Attracting Attention [Mood]

[FadedNoel]

Finally, Grace's honey-pot of online sci-fi managed to lure in what she was hoping for. Probably. Maybe. The Adversary, as she's come to term the nameless Mage(s) who have contacted her in similarly oblique fashion -- well, they haven't gotten violent or too mean. Yet.

It all started with a couple of messages she received on her writing blog -- some fans who were concerned about L. Marshall garnering a copycat. Someone out there also professed to be L. Marshall, writer of science fiction, and called Grace's current site their old one. This someone also sells PDF copies of her stories on Amazon...

Well, attention gotten, good sir.

Of course, it's not as simple as all that, is it? Grace could feel the Work of another Mage behind these sites. Just reading certain sentences was enough to trigger... something. A shattering thing, ever-changing, almost formless in its shifting forms.

So she decided to do the reasonable thing and hack them. In a car. In Aurora -- because like hell she's going to lead someone potentially dangerous back to a place or a person she knows.

Kalen decided to do the reasonable thing and bring a survival kit and guns to the party.

And it was a party. Kalen even danced. And then they got chased off the street by a guy weilding a hockey stick while yelling at them, saying they were perverts.

And she got a prize out of the thing, namely the contents of L. Marshall's Fallacy -- a forum of some sort, password-protected (easy peazy to crack, Adversary).

However, just as she sat down to digest the forum's contents, to really get into what this person (people?) have been saying on it, her phone buzzed. Blinked the light that means she got a text...

Greetings Grace Evans,
You have been randomly selected to test your 1337 skillz against The Wall, a complex encryption code designed to see if you have what it takes to work with a group of super-elite internet-freebooters. You have two weeks to break this encryption W/O the aid of electronics. To make sure you follow the rules, in sixty seconds any electronic device you attempt to use will shut down for the duration of the trial. This device will self-destruct in three seconds.

Three seconds later, just when Grace was pondering the likelihood of her phone actually exploding (and the battery, it would melt flesh, so...) she got another text.

Ha, just kidding. Wink Good luck! --anrkyangel

Anrkyangel? The Wall? Super-elite internet-freebooters!? But what? Doing it without the aid of electronics?

Just then, her phone screen flashed the word "NOPE" and died.

Panic. The heart, it races.

"No no no no no..."

Her laptop did the same.

Radios, televisions, calculators, anything with a digital screen -- NOPE.

"Oh you have got to be kidding me..."

[FadedNoel]

As much as her adversary might know about her, Grace doesn't suspect that they will know about Kalen's warehouse. It's a safe place. Safer than her apartment anyway, a place that she knows she's been tracked to.

So it's to her office (which Kalen had painted deep cobalt blue, festooned with silver stars in familiar constellations because he's Kalen) that she retreats -- with three build-your-own calculator kits, wire, current testing equipment, magnets, batteries...

Essentially, she's going to sit there and watch closely as each one of those calculators nopes out on her. She's going to prod them for their secrets one by one until they give up the code she's meant to crack.

That takes two days, all told.

The code itself takes longer.

Encryption is a process by which one turns normal text into the seemingly random, by the application of mathematical formulae. The best ones would take a computer hundreds of years to calculate. And computer calculations are measured in teraflops (A 'flop' being one calculation, say 4.6334 / 52.3523, and a 'tera' being a trillion of them. A second). This is why it all seems so utterly useless to do by hand, you understand.

But not all is lost. Brute force is but one way to handle a code like this. Thinking smarter about it might work better. And indeed...

5 days later, after filling up an entire notebook with scribbled figures, Grace gets a message, readable after all that work.

"960 s colorado blvd photography sorcerer stone hard cover pg 278 ln 10 do not use own copy do not ebook or you fail"

In the photography section of the Barnes and Noble at 960 S Colorado Blvd, there was a copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. It was meant for her. On page 278, there's a post-it note with the text "FOR G'S EYES ONLY" and the symbols for Correspondence and Prime. Line 10 reads "HAVE YOU GONE MAD?" Ron bellowed. "ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?"

Consulting with Kalen about the symbols (because Grace is a n00b who knows nothing of spheres and their alchemical representations) reveals the trial at hand. She must do magic. And she must do it without using her computer.

Imfuckingpossible. Whoever this is must be some kind of neo-Luddite. Some anti-technology maniac, trying to teach her not to use such evil devices. Surely, that has to be it.

Kalen says that she is a witch, and she can start a fire without wood whenever she feels like it (to use a metaphor from that story in the Harry Potter book).

So, she takes the thing back to her office in a huffy mood. And tries. Hard.

It's like attempting to tell a cat what to do sometimes, getting the universe to respond. And that's when she had her favored tools. The only way she can think of to possibly tap into the Source Code is to let it come to her. The concept she focuses on is how her brain and the rest of the universe are not separate entities. They are one. She can think the code if she tries, and is a brain not a calculating thing? She proved that herself with all those figures.

It takes time, effort, and much trial and error to open her mind up enough, to begin to see the code behind her eyelids, to focus on it and pry the secrets out. But it works.

When she opens her eyes at last, the post-it note is glowing with hidden text, laced with Primal energy. Grace shakes with the excitement of it all. Could this be the end? It looks like her handwriting, almost. Nigh illegible. It reads:
"GRATZ!"
"Only those who dare to fail greatly"
"can ever achieve greatly - Robert F Kennedy"

There are several glowing numbers written there as well, numbers she flips to in the book, and on those pages more hidden text resides.

"Alright, sweetheart, it's time for the final hurdle. Good luck!"

She slams the book shut. Kalen might freak out and come running, but she doesn't much care right now. She's going to scream. It's not a scream of fear or pain or anything. It's bloody murder. This isn't over.