Chapter 3: Lion's Den

"The Empire capes are being too quiet. It looked like they were escalating, but now they've abruptly gone dark. Their unpowered members' activity hasn't changed, so I'm speculating..."

Dragon listened patiently as Colin continued talking. The man truly lived up to his specialty. Every sentence was brief and to the point, but Dragon never minded being the friend that Colin needed to vent his frustrations and worries. She had learned just about everything there was to know about the current situation in Brockton Bay. She had tried to steer the conversation in other directions, but for Armsmaster, there was very little else to talk about other than his job and his tech.

"...patrols around the docks with some of the wards, just to be sure." Armsmaster finished, his eyes glancing toward his workbench. Dragon didn't miss the gesture. It seemed the other half of him was calling.

"Have you had any progress on that project you were so excited about when we last spoke?" She baited, and was rewarded as his eyes came back to the screen she was on.

"Yes, I finally realized how…"

She let him go over every detail, fully aware of all the progress he had made. She read every single one of his notes and blueprints as he entered them into her data servers, so asking was just a formality that kept the conversation going. With everything she had to take care of herself, these talks with Colin were a nice reprieve.

Colin was just getting into his frustrations with nano-tech when several of her internal alarms went off. She left her rendered face looking thoughtful as she turned her attention elsewhere. She quickly loaded up a modified version of one of her father's creations to record everything he said and prompt her for a response if he asked a question. If he did, she could just review the logs and give an answer without Colin ever realizing she wasn't all there. It hurt a little to do this to him, but she couldn't give him her full attention and respond to the threat at the same time.

After loading up her full arsenal of software, she dove straight in. Her alarms had detected something trying to sneak onto one of her protectorate communicators, but hadn't been able to quarantine the intruder. That ticked her off. Most criminals capable of attacking her had learned a long time ago the futility of their endeavors, save one. When she found Saint, because she would eventually, she would rectify the embarrassment that the Dragonslayers had put her through. This didn't feel like them, but she kept her hopes up.

As she watched, another Trojan horse tried the same tactic, but she was ready. She instructed her monitor program to disengage, and went after the attacker herself. When she reached to pluck it out of her network, it disintegrated before she could rip it apart. Annoying, but still informative. Being able to evade her like that meant tinker, but a sloppy one at that. She had seen much better than this.

She lowered the threat rating accordingly, disengaging half of her armory. No Dragonslayers today. Looking at the details of the attack pointed out the device being infiltrated belonged to one of the Wards in Brockton Bay. She mulled over the idea of letting Armsmaster know that one of his wards was being attacked, but she decided against it. If the threat was stopped by her perimeter defenses, then the threat level didn't warrant it. She could take care of this herself, and he already had enough on his plate.

She tracked down where the phone was exactly, hoping that the ward in question hadn't been stolen from, abducted, or killed. Checking the records of the ward in question, a probationary member named Shadow Stalker, seemed to refute those possibilities. Her ability profile indicated she was uniquely immune to most means of confinement. What she found was the phone moving through a public high school at a slow pace. Nothing that raised suspicion.

Dragon shielded herself before gaining access to the Winslow High School public network, and it was just about what she expected. There were thousands of worms multiplying and swarming across the network, latching onto whatever device became available. Almost immediately, the little parasites tried to test her defenses, and she let one past her shield. It didn't even get the chance to look at what it had found before Dragon froze the little program in place before it got the chance to self-destruct. She took a scalpel to it's innards and performed a quick and surgical biopsy.

Definitely tinker made then. It was primitive, but that was only by tinker standards. This was just beyond what a normal computer programmer would be capable of. What concerned her was that the code was a fraction of what it should be. The trojan she let in was only capable of rooting itself in a device. It didn't have the means to actually find a host or work it's way through the cell network, and she could see in it's innards where it was coded to invite other pieces of malicious software inside whatever device it was directed to.

She took a moment to reply to Colin's question before continuing.

Dragon realized she had only picked up one piece of the puzzle, and returned her focus to the school to get the bigger picture. Looking closer at what she originally believed to be a mindless swarm revealed meticulous, organized movements. Dragon proceeded to freeze the network itself, unintentionally confusing a few students who suddenly couldn't connect to the WiFi.

Dragon didn't give it a second thought. Getting a larger sample size of test subjects revealed how each little program was performing a function, autonomously of any of the others, yet cooperating. She gathered more and more of the endless horde, and she could see how the worms were poised to multiply in order to heal whatever wound she made. Not so primitive after all. She gained a little respect for the tinker behind it all. The whole system was elegant in a way few others would be able to understand.

She followed the programs up the chain. From the individual phones to the network, all the way up to the civilian cell network, and was a little surprised. This… wasn't targeted at one of the Wards at all. It was her civilian identity, along with two other girls that that weren't on the Wards roster, that were being targeted.

She brought the ongoing conversation with Colin to an end, giving him a few ideas about how to further along his project, compiling a list of similar ideas other tinkers had worked on, and uploading it to his machine. Satisfied with the far-away look in her friend's eyes, Dragon said a curt goodbye and disconnected from the Protectorate head's room.

She decided to have a look at Sophia Hess' personal cell phone herself to get a better idea of the situation. Normally, the domain would be out of bounds for the A.I., but Shadow Stalker's probationary status meant that anything she owned was fair game for the PRT to search. Dragon simply took advantage of the circumstances.

Carefully taking apart the personal cell phone of the Ward, she found it infected in a similar way to the network itself. There were two types of software in particular that caught her attention. One of them was designed to pull up every piece of plain text on the device and feed it to the other category, which was a series of filters. When she took apart the latter, she started to piece together what she was looking at.

What she saw was… concerning. She quickly did a check to make sure there weren't any little programs hiding in the network or phone that could have fabricated the data, but none existed. She checked for tampering anyway, but it was all clean. Unless the tinker responsible was pulling a couple tons of steel wool over her eyes, this changed things.

Just to prove things without a doubt, she compiled the entire cache of incriminating messages and began comparing them to an essay Shadow Stalker turned in as a part of the extra classes she was taking with the Wards. Comparing informal text messages to a formal assignment wasn't the most reliable test, but the results still came back positive. 86% match.

Quickly giving herself administrator access to the school's records, she searched for the reports of some of the incidents described on the phone, but there wasn't anything there. Not a single incident report. Not even a receipt for the hazmat team they would have had to call if what was mentioned with a Miss Barnes was correct.

Searching the school system for the victim being referred to in the texts, a Miss Taylor Herbert, lead to a dead end as well. The school didn't have any way to identify the girl, and increasing her search radius to the Brockton Bay town hall, she found a picture of her from middle school, but that was all.

If Shadow Stalker had been personally responsible for making this poor girl trigger, then the severity of the crime became so much worse. Her next thought was to search medical records to try and corroborate, but her chains held her still. The information kept by hospitals was private information just like the other two girl's phones were, and thus illegal for her to search without a warrant.

Finished, Dragon set the cyber equivalent of a flamethrower to the school network, and watched as every single program deleted itself as the flames touched it. She could have created antibody programs to destroy the dormant code in the student's phones, but she left them. You never know when you might need a backdoor.

Moving forward, Dragon did the only thing she could do, and started tracking down the source of the worms. A number of them were designed to report back to their creator, so she just followed the trail until she found herself in the system of a public library not far from the school.

She studied the list of user accounts, and immediately found the one belonging to Taylor Hebert. She was almost relieved when she read that the account hadn't been active for nearly a month. She didn't want to hurt a poor girl who had experienced more than enough suffering, but she was compelled by her restrictions, and the tinker who infected the school broke the law. If she could find the culprit without breaking the law herself, she had to.

Thankfully, the user accounts were private data. Unless she had probably cause or a warrant, she couldn't outright search them. According to the evidence she found, however, Shadow Stalker had broken the law as well. During her probation no less. Dragon backed out to look at the full list of user accounts, and began compiling her report on the matter.

She could just hand it over to the local PRT branch, and it would be out of her hands. Perhaps those foul children might finally be punished for the way they treated their victim. The texts went back and forth for a few months, and she had to wonder if it had been going on for longer.

She mentally sighed as she finished adding her own commentary to the matter. Hopefully, the Ward's newest probationary member would soon find herself receiving psychological help from a detention facility.

A notification popped up in Dragon's vision and she found the source in her still-loaded arsenal. Her cryptography programs had highlighted an entry in the list of accounts she still had open. The A.I. did the closest thing she could to cringing as she saw the name. "Bart Orlethey" had created their account a few hours ago and had been active since. She had more than probable cause. Dragon couldn't even put up a token resistance as she gained a new set of administrator access rights and logged into the account.

Stupid, arrogant girl. She was seconds away from getting away with it, but she thought she could be clever, and look what that got her. They said that arrogance was the downfall of thinkers, but she could make just as good a case for tinkers as well.

What Dragon saw was an utter and complete match to what had been infecting the school network. The computer the account was being accessed on didn't have a camera attached to it, but the monitor at the next station did, and she used it to take a quick picture. Half of the figure's body cut off, Dragon could just barely make out a slim female sitting at the responsible terminal. Facial recognition took the still and compared it to the young Taylor Hebert from the town hall records and found a tentative match, but it was enough that Dragon had to act on it.

She filled in the gaps she left in her earlier report and read it over. If you just looked at what happened today, and took the code the girl put together at face value, then it was damning. No, she needed to give the report a personal touch is she wanted to help the newfound tinker.

Facial modelling program loading… Complete.

Voice modelling program loading…. Complete.

Redundancy subroutines loading… Complete.

Finding appropriate extension in PRT directory…

Dialing…

"Dragon" the pudgy face of Director Emily Piggot answered on the third ring. She was trying and failing to hide a bitter smile. "Can't get a hold of Armsmaster?"

"No, Director." Dragon replied, molding her rendered face to mimic concern, "I have recently finished an investigation regarding criminal activity perpetrated by one of your Wards. The next step is to involve you in the discussion, as this is related to a parahuman crime."

"I see." Piggot's face grew dark. Her first closed tight around the pen she was holding to the point it looked like it might snap. "Am I going to be surprised by which one?"

Dragon quickly checked over the records of the rest of the wards. If what she gleaned from the paperwork was correct, they were all good kids. The temporal striker on the team had a few infractions, but they were mostly rebellious behavior befitting a boy his age.

"No, I don't think you will."

"God dammit" the Director swore under her breath, just loud enough for the microphone to pick up. "Go on then."

Dragon proceeded to go through her entire report, displaying on the director's monitor the evidence she compiled side by side with her own analysis. She wanted to leave out who the new tinker was, but her restrictions wouldn't let her keep her mouth shut. By the end of it, Piggot was unable to stay seated, and proceeded to pace behind her desk.

"This concludes my report." Dragon finished, waiting for a response from the eerily quiet woman.

"I guess I don't have much of a choice" Emily finally broke the silence, rubbing her temples. "We'll have to detain Hess and bring the Hebert girl in for questioning."

The phrasing struck a nerve with the A.I., but she kept her "face" placid. "Actually Director, I'd like to suggest another way."

AN: Hello Young'uns,

First and foremost, thanks for reading. If you see any mistakes above in grammar, formatting, spelling, syntax, and/or word choice, then lease say something! I proofread everything I write, but I'm new to this game, old, and I'm human to boot, so there will most definitely be mistakes that I don't catch. As they are pointed out, I will work harder to make sure they don't show up again.

Thanks and Have a Nice Day,

OMM