The Circuit's Edge
Prelude
Kainen is an anthropomorphic fox-wolf hybrid that lives in a big house, down in a rural area. He runs a large Minecraft server that has gained lots of traction, and also happens to own a PC company known as the Pawprint Coalition. Needless to say, Kainen has it GOING for him. This, of course, is cut short by attacks from an anonymous hacker group that has ties to his extremely strange past, that started in a laboratory. He's pitted into an all-out fight between the group, and himself.
Chapter 1 - "You cannot be serious..."
Kainen is sitting in his main computer room, where he has rows upon rows of servers set up. Cooling equipment can be heard gently whirring as he clacks away on his light-up keyboard he got from Best Buy. He's in the middle of updating some code for one of his servers. "This should do it..." Kainen would eventually murmur to himself as he smiled. He liked what he did, and most thought he did it well. He pulls out a small purple notepad, and sketched a little as the update was being installed. All was well. Until Kainen received a ping on his Discord from someone named " igede4th." The message simply read "." His main server's IP address... wait, WHAT? The rest of the messages went something like this:
K4IN3N: How the hell did you get that?
igede4th: i know some people
K4IN3N: Yeah, you 'know people.' That's funny. HoTw'd you ACTUALLY get that?
igede4th: i'm not telling you, lol
Kainen sighs heavily, blocking the guy and getting up from his computer. "You cannot be kidding me right now..." He'd say, pacing the cooling down server room as he tried to think of a solution to this. "WAIT! We gotta fight fire with fire..." Kainen murmurs, pulling his chair back up to him, and pulling up the DMs he has with a hacker friend of his. They don't really text each other, but they do call very often. The other end rings for a moment as Kainen waits. His friend picks up the phone. "Tsukahara, my man! What's up?" There's a small silence, and the sound of a microphone being set up. For some reason, Tsukahara always thought that there were people listening to him through his microphone. "This thing on?" He'd eventually say. Kainen responds with a simple "mm-hmm." Tsukahara adjusts himself in his chair, looking up at his webcam. "Alright. What seems to be the issue, Kainen? Another server attack?"
"I think it might be something bigger, but I can't quite tell. It definitely seems malicious." Kainen says, opening a screenshare tab to a server monitoring website. One is showing a string of strange connections. Tsukahara goes silent for a moment, the only thing showing he's still there being his profile picture, until he cracks the silence. "Yeah, that looks suspicious." Kainen jumps back a bit. Tsukahara does tend to be rather unpredictable at times. "It very well could be a server attac-" Tsukahara's voice is cut off. Kainen just got disconnected from his Internet. "Gnnnaaaaaawwwwhhh, shit, that's not good..." He murmurs, speedwalking out of his server room, into the kitchen where he grabs a bottle of water, chugging it in a few decisive gulps before calling Tsukahara's number. It rings 4 times, which leads Kainen to think that he's not going to answer. That's why, AGAIN, he flinches when Tsukahara abruptly (and rather loudly) says "HELLO?" Kainen readjusts, and puts the phone to his ear again. "Let's not shout, please. Um, my Internet's just gone out. I could very well be under attack. What the hell is going on?" A small pause ensues. "I don't know, Kainen, but I am coming over there with my laptop and we're going to figure out what's going on."
Chapter 2 – "Think, Kainen"
Kainen grabs his laptop out of the server room, and brings it into the living room, awaiting his friend. There's a knock on the door. "Alright, let's see what's happening..." Kainen says, as he walks toward the door. Kainen's hind paws gently caress the rug under him, as he looks back at the laptop he sat on the table in the living room. "Let's hope this isn't something that isn't fixable with some code..."
Kainen opens the door, and is greeted with Tsukahara, his snowy white fur and 9 tails gently swishing behind him. Kainen smiles at the sight of him. "Ah, you made it! Come in." Tsukahara, which comes in unusually quiet with his multi-thousand-dollar laptop in tow, sits on Kainen's plush living room couch, taking in all the... purple. Kainen has always been a really big fan of purple, to the point where it's almost odd. Purple candles, purple couch, purple coffee tables, lavender in flowerpots that lined most of his windows, purple this, purple that. Granted, it is a very soothing color, and he didn't mind, but there's just an oddly high amount of it. Kainen notices this, his smile slightly fading as he looks at Tsukahara spacing out a bit. "You good, Tsukahara?" Tsukahara snaps out of his contemplativeness and looks at Kainen. "Yeah." He spits out. "Just... very purple in here." At the mentioning of all the purple, Kainen smiles. "Yeah! It's nice, isn't it?" Tsukahara nods gently, looking down at his computer as he opens it. "Right, let's get down to business, yes? You're getting a lot of suspicious connections on one server specifically, and now your internet is down, yes?" Kainen nods. "Okay. Let's take a look... Oh. Oh, Jesus. Um, Kainen? You're going to want to go into your server room and shut down all of your servers. Now. You're being attacked by ZeroShade."