#also screw backgrounds all my homies hate backgrounds

[rat-pagi]

-- LEGACY --

There's so many people in Qymaen's story that we get to see so little of--a story, a passing glance, an object hastily passed on before time swallows it whole. Is this how they are in Qymaen's mind too? Death, after all, takes too many far too soon on Kalee. How much does he remember of his father, besides hands, larger and rougher than his own easing his fingers onto the trigger an Outlander rifle? Of his mother--no, a mother is not spoken of; we cannot say for certain that was someone he knew. And then there is Outlander itself, left by a great-grandmother decades gone, who had used it to defend a Republic that did not care whether she lived or died. Did her story outlast her? Did it tell Qymaen, even before he was old enough to know politics and war, that those who ruled from the Core could not be trusted? Or did it too, ebb until all that remained was her weapon, and the fleeting sense, that whenever Qymaen raised it, there was someone there beside him, steadying him with scarred yet gentle hands, and whispering in his ear that he is greater than what the world makes of him.

[polar-stars]

*Meanwhile in some alternate dimension*

I really got into the mood to draw them again, lately. I kind off tried to make it a little bit reminiscent to the cover of a Shoujo Manga 😅

[prorevenge]

He must have been a master hacker.

Warning: book ahead

Decades ago a was a restaurant manager. After years of working for TGI McChillibees I was recruited by a regular to come work at a hotel.

I was tired of the big corporate game and this seemed like a new challenge. Plus I was tired of trying to take pride in slinging food that when done perfectly was still mediocre at best.

Right away it was evident this hotel was a shit show. It turned out the property was under federal receivership as the owner was under indictment for making half a billion dollars in loans to banks that didn’t exist for companies that didn’t exist.

(One day the bellman who drove the shuttle can came back from a run superexcited to tell everyone the owner was back in country and he knew it because the bellman saw the owner led out of the airport in handcuffs by guys with windbreakers that read FBI.)

I was brought in to update the bars and restaurants but was not allowed to change anything. The head of housekeeping denied my request to dim the lights in the bar because it looked cleaner. I later found out this is common in some Asian countries but who the hell in America wants to sit in a bright white box with a bar in a shitty airport hotel when there are a load of hip bars a cab ride away.

No one. And that’s who was drinking in our bar. No one.

I was used to working with people more or less my age and with the same point of view. Now I was managing long term union members who gave zero fucks. Add to that the complete lack of training I was given in how to work in a union environment and it wasn’t pretty.

The HR manager (who recruited me) was leading negotiations with the union for the next contract and didn’t want to upset the apple cart so she refused to endorce any discipline. We had a busser no call/no show for a month. We let him go as it was job abandonment, it was grieved, and he was brought back as a banquet porter. Wtf?

It was a union house yet when someone no showed or called out I was expected to cover. I didn’t know this until a few weeks in when I got a call at 3 am saying I had to cover the breakfast shift as both server and cashier.

The controller was convinced everyone was stealing. She walked around all day looking for opportunities, nay possibilities that someone might remove a paper clip and screw the hotel.

The accountant sat in his office chain smoking cigarettes. He looked like something out of a movie with his long nails and an ash never less that three inches long. His office was always locked and he was barricaded in his desk by two shredders and they were always going.

The banquet manager got arrested for a DUI and convinced the guy who had my job before me to bail him out. No one knew this until one day he no showed and the cops come by looking for homie. Turns out the old manager had put his house on the line for this dude so he was fucked.

The Chef was awful. Like out of a book awful. He would buy fish from his steward who was catching them in the bay. The bay that was known to be full of PCBs and other contaminants from a few hundred years of pollution and was deemed off limits for catching food.

The Sunday buffet was everything from the last week or so covered in cream sauces and lemon slices. Didn’t matter if it was bad or not, just add more lemon slices.

Banquet food came out of the freezer and got put in the hot box hours before the event yet this clown ran around yelling at everyone like he was Gordon Ramsay.

The GM was told his contract wouldn’t be renewed a month into my tenure so he said fuck it and had me order cases of Dominus, and Lynch Bages, a fifth growth Bordeaux that drinks like a first. I learned that wine crap later as I was 25 and considered Miller Genuine Draft Light and Rumpleminz the pinnacle of fine drinking. All I knew was the shit was spends.

He would get off work and sit in the bar knocking back $60 of wine (around $100 in today’s scrilla) while I was yelled at for letting him do it.

Let him do it? That was my boss. How could I stop him?

Needless to say things weren’t working out so after a few months we agreed at my 90 day review to part ways. It was an easy decision.

I was moving on and happy in my next gig but still friends with some of the people I worked with who were there. In fact I ended up in the wedding of one of them.

I was already salty about my time there as what I was promised and what happened were worlds apart. But then my friend got fucked over.

She had landed a long term contract with the power company. We had some bad storms that damaged the power grid and they brought people from another market in for 9 months to trim trees, modernize things, whatever it is power companies due in such cases.

My friend should have received 1.5% of all their billing. Rooms, food, misc expenses all should have had a slight vig that kicked to her as was laid out in her employment bonus program. This would have been huge money as it was dozens of rooms a night over nine months.

When bonus time rolled around they kicked her a tiny fraction of what she was owed. Instead of close to 6 figures she barely got a few grand.

She was livid, as was her fiancé and I.

One night we were all bitching about it at the bar watching football. I really hated that place for me, for her, for everyone stuck in that hellhole. A terrible thought entered my brain around halftime and wouldn’t go away. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but this would be my night.

I drove to the property and parked next door. It was not a well lit area so I could sneak over to where my old office was and jumped the wall. We always left the slider open to go out and smoke (it was a converted ground floor room) and I knew the banquet manager who shared the office was still on the run so I should be safe.

Once in the office I looked around trying to decide what to do when I saw the POS computer. This was the 90s so everything was controlled by this dinosaur from the 80s in the backroom that had a plastic box over the keyboard so no one could accidentally hit a key.

I grabbed my shirt like I’d seen in the movies so I wouldn’t leave any prints and fired it up. This old beast ran MSDOS as it’s operating system and I was enough of a geek to know what to try.

I typed in cd\ to get to the root directory. Then del . For the vast majority out there who have no idea what that means wiped out the root directory. I was giddy with that total “aw fuck what did I just do” feeling. Not sure if that was enough and completely surprised I was able to do so I double downed and typed in format /c.

The damn thing blinked and just started chugging along. Fucking erased itself.

I got the hell out of there and somehow made it home without a dui. I guessed they’d have to reboot from a back up and ha ha that would be a pain in the ass.

A year or so later I ran in to some of the hotel peeps in a bar and they asked if I’d heard about what happened.

It turned out that someone hacked the pos system and destroyed it. Because it was so old, “experts” had to be flown in and they said the person must have been a masterful hacker because if they had done anything less then it would have been an easy fix. Anything more and it would have left electronic fingerprints.

It turned out that there were no back ups. It was towards the end of the month and all the sales data was gone. The experts couldn’t rebuild a system so old so a new system had to be purchased and installed. That alone ran over 6 figures to do.

This also triggered an audit.

Remember the controller who was convinced everyone was stealing? Turns out she was. She and the accountant were led out of the hotel in handcuffs as it turns out the feds don’t like it when you embezzle from a company in their receivership.

At that point it hit me that I could be in some seriously hot water so once my heart started pumping again I stopped any sort of coy “what do you mean” bullshit when asked if I knew anything about it and shut the hell up.

The statute of limitations is long gone and it’s an obvious throwaway. I wish I could take credit for being such a master l33t haxter but it was just the actions of a pissed off drunk with a geeky background.

(source) (story by Poskilla)