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

STORYBROOKE, MAINE

The laptop was worthless, Emma's suspect was only using it to monitor the hospital's servers and spy on Penny. The cell phone was just as worthless, his call history had been deleted and the flash memory erased. Emma's USB recover tool was no help. Almost. The only thing she had to go on was a final text message which had been programmed in to send when he pressed certain keys. The message was simple: "911."

With little time to spare, Emma collected Penny from the Sheriff's Station and looked up the phone number the text message was sent to, finding a physical address. The pair arrived at the house to find it abandoned. Fresh tire marks in the driveway revealed that someone had just left and in quite a hurry. Once inside, Penny tried to recover any data from suspect's many computers.

"It's no use; he fragged all of his systems," Penny concluded. Indeed, nearby were degaussing magnets which the other person in the house must have used to wipe the hard drives and all the computer equipment. It effectively rendered everything into giant doorstops. The "911" text must have been to alert the other person in the house to destroy all evidence.

"Whoever they were, they planned ahead," Emma surmised.

"Black Hats usually do," Penny answered. "The best ones always have an exit strategy."

"So which one was the hacker?"

"The dead one," Penny replied. "I think the other person who lived here knew just enough to wipe the computers."

"What makes you think that?"

"Only one chair in the computer room. If they were working together there would be two chairs."

It made sense. With no other choice Emma took Penny back to the hospital so she could continue her work trying to recover all the lost information. The database that had been uploaded to Penny's home network was several days old and did not contain Valerie's MRI scans. This omission piqued Emma's interest. Why not the latest database? The answer was a simple one, to implicate the one person who could recover that critical information and prevent those scans from being used at the hearing.

Whoever did this knew exactly what to excise. There was no doubt in Emma's mind that it was Regina. She had threatened Valerie and was determined to see her behind bars. Unfortunately with no evidence trail tying her to the cyber-attack, it was all just so much speculation.

~O~

As soon as Penny returned to the server room she noticed that all of her utilities had been shut down. "What happened," the slim blonde asked, horrified.

Allen, speculating that she was trying to interfere with the recovery, chose to exit all of her utilities and work on his own.

"NO! He was monitoring us." Penny restarted all of her utilities. Her worst fears were realized. The encryption had fully regenerated, no doubt as soon as her custom recovery utilities were closed. She had to start all over again. Days of work had been wasted.

Penny knew that if she were to break through this new encryption and drill through all the layers of overwriting she was going to have to do something huge. Something awesome. Something that was pretty much illegal.

PIXIE HOLLOW, NEVER LAND (The Mid-Georgian Period on the Mainland)

"Leggings," the dressmaking talent fairy said, showing Vidia what she had made.

"Leggings?" Vidia asked. They were form fitting trousers with the barbs of a feather sewn onto the sides of each leg. A blouse with a high collar accompanied the leggings. Suddenly it was as if her world made perfect sense. This was the clothing style that fit who she was. Vidia had always been at a loss for what she wanted to wear. First the flower dress, then the form fitting one. Neither one felt just right. However, as soon as she donned the new clothing Vidia felt comfortable in her own skin.

Her aggressive and often abrasive personality had sometimes been described as "tomboyish" by some in her own guild. A few even compared her to that new animal fairy that arrived a few years ago named Fawn. Vidia wasn't quite that bad, but she certainly wasn't the girly girl type. Leggings were the perfect compromise between Rosetta's frilly dresses and Fawn's boyish trousers.

There was just one thing missing. "Can you incorporate all of my guild feathers?"

"Of course," the dressmaking talent replied with a genuine smile. Within an hour all of her hard earned purple feathers were added to the ensemble. Attached to a belt that loosely hugged her waist, they stuck out from the bottom of the vest, flaring out a bit essentially extending the blouse without getting in the way.

"I love it!" she declared. She had found her signature style. Vidia now felt like she could take on the world…, Wisp included.

~O~

Taking advice from the dressmaker Vidia spent some time practicing with the new gear to get used to them. "They will alter your flying," the dressmaking talent informed her. "I suggest lots of practice."

Normally Vidia would have put the dressmaker in her place, except that she was absolutely right. Fairies didn't need to practice using their wings because that was as natural as breathing. This was gear, an add-on that wasn't part of their talent toolbox. To use them properly meant a skill that had to be learned.

Practice, though wasn't as easy as Vidia had hoped. The "rudders" as she called them, so significantly altered her flying that she fell out of the sky nearly every time that first week. It was more infuriating than failing at The Kessel Run. "That stupid dressmaker, these things don't work."

Vidia burst into fits of angry shouting. When she couldn't sustain it anymore she stopped and flopped on her back, exhausted. While imagining how satisfying it would be to strangle that fat tinker until his eyes popped out, birds flew overheard. At first she didn't notice, a big smile was on her face. In her mind, Clank was gasping for his last breath before passing out.

Then she remembered. Birds. She flew up to watch them while they were airborne. At first, they seemed to be making a few large adjustments with their tail feathers and wings. However, upon closer inspection Vidia noticed that in fact every bird was making many tiny adjustments. Dozens every minute to accommodate for changes in the wind, their position, speed, angle, acceleration, ascent, descent and several other factors.

"So that is how they do it," Vidia told herself. She returned to her practice taking with her what she had learned. This time there was rapid progress.

STORYBROOKE, MAINE

Distributed computing. Basically, using the processors from different computers to work together towards a single goal, with each processor assigned certain tasks to perform while updated information was shared over a network to all participating systems. Perhaps the most famous example is SETI Home (SETI at Home). An Internet-based public volunteer computing project which utilizes the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) software platform.

Users voluntarily download the software on their home computers where it would "borrow" unused processor cycles to analyze data, thus giving SETI access to more computing power than could be cost effectively stuffed into a single location. The operations carried out by the software are invisible to the user and do not slow down the computer in the slightest.

Penny Steveston had been doing that on a small scale before her arrest. Her friends on the internet allowed her to tap into their processor resources to break the encryption and dig through the layers of pseudorandom numbers that buried the database files. When there was time to be slow, the use of a few thousand computers was enough.

That had changed. All of her work had been undone by a single command. With limited time left a few thousand CPU's wasn't going to get the job done before the hearing started on Monday morning. She needed to go bigger. Much bigger.

With the help of her online friends, she hacked into the computer systems used by Storybrooke's schools, town offices and hospital. She had now had access to about ten thousand processors, each capable of delivering plenty of raw processing power to the math heavy decryption software. Unfortunately, it was still not enough. Not within the limited time available to her.

"I have to go bigger than this." She expanded her hack to include all the home computers and laptops in Storybrooke. The processing power being levied against the encryption had grown to more to more than one hundred thousand CPUs strong, including desktop, laptops, graphics processors and game systems. The encryption would probably fold by Monday, Tuesday at the latest. The layers of pseudorandom numbers she had to dig through would still stand in her way.

She sighed. It was getting late. Penny had gotten precious little sleep since she began this project and this time all the Red Bulls in the world wouldn't keep her awake through the weekend. She had to break through everything in only a couple of days, but going beyond Storybrooke could be dangerous.

"It has to be done," she told herself. Penny sent out messages to all of her online pals. "Time to hack the world."

The responses she received were highly enthusiastic. "Yeah." "It's about time." "I've always wanted to try this," were the most common.

It was going to take some time. When a home computer is connected directly to a cable or DSL modem that system is essentially live on the internet. Anti-Virus software removes a virus after the computer has been infected. Sort of like taking an antibiotic when you get sick.

Software firewalls can block inbound and outbound internet traffic from the computer, but they function within the operating system. Meaning that by the time software firewall has detected the possible intrusion it is already inside the operating system where it can do harm.

A more effective way to secure a computer from the internet is an internet router. Home networking routers are better primarily because they are a separate piece of equipment that exists between the computer and the internet. Routers act as shields and gophers. They block unwanted traffic from getting in while fetching what the user requests on behalf of each computer connected to the network. No computer is ever live on the internet. A single router can secure an entire household of home PC's, Macs, laptops, tablets and gaming systems.

Penny and her I.T. friends had to deal with all of these issues as they expanded the scope of their distributed computing program. To expedite things each "infected" machine would covertly scan for email addresses and send out spam to each of those systems where it would quietly "infect" the next machine and then repeat itself. No user was ever aware that their computers had been compromised by this tactic, although some may notice an improvement in their performance as the software Penny and her colleagues were implanting carried with it an effective anti-virus program of their own design. Since running viruses consume badly needed processor cycles they were deleted before the software installed itself in the background.

One by one computers came into their grasp. They had stretched out to Boston and then New York City. From there they added Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Charlotte and St. Louis, Miami and Tampa Bay. Then on to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, New Orleans, Montgomery and San Antonio. Austin, Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Portland and everyplace in between all fell to their ever widening influence. By nightfall Penny and her friends had captured nearly every home PC, laptop, Macintosh, high end graphics processor, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 platform in North America.

Hundreds of millions of processors all tasked with breaking the encryption and then tearing through layers of meaningless gibberish that had buried the database. All of it at her command. The assault was withering.

"This is my kung fu," she said triumphantly, quoting a line from the movie The Core. "And it is strong."

She was going to make it, but it would be close. Damn close.

I do hope you enjoyed this chapter. After all of this awesome, the next chapter or so will have some heartwarming moments.

As always your generous feedback is appreciated.