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Solos 5-8: 2,057 words
She really shouldn’t have been surprised when she was asked about this task. She had heard rumors about the Destiny City Medical Center and while she often didn’t keep her eye on such things, hospitals were a great target for hacking. So, when she had gotten an anonymous message, and had been paid half in advance, to mess with some patient files, she had been curious about the building.
She had heard it had a mold problem and though she wasn’t any sort of scientist, she figured that the building would have been torn down. Didn’t places with serious mold problems have to be? Unless they could set the whole thing on fire. But somehow the building was still standing, and people had been going in and out of it recently. She had only noticed it due to the feeds that she had received in the various places that she followed, but until she had been contacted, had taken no other interest.
So why did she have to go and mess with the files? Was it because patients had died due to the mold and they had wanted to cover it up? But when she started to look through the first few, she realized that wasn’t the reason. They did not appear to have any signs of inhaling the mold or anything, at least from the internet searches she had conducted. She wasn’t a doctor after all. Still, cardiac arrests seemingly out of nowhere, heart attacks when they hadn’t detected any signs? Something else was going on in the building and she was curious as to what it may have been.
Still, she did what had been asked and had changed the files to make it appear as though the patients had been sicklier than they had appeared, there were previous reports of things that had made them more likely to have a heart attack, etc. Whatever she could do to make it seem much more plausible and so families wouldn’t go looking to sue the hospital. She changed some of the dates as well and did what she could to cover up her tracks. It had been easy enough to get in. One of the silly nurses had decided to use their birthday as a password. Honestly, she felt like she should have gone there and lectured them about password safety.
But if she did that, then her job would have been much harder.
She didn’t learn the real reason for all of this work until she had gone to the Negaverse announcement that they had acquired the Destiny City Medical Center and would be reopening it. Now she understood why so many of the patients had appeared to be perfectly healthy except for one or two problems before going to the building. It appeared that there was either a loose Youma roaming the hallways of the building or that there were some rogue agents who had decided to go and take energy in some easy ways, without caring about how it would look to the hospital and the patient’s families.
She sighed as she stared at her computer screen. Didn’t the realize that they were making it harder on the Negaverse staff who may have wanted to keep such things under wraps? Sometimes she wondered just what kind of Agents they were recruiting. Or at least there didn’t appear to be any punishment for those who abused their powers. It made her furrow her eyebrows in annoyance. While she couldn’t say she was the best Agent out there, at least she did her job and what was expected of her, even if some of it included hacking into places and teaching newer recruits at Romano’s. Perhaps she should suggest to a General that they needed to hand out harsher punishments for those who decided not to follow the rules and risked the Negaverse being seen. Sure, they may have owned quite a few things within the City and probably around the world, but anyone who let anything slip or get information to the wrong Senshi or Knight could possibly unravel all of their plans.
She huffed. Not that she cared that much anyway. If they were to suddenly be defeated, she doubted that would mean that they would all just disappear. Most likely whatever had been used to give them their own powers would just be taken away and they would no longer be able to become Agents. That was fine with her as well. It had taken so long for them to recognize her as an Agent and to giver he any powers that she was more used to her civilian life than her powered one and much preferred it.
She knew as a Captain that she would have more power and better “weapons” but she was much more comfortable sitting in front of a computer screen and doing damage that way. If that venture into the Rift had taught her anything, it was that technology was much easier to deal with, even if that meant there could possibly be killer robots in the future. She would much rather face those than some Youma that they couldn’t even truly defeat.
Sure, she hadn’t done much in terms of fighting Senshi or Knights, but she thought that she was at least making a dent in the civilian lives of some Order characters. After all, they had lives too. She just wished that she could use her powers on those than actual fighting. Yes, she should know how to fight so that she could defend herself in a battle or pull a starseed if she needed, but she was just a Lieutenant for the time being. It’s not as if she would be able to make any significant dent in the Order unless they were really dumb. The Order characters that she had faced so far had been much stronger. She hadn’t been able to assess them that well considering how easily she fled, but she knew that she didn’t have a chance against them at this point. Her “weapons” were USB sticks that couldn’t even have any information on them. And she had tried. Especially when it came to information within the Negaverse.
She thought that at least they would have been able to do something with all this magical information. Perhaps if the other side any technology on their end she could have used the chaos magic to try and hack and destroy the other side’s systems. But alas, they were just two empty USB sticks with no ability to contain any information. Basically, they were best just to toss at an enemy for a quick distraction. Nothing that she could use to fight with.
She had often questioned why she had been she had been brought in. She supposed that she was had just gotten to close to information that they didn’t want an ordinary civilian to have access to. And maybe some of her skills, though she wondered about the latter. She had been able to use it. First in the building hack and now in these document edits for the Medical Center, but she wanted to do more with her abilities. To do that she would have to talk to a General and throw ideas out at them. Then they might be able to take any of her ideas up to a General Sovereign. Or she could try to get into the infiltration branch. She had barely looked over the requirements since she was just a Lieutenant, but it would most likely fit her needs within the Negaverse. It still required too much human interactions for her taste, but perhaps if she asked nicely, she could find a job that was suited for her.
After all, the Negaverse used the internet as well and they needed someone who knew what they were doing to keep their information a secret. Which is why she had been assigned another task. Some Captain, Rutile, had gone missing and they wanted to see if there had been any activity from him to where they could track him down. The fact that she didn’t know the Captain or had ever met him made the job harder.
She moved onto another laptop, the one she was using to try and find information about the captain that was missing in action. Why they had asked her to focus on this Agent and not other ones… she wondered what they could possibly be hiding. What information from this Agent was so important that they asked her to investigate him? She had gone and checked online, seeing if there was anything that would connect his civilian and his powered life and she hadn’t found anything. Not anything useful at least. She had to admit it, but it was a good thing that the two lives were kept separate.
She couldn’t blame any Agent who didn’t want to mix the two. Especially if they were looking to leave. It was an idea that had popped into the back of her mind, but without any concrete proof it was just a theory. Of course another, just as equally plausible, theory was that he had been attacked as a civilian by another Agent or a Youma or a Senshi. Missing didn’t necessarily mean leaving. She couldn’t blame anyone who left though. Of course, it wasn’t a good thing to lose members, but she had heard angry whispers from others about recruiting those who didn’t want to be in the Negaverse in the first place and forcing them into becoming Agents. She had to agree. It wasn’t something that was said out loud, but she didn’t believe that anyone who was forced into all of this, especially if they had been on the other side, would be a great Agent.
Corrupted Cybele had been another Agent that she had briefly looked into, just to see if there were any connections between the missing Rutile and the Force-corrupted Senshi. There hadn’t been anything in the database about Cybele, but she had heard rumors that another General had forced the Eternal to the Negaverse side. Why the General had thought that was going to work long term would forever elude Eveite. It would be one thing if the Eternal had willingly gone to the Negaverse. That would show that they wanted to be a part of all of this. But to force someone so powerful into it against their will? The Senshi leaving was bound to happen at some point.
It had just been quite quickly from what Eveite had heard. A year, less than that? She wasn’t sure, she had been a Lieutenant for less than one herself so she could only rely on the accounts of other Agents.
So, because of this turnaround by the Eternal Eveite thought there may have been a connection somewhere. There hadn’t been in the database, she was sure of that. The Captain surely wouldn’t have been dumb enough to consider leaving clues in there as to where he was going, unless it was just some sort of message saying he was on vacation or whatever. She hadn’t found such a thing, but she had looked for it. The only other place then was to look online. Unfortunately, with basically no information on him and not knowing anyone who knew about his civilian life, she had hit an information wall quite quickly. She had tried to look at pictures to see if he had some sort of active social media prescence where he posted pictures, but that had been a dead end as well. But she did commend him for it. She hated pictures of herself being up on the internet for everyone to see as well.
She closed the laptop and sighed, taking another sip of her hot chocolate out of her kitty themed mug. She needed more information than what she had been given and in order to get that she would have to prove herself to the Negaverse. She would have to start volunteering for more assignments and then when she became a Captain, she might have a bit more access. For now, the job was put on the backburner. She had scripts to grade and a teacher meeting that she had to attend the next day. And she already wanted to just call off sick.
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