#en route to evernight

[etruatcaelum]

[ @likemosaic | coco // salem ]

Darkness falls before Salem gathers the will to ascend from the subterranean chambers again, leaving Cinder to her fitful and feverish rest. She isn’t certain how long, from mid-morning to the night or whether days might have spilled unnoticed through her fingers while she worked, but the hour must be late enough for even Arthur to have gone to bed. The house is still and almost, almost all asleep.

Save one among her three new… guests. They crowd close to each other in the north gallery: two auras tense but dimmed by slumber and a third scratching fear into the walls. Salem pauses at the top of the stairs with half a mind to wake—Hazel, she supposes, is the one she’d expect to have taken the initiative—to express her displeasure. But practical consideration overrules that small impulse to be petty, and she sets off to the gallery herself.

Cinder had asked to take on an apprentice. One. Perhaps Salem should have clarified that her forbearance wasn’t an open invitation for Cinder to begin collecting, but… well. There is nothing to be done about it now.

She walks the pitch-dark halls in absolute silence, footsteps unerring—even the vestigial habit of discomfort in blindness has long since decayed from her—but her mind still wandering the caverns below. (Silver eyes. Tension passes over her in a wave, hands clenching and unclenching with impotent rage. Guarding his fortress with ever-younger children–)

Enough. What’s done is done.

Jaw tight, Salem prowls into the gallery. Moonlight bleeds through the high windows, stained in bruised and sanguine hues by the colored glass; Cinder’s little accomplices have taken shelter in one of the shadowed alcoves beneath the windows. Terror scabs over the old stones, thorny.

Her lips thin. She folds her arms behind her back as she scrutinizes the rigid lines of the girl’s posture, the two sleeping forms huddled in deeper shadow behind her. “There are,” Salem says at last, flatly, “bedrooms in my house, you realize.”

[bestworstcase]

but the thing is “ironwood might be able to contact vacuo” wasn’t the concern at all—he could have done that at any point, international communication wasn’t made impossible by the fall of beacon, just more difficult and less efficient. likewise nothing about the material realities of the global situation required ironwood to blockade his own airspace or place an embargo on dust exports to his own allies (and ironwood himself admits readily that he used the nonexistent threat of invasion by another kingdom as a pretext for recalling his entire fleet home in preparation for using the military to stifle unrest and deal with the grimm after he revealed salem’s existence). all of that came from his own paranoia.

( it also probably bears repeating here that salem believes ozpin has a plan. this is established early in v4; salem seems to be working from the incorrect assumption that ozpin is proactively trying to accomplish something, not merely scrambling to keep the relics away from her. so her concern isn’t just that ironwood might request some form of general aid from vacuo, it’s that ironwood might stop screwing up ozpin’s plan and get in touch with theodore. )

anyway, the reason salem sends watts and tyrian to atlas is she learns that ozpin has returned much faster than she expected him to and is en route to atlas with the lamp. that’s the information she has. the fear is that ozpin might snap ironwood out of his paranoia and get ozpin’s plan back on track, so she diverts her attention to atlas and sends watts and tyrian in to turn up the heat on ironwood, keeping him paranoid and irrational while she readies for siege. the whole scheme is emotional warfare calculated to make ironwood feel persecuted, solely so that he won’t listen when ozpin tries to reason with him.

the material existence of a comms satellite is sort of beside the point, because as long as ironwood stays paranoid and irrational nothing he does will be to ozpin’s benefit. it’s a secondary concern, at best.

it’s true that nobody on team salem is aware of the satellite project until ironwood announces it to bait out watts. i… don’t think there’s any possible way they could have known until watts arrived in mantle, at the earliest, because global communications are down; connectivity between evernight and infected atlesian technology would have been lost when beacon tower fell, leaving watts in the dark.

then amity is brought back to atlas, the network vulnerabilities exploited by the virus patched, and the virus itself either scrubbed or effectively corralled within amity’s system, unable to cross over into the atlesian network. under ironwood’s auspices, work on the satellite project begins in deepest secrecy—work that predominantly involves building the hardware, something watts would really only have visibility into if he specifically went looking for it, which he didn’t, because he took the cover story about a “remodeling” of the colosseum at face value and ignored it.

but.

consider the first two things we learn, in v7, about the current state of the atlas network:

1. security updates were made to the atlesian network, but not to the network in mantle.

2. watts has the exact same control over the mantle network that he did over vale.

he may have found an access point in mantle and infected the system with another copy of the same virus, certainly… or he may have realized that amity was still infected after his scroll reconnected to it upon arrival and done the obvious thing, immediately checking to see whether the file sharing vulnerability had been patched—which it had. in atlas. not in mantle.

the virus might have told him some changes were made to the code amity itself runs on, but… like amity already had broadcasting capabilities, yeah? it was literally built to televise the tournament. the idea behind building a relay tower on top of the arena was that they could use the broadcast software that the colosseum already had, so even if watts saw some minor adjustments made to that code i don’t think it would have been at all obvious why. (atlas does not strike me as having the kind of programmer culture where people are leaving helpful explanatory comments in their code kshdks)

so in this scenario he’d use amity as his access point into the mantle network—more convenient than dodging cameras and drones until he could find a terminal, ya know—and then just… ignore it, because it’s irrelevant. and that’s how ironwood “gets it past him.” can’t catch what you’re not looking for, and watts was focused on accessing the atlesian network to maximize the chaos he could cause.

it isn’t until ironwood reveals the satellite project that watts becomes interested in amity, at which point he goes to check out the new hardware—and then, well. watts did not have time to install a new virus. he walked in, gave the new construction a cursory glance, and didn’t touch ANYTHING before ironwood interrupted him.

and yet he has full control over the arena.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

what’s interesting to me about watts checking out the colosseum is what he actually says about the new construction. “hmm. this will certainly do the trick… although i wouldn’t exactly call it finished.” & then, once he thinks ironwood is down for the count and he’s gone back to whatever he intended to do originally, “now where did they put them?”

i… don’t think he was there to do anything to amity’s code. it really seems to me like he was interested in the hardware.

he might have gone out there intending to sabotage it in some way—break something critical so the relay tower would fail once the satellite launched, maybe—out of the assumption that salem wouldn’t want global comms to go up again. (it’s worth noting here that watts probably didn’t report back to salem to get new instructions after learning about the satellite; she gives her agents a lot of leeway as long as they’re making her goals their priority, and she was otherwise engaged piloting a giant grimm whale at the time. it’s not like she carries a scroll hakfbdkg) OR, it’s the opposite, and watts took it as a given that salem would want to hijack the satellite for her own use and intended to personally confirm that it would work as advertised before he told her about it.

in any case, salem learns about the satellite project within an hour or two at most before her arrival in atlas—if not from watts, then from tyrian once he reported in on monstra. by that point, watts has been captured and the satellite project stalled by the urgent issue of salem’s arrival. her foremost goals are to 1. wring the lamp’s password out of ozpin so she can find out where and how he hid the crown of choice, and 2. retrieve the staff of creation. it is… not clear whether she intended to drop atlas after getting the staff or not, as that depends on 1. how valuable a city’s worth of hostages would have been to her, and 2. if she planned to use the staff at all and if she’d bother to take the intermediary step of lowering atlas safely first if she did, which really is a question of whether she left vale and mistral alone after getting what she wanted with their academies (ozpin dead/lamp out of the vault) out of apathy or out of a desire to minimize unnecessary collateral damage; but conceivably had salem gotten everything she wanted here the end result would’ve been two relics, a city of hostages, and the entire global comms system under her control as a tasty bonus as soon as she sprung watts out of jail to launch amity.

like—*waves hands* by the time salem finds out about the satellite project at all it’s not being actively worked on anymore, but as far as she knows it’s ready to go whenever. the obvious thing to do here is leave it as-is until she’s secured the relics, then launch the thing herself or get watts to remotely hijack it if the kids manage to pull off launching it themselves in the interim, and given salem orders cinder not to go to amity that… really seems to be precisely what salem does?

………amity colosseum was infected by watts’ virus during the battle of beacon

and then atlas brought it home

and ironwood was gonna convert it into a global communications satellite

pietro in v7 states the atlesian network received security updates—presumably to close vulnerabilities exploited by the beacon virus—but he makes no mention of scrubbing the virus out of amity.

the beacon virus, to all appearances, exploited some kind of file-sharing tool to hitch rides from infected devices to uninfected ones—this is how it jumped from the infected network access point in ozpin’s office to ironwood’s uninfected scroll—so, even though amity was connected to the atlas network (re: passing request for launch authorization to ironwood’s terminal), the virus may not have been able to exploit that connection, particularly if the file sharing vulnerability was patched

but there’s a Not Insignificant possibility that amity itself was still. infected with the beacon virus the whole time

which sure does add a layer to salem wanting the satellite launch to succeed 😶