Belle
"Belle, 85% of my processing capacity is currently engaged," said Fairy, her monotone voice sounding strangely exasperated. For an A.I., her voice really did a good job of simulating emotion. "That leaves only 15% available for-"
"I can do that much math myself, Fairy!" growled Belle as she typed furiously on the keyboard of her mobile HDD. Fairy was some sort of super illegal and super powerful A.I. that her brother, Wise, had brought back from one of his commissions. It was now an invaluable member of their team, but Belle was becoming more and more wary of their overdependence on the entity. Fairy was a computer of unknown origin, and despite its apparent sentience, Belle knew that if it was programmed to betray them- it would do so without hesitation.
"I don't need your help," said Belle, still typing. "Don't worry about me. Attend to Wise and the Hares."
"But Belle," continued Fairy in Belle's ear. "It is ill advised to-"
Belle took a precious moment to take off her headset, turn it off, and shove it down onto her neck. "Go reformat yourself, Fairy. I can take care of myself."
Belle had always taken care of herself. And Wise, too. Since their parents died in the destruction of the Capital. She didn't need Fairy. She didn't need Wise. She didn't need a team of agents. She had ether resistance of her own! She could do missions, too! Not that Wise believed that- she was just his cute smaller older sister that watched the video store and did his chores! Not that Fairy believed her, either. If an A.I. could even believe anything. Calculate, then! Not that Fairy calculated that Belle could do anything! And Wise- well Wise was so focused on his work and his agents, that sometimes it seemed like he forgot his sister even existed! Even as she delivered clean laundry to his damn room while he watched an old VHS with a certain busty, pink-haired woman who owed them a lot of money but somehow managed to have Wise add everything to her ever-growing tab!
Belle's fingers clattered even louder across her tiny keyboard. She was a petite young woman- everyone was always shocked when they discovered she was twenty-two years old- and so the compact laptop HDD was rather large in her lap. But that made it easy for her delicate fingers to move across the keys with accurate alacrity. She couldn't bust her way through a localized security node like Fairy could, nowhere close. But Belle had spent many hours now watching Fairy work, and the A.I. did not have very creative thinking. Fairy would hit a codewall and then work to plow right through it, but any program was a web, and there were always a dozen ways inside anything- and that's where an illogical and creative human hacker could still compete with the computers and get things done.
Herself! Damn! Belle's index finger slammed down on the enter key with unnecessarily theatrical force, but dammit, it made her feel great to do it! The sealed door she was crouched next to had little red lights on it. Suddenly, they turned green.
Bingo!
With a yank of her arm, Belle disconnected her laptop from the wall socket, slid the computer into her pack with practiced speed, secured it, and then peeked inside the unlocked room. Belle's heart leapt into her throat and she pulled back out of the doorway. There was a damn ethereal in there!
Belle was not currently in the mood to agree with Fairy about much, but it didn't take a super A.I. to know that traveling inside a Hollow alone was ill-advised- to the foolish extreme. People still did it, however. Hollow raiders were a real thing, and PubSec tried to arrest them more for their own protection than for anything else. People died in Hollows. All the time. Like Mom and Dad.
But with preparation, caution, and a bit of brain juice- someone could get around just fine, regardless of the dangers. Belle took out a small plastic ball from her jacket- a simple cat toy filled with lots of little jingly bells. She leaned back around the door and tossed the toy across the room. The thing flew, bounced, and jingled noisily in a way sure to attract a feisty cat- or a murderous, mindless ethereal. The vaguely humanoid creature turned its body towards the noise and pounced. Meanwhile, Belle's light frame on her graceful feet crossed the room and out the other side without the ethereal becoming the wiser.
The hallway on the other side was occupied as well, by two humanoids, neither of which Belle saw as she sprinted through the doorway, turned a sharp left, and sprinted down the hall. The first humanoid creature was an ethereal, and it coiled itself to spring after the sprinting human. The second humanoid was something a bit different, and it moved from its hiding spot with a deadly grace- the ethereal only just hearing the approach of its death before something smashed with devastating force into what passed for its head.
Belle heard a machine-like whirring sound and the shattering of what sounded like glass. She looked behind her with a twang of fear, but she couldn't see anything in the dark corridor. Nothing seemed to be following her. She ran onwards, figuring the noise had just been some odd sound of the Hollow. There were plenty of those to be heard.
Her objective was just ahead- a large server bank of the original Inter-Knott from way back. Hackers and proxies called it the OldKnott. It was from back before Hallowfall, the fall of the first Hollows, which knocked human civilization to the mat for, oh, a good 3 or 4 count. Meanwhile, Belle had been hunting this Hollow for this very building for a while, having only discovered its possible existence by pawing her way through hundreds of thousands of utility bill records she'd dredged out of some ancient hard drive she'd found in a junk shop on the far side of the city.
The final door was unlocked from a security perspective, but from a structural perspective, it was very much locked in a half-open position. This part of the building seemed to have half-collapsed, tilting the floor and giving everything a slightly skewed look. Belle glanced into the darkness of what should be the server room. She couldn't see anything. She took out another tool from her pack. This time, a simple little UV flashlight.
It clicked on. Immediately, a phantom-like ethereal appeared in the light- Belle's heart leapt into her throat once again. The creature screamed silently in the light, its strange body contorting in visible agony, and then it dissolved from existence. Belle took a large calming breath, her shaking wrist causing the cone of light from her flashlight to wobble over the far wall of the dark room. It was a very good thing she had not entered before getting the UV light out- that could have been really bad for her. If something had been chasing her and she'd been forced to dive into this room with a ghast waiting for her.
Belle shook her head. Well, that hadn't happened. She was fine. And with a few more passes of the flashlight, she confirmed that the server room was clear of any other ghasts or other types of ethereals. She stepped into the room, too engrossed with reaching her goal to notice the quiet approach of a humanoid figure walking towards her from behind.
The server block was an archaic bundle of devices that were low capacity, low flow, low frequency… low and crap everything in every spec. It was a wonder the OldKnott even worked back in the day, if this was the best they had back then. But whatever, it didn't take much to store a ton of data, and these kinds of server blocks, supposedly, kept localized backup files for paid subscribers on the network. Those files were the treasure that Belle hoped to find.
Power was a problem. The electricity for this part of this Hollow had been out for decades. But that was yet another problem that Belle's pack of tools and gadgets could help her with. She pulled out a small W-Engine and plugged it into the server block's power ports- which were a bit difficult to find. In theory, this block should have a rudimentary operating system that had mainly only existed for tech support to troubleshoot its connection to the OldKnott. Belle intended to use that to search the local backup files and, with luck, find the information she wanted: data from the original Ether Dawn project- the mad scientist experiment that conspiracy theorists believed actually caused Hallowfall.
Belle wasn't a conspiracy theorist, but she did agree that a seriously funded and seriously secret experiment on ether, just so happening to coincide chronologically with Hallowfall, was a very interesting coincidence. And if this server block had what she hoped it had, she would have new information to add to the global discussion. And from that, perhaps, hope against hope, someone somewhere might find some new advancement towards destroying the Hollows once and for all and fixing this broken world.
She powered up the W-Engine and watched the server towers with trepidation. After a few seconds, they whirled up into operation. Lights blinking sleepily in the dark. Good. The things actually turned on. That was a blessing. Now for the OS.
Belle crouched down and took out her laptop HDD. She attached a hardcord to the server block and tried to access the system. It connected, and then her screen flooded with endlessly changing numbers. Damn. It was Base Eleven, the obnoxious code the OldKnott used for its, at the time, 'revolutionary' VR user interface. Obnoxious because it was impossible to interact with it outside of VR. Damn. Damn. Damn. Belle had a VR headset with her, but plugging herself into the OldKnott while her body was in an ethereal infested Hollow seemed a bit too reckless, even for her.
She looked around for options. Then, she looked up. Oh. Well, that could work.
Lycaon
Lycaon frowned slightly as the human girl darted into the room ahead of him. She was small, perhaps only as tall as the lower part of his chest. She was young- if not a teenager, then just slightly over the line of young adulthood. He wondered what she was doing in this Hollow by herself. She certainly lacked the formidable appearance that most hollow raiders possessed. That meant she was either a fool or a recklessly confident person- and the line between those two things was extremely thin in Lycaon's estimation.
His wolfish ears rotated left and right as he walked, searching for the sounds of movement nearby- he didn't hear any ethereals at the moment. His mildly wet nose vibrated at the end of his lupine snout as it sniffed the air for the acrid scent of enemies, but all he could smell was the vaguely floral scent of the human woman he was following. The smell was intriguing to Lycaon.
As a member of Victoria Housekeeping, he was naturally well-trained and knowledgeable in flower arrangement and displays. He could identify two dozen varieties of blooms while blind-folded. If the weather was just right, he could differentiate between a red rose and a pink rose by scent alone.
But he did not know the flower scent that wafted gently behind this young woman. Lycaon found that to be an alluring mystery. Though idle floral curiosities would not distract him from his true mission; however it just so happened, the human woman had just entered the room that held his own objective: a server block of the OldKnott network.
Victoria Housekeeping catered exclusively to the clientele of the upper crust of society: trillionaires, CEO's, government officials, and the like. Those types of clients had varied needs, and Victoria Housekeeping aimed to meet them. In this particular instance, Lycaon's client was interested in what could be on this old server block. The client had provided a very advanced and likely exceedingly expensive little mini-HDD hyper device that would, according to Lycaon's briefing, harvest and then destroy everything on the server block automatically. Lycaon simply had to find a slot and plug it in. No electricity required. Amazing, Lycaon was sure, though he didn't really grasp how amazing that actually was. Computers were not really his forte. He specialized in field work.
Lycaon walked silently to the half-open door of the server room. He sniffed cautiously, but only received a concentrated dose of that unknown floral scent, underlined with the usual body smells of a human woman: faint sweat, a light musk, and latent soap. Lycaon glimpsed inside briefly, did not see the woman watching the door, and darted inside- careful to keep his tail from snagging on any part of the door mechanism.
He crouched, his tail raising in anticipation of the need for quick movement, but the server room seemed empty. The human girl was nowhere to be seen, but her scent was everywhere, and the server block was blinking with green and yellow lights all over. Lycaon heard the soft humming of a powersource- a W-Engine, he was sure. So… this little floral raider brought something to get into this server block, too. Well, this was a strange coincidence.
Lycaon rose and started walking around the servers, looking for the little hacker. He had no orders from his client regarding a rival hacker. He doubted his client had even considered the possibility that someone else might know about, or be interested in, this particular little room in an unremarkable Hollow. Lycaon debated what to do, and decided to go with one of Victoria Housekeeping's foundational tenets: When in doubt, be discrete.
He resolved to first make sure she wouldn't damage the server, and then simply wait for the human woman to finish with whatever she was doing and then he would accomplish his own mission, and if all went as he hoped, this strangely floral woman would never realize he had ever been nearby.
But- where was she? Lycaon finished his stealthy patrol of the server room and did not see the woman anywhere. He sniffed. She was definitely in the room. Perhaps he could simply follow some wires to find her.
Lycaon walked amidst the server racks and immediately spotted cords that looked much newer than the rest of the tech. His crimson eyes traced their path up and he realized where the human woman was- she had climbed atop the server block itself and must be lying atop it. A reasonably safe refuge in a Hollow- ethereals generally lacked spatial awareness and could prowl all over this room and probably never find the human woman up there if she kept quiet.
Lycaon crept over to the base of the structure to have a look at the hacker's tech: the W-Engine and the cords. He was no expert, but this stuff didn't look like a threat. Should he climb up and take a look at the woman? No, that seemed foolishly risky, and whatever the woman was doing to the server seemed like simple access. So, his plan of waiting for her to finish seemed workable. Lycaon resolved to-
The server blocks all around him suddenly thrummed with intense activity. Lycaon's wide eyes watched visible electric current arc all around him, and then it shot through the hacker's cords. The energy went to the W-Engine at his feet and it suddenly flared into intense activity, sparks shot from it, and it visibly melted before ceasing operation. Meanwhile, current arced upward along the other cord heading to the top of the server.
A high-pitched feminine scream broke the silence of the room. Lycaon's ears focused on the top of the server block and his gaze followed- just in time to see the human woman tumble off the top of the server and towards him. With mindless reflex, Lycaon raised his arms and the young human woman tumbled right into them, her eyes covered with a VR headset, her mouth agape, and her small body twitching with convulsions.
Lycaon blinked.
Well, this was an unforeseen complication.