey's audio with filename extensionape, is lossless format with barely higher compression rates in comparison with different lossless compression format like FLAC and WavPack. APE recordsdata make use of a symmetric algorithm which makes them have limited assist on software program platforms apart from Windows. Whereas, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), Monkey's Audio's essential competitor, has extra features than Monkey's Audio (streaming support, for example) and hardware assist to its benefit, although its efficiency in compression is just not as nice. So converting APE to FLAC is better solution for compression, quality as well as functionality with players. To take pleasure in music saved in exotic formats that you just media participant does not help, you may need to put in an audio converter software program that guarantees to transform the audio tracks to a supported format. Numerous audio formats exist, and each has its own unique options. Some keep glorious sound quality, some may be played only on particular devices, some presents compact dimension, and others are so rare that you have no thought which programs can open them. AudioConverter Studio may also sort your music while converting. By default, the filename of your source file is used, so might be converted to track01.mp3 (for those who convert FLAC to MP3). However the file may contain some further info in its tags: title, artist, album, and so forth. AudioConverter Studio is able to using this information for naming converted recordsdata and creating folders for them. For instance, with a format like Artist\12 months - Album\Observe# - Title any Audio CDs that you just rip shall be sorted in your music folder routinely by artist, then by year and album, then by monitor number and title. So that you get a nicely structured assortment with none additional effort. FLAC first emerged in 2001 as an open-supply various to other lossless formats rising on the time. These included Apple Lossless (ALAC), Microsoft's WAV (Waveform Audio Format) and WMA Lossless. But these competitive formats do have their disadvantages. While ALAC has a loyal following among iPod and iPhone users, it hasn't seen a lot uptake outdoors of Apple merchandise. The WAV format can be fashionable, and it is appropriate with iOS gadgets, however its biggest issues are that file sizes are very large, and it may't retain "tag" knowledge - artist, album name, lyrics, and so on - in the way in which the other codecs can. FLAC, on the other hand, not solely helps tags but can be appropriate with most music players. Apple is the only real holdout right here, for whereas there was speak in 2017 of hardware support in both the iPhone eight and X nothing has materialized. Nevertheless, there are easy workarounds for iOS and Mac customers. With regards to conversion from APE file to MP3, I bet you've scanned lots on the Internet to search out one of the best ways out. However only few of them indeed support the conversion. Even, most APE converters allow to try this, however you most likely must obtain two or three plug-ins to make it work. It's actually boring, is not it? Other than that, some converter tools take much time on installing to your laptop and importing the APE file. What's worse, the uploaded audio file may be invalid as a result of format restriction, which means it solely helps the input formats like MP3, WMA and WAV. Fortunately, it will not be a problem stopping you from APE to MP3 conversion with apowersoft audio converter, a complete free and dependable online software. I did attempt to convert utilizing JRiver, but the way in which the information find yourself it's important to highlight every observe to delete individually. Doesn't look like a giant deal, however after doing 5 cd's and having three of them copy the spotlight as a substitute of delete I gave up. I know that is either consumer error or finicky keyboard however both way huge amounts of labor versus dbpoweramp that when converted retains the unique ape files highlighted for simple removing. As for converting initially did not know and it was all done. APE , the Monkey's audio format withape filename extension, is lossless format with slightly better compression charges compared to different lossless compression format like FLAC and WavPack Ape audio recordsdata are appropriate with only a restricted number of digital units and working programs (in actual fact, it is just Home windows that supports Ape). FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), Monkey's Audio's important competitor, has more features and supported by many hardware units from Philips, Onkyo and Pioneer, e.t.c. If you find the compression ration is just not so necessary, then converting APE to FLAC is best answer for lossless compression, high quality in addition to functionality with players. APE can be referred to as Monkey's Audio, which is a free lossless audio compression format and might scale back the audio size to 50% of the unique and preserve the earlier high quality at the similar time. Nevertheless, APE is restricted to be officially supported on Windows working system and solely few players can acknowledge these audio format. In contrast, FLAC is a cross-platform open supply and is suitable with extra units and players. What's extra, there is no such thing as a any difference in audio quality between APE and FLAC so many individuals are inclined to transform from APE to FLAC for useful playback and broad usage. Subsequently, this text aims to introduce three practical strategies of changing APE recordsdata to FLAC without quality loss.

A buddy and I have just downloaded model 2.2.0, and tested both the 32bit model and the 64bit model, and we've found a standard downside. When utilizing the profile choice of MP3 and leaving the defaults alone, it really works and saves the audio in an MP3 format, and the listed container is indicating Containers (.mp3). The moment we change the bitrate to a better degree, either one hundred sixty or in my case 192, the output container now signifies Containers (.ts), and the resulting created file is garbled, mainly destroyed. Even if I drive the extension to MP3 by altering the container choice to All files (.)", and the file name and extension accordingly, it does not assist. I have not tested additional with other enter file codecs, but we are currently tryingmp4 andmp4a files, video recordings from our cell phones, and attempting apepack to flac free converter extract the audio solely.

[biancacelinebb-blog]

writing prompt no. three: what are some recent moments of happiness in your life?

I am a very sensitive person which makes the word “happiness” vague to me. My definition of happiness is something that only I understand. For instances, there might be happy moments that are memorable to me but are just small things to other people. I think it’s because we all have different standards. But as for me, I am a very  shallow person, at top of that a sensitive one. 

If you know me personally, the answer to this question would be a very obvious one. I forgot to write about my Taeyeon experience but it turns out this post would be half writing prompt-half concert experience post. So yeah, the recent moment of happiness in my life would have to be attending Taeyeon’s concert in Manila.

Lately, Taeyeon has been growing up on me. I think it’s because I can empathize with her. I can feel her sadness and her loneliness which are few things we have in common. I don’t know why but I feel her in so many ways to the point that I prayed for her happiness on my birthday. Anyway, I think it’s possible that my fondness of her came from me feeling pity towards her. I even just recently realized that she was my bias in SNSD lol. I always thought it was Yoona. I can only remember jamming to Genie in 2009 and waiting for updates about them but never knowing their names. Weird me. So when I came back to stanning them, Yoona became my bias-- which is not pretentious since I became a fan of her in K2 and I love the way she dances. A friend even told me the worst things about Taeyeon. I can understand where she’s coming coming from since she’s an EXO-L and we were young that time. So anyway, I believed everything my friend said to me about Taeyeon.....until I heard her laugh. I don’t even know why but I think her laugh isn’t the funniest one but to me it is. It all started with her laugh then Rain, my most favorite out of all her songs. There’s this thing going on inside my head that  when I listen to a certain song I can separate all the instruments. I don’t know but I can hear the bass separately as if it’s playing alone, the drums, the rhythm guitars, the keyboards. Maybe it’s because I’m musically inclined. Rain was and is still the most perfect song. So since then, I looked her up on Youtube everyday not knowing that she was “outbiasing” Yoona. In just a matter of days I understood her better-- why she was mean as they I said. Why she was an aloof, why she chose to put her walls up, why she became weird. It’s really weird since you can clearly see the line between 2007-2011 Taeyeon and 2012-2019 Taeyeon. Anyway, since then I always told myself that I’d watch her concert someday. It was impossible for women korean acts to take place in the Philippines. I don’t know why. We only get a bunch of boygroups. I mean SNSD came to the Philippines but it wasn’t like the solo tour one. I don’t know what the problem is so I promised myself to save up and watch her concert overseas. It was almost impossible until rumors came. Once they were slightly being confirmed, I immediately withdrew all my savings. I even sold some of my belongings. It was the first concert ticket I entirely bought for myself...since parents paid for the other concerts.

The rumors were true. Taeyeon eats CDs for breakfast. I am not even kidding. Her true voice sounds better than the recorded one. I also realized that her speaking voice was a little pitchy. Man. I had to let it sink in that I wasn’t watching her on instagram live. It was the best concert I have been to. I was in the loge section of the theater which was perfect. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t hear the first three songs but I lost it all in I Got Love. When I Got Love played, life decisions were made. It was also nerve wrecking since she was experiencing mic problems and in-ear monitor problems. We all know how meticulous she is about these stuff. It was really loud, like really loud. I think it was particularly loud in the loge and seating section. I enjoyed it so much. I didn’t want it to stop. I am very thankful for the Lord for making me live in the same era as Something New. It was the shit. This song takes me to a different dimension every time I listen to it, especially the bass guitar parts. Damn. Rain came and I was completely dead. Rain has always been my mood, I sing it out loud even when I do not know the exact lyrics. Rain will always be the superior Taeyeon song to me. Moving forward, it was fun as fuck. Watch me swear in this post when I haven’t sworn in a single writing prompt before. I saw Taeyeon’s eyes through the giant LED and I could see that she was happy. Her eyes were happy and it was enough for me. I only asked the Lord to see her happy eyes but He also even let me hear her laugh. I can say that neither I Got Love, Something New, Rain, Why, Gemini, Christmas Without You, or I were the best parts of the show. It was when she laughed with us. It was when she said we were saying nonsense for making her want to cry. It was when she forgot what she had to say. It was when she, the korean goddess herself, proclaimed that we were the funniest people. In the last three songs, I can clearly tell it was bittersweet. It was when phones started to go up rather than lightsticks. I think it was because people wanted to keep that moment. Every time a song ended, there were no screaming unlike the other songs. It was bittersweet since people didn’t want it to end. 

Taeyeon did not disappoint me. She was the best. In that small venue was my biggest memory of her. Even if I meet her again someday, it will always be the first. Filipino Sones also did not disappoint. It was funny though that almost everyone were at least at ages 18-40. It was unlike any concert I have seen before. In that venue, it’s like everyone were long time friends. I even got along with my seatmates who were also watching alone like me. I realized that when people share the same happiness, the same goal, the same love, there is unity....which on a bigger scale is hard to achieve for Filipinos. 

This is the only recent moment of happiness I can recall. After the concert, it was back to normal. Me, being lonely. It was really lonely though. I had so much fun at that concert but I had no one to share it with the moment I went home. No one in the family is into this stuff except me so I didn’t bother telling them about it. It was for me to keep anyway.

For Taeyeon, I hope she keeps on fighting. She is already brave enough for choosing to fight her demons. I hope that she will never get tired. I hope that she will only think of happy thoughts. I wish that she’d receive lots of hugs. Someday she will be there. She will get that happiness she always deserved. Until then, I hope she doesn’t give up on herself since she is a very precious human being.