Chapter 6: In which Mary has a Cunning Plan. Short, but I'll be adding more soon.


Late nights and stale coffee

Mary sighed, and reached for her coffee mug. The contents had cooled down to room temperature, and a pale, thin skin was forming on the surface. Still, it was the only half-mug of caffeine in reach, so it'd have to do. Trying not to think about whether this was tonight's mug or yesterday's, she downed it in a few quick gulps. Four thirty in the morning, and she still didn't have a clue about who SueSlayer's next... victim... would be.

That's what they were, no doubt about it. Victims. So much for three 'new lives on Pern'. SueSlayer had passed on the promised details several hours before, details which had been disturbingly brief and final. The first piece of poor-quality video footage had just appeared on Mary's screen with no warning, and she had watched in horror as the first hapless author dissolved before her eyes.

Somehow, she had to make this stop.

She'd started by going over ever review she'd ever made. Sometimes she'd had the patience to give concrit, other times she'd simply heaped scorn on their pathetic prose - the latter type all from nice, secure sock-puppet accounts, of course, but that didn't seem to matter as far as SueSlayer was concerned. Then, she'd had to track down all those stories she'd sporked less publicly. Well, most of them were less public. There were a few cases where the merciless derision of the collective had been anonymously linked back to the original author, followed by a whole spectrum of responses ranging from tearful suicide notes to threatening legal-ese. Not that they were any easier to find than the rest, with the site on the blink like it was right now. Did SueSlayer have its own records, or could it pull the information directly from various databases, electron by electron? With all that Mary knew now, she wouldn't be surprised if it could.

But maybe she was going about this the wrong way? The fanbrats seemed to have a pretty widespread community out there, even if it was about as saccharine and insubstantial as candy-floss. Mary clenched her teeth, and mentally switched off her internal grammar-nazi. This wouldn't be easy, but it might just work...