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For knowledge of good and evil; Regan Wyngarde
Topic Started: Jun 14 2015, 01:18 PM (382 Views)
Tessa
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Cyberpathy, Kinetic Mind, Biokinesis
Date: June 13
Time: 2am




Anonimity was a difficult thing to come by these days, what with technology, fingerprints, intelligent software. Anything anyone posted on the Internet would remain there - forever. A nexus of infinite information on anything and anyone. But more importantly, it was a mass of wires and algorithims that connected the world together - ones and zeros, all interlaced to form one gigantic organism.

Well, it was an organism to Sage. A well trained, well-oiled machine that she knew inside and out.

Strolling through a darkened alley way two streets from the targetted facility, she swept a glance across the street - immediately the two cameras, mouted on street lamps, shuttered closed. Effortlessly, she replaced the timestamp on the footage and set them on a loop. Connected to everything electronic through her nanite shades, the Black Queen was fully in her element. Leaning casually against one wall - hidden from view on an otherwise empty street - Tessa kept one partiton of her mind monitoring traffic, while another kept tabs on the lab's security gantries. Her third partition mentally marked access points and prepared to disarm them, while the fourth... Well, her fourth partition was connected back to Hermes, and currently breezing through level 325 of Candy Crush.

It was only a few hours ago that her cellphone pinged with a message. It went straight to the point, listing a time and a rendevous point - this alley way, adjacent to the marked facility. Trust did not come easy to her, but logical thought told her that if Regan had wanted her eliminated, there were many much more convienient ways to do it than to propose an elaborate plan, and stage an ambush. The illusionist could have simply waltzed into the club.

Waiting for the Red Bishop, Tessa skipped ahead to level 328 on Candy Crush while reaching back to pull her dark curls into a convienient french braid and out of her eyes. She stood with one foot propped against the wall, almost melting into the shadows in her all-black ensemble. The only colour came from the dim red flares on her glasses.

"You're here," she voiced aloud once her genetic sight picked up Regan's signature. "It's a calm, breezy evening..."

The sky was clear, which meant the shadows cast by the moonlight on the buildings would be starker. Muted sounds came from the facility's assembly yard. In minutes the shift would change and guards would be handing over their reports to the graveyard shift. Slipping in and out then would be almost too easy.
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Regan Wyngarde
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Illusions
There was a distinct feeling of deja vu about this entire operation, Regan decided, on several distinct grounds.

The most obvious sense, of course, was the purely tactical: she was once again infiltrating a high-security facility with the aid of a technopath, as she'd previously done twice, once with McKenzie and once with Serafina. This was also the least interesting sense, in that it was tactically overdetermined... such facilities combined human security with electronic security precisely to avoid being compromised by superhumans with strengths in either area, which in turn required a synchronized intrusion. Not many organizations could count both among their resources. Xavier's was one, and the Brotherhood had been another (though under their current circumstances even Regan wasn't sure what resources they controlled), and Hellfire was a third. Given that, it was really no surprise that this scenario kept repeating itself.

Somewhat more meaningful was the second sense, the organizational: members of the Black Court working together towards a common cause. Admittedly, Regan was no longer Black Court, and even when she had been she and Tessa had never precisely worked together except in the most technical of senses. But this was Hellfire, after all, where cooperation was always something of a technicality, and Regan's impression based on their last conversation was that their admittedly tumultuous relationship was moving into a new phase, one marked by less active conflict and more feasible cooperation.

Most significant to Regan was the strategic perspective, though... the resurgance of the Sentinel program. The last time this program was activated the Purifiers had taken control of it and almost successfully used it to destroy the largest mutant population center in North America. If the robot soldiers were being reconstructed, Regan intended to make sure they were following the right orders... namely, hers.

Of course, no doubt Tessa had the same idea, and Regan had to admit she was in a better position to achieve that control. But she would cross that bridge when she came to it.

"You're here. It's a calm, breezy evening..."

"...in which voices carry surprisingly far," Regan cautioned as she cloaked both of them in the illusion of an empty yard. "Any difficulties subverting their electronic defenses?"
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Tessa
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Cyberpathy, Kinetic Mind, Biokinesis
Had she been a person more suited to the expression of emotion, Sage would have rolled her eyes. As it were, stoicism was much more suitable.

Sound waves would not carry the tone of her voice that far - two streets, with more than enough interruptions of concrete structures was enough to suit her purposes. And of course, this only added what she saw in the video feeds, that all employees were marked and accounted for, the thermal sensors of the facility's security system doing their job admirably.

While she had been initially impressed - upon first breach- by the security protocols, it had not taken her long to crack the algorithm that controlled their central hub, and from there, she flitted easily through the coding. Within minutes, she had propped open a little back door on the third floor server room. Inconspicuous enough that no one would notice one of their little lights turning from green to red to indicate a slight change, but eminently suitable for her purposes.

In the facility's networks, she skirted around corners easily, shielding herself from detection by averting their regular 3 minute vulnerability scans by masking as a patch program. While their server was protected by a Firewall, it had not taken Sage more than five minutes to gain access. When Reagan arrived, everything had been put in place.

There was no reason the Black Queen should encounter difficulty, This was not foreign technology - but Mastermind knew that as well as she did. It was why they said she was the best.

Tessa had arrogance, and pride, but when it came to being on the field, she felt that it was more important they achieved their goals than feed her ego. As such, she found no advantage to look down on the illusionist from her pedestal, instead, spoke briskly to explain whatever she had done since arriving.

"None," she answered and immediately, a hologram of the building appeared between them. "Thermal detectors are at every entrance and exit, marked green here - they log each heat signature, but it will be no problem to toggle their sensors for the time we are in the building."

"When we're ready, I'll cut into a loop security footage, so we'll be able to move around freely. All doors are fingerprint and retina access, but they've already adjusted to open when required." The hologram changed as her cybernetic mind did, highlighting the different elements as she spoke.

"It appears the lab we want is on the second sub-basement level - the blueprints end on the ground floor, but the thermal scanner logs show access points here, and here", she pointed to the north and west entrances to the facility.

According to the facility's protocol, there would be a handover exchange in ten minutes, which meant that essentially, all personnel would be away from their stations, and in a team debrief in preparation for the next shift. It would be their easiest opportunity to get in and out with minimum fuss.

"We can take the north entrance, it's closest to us now, but there's a matter of armed guards," she said, the hologram zooming in on the north entrance. "All recent employments. It seems they have upped their security in the last half a year."
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Regan Wyngarde
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Illusions
Even Regan had to admit that Tessa's ability to infiltrate the site's technological defenses was remarkable. Not surprising, of course; she was by far the most powerful technopath Regan had ever met. But still worth noting. She watched the hologram intently, memorizing the spatial layouts and comparing them in her mind to the maps she'd previously reviewed. There were discrepancies, but nothing out of the ordinary for a facility undergoing active renovations. Good.

She nodded approval of the other woman's plans, cloaking them both in imperceptibility as they made their way to the north entrance. "Guards won't be a problem," she added, "they won't even know we're there."

The guards were admirably attentive, but their attentiveness meant nothing when Regan edited their perceptions directly; as the two of them walked casually towards the entrance gate the guards saw nothing but the same quiet city street they'd been watching all morning. And the supposedly high-security entrance allowed them in without a hitch thanks to the Black Queen's technopathic wizardry, while Regan prevented observers from noticing the gate even opening.

If all was going according to plan Tessa was also preventing any automated record of their entrance from being sent to central security or stored in local memory, but just to be sure Regan kept a telepathic "eye" open for anyone spotting them on a camera feed or other remote pickup. Nothing. Good. There was a lot of movement and shifting of focus -- no doubt the shift handover the Queen had mentioned -- but nothing seemed alarmed or related to their intrusion.

Excellent.

It was almost an anticlimax, really, which was the way Regan preferred it.

The northern gate led to a mostly featureless hallway, which Regan had no doubt was full of deathtraps for an unwary intruder who lacked the foresight to obtain technopathic support, which had an elevator mounted in the wall near its far end. "Second sub-basement, you said?" She gestured towards the elevator door, inviting Tessa to go first -- both a gesture of politeness, and a habitual act of self-defense.

"This reminds me, actually: how are the Palace's new defenses working out?" Rebuilding Hellfire's base after its destruction at Spiral's hands had been a major undertaking, and Regan assumed that the improved security she was aware of was only the tip of the iceberg. For her own part, she'd come long ago to the conclusion that in a world full of both mutant and technological threats, there was no such thing as reliable security... weren't the two of them demonstrating that right now? It was best to embrace that truth and plan accordingly.
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Tessa
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Cyberpathy, Kinetic Mind, Biokinesis
It was a walk in the park. A technologically crippled park.

Tessa waved a hand and the infrared sensors swung in a different direction, the heat registries on a loop from their data collected three hours ago. The hard disks in the mainframe were on a patch that would last for the next two hours, triggered by Tessa, of course, but to the inexperienced eye, it would look like a routine, run-of-the-mill update. By then, she and Regan would have been long gone.

It bordered on the mundane that she actually had to continue with her Candy Crush crusade to keep her mind occupied.

Confident on her own abilities, Tessa stepped into the lift, then hit the button for their designated floor, the biometric verification system glowing green to show her smooth entry.

Conversation turned to pleasantries as they swooped downwards in the stainless steel box.

"No problems yet, although with the speed of technological advances, and the increase in the tech savvy industry, I presume it would not be long before someone gets it in their head to try breaching our walls."

Not that it would be possible. Tessa had rebuilt the Nexus from scratch, in it she had interfaced her own unique security measures, thus far proven to be digitally hacker-proof. But on top of the tech, they had been placing more stringent eyes on the people they invited into their hallowed halls.

For one, the Black Queen now allowed no one aside from a select few of her coterie into her private rooms, and of those, only two of her closest assistants knew of the existence of Hermes, her supercomputer. Hermes functioned very much like she did, above and beyond the logical processors of normal devices. As a system, Hermes was capable on running independent programs and search functions, controlled by Tessa even from a distance, via the wireless.

"Staffing the club has always been a bit more challenging than the technological aspect. We're much more stringent now, I'm sure you can understand why." It was more personal for her -- Sage was incapacitated immediately after her coronation, and locked in skull prison for months. All that could have been possibly prevented had they realised one of their pawns was more than she seemed.

The elevator dinged and the doors slid open, giving way to another sanitised hallway.

"This way," she said calmly, turning a right, and then a left, coming to a wider corridor with double doors at the end.

Placing her hand on the biometric scanner once more, Tessa waited for a moment, then smiled as she once more, gained entry. "Voila," she smirked, allowing a moment of satisfaction.

The doors revealed a large, cavernous laboratory, dark, and lit only by the light from the hallway. Tessa laid her hand over the switchboard near the door, and in seconds, infiltrated their mechanical console, turning on the lights with her melded technopathic control.

What greeted them were three sentinels, standing side by side, held up by conveniently placed scaffolding -- Tessa presumed, for the ease of their researchers. Right in front of them, on a raised platform overlooking the lab's bullpen, was what evidently was the lab's main console.

It took the Black Queen less than a minute to gain entry to their system by touch. One partition of her mind churned out an algorithm to gain the lab's audit trail files, while another proceeded to actively download the blueprints and documents for the sentinel project.

With her hands on the console, it was as if Tessa was speaking to it, and effectively, she was. She asked for the information, and the technology replied.

"If we wanted to end this programme now, we can, Mastermind," she mused out loud, her voice laced with languid amusement. Right here, right now, she could end the project before it would even begin. The files would be gone, hidden from anyone within in the dark depths of cyberspace, except from her.

Power, it was a heady, heady drug.
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Regan Wyngarde
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Illusions
Well, credit where credit is due, Regan admitted privately, she took care of that quite handily.

"If we wanted to end this programme now, we can, Mastermind." Regan chuckled at that, amused by the thought... that would certainly throw a spanner into the works! But that wasn't why they were there, of course. A simple mission of destruction would not have required their unique talents; they'd already demonstrated mutantkind's ability to destroy these armored monstrosities, more than once.

Of course, the humans had also demonstrated their willingness to rebuild, again and again, and a pre-emptive mission of destruction was more likely to degrade the Court's position than improve it. Either Court, really, though Regan's concern for her former association was less compelling than for her current one.

So, no, destroying the program wasn't part of their plan. And while Tessa had always been more... militant... than Regan was entirely comfortable with, she was no fool; she understood perfectly well what they were doing there. Her remark was no doubt meant as a joke... it was always difficult to tell when Sage was joking. Or perhaps as a test of Regan's motives. Either way,

"We can, yes," she replied drily. "Best to stick to the plan, however." Regan wasn't entirely sure what the algorithm they were inserting into the Sentinel program was intended to do, but she was quite certain the programmers who developed it would not approve. "It seems a shame to waste so much exceptional stealth."

As they chatted, a fraction of Regan's mind was taking exceptional care to record every perceivable aspect of the space, and of the personnel working here... sooner or later she would likely find it useful to have their precise perceptual parameters ready to hand. If all went as she hoped, this would not be her last time in this room.
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Tessa
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Cyberpathy, Kinetic Mind, Biokinesis
Tessa shrugged. She had what she came for, the intricate manuals, files and various copies of information on the Sentinel project; if Regan wanted to leave them be, only to expend effort to kill them off another day, then so be it. It was not of the Black Queen's concern. Ultimately, she had wanted the tech, and by all accounts, had fulfilled her own requirements for this sojourn.

For the express purposes of both concealing this evening's intrusion, as well as... setting back the facilities' geniuses several decades, Tessa had engineered a little gift in a something Sage called a Black Box. Hidden beneath her patches, she had put in place a self-changing algorithm that would periodically wipe the facility's drives every third day. The Black Box, installed on the mainframe, had been seeding throughout the branch servers since it was installed earlier this evening, and would move through the networks to avoid detection. The developers would have to think three steps ahead, predicting where the Black Box would be, in order to code to fight it. In any case, she was confident her little bit of trickery would prove amusing for her, and stumbling for the little scientists.

They would have their back-ups and their copies, and they would restore and start again, only to see that on the third day, the action would repeat. Tessa didn't know how long they would hold out for, but she intended to watch from afar.

"Oh, it's not a waste. At the very least this served as an extremely informative survey, should the need arise for either of us to return to the establishment," Tessa remarked casually as her slender, clever fingers tapped out code after code on her pink, holographic keyboard. With Candy Crush still playing in the back ground, Tessa sorted out the information she received from the drives systematically in her head, filing them away for eventual use. Then she neatly disposed of all digital fingerprints, finally accessing the server mainframe from the lab itself to run a cursory check that no one in the building had picked up on the infiltration.

If anything, to the outside world, her keystrokes and codes simply looked like the run of the mill Safe Mode checks. All very plebeian -- no one would be any wiser. And even if the Black Box was found, it could not possibly be connected to the Hellfire Club in anyway, after all, there was no where they could turn to to find information, not when Sage was a veritable mistress of Cyberspace.

Two final clicks and she was done.

It did not escape her notice that Regan's interest lay too, in the location and perimeters of this room. They would be kidding themselves if this was the end of the game. How boring.

She'd always found Regan to be the sort who watched the world play its games before deciding which side to stand on. Tessa was a little different. She was more critical of civilisation, and time after time, they had proved that without guidance, they would simply make judgements of error.

Like this project. Tessa could certainly eliminate the threat here and now... but then, what if it turned out to be to their advantage? She was no precog, her assumptions were simply accurate calculations. In a world where motivations lay not in accuracy, but in emotion, she was made that fraction less accurate.

"The project will live to see another day, if you are ready, I believe our presence here is no longer necessary." The holographic keyboard disappeared from view, as the Black Queen turned to the illusionist.
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