#so i try messing around with my laptop first. mostly with the audio drivers to see if can update/roll back

[snorfbin]

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[crystalninjaphoenix]

Chaos Theory

Part Two

(Here, have Jackie solving puzzles. That’s all this part is.)

The city buses stopped running at eleven each night, which meant when Jackie arrived at a bus stop at 12:32am he wasn’t even going to entertain the idea of taking a ride back to his apartment. Besides, even if they did run this late, he doubted any bus driver would give a ride to the city vigilante, which he was easily identifiable as while wearing this suit.

He sat down on the bench, using the light from the streetlights to see while he tore open the cardboard box. The laptop inside was clunkier than the most recent models, and it didn’t have a brand label on it anywhere. When he pried it open, there was a yellow sticky note on the screen, with a message made from letters cut out from a newspaper: The password is your birthday, year and all. 6 digits.

“Oh great. Psycho knows my birthday, got a real stalker here,” Jackie muttered to himself as he powered up the computer. A hysterical smile twisted his face. “What else does he know? My shoe size? My underwear color?” He let loose a small giggle as he typed his birthday into the slot for the password: 100790.

PASSWORD INCORRECT flashed on the screen. Jackie blinked, then reentered the series of numbers, slower. The same message popped up. Jackie leaned back against the bench. Were there more numbers? No, the note said six. Then it hit him. He typed in 071090. The lock screen disappeared, the desktop loading up. Jackie breathed a sigh of relief. Stupid backwards American dates. Stupid American creep getting him to play this twisted game.

Speaking of that guy, he said the first set of puzzles would be in the files. Jackie went to pull off his glove so he could use the mousepad on the laptop before remembering he already took it off. He shrugged, then gave the screen’s desktop a once-over. Mostly empty, except for a few shortcuts on the desktop, including one for Google Chrome. The background picture was a blank red screen that kind of hurt Jackie’s eyes to look at. The only thing pinned to the taskbar was the file explorer, so Jackie clicked on that.

After exploring the files, he found there was a single zip folder in the Documents named “Set 1.” After unzipping it, he found it contained two files: 1.txt and 1.ogg.

Wait, wasn’t .ogg an audio file? Did he dare risk playing whatever message this...gamemaster left for him while in a public place? Sure, it was midnight and the streets were empty as far as he could see, but you never knew...and then Jackie noticed the pair of white earbuds sitting in the box next to the laptop. He closed his eyes and sighed, then plugged the earbuds in and put them on.

The laptop came with an audio player installed, which he clicked on, uploading the 1.ogg file. He pressed play and—

“Jesus fuck!” Jackie yanked out the earbuds, instinctively leaning back against the wave of distorted sound that had blasted his ears. He hurried to press pause on the sound. “What the shhhhhit was that?” He hissed.

He decided to come back to that later, opening the 1.txt file with notepad. Inside was empty, except for a url: 6368616f737468656f7279.com. Jackie frowned, then opened the Internet browser, copy-pasting the url into the search bar.

The webpage that popped up was blank white except for a single line of text: Enter Password with a space to type something.

“Are you fucking—?!” Jackie set the laptop on the bench and stood up, walking a few circles around the bench and pulling on his fingers while he tried to calm down. “Okay. Okay, focus. Think, Jackie. Get into that zone. What could the password be? Where could I find it?”

After a few minutes of walking, something occurred to him. That distorted audio. First, what was the point of it? Why include it if it wasn’t important to the puzzle? And second, he’d heard a lot of distorted audio before. This didn’t sound like random white noise. It sounded like something that had been a normal audio file, but had been tampered with.

So, stands to reason that there would be a way to un-tamper it. And maybe...there would be a message once the puzzle was unscrambled. Jackie took a deep breath, then sat back down and grabbed the laptop again.

The computer’s audio player had settings to edit the file with. After speeding up the sound, playing with the pitch, and reversing the audio, he had it sounding almost recognizable. In fact, it sounded familiar...Jackie pressed the earbuds closer. He knew this song. “What is this?” he muttered. He racked his brains, flapping his wrist to help him think. Come on, he definitely knew it...

“Lone Digger!” He finally shouted. “Yea!” He punched the air. The song was by Caravan Palace, who were absolutely fantastic. Jackie wasn’t usually one for electro swing, but he liked them. He actually recommended them to JJ the other day—

Jackie froze. Oh. JJ.

On the one hand, the gamemaster could’ve chosen the song at random. On the other, if this guy knew who his friends were...how many conversations could he have overheard? What if the song choice meant something?

Jackie checked the time on the laptop clock. 12:41am. He had five hours and nineteen minutes left. That sounded like such a short amount of time. He took a deep breath. The night felt a lot colder than it had even a few moments before.

He’d done his best to clear up the distortion in the song, but there were still some odd random noises. Maybe there was another program to help with that. He scanned the shortcuts on the desktop. A visualizer program? He opened it, then loaded his editted version of the 1.ogg file. There were a few filters he could turn on, and he began messing about with them. When he turned on the spectrogram, he sat up straight. Numbers had suddenly appeared in the visual representation of the sound file. 1031, it read.

Jackie switched back over to the strange website, entering 1031 in the spot for the password. After a few seconds when he waited with baited breath, the page changed from the password screen to a map, along with a sidebar with some text along the left of the screen. He recognized the area the map was showing: a spot in the west side of the city, a historic section. The map had no markers. But the sidebar with text could hold some answers. Three questions were written there.

Jackie took a deep breath, fingers drumming on the bench next to him. This area wasn’t too close, but if he ran, he should get there within thirty minutes. Okay. He was doing good on time. He could do this. He deliberately pushed away the voice in his head reminding him of the stakes of the game, reading through the questions.

1. Q: What is the shortest blade a knife can have and still be brought to a public gathering, as of current city laws?

A: _ inches

2. Q: How many letters are there in the British Sign Language Alphabet?

A: 2_

3. Q: What year was the first film with sound released?

A: 192_

Okay. If Jackie had any doubts about who he was trying to save for the first set, they had now been erased. His stomach was full of worms, but he pushed them down farther and calmly opened another tab on the browser.

He had to Google the city laws on knives, and then open up a converter for metric system to American system, but he found the answer easily enough. He didn’t need Google for the second question; it was technically a trick. If you were talking letters and not signs in general, there were the same number of letters as the spoken and written English alphabet. He did have to look up the last one, though.

(3) inches. 2(6) letters. 192(7).

367.

Jackie examined the map on the screen again. There, an address in the area: 367 Studio Blvd, a street appropriately named as an old film studio was located there. In fact, the studio’s address was 367.

The time was 12:49am.

The clock was tick, tick, ticking.

Jackie slammed the laptop shut. He knew how to get there. He was fast, and he had the stamina to run for a while. He packed the computer and its earbuds back into the cardboard box, then stood up.

“Hang on, Jays. I’m coming,” he whispered. And then he ran.