[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/wW8Zqhp.png[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/milA0pJ.png[/img][/center] [center][hider=She’ll never quite forget her quick soiree with Cyber-Death][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7B7HNwseic[/youtube] [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y0YrI-Dybo[/youtube][/hider][/center] [color=008000]>>>π•π•’π•”π•œπ•šπ•Ÿπ•˜ π•€π•Ÿ... >>>π•ƒπ• π•’π••π•šπ•Ÿπ•˜ 𝕃𝕒𝕓π•ͺπ•£π•šπ•Ÿπ•₯𝕙… >>>...[/color] [color=#035096][i][b]It’s nice to escape. Forget your place, Just focus on hitting these sick eliminations in a digital landscape, Or maybe just focus on painting.[/b][/i][/color] Even after her flatline, Delilah could hardly resist this sick urge to spread herself thin. It was [i]the Grind[/i]. Some twisted physical dependency of multitasking. Maybe that was the only way she could think. [i]Side effects of too much integration…[/i] So much of her life, she’d been strapped up, sucked into the void. All the doctor’s liked to tell her the oppositeβ€”not that she’d seen a doctor in years. If she kept her eyes (quite literally) strapped to a screen, lost herself jacking-in, she would have trouble thinking. Symptoms include: anxiety, [i][color=#035096]flux[/color][/i]es of stress, attention difficulties. Maybe they were right. When Delilah wasn’t smashing the digital recreations of phantom monsters in Labyrinthβ€”when she found herself walking down the Reclaim’s unclean streets, headphones and cyberdeck with no batteryβ€”she couldn’t much think. When she did focus on the outside, it was usually on drafting plans for the inside. Delilah’s Labyrinth form jutted out in a limb of spiralling code, crushing another advancing bot. They looked like big monochrome insects crawling around the Labyrinth. Familiar spaces nearby simulated a realistic landscape. She was inside the Swathe Street Commons suites. Any gaps that couldn’t be filled in by the surrounding cameras and recording devices from which the Shaman leeched were static chunks of nothing but flowing data. In here, though, she found focus. She focused particularly well while bashing bots. The new gaming scripts that were being traded around Labyrinth forums were hyper-realistic. Don’t get hitβ€”it hurts. The folks with bad decks were liable to lash out IRL or piss themselves if they took too much damage. A prompt open on the far-right side of her vision allowed Delilah to write her own scripts. She opted to generate a katana, like that one girl she knew from the old campaign days. Slash slash, another bot erased itself from existence once hit. Other prompts scattered around her vision transcribed her thoughts into text and rolled them out for her to see as she thought them. [b][color=#035096][i]Thoughts on the simulation:[/i][/color] [right][color=#035096][i]I wonder what Samsara is doing right now?[/i][/color][/right] [color=#035096][i]Ideas on ways to eat without having to leave Labyrinth:[/i][/color] [color=#035096][i]If I continue play at this pace, accounting for two skill plateaus, I’ll have the regional high score by…[/i][/color] [center][color=#035096][i]Am I unemployed? Does e-begging Samsara count as a job?[/i][/color][/center] [right][color=#035096][i]Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Emotional imbalance reaching critical levels. What is it this time? Another hit of Mente Scindendris? Do I need neurosynth?[/i][/color][/right][/b] Delilah lost her focus on the projected game for not more than a second. Her form sped forward straight into a deadzone in the cameras and she was shot into another random part of the building. She was on what she thought was the top floor, staring directly out of the thick, dusty, (bulletproof?), glass. There, suspended in the air was one of the tags. Right where the attacker had escaped. [b][color=#035096][i]That Tag...[/i][/color] [right][color=#035096][i]That Tag...[/i][/color][/right] [center][color=#035096][i]It was everywhere.[/i][/color][/center] [right][color=#035096][i]Everywhere important.[/i][/color][/right] [center][color=#035096][i]A master painter...[/i][/color] [color=#035096][i]In this twisted cyberscape...[/i][/color][/center] [color=#035096][i]Who?[/i][/color] [center][color=#035096][i]Who[/i][/color][/center] [right][color=#035096][i]Who could pull off that sort of flex?[/i][/color][/right][/b] The cyber-graffiti seemed purposefully placed in the hardest to reach spot. The would-be assassin’s escape route had since been covered in ICE and other detection scripts. Delilah was careful not to get too close. Whatever the encrypted tag said, she couldn't decipher. It was layered with various encoding mechanisms such that, even surrounded by the dark ICE formations, it shimmered with a rainbow variety of colors. [center][color=#035096][i][b]β„‚ β„™ 𝔸 𝔽[/b][/i][/color][/center] The bots swarmed her before she even realized she was still playing the game. [i]Multitasking burnout.[/i] All at once, the simulated building evaporated and Delilah was back in the white frontier, dotted with crawling messages, signals, and software. It was definitely another cluster of E-Drug cocktails, she decided. That would solve this feeling, whatever it was, or at least temporarily send her back into some frantic attention-deficit mania long enough to forget about the tag, about reality. She could get back to focusing on blasting bots, or scouring the net for more of the tags, or something, or something, or something. [color=008000]>>>π•π•’π•”π•œπ•šπ•Ÿπ•˜ 𝕆𝕦π•₯... >>>ℙ𝕙𝕒𝕀𝕖 π•Šπ•™π•šπ•—π•₯... >>>π”»π•£π•šπ•—π•₯... >>>π”»π•£π•šπ•—π•₯... >>>π”Ήπ•’π•”π•œ π•₯𝕠 β„π•–π•’π•π•šπ•₯π•ͺ… >>>...[/color] [h3][color=gray]π•Šπ•¨π•’π•₯𝕙𝕖 π•Šπ•₯𝕣𝕖𝕖π•₯ β„‚π• π•žπ•žπ• π•Ÿπ•€[/color][/h3][color=008000][b]β„π•–π•”π•π•’π•šπ•ž β„€π• π•Ÿπ•–, π•Šπ• π•¦π•₯𝕙 β„‚π•šπ•₯π•ͺ π•Šπ•‘π•£π•’π•¨π•[/b] [b]π”Έπ•‘π•£π•šπ• πŸ™π•€π•₯, 𝟚𝟘𝟞𝟝 πŸ™πŸ :πŸ™πŸ˜[/b][/color] [right][sub][@Jarl Coolgruuf][/sub][/right] Cold sweat, but overheated. Just like always. Her legs were particularly well-heated from the overclocked deck she left on her lap. Delilah had to fight a tangled mass of cords, cables, and stray devices for a space on the dirty desk before she could lug her cyberdeck up onto it. The room was still dark, but a number of screens left on around the room still supplied the netrunner with her regular unrecommended dose of unfiltered blue light illuminating the dirty bricks of the forgotten room. She couldn’t decide if it was meant to be a closet or if the architect just hadn’t planned well, but the place served her purposes well. Delilah was tucked away on the mostly-deserted top floor of the Swathe Street Commons suites. The derelict factories they’d been built into were full of surprisesβ€”unused spaces between walls, forgotten rooms, that sort of thing. It was only once you got to the heavily-used areas of the complex that security, alarms, and other sensor defences got intense. Delilah sent out a ping for a series of signals she was following, wondering who or what was online that she could interact with. The place was flooded with all the candidates’ entourages, each full of their own invasive tech and countermeasures that lit the place up with loose connections, chunks of poorly-written ICE, and miscellaneous encrypted messages jumping back and forth all over. Citizen K’s signal connected to Delilah’s network almost immediately, which was unusual. Usually, Delilah’s proxy server aboard some dark web Antarctic barge took ages to bounce back off of her hacker friend’s own severely hidden server. Labyrinth folks were always over-cautious, at least the good ones were. [i]She couldn’t be nearby, could she?[/i] Delilah never took K for the Twin City type. Most folks like the two of them were holed up in isolation, coming out of their gamer-caves only to hit the nearest convenience store for a week’s worth of rations. Delilah wasn’t averse to the big city, though, as long as she could get herself hidden away in some secret base she set up. After all, the Reclaim had excellent delivery sushi. There was no mirror in the corner closet-room, so Delilah settled for a dead screen to fix her hair, spending only a moment to let herself bat her blue locks into submission. She looked towards the door, contemplated going into public, then the [s]anxiety[/s], [s]existential dread[/s], [s]l’appel du vide[/s], [s][color=green]𝔽𝕦π•₯π•šπ•π•šπ•₯π•ͺ[/color][/s], particularly bad and inexplicable feeling set back in. Delilah backed up and flopped herself onto the pile of pillows, blankets, discarded gadgets, and carcasses of this week’s worth of take-out meals. She allotted herself approximately fifteen-point-six seconds to balefully groan into the void before coming to grips with the nature of reality once again. Her left hand flailed out in her nest. Delilah was face-down in the pillow with the least amount of crumbs on it, almost unaware of what she was searching for until her hand found its quarry. The box had the classic yellow smiley-face on it. That was itβ€”no writing, brand name, other nonsense. Delilah pulled the opaque plastic package from the tiny box. [i]Last one[/i]. The metallic device looked in looked like a little box with a few spikes protruding from one side. Delilah, like a zombie, jammed the device against her neck until it found her Cyberdeck CIU interface and plugged in. [color=008000]>>>π•ƒπ• π•’π••π•šπ•Ÿπ•˜... >>>π•€π•Ÿπ•šπ•₯π•šπ•’π•₯π•šπ•Ÿπ•˜ π••π•šπ•€π•‘π•–π•£π•€π•šπ• π•Ÿ 𝕠𝕗 π••π•’π•Ÿπ•˜π•–π•£π• π•¦π•€π•π•ͺ π•¦π•Ÿπ•“π•’π•π•’π•Ÿπ•”π•šπ•Ÿπ•˜ π•”π•™π•–π•žπ•šπ•”π•’π• π•”π• π•”π•œπ•₯π•’π•šπ• π•šπ•Ÿπ•₯𝕠 𝕦𝕀𝕖𝕣'𝕀 π•“π•šπ• π•₯π•šπ•” 𝕀π•ͺ𝕀π•₯π•–π•žπ•€... >>>...[/color] [center][color=#035096][i][b]ℍ 𝔸 β„™ β„™ 𝕐[/b][/i][/color][/center] Delilah’s facial muscles contracted unwillingly into a smile. Her eyes started to go in and out of focus, and she was sure they started drifting around her eye sockets like some sort of glitched turret camera searching for a target. She didn’t really register what she was seeing either way, so it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was what she was feeling. Still, as her common sense started to leave her, she had one final thought to conceal her eyes before she drifted into the ether and out of her secret base. She sat up and tried to assemble some ensemble to make herself look presentable. Unfortunately, she left all of her nice clothes in an incinerator somewhere or something. She didn’t remember. What she did come up with was a nice long coat that she’d probably stolen from Samsara when he wasn’t looking. She like it because it was sleekβ€”the sort of techwear that lights up in embroidered lines for some reason, because corpos thought that was cool. Delilah threw it on over her skirt and t-shirt, and turned up its thick collar to cover the protrusion plugged into her neck. A few cords entangled the jacket as she grabbed her heavy definitely-not-portable cyberdeck and tucked it under her arm just out of view. She was forced to hold the bulky thing beneath the jacket, so one of the oversized armholes flopped freely, empty of a limb. [i]A real snazzy dresser, she was.[/i] In terms of covering her eyes, she hadn’t yet managed to jack Samsara’s cybershades, so she settled instead for the only pair of eyewear she’d managed to liberate from some unknown place, at an unknown time, in an unknown haze: a pair of retro paper 3-D glasses with the red and blue filters. [color=008000]>>>β„π•¦π•Ÿπ•Ÿπ•šπ•Ÿπ•˜ π”»π•šπ•’π•˜π•Ÿπ• π•€π•₯π•šπ•”... >>>π”Έπ•‘π•‘π•£π•’π•šπ•€π•šπ•Ÿπ•˜ π•Œπ•€π•–π•£'𝕀 β„™π•–π•£π•€π• π•Ÿπ•’π• π•Šπ•₯π•ͺ𝕝𝕖 ℝ𝕒π•₯π•šπ•Ÿπ•˜... >>>... >>>... >>>ℝ𝕖𝕒𝕕𝕠𝕦π•₯: >>>β„‚ β„™ 𝔸 𝔽...[/color] Delilah bobbed her head sluggishly in directions that were surely offbeat in relation to the music that was playingβ€”origin unknown. The moment the bright yellow bulbs beyond her secret base hit her skin, the wave of fatigue and dehydration hit her and she wondered how long she was jacked in. She quickly stopped caring about that thought, and another one took its place. She ping-ping-pinged Citizen K with three stray signals to try and get her friend’s attention. Delilah had a tendency to randomly flag her friend without any substance or message to the signal when her mind wasn’t completely inhabited. K had to be used to it by now. Delilah had forgotten about the ordeal by the time she reached the scanning lasers that protected access to the suites’ lower floors. Really, she just wanted her friends attention, to trade banter and the like. Something was off, though, but she couldn’t recall why K was so prevalent in her mind. [i]Oh well.[/i] Another series of signals: [color=008000]>>> ℙ𝕀ℕ𝔾 ℙ𝕀ℕ𝔾 ℙ𝕀ℕ𝔾... >>> [/color][color=#035096]"π•ͺ𝟘 β„šπ•¦π•–π•–π•Ÿ."[/color] [color=008000]>>>...[/color] The complex's stairwell sensors were overloaded from every angle of attack in just a few seconds, every vulnerability coordinated and simultaneously exploited. Delilah rerouted the signals to connect to another random sensor somewhere in the facility, which she mistakenly set off, surely scaring the hell out of any security guard who might have believed in ghosts. The Central Square suites were a labyrinth of their own, but Delilah did eventually find her way to her destination. The disheveled appearance of her entrance was certain to turn some heads, and Delilah certainly wasn’t expecting the place to be so full of assorted people. A swathe of fear cut through her for just a moment, before she saw Samsara. She figured she could pretend to be with the NTP if necessary. She looked the part. Sort of. Tech-junkie, yes. Nicely dressed and overly pompous, not quite. The candidates were plenty distracted by their own arguing and the antics of one of Gatch’s employees. Delilah adjusted her 3D glasses and blew a tuft of hair from her face, content to just be chillin’ in the thick of things. She could hardly focus on the whole scene anyways. She did her best to send one-handed signals into the obviously lumpy protrusion beneath her jacket. She thought about paintings. About Tags. [color=008000]>>> ℙ𝕀ℕ𝔾 ℙ𝕀ℕ𝔾 ℙ𝕀ℕ𝔾... >>> [/color][color=#035096]"𝕀'𝕧𝕖 𝕕𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝𝕠𝕑𝕖𝕕 𝕒 π•€π•¦π••π••π•–π•Ÿ πŸ™π•Ÿπ•₯𝕖𝕣𝕖𝕀π•₯ π•šπ•Ÿ π•₯𝕙𝕖 π•—π•šπ•ŸπŸ› 𝕒𝕣π•₯𝕀..."[/color] [color=008000]>>>...[/color]