#any password could be brute forced in like two seconds

[erindizmo]

Courtesy the Nevada DMV website, observe the worst password requirements of all time.

[arbitrarygreay]

Possibly one of the largest shifts in SNSD dynamics for the 15 year reunion is that the intra-group popularity order is no longer in play. Paying heed to their relative popularity is an incoherent concept, and will no longer benefit their solo activities. This fundamentally changes all of the members' need to chase screentime during their group activities, and so their relationship dynamics and sentimentality (or even lack thereof!) feel more honest. This, of course, is most demonstrated by the three who were relatively SNSD's underdogs. Sooyoung has an irrepressibly forward personality, often taking the initiative and having the competence to back it all up. But back in the day, that was always shadowed by the financial incentives to grant the demands for more popular members instead. After leaving SM, nothing can hold her back, and neither do the other members want to. See how she naturally becomes the star of the Among Us puzzling, and the other members are happy to follow her lead. Sunny can be just as competent, leading to a variety-centered "post-SNSD" career, but even as early as Invincible Youth, we pegged that it's probably not her passion. She's okay with sitting back until the challenges come to, or are foisted upon her. There is an innate drive and competitiveness, but it doesn't seem to be people-centered. She seemed to relish her late-SNSD performance highlights (e.g. You Think, Gain's Bloom), and is Among Us puzzling's second main detective. Though, I found it hilarious that she fell back on "let's brute force this laptop password", and the contrast to Sooyoung's dogged pursuit of negotiations (which ultimately cracked that challenge) is quite illuminating of the difference between the two. Sunny seems to be the sole member of SNSD who doesn't appear to have a specific career dream that she's aiming for. Was this also the case during the SNSD days, or was it something that she eventually let go of after debut? Sunny is Schrodinger's Ambitions. There is so much I could say about Hyoyeon's career trajectory that it wraps back around to being able to say less than how much my Sunny paragraph ballooned out. She had more than enough ambition to match all of the most popular members, and yet SM seemed intent on suppressing it during the group activities days. The moment contracts were renewed, though, Hyo set about building that solo career like she was as popular as Taeyeon the entire time, with the clear creative vision to match. (Not to mention various little offhand comments and Jessica's novels implying some upper management-level industry clout Hyo and/or her family has!) The group activities days must have been so frustrating on so many fronts, and there was always a question as to how that situation affected the relationship dynamics and how she approached the opportunities she did get, whether performance or variety. But, of course, none of that situation, so dependent on the intra-group rankings, applies to now. Hyo doesn't have to give a shit about the other members' popularity. 15 year reunion activities are nothing but up-side. And what do we see? I think Hyo has probably been featured the most she ever has. She's truly unleashed, and the results are so compelling that even the editors can't ignore it. I think a similar effect has been in play for Sooyoung, as well. And staying on brand, less so for Sunny, who can't deny her own instincts in excelling when she can, but whose relatively more "relaxed" state doesn't have as consistent initiative (Sooyoung) or disruption (Hyoyeon). There's also an audience-side effect, too, where during the group activities days (which, I remind y'all, was concurrent with the 48G era), the oshi vibe meant that fans were constantly only pushing for their number one. In this era, acknowledging other members no longer poses any risk to their oshi's activities, so they may feel more free to spread their praise-lavishing around. Hyo is not only featured in more footage, but my perception is that she's getting a lot more comment-love, too.

[moonlite-drabbles]

Sbi Mafia AU ft. Ranboo Prompt/Oneshot

The SBI is mafia and has a habit of adopting the kids who (try) to mess with them. Ranboo is no exception.

Sbi was far too powerful. A monopoly covering trade, drug, dealing gun through this and many other cities.

The Essempi, veterans who came much before the two immortal seeming beings and their family settled, was not happy about it.

Ranboo worked jobs like this before. Nothing was new to him, but each new mission sent waves of anxiety through his body, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to be found, vomiting into a toilet over events he never seemed to remember by morning.

Dream liked him and his work for practical uses. Issues remembering things and reliance on muscle memory for things like codes and passwords kept his mouth shut when compromised, and they could clean up the mess.

His Enderman roots also left him with a few advantages. They typical, teleportation, a beastly alternate form with sharp talons for fingers and jaws with the bit force of an alligator. But the vitiligo that marked his skin, unseen in the dark where he operated, but obvious for the world to see under the bright police interrogation room lights. He never matched the descriptions of an enderman hybrid’s silhouette in a window, and glowing purple eyes the result of colored contacts.

The plan was simple. That’s probably why it didn’t work. Gunshots, yelling, blood in his mouth (his) and the body of another lanky teenager’s (his target’s son) used as a shield as he growled out threats and flashed his teeth. Cornered like an animal.

The eldest son (the warrior, a piglin hybrid, nicknamed “the undying,” not someone he could take,) blocked the doorway, eyes narrowed. “There’s no need for that.”

He warbled out a laugh. Pressure built in his chest, preparing for a teleportation. The cameras had to have seen him (blaring alarms, swears whispered under his breath).

“Come on, his like, twelve” (“hey!” More struggling from his hostage,) “And what are you? You look like you have math homework to finish. Jesus.”

He knew the brute was stalling. (Footsteps of backup running down the halls.) So was he. He would take the blond teen with him. Dream would want something if he couldn’t take Philza out. And the writhing boy (just younger than him, the file said) would probably be enough to get away with failure.

He’d failed his savior so many times.

The pressure in his chest finally peaked, and then snapped. He hissed as he began to slip, taking the boy with him-

The man bolted forward, tackling him to the hardwood floor, which turned to grass seconds later.

The blond slipped out of his grasp, and then it was him and the warrior son of Philza. The Undying.

Ranboo went limp seconds later. Giving up as his feet left the ground and his back slammed against the wall. Suitably losing consciousness as his half mask was pulled off and the white of his face (young and scarred under the eyes and scared) was revealed.

He was out seconds later, a heavy hand coming down hard and then something like sleeping.

The next day, the entirety of the family sat around the dinner table, Tubbo absently scrolling through deep web hitman and assassin networks, trying to find someone like their mystery attacker, whilst the rest discussed

“He’s got the Essempi mark on his shoulder. He has to be one of theirs.” Technoblade aaid.

“I’m more concerned about his age than where he came from, Techno. Can’t be older than eighteen.” Phil replied with that determined fatherly look that everyone just knew the meaning of immediately.

“Phil no.”

Phil just smiled.

“Phil we already picked up those fucks please.” Wil said with a sense of panic. Tubbo and Tommy both glared.

They got Tubbo when tracking down an info leek, and were mildly surprised to find the fifteen year old behind the computer in a crappy apartment trying to get through college early. Tommy they just found (it was a weird week) and kept.

“Op, found him. Guys I found him!” Tubbo's face was written with some sense of pride, but fell after he read a bit more. He flipped the laptop around and showed off Ranboo’s file.

No possible info leeks, no family to complicate things should he die, willing to take on any paid request, great track record-

This kid reeked of “hybrid picked up off the street.” Of survival and hopelessness and hybrid only alive because someone looked at him and thought “useful”. Technoblade gave up then, because Phil had that look and Tubbo looked concerned and Wilbur (who was still half asleep) just rolled his eyes with a smile.

“We’re keeping him.”

[alterrune]

So I'm having some trouble with the red string password thing, I got the first and second set all figured out, I think, but I'm struggling with the third set I bit. I think I know what numbers are a part of the code or not, but I'm not sure what order to put the third set of numbers in or if my numbers are wrong. Could I have a few hints please?

Sure. I can give a few general tips.

1. The first set (which is marked by one dot) has some other numbers that are smudged. They're smudged like that for a reason: they aren't part of the code.

2. The second set (which is marked by two dots) is the most straightforward of the lot. However, the image it's hidden in is cluttered as all hell. Make sure to take a good hard look at the image, and disregard any other numbers that are not marked by the dot patterns.

3. The third set (which is marked by three dots) is the most complex one out of the lot, and ironically, it's on the same post as the password entry is, which is where it started. There is an image of a clock, and certain numbers on it are warped. Those are the digits for that piece of the password. However, it's not as straightforward as it may seem, as only the numbers are given, not the order they go in. I suggest just brute-forcing all possible places of the last 3 digits and process-of-elimating your way to the correct solution.

4. As I said in the last 3 hints, all 3 pieces of the code have a set of dots used with them. They're a way to distinguish the order in which they go in:

• = First Position

•• = Second Position

••• = Third Position

5. At the password screen, when in doubt, just backspace and re-type the passcode. If you think you screwed up somewhere and don't know where, just type it out again to make sure it's inputted correctly.

That's all I can give you. Hope this helped.

[streetlites]

The house is small concrete box in the middle of a neighborhood filled with small concrete box houses. Bolivar stops the car at the stop sign and turns it off. “Do you remember my number?”

“I've got it,” I assure him. “Just stay here until I call.” The street is empty now, there were people sitting on the stoop of the house we parked in front of but had since retreated inside. I guess nothing good comes from unfamiliar black SUVs pulling up at 3 AM.

My ears are hot and there’s butterflies in my stomach from nerves. Every step I take closer to the house intensifies my nervousness; Am I walking correctly? What will I do if he doesn’t answer? If he does answer, can I pull it off? I swallow and take a breath before knocking. The sound is loud on this quiet street.

“Who the fuck is it?” a voice comes from inside.

“Omigod, please, please let me use your phone!” I beg, trying as hard I can to emulate the Bay Girls from school. “My car broke down and this is, like, the fourth house I’ve been to!” I whine. I hear the man on the other side grumble but he tells me he’s coming. I clap my hands, “Yay!” When he opens the door, I twist my body before standing straight, popping my chest out where he takes me in, “Thank you soooo much!”  

His brown eyes meet mine and he looks sheepish, “Yeah, uh, no problem.”

“So, do you want me to wait out here, or can I come in?” I ask, smiling.  

He’s still feeling cautious, looking behind me to make sure no one else is hiding. “Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry,” he apologizes. “Come in, I’ll go get my phone.”

I look around the kitchen and into the living room; no one is in there, which is good. “Thanks for helping me out,” I coo. “You’re pretty cute, do you have a girlfriend?”

“Ah, nah,” his voice comes from a bedroom. He appears a few seconds later with a phone in hand. “Here.”

“Cool.” I let my eyes wander his body, biting my lip and winking. He smiles back, relaxed.  

I dial Bolivar’s number and it rings once before he picks up, “Buenas noches, bellisima,” he purrs. “Is he alone?”

“Yes? Gabriella! Omigod you need to come and get me! My car broke down and I’m all alone!” I whine.  

“I’m coming,” Bolivar says and hangs up.

I keep talking, “What? No, this nice guy let me use his phone. Please come and pick me up! Alexis went home with some rando and left me at the club and I’m freaking stranded out here!” I sigh dramatically. I shake my head, acting like it’s tragic and the man laughs. “I can’t use the bus! God! Didn’t I drive you around that week your car was in the shop -”

The door creaks open and the man curses when he makes eye contact with Gabriel, his pistol drawn. I drop the phone but the guy is quick; he grabs me and has me in a headlock before I can reach for my holster. “I fucking knew it! Put the gun down or I’ll snap this bitch’s neck,” he warns.

Gabriel stops and slowly begins to lower his pistol to the floor, “You don’t want to do that. That girl? Her people will come after both of us and we’ll wish for death when they’re done. Let her go and we’ll leave.”

“Do you think I’m stupid? I’m going to be the one that leaves.” He tenses, “Put it on the ground now!” He yells. Bolivar places the gun on the floor, his hands up. “Good, now kick-”

I use the split second of relaxation in his grip to bite down hard on his arm. The man screams as my teeth rip through flesh and blood pours into my mouth. The slight recoil gives me enough space to bring my head back and crack into his nose and break loose. I use the momentum as I’m turning to swing my leg around and catch him across the face, bringing him down. His head smacks against a desk and he lands on the floor, motionless. There’s a flare of fury as I’m trying to calm myself down – I need him alive, if possible. I spit the skin and blood from my mouth onto his body.

Gabriel whoops, “You beat his ass!” He laughs, “Damn, girl!”

My body throbs with pain; My teeth ache from how hard I bit his arm, the back of my head from the headbutt, and my leg from the too wide kick. “Shit,” I groan, half from pity for myself and the other half afraid that I’ve already killed him.

Bolivar assumes it’s from the latter as he checks the body, “Oh, don’t worry, he’s not dead. I’ll tie him up. You go start to look through the house.” He says, rolling a desk chair to the middle of the living room.

There isn’t much house to search – the bathroom is small and appears clean. A small altar is lit; Jesus looks mournful as shadows from the flame flickers across his face. I shut the door and go to the other across from it into a sparsely decorated bedroom. “I found a safe,” I tell my partner.

“Shit, I’m not good with those,” he says.

“I am,” I tell him, looking over the lock. I started getting interested in picking locks when I was young, after hearing people tell stories of my mother when she was in the LA-13. She encouraged it and eventually started me on safes; leaving little lock boxes with presents or money inside for me to crack. This one is cheap and the locking mechanism is simple – if I had a drill or some medigel, I could brute force it in a minute or less.

Sighing, I pull two bobby pins from my hair and bend one into a pick and straighten the other to push the pins in place. It is slow going because the pins reset every small turn of the lock and I have to keep pushing them back in until the lock has gone all the way around. When it finally opens, I’m rewarded with the sight of stacks of cash, a gun, a vial of ruby with dab sheets, and about a kilo of coke.

I go into the living room, where Gabriel stands with pieces of mail and receipts littering the floor. “I bricked the phone trying to guess the password,” he says when he sees me.

I stare at him with disappointment, “You could have used his fingers to unlock it.” That was basic!

“Too much blood, it couldn’t read it. But, I’ve got this guy’s name! Jesus Ignacio Soto Ortiz, you can get his phone records later.”

“Gee, thanks,” I complain. “He’s got coke, ruby, and a lot of cash in his safe. Did your contact say he dealt those?”

Gabriel shakes his head, “No, just said the guy was an enforcer.”

“That’s probably our guy’s stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was 20 thousand in the safe.”

My partner whistles, “Why that much?”

“They only allow you to take up to 10 on planes. Whoever he is, he’s already gone.”

He looks like he’s thinking it over and nods, “Explains the airport parking receipt I found. Let’s wake him up and see what his friend’s name is and where he ran off to.” He walks off toward the kitchen and I hear the water running as I try in vain to wake the guy. “That won’t do it. Watch,” he instructs and takes a bowl of water and shoves the man’s face in.

Chuy’s body thrashes, rolling the chair side to side. Gabriel takes the bowl away, leaving the other man wide-eyed, gasping for breath. “Good morning, sunshine,” he smiles coldly. “We’re looking for your friend, goes by the name Jay?”

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” the bound man coughs.

“Which do you know him by? Because we found his things in your safe. You give us a name and I’ll take five thousand of that cash and let you live.”

“That’s my money,” the other man insists.

Gabriel sucks his teeth, reproachfully. “He’s worth 30 thousand to the LA-13, 100 to Marin. And you? Not worth anything at all. I got your address just by asking for it. Free.”

“Fuck you, goddamn Kings,” Chuy spits.

“We’re not with the Kings,” I tell him. Bolivar grins when the realization dawns on the other man’s face.

“That’s right, we’re, what do you call us? Phantasmas?” He turns to me and laughs, “I love it, I do,” he says as an aside before continuing with the other man. “And we’re going to get your friend; it might take longer than we’d like, but we will. You decide whether you’re going to die for him. All we want is a name.”

Chuy shakes his head, “Not from me, no. Never. And I’ve never heard of any Phantasmas wearing no goddamn space suits so, fuck you there, too.”

“Shit, off-world.” Gabriel complains.

“It doesn’t matter, we’ll log it. He’ll come back eventually,” I tell Gabriel, screwing a silencer on the end of my pistol. “I don’t need him because I’ll have his phone records.” My partner nods. “We’ve got him at the apartment when it went down so it’ll placate Marin.”  

“Wait, wait! I didn’t - I only,” the man sputters.

I shake my head at him, “Like I said, it doesn’t matter. You were a good friend. Shame you can’t say the same about him.” Despite the silencer, the shot is loud and my ears ring. The man’s head slumps forward, the ties on his arms and legs keeping his body upright.

“Well,” Gabriel sighs, “I guess that’s it. I’ll call Dito out here and he’ll take the arm off and make it presentable.” He takes one of the small bricks of coke and a 5K stack and shoves them into his jacket pocket.

“Didn’t you tell your contact you’d leave the money?”  

“I left most of it. And a dead man can’t argue that he didn’t already spend it. Shall we?”

[pookha]

Luck is no substitute for a good plan by KittenKnife (pookha) M rated for violence and self-harm/suicide

Felicia Felix, also known as Lucky Clover, has a dark past. She joins the All-American Angels under false pretenses to further her plan of revenge. Ultra will pay for what he did to her parents.

Act 1

"Next," Witchcraft said with weariness in her voice.

A young woman, maybe a teenager, Felicia wasn't sure, went into the circle.

"Name?" Witchcraft levitated a stylus over her tablet.

"Lumineera," the woman said from behind her light-blonde bangs.

"What are your powers?" Computrix asked.

"I focus light," the woman said, but so quietly it was almost inaudible.

"Sorry?" Lady Justice shifted in her chair and her scales rattled on the table.

The woman stood up straighter, and spoke louder. "I focus light."

"Show us," Computrix said in their cold, clipped voice.

Lumineera raised her hands and the overhead lights dimmed as her skin started glowing brighter and brighter until she was painful to look at. Suddenly, she pointed at a wall. A focussed beam of light shot out from her hand and scored a dark black line on it. She produced balls of light and flung them at various members of the All-American Angels. None of them did any damage as far as Felicia could see, but they were definitely dazzling.

She unzipped her loose jumpsuit and let it drop. She became painful to look at. Suddenly, she dissolved into a burst of light and disappeared. A second later, there was a glow under the door and she reformed from the other side of it, slowly oozing out from the small crack under the door.

Her glowing form walked back to her jumpsuit, put it on and then went back to the circle.

"Interesting," Computrix said. "Must you disrobe to teleport like that?"

Lumineera nodded and then lowered her head shyly. She just looked like a shy young woman again.

"Can you do real damage with the light?" Lady Justice asked.

"I can focus enough as a laser beam to cut through a steel I-beam, but it takes a while unless I have a really bright source of light to use." She was still mostly hiding behind her hair.

Witchcraft let her stylus drop onto the table, waved her hands and a small block of metal appeared on the floor.

"Demonstrate, please," Computrix ordered.

Lumineera concentrated for a moment, the lights dimmed again and a beam of light came from her hand. Felicia had to turn her head because it was like looking at an arc-welder without darkened goggles.

Witchcraft made sunglasses appear over her face and Lady Justice's, but Computrix merely watched with their expressionless black eyes.

Less than a minute later, there was a clank and when Felicia looked back, the slab was neatly cut in two, with the edges still glowing white-hot.

"Very good," Witchcraft said. "We'll be in touch."

Lumineera nodded, then walked quickly out of the room, leaving only Felicia with the Angels.

Witchcraft made the two hot pieces of metal disappear.

"Next."

Felicia stood and moved to the center of the room, conscious of how she looked: just an ordinary young woman in jeans, a Harry Potter T-shirt, Cons and glasses. She knew she looked younger than her twenty-five years. She also knew she was far, far, from ordinary.

Witchcraft turned her focus to her. Felicia swore she could actually feel Computrix's gaze on her, too. Lady Justice merely looked on impassively.

"Name?"

"Felicia Felix, but some people call me Lucky Clover," Felicia made eye contact with each of the Angels.

"Powers?" Computrix demanded.

"I can control people's luck, either making them lucky or unlucky. I can transfer luck from one person to another." She did not; however, tell them she could also split her mind into multiple parts, or that she was the daughter of Dr Eugenica and SirRebral.

"Luck does not exist," Computrix said. "There is no such thing as random."

"That is not true at all," Felicia said. "Radioactive decay is predictable, but when an individual particle will decay is random. Wave-form collapse has probabilities, but they are just that; probabilities, and they do randomly happen based on those probabilities."

Witchcraft and Lady Justice turned to Computrix.

"Are you saying that you can shift the quantum possibilities?" Computrix sounded doubtful, a trick of the voice they must have learned recently.

"That is exactly what I'm saying." Felicia held up her hands. "I don't know exactly how it works, but I can demonstrate it."

"Go ahead," Computrix said.

"While I've been sitting here waiting, I've been draining luck from Witchcraft and transferring it to you." Felicia pointed at Computrix.

Computrix shut their eyes briefly and then reopened them."You are certain? I do not feel different and my diagnostics do not show any interference."

"I am sure; I wasn't sure if I could before getting here, but I can...I guess ‘feel' would be the best word for the transfer, and you definitely have some quality that I can transfer luck to that I can't do with a mere machine."

Felicia pulled a tablet out of her pocket and turned it on.

"I have encrypted the password to my GreetMe page with 128 bit encryption that would take approximately 2 times 10 to the 12th power years to crack with a brute force attack."

She looked at Computrix.

Computrix nodded.

"A very close approximation," they said. "I assume you would like me to brute force this password?"

"Yes, please." Felicia started to walk to the table where Computrix sat, but Computrix waved her off.

"Please turn on your bluetooth and I will do it remotely."

While Felicia did just that, she said, "I would like you to start with a random--"

Computrix started to object, but Felicia spoke over them.

"Okay, pseudo-random seed."

Computrix closed their eyes again and Felicia increased the flow of luck from Witchcraft to Computrix. She transferred it as fast as she could and soon Witchcraft was nearly drained of luck.

"I---" Computrix started to say, but Witchcraft's chair snapped, she dropped her tablet and it shattered on the edge of the table. The stylus fell suddenly from where it had been writing on its own on the tablet and stuck in the chain of Lady Justice's scales, causing them to tip wildly for a second before she stilled them. While they were swinging, her head became a crocodile's head, then reverted back to a human one when she stopped the scales.

"I have cracked it." Computrix said as Witchcraft tried to stand, slipped on a piece of the tablet's broken screen and fell heavily back to the floor.

Lady Justice helped Witchcraft back to a chair.

"It took me two minutes, forty-three point three two five seconds," Computrix said. "Impressive."

"How did you choose the seed you started from?" Felicia asked.

"I based it on my internal chronometer translated into hex then back into alphanumeric, based on an Enigma pattern that was encoded on the date of my creation in 1940."

"How did you decide on that particular seed, though?" Felicia pushed the issue.

"I...It just seemed right," Computrix's voice had a doubt to it that Felicia had never heard before when they had spoken on television.

"Intriguing. Have you always been able to control this luck? Can you increase it only to a set amount? Does it work at a distance? Over video?" Computrix was going to keep asking questions, but Felicia jumped in.

"I can't increase or decrease my own luck. I can do it over a distance, but it is not as effective; my assumption based on my qualitative observations is that it varies inversely to the distance between me and my target squared; both ways if I'm transferring it and not merely removing it and dissipating it. It seems to be a positive quality and to increase someone's bad luck, I merely have to remove their good luck. I have to be able to see my target or both targets, but I can do it over video if I know where they are."

She paused. Computrix started to speak, but Felicia continued.

"It can only go to a certain point then there are diminishing returns and it seems to dissipate into the ‘aether'."

Computrix frowned at the word ‘aether.'

"Yes, I know, there is no aether, but it does decay somehow. It does not affect machines, as I said. I also can't seem to affect my parents with it, but I don't know why not." She meant her real parents, not her adopted parents. She had tried over a live feed she had hacked from the black site prison they had been renditioned to and it hadn't worked. Soon after, they died in Meteorite's failed escape.

"Please return to your seat while we deliberate." Lady Justice stood and helped Witchcraft to stand.

"Also, return my luck," Witchcraft demanded.

"Already in process," Felicia said. "I would estimate that you are at around fifty percent of normal now and will be back to eighty or so percent before I leave; Computrix used quite a bit of it."

Witchcraft's face darkened and Felicia held up her hands.

"Don't worry, it will refill completely by tomorrow morning, I promise."

Felicia sat back down on one of the chairs she had been waiting in before the audition. The Angels sat behind the table and discussed her in whispers, with the occasional hard look from Witchcraft.

After a few minutes, they called her forward.

She stood in front of the table.

"I must ask; what do you do for a living?" Computrix asked.

"I'm sorry, I can't tell you," Felicia said smiling. "Couldn't see my files, could you?"

Computrix's eyes narrowed in a very good approximation of a human.

"No, I could not." They steepled their  long, grey fingers.

"I estimate a ninety-five percent chance that you work for the CIA or NSA, a three percent chance that you are a plant from the League of Malice, a one percent chance that you are an alien/fey/other unknown and/or mischievous creature and a variety of other probabilities that each are less than one percent. Accordingly, we would like to offer you a probationary acceptance to the All-American Angels as a support hero."

Felicia smiled. She hadn't expected to succeed on the first try, and even making the support hero team was an amazing accomplishment; only three others had done it on the first try. This would speed up her timetable.

"We would like you to be on-call at our HQ, so that you may..." they paused.

"Fill us with luck," Lady Justice said, smiling.

Act 2

Since joining the Angels, Felicia had assisted on ten missions and they all went well. They were rated almost as highly in the public opinion polls as the Second-City Rectifiers, and they had Ultra on their team. The Angels had all agreed with Felicia that it would be best if she wasn't seen in public with them and that the reason for their latest accomplishments would stay a secret. They had publicly added Plumbia to the team at the same time as Felicia and Plumbia was making her mark as well.

Felicia watched Dark Zombie on the monitor from his prison cell located in the basement of Angel HQ. She could feel Dark Zombie's luck seeping out, out, out into the aether to Lady Justice, who she was watching on another monitor.

Lady Justice had Drunken Bastard fully in the power of her scales and Felicia knew he was reliving his crimes and judging himself. She'd had to endure Lady Justice doing this to her, and it was quite painful, even when your crimes were minor like Felicia's had been. She relived sucking all the luck out of her ex-girlfriend during the Homecoming game and watching her tumble from the top of the cheerleader's pyramid where she hit the ground with a sickening crunch. She relived using her power on the neighbor's dog after it had bitten her sister and the way it ran into traffic.

Felicia let these relatively minor incidents be judged and hid the rest in the eighth partition at the back of her mind. Lady Justice never saw Felicia manipulating the luck of the NSA background checker who was vetting her employment application or the way that Felicia had drained all the luck from the NSA cryptanalyst who had the job in the SuperVillain cryptanalysis lab before her.

On the monitor, Sharkey rose up just behind Lady Justice to bite her head off, but then suddenly an I-beam fell off the crane that had been lifting it and flattened him. Lady Justice didn't even blink, and she kept her focus on the now-blubbering Drunken Bastard.

Felicia could hear him over Lady Justice's feed.

"I'm sorry, Charlene. I'm sorry, Charlene, I was drunk. I was stupid. Forgive me!"

He screamed in pain and frustration.

Sharkey pushed the I-Beam off him and then the dump truck he was next to had its back gate fail. A rain of red dust enveloped him as it dropped its load on him like literally six tons of bricks. Felicia smiled. It wouldn't kill Sharkey, he was too tough, but it would put him out of the fight.

She turned  to Computrix's monitor, but they didn't need any help in their fight with Slamdance. Whatever attack Slamdance tried to use, Computrix blocked and then counter-attacked. They were both so fast, it was a blur, but the computer readout made it clear that Computrix was fine and Slamdance was rapidly tiring.

Felicia watched Plumbia pounding the crap out of Steelhead. He was made of harder metal, but his attacks just sank into Plumbia's soft lead body without hurting her. Witchcraft was somewhere nearby, but invisible; Felicia could tell by the glowing bands that were beginning to tighten around Steelhead's arms and legs.

She turned back to Lady Justice like she had been doing for the last three months and admired her as she reduced Drunken Bastard to unconsciousness and then moved on to the now restrained Steelhead. He soon fell into her power too and just about the time he went under, Computrix finished off Slamdance with a powerful axe-kick. Slamdance toppled, her shoulder dislocated.

The FBI's super-villain transport unit arrived soon afterward and took the Destroyers into custody. Computrix double-checked all of their meta-restraints and made sure Steelhead was actually out before they let the FBI transport the villains away.

The Angels all gathered in a circle and Witchcraft teleported them back to HQ. Felicia heard the displacement of the air in the conference room and went to greet them.

Lady Justice met her just as Felicia opened the door from the control room to the conference room.

"Thank you," Lady Justice told her and hugged Felicia tightly. Felicia's heart began beating faster. She hadn't expected to feel anything for any of the Angels, but something about Lady Justice made her...long for...companionship? Sex? Love?She wasn't sure exactly what she wanted. This was not part of the plan.

"I...You're welcome," she said in a strained voice as Lady Justice tightened her grip.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Lady Justice said as she released Felicia.

"No, it's fine, really. Glad it helped out. Sharkey's one tough bastard, huh?"

Lady Justice grinned. "And Drunken Bastard wouldn't be so bad if he could dry out, but he stays drunk even when there's no booze around."

Felicia nodded. She'd read his file.

"I'm going to go shower. Want to wait for me and then we can talk after?" Lady Justice asked, her voice sounding somehow confident to Felicia.

Felicia nodded and followed Lady Justice to her quarters. She had been there only once before, when Lady Justice had asked her to help Computrix with a bug sweep. They'd been afraid that the TechnoBabbles had infiltrated HQ somehow, but it turned out to be a false alarm. Computrix seemed surprised at Felicia's knowledge of surveillance and also Felicia's capabilities in counter-surveillance, but Felicia thought it was likely an act on their part as they had to have figured out Felicia's capabilities by now. Or maybe, Felicia had thought, Computrix wasn't the super-computing android she was made out to be.

As they went through the conference room where Plumbia was talking loudly with Witchcraft and Computrix, Felicia felt a gaze on her and turned her head. Computrix met her eyes for just a second before turning her face back to Plumbia.

The walk to Lady Justice's quarters passed quietly, Felicia concentrating on not staring at Lady Justice's backside as she walked behind her. Lady Justice partially turned her head and noticed. Felicia blushed. Lady Justice laughed and turned back around.

Lady Justice opened the door to her quarters and let Felicia inside, then came in and locked the door.

"It's okay to look; do you like what you see?" Lady Justice asked as she set her scales down on a plinth in the center of the room. They glowed red-gold briefly then looked just like old-fashioned scales sitting there.

"I--What?" Felicia asked.

Lady Justice undid her hair ribbon and her dark black hair fell to her waist.. She put the hair ribbon over her eyes like a blindfold.

"You must know that even blindfolded, Lady Justice sees all." She laughed and threw the blindfold/hair ribbon on the couch, then she flopped on it heavily and patted the cushion next to her.

Felicia gulped and sat.

Lady Justice leaned in and suddenly she was close, her lips were close, her hair was close, and her lashes were oh so long. Felicia shouldn't; but she wanted to.

Then her lips were on Felicia's and they became lost in the kiss.

After what seemed like minutes, but must have only been seconds, Lady Justice pulled back.

"I thought I might have to make the first move. Before you decide, you need to know what I am."

"You're Ammit," Felicia said, "The Devourer of the Dead, who commits the unworthy to eternal fire."

"I am. But I am also what remains of Anubis and Ma'at. I am more than one being in this body." She sighed.

"This is my true form."

She changed. The crocodile head that Felicia had briefly seen in her tryout was there, but so also was a jackal head superimposed with it. She had both a human body, but also a lion's and a hippo's body. They all overlapped and morphed together.

"I am all this," Lady Justice said. "But I am also this."

She changed again, back to herself, she wasn't outwardly bigger, but she had more...presence . She looked like herself again, but with a heavy black blindfold over her eyes. The scales disappeared from the plinth and reappeared in her hands.

When she spoke, her voice carried weight.

"I am Justice. I was born into this world long ago. I have been Justice as Vengeance; I have been Justice as Truth; I have been Justice as Mercy." She snapped her fingers, the blindfold disappeared, the scales went back to the plinth and Lady Justice sat there, looking small.

"I change with the times and each rebirth." She hugged herself.

"Can you handle all that?" she asked.

"I can try," Felicia said and leaned in for another kiss.

Two years later, Computrix addressed the Angels in the conference room.

"I am concerned that the League of Malice has been too quiet lately. I propose we strike first. Ultra has information on that front."

Ultra was also there from Second City Rectifiers. Felicia eyed him; if he figured it out too soon, then her plan would be for nothing.

Computrix sat and Ultra stood. His voice was dark mahogany sliding over oiled leather.

"We have uncovered the lair of the League of Malice and would like to perform a coordinated strike on it with the All-American Angels."

"We will be the primary force, and the Angels will be the infiltrators. While we engage the League from outside, Lady Justice, Computrix and Plumbia would go in the side entrance, corrupt L'ordinateur's computers and then capture him. Without him quarterbacking, it should be an easy mop-up on the rest of the League."

Felicia thought he sounded over-confident. But then he had every right to be; he was nigh-indestructible.

He pulled up a hologrammatic plan of the League's base and they all hashed out the plan together.

"Excuse me," Felicia interrupted.

Ultra turned his blue glowing eyes to her and from the other side of the table Computrix also stared at her coldly.

"Yes?" Ultra asked.

Felicia met Computrix's glare.

"What do you calculate your odds of corrupting L'Ordinateur's computers at in the time Ultra's allotted for it?"

Computrix closed their eyes for a second.

"Seventy-three percent with an error range of plus or minus five percent," they replied.

"And what would those odds increase to with my assistance on the scene?"

Computrix recalculated.

"Ninety-two percent with an error range of plus or minus two percent."

Ultra turned his full attention to Felicia. She felt very small suddenly.

"I haven't met you until today," he told her, his voice penetrating directly to her brain. She partitioned her mind into eight parts and it retreated.

He noticed somehow that she had done something and redoubled the power in his voice.

"What do you do for the Angels?"

"I am the secondary computer expert, the tactical coordinator, and..." she looked to Computrix who nodded.

"And, I also push good luck to the team by removing it from others." His blue glowing eyes stared through her.

"You literally control luck?" he asked.

She nodded.

"This is the missing piece in why your team has become so much more effective, isn't it?" he demanded of Computrix.

"She is the biggest change, yes, but it is not solely her powers that have made the difference. She also has one of the most amazing intellects I have seen in a human, and she runs the team effectively from the comms."

"Why don't you go into the field more?" he asked Felicia.

"I'm just a human. One good hit from almost any super and I'd be dead. I'm a liability in the field as I would distract the team trying to protect me."

Lady Justice looked down at her hands. Computrix saw, but Felicia didn't think Ultra did.

"Why then, would you want to go on this mission?" he asked.

"You heard Computrix, it increases our odds by twenty percent and reduces the error rate. It's a risk I'll have to take eventually. Also, I can control the flow of luck much better in person."

"Can you keep me invisible or do something else to protect me?" she asked Witchcraft.

"I could keep you invisible, but it takes a fair bit of concentration. I don't think I could do it and complete my other mission parts."

"What about Robotrice's mech-suit? We have that in storage and she was about the same size as Felicia," Lady Justice chimed in.

"That would make a difference," Computrix said. Felicia felt she could see the numbers running behind their eyes.

"We could also have Plumbia stay near Felicia as a bodyguard," Lady Justice said.

Computrix nodded. "But then we have to give Plumbia's part to someone else; one of the reserves, perhaps?"

"You would trust this to a reserve?" Ultra demanded.

"I think Lumineera could get us through the doors almost as fast as Plumbia?" Witchcraft asked.

Computrix closed their eyes and this time Felicia definitely saw the eyelids moving, almost like REM sleep in a human.

They opened them a second later. "Yes, Lumineera can perform the task adequately."

Felicia grinned. She'd been with the team for two years and this would be the first time she was in the field. This might just be the time to push the next part of the plan forward.

After the meeting, Lady Justice caught up with her.

"You should go tailor Robotrice's mech-suit to you now, so you can get used to it by the time of the op."

"Good idea, come with?" Felicia asked.

Lady Justice shook her head. "Sorry, I've got to visit an old friend in Cairo tonight."

They kissed their goodbyes and Felicia went down to the storage lockers to get Robotrice's suit.

Felicia knew the op wasn't running correctly when there were more soldiers on the ground than predicted. Plumbia protected her from the bullets and mopped the soldiers up when their weapons all jammed at the same time. Felicia saw the other groups were similarly delayed by human minions. It was nothing they couldn't handle, but it was starting to throw off the timetable.

She watched the HUDs inside the mechsuit's helmet, keeping an eye on all the conflicts at once. She'd already partitioned her brain into sixteen parts and would have a full-scale migraine later, but for now it was worth it since she could multi-task; keeping aware of her surroundings and controlling luck flow for four or five people at once; six if she pushed it and didn't care about lost luck transmission packets.

She kept two of her mind-partitions on Lady Justice's display and also was transmitting extra luck to her from the unconscious soldiers.

One of the screens blinked red and she paid more attention to it. Angelfire from the Rectifiers had been taken down by Demonspawn from the League and forced to battle on the ground where his wings were more a hindrance than a help. Demonspawn threw bolts of darkness at Angelfire, but he danced around them.

A flaming sword appeared in Angelfire's hands and he met the next bolts directly with it. They splattered and fell to the ground where they smoldered. Angelfire leapt and struck at Demonspawn with his blade, but Demonspawn met it with a black blade of his own. Felicia ran as she followed Plumbia through the jungle to the side door. Computrix and Lumineera were still paralleling them and Lady Justice and Witchcraft trailed behind them in reserve, ready to teleport in when it was clear.

The Rectifiers were holding up their end of the bargain and keeping the League distracted with their frontal assault. Ultra showed up to help Angelfire and while Demonspawn was distracted by Ultra's attack, Angelfire smote him. Demonspawn disappeared in a greasy puff of black smoke.

"He'll be back, but not for 666 days," Angelfire told Ultra.

Ultra nodded, picked up Angelfire and flew off with him to the next conflict.

Plumbia had cleared the way and she and Felicia reached the side door. Felicia popped the decoder device over the keypad and started to decrypt the passcode. The plan was that whoever got to the door first would try to open it their way and if that didn't work, Lumineera would just laser through it.

Felicia ran the program over the keypad, but also looked at it to see if any of the keys showed obvious wear; even knowing one or two of the numbers in the passcode would speed the process quite a bit. She thought the two and four looked slightly more worn, so she put those in the device and just as Computrix and Lumineera arrived, the door opened.

A fusillade of gunfire came through the newly opened door. A bullet ricocheted off a wall and clipped Felicia on the side of her helmet. It didn't penetrate the mech-suit, but it snapped her head back painfully.

Lumineera put up a shield of light in front of herself and got spattered lightly by some melted bullets, but they couldn't pass her kevlar suit. Computrix avoided the bullets with speed that Felicia still couldn't believe even though she'd seen it before. Plumbia merely waded into the soldiers and began to beat them relentlessly as their bullets just sank into her soft lead flesh.

Plumbia had just reached the leader barking orders at the back when he pushed a red button on his suit. All of the bullets embedded in Plumbia exploded and bits of lead and other body parts flew past Felicia. A leaden hand fell at Felicia's feet.

Plumbia's explosion killed most of the soldiers and before Computrix could stop her, Lumineera had lasered through the heads of the rest.

"We do not kill!" Computrix shouted at Lumineera as they ran through the door into the hallway. Felicia stared in shock at Plumbia's smoldering corpse before Witchcraft and Lady Justice appeared suddenly in front of her with a whoosh of displaced air.

"I didn't give her enough luck," Felicia said quietly into her comm.

"I don't think any amount of luck could have prevented that trap," Computrix's voice came through her earpiece.

Lady Justice's hand squeezed Felicia's shoulder. The haptic feedback in the suit made it feel like her hand was actually touching Felicia's flesh and she shivered.

"Mourn later; we have to finish this, okay?" Lady Justice's voice was soft.

Felicia gulped and nodded. She concentrated briefly again and began searching for luck to remove, but Lumineera and the explosion had killed all the enemies close enough to make a difference.

Felicia followed behind Witchcraft and Lady Justice, and they trailed just behind Lumineera and Computrix in the vanguard. The schematics for the League of Malice's base that the Rectifiers had uncovered appeared to be accurate and soon they were in L'ordinateur's server room.

Computrix immediately jacked into the servers and began to process the corrupting virus she had been carrying. Lumineera guarded one door and Lady Justice and Witchcraft guarded the other. Felicia also plugged her tablet into the servers to help Computrix. She'd found out that Computrix wasn't better at this, merely faster.

Her tablet beeped, she looked at it. It glowed red around the edge.

"Disengage!" she yelled at Computrix, but it was too late. Computrix began to shake uncontrollably as viruses from L'ordinateur tried to penetrate her firewalls. It had all been a massive trap. Felicia desperately flailed at her tablet, but nothing she did helped. Computrix would either fight the viruses off on her own, or she would die; or worse, be taken over.

Felicia began unplugging the servers from each other and their power sources.

The cooling fans reversed suddenly and the doors closed.

"What's happening?" Witchcraft asked.

"L'ordinateur is pulling all the air out of the room," Felcia said. "It was all a trap."

"Yes, it is," L'ordinateur's voice came from Computrix's mouth. They struggled to stand. Witchcraft began to create air in the room, but it was being sucked out faster than she could replace it. Lumineera had just started to cut through one of the doors when the lights went out. They could all still see, but Lumineera now had no ambient light to draw from. Felicia turned on the spotlights on the mechsuit, and as Lumineera started to cut through the door again, Felicia saw the battery meter on the suit dropping precipitously.

Felicia tried to find someone...anyone to drain luck from and give to her team, but there was no one.

"Luck is no replacement for a good plan," L'ordinateur said through Computrix. They managed to stand and tried to grab Felicia who danced back. Computrix was still wobbly, but if L'ordinateur gained full control of her, then they'd all be in trouble.

Lady Justice met the gaze of Computrix and tried to pull L'ordinateur into the power of her scales of Justice, but it didn't seem to be working.

"That won't work on me, I'm afraid," L'ordinateur said. "I have no remorse or guilt for anything I've ever done. Human emotions are a curse. It's a shame my child here never understood that. Her emotions and care for you all will be her undoing, but now that I have control of her body, she can be reset."

Felicia wondered briefly why L'ordinateur referred to Computrix as ‘she' instead of ‘they,' but dismissed it as unimportant.

Computrix lunged suddenly and grabbed Lady Justice's scales. They ripped them out of Lady Justice's hands and flung them across the room.

Felicia opened a compartment on the mechsuit.

"Now let's see if a god can die," L'ordinateur/Computrix said. They gripped Lady Justice's head in both hands and twisted just as Felicia reached into the compartment.

A loud snap filled the chamber and Lady Justice fell to the ground.

"You're next," Computrix said to Felicia and took a step toward her. A blast of light from Lumineera stopped them briefly and Felicia pushed a button on the device she'd pulled out.

Nothing happened outwardly, but Computrix suddenly fell to the ground, limp. The fans stopped, the servers stopped, the mechsuit shut down and the lights on it slowly faded to glowing filaments as they cooled. The mechsuit opened in failsafe mode to let Felicia out.

"What was that?" Witchcraft asked.

"EMP bomb," Felicia said. "All the electronics within about 2 miles will be out now. If L'ordinateur was in that range, then he's dead." She didn't think he was, but she hoped.

"You killed Computrix?" Lumineera's voice squeaked.

"No, L'ordinateur killed them, I merely killed their animated corpse." Felicia sat heavily. The air was still thin.

Witchcraft kept filling the room with air and when they could breathe easier, she created a miniature sun that Lumineera used to finish cutting through the door. Felicia went to Lady Justice's body and cradled her head in her lap.

"She can't die like that," Witchcraft told Felicia. "She'll be back, but it will be in a slightly different incarnation than before. We need to keep her scales for her, she'll want them."

Lumineera finally got through the door and they walked wearily out of the base. Felicia carried the scales.

Ultra met them at the side door.

"All went to plan then?" he asked, but his eyes were on Lady Justice's scales.

"We lost Plumbia and Lady Justice," Felicia said.

"But we also captured all of the League except L'ordinateur, who doesn't seem to be here." Ultra's smug voice blanketed Felicia.

"You knew this was a trap?" she asked him.

"Of course not." The lie was smooth, but this was part of Felicia's training. He was lying. They had been the distraction; he'd used them as a fucking distraction and now Lady Justice was dead; Plumbia was dead; and he'd taken another person she loved from her; first her parents, now Lady Justice.

Time to move the plan forward, she thought in fifteen of the sixteen partitions of her mind.

Act 3

Lady Justice appeared at her own funeral. Her new incarnation reminded Felicia unsettlingly of Computrix. She was cold and emotionless as she judged now and whatever she and Felicia had was gone. She wasn't the same person that Felicia had loved.

When she got back to HQ, Felicia left a note on her dresser and left. Witchcraft or Lumineera would find it soon.

Felicia went home, made some tea and ate a stale sandwich, then she curled up on the couch and cried until she fell asleep. When she woke up in the early hours, she sighed, stood up, showered and then sat in front of her laptop.

While it booted, she opened her secure desk drawer and removed Computrix's head. She attached a high-speed cable of her own making to the port in the back of Computrix's neck that she'd rebuilt.

Humming tunelessly, she opened apps on her laptop and then connected the cable to it. Soon she confirmed what she'd thought. There was nothing of Computrix left after the virus and the EMP bomb, but there were  small traces of L'ordinateur.

She ran backtracing protocols on the virus, looking for signatures of L'ordinateur, software he'd used, servers he'd hacked or VPNs he'd bounced data from. The NSA programs she used had been developed by programmers that she'd pumped luck into, and she'd also used ten parts of her partitioned brain in checking them for bugs and errors afterward.

It was good that Computrix was finally out of the way, as they would likely have been able to stop Felicia from what she was about to attempt.

She backtraced L'ordinateur as far as she could and put a message out into one of the servers she'd found on a VPN. He might have thought his VPN was untraceable, but she'd just showed him it wasn't.

She only had to wait a few seconds when a message pinged back.

Clever girl. You knew I wasn't dead.

Need to meet you, either IRL or virtual; don't care.

Why would I agree to that?

I have something you need.

Yes?

5x10^23 qubits of processing power.

Lies.

I work with the NSA and can get you access to the SC3.

The Super-Cooled Super-Conducting Super-Computer is a rumor. This is a trap.

Can prove it. Give me a 256 bit protected password and I'll brute force it in seconds.

Fine.

A few seconds later a link appeared. Felicia checked it every way she knew for viruses and traps and didn't find any.

Starting now.

She connected her laptop through the backdor of the SC3 that she'd helped work on and then used a code-cracking app she'd developed on his password. Forty-three seconds later, she'd broke it.

She logged into a virtual chatroom and then they worked out the rest of the plan to capture or kill Ultra together. L'ordinateur never knew it was all a lie.

The amplifier helmet wasn't comfortable, but that hadn't been in Psycho's mind when he'd made it. Felicia wiggled in the reclined seat and tried to relieve pressure from her neck. It may not have been comfortable, but it did its job. With Psycho pumped full of luck, he'd made breakthrough after breakthrough on his mind amplifiers and he'd been able to make what had always eluded him: an amplifier for any meta-human's natural powers. He'd used it first to take over both the president of the U.S and then the Russian president. When she used it, she no longer needed to see her targets, she could feel them.

The Rectifiers knew something was up and they'd stepped up their attacks on the League, but bad luck kept happening to them. Angelfire had been dragged to Hell when Lucifer himself had accidently been summoned by some school-girls and ClawBomb had come down with some weird virus when he'd bitten Chupacabra. Only Ultra seemed to not be having bad luck. He'd figured out that Felicia had joined the League, but he couldn't find her; with both her and L'ordinateur covering their cyber-tracks, they were virtually invisible.

Felicia concentrated on all the remaining members of the Rectifiers, pulling their luck out and putting it into Ultra. Tomorrow, the big test would happen. She unplugged and went to bed and slept the best she had since before her parents died; even better than she had in Lady Justice's arms.

In her dreams, Lady Justice had her trapped in the power of her scales, but since she didn't feel guilty about what she had done, she wasn't affected. She awakened even more sure of what she was doing.

She started to undress to shower, then decided it didn't make a difference. Today, it ended one way or the other. She left, still in her Ravenclaw pajamas.

She went to the PsychoChamber and attached the helmet. She adjusted all the dials to 11 then she started sucking luck out of everyone that she could; billions of people. The gauges pegged into the red-line immediately and a tinny computer voice spoke in her ear.

"Warning! 6.5 billion people exceeds safety parameters! Override to continue!"

"Override code Lucky Clover 654xYZ," Felicia said, then she partitioned her brain into thirty-two parts. She'd only done it once before, and it had put her in a coma for a month afterward, but it just didn't matter.

She kept twenty of the partitions focused on draining luck from everyone else and pushing it to Ultra. There was a ton of leakage, but it wouldn't make a difference in the long run either.

"Lucky Clover," L'ordinateur said into her earpiece. "What are you doing? This is not what we agreed."

"It isn't, is it?" she said simply.

The thirty-first partition of her brain pushed a button on her tablet and the Dedicated Denial of Service automated attack she'd put in place started happening to L'ordinateur.

"What?" his voice crackled out of her ear.

He was now being bombarded with requests from millions of slave computers that Felicia had infected. It wouldn't keep him long, but it would be long enough.

The thirty-second partition noticed Psycho come through the door.

"What are you doing?" he asked. He tried to walk across to the main console, but tripped on a mess of wires.

"Destroying the world," she said emotionlessly.

Psycho tried to invade her mind, but the partitions confused him for a second. Since he was now in her mind, she could do something she had never tried before. She reflected his mind in all of her partitions and pushed it back at him. His mind snapped into thirty-two pieces, mirroring hers.

He screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed. He tried to stand, fell, then crawled away still screaming.

She turned all but five partitions of her mind to the luck draining again. The others entered codes on her tablets.

"Launches confirmed." the computer voice said.

She kept draining luck. It would take about thirty minutes for the first missiles to reach the U.S and Russia, but reports were already in from the Middle-East and India and Pakistan.

News reports started to go crazy. NORAD scrambled, but it was too late. Secret SDI satellites from the U.S. and Russia shot down some of the missiles, but there were just too many.

"What have you done?" L'ordinateur's voice came

"What needed to be done," she replied.

"You won't," he said, then there was a crackling and his line went dead. Wherever he had actually been in the world must have been hit.

Felicia took the helmet off, sat up and left the League's bunker. When she got to ground level and stepped out of the elevator, she could see missile contrails in the distance.

She sat down and waited. She kept her luck sense extended. She could feel Ultra getting closer. It was only minutes before he got there.

He landed and lifted her effortlessly until her face was in front of hers.

"What did you do?"

"Why does everyone keep asking me that? It's fucking obvious. I launched nuclear armageddon."

He shook her so violently she almost passed out. Twenty-four of her mental partitions blanked out.

"Why?"

"I did it for you." She kept pushing all the remaining luck the people in the world had into him. The luck kept sputtering out as millions or billions of people died, but there was still some and Ultra was getting it all.

"You put my parents in prison and they died there. I wasn't able to help them. You let the Angels be shock-troops for you. You knew it was a trap and you sent us anyway. You let Lady Justice die."

He shook her some more and this time she did pass out. When she woke she was leaning against a tree and he was looming over her. Her head ached and only one partition was still working correctly.

"You're killing everyone just for revenge?"

She sighed and shook her head. "No, not just revenge, and not everyone will die. The human race is pretty resilient; they'll have a bad time of it for a while, but it will survive, just, you know, not anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere for millennia."

"Who were your parents?" he asked. He sat down and put his hand in his hands.

"Dr Eugenica and SirRebral," she answered.

"I remember you; you were just a baby when we fostered you. How did you find out?" His eyes glowed even bluer.

"I've always known I was special. I couldn't just control luck, I could split my mind into multiple parts and multi-task on so much."

She sighed again.

"Soon, it will be over, and Lady Justice in her form of Anubis will come for my soul. It will be judged by Ma'at and will be heavier than a feather and then Ammit will devour me and I'll be part of her forever. And I'll see my parents again."

She met his gaze.

"You are the luckiest being on the earth and you avoided all the destruction, even if you couldn't prevent it. You have so much luck that you'll live for thousands of years on this shattered world. If you aren't actually immortal, it will feel like it. Enjoy your life; I'll enjoy my death."

A rumbling of rocket engines came and missiles started to appear in the sky. Ultra flew off to intercept them and managed to get most of them.

But it only takes one and as L'ordinatuer had said, luck is no replacement for a good plan.

The missile detonated in an airburst 500 feet over the base and Felicia met Ma'at in a nuclear fireball.

[morris-magus-merry-miller]

Chapter 5: The Marvelous Manor of Madness

The island was to be a two-hour trip from Port Town. Enough time for me to prepare a special little spell, which if this is not the final draft will likely be on this page if it hasn’t already been expended. Sorry about that, I’ll undo the effects if you weren’t the intended target. Hope you at least have a nice nap.

Anyways, it was a quick and uneventful boat ride, until the last moments. As we approached the island, we found there was an ominous storm brewing. Blood red clouds had gathered in the sky above Gladshire’s manor. I would not blame you, dear reader, if you find this storm very similar to the roiling pink clouds which had gathered when Ulong had frozen Dualwood. Certainly, that is what we feared as we approached the island. But this proved to be a different phenomenon entirely.

We dropped anchor at the shore and made our way inland on foot. As we approached the manor, we came upon four shambling animated corpses and a foreboding looking tree.

Issac, our dear nature expert, informed us that the tree was a very dangerous undead plant called a Hangman Tree. It’s a tree…that does exactly what its name implies. It’s an insidious creature that uses spores to trick your brain into thinking it’s nothing but a normal tree, or even a friendly treant. Then when your guard is down it snags you by the neck with its vines, strangles you to death, and then eats you!

As we formulated a plan of attack, Issac warned that it wasn’t particularly flammable by normal means—but it would likely be set ablaze by a well-placed lightning bolt.

That meant it was John and Vigo’s time to shine. John called upon his goddess’ wrath and bolts of lightning rained from the heavens, striking the tree and the zombies that meandered around it.

Strange that a goddess of death would have an affinity for storms…although I suppose many people are likely killed by lightning strikes, so it’s not utterly uncalled for. It would make more sense I think for a cleric worshipping Nairon’s goddess to strike down foes with lightning. But again, I am no expert on divine magic. If a goddess of death wants to grant her followers control of the weather, who am I to say it makes it seem as though the world we live in has no internal consistency?

With the zombies weakened, Vigo followed up with a wall of lightning that blew them apart. Thus in mere seconds only the tree remained.

I began a reading to focus my companions’ minds to the task at hand, and also sent a spell at the tree to slow its movements to a snail’s pace. Even if it released its spores, I thought, it wouldn’t be able to immediately grab any victims.

Well, I was right, but that didn’t stop it from releasing said spores. As Terrance and Nairon pushed forward, intent to take advantage of the plant’s slowed state, a cloud of spores were released into the air. I saw Candy let out a gasp, breathing in the mind-altering pollen. I couldn’t allow that to happen to my friend, of course. I snapped my book shut, abruptly ending my performance. The remaining magic was channeled to Candy, clearing her lungs of the dangerous substance.

Unfortunately, in doing so I left myself open to breath in the same pollen. Things got a bit fuzzy from there. The tree actually looked quite friendly. I think I was about to run up to it, before John utterly annihilated it with another lightning strike from above. It is quite possible I owe John a life debt for that, and I will repay him in kind.

 Nairon and Terrance had apparently also been taken in by the tree’s mind warping properties. They expressed discomfort with going any further after such a harrowing experience, and decided they would return to the ship and keep watch from there while we cleared out the manor.

So we parted ways, and our band continued onwards. As we approached the manor it was clear all was not well. Many of the once opulent windows had been shattered, and a quite deceased body hung out of one. Not moving, unlike the corpses that had stood vigil around the tree, thankfully.

However as we approached a voice spoke up from the body. At first it appeared a lingering spirit was calling for our aid. What we discovered, however, was that the body had one of those Stones of Farspeech on its person, and Oswald Gladshire was trying to contact us through it. The Wizard of the Stars was being held captive within his own tower by a vile necromancer—who also happened to be his grandfather. Gladshire requested our immediate aid, to clear out the monstrosities that now infested his home, and to free him from the bird cage he’d been locked within at the highest point of the tower.

We needed his guidance to save Dualwood, so we were of course going to do so regardless. Adventurers save nobles in distress because it’s the right thing to do, that is a given. That he offered to let us keep anything we picked up that could help us within his manor was, of course, a secondary concern.

He quickly dropped the call as he heard his captor approaching, but promised to keep in touch as the situation allowed.

 The inside was both as extravagant and as wrecked as the outside had been. Rubble blocked a ruined staircase, necessitating us going the long way around to get to higher ground.

There were a number of rooms down the halls to both sides, many with placards denoting what the room was. Vigo stuck he head into a room labelled “WC”, which he said didn’t have anything of interest. John and I went looking into the “Horse Room”, which was a mostly barren room with a single large golden statue of a horse. Someone—Gladshire I must presume—had placed sunglasses upon the horse’s face. Quite reminiscent of Nathaniel’s usual attire, in fact, although something about the statue gave me a feeling that this horse was much older and more venerable than my own dear companion. I gave him a polite nod in greeting, as I would Nathaniel if he had been there at the time, before being on my way.

Down the next hall we came upon an imposing metal door—Gladshire confirmed over the Stone of Farspeech that it was a vault. He was fairly certain some baddies had made their way inside, and asked that we unlock it and clear it out. One itty bitty little problem stood in the way of that—the door was protected by a device that was password protected. A skull mounted above the door would spit acid at anyone who guessed the password wrong, or tried to open the door through brute force. Gladshire didn’t know the password himself, he’d had his apprentice Elena set it for him, and he hasn’t seen her since the attack. All he knew was that he’d told her to set it to ‘something you will remember’.

Clever adventurers that we are, we took the most prudent course of action. Guessing wildly. Paige confirmed that a few…admittedly rather vulgar terms were not the password. I tried Elena’s name—after all she was sure to remember that! We brainstormed other possibilities, and were about to give up when Paige tried the word ‘Something’. While the door remained closed, the skull didn’t activate.

A brilliant thought hit me—Gladshire hadn’t said the password need be only one word. Heart pounding, excitement flowing through my veins, I spoke the password.

“Something you will remember”

And voila! The skull remained inactive, and there was the sound of a lock opening. I pushed open the door.

And immediately back-peddled for Candy to take the lead, as there was a golden skeleton waiting directly within the doorway. A swift flurry of kicks was all it took to do away with that little problem. We got a number of nifty trinkets courtesy of Gladshire’s generosity, and we continued on our way to keep clearing the manor of such ghouls as that. Not literal ghouls. I don’t think we faced any literal ghouls. A few…other things, as you’ll soon find, but no ghouls.

 We circled back around, finding that the next hallway led back the way we’d come, but also continued forward in the opposite direction. John found a “smoking room”, and he and Vigo took a number of seemingly enchanted cigars from there. One was as long as Vigo was tall, and smelled…just atrocious, really. I had to excuse myself, alongside Peanut whose poor sensitive bear nose must have been burning from the putrid smoke.

Next we came to a parlor. The room beyond had music coming from it. Issac decided to try to scout ahead. He transformed into an adorable little hedgehog and skittered forward to peek beyond the door.

He didn’t get far. In the next room a number of awakened skeletons waited, and they immediately spotted the tiny hedgehog that pushed his way into their midst. The music grew louder and more focused, as one of the skeletons—whom I later learned was named Georgio—began playing trumpet.

I felt a challenge had been issued, and whipped out Nathaniel’s flute to begin a tune of my own.

While Georgio and I provided background music for the skirmish, Candy had a more up close and personal fight with one of the musician’s friends. (A backup dancer perhaps…?) I threw my hat into the ring as well, so to speak, when the skeleton had some disparaging words to say about Candy. His companion may have been a fine musical talent, but a gentleman this one was not. I called up a new spell I’ve been toying with—biting words—and told him just what I thought about him speaking ill of my companions.

Between the five of us, the musician’s two companions fell quickly. Georgio didn’t seem to have much in the way of battle prowess himself, and quite frankly I felt no desire to destroy him. He was a man of true talent after all!

It would seem he had no desire for a physical confrontation anymore, either. He ceased his trumpeting and challenged me to a far more desirable duel—one not of magic or sword, but of musical might.

Unfortunately for him, he flubbed his notes rather quickly, while I was quite on point. He tipped his hat to me.

Before exploding.

…I know some people don’t handle a loss very well, but looking back that still seemed a bit excessive.

 I took both his trumpet and a fiddle from the wall, which I shall play in his short lived memory.

With the skeleton band out of the way, Issac stole a peek into the next room. It was…beyond description, and even if it weren’t I fear I don’t desire to make use of words to do it justice. You shall have to fill in the gory details yourself, dear reader. Suffice to say there was a veritable horde of Fetches. They were seated at the table eating. Not food—oh no—but viscera, scraps of flesh, the last remains of many a visiting noble’s carcass...

I apologize, I did say I would not describe it, but the memory is difficult to banish.

Standing before the feasting horde was a man. Although ‘standing’ and ‘man’ are both inexact. It was more ‘floating’ and ‘ghost’.

I recognized the man from some old news I’d read some time back, while Candy realized she’d seen this man first-hand in the past. A vile fellow by the name of Count Bartholomew McLaurin. For those not in the know, he was once a count in Donmum City. However he was caught up in some dark business—human experimentation, warping creatures together, and who knows what else. All at the behest of some group called the Society of Great Enlightened Ones. He died in an explosion, a suicide bomb, I suppose to escape any punishment for his crimes.

What connection he had to this place was at first unclear. Without knowing we feared we couldn’t best him permanently—for as everyone knows, a ghost will just keep coming back if it still has unfinished business in the mortal realm.

And it would seem I was to be the one to uncover the truth. The others were rather quick to volunteer me for the task. I cannot deny I have a knack for words. I wouldn’t be an author if not! But I must say this entire situation was rather off putting. Quite frankly, I wasn’t certain that the entire room wouldn’t just mindlessly attack me. Not that all undead are mindless—as we saw from Georgio that is very much not the case, and I am well aware of the rise of awakened undead in cities across the globe. However these were…you know, eating viscera in the middle of a manor where most everyone had apparently been slaughtered…it didn’t seem like an ideal place for a chat. Georgio aside.

Still, my companions felt this was the best course of action. The fetches wouldn’t be difficult due to their pyrophobia, but we feared the ghost alone might be enough to drag one or all of us to the grave if we weren’t careful. So we hatched a plan to speak to the ghost, butter him up to learn what we could about what bound him to the mortal plane. We brainstormed possible codewords to use to call in reinforcements if things got out of hand—and settled on ‘would you like some merlot with that’, since the undead were eating. Issac also decided to come along with me—transforming into an adorable little black rabbit who helped calm my nerves tremendously. I wonder if anyone has ever told Issac he’d make an amazing therapy animal in that form?

To be quite honest with you, dear reader, I found the idea of talking to a ghost a rather frightening concept. I know we were in a haunted manor, but I didn’t expect to find a real ghost of all things!

As a wise man once said “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts”. Actually, I think maybe Vigo said that. Regardless, with a plan in place, a very fluffy bunny in hand, and a few spells cast to grant myself a…let’s say confidence boost, I strode forward into the feast of horrors.

[raymondsecurityadventures]

Lecture 6

I just remembered that professionalism was part of the portfolio marking criteria so I’ll try to keep it PG in these posts. Meaning that I’m allowed to drop one and only one F-bomb somewhere. 

Avalanching

Recall that the Merkle-Damgard hash construction looked like this: 

The reason the hash function is segmented into the various f’s you see above, is to allow avalanching to occur; the property that causes good cryptographic hashes to be drastically different from one another, even if the edit distance of the inputs if minimal. This allows for the semantic meaning of relatively similar inputs to be obfuscated, as one would otherwise be able to perhaps glean information pertaining to the information that had been hashed, through observation of the structure of the hash string and comparison with other similar hashes e.g. if hashing 12345 and 12346 produced hashes of 0xaa0geb212r3r3142q and 0xaa0geb212r3r3131w, then an attacker could probably guess the structure of the input at the very least and perhaps interpolate the inputs by generating other hashes. 

Passwords Part II 

From the exam, we might have found that the # of bits of security that we get from a random password using the Elephant Apple Golfing principle (or some shit I don’t remember the stupid name) isn’t as many as we would like. It’s naive to say that a password has as many bits as it is long, unless those bits are truly random and the full complement of ASCII characters are actually utilised, such as \0. Indeed most passwords aren’t that many bits, given that they’re based largely on quotes, names, birthdays etc. etc. and it’s only a matter of time before increases in computing power renders them obsolete.  

So yeah, the answer to that question pertaining to the Homophobic Dog Shagger principle is 40-49 bits i.e. the smallest choice. Congratulations if you got it right. 

This kind of segues into why WEP keys are terrible: 

They’re consisted of a shared 40 bit key, that everyone connected to a network knows, and a 24 bit initialisation vector that was randomly generated locally by the receiver that were combined to form a ‘64′ bit key and this key was used to encrypt every frame.  The obvious issue with this is that it’s trivial to brute force 24 bits, and it’s probably trivial to brute force 40 bits, and it wasn’t too difficult combining all the brute forced combinations to obtain the purported 64 bit key. 

Mixing Control and Data - Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit 

http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html

Mixing control and data is bad, don’t do it.  C lets us do it and although most modern compilers such as gcc and clang have several countermeasures for stack smashing, it remains a useful case study and a common issue in modern software. 

Buffer overflows can occur when someone writes shit code and rather than fixing declaring a fixed array size in their loop iteration, they end the array loop once the program hits NULL, allowing a third-party to use a function such as strcpy() - that doesn’t check buffer size - to stuff more in the buffer than has been allocated to memory. There are other methods too but this is the most intuitive to understand. 

The Stack and Return Addresses: 

Computers switch context lots of times a second to allow them to deal with interrupts from a multitude of sources. When something interrupts them, such as a keyboard entry perhaps, the computer will execute the interrupt and then return to whatever task it was completing before. How it knows where to return in the code, is by adding the address of that particular point where it stopped - the return address - as well as the miscellaneous parameters that the code needed to execute, onto a LIFO structure known as the stack. These miscellaneous parameters, such as our array, are stored before the pointer and as such, by overflowing the array, we are able to overwrite whatever return address was in stored at the pointer(’s address) which paves the way for all sorts of shenanigans.

Most common of these shenanigans: - Actually writing code into an overflowed buffer and addressing the pointer to the location of this code - Getting a shell open 

Overflowing the array is most commonly done with a NOP Sled, which is simply consisted of a bunch of NOPs (no operation commands) that serve to pad the buffer up to the memory/stack address containing the return address and your payload which can be either a memory address pointing to your code or pointing to whatever would open up a shell.  This requires us to know the # of NOPs to place into our sled, which can be done in a variety of methods that the course doesn’t require us to know.

*will add more to this section as I read more on it* 

NIST and the History of Ciphers

Even after WWII, ciphers were not particularly powerful and for a while there was a ‘crypto black hole’ where no new cryptographic methods were being devised and nobody was aware of any principles one should follow. This changed with the advent of computers and eventually, groups concerned about security put out a standard known as NIST. Except noone knew what to put into the standard and so a competition was held which noone except IBM entered into and they won by default. And so IBM’s DES was adopted and had at the time, only 56 bits.  Then the NSA comes along, looks at DES, breaks it in two seconds using their differential cryptographic methods and says ‘yeah it’s okay keep using it XD’. 

Except everyone was like HANG ON, and eventually a successor AES was built. AES was predicated, much like DES, on performing many permutations, transposing and other obfuscating measures, which created an encryption method that was difficult to break feasibly, but had significantly more bits than AES.  XSS (Cross Site Scripting) or why Javascript is awful Cross Site Scripting 

Involved placing Javascript on a webpage, for example in a poorly secured forum, where you know unassuming people would visit. The Javascript will execute upon that page opening and whatever was in the JS will proceed to wreak havoc.  Common attacks include stealing your cookies to impersonate you.

SQL & Command Injections 

Webpages that require you to enter your username and password into fields will typically take the characters you entered as your username and password, stick them in an SQL query and execute said query to check your username and password against a preexisting username and password database. 

Instead of entering our usernames and passwords, we can enter actual SQL code which will actually execute, due to the nature of PHP converting your input into code. This wouldn’t work in any other language. For example:

Here’s an example query taken off https://www.acunetix.com/websitesecurity/sql-injection/

# Define POST variables uname = request.POST['username'] passwd = request.POST['password'] # SQL query vulnerable to SQLi sql = “SELECT id FROM users WHERE username=’” + uname + “’ AND password=’” + passwd + “’” # Execute the SQL statement database.execute(sql)

Now, we could easily input as the password:

password' OR 1=1

which would cause:

SELECT id FROM users WHERE username='username' AND password='password' OR 1=1'

SELECT id FROM users WHERE username=‘username’ AND password=‘password OR 1=1′

to execute, which would return the first ID of the first user in the database table due to that 1=1 is always true and the query is made complete by the ‘ appended to the word password. 

We could easily modify this query to print out the entire table if we wanted to write more code. 

Command injections rely on the same concept of writing code into input boxes, but instead we write shell code and grep our way to sensitive data. 

Cryptocurrency

Wasn’t really paying attention to this part, I’ll fill it in later

Block Modes 

How we combine individually ciphered blocks of a ciphertext, like we did in the Merkle-Damgard hash (recall that the input was split into blocks), to get a whole ciphertext:

- Can concatenate them like in WEP - Or more commonly, we can use CBC which is really convoluted: here’s some reading if you’re interested, but basically each unciphered block is XOR’d with the previous block. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#Cipher_Block_Chaining_(CBC)

Authentication - WIP 

How? What decisions?

Humans are bad at looking at      faces

No point in confidentiality, if there is no authentication

Defence in depth 

Something you know

Have: let's send someone an SMS when they type their PW WOW.

2FA worked well initially, however, SMS is easy to intercept.

Have single point of weakness, in your phone

Are:

Requires secrets to be     confidential, keyloggers, shoulder surfing etc.

Naïve but easy to implement

[flyhigh-studying]

What’s your SSID?

The number of data records stolen or lost increase each day. I think it is important to know how to deal with some situations that happens online. I hope these posts can help someone to be safe in cyberspace. Sorry for any grammar or misspelling mistakes lol.

You know what it is "SSID"? This can be a strange term for most of the people, but it is something really common in your daily life. The "Service Set IDentifier" is the name you give to your Wireless/Wi-Fi network. Choosing a good name to your network can add more security for you online life. Your network name can facilize an attack. If I put my name on my Wireless/Wi-Fi people will know the owner of the network and with an easy password the access can be facilized. Alright, but I'm an ordinary person why someone would try to access my network? Here are some reasons:

Change your password, so the network would be just for the attacker.

Use your network to commit a crime. Doing some bad while connects in your Wireless/Wi-Fi could turn difficult to find the real author of the crime or even incriminate you and the others common users of the network.

Sniffing your data and get knowledge about what you do online. It is like you talking with someone but between you two is this other person listening everything. Imagine this conversation containing your bank password, or your social network information and even the content of an important email or the last massages you've sent to your friend, and one random person listening everything and taking notes to utilize that data.

To summarize I can use an example. When I saw this picture for the first time a few years I go I thought about it and I now I'm going to use as an example (everybody says thank you EXO for teaching me cybersecurity, lol)... I hope the responsible for the IT in their shows don't do this anymore, the boys and the staffs must be secure.

On the wall it is a paper, if you zoom in you can see the SSID (KT-NET-EXO) and the password (123456789).

In an unpleasant scenario (that I hope never happened or happens in the future, please) a sasaeng (a bad kind of kpop fan) finds on its device this network with the group name on it. Of course would call attention right? With a simple brute force app it could guess the password in seconds because it is too easy (is composed with just numbers) and with a few computer science knowledges could see everything the members and the staffs were doing online... Their privacy would be compromised and of course their security. Your network name and password are something important to consider if you want to be safe online...

Short security tips 8/?

[hypnosthemindmaster]

Converting Dani - Part 1b

"That won't be an option for you soon," TJ said as he rolled a stand up computer cart over next to her prone body.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

TJ picked up a VR headset from the cart and said, "I'm going to brainwash you to be my mindless slave, you'll have no choice but to obey me." He leaned over her to stare her in the eyes and continued, "when I'm finished with you you'll be nothing more than a robot, a drone following commands." The look of shock on Dani's face told him the realization of what he said was sinking in so he continued, "Sound familiar?"

'How'd he know?,' Dani thought as she stared up at him. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Yes," Dani said as she tried to stare him down and maintain her composure in spite of the feelings welling up in her body.

"I see," TJ said as he walked away for a moment.

'Yes, I've won,' Dani thought as she watched him walk away. She seemed confused when he came back holding a tablet tucked under his arm.

"You do realize I have the master passwords for every device in this house right?" TJ said.

A wave of fear ran through her as he pulled the tablet from under his arm and she realized he was carrying her tablet.

"Not that I needed it Ms. ABCD1234, a beginner could crack your password," he said as he unlocked the tablet. He tapped the screen a few times then turned it to face Dani.

Dani felt the life drain out of her as she stared at the screen. It was showing her journal, specifically the entry she'd titled 'My Conversion Fantasy.'

"That's right, I know your little secret. I've known it for months actually," TJ said as she stared at him in shock. "I'm going to give you your fantasy, even if I do think that fate is to good for you," TJ said as he laid the tablet aside.

Dani was to in shock to speak as TJ picked up the VR headset again and slipped it over her head, blocking out her vision for now. He pulled the two ear buds from the side of the headset and inserted them into her ears. Dani felt something being placed over her ears.

A simple spiral pattern began to appear on the screen as she heard TJ's voice in the ear buds, "Time for your programming to begin. You can close your eyes if you want to, it won't help though as I've ductaped the ear buds in your ears so you'll get the audio either way. It'll actually make it more entertaining for me to watch later if you struggle and resist."

'Watch later?' Dani wondered as the pattern came more into focus.

"I forgot to tell you, I'm recording this since I won't be here to watch your conversion. I'm off to make your disappearance complete. I found a woman who looks a lot like you. She's going to take your license and passport and board train to Mexico. She's going to jump off the train in the mountains and double back here, destroying your identification after she leaves the train and thus destroying any evidence of you. Since you said you were taking nothing with you in your letter there will be no trail for people to follow if anyone decides to look for you. Since you had no family and your only friends were Dad's friends, it's doubtful anyone would go looking for you anyway. So enjoy your fantasy come true, see you in a few hours."

When he finished speaking, TJ's voice was replaced by a soft female voice reciting a slow hypnotic induction.

Dani resisted for a while but the endless onslaught of the repeating induction in her ears, along with her own body's betrail as it became more and more aroused by her fantasy broke her will and she felt herself slowly giving in to the words resonating in her ears. Finally as the induction once again told her to "sleep" everything went dark for Dani as she closed her eyes and surrendered to her fate.

It was early the next morning when TJ finally returned, he'd been gone for almost 12 hours. "Time to go check on my project," he said as he got out of his car and headed into the house. He was glad to see his Dad's car was gone when he got home. He made his way back to the basement and checked the computer connected to the headset, he liked the readings he saw. Dani had resisted for almost 3 hours before it registered her eyes closing at the sleep command and had switched over to the programming part of the file. He couldn't believe she'd resisted this kind of brute force attack on her mind for that long. She'd been kept in trance ever since, the conversion program repeating and reinforcing itself multiple times over the last few hours. He entered the password to complete the program, then stood back to wait. A few minutes later a program complete message appeared on the screen and the lights on the headset went out. A second notification appeared on the screen:

Unit D34C is fully programmed and currently powered down. To activate unit, say the command "D34C Power on." To put the unit back in storage issue the command "D34C Power Down." Enjoy your new Fembot unit.

TJ removed the tape and ear buds from her years and tucked them back into the headset, the carefully removed the headset and set it aside. He took a step back and admired her body as she laid there. He found himself noticing that she really was quite beautiful, and thinking that if they'd met under different circumstances he probably would have asked her for a date. "No time to dwell on what might have been, what's done is done," He said as he shook himself out of that train of thought. "D34C Power On."

He watched with fascination as her eyelids fluttered, opening as she spoke in a monotone voice, "Unit activated, commencing start up diagnostics." She blinked her eyes a few times and said, "Optic Sensors activated and functioning normally. Auditory sensors activated and functioning properly." She turned her head back and forth a few times before tugging at the restraints holding her to the table several times. "Neck motor functions active and working properly, all other motor systems impaired. Unit is fully activated but will have limited usefulness with malfunctioning motor control systems."

"Who are you?"

"I am not a who, who refers to a human being."

"What are you?"

"I am female cybernetic unit, built from the Dani template."

"Do you have a name?"

"Cybernetic units do not have names, we have designations."

"What is your designation?"

"My designation is D34C."

"What are you programmed to do?"

"I am a servant and human companionship unit. I am programmed to perform all nature of household tasks as well as all aspects of relationship tasks my owner might require of me to perform."

"Does that involve intimate relationship tasks?"

"Processing............An intimate relationship is an interpersonal relationship that involves physical and/or emotional intimacy. Physical intimacy is characterized by friendship, platonic love, romantic love or sexual activity. Yes I am programmed to approximate friendship, platonic love and romantic love. I have been constructed with anatomically accurate features and I am also programmed for all forms of sexual activity a human female would be capable of performing."

Hearing her talk like this was exciting for TJ.

"Do you require sexual tasks from this unit?"

"Not at the moment. Do you contain a human personality program if I need to conceal that you are a robot?"

"Affirmative, I contain an imprint of the memory files and personality program of the original Dani template I was constructed from."

"What happened to the original Dani template?"

"Processing..........She was destroyed. I am all that is left."

'I wasn't expecting that response,' TJ thought as he stared down at her. "How do I access your human personality program?"

"Processing..........the command to access the human personality program is 'Activate Dani program'. To turn it off the program the command is 'Deactivate Dani program.' Do you wish to activate the Dani program?"

"Not yet, are you able to access the Dani program memory files without activating the Dani program?"

"Affirmative."

"Is the Dani program aware that it is a robot?"

"Affirmative."

"Activate Dani program."

"Activating Dani program....processing......."

TJ stood back and watched as D34C closed its eyes, they fluttered a few times then reopened.

[icecoldflames]

(Chap. 14 + Chap. 15) When Parallel Lines Meet

Masterlist

Previous Chapter

Chapter 14

Virgil didn’t like Mr. Edra. He had lied to him. The Markku group was right.

He felt sort of numb and couldn’t think straight. He hoped Roman would find Canace at least.

Virgil had no idea who Ben was and he knew he sounded rude and cold, but Canace was critical to stop the storm. Ben was just a Markku group member.

If there was no threat of a storm, all of them could have escaped through his portrait.

But that was not possible.

Virgil heard a click and he ducked and fell to the floor. He couldn’t believe he had helped make that deadly weapon.

He couldn’t hear anything over the shrieks and shouts of other people.

Virgil quickly stood up and felt other people against his white lab coat.

The lights flickered on as the floor shook again and he heard a loud crash that resounded throughout the building.

Virgil’s eyes immediately found Mr. Edra who was on all fours, his cane and gun not in his hands.

“Give up, Mr. Edra,” Virgil said slowly and steadily. “We’re giving you a free pass to leave and go to your wife.”

Mr. Edra sprung to his feet quickly, despite his old age, and ran at Logan.

“Don’t...don’t move!” Patton’s voice said shakily.

The air seemed to thicken and Virgil’s head slowly turned to see Patton, his two hands around Mr. Edra’s gun, pointed straight at Mr. Edra’s chest.

Mr. Edra froze in shock and then squinted at Patton. “James Norice?” He asked slowly.

“Patton Fitzroy...natural-born and not afraid...not afraid of you!” Patton exclaimed, stuttering and not able to look Mr. Edra in the eyes.

Virgil watched as Mr. Edra’s jaw slackened and his eyes widened. “What?”

What’s he planning? Virgil asked himself. He didn’t remember anything about Patton but even he knew Patton wouldn’t shoot Mr. Edra.

Mr. Edra seemed to be having the same thoughts. “You wouldn’t dare kill me, Mr. Fitzroy.” His voice was honey sweet and he was smirking.

“Try me.” Patton said, lifting a hand off the gun to push up his glasses.

Mr. Edra, as quick as a cat, grabbed Logan and put him in a tight headlock.

Patton didn’t shoot. Mr. Edra grinned. “I was staked out here ever since you punched in the password into the children’s ward. I gave Virgil another skeleton code that would notify me as soon as it was used.”

Virgil’s eyes flashed back and forth between Patton and Logan being squeezed tightly by Mr. Edra. Of course. Mr. Edra’s always one step ahead. He never trusted me for a minute, he thought bitterly.

He could see Connie a little further away, holding her arm tightly. Kate was in the same stance as Virgil.

Mr. Edra slowly bent down and grabbed his fallen cane. He straightened up again. “I have a daughter, Patton,” he said, deciding to use Patton’s first name. “Did you know she’s natural-born too?”

Silence. Patton’s hands shook wildly. There was another rumble and crash from outside.

“That’s why my wife got sick. Bringing Canace into the world weakened her greatly. I want to find a weather manipulator so we can stop this storm and my wife can live again.” Mr. Edra explained desperately.

“At the cost of children?” Patton asked.

“They signed contracts. Their parents agreed to it!” Mr. Edra exclaimed.

“Roman was miserable,” Connie piped up sluggishly. “He only came here because he idolized you, Mr. Edra. He didn’t know what he was getting himself into!”

“Nevertheless, he came here.” Mr. Edra said, not seeming to realize Roman’s absence. He turned his attention back to Patton. “Would you painfully kill a husband and a dad? I’m trying my best and you’re trying to kill me?” Mr. Edra said, his shoulders sagging.

Patton lowered the gun. “I...I can’t kill him.”

Virgil gritted his teeth. No. He wasn’t going to allow Mr. Edra to roam free. What did Roman say to him? That he called Mr. Edra an old bat? Yes, that was it.

“Old bat,” Virgil mumbled and suddenly white filled his eyes and he felt memory after memory slipping back into his brain.

Running away from the government...breaking into Patton’s house…giving Patton his note...getting caught by Mr. Edra...meeting Roman...Mr. Edra taking him and erasing his memory.

Virgil’s head pounded as memories from his childhood and earlier years at the government came back to him in an endless stream.

As soon as his vision cleared he ran over to Patton and yanked the gun up to Mr. Edra’s heart again, his teeth gritted and his thoughts set on one soul purpose.

Patton’s hands were still loosely on the gun.

In a split second Virgil pressed his fingers down on the trigger the same time Mr. Edra raised his cane and something flew out of the bottom.

Then, everything went black.

***

“No!” Logan shouted as the bullet hit Virgil in the chest.

The needle lodged itself into Mr. Edra’s thigh and Logan pushed Mr. Edra off of him.

Mr. Edra’s face was scrunched up in pain. “A nice little surprise...don’t you think?” He managed to goad.

Logan ran over to Virgil’s limp body, Patton’s body shuddering as he sobbed. “He’s...he’s dead,” he cried.

Virgil’s hand was still holding the gun an his eyes were opened and glossy, looking straight up.

There was a bright red splotch forming on Virgil’s white coat.

“There has to be a way to save him! Right?” Patton asked, looking up Logan, tears glistening in his eyes.

Logan shook his head sadly, feeling wetness from behind his eyes as well. “It’s too late. He’s dead.” He pronounced, kneeling next to Virgil and checking his non-existent pulse.

Logan couldn’t believe it. Virgil was dead. But he killed Mr. Edra.

A wave of thoughts came to him then. What if Patton had killed Mr. Edra instead? Or if Mr. Edra hadn’t bent down to get his cane. Or if he hadn’t come at all and Connie hadn’t run away.

He stood up again, feeling numb and cold from the realization that one of their own was dead, and glanced over at Kate who was slowly ungagging and untying the Markku group through the bars of the pen.

“Let’s go help Roman,” Connie said through gritted teeth, glancing at Mr. Edra’s writhing body on the ground.

“Patton needs some time to mourn, anyway,” she added in, turning away from Patton and Virgil and towards the door.

Logan looked over at Kate, “do you think you could try to pick lock the doors?”

“I’ll try my best.” Kate said, glancing at the keyhole.

Logan and Connie walked up the stairs, feeling much more calmer now that the largest threat they could control was out of the picture.

When they landed on the next floor there was sand swirling everywhere, the wind coming through the broken windows just about lifting Logan off the floor.

“What’s it going to be like on the higher floors?” Connie said quietly, gripping onto the handrail tightly, her short hair flying everywhere.

“Canace or Ben?” Logan asked Connie. “Quickly,” he added in.

“Canace, I’d say Sophie and Roman went to find Ben.” Connie replied, walking quickly down the hallways to where they had seen Canace and Winnie earlier.

They ran up another flight of stairs. Logan caught Connie wincing.

“Something wrong?” He asked worriedly, glancing at her.

Connie held her arm and shook her head, “my arm just hurts a little.” She said quickly.

Logan nodded and kept racing up the stairs, Connie close behind.

He was the first to go into Winnie’s room, the two of them still there, hugging each other tightly through the storm and the window that had broken open.

Broken glass was everywhere on the floor.

“Canace!” Logan shouted over the wind. “Come with us to safety!”

Canace shook her head and pulled herself closer to Winnie.

“We’ll bring your mom,” Connie shouted, walking closer.

“What?” Logan asked, not sure if he heard her wrong. But he knew his ears were perfectly fine when he saw Connie grabbing the back of Winnie’s hospital bed.

They couldn’t get down to the basement again with the four of them. It was practically impossible.

But then he remembered how they were so close to save everyone. Virgil killed Mr. Edra. Of course, it came at a price of one life gone.

Patton’s words from earlier rang in his brain. “Sometimes the heart can be more logical than the brain.”

“Okay, alright. But hurry. Let’s hope Sophie and Roman got Ben.” Logan muttered lifting Canace up onto the bed and then holding the door open so Connie could push the bed through the door.

The wind was against them and Logan came behind Connie to help her push against the brute force of the wind.

Winnie and Canace were curled up in the white blankets, Canace fully covered and only a lump while Winnie had her nose and mouth covered, her eyes clenched shut.

Connie’s left hand slipped off the handle and her right hand pushed it back up. Her eyebrows were scrunched together in concentration.

When they got to the stairs they just stared down the many stairs they had to go down in order to get back down to the basement.

The elevator was too risky and small to go down.

Logan sighed and went to the foot of the bed, his back to the stairs. ‘Lift,’ Logan mouthed to Connie, the wind to loud and against him to speak.

Logan pulled up the same time Connie did.

And now, to walk downstairs backwards thorough multiple flights of stairs.

Chapter 15

Patton limbs were stiff and he couldn’t feel any of his limbs except the weight of Virgil’s head in his lap.

He didn’t know what to do with himself.

If he had just pulled the trigger on Mr. Edra, Virgil wouldn’t be dead and everything would be alright.

It seemed oddly quiet even though Kate was cursing as she was wiggling something inside the lock, and the Markku group was talking amongst themselves.

When Mr. Edra had talked about his wife and daughter...he just couldn’t do it. Winnie and Canace both needed Mr. Edra even if he was a bit...morally different.

He couldn’t imagine if his future husband was shot...or if his dad was killed. It just didn’t feel right to kill Mr. Edra.

And yet...if he had killed him Virgil would have lived.

Patton’s glasses were digging up from his tears and he felt like he might be dead too.

“Patton? Patton?” A voice shook him out of his thought. “Are you okay?”

Patton turned slowly and saw Kate and all of the Markku group staring at him. “Hmmm?” He mumbled.

“Can you check to see if Mr. Edra has anything useful on him? Maybe even the actual key?” Kate asked.

Patton nodded slowly, lifting Virgil’s head off his lap and going over to Mr. Edra’s still body.

He didn’t like digging around in a dead man’s pockets. He felt odd and slightly nauseous as he pulled out a small ring of keys.

Patton walked robotically towards Kate, the keys outstretched in his hand.

“You alright?” Kate asked, cocking her head to the side taking the keys gently. She looked at the keyhole then inspected the keys.

“I don’t know…” Patton shrugged.

Kate pushed one of the copper keys into the hole and twisted. “I’m not good with the emotional stuff...but Virgil didn’t die in vain. We’ve got all the children and perhaps Canace and Mr. Edra’s dead. He didn’t die in vain.”

     “I know...but it’s just...I wish I could have gotten to know Virgil better. He was like a best friend. And now he’s...he’s dead.” Patton sniffed.

Kate nodded, “that makes sense. I never really knew him but he seemed like a good person. Too bad he couldn’t have gotten his memory back earlier.” She put in another key. This time, it clicked as she turned it and the door unlocked quietly.

There were cheers from the Markku group but it seemed to just put Patton in an even worse mood.

***

Roman banged on the glass that surrounded Ben.

Ben’s cage was nothing like the rest of the Markku group’s jail.

It was more technological and metallic-like than the dingy dungeon they had just been in.

Ben was in a glass tube, handcuffed to the ceiling, his feet handcuffed to the ground. He was also gagged.

Sophie had remembered that Mr. Edra said he would put Ben in the basement.

The basement wasn’t massive like the other floors but it certainly wasn’t small. There were at least 20-30 doors.

Sophie had been given the password to go into a couple of rooms. They had already been in the basement when Roman went into the room with Sophie and the 12 kids, so they decided to find Ben first.

Roman put Remy in charge of the children while they were away.

“I don’t see a way we can open it!” Sophie shrieked over the wind that had started up a couple minutes after they had walked into the room and turned on the lights to see Ben.

“Keep trying! Mr. Edra got him in one way, there must be a way to get him out!” Roman shouted back, trailing his fingers around the base of the tube.

“I’ll check the walls!” Sophie exclaimed.

Roman prayed Connie was okay. They had heard a loud gunshot a while ago and it had shook him right to the core.

Please let it not be Connie, he had wished at the time.

“I think I found something!” Sophie said loudly, beckoning Roman over to the far right corner of the tight room.

Roman ran over to Sophie where she had uncovered a black pad on the wall.

“I pushed a screw,” Sophie explained before tapping the black pad with her pointer finger.

White letters appeared on the top of the pad. ‘ACCESS DENIED’, it read.

“What kind of password is it?” Sophie mumbled, her eyes focusing on the pad.

“Rhythm?” Roman offered, tapping the black pad.

Nothing happened.

“Shapes?” Sophie said and drew a large circle with her pointer finger again.

Roman bit his lip and, from the corner of his eyes he saw Ben holding up his thumbs.

Apparently, Sophie saw it at the same time and they looked at each other. “Thumb print!” They exclaimed together, their eyes wide.

Sophie tried both of her thumbs to no avail. Roman tried his just in case, though he doubted it.

“No,” Roman muttered. “But I guess that was expected. How do we get someone’s fingerprint to open it up?”

“Oh my gosh! You found Ben!” Connie’s voice exclaimed from behind Roman.

Roman turned his head to where he heard her voice.

Connie and Logan were pushing a hospital bed with Winnie in it. “Where’s Canace?” Roman asked hurriedly, not seeing the young blonde.

“She’s under the blanket,” Logan explained quickly. His eyes glanced over to the glass tube Ben was in.

“It uses a fingerprint,” Sophie said. “How-“

“Mr. Edra. Use his thumb! Quickly!” Logan shouted, the wind becoming louder.

Sophie’s brown hair was slapping against her face and their clothes were billowing out from their bodies.

“Connie, you put Winnie and Canace with the children. Roman and Sophie, you get Mr. Edra.” Logan instructed. “I’ll come with you and see how Kate is faring and then I’m going to try to find the way into Mr. Edra’s underground bunker.”

Connie nodded, biting her lip and sped off with Winnie and Canace.

“We’ll be back,” Sophie told Ben before following Logan and Roman quickly out the door.

Roman opened his mouth to ask how they were getting Mr. Edra’s Fingerprint.

Apparently, Logan was one step ahead of them. “Virgil killed Mr. Edra.” He said with pursed lips.

“What?” Sophie said. “He’s dead?”

Roman’s heart tumbled and lept. His body went cold and he felt floaty like he was in Canace’s theatre or Dr. Cross’ awards ceremony.

Mr. Edra was dead. He was gone. Virgil killed Mr. Edra. On any other occasion, he would have asked Logan if he was serious. But Logan wouldn’t joke around like that.

Logan nodded, and opened the door. “But, unfortunately for us, everything comes with a price.” He frowned.

Roman eyes went to Mr. Edra’s still body on the floor. Then, to the free Markku group and Patton and Kate.

Then, his eyes found Virgil on the floor. “He’s...wounded right?” He asked meekly.

“Mr. Edra had a gun hidden in his cane. When Virgil shot him with the needle gun, Mr. Edra raised his cane and shot Virgil dead in the chest.”

Roman’s own chest clenched with the thought of that sour, prickly, boy, dead on the floor who gave his own life to kill Mr. Edra.

He glanced at Sophie. So that was the gunshot, he thought. Sophie’s face said that she was coming to that conclusion as well.

Logan blinked and then seemed to steel himself. “Anyway, you guys grab him and use his thumb.” He ordered.

Roman and Sophie walked over to Mr. Edra and grabbed him by the feet and legs.

As they made their way back to Ben’s tube, Roman was not blind to the cold stares the Markku group was giving to Sophie.

“I’m sure they’ll forgive you when they learn how you’ve helped us.” Roman said lamely as they came into the room where Ben was held and managed to close the door.

“Here, I’ll hold him up, you use his fingers,” Roman shouted as the door was busted open, the metal door hitting the metal wall with an ear piercing smack.

Roman heaved Mr. Edra’s limp body up into a standing position, feeling disgusted as he remembered he was holding a dead body.

Sophie picked up Mr. Edra’s right hand and pressed his thumb against the black pad. The familiar white words of ‘ACCESS DENIED’ appeared.

She hurriedly picked up his left hand and put the other thumb onto the pad.

‘ACCESS ACCEPTED’ the white words flashed and Roman heard a grinding sound as the tube slid up into the ceiling.

Sophie ran over to Ben and ungagged him, throwing her arms around him. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” She exclaimed.

Roman walked slowly over to them, beginning to untie Ben’s binds.

Ben was looking up at Sophie, a conflicted look on his face. “You threw me away and told Mr. Edra to put me somewhere alone. And now you come here and say you’re sorry?” His voice wasn’t cold or mean, it was genuinely confused.

Sophie rubbed her arms awkwardly. “I guess I just realized how much you mean to me and that the government wasn’t the place for me.”

“Pretty late realizing I mean something to you,” Ben said, standing up and stretching his back and arms.

“Um, we should probably get back to the rest of the Markku group,” Roman interrupted, feeling bad for cutting in on their sibling moment.

Sophie pulled away from Ben. “As you can see, Mr. Edra’s dead.” She said as they followed Roman hastily out the door.

Roman didn’t hear a reply because another rattling shake ran through the entire building. He could hear more crashes and cracks from upstairs. “I hope Dr. Cross and Ms. Denes are okay,” he muttered to himself.

Then, Roman saw Logan in an empty room. “You guys go on,” he said and jogged over to Logan.

“I think this is it,” Logan shouted, “I just don’t know how to open the door.”

Roman turned around in the room. It was completely empty and had no lights, windows, or furniture.

“Is there some secret button or knocking combination?” Roman asked, wanting to add in ‘are you sure it’s the right room?’ but decided against it.

Logan crosses his arms and tapped his foot.

Another earth rattling rumble went through the building and Roman was positive he saw dust fall down to the ground.

A metallic click reverberated through the room and another grinding sound.

The far wall was rising slowly. To where? It was moving at a snail’s pace and for a moment there, Roman just stared at it.

“What in the world?” Roman mumbled as the wall was slowly revealing another single door behind it, a black screen rectangle above it.

Logan didn’t reply, only walked forward and yanked the door wide open, revealing Dr. Cross and a couple of other scientists he recognized.

There was a red blink and suddenly, the black rectangle showed numbers. 1:30.

“Roman!” Dr. Cross exclaimed in relief, coming out of the door and walking up to him. “Mr. Edra was supposed to bring all the children-“

“Mr. Edra is dead.” Logan cut in sharply.

“W-what?” Dr. Cross stuttered, taking a short step back.

Roman glanced up at the black rectangle positioned above the door. His eyebrows furrowed. “Um, why does the clock thingy say 1:00? It used to say 1:30.”

Dr. Cross immediately schooled her racing emotions and surprise. “It’s a countdown until the door closes and locks. Who else do you have with you?” She asked.

Roman was about to speak but Logan cut him off. “All the children and the Markku group,” he said simply; as if he were ordering an ice cream at an ice cream parlor. “Vanilla please!”

“The...the Markku group?” Dr. Cross repeated. “Those ruffians stealing files from the government?”

“The one and only,” Kate said, coming into the room.

She said this the exact same time that Roman said, “45 seconds!”

Logan spun on his heel, ignoring Dr. Cross’ blubbering and turned to Kate. “We need everyone in there immediately. Our time is running out. Hurry, go get everyone and bring them here.” He turned to Dr. Cross again. “How many people can this bunker fit comfortably?”

“It’s only meant for the scientists, Mr. Edra and family, and only a couple of the children.” Dr. Cross said, worry lines creasing her forehead.

“And how many could it fit if we rationed the food and water and got people to sleep on the floor?” Logan kept on.

“Many more,” Dr. Cross said, “however, I doubt there will be enough food-“

“Don’t you have gardens growing or something? A well?” Logan firmly.

“Yes, but-“

“-But what?” Logan pushed, he was frowning and Roman wasn’t sure he wanted to see Logan mad.

 “It will take years for it to grow. You know our sunlamps aren’t the best and do not replicate the sun's energy as well as the real thing-“ Dr. Cross explained.

“-We’ll make the food last until the gardens grow.” Logan said defiantly as Kate hearded everyone into the small room.

Logan turned away from Dr. Cross who looked like a berated child. “Children first! Then the Markku group and Winnie and Canace!”

00:20

The children ran inside, some of them crying. Remy was holding one young boy in his arms who was shaking from fear.

00:13

“By the way where is Mr. Bolter? He should have been inside ages ago. All the scientists have been inside since the door upstairs opened around thirty minutes ago.” Dr. Cross asked, ushering the children in.

00:11

“He’s dead as well.” Logan said after a seconds pause. He tugged on his tie and coughed awkwardly. “He and Mr. Edra shot each other and both died.”

Roman noticed Logan looked mildly uncomfortable.

00:10

“Markku group!” Logan called quickly.

Roman glanced at the clock, tapping his foot anxiously. He could have went in with the kids but he decided he would stay and help the others along.

Ben and Kate went through the door, their faces worried and their hands protectively intertwined with one another.

An earthquake-like jolted most the of the Markku group off their feet.

More dust came through and...was it just Roman or did the place just get blown hot air? He was sweating already but the place felt unbearably hot.

Connie gave him a weak smile as she went through the door.

00:05

The Markku group came in, Patton in the midst of them and Logan ran inside.

Roman watched as he did a quick headcount.

“Where’s-?”

“I’m coming! We’re coming!” Sophie’s voice rang through the room, the new wind carrying her voice into the bunker.

Roman’s and everyone’s head spun to see Sophie running into the room, her hair spinning everywhere and her face ashen. She looked like some crazy ghost.

Sophie was also pushing Winnie’s hospital bed with Canace in it. She ran towards the bunker door.

00:03

The bed was slowing her down, that much was clear.

Everyone seemed to be frozen in their shock that somehow...somehow no one had noticed Sophie, Winnie, and Canace were missing. Two of them in a hospital bed.

00:02

Sophie’s eyebrows were furrowed together as she ran to the door, her face morphing into panic as she realized she was going too slow.

00:01

Sophie stopped in her tracks, her hands tight on the bed’s handle. Winnie was crying.

Then, Sophie pushed with all her might as another rattle jolted through the room.

The bed rolled quickly into the door. Everyone parted for it to fit.

00:00

“Sophie!” Ben shouted, his voice cracking.

“Rainflower.” Sophie nodded to her brother, the corners of her mouth tipping upwards.

The door slowly shut with a resounding click.

***

Logan’s mouth went dry as the door shut, Sophie on the other side.

Ben ran drunkenly to the door, his hands grasping for the doorknob. There was none. He pounded on the metal door.

“Purple hyacinth,” Ben murmured, curling up in a ball at the base of the door as Kate slowly walked up to him, sitting next to him.

“Come along, everyone,” Dr. Cross said, “let’s leave them alone.” She managed a small smile.

“How do the doors open?” Logan asked curiously. Was there a way to get Sophie back?

“As soon as they detect the storm’s end, they will open on their own.” Dr. Cross said, opening another door which revealed a common room sort of room with old couches and wooden end tables.

Logan’s shoulders slouched. Sophie was gone. She would die out there in the storm.

He thought she could have made it with Winnie and Canace in tow. But obviously, they didn’t.

Sophie had always been a little tough and stubborn but she was still a part of the Markku group.

Maybe she did turn the Markku group in. But, in the end she did make up for her mistakes.

Logan still didn’t like her betrayal but he wasn’t heartless enough to want her to die.

One person dead, another one who will die, he thought to himself miserably.

Logan glanced over at Roman who was talking quietly to Connie. Roman was smiling a bit while Connie was nodding and frowning to whatever he was saying.

Dr. Cross opened up another door with multiple bunk beds. “Children, I think you should all go to bed. It’s early morning and you need rest.”

Canace let go of Virgil’s hand and walked into the room slowly, choosing a bunk bed in the back of the room.

“Can I stay up?” Roman asked, looking over at Dr. Cross.

“Not me,” Remy said. “Sleep! Here I come!”

Dr. Cross bit her lip before nodding. “Very well.” She closed the door and everyone followed Dr. Cross back out to the common room.

Everyone sat down, a couple of people cross legged on the floor.

For a moment, everyone was silent. Everyone was thinking about the people and things they left behind.

Their families, their comfortable houses, their high-tech phones and cars. The realization that they would be here for years. Stuck with each other.

“We did it. Oh my gosh, we actually did it.” Patton stated numbly.

“Did what? Bring an extra 30 people into the bunker?” A scientist scowled, walking across the room and into another.

Logan looked down at his favourite tie. “It didn’t exactly work out like we were expecting but yes, Patton, we really did it. We brought all the children to safety.”

“If only Virgil was here too.” Patton frowned.

“And Sophie,” a Markku member said.

Dr. Cross seemed stiff. “Nothing is won yet, we still need a Weather Manipulator. Testing will not be cancelled.”

A thick silence fell over the crowd.

“There is a Weather Manipulator.” Logan said slowly, looking up to Dr. Cross. “Canace. Virgil told us.”

From the corner of his eye, Logan saw Roman give Connie a discreet side hug.

***

“Ow!”

Roman swiveled his head to Connie. “Are you alright?” He asked worriedly. He wasn’t trying to hurt Connie.

Connie managed a watery smile. “Yes, of course. Just a...sore spot.”

Suddenly, her body went limp and her head fell back onto the couch, her body convulsing and her limbs twitching.

Logan and Roman were the first ones up, Patton a close third.

“C’mon, Connie, we both know that’s not true. Now come on, what’s wrong?” Roman asked. “We can go somewhere private if you want if you don’t like everyone’s eyes on you.”

Connie shook her head. “No.” She said sharply. Roman took a step back. “I’m okay. Really.” She forced a smile on her face. “I’m fine.”

“Connie,” Roman said, his eyebrows raised.

“You might be my older brother but you can’t order me to do stuff.” Connie scowled.

Roman sighed. “I’m not ordering you to do anything. I just want you to tell us, or just me, what’s wrong.”

“If it’s a sore spot I’m sure Dr. Cross has something for it.” Patton added in kindly.

Connie looked down at her feet, biting her lip.

Then, she slowly began to take of her brown leather jacket. She winced as she revealed her left arm.

Roman felt faint. He wasn’t getting enough air. He wanted fresh air and some wind but they were stuck in this bunker.

Connie’s entire left arm was red and crusty. He didn’t know if it continued to her shoulder or not.

And, on the front of her forearm, a needle was lodged into her skin. It wasn’t extremely deep but it wasn’t under just a few layers of skin.

Where the needle was, gushes of blood was coming out.

“Mr. Edra’s second shot…” Roman murmured, his eyes transfixed on the little needle. He remembered seeing the needle go out of the gun but didn’t catch where it hit.

“Oh dear-“ Dr. Cross said, suddenly standing up and cutting into Roman’s thoughts about how he should have looked to where the needle had landed.

Dr. Cross suddenly bristled. “I’ll go get the first aid kit.” As she hustled out, Roman could just hear her mutter, “where did Mr. Edra put it?”

“Connie…” Logan began his face has crumpled at the sight of Connie’s arm. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“There were more important things to do. Besides, it’s not deep.” Connie said, shrugging then wincing at the pain.

“We could have been able to take it out,” Roman said, feeling water build up in his eyes. “You should have told us.”

“I would just be in the way and another trouble. I would rather die for everyone else to live than live for everyone else to die.” Connie mumbled, moving her left hand and fingers slowly. She wouldn’t look them in the eye.

“I don’t...I don’t think I’m going to make it.” Connie said quietly. “You heard Mr. Edra. There’s no cure for it.”

“We need to stop the blood and take out the needle.” Logan said suddenly, almost robotically. “Then we can think about your arm.” He looked around. “We need something to act as a bandage.”

After a moment of scrambling with no one finding a scrap of material, Logan pulled off his cotton tie over his head and ran his hands over it. “Here, we’ll use this.”

He used the tie like oven mitts and quickly slid the needle out of Connie’s arm. Then, Logan tied the tie around Connie’s arm.

“Does it hurt?” Logan asked.

Connie clamped her eyes shut and nodded. “Honestly? Quite a bit.” She admitted embarrassingly.

Roman’s thoughts went back to Dr. Cross’ statement earlier about his power. “I think you have emotional transferral perhaps pain transferral as both feelings and emotions have both been negative.”

Pain transferral. Dr. Cross said maybe he could transfer pain. He could help Connie! Maybe it would even cure her!

Roman closed his eyes and imagined himself flying into Connie’s heart.

Roman opened his eyes. The first thing he noticed was that he was floating above large grey pointy things. They were all over the place like stalactites and stalagmites in a cave.

He could see where Connie would be, it was in the center of the room. However, she was shorter and there were other things around her.

Roman took and deep breath and hoped and prayed that these things weren’t like Virgil’s amnesia.

He waved his arms like a conductor and the spikes shrunk into the ground, floors and ceilings quickly.

Right now, Roman wasn’t worried about where he’d put all the pain. All he wanted to do was to save Connie.

Roman glanced over to where imaginary Connie was sat at what looked like a dinner table set for five, including Connie.

Connie was smiling brightly, her eyes closed. She had on what Roman remembered as her favourite outfit; a purple shirt under dark blue overalls.

As Roman looked at his surroundings he recognized the room. The ghastly striped purple and red wallpaper of their dining room and the dark oak table that Roman and Connie used to stick stickers under it when they were bored. It was their dining room at their house.

Connie was surrounded by four chairs. She was at the head of the table with two groups of two on either side of her.

Roman walked to the closest chair which had his father’s old watch that Roman’s great great grandfather owned. It was matte black with bolder numbers at their respective spots. The hands were thin and matte black as well. It was passed down and Roman’s father owned it. 

In the chair next to the watch was Roman’s mom’s favourite lipstick, a dark red called Totally Twig.

Roman went around the table to the other side. He looked at the one closest to Connie.

“Mrs. Fluffybottoms!” Roman exclaimed, noticing his childhood stuffed toy he had left at his house when he left so Connie could cuddle him while he was away.

Roman walked to the next chair, curious to know who it represented. He had seen his entire family. Who would be at Connie’s family dinner?

Did their family have another child Connie didn’t tell him about? Did he have a younger sibling?

Roman looked at the last chair and only saw a neatly folded, blue striped tie.

A tie? Roman wondered to himself. A baby wearing a tie?

He was just thinking about how it looked familiar when Roman heard a small sound, like the quiet rustling of leaves or of a pinwheel spinning.

Roman turned to see more spikes growing steadily upwards from the ceiling. To Roman’s surprise, grey putty was also slinking around like a sloth.

With a wave of his hand again, everything disappeared.

Then, Roman visualized the bunker and he was back in reality, puzzling over the tie and worrying over Connie.

Roman could barely hear Connie say, “my pain’s gone,” before a jolt of pain bloomed onto his forearm and swept up and around his entire arm. He slapped a hand over it in shock.

He winced in pain and glanced around the room, hoping no one noticed. Connie and Logan were looking at him.

Roman’s eyes swept over Logan’s worried and puzzled face to Connie’s-

The tie. The tie that Logan had wrapped around Connie’s arm was the tie that was folded on the extra chair!

That chair represented Logan.

But what did Logan have to do with Connie’s family supper? He certainly wasn’t family.

What if his parents had another child that was Logan? They just never told him but told Connie while he was at the government-

No. No. Roman was getting ahead of himself. Besides, Connie was what was important now.

“-It just...went away,” Connie said breathlessly. She was looking at Logan with wide eyes.

“Can you move your fingers?” Roman asked hopefully.

Connie scrunched up her forehead and managed a little wiggle of her thumb and pointer finger. She shook her head.

Dr. Cross busted in with an array of pills and a small box. “I’m sorry it took a while. The First Aid kit was in a box in the storage room. I also got some pain killers and-“ She cut off her own babbling and busted over to Connie, opening up the white box in the process.

“Don’t bother,” Connie said narcissitically. “Just...just...I’m gonna try to fall asleep.” She closed her eyes then snapped them open. “Don’t poke any needles in me.” She glared directly at Dr. Cross then Logan, then Roman.

“Connie, c’mon, let us try to help you.” Roman held his left arm and squeezed, trying to hold the pain off. “Please?”

Connie shook her head. Roman barely registered the Markku group filing out of the common room, leaving only himself, Dr. Cross, Logan, and Patton.

“Sing me a song instead so I can sleep,” Connie said. “I’ll be up tomorrow.” She said after a moment’s pause, her eyes flicking to the left.

Roman sighed in agony and Dr. Cross glanced down at Roman’s right arm which was clenched tightly around his left arm.

He remembered his first ever stage show he did in school, Disney’s Coco. He had been casted as Miguel.

“Remember me Though I have to say goodbye Remember me Don't let it make you cry For even if I'm far away I hold you in my heart I sing a secret song to you each night we are apart-“

“Roman,” Connie interrupted. Roman abruptly stopped. “I hope you know that I didn’t for one day, not think about you. ‘Oh! Roman would love this play!’ Or ‘Roman wouldn’t be a chicken and go on the new zip line!’”

Guilt consumed Roman. Connie had, since day one, been against him going to the government but once everything was signed and he’d be going in the next week, she sort of just let it drop.

And when he went away, he forgot about his sister and how old she was, what she looked like.

Roman grabbed Connie’s hand and kept on singing.

“Remember me Though I have to travel far Remember me Each time you hear a sad guitar Know that I'm with you the only way that I can be Until you're in my arms again Remember me”.

Connie closed her eyes, and then opened them for the last time. She smiled weakly at the three boys in the room, then closed her eyes once again for eternity.

Roman looked up at Logan then Patton.

Patton pulled a small blanket from a couch and put it over Connie.

They stayed in silence in different corners of the room.

his was where they would be staying until Canace grew old enough to stop the storm. This was where they would live out the prime time in their lives. This was where they would be.

The three of them had all lost something. Each of them were broken.

The Rebel could not save everyone.

The Illegal lost his best friend.

The Lab Rat no longer had a his sister.

And the Fugitive was no longer on the run.

There was another rumble in the Earth and crash as the world fell apart above them.

[cryptocoinguides]

DON’T Make Crypto Security Mistakes!!

There are many mistakes you can make, which will compromise your crypto security. This means that there’s a strong chance that you could one day lose your crypto or worse. So in my video today, I’m going to be taking you through some of my top security tips, those that are simple to implement and can save you from potential losses in the future. This folks is a video that you just cannot afford to miss before we progress. Lest i forget, there is something i need to stress.

There will be no financial advice today, as education and information is my only forte doing your own research is the only way to stay ahead in the crypto game. Now, with that out of the way, i’d like to say hey to those new here today, my name’s guy and i’m the reason why the coin bureau is relied on by so many time after time, news reviews, overviews, market moves and market blues too. So if that’s something that’s up your street, then it would be mighty neat if you gave that subscribe button a beat. You may also want to repeat that and hit that bell as well. So youtube will give you a yell when my next video is about to cast its spell.

And finally just so you know, i’ve broken up the video timeline below. If you feel i’m going too slow, then it’s fine to jump to different sections of the show, but watching the whole way through helps the view time grow. Okay, that’s quite enough sound and fury, let’s dive in to some crypto security. Let’S start this list with perhaps the most obvious security tip. Now this is one that’s generally accepted, but rarely practiced, because so many people find it just a little too inconvenient, and that is password use if you’re setting up a wallet exchange, account lending platform or anything web related, even if not crypto, be sure to use an Extra strong password, a password that has no relation to you or dates relevant to you or those around you.

You have no idea how sophisticated hacking tools are. These days, hackers have access to tools that are able to very easily crack passwords with brute force attacks. Often they use a list of commonly used passwords that can be easily bought on the dark web, usually password lists that come from well-known data breaches. There is a strong chance that your password could be among the millions that they can fire in the hope of landing. A lucky shot heck.

It’S also pretty likely that your details were present in a data breach back in the day, meaning some bad people out there have your password. That means that they can potentially access your account, especially if you make this second schoolboy error and that’s reusing passwords now i’ll admit i am still sometimes tempted to do this. It’S just such a hassle to store numerous different passwords and set them up for different accounts. Time is so short these days and we never think that it will happen to us, but it has, and it does so if you want to be extra secure with your passwords, then you’re going to want to use extra, strong and unique passwords for all your different Accounts now these passwords can be generated using online tools and i’ve linked to a few below now something that a lot of people have asked me for my view on is password managers. Well, they can be a useful tool, especially if you’re using multiple strong passwords for numerous different accounts and logins, but there are risks that come with them, of course, the main one being that they are a single point of failure.

If someone is able to get access to your password manager, then they can get the keys to your entire kingdom. So if you’re going to be using password managers make sure to only use the desktop versions of them, i.e, not cloud or browser-based. Also, i would highly advise against storing any wallet seed words here or hardware wallet pins more on those in a bit. I would also do your own research on these password managers and make sure that, if you’re going to be using one for your less sensitive passwords, you enable two-factor authentication of some kind, and this neatly brings me on to my next top tip.

Yes, you should always set up two-factor authentication. This includes for your exchange, accounts, emails, bank accounts and even social media, etc, etc. I’D also suggest that you use a phone-based 2fa and not an email one in case your email is compromised. Now, when i say phone based, i mean, via the use of an authenticator app like microsoft, authenticator, google, authenticator or authy the one phone based two-factor authentication method that you should, however, avoid is an sms based one. This is because of a pretty common attack, vector called a sim swap.

Basically, this is when a hacker or other nerdy well is able to gain access to your phone number through your phone or network provider. They trick them into moving the number over to a phone that they control and they can then use this in order to change all your passwords gain access to your emails and eventually your crypto stash. This has happened too many times to count and some have been able to steal upwards of a hundred million dollars pretty crazy. So just don’t use sms-based authentication, it’s not worth the risk, get an authenticator app instead. Now, if you want to take your two-factor authentication to the next level, then you can use what is called a security key.

This is basically a usb device that you can sync with your online accounts. These could be your email accounts like google, etc, or your exchange accounts. Therefore, in order to log into your account, you’ll need to physically have access to one of these devices. Now everyone on the coin bureau team uses them and they are perhaps the gold standard in 2fa security. I personally use the google security key, but i see that these have been out of stock for a while, basically supply chain problems really have become a feature of life.

These days, haven’t they anyway, another one that i’ve seen being recommend constantly. Is the ub key i’ve? Not personally used it, but if it does what it says on the tin, then it should be a-okay. So that’s two-factor authentication, quite the gold standard for securing accounts right. Let’S now kick our security up.

Another notch. My next tip is to have different email addresses, based on how important the service is that you’re signing up for now. I know this can be quite a pain and an inconvenience, but there is a very good reason for this. That’S because, in the event that your email is ever leaked in a data breach, the hackers won’t have the actual email that you use for your banking or exchanges, etc. So, for example, you can use a simple gmail email account for all your personal stuff, like newsletters, social media, online shopping, etc.

These are the databases that are more likely to be breached. Therefore, if they are breached and your email is leaked, it won’t help those who have it as it’s, not the email that you’ve used for those exchanges and other high value honeypots. Now a recent example of all this was the ledger: hardware wallet data breach from last year, in that the hackers got their greasy mitts on the email addresses of countless users. These could easily have been used to try and gain access to exchange accounts, mainly because they knew the users held crypto. However, if it was a different email from the one the user had for their exchange accounts, then the hackers would have struggled to log in then for your main, secure account.

You can use another email service provider, one, that’s, perhaps more secure and private than gmail. Protonmail is a good one, but there are many others now. If you want to take this email account solution one step further, then you can also do what i do and that is to have a different email address for each of the exchanges that i sign in with. I then have all of these email addresses auto forward. Those emails to my main account, so why would i do this?

Well that way, if one of the emails for those exchange accounts at all lands up in the wrong hands, then the hackers are not able to attempt a takeover of other exchange accounts. I keep the separate email addresses isolated from one another, and if one of the emails ever lands up in a breach of any kind, then i can just discard it and get a new email set up with the account now, of course, i do realize that this Might sound like overkill, but it’s a system i’ve got used to, and moreover, this exchange email point ties in to my next top tip and that is to have more than one exchange account. Now. There are a number of reasons for this, both from a security as well as a practical perspective. Firstly, if you have your hot coins split across a number of different exchange accounts, then there is yet again one less point of failure.

These points of failure are not only related to the risk of potential hacks on exchanges, but also in those periods when the exchanges go down, as they often do. I’M sure that you’ve experienced times when you can’t log into your account just when the markets are going ape now. Those of course are exactly the times that you might want to buy the dip or take some profit. It’S incredibly frustrating, if you can’t log into your. Only exchange account to do that.

It’S not only about having more than one exchange account, though. It’S also about making sure that the exchanges that you’re using are safe and reputable while there are a lot of reputable exchanges out there. There are also plenty of bucket shop exchanges, too exchanges that could either lose access to your coins or your documents, both pretty damaging. Now i actually have a video that takes you through some of my best exchange picks for the year, and you can find that in the top right anyways beyond just the security aspect of having more than one exchange account. It’S worth noting that different exchanges often support different cryptocurrencies.

You won’t often find that hot new altcoin on the exchange you prefer so a backup exchange is a great way to hedge against that now, even if you may have your crypto split across numerous exchanges, you should never leave the bulk of your crypto on any exchange. Account – and this brings me on to my next tip – and that is to self-custody your crypto now by that i mean you, withdraw the crypto from the exchanges and you store it in an offline wallet. The main benefit of this is that you fully control your crypto. Just as satoshi intended now, of course, you also bear the responsibility for keeping it safe, but that’s why you have to make sure you employ other security measures that i’ll be talking about later on. Now there are a lot of offline wallets out there, that you can use pc browser and mobile, all free, of course, and i’ve done a video on the best ones which i’ll leave a link to in the description.

Now, although these offline wallets are great, they just aren’t the gold standard when it comes to offline security. If you want that, then you’re going to want to cold store your coins, basically storing your coins disconnected from the internet or air gapped. This can be done in a number of ways with offline wallets or paper wallets, but it’s complicated and not 100 fail-safe. That’S why i highly recommend that you get yourself a hardware device. These are physical, wallets that store your private keys on them and are connected to your pc through a usb cable.

The main benefit of these devices is that your private key is never exposed to the internet. This means that, even if someone was to install malware on your pc, they could not exfiltrate private keys, and even if someone is to get their hands on your device, they still can’t get hold of those private keys, because the wallet is encrypted and protected. With a pin code, if you want to sign transactions, you will have to first enter that pin code. Now i store 95 of my crypto wealth on these devices, and i have several of them just for extra precaution. Apart from the security aspect, these devices are also incredibly user friendly and there are several different types, brands and models available.

I won’t go into each of them here, but if you want my list of the top hardware wallets as well as those that i personally use feel free to watch my video all about it, that’s in the usual spot, something else that’s really beneficial about these hardware. Wallets, though, is that they have integrations with a whole host of third-party wallets and software. This is especially the case if you’re a defy user who has a web3 wallet, for example, i’m a big fan of metamask, and i use it regularly as my web3 wallet through bridges and integrations with most hardware wallets. I can still store my keys in an uber, secure environment while doing my defy dabbling now. My next security tip is something that is tied to both offline and hardware wallets, and that is backups.

Whenever you set up a new wallet, you generate what are called backup seed words. These basically allow you to recover the wallet in case you ever lose access to the wallets or forget your passwords mnemonic seed. Words are basically a collection of words that have to be entered in a specific order and they’re usually given to you when you first set up that wallet. This is why it’s incredibly important how you take down those seed words and how you store them. The most important thing to note here is that, when you’re setting up your wallets and getting your words given to you, do not under any circumstances save digital copies of them, don’t copy and paste them onto your pc, don’t store them in a password manager.

The best thing to do is to write them down with a pen on a piece of paper. If you buy a hardware wallet, then it usually comes with its own seed cards. For you to write down those all important words and once you’ve written them down, then be sure to store them in a very safe location. Know that if anyone has access to these seed words, then they can restore any bip 39 compatible wallet. It also won’t take a thief very long to figure out these seed.

Words are related to crypto if they get their hands on them. So if you’re sure that you can find a place in your house, that’s safe enough to store them then go ahead. However, i personally prefer to use a safe deposit box. Yes, i do have to trust that nothing will happen to this box, but it does remove some of the risks of personally storing these at home. Of course, you may be concerned about the long-term integrity of paper.

It can be burned in a fire destroyed in a flood or even innocently thrown away by an overzealous other half doing a spring clean. This has happened. Happily, there are steel seed cards that you can buy to mitigate against the fragility of paper. I’Ll leave a link to a number of them in the description, but there is one thing that you can do that will really take your security to the next level and that is to require multiple seeds through something called a shamir secret sharing scheme. Now i will admit that this can be overkill and it really depends on how much crypto you’re storing and how comfortable you feel with your contingency planning, but it is a seed, backup method.

We use here at the coin bureau. So what is it? Well, it’s similar to a multi-stick setup for a multi-signature wallet where you need a certain threshold number of signers to sign a transaction before it’s sent out. Similarly, with the shamir secret sharing scheme, you need a certain threshold of seed words in order to restore the wallet. For example, you can use a 203 setup where two of the three seed words can restore the device, a three of five and eight of eleven.

Whatever works for you, then you can store these seeds in different places or hand them to different people, who you trust, it’s essential contingency planning. Now, if you need a guide on how to set up your seed words like this, don’t you fret uncle guy. Has you covered with a video in the top right now? One more thing that i will say on seed management is that you should never ever put your seed words online. If there’s ever a wallet update that asks you to re-enter your seed words, then don’t the only time that these seed words will be required is when you are actually restoring a wallet and in the case of a hardware wallet it’s done on the device.

So be sure to keep that in mind. Okay, so that’s the overview of seed management, it’s time for my next tip, don’t download dodgy links and keep your pc virus free. Now. This is pretty obvious for general security, but i think it’s something that’s even more important for those of us who use cryptocurrency. This is because there are a number of ways in which viruses and malware can be installed on your pc, those that are able to either exfiltrate keys from offline wallets or to key log.

Your keystrokes there’s also malware that i’ve seen that’s able to take over the ram and replace the wallet address that you may have copied and pasted. Then, of course, there’s also the risk that you download an incorrect version of a wallet or worse. Yet you download a fake wallet, that’s designed to fish your private keys or seeds. These are surprisingly common and have happened with mobile web and desktop wallets either the hackers will direct you to a fraudulent site or they manage to get the app or download officially listed in app stores. For example, i recall a fake metamask wallet being listed in the chrome web store.

Another example was a fake cardano deadliest wallet that was listed in the google play store earlier this year, crazy, how they managed to get it listed, but that’s neither here nor there. So if you’re looking to download a wallet from a project or other developer, make sure you go right to the official download link, i never search for the app in google or in any app store. That’S because that’s where the scammers can upload their false apps they’re. Also able to manipulate reviews and ratings to make it look as if there’s nothing to worry about, and sometimes in google, the scammers will run ads on fake websites in order to trick you into thinking that it’s the official website yet another reason why i personally never Click on google ads in general, and it’s not just about once you’ve downloaded the official wallet. You also have to be very careful when it comes to downloading updates to the software.

Sometimes an update is pushed with bugs or worse now. This is something i do with all software in general, i like to wait and see if there are any reported issues with the update before updating myself. However, it’s even more important with crypto, as there is money involved, hackers could either gain access to the website and install a poisoned update or they can trick you into downloading a fake update. I recall this happening to one unlucky, electrum user, who was duped into downloading a false update to the wallet the poor chap lost over 1400 btc in the hack ouch, so just disable those automatic updates for now now. This does not mean that you should not update or ignore some of the updates that are pushed.

There are many occasions in which there’s a critical security update, that’s pushed which you need to download. So i recommend you follow the socials of the wallet provider in case they have a critical update. Also, when you see that a new update is ready to be installed, you can read about it. First double check how critical it is and whether it’s okay to wait. Finally, i think it’s just general best practice to keep your pc clean of any nefarious junk the internet spews out, if you haven’t already install some antivirus software, no personal preference here, just as long as it’s not mcafee, hey well he’s still with us, mr mcafee himself.

Would agree? Oh one more thing that i have to say on this is to be very careful with remote access software, basically software that allows someone else to access your computer. This includes the likes of teamviewer, etc, always be careful with permissions and, if possible, don’t use these programs on devices that have your wallets on them. Now security doesn’t only come in the form of access to your crypto, but also being able to track your crypto and that’s the topic of my next tip. When it comes to getting crypto sent to your wallet.

I would highly suggest that you don’t only use one wallet address, that’s because the more that you use this, the more likely someone is to create an online profile of who you are and what crypto you hold. As i’m sure you are aware, the blockchain is completely transparent and anyone can track where crypto is being sent. In fact, there’s an entire industry. That’S been set up in order to track crypto transactions. More about that, in the description, all that someone needs to do in order to track down someone who owns a lot of crypto is to link their wallet address to them.

Personally, this is not that hard to do these days, especially if you’re submitting kyc on your exchange accounts, which most exchanges require these days, and if people are able to identify that you’re, a hidden crypto whale and they know where you live. It could present some problems down the line. Apart from this, though, you also don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket, it’s best to have numerous different wallets generated with different external addresses for each. This is what i do for my personal storage. Now i know that this can sometimes be an annoyance having multiple different addresses and having to change these around for the new exchange accounts that you create.

Now the purest cypherpunks among us will say that you should generate a new address for each transaction. Now i realize that this is overkill and i certainly don’t bother with it myself. However, for really large sums of crypto that you want to store cold, then this could be a good option. I personally use one-time and unique addresses for all of my ethereum nfts, given the nature of a unique non-fungible token, it’s a lot easier to identify exactly who is behind said wallet. Quite simply, privacy is important because when things are not private, security could one day also be compromised on to my next tip, though – and this is all to do with sending crypto if you are going to be sending crypto to an address, make doubly and triply sure That the address you have pasted is indeed the correct one.

This is because it’s very easy to paste an incorrect one, they’re generally just a string of numbers and letters and if you’re operating in haste, it could be very easy to mistake, one for the other. For example, back in my noobish crypto days, i once accidentally sent five eth to the wrong address. I meant to send it to my exchange account, but accidentally send it to my friends exchange account. I did ask him for it back, but he blocked me so john. If you’re watching this, i haven’t forgotten pal, i digress.

The point is that these mistakes do happen and i could easily have avoided that mistake by merely double checking those addresses. Now, beyond that, there’s a risk from clipboard hijacking software, especially if you’ve neglected to use proper antivirus software. It’S also pretty easy to paste the wrong address which could see your crypto destroyed or lost forever, while wallets generally run checks on addresses. This is not the case. If you’re sending to an address on another chain that uses a similar address, type examples here include ethereum layer, twos and bsc for eth and bitcoin cash for bitcoin, etc, etc.

This brings me on to another top tip that i have when it comes to sending crypto and that’s to do test transactions. How often you should do this and whether you think it’s necessary is entirely up to you. I don’t do it for every transaction i’m making, but i certainly do send a small test when there is a considerable amount of crypto being transferred. Yes, this may increase the gas costs, but if the size of the transfer warrants it, i certainly don’t mind paying a tiny bit more for that insurance. Okay time for the next security tip – and this is a mistake that i see far too many people making.

No one – i repeat, no one – has to know how much crypto you hold just because you hold a digital asset does not mean that people won’t try and rob you of it as if it was any other item of value ever heard of the five dollar wrench Attack, it’s perhaps one of the most effective ways to extract private keys. It’S a literal, brute force attack. This has happened to so many people in the past, like in this story from 2018, when a user here in the uk was forced at gunpoint to hand over his crypto or just a few months ago. This man in spain was tortured and robbed for his crypto. If you let too many people know that you own crypto, then the results can be predictable, and i know what you’re thinking i can still flex online right.

No one knows who i am and they won’t be able to find me. Well, you have no idea how much a skilled cyber sleuth can find out about you if they’re determined enough. Your digital footprint is bigger than you think, forum, post history, social media tags and geolocation, reverse image, searches, etc, etc. So yeah, i know it can sometimes be tough not to do that flex, especially in the age of social media and these very rare profile, pick nfts, etc, etc. But the reality is that this online flex could cause some serious problems for you, irl anywho, there’s one more top tip for you and it’s the only certainty in this whole list.

We are all going to die. Sorry didn’t mean to kill the mood then, but it is a fact of life, and, what’s important from this angle, is to make sure that your next of kin can easily access your crypto. This is especially the case if you store your crypto using some of the methods that i suggested earlier: protocols such as cold storage and safe deposit boxes, etc. You should also be aware of the fact that your next of kin may not be as tech savvy as you are. The last thing you want is to have a situation where, in their grieving state, they have to turn to an untrustworthy source to gain access to your crypto.

That’S why it’s incredibly important to leave a detailed breakdown of where your wallets and seeds are stored, how to access them and what crypto you have exactly. It’S perhaps best to leave these instructions in a secure place that can only be accessed in the event of your untimely demise. Perhaps you want to leave the instructions in your will so long as you’re sure it’ll be kept in a secure place. Of course, this actually feeds into another use case for those multiple seed setups that i talked about earlier. You can give sets of seeds to your family members and one to the executor of your estate that way they can only access the wallets and restore them.

When both sets of seeds have been used, it’s a great way to extend the benefit of those wallets and build in a contingency to your coin storage. When it comes to your exchange accounts, these should generally be easier to access for your next of kin. Given the the exchange controls, the crypto in the account they’re more likely to hand over ownership of it, if stipulated in a will, however, to be on the safe side, i would still give them as much information as possible to access these if they can seriously guys. I know it’s a topic that we don’t want to think about and we tend to make the assumption that we have many more years to live, but accidents happen and life is fragile. It reminds me of that story about mercea popescu, an early bitcoin adopter with a purported bitcoin fortune of two billion dollars.

He drowned in an accident in costa rica. Earlier this year he was 41.There are rumors that his 2 billion bitcoin fortune can’t be accessed, lost forever and never to be recovered. You don’t know what your crypto fortune will be worth in 5, 10 or 20 years, and you don’t want that fortune to die with you, especially when your loved ones could have shared in that wealth and that’s it for my list of top security tips. I know it was a long one, but i really do hope that they were able to help you.

I will say, though, that some of these may be overkill and what you end up doing really depends on how much crypto you have and how much you’re willing to spend to protect it. Just as long as you appreciate that taking full control of your finances means taking full responsibility too, and as uncle ben once told peter parker with great power comes great responsibility, and now i’m keen to hear your feedback folks. Do you have any questions for me or are there any security tips that i may have missed? Let me know in the comments down below oh and while you’re down there, i have some other goodies for you, my socials page. This has links to all the other places that you can follow me off.

The tube most of these are verified by blue ticks and include my telegram channel my twitter, my instagram and tiktok and, of course, my email newsletter, where i share a breakdown of my personal portfolio, as well as a breakdown of some upcoming videos. Oh and if you’ve been eyeing, this magical little number right here. Well, you can bag it in my merch store, also linked to below there’s a whole lot of other merch there, including teas beanies and more all sales, go to help supporting the channel and making sure that i can keep it ad free. And finally, if you found this video fire, then fire up the likes, don’t forget to subscribe, to make sure you’re in line to receive my latest crypto vibes, oh and hit that bell as well. We don’t want it to get lonely.

That’S it for today, my fellow crypto fans. This is guy bidding you goodbye.

via DON’T Make Crypto Security Mistakes!!

[respheal]

Phishing Scams: The BTC Scare

Here’s a bit of a different thing, but I’m in the mood to ramble:

Credentials: For my dayjob, I’m the manager of system administration for a web host, in my current position after spending three years as a CentOS sysadmin. My specialty is in identifying and quarantining phishing scams, spam cannons, and hacked websites in general. I am the exim -Mrm in the darkness. I am the ps aux on the shell. I am the filter that guards the inboxes of men.

And I’m seeing this message goin’ around at the moment:

So I wanna straighten out some facts here:

The only way anyone can send a message using your tumblr account is if they have your password or if they're controlling your computer remotely (which, trust me, you’d know if they were. Remotely controlling a computer is typically pretty damn blatant, like the mouse moving or things being typed on their own). 

A virus cannot extract your tumblr password from your computer passively because your password is not stored in plaintext (i.e. unencrypted) on your computer...unless you’ve saved it in a text document or something. Don’t do that.

A virus could get your password if it’s a keylogger (that is, it records the keys you type), but that’s likely not what’s going on here

More likely, what’s going on here is a combination of previously-compromised accounts getting utilized (It’s pretty dang common for hackers to build a collection of comp’d accounts and then blast from all of them at once) or, if there are indeed links in these spam messages (which I’ve yet to see despite asking for examples to check out), this is also a phishing scam to get more compromised accounts.

For the first, basic password security:

Never use a password in more than one location unless you are okay with all of those accounts getting compromised. All of them. I have a crappy password that I use on junk/temporary services when I don’t want to bother with a good password and I know for a fact that password is compromised, so any account I use that password on is compromised from the get-go. When your password is compromised on any site, hackers can add that to their dictionaries to try out on other websites.

Rotate passwords frequently and don’t reuse old passwords.

If your password is on any of these lists, change it right now.

If your password is listed on this page, please go stand in a corner and rethink your life.

Yes, you too, Equifax. In the corner you go.

Don’t write it down. But no, you don’t have to memorize it. More on that in a bit (I don’t even know any but one of my own passwords. and that’s the password to unlock my password manager).

Don’t save your password on public computers. That feature in browsers to store your password? Fine at home because it’s stored encrypted, but never use this feature on any computer that others might use.

Password complexity is your friend. The longer the password and the more complex (special characters, combinations of letters/cases, no dictionary words), the better. Longer, however, is better than complex. If a service says your password can be 6-20 characters, make it 20.

Generating a unique complex password for every service would suck if you had to do it yourself. Instead, I recommend using a password manager. Personally I use KeePass. It stores your password database, encrypted, on your computer and works on just about everything (even smart phones). I would recommend against using a password manager that’s on the cloud (that is, not installed locally on your computer)--that just moves the database into a location that’s easier for hackers to reach.

Additionally, and if you only take away one tip from this, let it be this one:

TURN ON TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION.

Doesn’t matter if you get the authorization code via SMS or an app, but two-factor authentication (aka 2FA) basically makes it so your account has a second password that resets every few seconds. Good frickin’ luck hacking that. Possible? Yes. Plausible? Pffft.

If given the option, use an app for 2FA rather than sms. It’s still way better than nothing, but app 2FA is more secure than sms 2FA because sms isn’t a fully secure system in itself. Google Authenticator and Authy are two free 2FA apps.

I would also like to say that this 2FA moment was one of the more satisfying things in my life and might never be topped:

Passwords get compromised typically in one of three ways: brute force, phished, or data breaches (from the common desk sticky note to lousy website security), or phished.

Brute force attacks are when a hacker spams a password form with thousands of different username/password combinations in the hopes that they find a working one. Depending on the commonness of the password or complexity, this could take anywhere from a few attempts and a couple seconds, to trillions of attempts and decades.

(As a point of trivia, in November/December 2016, thousands of Wordpress websites underwent brute force attacks to their login pages, wp-login.php. Wordpress, by default, had no way to secure against this, placing the onus on hosting companies or site owners to implement a solution.)

Data breaches happen when the hacker obtains a password, either by violating the physical security of a computer and its workspace (e.g. the sticky note or text document with the password on it) or by compromising a server storing passwords (encrypted or not). The notorious Equifax breach earlier this year was one of these, as was the good ol’ Ashley Madison hack.

Lastly, phishing. This is the other possibility for where these tumblr scams are coming from. Phishing is when a fake or hacked website pretends to be a legitimate website in order to trick users into entering their personal information. There are a million different flavors of phish, but it all boils down to getting tricked into putting info where it shouldn’t go. Phishing scams are commonly done over email (The “Nigerian Prince” scam is one) or by directing users to click a link that goes to a site that looks legit.

Like, seriously legit.

Source: https://www.welivesecurity.com/2017/01/27/paypal-users-targeted-sophisticated-new-phishing-campaign/

Phishers use a combination of disguise and panic to get users to enter information into malicious forms. The information gained can then be used to send out more phishing scams or spam from your own account, or even steal your identity.

When it comes to phishing, the best possible advice I can give you is to be vigilant. Avoid clicking suspicious links. Read the entire URL in your address bar to make sure you’re in the right place before filling in sensitive forms. Use two-factor authentication to make sure that your account is only accessible to you. If you come across a phishing scam, report it to the entity being faked and they can contact the right people to get it taken down.

Although you should be rotating your credentials frequently anyway *pointed look*, you can find out if you have accounts in any places that have been previously compromised here: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Fun fact, tumblr was one of the pwn’d sites back in 2013!

Anyway, the tl;dr of all this is...

TURN ON TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION.

[raymondsecurityadventures]

LECTURE 5

Don't roll your own Don't try and create your own cryptographic algorithm and ACTUALLY use it since there are so many subtleties to cryptography that there’s no way that you, not a cryptography expert, can write a reasonably secure one. 

Example: Programming Perls. Guy makes fun of everyone's code, writes the 'correct' version and his own code ends up being buggy.

Security Protocols

WEP  'The inside became the outside' - wireless internet should be encrypted because now anyone could listen in. WEP was made by amateurs and famous for being the worst protocol ever. Quite easy to inject your own packets.

Salient things about WEP:

Not everyone stopped using WEP when it was broken. In fact, some former student made a Pringles can antenna and rode around Sydney breaking into those that still used this crappy protocol. Bet there’s an article about that somewhere. 

Technical aspects of WEP:

Stream of bits - frames - from sender broadcast everywhere, and the receiver needs to know which frames it should read. Need to make sure the frames are unintelligible except to the guy with the key.

Sender A and Receiver B both use a RNG - RC4(?) - set to the same seed. This is used as the XOR cipher key and is XOR'd to the information.

XOR has this nice property where if you XOR something twice with the same key, you get that original something and since the receiver will have the same key they'll get the OG something but the ‘encrypted’ plaintext floating through the airs would be almost completely random. 

TCP/IP: data is broken into packets and can arrive out of order to be sorted through by the receiver. 

Layer 3 of an IP packet has the source and destination address. So we know which bits in the ciphertext correspond to it.

Replay Attacks: 

WEP:

There is no specific measure that prevents replay attacks i.e. you can listen in to all the packets and send your own packets and the machine will have to decide which to accept and the machine will accept those with the correct address. 

You, the listener, change the destination address of the intercepted frames to be your address and send the frames to the access point. The details are a little hazy but you send it to the access point, and it sends the plaintext back to you through an alternative channel. There's some method of narrowing down the key to 8 bits at which point you can simply brute force the key and broadcast 2^8 packets back to the access point. 

Phreaking and Captain Crunch:

Phone phreaking involved replaying control tones that were sent in the same channel as the data and which controlled the operation of the system, including controlling call length, distance, whatever to the receiver, in order to gain unauthorised control.  A 2600Hz tone was the control tone for a free call, and it just so happened that Captain Crunch cereals contained a 2600Hz whistle toy that would allow anyone who had obtained the toy to gain easy access to free calls. 

Hashing - Random Points

'Just as important in cryptanalysis' and poorly understood.

'Breaking' means finding an undesirable property in a function that is faster than brute force.

Small breaks are an issue as people will continue to find structural flaws with the algorithm and eventually cause easier and easier breakages. MD5 became really cheap to break despite the fact that it's 56 bits.

Then, Santa Clause aka the NSA came with SHA0, SHA1 and then SHA2 and everyone got suspicious. And then some people broke SHA-1. 

To find a brute force hash collision, it would theoretically take about half the bits to get it.  

And then kind of recently, people started making their own hashes and people placed money on that idea and this seed became cryptocurrency

Bias 

Everyone has behavioural and observation biases: what you see will cause you to think in a particular way. For example, if you’re a police officer responding to people getting shot everyday, then you’ll think that gun crime is a super big issue but those not having to deal with those situations will not. 

Further examples were explored by the guest speaker, and I’ve outlined them below. 

Examples: Drug companies tend to take advantage of these biases by doing things such as taking doctors out to lunch to simply implant the idea of their drug in their heads. And typically, different brands of that same drug type are fairly indistinguishable so those doctors will tend toward prescribing the drug they recall the best or perhaps prescribe the drug based on their feeling for the need to reciprocate gestures.   Slightly different example: Patient groups, such as Asthma Australia, Cancer Council etc. etc., are considered to have relatively respected voices in the ears of democracy and those patient groups that are better funded - i.e. bankrolled by drug companies - will have the loudest voices and be able to place pressure upon legislative companies to subsidise such and such disease’s drugs and thus benefiting those drugs companies.

Fun fact: pharmaceuticals companies tend to spend more on ‘marketing’ (including taking medical professional out to lunch expense) than they do on R&D.  

And so, bias can form the basis of an insider attack. Perhaps to break and enter into a system, one might be able to take advantage of any number of human behavioural weaknesses.

Culture as a security device:  Fundamentally restructuring the culture of a particular organisation can be potentially incredibly impactful upon the security of that organisation i.e. compliance culture may be able to minimise the net impact of human error upon the weakness of that organisation and human error is, of course, a leading cause of security flaws.

Once again, Tumblr has let me down and I’ve lost my longass edit. I’ll have to condense it.

Merkle Hash Construction 

The Merkle Hash Construction is essentially the construct used today to hash information. It involves splitting said information up into several blocks, obtaining a password and passing said password and the first block into what Richard described as a ‘mini hash function’.  The result is passed into the second function as the second password, and the second block is passed into the function accordingly to generate the third hashed block which is used as the password and so on so forth. 

MACs and Length Extension Attacks II 

Recall that MACs provided integrity and authenticity to a message sender and receiver by encasing in a virtually unbreakable hash, the message digest appended to a shared secret password and sending both the digest and the hash. The receiver could then recreate the hash with the digest and see if his matched the hash that the sender sent. If they did, great, the message was likely untampered with and we can confirm it was the intended sender who sent the message. If they didn’t, then the message was likely to have been tampered with by a third party since a third party without access to the shared secret would be unable to produce a hash that matches the profile of the digest appended to the secret. However, issues existed: 

The requirement of a shared secret.  Symmetric cryptography can become incredibly messy when there are many parties that wish to have their messages verified as you would require a password for each of them; and if they wanted to communicate with each other, they would need passwords for each other as well. This becomes an issue in messaging platforms.

Length extension attack  Hashes are subject to the length extension attack. Recall the Merkle-Damgard hash construction. If an attacker were to obtain any of the resultant vectors from any of the sub-hash functions, they would be able to reconstruct the original hash WITH the password prepended to it, meaning they would be able to add their own message to the hash. 

Collision Attacks Hashes are also subject to this. Hash collisions are an inevitable fact of life, since all hashes are of fixed length. People can exploit this fact and try to find an identical hash for, say, a particular message digest that confirms that the file you’re downloading is indeed the file that you intended to download from the site, and suddenly the MAC that you’re using to confirm this download is not quite secure. An attacker could simply send you an identical hash, but for an utterly different digest and you would never know: which opens the door for many nefarious things.

These collision attacks are better known as birthday attacks as they generally make use of the birthday paradox. The birthday paradox simply outlines the probability of two people, in a room of X > 2 amount of people, of having the same birthday. You’d think it’d be low, however, the probability is quite great.

This is because humans like to think of probability as a linear construct: that since there are 365 possible birthdays and there are only, say, 50 people in the room that there would be about a 50/365 chance of colliding birthdays. This is a fundamentally flawed mode of approaching the problem however: we need to think of the # of pairs of people in the room and from there, work out the number of possibilities of any single pair having the same b’day. 

There are 50C2 possible combinations of people in the room. And there is a 364/365 chance of any particular pair, not having an identical birthday. So our probability of at least one pair having the same birthday would be: 

which would work out to be, for 50 people, 96.529%.  Replace birthdays with hashes and you get the possibility of hash collisions. 

On average, it would take an attacker sqrt (bits in hash) to obtain a general hash collision (general meaning any particular hash having a collision).

Digital Signatures RSA 

Too lazy to type this out since this isn’t fresh content anymore: 

An alternative to the MAC, RSA can be used as an authentication method as well, simply by having the sender encrypt their message with their private key and allowing receivers to decrypt the message using their public key.  This way, since only the sender will be able to encrypt their messages this way, it would be trivial to confirm that the sender is indeed the authentic sender.  RSA is really slow though, so generally only digests can be encrypted in this way, which leaves it a little vulnerable to attack. 

Additional Reading and Endnote

We’re constantly living in fear of one day people discovering how to decompose large numbers into its two prime factors because RSA is essentially predicated on this concept. 

Also read up on data breaches: Ashley Madison, LinkedIn, FB, Runescape

[civilcoconstruction]

Smart Digital Locks are a Necessity (Review)

Do you really need smart digital locks?

Some 15 years ago, smart digital locks for your door were for homeowners who could afford it. Others felt that smart digital locks weren’t as secure as the traditional lock and key and were easily hackable.

It’s different nowadays, where majority of the homeowners prefer smart digital locks for better convenience. Habits like digging through your bag for the keys, misplacing your keys when you’re in a rush to step out of home are no longer an issue thanks to smart digital locks.

There are so many brands of smart digital locks to choose from. But I went with igloohome for its award-winning design and technology. Being a local company, it is also a plus for maintenance. I am reviewing this as a first-timer’s experience using smart digital locks at home.

First impression

All of igloohome locks are black, which is the easiest colour to match with different kinds of door and gate colour or material. It can be boring for some, but I’m fine with just one colour as locks shouldn’t stand out too much.

Size and measurements of your door and gate matters for compatibility, so make sure you check them over at this link before making your purchase. Both the Mortise 2+ (for main door) and Rim Lock (for gate) come with an electronic keypad that brightens up upon touch. The Mortise 2+ has an additional fingerprint scanner.

Rim Lock

Mortise 2+

Smart Digital locks compared to traditional locks

We used to lock our main doors, then gate and we’ll add an additional padlock for enhance security—all with keys. How are these secured comparing with smart digital locks? It may sound dumb, but personally all locks can be open (if the perpetrator really wants to), regardless if it is digital or key. As such, it really doesn’t matter which is more secure. What matters more is—once again—convenience. In this case, going for smart digital locks makes more sense.

Choosing a secure smart digital lock

That said, I would avoid digital locks that require a WIFI connection to operate because they can be hacked. You will also want to find one that has Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). I read that having 2FA authentication is a plus, but I’m not sure if I will have this over faster access to open the locks. Finally, get a smart digital lock that has the ability to create longer passwords to prevent ‘brute force attacks’ from hackers. These are just some important security functions to look out for in a digital lock, and igloohome locks fulfils them.

How many different access options?

Everyone opens their smart digital locks differently, and it later on becomes a habit after choosing the one you find the easiest and most convenient. This is why locks have a variety of different functions made available, though most of the time you will use just one or at most two of the available options. Mortise 2+ can be operated with the following methods:

Fingerprint Sensor: My favourite option, because you have your fingers/thumbs with you all the time. And thankfully the fingerprint scan has a high success rate of getting it right. Out of the 10 times we tested, we managed to open the lock eight times. Fingers must be aligned straight though.

PIN Code: You can set a ‘Duration PIN’ that works for a period. It’s useful if you have temporary visitors you don’t want to give a physical Bluetooth key to, people like your part-time helper or a confinement nanny. The ‘Recurring PIN’ works every one day of the week. ‘One Time PIN’ works only once, great if you would like your friend to collect an item from your house while no one is at home.

Bluetooth Key: This unlocks the door via a mobile app. And as an admin, you can also set someone else in the family to have the mobile bluetooth key on their phone without them having admin controls.

Keycard: A physical small card which you can bring along and put it in your wallet. Notably, the keycard even works through a leather wallet. Multiple cards can also be registered through your mobile app.

Physical Key: This is also called the emergency key which you should carry it with you in case you’ve forgotten to bring along your phone, your keycard or can’t remember your PIN… which chances are very slim for all to happen at once. But I still carry it with me, just in case.

The best part about this smart digital lock is that all entry and exits are logged into your mobile app which you can review if required. It’s great because all individual access methods can be named, and you know who comes in or out and at what time of the day.

From Left: Emergency Key (M2+ and RL), Keycard, Key Fob

Home Page in Mobile App

Basic Unlock Button

  Configurable Access in Mobile App

All Access of Individual Lock

So many options for what? Just gimmicky?

People like options, that’s just how it is for most products. Most importantly the options of the product must work well. Personally, the Fingerprint Sensor is a must-have and it works well. You can save both your left and right index fingerprints in the event you’re carrying items on one hand. It is simple to use and even my son enjoys using it effectively.

I haven’t been using much of the various PIN Codes because most of the time someone is at home, but it may be of great use to you if you’re often out and about. Sadly, the fingerprint scanner is not available in the Rim Lock (Gate), so I use the regular pin for that.

Good Sensor with High Success Rate

Battery type and lifespan

Thankfully, the type of batteries used for both digital locks are the same: AA batteries. With Mortise 2+ requiring eight pieces and Rim Lock requiring four. The batteries do last very long. For the M2+, it started operating on 2 February 2021, and to date, 87% power remains. That is six months of usage! Considering that a door lock is used daily, that is phenomenal performance.

The changing of batteries is easy too, especially for M2+ that only requires pressing on the back cover to open the battery compartment up. Rim Lock though will require a tiny Allen key to open it up, as it is reachable by outsiders.

Mortise 2+ Battery Compartment

Rim Lock Battery Compartment

Is the set up difficult?

The instruction manual can be found on the QR Code. Even without that, it is actually pretty simple if you just follow the instructions in the app. There are step-by-step guides from adding in a new lock into the app to giving access to your key cards. The UI/UX is very intuitive and most if not all the functions are within the app.

Also, there is no need for Internet connection at all. They have created a technology called algoPIN, that uses a combination of their mobile app, cloud system and PIN code to work. There’s a lot more to the technology behind, so if you’re keen to know how to works just check it out here.

Do note that it’s best to leave the film intact as it helps to keep off fingerprints. I regretted taking out my Mortise 2+ film.

Some REALLY useful features

Masking/Decoy pin: The purpose of the Masking PIN makes it difficult for anyone to see you pressing the PIN number or for anyone to guess your pin by the fingerprints left on the keypad. It is not foolproof, but at least it confuses people who wants to know your number. All that is required is to add in additional numbers in front of your actual PIN number.

Masking PIN & Actual PIN

Key Fob: This small key is included in the Rim Lock purchase. And its sole purpose, according to the installer, is to allow homeowners to open both the main door and gate digital locks with just a single press on the button from inside (at home).

How far a distance can you use the Key Fob to unlock? Can you use the Key Fob outside of home?

The sweetest part to the key fob is to actually bring an extra key fob when you’re out. I’ve tested it out myself and within a distance of approximately 6 metres away, you can press the key fob and both locks are opened by the time you walk in the front of your door. This is probably the fastest access method out of all.

Key Fob on the side of Main Door

Child Lock proved useful too for my toddler

Things to improve on

It will be great if there are widgets for the mobile app or even an Apple Watch. Imagine having a widget within easy reach that allows you to unlock the door even before reaching home, or being able to create a last minute random PIN that allows your Mother-in-Law a delivery person to drop off your online purchases from a widget—with the assistance of an in-house CCTV of course. At the moment, you will need to open the app and configure the above.

Pressing the Key Fob opens both locks, but it takes about three seconds for them to open, which I think could be shortened to 1 to 1.5 seconds.

There isn’t a button to unlock the Rim Lock from inside, which, obviously, is to prevent an easy reach-in by anyone who is outside. To do so, you will need to use the Key Fob or a Keycard to reach the Rim Lock sensor outside. But I feel there should be an easier way. For example, when you open the main door (Mortise2+) from inside, the gate (Rim Lock) automatically opens as well. I wonder if that is possible for other brands?

Internal of Rim Lock with small locking button

Summary

Although igloohome locks allow multiple access methods, it doesn’t force you to use only one just because the rest of them sucks. All methods work great, and you also have the option to disable (not use) certain access.

For example, you can choose not to use any Keycards if you’re worried that it may get lost. This adds versatility in how you want your lock to perform based on your lifestyle. If you want a very secured PIN number you can create a longer code, but that also means that you will need a longer time to access, which kinda defeats my personal purpose of having a smart digital lock.

Two daily changes to how I open and lock my door make a huge difference to my lifestyle: not needing to find the two keys within a bunch of other keys while carrying groceries, and simply having both the automated gate and door locked up when we are leaving home. You will know it is worth the change after experiencing it yourself firsthand. Smart Digital locks have been a great home product for my family!

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from CIVICLO Construction & Interior https://civilco.construction/smart-digital-locks-are-a-necessity-review/