Ana wasn't in a hospital, which was a major plus. Probably the doctors had decided she'd spent enough time in hospitals for any self-respecting twenty-odd-year-old person... or they'd decided that someone who got their lung caved in by a fifteen-foot-tall hellmonster from hell deserved to not deal with hospital food for the time it'd take to recover. They'd stashed her in a care facility. Like, a nursing home. Humiliating, but all in all, it made sense. She leaned back on her pillows and gently probed the row of crooked black stitches, the drain wedged between them. Little ants of black wiry s**t and a great black hole within. Like, she wasn't supposed to be doing touching her sutures, but hey. She thought she was a little bit entitled to her meager delights, and by now she knew the drill.

The care facility had wifi, and her tablet was allowed as long as she didn't do anything Untoward. She could Skype, or Facetime, or whatever she wanted as long as she didn't do anything stressful, so... she'd been doing nothing stressful. Just poking around IP addresses she'd pulled from... places. Secret places. One of them was very interesting; no matter how many different approaches she tried, the firewall wouldn't come down. She couldn't get in. It was looking for something else, maybe. A keycode? A name? A cookie in her browser cache?

On her tray table, the tablet was a negligible weight. On her lap, it was easier to type into, but harder to manage overall. "How the ******** do you make a cookie again," she murmured, pulling up her notes from class. How the ******** did she make a cookie?... The tablet chimed, a neat distraction from her two-year-old notes. An email? This she opened with a double-tap of her fingers, scrolling through it. The text was as such:

Quote:
To: anabau(at)dcu.edu
From: pcd3393276(at)slipmail.net
Subject: 223.xx.xxx.x

Where did you get this IP?


Ana thought about it. Telling anyone would be a problem--especially if they had her email address, like, holy s**t, no one else had that email, it'd be pretty easy to turn anabau to Anabel Au, senior computer science undergrad--but this person could probably find out anyway? Since they tracked down her email in the first place? No, that wouldn't really be that hard...

She responded and settled in to wait. The person on the other end must have been waiting for her with bated breath. She got an answer in less than ten minutes.

Quote:
To: anabau(at)dcu.edu
From: pcd3393276(at)slipmail.net
Subject: 223.xx.xxx.x

Quote:
Quote:
Where did you get this IP?

From Europa. She lent me her phone. What is it?

The database.


There was an attachment, a PDF, and she doubleclicked. The information there was... all about Negaversers, identifying information of the people collecting it redacted out. One thing stuck out at her: It was ******** old as balls.

Quote:
To: anabau(at)dcu.edu
From: pcd3393276(at)slipmail.net
Subject: 223.xx.xxx.x

Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Where did you get this IP?

From Europa. She lent me her phone. What is it?

The database.

When was this last updated? This is so out of date.


His response came a little slower that time, with a little data packet. She dragged that into her cache and tried to access the IP again, and...

Boom. The interface was bare-bones, but it was there. She could work with it, code it better.

Quote:
To: anabau(at)dcu.edu
From: pcd3393276(at)slipmail.net
Subject: 223.xx.xxx.x

Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Where did you get this IP?

From Europa. She lent me her phone. What is it?

The database.

When was this last updated? This is so out of date.

I don't have time for it anymore. You fix it. You're not totally useless, if you managed to find it in the first place. The mantle of Snarky Admin falls onto your respectably ready shoulders, stranger.


She emailed him back, but he didn't answer. So she looked to the code he'd sent her, the cookie that let her access it on a civilian computer, and cracked her knuckles.

At least she had a project to keep her busy while she was in rehab.

531 words, without emails. With, 651.