Meaningless Diversions [Con-Soul Gaming - Case File 30 | Afternoon]

As stressful as the day had been there were still things to take care of and like it or not, want to or not they would need to be done. Susan found herself in the hospital waiting room once again. She needed to be examined and that was not done the first time at her insistence, only the basics were performed. A simple triage determined she did not have any immediately life-threatening injuries but it would still benefit her to have her wounds look at through practical care, they may be able to supply her with bandages, medication for the swelling in her neck, and a reference to psychiatric care now that she had the resources. Despite her orders from the Prince the businesswoman had denied them and sent an email giving her justification. She still had not slept. She was injured. And she need to assess her mental health, all of which were not going to be solved by any heart-to-heart or verbal crucifixion. While discipline in the ranks and this most recent matter were very important her well-being was in danger and she explained this, she was sure he would understand and if he did not then she would take whatever repercussions came her way in favor of getting the help she needed.

And so she sat in the waiting room, a dark cloud hovering over her weary head as she cursed anything and everything that placed her in her current circumstances. Moreover there were things other than this that needed to be done, like her work she was neglecting for this schadenfreude. Susan worked on her finances assessments with tired eyes and no joy in her heart before becoming stale of the whole thing. She minimized her projects for a quick break on her favorite forum instead, bookmarked for convenience of course. It was a tabletop gaming forum sorted through RSS feed to the ones she paid attention. She loved the games but never really got a chance to play more than a few sessions with her schedule, instead she digested the systems and became an authority on them within her small little online community.

Lazee_Susan22: It's an interesting build but it can be optimized a little. If you dip into Martial Artist for a few levels and pick up Shattering Fist you can attack with contact spells you cast as a Prep action on top of getting the stun chance. Your damage will suck because you're a mage but that isn't going to matter since you'll be getting it from the spell. The drawback is you need to have some points in Power but you can get around that with a Brute's Bandolier for 14k gold. It does the same thing at level 8 as your Warmage with the Dirty Combatant boon does at level 10.

After her most recent message, Susan would be greeted with an abrupt and strangely speedy response, the person she was talking to simply linking a PDF (presumably a character sheet). Were she to tap on it then immediately after it loaded, her screen would flood with an absurd amount of jumbled green code, an indecipherable stream of numbers and letters engulfing her entire browser and rushing down the tab while her touchscreen silently shut off. It'd be blatantly obvious to anyone who'd interacted with a tablet before that this wasn't normal by any stretch of the imagination; it was a bombastic wave of flair not unlike the kind of hacking you'd see in an outdated mediocre movie or a meme floating around the web, something that had to either a blatant display of supernatural power or an elaborate prank... or perhaps both? Regardless, while the sight might initially prove alarming, things would calm down not long after as the rapidly moving text slowed to a trickling crawl and control over the device returned to the businesswoman. Her browser would remain altered though and every tab she opened would load the same black screen, a masked figure slowly fading into sight and waving in her direction, the girl(?) hovering peacefully in a sea of code while the screen automatically began to zoom in on her head.


Most of the random text behind her would disappear and in the vacant space new words would be spelled out, the messages speedily darting in to fill the empty spot. But in spite of their swift arrival, they'd linger for a decent bit before vanishing and being replaced giving Susan a fair amount of time to read it over, likely thanks to the fact that the terrorist wasn't actually speaking aloud for her to hear. In the meantime, the rabbit-headed woman would toy with a pencil emoji while staring down at a floating sheet of paper in front of her, waiting for the woman to finish reading before proceeding to look back up at her.

As the weary woman emptily poured through her forum, going through the motions she would make a grave mistake and do exactly what she had been taught not to do through Salem Ltd.'s cyber security training: follow strange links. She hadn't even checked the expanded URL for a redirect, she just clicked it like an imbecile and was rewarded for her stupidity. At once her screen was filled with black and shifting green characters and Susan flipped. Out.


The businesswoman gasped and shook her tablet as if that would be what brings her system back to life and magically restores the past hour of work she just lost. She assumed this was some new bluescreen design and her tablet had utterly crashed, staring at it as she felt the lump growing in her throat. Susan wanted nothing more than to cry at the horrible day that would not end and was seconds from doing so until she regained control of her browser. And it did nothing. She was concerned but it appeared to be on the surface a graphics driver or graphics card failure, she could still salvage what she had if she could take the proper care with her tech department. That is until the head of a rabbit appeared.


It made perfect sense, everything finally clicked. Susan was hacked. And why would she not be? Why wouldn't ANOTHER terrible thing happen to her today of all days? She really should have expected this to be honest. In fact the businesswoman would begin to contemplate pre-filling out an insurance claim on her car for the truck that would surely sideswipe her on her way home and finding a quote from a contractor on dealing with the exploded water heater that she'd find her home half-demolished from. No, no it made perfect sense. But rather than sit and sulk and fume the short woman was the productive sort and started to get to work. She folded up one of her business cards and placed it over the front-facing camera before doing anything else, her brain beginning to lurch for solutions.

Lazee_Susan22: Frostbite because it eliminates rolls and guarantees hits which takes RNG out of strategy but that's not important, if I play your dumbass game will you unlock your stupid ransomware? I don't have time for this.

Susan was tempted to toggle her Wi-Fi connection switch but thought twice, if what she knew about ransomware was correct severing the connection would brick her system and she would need it for digital forensics. So she would need to play the game. And so the businesswoman sat in the hospital waiting room staring daggers into her computer screen and trying to explode the rabbit's head with latent psychic abilities.

"...Sheesh lady, I'm offended. I don't know what's worse: you mistaking my art for ransomware or how rude you're being right now." Con-Soul pulled at the rabbit ears at the top of her head and awkwardly fidgeted in silence for a few seconds before unceremoniously vanishing. Plain white lines would appear around the code-covered void in her place and create a crude but clear gameboard for them to play on. Then after the process was finished her head would pop up from the lower-right corner and a small box of basic information would open up at the very bottom.

Tic-Tac-Jack!:

To say that Susan was livid was an understatement. Her personal computer was her little safe haven from the outside world where she could get her work done and explore the web and research ideas. She'd been a little out of character and actually formed an emotional attachment to her tablet like one would a car or a piece of jewelry and to have someone break into it felt like a personal attack, she was not happy in the slightest. Suffice to say she was going to lose her work anyway, now that her tablet was compromised nothing could be permitted to come off of it for fear of infecting other systems. She would lose aaaaaaaall of her work and have to buy a new computer while the person responsible mocked her in front of her face. And there was nothing she could do about it. The damage had already been done.

Susan would get no catharsis from her imminent victory, but she would win all the same.

The businesswoman would retaliate as she sometimes would online: by flaming. The shroud of anonymity that the internet granted gave her a sense of freedom to act more as herself rather than within her professional facade. She could share silly stories and joke around and give heartfelt sympathies a lot more readily without anyone there that could judge her future behavior, and more importantly she could be as uncouth as she felt like acting with zero backlash. This was one of the latter times.

Lazee_Susan22: Don't like it? Leave. Your art is like an Andy Warhol painting: it's overrated, basic af and made by an autist. Make like Van Gogh and kys scrub.

It was rather unfeeling of the short woman but any sense of common decency to people who have wronged her had left her body with the gunshot wound to the head the other night. Susan would make her play but at the same time see what she had control over within her system in order to take back control or isolate the ransomware. Given her unique abilities she would have better luck removing malicious code as long as she could find it. She started by trying to run Task Manager to check which unmanaged processes were running.


Lazee_Susan22: I moved. Play your stupid game.

Susan's flaming would be met with silence. The only real sign of Con-Soul's continued presence from there was the intentive staring of the rabbit mask and the subsequent placement of a piece after the Cadet made her move. Nothing would stop her from opening Task Manager either, although when she did she'd be greeted by only one "program", a rather strange looking piece of software with an overly long name. If she so wished she could attempt to close it but that was her decision to make and no messages would prod her toward or against it (excluding the name listed itself).

Susan expected some kind of push-back, push-back that never happened and that alone was telling. It meant the rabbit was doing something instead of making retorts and it made her question her approach but if it came down to a battle of wits she would need to come out as the successor. The situation with T would not happen again, she would not be outwitted but some 3rd rate script kiddie. The board moved and Susan prepped her next move but would continue to seek options. Her eyes fell on Task Manager. She bit her fingernails in frustration. Of course it was disabled, she was a moron for thinking it would not be. She chewed on her cuticles as she began to contemplate her other next move, the one involving her tablet being compromised.


Lazee_Susan22: Adorable.

In the meantime Susan would attempt a few more actions on her tablet: opening up Command Prompt and seeing if she could open Notepad from there. She had a hunch to go off of and if this worked it would cripple this entire attack.

Susan's attempts would work, albeit not without some delays. The system would slow down inexplicably and for a moment everything but the background and Con-Soul would be frozen, however, eventually the loading time would give way and Notepad would open while the rabbit-headed girl shrugged in the background. When it did appear on the screen Susan would actually find herself able to type in it normally (if she so desired) and it would appear things were almost completely the same as they'd usually be for it... save for the fact that Con-Soul was able to grab a hold of the box and idly shake it, adjusting it slightly in position before letting go, the software snapping back into place the second she released her grip from its lower corner.

Despite being frustrated at the situation Susan would find herself engaged. The strategical element of this exchange made her pensive as she assessed her objectives.

1.) Regain control of her tablet.
1A.) Regain control of her tablet without locking it down in ransomware.
2.) Isolate the security breach so that a countermeasure could be implemented for next time.

While she was an analyst Susan was familiar with this process and sometimes worked in the vicinity of the security technicians in her company when a concern will impact a timetable. Being who she was she sought to learn about certain measures, and she did know what a Zero Day attack was and how valuable it would be to create a solution and apply it to the enterprise. So she began to think. The slowness and manipulation worried her, Notepad should not slow down the system for being a small program and whoever this person is should not be able to play with her programs like she was. She suspected it was simulated, not an actual Notepad window. Just a shell. Which would make her plan useless. Susan thought on the matter some more before making a move and opening an empty PowerShell window.


Susan would then lay out one of her business cards and begin to scribble notation on it for easy reference.

PowerShell would open, but the same delay that occurred with Notepad would happen once more, even lasting a bit longer than before. Unlike with Notepad, Susan would find herself unable to type things in normally, however...

Yet another delay, this one more substantial. Understandable of course, Powershell was a more robust program. She tapped her finger in irritation as she expected the obvious result, being that her program would be interfered with somehow. As anticipated indeed it was, though not in a way she expected. To be honest, under lighter circumstances Susan would have laughed at the oldest copypasta in existence but given her predicament the businesswoman was livid. And that was before the mention of Psyche Terrorist.


The short woman had actually let out a small growl upon reading it. She wasn't afraid. Fear did not register, only loathing. On reflex Susan popped the SD card slot, prepared to rip it out and halt this little game but she paused and thought twice. Her knuckles grew white on her tablet and she took a deep, shaky breath. This could all be solved with proper planning and assessment, whoever this was likely had all of her data already so that could be considered a loss. There was damage in that but none grave and none pointed at the government, this was her work tablet. At best the hacker had access to company portfolios and plans and all of her work damnit. But this could be fixed...! She would... just need to come up with a strategy. That would do.

No input registered on the tablet as the gears in Susan's mind whirred faster, she had to think carefully about her approach considering her last one would not likely work. Whatever victory she had would be small but important. Susan took out her phone and played with it, ensuring that its tethering was off and she was going through the cell towers and not wifi or blutooth so she couldn't get hijacked from her tablet. The two devices may have been hers but they were two completely separate entities, the odds of both of them becoming compromised were slim however her name would be known and she could be searched through that. It would be a matter of time. The first thing she did was take a picture of the tablet screen on her phone for evidence, being time-sensitive. The second thing she did was pause more to think.

It was likely that these weren't real programs but simulated programs that were being produced by the hacker, meaning it could be reasonable that she could do nothing but watch. All input seemed to be filtered before being allowed to go through and she might be trapped but in the off-chance she was not she could take back control with her strategy, but must consider the option that this was not true and she would have to operate within the boundaries of the simulation. Susan chewed more on her nails in agitation, calling upon her knowledge of the industry she could use to win the upperhand in this situation without further compromising herself. One of the ideas available to her was mutually assured destruction but she could not perform that one. Through tethering her phone to her tablet she could download a virus and completely eradicate this end of the connection and give the hacker some grief as it flooded her own hijack attempt with malware, they would have no choice but to sever the connection to save themselves. But this would also complicate whatever remained of the original leak and she would need to recover it, so this was out of the question. She could not destroy her own tablet, she would need its data. She had to free herself from outside control somehow.

Susan would make her move while simultaneously taking more notation from her phone. As she did this she would attempt to open maneuver to her Notepad window and type in a message.

Did you just think that you could fucking fool me with that trick of yours? I've searched your name up in the leaderboards and you have never even hit the top ten, hell, even gotten over a 1.0 win rate. If you were actually a hacker, then you would actually know how to play a game that doesn't end in draw literally all of the time, you fucking moron. And you say you are the best Psyche Terrorist in all of Endymion and have over 300 confirmed victories. If that were true, then why the fuck is Joker a household name and you aren't? And plus he only had 160 victories. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. Plus why the fuck would you say you have a secret network bestest buddies yet you just revealed that you're a fucking forever alone NEET? Are you a fucking idiot? If you can beat someone in over 700 different ways, then list them all, I bet you can't even understand we're already in stalemate. And if you had access to your entire ROM collection, then why the fuck are you playing tic-tac-toe? If only you could have done your research prior to performing your little “clever” hack, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you goddamn idiot.

Susan would then save this file to her Desktop under the name FakeNGay.txt.

Con-Soul's ears would twitch and droop in confusion as she looked over the response. For the first time in a while, she'd take to directly communicating in the play-area as she had at the start, green text being scrawled above her head that'd go through several on-the-fly revisions in the midst of it all before it finally fell motionlessly into place for Susan to more easily read. "Well I don't expect you to get it. It's not about the kind of game, it's... well whatever, someone like you wouldn't understand."

So she could save her Notepad file. This was fantastic news. A function she could call could produce a program which could affect changes within the (likely) virtual environment. If this were in fact a virtual environment it would make this much worse for the hacker, but Susan still needed to pull it off. She took another sighing breath as she made her final move and decided to respond.


Lazee_Susan22: I understand fine. Blankenship calls you a poser fyi.

With her last "educational" taunt Susan would look over her notes and launch her own counterattack. It was stupid and cocky to even give her Command Prompt and this would end in suffering for one of them. Susan touched her tablet and immediately generated a text string designed for a specific purpose. It would place some commands and a host of garbage text in a Notepad file and export it to a batch file, then run that batch file. And the batch file would do the same thing, it would create a new batch file filled with text and then execute the new batch file, which would fill yet another file with garbage and so on and so forth. Her intent with this was to create a runaway process that would quickly fill the hard drive if it could not be stopped. If on her own tablet then it would prevent any more data from being saved on it, possibly leading to a crash unless it was running in RAM and not creating anything in which she could have a diagnostic computer pick apart the pieces. But if run in a virtual environment it would begin to eat into the resources of the virtual computer, breaking it and releasing her control back to her own desktop. Or freezing it. Much safer than willing installing a virus but not without its own risks. But only if it worked.

Susan pressed Enter and crossed her fingers.

Soul Skill:

Yellow orbs flickered into being piercing the beady blackness of the hare's eyes. They'd only appear for a split second, but with Susan's focus peeled to her tablet she'd no doubt catch it, the first and only sign of any genuine anger emanating from what was an otherwise innately non-expressive terrorist. Yet that fury vanished as soon as it came and Con-Soul would only watch passively as the swarm of commands and recurring scripts went through unchallenged. Ultimately, however, Susan would notice nothing different in the digital playroom; even the sequence itself would stop after its initial rapid repeats as cause was severed from effect and the script ceased to incite any further reactions from the seemingly still active device. Naturally though, her efforts hadn't gone unnoticed, and in spite of the tablet's sudden refusal to cooperate with normal commands the "hacker" would reach up from her corner and with a quick tap open up one of the files where the copied script rested. Then she reached over to touch the text and in an instant erased it. The screen cut to black for a moment and when it returned all would be as it previously was prior to the countermeasures... save for the fact that a new board was in place with all the previous pieces removed.


True to her word, Susan would find herself completely unable to interact with the tablet's typical features. Programs, new tabs, even messages through the chat to the rabbit herself: all of it was locked off and inaccessible to the businesswoman besides the ability to place pieces inside the game... through normal means that is. If nothing else, she had a perfect avenue for continuing to taunt the rabbit if she wished, though that trick certainly wouldn't go unnoticed under these new circumstances.

The businesswoman held her breath as she watched her script initiate and begin to run, her grip on the tablet becoming just a bit tighter after it passed each phase. It was allowed to run. It was allowed to replicate and clone itself. And it would continue to do so. But she finally did feel fear when she witnessed the flash of glowing eyes and the fury seeping through the digital text. Susan stifled a gasp and gave herself the hiccups in turn. She just... had to remind herself that it was all a computer program. This was a jump scare designed to frighten, it could not do any more damage than her hijacked data and lost tablet. However, there was the unknown factor. That this hacker could be a Psyche Terrorist as they claimed. That they were capable of more than they appeared. She would need to remain conscious of this and her mind searched for any and all reason and information that could be fed to it in order to find useful information. A hacker was a hacker was a hacker, Psyche Terrorist or simple Cyber Terrorist. She would be sure to take video on her phone of the events after making certain it was in airplane mode. There wasn't much she could do to ensure there wasn't a breach but she would take all precautions she knew she could.

Susan's jaw dropped as her script began to fly through its process, a small smile curling at the sides of her mouth. It was a minor but important victory. The tablet froze. It could not be locked down if it were frozen, diagnostic software could then be used to recover the details of the hack and a countermeasure could be implemented. There was no way to prevent what already happened but even in failure she could find a way to salvage a win. The ghost of Susan's smile all hung and then disappeared as the rabbit-masked figure then took to interacting with her desktop. She had to try herself before believing the hacker, and she couldn't do anything. She could feel tightness in her chest with a combination of the hiccups and frustration. It was a completely virtualized and controlled environment as she had initially thought, she could not have performed any meaningful action at any point.

To say that this made Susan upset was an understatement. The short woman had become so frustrated she wanted to cry. She ground her teeth in agitation. Susan was sick of being harassed and outsmarted and placed in no-win situations. She bit her knuckles hard enough to make them bleed. There wasn't any escape from distress and it had warn her nerves to the center, like a dry socket from a root canal with nothing more to protect it from the violent agony of the slightest disruption. But still she would try to salvage this, to discern motive.

No input came from the tablet for a good while. Until a piece was placed.