Disney's Tinker Bell in Storybrooke
A Disney Fairies / Once Upon a Time Crossover
Season 1, between episodes 7 and 8

STORYBROOKE, MAINE

Tina didn't know what to think. When Penny touched her shoulders it felt like there was a spark between them. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but it was a strange experience. She chalked it up to static electricity. Yet the coincidence was remarkable. Someone who looked like her, had a similar interest and could help her with her math homework AND that spark. It felt…spooky.

In spite of all that, Tina also felt energized at the prospect of a new friend. She had made many friends at school, but none could truly relate to her. She could talk all day about the internal mechanics of a washing machine or the virtues of a Chevrolet 350 small block V-8. Those things fascinated her, but when she talked about those things to her friends their eyes would just glaze over.

Marco appreciated her enthusiasm for the intricate work he did in his workshop. He would let her help out some times in exchange for tutorials or materials for her own projects. Billy at the auto repair shop liked to talk cars with her and explained how to make repairs. However, neither were people her own age.

Clarence was a peer who could almost relate. Unfortunately, close wasn't enough. Not even her own mother came so close. This Penny girl seemed like the one person Tina had met in her life who might truly understand her. For Tina it felt like someone had just opened a door that had been locked her whole life. A door she was desperate all these years to unlock. It was a heady feeling.

~O~

Emma Swan strode down the hallway and into the elevator with this girl, child actually, right on her heels. She had no confidence that this tiny slip of a teenager could overcome a room filled with servers. Computers so complicated that people spent years in college just to comprehend how they functioned.

What surprised Emma was how confident this child was. Almost arrogant, in fact. For a moment, Deputy Swan considered turning right around and telling this little girl to go back home and let the adults handle this difficult situation. Mr. Winter's advocacy of Penny was all that kept her from doing that. Nonetheless, Emma did not come unarmed.

She knew that if she had her own misgivings, the mayor would laugh Penny right out of hospital. Then Regina would go all out to strip Emma of her title as deputy. Bringing this underage girl would be all the ammo the mayor would need to declare Emma incapable of holding the office as the town's sole law enforcement officer. She was putting everything on the line for this Penny person. Emma hoped she could pull this off.

To that end Deputy Swan procured some information from the hospital staff during the long wait for Valerie to get discharged. In her hands were several printouts that she intended to use to get Penny all the time she needed at the servers to work her computer magic should the mayor resist. Ms. Swan was certain she would. A likelihood she confided in Penny.

"Mayor Mills doesn't like me and she'll probably try and have you thrown out," Emma told her. "So just let me do all the talking, okay, kid?"

"You got it," Penny answered almost flippantly.

"Hey, this isn't a day at the Homebrew Computer Club," Emma admonished, somehow recalling the name from a movie about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates called Pirates of Silicon Valley that she had seen years earlier on television.

"I don't like the mayor, she bullies everyone around," Penny said as they exited the elevator and walked towards the server room. "Someone has to stand up to her. I've been wanting to, but we've never crossed paths. When I see here I'm going to-."

"You'll do nothing but what you're good at, working on those computers," Emma said sternly. "Leave the negotiations to me."

"You're the boss."

~O~

"Oka-ay," Emma announced when she walked into server room again. "I found our nerd."

Regina was annoyed by her return. "Deputy Swan, we don't need any more distr-." She stopped cold when she turned and saw who the deputy brought with her. Standing next to Emma was a tiny slip of a girl with platinum blonde hair. She was short, thin and pale. Almost sickly looking. The girl wore light blue jeggings, ice blue colored Chuck Taylor All Star Converse sneakers with white tops over the toes, a brown flight jacket right out of the original Battlestar Galactica TV series and a t-shirt with an image of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory with the word "Bazinga!" emblazoned across it. Slung on her shoulders was a backpack so big and weighted that it threatened to tip the girl over.

"That's your solution, Ms. Swan?" Regina commented with disdain.

"This is Penny, a computer nerd with the skills to recover the lost data," Emma replied. "Now if you will kindly let her through."

"No!" Regina stated outright. "I'm not. And do you know why? Because I refuse to allow you to make a joke out of a real tragedy, Ms. Swan. People are in dire need in this hospital. This security breach could kill any number of people who rely on this hospital and you bring me this reject from a Star Trek convention. Furthermore, this demonstrates your inability to act appropriately in serving this fair city. I think it's time you vacated your post as Deputy and let someone else take the job. Someone who knows what they are doing. Good day."

She knew this would happen, so Emma brought out her own ammunition. "Madame Mayor. May I have word with you in private?"

"I'm busy, Ms. Swan," she replied without looking.

"Too busy to take an interest in your own son?"

That got Regina's attention. "Keep working," she whispered to the network admin who was sitting at the desk. "Don't let anyone touch these computers. Understood?"

He nodded and kept searching Google for answers to the current problem. Regina stepped to the side to speak with the soon to be ex-deputy. "What is it, Miss Swan?" she asked, putting an emphasis on Miss, implying that the title of deputy was no longer Emma's to use.

"Look at this," Emma said handing the mayor some of the printouts. "I find it interesting that so many files including Valerie's were deleted, but yours were somehow kept intact."

"That's what you brought me here for? To point out that a random attack was actually random? And how does this relate to Henry?"

"Because while your files were untouched, his weren't," Emma said. "Everything from four years ago and older is missing. Gone."

Regina yanked the other pages from Emma's hand and reviewed them. "How did you get these anyway?"

"I'm the deputy conducting an investigation. Remember? Now do you want to let your network administrator to keep trying? Or will you let Penny succeed where he can't?"

Regina fumed. Her plan was falling apart. The medical history of her own son was partly missing. If Henry had an accident or became very sick his own life could be forfeit. Sydney's "man" had bungled this assignment. And that meant Sydney had failed, as well. Inside she was a ball of caged fury, ready to lash out to whomever was nearest, but Regina had to keep a lid on that roiling caldron of anger.

The pages in Regina's hand crumpled and twisted as she balled up her fists. Her very hands shook as she tried to crush the very molecules into nonexistence. "Fine, but she better get results or I am holding you personally responsible for this fiasco," she hissed to her not yet ex-deputy.

Regina stepped slowly and deliberately to the little girl with the giant backpack. She smiled a big, but utterly fake smile and said with a condescending tone, "Well, I hear you are computer technician."

"Please, what I've forgotten about computers can fill the Library of Congress ten times over" Penny replied off handedly.

"Who do you think you are, little girl? Bill Gates?" Regina questioned snidely.

"No, I'm better." Penny pivoted around on her heels and faced the bank of servers and the man working on them. "Now move aside, admin dude, Super Nerd coming through."

Regina took an instant dislike to this little girl. She was a child playing in an adult world. Worst of all, Penny was so cocksure of herself. "You certainly are confident in your abilities for someone so young."

"You don't get to be as good as I am by being scared," Penny answered without looking back at the Mayor.

Regina's eyes narrowed and her brow furrowed with unabashed fury. "Well, if you can impress the network administrator, the server room is all yours." The mayor smiled at her cleverness. This whelp couldn't possibly be a match for the hospital's accomplished and long standing employee.

The man whirled in his chair to face the petite platinum blonde. "How old are you?" he asked her.

"Sixteen," she said arrogantly.

"Sixteen?!" Regina yelled at Emma. "You brought a high school student to fix our network?"

"I'm forty five," the administrator told her calmly, "with more than twenty years of experience in the field of computer networking."

"What are your qualification?" she asked him.

"He just told you," Regina yelled.

"I have a Bachelor's of Science Degree in Mathematics and I hold a current MCSA," the admin boasted.

"Really? Microsoft Certified Solutions Administrator? That's what you're going with?" Penny answered, clearly unimpressed. "I'm certified A plus, Server plus, Network plus, Security plus, Linux plus and CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner. I'm a Microsoft Certified Professional, I hold all eight Microsoft Certified Solutions Engineer certifications AND I'm Cisco certified as a Design Expert and an Internetworking Expert in Routing & Switching, Data Center and Security, all of which are current. Did I mention that I'm also a Certified Novell Engineer, and a SUSE Certified Linux Engineer? I can code in every known programming language, including machine language, and I'm writing my own version of Linux. Maybe you've heard of it? Linux Frost Forest?"

Her smug and superior tone obviously rankled the older man. "I don't use Linux," he said with a bit of a sneer. "I live in a Microsoft world, like most of us do."

Penny's eyes narrowed. "And for your information, I graduated high school last year. Since then I've been auditing internet classes from M.I.T. for a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering with a double major in Computer Science. Oh, and I like to take long walks on the beach, I'm a member of Mensa and I have an I.Q. of 179. How about you?"

"Well…, that sounds all well and good, but anyone can rattle that off and sound intelligent."

Penny didn't like his attitude. She grabbed her cell phone and began fiddling with it.

"What are you doing?" Regina asked. "Calling your mommy?"

A few seconds later the Network Admin's phone chirped. He grabbed it and flipped it open. On the text screen it showed someone from the outside altering the portable phone's firmware, ultimately giving him unlimited lifetime minutes …for free. Then these words appeared: I just hacked your cell phone in under one minute. Now move over! -Penny.

Impressed, the admin got up and yielded his position to the little girl.

~O~

Sitting down in front of the two large LCD screens, Penny removed the CD case and slipped in one her discs to analyze the empty portions of the hard drives in the connected RAID Array.

"We have already tried using hard drive recovery tools and the utilities from the manufacturer, Western Digital," the admin told her.

"You found nothing on the hard drives and the utilities couldn't recover the lost data," Penny concluded.

"Exactly, how did you know?"

"I wouldn't be here if you could."

Penny launched the hard drive analysis tool, one that the hospital's system administrator admitted to never having seen before. "Where did you get that?"

"From some of my friends," she replied. "We code stuff like this all the time." Several moments later she announced that the lost data wasn't just deleted, but erased.

"We know that already," Regina scolded. "Is that the best you can do, little one?"

"I don't understand," Emma said, "what's the difference?"

Windows operating systems store information on hard drives in blocks that are scattered all over the hard drives. To keep track of their locations, Windows maintains a table that records entries for each block. When data is deleted by a user, the log entry is deleted, but not the blocks of data. They remain until overwritten by new blocks. This is why recovery tools are so effective. They can find those orphaned blocks and reassemble them. Here, more than just log entries were deleted. The blocks throughout the drives were erased.

"That's why my little tool didn't work," Emma stated. "There was nothing to find."

"Exactly," Penny said. "But according to this analysis, more than just erasure occurred."

"How can you do more than just erase data?" Regina asked her.

Data and identity theft are serious problems in the digital world. Disposing of hard drives properly can be difficult because they still have information on them that can be extracted using commercially available software. Preventing data recovery has become very important. To avoid that possibility, sanitizing drives has become the go to method for eliminating sensitive data. Software and hardware techniques are employed to blank discs before they are disposed of.

"The Department of Defense wrote a standard for sanitizing hard drives many years ago," Penny informed everyone. "The process overwrites what was there with multiple layers of pseudorandom numbers and then zeroes out the drive. It makes what was on the platters unrecoverable without bringing those drives into a clean room where expensive and specialized equipment are employed to dig through those layers. Whoever did this employed an encrypted algorithm to make recovery virtually impossible."

"Well, I guess your little friend can't do the job you promised," Regina told Deputy Swan. "How surprising."

"I said virtually impossible," Penny clarified. "Not totally impossible."

"But you just said-."

"That standard is very old and many of us in the IT community have been working on ways to undo the sanitizing," Penny expounded. "That's why the DoD no longer uses software to erase their drives. Instead they degauss them."

"Degauss?" Regina asked.

"A powerful magnet that blanks the drives, but also erases the control chips on the drives making them totally unusable."

"Do you think you can undo this security breach?" Emma asked Penny point blank.

"Sure, though I'll have to write my own program to do it. Give me a few days."

"Days?"

"The algorithm uses a 256-bit encryption and will take time to crack before I can tackle the actual overwriting," she answered.

"Doesn't an encryption of that length usually take years? Even decades to crack?" the admin asked.

"Normally, but I've got a few tricks up my sleeve," she replied. "Encryptions use digital keys to unlock them. I've studied the encryption employed for this method and I can narrow the field by ignoring the least likely digital keys. I'll also be using resources from outside the hospital to multiply my efforts exponentially. Whoever did this won't know what hit 'em."

"Well get to it, you've less than a week to get that information back," Deputy Swan told her.

"No problem!" Penny removed her laptops from the bag and began to set them up on the desk in front of her.

"What are these for?" the administrator asked.

She pointed to each one and described its purpose. "This first one is for coding new programs. This one is for video conferencing with my I.T. friends on the net, they'll be helping me when I need it. This third contains all of my latest stable programs and utilities. And that last one contains video files for all of my favorite TV shows."

"Do you need anything?" Emma asked.

"Yup, a steady stream of pepperoni Hot Pockets and Big Red soda," she said.

"It would be my pleasure," the administrator offered. He introduced himself as Allen.

"Well, at least if nothing can be found we know that love will blossom," Regina said with a sarcastic tone. "I'll be in my office. Call me if anything changes." She stormed out of the server room, furious for reasons known only to her.

Love? Emma asked herself with confused look on her face. From her point of view, it was simply professional admiration.

~O~

Regina stalked down the hallway towards the elevator. Anyone who happened to walk by kept their distance. She wore a facial expression that scared everyone who saw it. The mayor opened her cell phone and dialed Sydney. When he answered she ripped into him for the errors made by his "man."

"I guess he wasn't the person for this job after all," she growled into the phone. "And apparently, neither were you."

Those certifications that Penny rattled off really do exist and are offered by CompTIA, Microsoft, Novell and Cisco. IT Professionals and companies use them to gauge the level of knowledge, skill and expertise a person possesses.

Another chapter will be up soon. Thanks for reading.