
Jennifer's thick French nails beat a steady tattoo on the hard surface of
her desk. She was not sure exactly how the habit had developed, but now
that it had taken hold it was impossible to break. She had tried to fight
it for a while, but given up years ago. Self control was not something that
Jen had a lot of, and what little she did possess could be better spent
on other things.

"Oooooohhhhh-kay... so you loop though here a couple of times, calling
that guy if..." Jennifer always talked to herself when she was reading
code, and this was especially true when she was cracking.

"You fuckers think you can stop me by dynamically assembling the key.
That's what they make debuggers for." She continued, tapping the start
button and using the search bar to bring up Visual Studio. She fiddled
with a few configuration dialogs until she had the program pointed at
the right binary. *I found that method fast. I'm definitely going to
get there first this time.* She thought to herself, allowing her thick
lips to twitch into a grin. Of course now that she had thought that
it would turn out to be a totally unrelated dummy method meant to throw
people like her off.

"Come on baby. Mamma's gonna crack this fucker first." She said, left
clicking to set a breakpoint at the exit point of the offending method.

A few second later she was rummaging through the frozen memory of the
paused decoder. It took her almost a minute to assemble the key she
was looking for by copying bits of text into Notepad++ and then converting
to the right format. It took her another half an hour to alter an old
rip script she had lying around, and then she was uploading the first
DRM free copy of a song in a new thread on her favorite cracking message
board.

The replies started trickling in almost instantly:

GDana: Nice! Code?
Crackentosh: When will these guys learn they can't win? Nice going
@gorgon5. I can add the code to Ripstick if you post it.

Jennifer pressed her lips together in satisfaction. She had been spending
a lot of time cracking DRM lately, so she was usually the first one to
throw together an exploit for each new release of her preferred
media streaming client. Of course she could always just grab higher
quality files by torrenting, but it wasn't really about getting the
music. It was about making the software installed on her workstation
her bitch. Jennifer felt strongly that computers ought to obey humans,
and it annoyed her when some asshole deliberately sabotaged the software
they gave to her. She typed out her reply.

gorgon5: 2ez. Code is attached. Just run it with `python ripit.py <song-title>`.
Happy hacking!

She basked in the virtual high fives for a few hours, watching as the script
kiddies who hung out of the forum congratulated her and themselves for
pulling one over the corporate overlords yet again. It would be a few hours
before Crackentosh wanted her to to look over the way he had integrated her
code into his general piracy toolkit, so she decided it was time to do some
real work.

She slapped the desk and started waddling towards the narrow stairs
at the back of the archives. A cleanup team had dumped ten file boxes
full of paraphernalia from some vampire death cult, and she had to start
digitizing anything that could be digitized before she could forward the
crap to storage. Walking across the room was an unwelcome reminder of
her body, and Jen felt her mouth set into its resting frown as she
huffed air through her nose. The short walk already had her a little
out of breath, and she knew it would only get worse as she traversed
the two flights of stairs between her and the supply closet.

Each step sent a jolt through Jen's skeleton as she walked down the
steep stairs, causing grotesque fat hanging off her 4'8" frame to
wobble and shake. Moving always made her angry at herself and the world.
When she got to the supply closet she grabbed a whole pack of floppies,
before lumbering back towards the stairs. She hated running out of the
anachronistic disks. It was particularly annoying that the nature of the
archives she maintained meant that she had to use such low-density storage.

Digitization had swept libraries everywhere, even in mystical circles, but
unlike the Dewey Decimal system, databases could not be seamlessly adapted
for the arcane. Spells don't handle being packed together very well, and while
bits on a hard disk might not have the same capacity to build up magical
potential, there was a definite limit on how many spells you could safely put
on one disk. When Jen first started she had tried filling a 2TiB drive with
a minor communication spell to see what would happen. In the end it had taken
one of the wizards from operations to stop the calls she started getting from
long dead sailors. Policy was that she could store up to a megabyte of data
on one disk.

Jen settled her 210 pound body back into her chair with a grunt, slapping the
disks onto the desk beside her. She was going to have to get up to lug the
boxes over so she could start scanning things in and running OCR over the
scans. Not for the first time Jen asked herself why she just didn't get a
real tech job. She certainly had the skills to work in a security or embedded
software firm, but the truth was that the prospect of switching jobs drained
the energy out of her. After almost 20 years as an archivist for the Wizard's
Counsel, she found it hard to imagine switching jobs. Jen found motivation in
her manic drive to crack new systems, and not much else. Her job might be
boring, but it let her loaf around all day and hang out on cracking forums.
Since her mother died 4 years ago she had no dependents, and had long since
realized that no one would look at her long enough to make starting a family
an option, not that she really wanted one. The job paid enough to get be
comfortable, and she had some decent investments squirreled away in offshore
accounts from her more daring younger days as a teenage identity thief.

Jen was just heaving her heavy body out of her chair when a klaxon sounded
in the hall. Her phone started buzzing like a fistful of bees and when she
looked at the notification, she saw an emergency alert to all hands. The
Wizard Counsel was under attack at multiple locations, and all non-combat
personnel were advised to shelter in place. She hurried over to the door
as fast as her stubby legs could carry her and shot the bolt. She saw
a group of commandos with wands and rifles held low rush past. When she saw
Andrew, the mild mannered voodoo scholar come sweeping after them in an
ill-fitting black robe holding a green bladed knife in one hand and a
flapping chicken in the other, she knew that this was serious. Andrew had
not held a combat position for three centuries, and he hated having to use
his blood magic.

"Fuck me." Jen said to herself, tearing her eyes away from the hurried scene
in the hallway and going to lock the door leading to the stairs. Once the two
entrances to the archive office were shut down she hurried to a third door,
and opened it to reveal a dark room filled with row after row of tall shelves.
The room she spent the most of her time in was just the public facing
part of the archives, but the main event was here.

"Minerva, defense mode. Keep me safe." She said. A thin vine shot out of the
darkness and wrapped around her wrist. More vines followed quickly, and soon
Jen was bundled up in a cocoon of tough plant material. She let out a yelp
of surprise when the vines jerked her abruptly into the air and whisked
her down several corridors before depositing her in the intersection between
four paths. She had practiced this before, but it felt even more unsettling
than usual to be manhandled by the archival golem now that she was doing it
during an actual emergency. More vines rapidly wove themselves into thick walls
at each of the four entrances to her little shelter, and Jen sat down to wait.

================================================================================

Jen lay on the floor of her hiding place breathing in and out, and trying to
ignore the sounds of gunfire and concussive hexes that made it through
the thick walls of the archives. Her phone buzzed every 15 minutes to inform
her that headquarters was in a state of emergency. Starting with the third
message she received, the updates included a note that combat personnel should
arm themselves for combat against vampires. Despite the panic she was feeling
inside, Jen was able to maintain the appearance of calm, or even relaxation.
She took comfort in the way her heavy body pressed into the cool ground. It
made her feel grounded and safe. Whenever Jen sat or lay on the floor she
felt as if the earth was laying a comforting hand on her shoulder. She sometimes
wished she had been a druid. Of course that was out of the question for a
mundane like her, but she still took solace in the vastness of the earth.

After a long time, the noise of the battle died down. Jen had stopped getting
phone alerts a few hours before, but she had remained in her hiding place
because she still heard the occasional chatter of gunfire. With a huff she
raised one stubby leg and brought it down sharply, using the momentum to lever
herself up with a groan. After standing up she brushed herself off and
straitened her lank brown hair.

"Minerva, status." She said. It was worth finding out if the archival
golem had taken any damage in the battle. The vines of her cocoon shifted,
and one wall took on a much flatter appearance. Several status bars showed
up in the wooden panel. Minerva used to report to Jen in a voice that managed
to sigh and scream all at once like the wind whipping through a weeping
willow tree, but Jen had devised a visual layout which included most of
the things she cared about. Most of the display contained summary statistics
about the number of books checked out and the amount of new material that
needed processing, but a few of the status bars included information on
Minerva's own health. Jen was relieved to see that her faithful servant
was unharmed. She was about to dismiss the report and order Minerva to open
a door for her when she noticed that the number of the golem's handlers
had dropped significantly. Normally there were at least 6 or 7 authorized
handlers in range, but she looked to be the only one.

"Minerva, what happened to the other handlers." She asked.

"I lost contact with them." The golem replied in rustle of branches.

"When did you lose contact with the Merlin?" She asked.

"I detected him cast his death curse 2 hours ago."

Jen chewed the inside of her cheek. "Minerva, who is your master?"

"When Sam Drey died, you inherited command of me." The vine golem
stated.

Jen's pulse sped up. She had already known what the answer would be,
but hearing it stated by the magical automata surrounding her
made it somehow more real. If all of the ranking wizards had died,
she was definitely not going to be walking out into friendly
territory.

"Minerva, I am lifting all space restrictions on you. You may spread
your vines wherever you wish. Send your roots deep, and drink from
the water mains. Break whatever you must. Begin expanding your vines
into the rooms surrounding the archives. Kill any hostile
supernatural beings you encounter."

The branches rippled with a haste that Jen had never seen before.
She just watched Minerva flex and move for a few minutes before she
asked, "What have you found? Nevermind. That's too open ended.
How many Wizard Counsel personnel have you found? Put it in the
display."

The number 319 appeared on the branches in front of her.

"How many living?" She asked. The number dropped to 0.

"How many non-Wizard Counsel?" She asked. 14, came the answer.

"Jesus, that's not many. We really got hit hard." She muttered
to herself. "Are there any signs that bodies have been removed
from the place?"

"What is sign?" Minerva asked.

Jen signed. She was going to have to go look herself. "Are there
any enemy combatants left in the building?" She asked.

"No." Minerva replied.

"Okay. Take me back to the archives, and then send creepers following me
as I walk though the halls. Keep me safe old girl." Jen ordered. The
vines cradled her and moved her back to her work room at a more sedate
pace than they had used to whisk her into the heart of the archives.

That morning Jen probably would have told an interested party that she
didn't much like her job. She didn't hate it or anything, but it wasn't
much to get worked up over. Walking through the halls now, she realized
that while she might not have loved her job, she had loved the people.
She found Cameron, the young wizard from New Orleans, slumped against
the side of a hallway, his throat torn open and his hands in claws.
