45: A Watched Pot
PyrrhicSteel
Look natural.
- Location
- Idaho
With a series of clicks, clean blue flames broke the not-quite darkness around Trinitite, illuminating the propane stove further. As she watched the blue flames fade to the normal orange, The Wo-class felt tension throughout her frame start to ease. Slumping against the tree behind her, the Abyssal relaxed, allowing herself to bask in the moment for a few seconds. Right now she was wasting propane, but that didn't matter too much to the abyssal. For the first time in weeks, Trinitite's logistics situation had become… comfortable. Inefficient use of her propane was nothing compared to how much material she carried had suddenly transformed from ballast to useful food. She was going to let that sink in before she actually put the stove to use.
As she'd walked from the Walmart Fleet's warehouse to her now-common 'anchorage' in the woods just outside Mill Creek, she'd speculated on what she'd try to make first. There was so much food in her hold that the decision hadn't been easy. A moment or two of thought passed. This stove had two burners, meaning she could prepare two foods at once. Good for a ship who needed plenty of food to stay supplied, but for now it widened the number of options she had to choose from. After some experimentation she might be able to figure out the best combinations, making her choice a little easier, but that wasn't the case yet.
Tools weren't going to be a limiting factor. Beyond the 'griddle' that had come with the stove, she'd also bought a pair of pans for most food, and pots to boil water in.
Boiling water… she should probably give rice another try, shouldn't she?
Producing one of the pots from her hold and placing it over the lit burner, Trinitite reached back into her hold. A bit of searching and queries with her quartermaster eventually got her a bag labeled 'Organic White Rice.' She wasn't sure how 'Organic' made this rice different from the… failure she'd had a few days ago, but hopefully they were similar enough that cooking this would give her an idea of what she'd missed.
Along similar lines, she removed the bag of hamburger patties she'd tried that night, ready to see what they tasted like once the new stove had unfrozen them. She started the other burner, placing a new pan on it and letting it warm. She now had both burners happily consuming propane, blue-orange flames obscured by the pot and pan she'd placed on each.
What did she do now?
Somewhat frantically, she turned the bag of rice over, holding it to her face so her eyes would illuminate the instructions. Right, she needed water. That was the point of the pot in the first place, after all. Unfortunately for her, humans had somehow created variants of that, as well. She knew saltwater and freshwater were different, but sparkling water? Did the existence of drinking water mean you weren't supposed to drink the others? Well, she knew distilled water as the product of condensed steam, making it probably the purest and the most basic, so she opened that container and poured the majority of it into the pot.
And then, she waited.
Compared to her massive oil-fired burners that ran her boilers, this tiny propane one was going to take a while to warm up, so she was going to have plenty of time. Realizing that, she quietly shut the other one down, returning her frozen burgers to her meat locker to ensure she didn't have to eat them all tonight. That wouldn't be terrible, but it would mean she'd have to experiment with a different meat, something that would make the lessons learned from her cooking training less reliable.
...Actually, since she would be burning most of these and had already tasted a few frozen, she should try one raw, shouldn't she? That way, she'd get an idea of what the human-made meat was like before she started messing with it.
That, of course, meant she'd just stored the frozen hamburgers for no reason! Unable to keep from blushing despite not being watched, Trinitite hesitantly reached back into her hold, re-procuring the bag of hamburgers and pulling one out. It plopped on the now-cooling pan with a clunk and a slight sizzle, and Trinitite returned the rest of the burgers to their rightful spot in the meat locker.
That was another thing out of the way. There was nothing else she could do until the water started boiling, was there?
The abyssal relaxed again, idly watching the pot while her thoughts left her. The work day hadn't been that busy, due to the crew that ran the crane neglecting basic maintenance. No one else had known about the problem until the vital machine failed to start this morning, when Austin's team needed it's help. The idea of something that important being neglected was appalling to Trinitite, of course, but she had seen things like that happen before in abyssal ships who hadn't been properly trained, usually those who served under Princesses with no experience of their own. To see it here didn't speak well of the fleet she had volunteered to join, but considering how angry everyone else she'd seen had been, it must be an unusual occurrence. Hopefully Dan would make sure something like this wouldn't happen again.
In the end, Trinitite and the rest of the work crew had spent a good portion of the day building a pulley system, intent on hoisting the pallets of supplies up themselves. It had meant hours of delay hunting down pulleys and a long enough cable or rope, but in the end they had managed to get something worked out. After lunch they'd gotten started on finishing the braces for the rebar cages they'd erected, ensuring the concrete would remain contained in the pillars when whomever poured concrete in the fleet got around to doing so. Hopefully Trinitite would be able to help with that. Patching some of her damage with concrete was a bad idea in so many ways, but if she needed to become combat capable quickly she might have no other option.
Leaning forwards so the light from her eyes better illuminated the pot of water, the Abyssal checked to see it's progress. Seemingly unchanged, but that wasn't a surprise. Trinitite knew it would take longer to heat the water properly, so she wasn't sure what she was hoping for when she'd checked.
The Wo-class was just getting impatient, she guessed, which was unusual for her. It wasn't like the next meal she made was going to compare to those made by the lunch trucks she ate from, and she'd been eating enough that she wasn't desperately hungry now. Forcing herself to look away from the pot and towards the dimly glowing clouds above, she sighed, focusing on the radio broadcast she'd been listening in on.
The soothing 'classical music' continued to be a mystery to her, but it was one of the few she was content not knowing much about. When the humans on the frequency reported on songs, concertos, composers and orchestras, she was alright with leaving the unfamiliar terms off of her research list, and often when they spoke of what feelings or images the music was supposed to invoke, she didn't spend much time trying to draw a connection. It was just… music, and the complexities behind it would probably take months to understand. Months she didn't want to spend on something so unimportant, considering she content listening to it while remaining ignorant.
Looking down and impatiently checking the pot again, Trinitite turned her attention to the no-longer-frozen hamburger. The frost that had initially encrusted the meat seemed to have faded, leaving it an even pink. Speculatively, the abyssal picked the partially-thawed meat up, getting a feel for it's texture under her gloves. Oddly it didn't seem to be one piece of meat at all, instead several miniscule chunks moulded by humans into an easy-to-store disk. It would explain some of its properties, like how it didn't return to its original shape when Trinitite pressed divots into it with a finger. As she did so, blood slowly seeped from the meat, far less than she'd expect from a normal animal, but considering there weren't any veins in this, it was more than she'd hoped for.
Her inspection was almost complete. Eager to see how the thawed burger differed from the frozen ones she'd eaten, Trinitite raised the meat disk to her mouth, stretching her lips to allow as much of the hamburger into her mouth as possible before biting down.
Crunch.
The almost thawed burger was still a little too cold for her tastes, but she guessed that was what cooking it was for. There was a distinct flavor to the meat, unique from the fish she was used to, and ignoring its icy core the processed texture made it feel very smooth for a meat. She wasn't too sure she liked that part yet, but she'd withhold judgement until she'd cooked a few hamburger patties. What little blood there was pooled around her lips, forcing the Trinitite to get a taste of her lipstick as she licked the red liquid away. She couldn't afford it dripping all over her makeup and human clothes, after all.
After sliding the rest of the raw meat into her mouth over the course of a minute, Trinitite leaned forwards again, checking the water.
Still no boiling, obviously.
Leaning back and trying to find a comfortable position, Trinitite forced herself to look away from the stove. Maybe it was time for an impromptu test of her marines' stealth abilities. Trying to ignore their presence in her mind, she squinted, attempting to make their forms out in the darkness. Another minute passed like this, the abyssal searching her surroundings for her sentries, but they stubbornly remained unseen. They'd probably gone to ground once they realized she was looking for them, the little crabs.
Her interest waned again, and her thoughts returned to her day. Searching for Circuit Breaker Coolant had been a colossal waste of time, either returning articles on specific pieces of equipment or those answering the question of why plugging an 'air conditioner' in set one off. Nothing helpful. Not wanting to waste the rest of her time in the library, the abyssal then moved onto the next term:
Family.
The trees around Trinitite suddenly seemed much further away from The Carrier than they had a few moments ago, alone with her crew and the human radio transmissions. Unlike a lot of the other terms she'd looked for, this one had brought up a 'Dictionary' entry that summed up the word in a concise manner.
A group of one or more parents and their children living together as a unit.
That had described her fleet fairly well, which was reassuring. Below it was a link to the term 'Nuclear family,' which had initially caught Trinitite's interest but was surprisingly boring. What did having two parents, a necessity for humans if Trinitite recalled correctly, have to do with The Fire?
However, Trinitite was starting to recognize questions with needlessly complicated answers, so she had discarded that line of inquiry and focused on the rest of the search. After the first definition, three others were listed. Initially, it seemed that having multiple definitions for one word would only cause confusion, but it only took a moment of thought for Trinitite to realize the problem was relentlessly common in the language she was used to. Plus, the definitions had seemed similar enough here that they wouldn't cause much of a problem.
Things got more serious when she found the Wikipedia article.
Phrases like 'builds a person into a functional adult' and 'ensures the continuity of humankind,' although not fully understood to the abyssal, clearly carried a massive amount of weight. Fleets were important to humans, yes, but she wasn't sure anyone she worked with would consider them important to the continuity of humankind. Again she didn't know the exact meaning of the phrase, but she could guess its jist. Considering how casually she'd joined the construction group she was in, humans came and went in fleets, but their families were their anchor.
Something she was lacking, right now. She certainly wouldn't trust her fleetmates with her concerns and worries, after all.
Her coworkers had asked her about her family a couple times. Perhaps tomorrow, she should return the favor. Informed guesses from reading articles was one thing. She'd get a better idea of what that meant to them in their own words.
Unfortunately, the library expelled her before she could finish reading the article, but it was mostly technicalities and unfamiliar jargon by that point. She'd gotten most of the information she needed from the introduction, anyways.
...
Oh, hey! The water was boiling! Eagarly tearing open the bag of rice, Trinitite triumphantly upended the rice and poured the contents of the bag in. That was probably far over the 'two cups' indicated on the back, but she was planning on eating more than that anyways. Tomorrow, she'd have to invest in some measuring tools, but guessing like this was probably fine...
- - -
"I'm home." Katie Harmon mumbled, yawning to herself as she slid into her house's entryway. The drive down from Everett, which had eaten up pretty much all of her Tuesday, had been stressful, but for once the traffic hadn't been the worst part of her little business trip. Working with Brad, of course, was always a negative in her book, but it was only one of many problems with this shitshow of a job.
There was the paperwork. There were the self-righteous feds she'd have to work with. She had to cope with the fact that an unknown number of shipgirls were secretly former princesses, now. Finally, there was the knowledge that despite the Navy's size and supposed power, they'd let a regular abyssal just walk ashore, and it was her turn to track down the monster before things turned into a public shitstorm.
At least Brad hadn't seemed to woo over any of the shipgirls. That disgust in Nashville's denial could have been directed at her or the idea itself, but it had been real. Katie knew she hadn't made a good impression with the shipgirl, but she wasn't there to make friends. She'd wanted to know who she was working for, besides Brad, and she'd have a chance to win some respect back once she beat the FBI to finding Trinitite.
Smirking to herself, the private detective dropped her overnight bag on her couch, zipping a little-used pocket open to remove a thumb drive. It had been given to her by… some sailor under Brad, she'd forgotten the name stitched into his uniform, featuring images of the roving abyssal that he had photoshopped to look human. Obviously Katie would have preferred something undoctored, but she'd gotten them under the pretense she'd be providing the image to several human contacts she used to find people, meaning it had been censored to hell and back. While she would be providing this image to some of her flesh-and-blood contacts, complete with the witness cover story they'd created, her real ace would have worked better if she had the raw data.
Speaking of which, after the hellish commute down the length of the West Coast, Katie wanted nothing more than to head off to bed, but she should probably check out her 'contact' and get it introduced to Trinitite before she took her long-awaited nap.
While her office's lights were off and her computer was powered down, the ceiling fan continued to run, sucking cool air in from adjacent rooms to keep her secret weapon running at peak efficiency. The room's doors remained permanently propped open, allowing Katie to get a brief glimpse of the beast lurking in the converted bedroom's closet.
It had been a bit of a passion project from another ex-boyfriend, a Computer Science Professor at Berkeley, and a small team of his students. Eventually, it became clear that the nerd loved his field more than any woman and the relationship fell apart, but unlike Brad her fling with the professor was still helping her today. If anyone asked about the server in her closet, the unassuming box was simply a side gig she had: Taking advantage of some excess power from her roof's solar panels to host a few domains for people.
In reality, 'The Contact' only ever connected with two devices: her desktop computer, and the servers of a VPN based out of Panama. The specifics were very beyond her, but by working with it over the past three years she'd gotten a good idea of how to run the thing.
Sitting down in her well-worn office chair, Katie tapped the power button with her foot, the desktop's fan whirring to life as she leaned forwards to activate both screens. Through the VPN, The Contact ran a small collection of web scrapers, each pulling and pouring through new images posted to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. From there, it ran a facial recognition program her ex had put together, trying to find any matches with Katie's Queries. Trinitite probably wouldn't use any of those pieces of media, but with today's cameras on phones being as good as they were?
She had an automated surveillance system that spanned the entire country, more if she was willing to expand her server and messed with the crawlers' geolocation filters. The abyssal didn't have to become some twitter star to show up: She just needed to be walking down the road while someone took an image of their breakfast, or a reporter snapped a quick image of a building. Not a foolproof system, but it meant something was looking for the little monster at all times.
Her monitor finally lit up, and Katie hurriedly entered her PIN when prompted. Her bed was calling, so she wanted to get this done as soon as possible. As her desktop loaded in, she hurriedly opened up her documents, plunging into a few folders before opening an innocuous looking program titled Carmen.
The legal technicalities were also beyond her, something she used to know but no longer cared about, but it certainly violated a few points on the websites' terms of service, and some negligible provisions on crawl speed and privacy. Nothing important, especially considering how many missing kids or suspects she'd found through The Contact. A bit of legal bother was a price she was willing to pay. Plus, while she was already the best private detective on the West Coast, The Contact had put her quite a bit ahead of her competitors, even dropping her prices to ensure she stayed ahead.
It wasn't like anyone would figure out where the resource-hungry crawler from Panama was actually from, anyways.
Carmen finally opened, displaying the results of The Contact's work during her road trip. Katie's thoughts on the abyssal were disrupted when the program announced a positive match, linking her to the file on one of her cases. Her quarry opened up, linking to some post a certain 'McCally Construction Group' left on their facebook page. According to The Contact, it had been made from somewhere in Utah, but the image's geolocation data pointed back at Washington.
Great, it looked like she had another reason to go up there. Well, she'd be visiting Brad's team again next week. Perhaps chartering a flight up a little sooner to track him down would be in order.
Her Ex and his team of unpaid programmers had done a good job. The missing person was in the background of the image, his face at a strange angle while he walked in the corner of the picture. Judging by what he was wearing, Katie had probably just learned his place of employment, as well.
Triumphantly she stood, walking over to the corkboard of images and pulling the picture of Tirto off the wall. She'll finish getting the abyssal's information uploaded, then hit the sack. After that, she'd get a flight back to Washington to hunt Tirto down, then present the good news to her client.
She could already imagine how his daughter was going to react when she told her the good news.
As she'd walked from the Walmart Fleet's warehouse to her now-common 'anchorage' in the woods just outside Mill Creek, she'd speculated on what she'd try to make first. There was so much food in her hold that the decision hadn't been easy. A moment or two of thought passed. This stove had two burners, meaning she could prepare two foods at once. Good for a ship who needed plenty of food to stay supplied, but for now it widened the number of options she had to choose from. After some experimentation she might be able to figure out the best combinations, making her choice a little easier, but that wasn't the case yet.
Tools weren't going to be a limiting factor. Beyond the 'griddle' that had come with the stove, she'd also bought a pair of pans for most food, and pots to boil water in.
Boiling water… she should probably give rice another try, shouldn't she?
Producing one of the pots from her hold and placing it over the lit burner, Trinitite reached back into her hold. A bit of searching and queries with her quartermaster eventually got her a bag labeled 'Organic White Rice.' She wasn't sure how 'Organic' made this rice different from the… failure she'd had a few days ago, but hopefully they were similar enough that cooking this would give her an idea of what she'd missed.
Along similar lines, she removed the bag of hamburger patties she'd tried that night, ready to see what they tasted like once the new stove had unfrozen them. She started the other burner, placing a new pan on it and letting it warm. She now had both burners happily consuming propane, blue-orange flames obscured by the pot and pan she'd placed on each.
What did she do now?
Somewhat frantically, she turned the bag of rice over, holding it to her face so her eyes would illuminate the instructions. Right, she needed water. That was the point of the pot in the first place, after all. Unfortunately for her, humans had somehow created variants of that, as well. She knew saltwater and freshwater were different, but sparkling water? Did the existence of drinking water mean you weren't supposed to drink the others? Well, she knew distilled water as the product of condensed steam, making it probably the purest and the most basic, so she opened that container and poured the majority of it into the pot.
And then, she waited.
Compared to her massive oil-fired burners that ran her boilers, this tiny propane one was going to take a while to warm up, so she was going to have plenty of time. Realizing that, she quietly shut the other one down, returning her frozen burgers to her meat locker to ensure she didn't have to eat them all tonight. That wouldn't be terrible, but it would mean she'd have to experiment with a different meat, something that would make the lessons learned from her cooking training less reliable.
...Actually, since she would be burning most of these and had already tasted a few frozen, she should try one raw, shouldn't she? That way, she'd get an idea of what the human-made meat was like before she started messing with it.
That, of course, meant she'd just stored the frozen hamburgers for no reason! Unable to keep from blushing despite not being watched, Trinitite hesitantly reached back into her hold, re-procuring the bag of hamburgers and pulling one out. It plopped on the now-cooling pan with a clunk and a slight sizzle, and Trinitite returned the rest of the burgers to their rightful spot in the meat locker.
That was another thing out of the way. There was nothing else she could do until the water started boiling, was there?
The abyssal relaxed again, idly watching the pot while her thoughts left her. The work day hadn't been that busy, due to the crew that ran the crane neglecting basic maintenance. No one else had known about the problem until the vital machine failed to start this morning, when Austin's team needed it's help. The idea of something that important being neglected was appalling to Trinitite, of course, but she had seen things like that happen before in abyssal ships who hadn't been properly trained, usually those who served under Princesses with no experience of their own. To see it here didn't speak well of the fleet she had volunteered to join, but considering how angry everyone else she'd seen had been, it must be an unusual occurrence. Hopefully Dan would make sure something like this wouldn't happen again.
In the end, Trinitite and the rest of the work crew had spent a good portion of the day building a pulley system, intent on hoisting the pallets of supplies up themselves. It had meant hours of delay hunting down pulleys and a long enough cable or rope, but in the end they had managed to get something worked out. After lunch they'd gotten started on finishing the braces for the rebar cages they'd erected, ensuring the concrete would remain contained in the pillars when whomever poured concrete in the fleet got around to doing so. Hopefully Trinitite would be able to help with that. Patching some of her damage with concrete was a bad idea in so many ways, but if she needed to become combat capable quickly she might have no other option.
Leaning forwards so the light from her eyes better illuminated the pot of water, the Abyssal checked to see it's progress. Seemingly unchanged, but that wasn't a surprise. Trinitite knew it would take longer to heat the water properly, so she wasn't sure what she was hoping for when she'd checked.
The Wo-class was just getting impatient, she guessed, which was unusual for her. It wasn't like the next meal she made was going to compare to those made by the lunch trucks she ate from, and she'd been eating enough that she wasn't desperately hungry now. Forcing herself to look away from the pot and towards the dimly glowing clouds above, she sighed, focusing on the radio broadcast she'd been listening in on.
The soothing 'classical music' continued to be a mystery to her, but it was one of the few she was content not knowing much about. When the humans on the frequency reported on songs, concertos, composers and orchestras, she was alright with leaving the unfamiliar terms off of her research list, and often when they spoke of what feelings or images the music was supposed to invoke, she didn't spend much time trying to draw a connection. It was just… music, and the complexities behind it would probably take months to understand. Months she didn't want to spend on something so unimportant, considering she content listening to it while remaining ignorant.
Looking down and impatiently checking the pot again, Trinitite turned her attention to the no-longer-frozen hamburger. The frost that had initially encrusted the meat seemed to have faded, leaving it an even pink. Speculatively, the abyssal picked the partially-thawed meat up, getting a feel for it's texture under her gloves. Oddly it didn't seem to be one piece of meat at all, instead several miniscule chunks moulded by humans into an easy-to-store disk. It would explain some of its properties, like how it didn't return to its original shape when Trinitite pressed divots into it with a finger. As she did so, blood slowly seeped from the meat, far less than she'd expect from a normal animal, but considering there weren't any veins in this, it was more than she'd hoped for.
Her inspection was almost complete. Eager to see how the thawed burger differed from the frozen ones she'd eaten, Trinitite raised the meat disk to her mouth, stretching her lips to allow as much of the hamburger into her mouth as possible before biting down.
Crunch.
The almost thawed burger was still a little too cold for her tastes, but she guessed that was what cooking it was for. There was a distinct flavor to the meat, unique from the fish she was used to, and ignoring its icy core the processed texture made it feel very smooth for a meat. She wasn't too sure she liked that part yet, but she'd withhold judgement until she'd cooked a few hamburger patties. What little blood there was pooled around her lips, forcing the Trinitite to get a taste of her lipstick as she licked the red liquid away. She couldn't afford it dripping all over her makeup and human clothes, after all.
After sliding the rest of the raw meat into her mouth over the course of a minute, Trinitite leaned forwards again, checking the water.
Still no boiling, obviously.
Leaning back and trying to find a comfortable position, Trinitite forced herself to look away from the stove. Maybe it was time for an impromptu test of her marines' stealth abilities. Trying to ignore their presence in her mind, she squinted, attempting to make their forms out in the darkness. Another minute passed like this, the abyssal searching her surroundings for her sentries, but they stubbornly remained unseen. They'd probably gone to ground once they realized she was looking for them, the little crabs.
Her interest waned again, and her thoughts returned to her day. Searching for Circuit Breaker Coolant had been a colossal waste of time, either returning articles on specific pieces of equipment or those answering the question of why plugging an 'air conditioner' in set one off. Nothing helpful. Not wanting to waste the rest of her time in the library, the abyssal then moved onto the next term:
Family.
The trees around Trinitite suddenly seemed much further away from The Carrier than they had a few moments ago, alone with her crew and the human radio transmissions. Unlike a lot of the other terms she'd looked for, this one had brought up a 'Dictionary' entry that summed up the word in a concise manner.
A group of one or more parents and their children living together as a unit.
That had described her fleet fairly well, which was reassuring. Below it was a link to the term 'Nuclear family,' which had initially caught Trinitite's interest but was surprisingly boring. What did having two parents, a necessity for humans if Trinitite recalled correctly, have to do with The Fire?
However, Trinitite was starting to recognize questions with needlessly complicated answers, so she had discarded that line of inquiry and focused on the rest of the search. After the first definition, three others were listed. Initially, it seemed that having multiple definitions for one word would only cause confusion, but it only took a moment of thought for Trinitite to realize the problem was relentlessly common in the language she was used to. Plus, the definitions had seemed similar enough here that they wouldn't cause much of a problem.
Things got more serious when she found the Wikipedia article.
Phrases like 'builds a person into a functional adult' and 'ensures the continuity of humankind,' although not fully understood to the abyssal, clearly carried a massive amount of weight. Fleets were important to humans, yes, but she wasn't sure anyone she worked with would consider them important to the continuity of humankind. Again she didn't know the exact meaning of the phrase, but she could guess its jist. Considering how casually she'd joined the construction group she was in, humans came and went in fleets, but their families were their anchor.
Something she was lacking, right now. She certainly wouldn't trust her fleetmates with her concerns and worries, after all.
Her coworkers had asked her about her family a couple times. Perhaps tomorrow, she should return the favor. Informed guesses from reading articles was one thing. She'd get a better idea of what that meant to them in their own words.
Unfortunately, the library expelled her before she could finish reading the article, but it was mostly technicalities and unfamiliar jargon by that point. She'd gotten most of the information she needed from the introduction, anyways.
...
Oh, hey! The water was boiling! Eagarly tearing open the bag of rice, Trinitite triumphantly upended the rice and poured the contents of the bag in. That was probably far over the 'two cups' indicated on the back, but she was planning on eating more than that anyways. Tomorrow, she'd have to invest in some measuring tools, but guessing like this was probably fine...
- - -
"I'm home." Katie Harmon mumbled, yawning to herself as she slid into her house's entryway. The drive down from Everett, which had eaten up pretty much all of her Tuesday, had been stressful, but for once the traffic hadn't been the worst part of her little business trip. Working with Brad, of course, was always a negative in her book, but it was only one of many problems with this shitshow of a job.
There was the paperwork. There were the self-righteous feds she'd have to work with. She had to cope with the fact that an unknown number of shipgirls were secretly former princesses, now. Finally, there was the knowledge that despite the Navy's size and supposed power, they'd let a regular abyssal just walk ashore, and it was her turn to track down the monster before things turned into a public shitstorm.
At least Brad hadn't seemed to woo over any of the shipgirls. That disgust in Nashville's denial could have been directed at her or the idea itself, but it had been real. Katie knew she hadn't made a good impression with the shipgirl, but she wasn't there to make friends. She'd wanted to know who she was working for, besides Brad, and she'd have a chance to win some respect back once she beat the FBI to finding Trinitite.
Smirking to herself, the private detective dropped her overnight bag on her couch, zipping a little-used pocket open to remove a thumb drive. It had been given to her by… some sailor under Brad, she'd forgotten the name stitched into his uniform, featuring images of the roving abyssal that he had photoshopped to look human. Obviously Katie would have preferred something undoctored, but she'd gotten them under the pretense she'd be providing the image to several human contacts she used to find people, meaning it had been censored to hell and back. While she would be providing this image to some of her flesh-and-blood contacts, complete with the witness cover story they'd created, her real ace would have worked better if she had the raw data.
Speaking of which, after the hellish commute down the length of the West Coast, Katie wanted nothing more than to head off to bed, but she should probably check out her 'contact' and get it introduced to Trinitite before she took her long-awaited nap.
While her office's lights were off and her computer was powered down, the ceiling fan continued to run, sucking cool air in from adjacent rooms to keep her secret weapon running at peak efficiency. The room's doors remained permanently propped open, allowing Katie to get a brief glimpse of the beast lurking in the converted bedroom's closet.
It had been a bit of a passion project from another ex-boyfriend, a Computer Science Professor at Berkeley, and a small team of his students. Eventually, it became clear that the nerd loved his field more than any woman and the relationship fell apart, but unlike Brad her fling with the professor was still helping her today. If anyone asked about the server in her closet, the unassuming box was simply a side gig she had: Taking advantage of some excess power from her roof's solar panels to host a few domains for people.
In reality, 'The Contact' only ever connected with two devices: her desktop computer, and the servers of a VPN based out of Panama. The specifics were very beyond her, but by working with it over the past three years she'd gotten a good idea of how to run the thing.
Sitting down in her well-worn office chair, Katie tapped the power button with her foot, the desktop's fan whirring to life as she leaned forwards to activate both screens. Through the VPN, The Contact ran a small collection of web scrapers, each pulling and pouring through new images posted to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. From there, it ran a facial recognition program her ex had put together, trying to find any matches with Katie's Queries. Trinitite probably wouldn't use any of those pieces of media, but with today's cameras on phones being as good as they were?
She had an automated surveillance system that spanned the entire country, more if she was willing to expand her server and messed with the crawlers' geolocation filters. The abyssal didn't have to become some twitter star to show up: She just needed to be walking down the road while someone took an image of their breakfast, or a reporter snapped a quick image of a building. Not a foolproof system, but it meant something was looking for the little monster at all times.
Her monitor finally lit up, and Katie hurriedly entered her PIN when prompted. Her bed was calling, so she wanted to get this done as soon as possible. As her desktop loaded in, she hurriedly opened up her documents, plunging into a few folders before opening an innocuous looking program titled Carmen.
The legal technicalities were also beyond her, something she used to know but no longer cared about, but it certainly violated a few points on the websites' terms of service, and some negligible provisions on crawl speed and privacy. Nothing important, especially considering how many missing kids or suspects she'd found through The Contact. A bit of legal bother was a price she was willing to pay. Plus, while she was already the best private detective on the West Coast, The Contact had put her quite a bit ahead of her competitors, even dropping her prices to ensure she stayed ahead.
It wasn't like anyone would figure out where the resource-hungry crawler from Panama was actually from, anyways.
Carmen finally opened, displaying the results of The Contact's work during her road trip. Katie's thoughts on the abyssal were disrupted when the program announced a positive match, linking her to the file on one of her cases. Her quarry opened up, linking to some post a certain 'McCally Construction Group' left on their facebook page. According to The Contact, it had been made from somewhere in Utah, but the image's geolocation data pointed back at Washington.
Great, it looked like she had another reason to go up there. Well, she'd be visiting Brad's team again next week. Perhaps chartering a flight up a little sooner to track him down would be in order.
Her Ex and his team of unpaid programmers had done a good job. The missing person was in the background of the image, his face at a strange angle while he walked in the corner of the picture. Judging by what he was wearing, Katie had probably just learned his place of employment, as well.
Triumphantly she stood, walking over to the corkboard of images and pulling the picture of Tirto off the wall. She'll finish getting the abyssal's information uploaded, then hit the sack. After that, she'd get a flight back to Washington to hunt Tirto down, then present the good news to her client.
She could already imagine how his daughter was going to react when she told her the good news.
Should have rinsed that rice, Trin! It's gonna be all sticky! It's progress, though.
This chapter was a little experimental. Since Trinitite isn't getting that personable with her coworkers this arc, I'm a bit limited in the types of chapters I can present, so I tried a bit of a flashback sequence to mix a cooking chapter, a research chapter, and a little bit of a work chapter. It may or may not have worked here, and it's not a format I'm going to make a habit of using (breaks 'show, don't tell' a little too much for my liking), but hopefully it was some pleasant variety.
Also, does anyone remember Tom Clancy's Net Force? That really 90's thriller series written by someone who wasn't Tom Clancy about a bunch of FBI agents who stop techno-criminals through the power of virtual reality? I don't remember it that well, only read the handful of books that my middle school library had, but writing the second part of this chapter gave me big Net Force vibes, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.
This chapter was a little experimental. Since Trinitite isn't getting that personable with her coworkers this arc, I'm a bit limited in the types of chapters I can present, so I tried a bit of a flashback sequence to mix a cooking chapter, a research chapter, and a little bit of a work chapter. It may or may not have worked here, and it's not a format I'm going to make a habit of using (breaks 'show, don't tell' a little too much for my liking), but hopefully it was some pleasant variety.
Also, does anyone remember Tom Clancy's Net Force? That really 90's thriller series written by someone who wasn't Tom Clancy about a bunch of FBI agents who stop techno-criminals through the power of virtual reality? I don't remember it that well, only read the handful of books that my middle school library had, but writing the second part of this chapter gave me big Net Force vibes, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.