Log:The Devil's Trail

The Devil's Cut 2015/10/29 Daemon Grimm 2

The regulars at the Hacker's Rage have learned not to bother the cute rocker college girl who likes to sit at the back booth. Mainly do to her association with another regular who tips well and you don't want to f*** with.

Gabrielle's nursing a whiskey sour, lips pursed moodily as she stares at her phone's screen as it rests on the table. She's been like that for a while. It's her third whiskey sour, and it's almost drained. That's pretty heavy for Gabrielle's fortitude.

Grimm's phone vibrates as Daemon swings down a street nearby.

<> Simple and to the point.

The cold fall rain blanketing the city only sours Daemon's mood more as he lands across the street and he makes his way to the front door of the bar. Once he gets under the canopy over the front door, Daemon's coat shakes itself off like a dog.

He prepares to walk inside but first he lights something that smells decidedly non-tobacco outside. It's been one of /THOSE/ days. He sighs as he takes a long drag and watches the unseasonable late night rain fall.

Grimm peers down at her phone as the message pops up. She types with one finger, the booze making her have to retype a few times to make the message coherent. <> Send. The typing style is nothing like her usual texts.

<>

Soon enough Daemon finishes his 'smoke' using superhuman lung capacity to make extra quick work of the glorious relaxant, and he looks to his usual booth in the back.

He fights a smile when he sees Grimm already in their place.

Daemon slides into the booth opposite Grimm and says, "Great minds." as his helmet mouthpeice opens. "Who's on shift ton... Oh Gladys." He waves at Gladys to come take his order. When she arrives there isn't any of the usual quipping or fanfare. His usual x2 double time. Was all he said.

He looks to Grimm when she steps away and asks, "So what's got you all rainbows & sunshine?"

Grimm rubs her face a little as she says in slurred speech, "Stupid shick. I blew it tonight. Big time." Is that blood? On the outside of her wrist? Just a small drop or two that look like it was splattered. Something she missed. Strange. His bugs didn't alert him to any injuries.

"The Hell Knight rides again. And I couldn't save his intended victim tonight. -Again-," Gabrielle says sourly. Her eyes don't even lift to look at him as she speaks. She just lifts her glass and tosses it back, then shakes the empty glass towards Gladys to indicate a refill of her fourth drink. She sounds and looks angry. And hurt. And coping with alcohol.

Coping with alcohol is one of the things Daemon does best. He's here to do much the same.

"The Hell Knight? Sounds like a real tool. Who calls themselves that?" Daemon asks trying to lighten Grimm's mood a bit. But he knows she's upset- Grimm's a bright and shining beacon of good and righteousness despite the black garb and Dae knows that well.

He looks towards Gladys walking away and says, "I know you- and knowing you I know you did everything you could. Is there anything I can do to help you with this case?" he asks sincerely.

Grimm manages a lop-sided grin. "The Hell Knight does?" she answers back, then drunkenly snickers at her own stupid response. She'd probably laugh her ass off if he told the angsty young woman she was a shining beacon of anything. But the laugh turns a little bitter as she just laughs at her own failure before it dies off.

"Maybe. Help me stop the bastard next time he shows up? I...I just watched him hack up another innocent person with a battle axe." The hand not clutching her empty glass balls up into a fist as it rests on the table top. Maybe she didn't just sit back and watch. But it felt like it for how effective she was.

"Hm..mebbe...maybe you can find out if there's a connection between the victims? I think he's attacking people at random, but...it doesn't seem right. He hunts them down."

Gladys arrives with round 4 and Daemon's drinks. He nods her direction and slides his drinks to him.

Daemon is of course already on the case, looking for victims 'hacked to bits' by a battleaxe within the past year or 2 only leaves so many choices.

"Of course- I'm already looking into it." He says as he sips his Jack n Coke.

"Yous ay he hunts them?" He asks. "How so- like does the victim see this Hell Knight prior to their murder?"

Daemon is able to pull up the details. Today's victim was one Linda Henley, a real estate agent. There was a previous victim almost a year ago named Robert Bartle. He was a mortgage officer who was hacked to death in the bathroom of the Past Time's Coffee Shop. Gabrielle Grimm's names shows up in the police report as having been involved along with Frankie 'Ghostfist' Justice. Prior to Bartle by a few months, there was a Stan Leruda who was founded murdered, hacked to bits with an axe. He was a banker.

He's able to see a quick connection. First, they're in related industries, and second, Bartle had gotten loans for some of Henley's clients. Stan takes more digging. The closest tie is that he handled the foreclosure one of the houses of Henley's clients.

Gabrielle's hand drifts for her new drink and slides it close to herself. Her eyes aren't quite as focused as they could be. She's really having to focus. "The hell knight or rider or hell dick picks out a person and pursues them until they're dead. Don't know if they have visions of him." She takes a much too big swig of her drink and downs it quickly. She's going to end up on the floor and soon at this rate. She offers Daemon a thankful smile, but there's little happiness there. "Thanks for looking into this. Let me know if you find anything. So what was going on with your evenin'?" she asks tipsily. She may be so drunk that she's forgotten how fast Daemon works.

Daemon flips through the police crime scene photos and shudders at the 'sight' of some of them. He really wished he could delete these images from his mind- but alas having an eiditc memory has to have some shortcomings.

"So far I've found 2 victims- same M.O. though... wait here's a third. A banker a few months before the mortgage officer." He sits back and ponders this a while, pulling up the last victim's report and checking their documented career. "Tonight's winner was a Real Estate agent... which throws my theory right out of the window." Daemon says to Grimmm, or maybe to himself. Its hard to tell when he get's going.

"I thought I hada tentative connection with them both being in finance- but Real Estate? It's a stretch. Maybe they share clientel?" Daemon continues to spitball.

Daemon downs a shot to keep his mind going.

"Just normal people..." Gabrielle murmurs to herself. She looks even more miserable. She sags down in her seat a bit and drinks some more of her whiskey sour. She drank the others so fast that she didn't give time for the effects to hit her, but they're all starting to stack up now. "Maybe...they shared cly...clien...people..." she murmurs.

Daemon begins a packet injection attack on the Real Estate Agent's computer systems, and registered sales with the relevant authorities.

After flooding their web server with requests, the server drops into an Anti-DDoS mode. Daemon wants this to happen- a Zero-Day bug in the application allows for the initial packet injection to compromise root systems. From here it's really just tedium- scanning financial records, comparing assets, repeating the proces on each client. Over all Daemon expects this to take the better part of the evening. That is if he does the work himself.

Instead he writes a subroutine for his SPECTREnet to accomplish his task for him. And like that the city itself goes to work. Daemon smiles at the rightness of that. The people should have a hand in their own salvation- even if they don't relaize it.

Daemon notices Grimm dozing off. He decides to keep her awake by showing off his new toy.

He texts Gladys for a pot of coffee and a bottle of coffee flavored tequila. That last one is for him.

"Grimm- did I show you my new toy?" He grins his most devilish grin at her- you know the one, the one that means 'Oh lawd! Here comes trouble!'

Grimm blinks up at Daemon as she perks up a little at the question. Her eyelids look heavy and her eyes dark as she tries to focus on him, but she does sway a little on occasion. "I don't think so. Didn' know you had a new toy," she responds drunkenly. At least the booze seems to have reduced her emotional suffering considerably. It's done its job.

Daemon grins as he brings his gauntleted hand towards the center of the table.

It looks the same- generally speaking- but internally its a whole new gauntlet. He doesn't say that of course.

He starts by wrapping his knuckles against the table. Then flipping his hand palm side up he flexes his fingers in the same way one might test a fruit for ripeness. Nothing but his slightly sharpened talon tips at the end of each finger. Of course Grimm wouldn't have noticed htis- or who knows with her I-SEE-EVERYTHING-ness she might've- but now the tips of the talons are split where once they were rounded off.

When he flexes his hand a 3rd time he activates a trigger in his mind which powers up a small electromagnetic field bound between the split tips on each finger.

Then the electromagnetic field actually becomes visible as a cyan colored plasma fills the 'bubble' created by the EM field. After a split-second he has one to one and a half inch glowing claws on each finger tip.

For fun he turns his hand over and sets it gently on the table.

The digistructed talons slip right into the table as if it were made of gas despite no pressure being applied besides the weight of his hand.

Daemon deactivates the claws and grins some more. Clearly a child when it comes to his toys- like any red-blooded American male.

"Crash right?" He says excitedly.

Grimm is too drunk to really be feeing everything with her shadow sight correctly. She's having trouble filtering out that awful, skittering feeling from the cockroaches in the walls. It makes her skin crawl just feeling it.

The glowing claws distract her from the health code violations within the walls. Her eyes go wide as the cyan light illuminates her face from below as she peers at them. "Whoa...super crash," she says in amazement. "Since when could you do that??"

"Since always- jsut didn't know I could do it." Daemon says by way of explaination. "Really I just designed the systems based off a government database I co-opted. Took a while for the buggers to build it right and keep from blowing off my own fingers. But they work like a charm now."

He slashes his hand in the air- leaving four fading cyan trails behind his fingertips. But when his hand returns to the table the talons are already gone.

SPECTRNet starts to do its work. Digging through paperwork, financial trails, CRMS. These three people, the Mortage Officer, the Real Estate Agent, and the banker, having business relationships with each other. Legal business relationships. Although with the housing markets and money lending, they didn't do their clients any favors while lining their own pockets. All legal. Just not ethical.

Daemon's sure there is more to this than that. In fact- considering the 3 people's career paths, insider-business deals and pocket lining- there was definitely a person, or a group of people who were negatively effected by these crooks.

Daemon sends his SPECTREnet to start digging into their customer base's records for people who lost money or land.

He groans as so far these 3 people seem to be on the up and up. He decides to personally dig into their lives because no one is squeaky clean.

Grimm has begun to stare blankly into her drink as the booze does its work to make her feel numb. She's oblivious while Daemon does record-speed computing. Eventually her mind seems to start up again. "Those claws were pretty arid. They look like they hurt, too." She throws back the rest of her drink.

"I certainly hope so- otherwise I wasted far too many hours trying to integrate these systems into my gauntlet." Daemon says fliping his hand over and looking appreciatively at his gadget.

"So these 3 seem to be on the up and up. But I can't shake this feeling that whoever this 'Rider' is- they were wrapped up in some shady business dealings with these three. I can't porve anythign yet though. Just a hunch."

Daemon tips back a shot and pulls his other drink forward as he looks to Grimm with a forlorn look- though you can't tell that with his helmet on.

Grimm has absolutely no clue what Daemon's expression is. But the booze is hitting her really hard. Four drinks. That's a record for her. She lifts a hand and waves it with a lack of coordination to order another, then drops her hand clumsily down at the table. She's still just staring at the now empty glass before her, then folds her arms on the table as her head dips down a bit more. "Ssssooo....revenge, then? The way he hacked up....you'd have to be souless...or really...really hate someone to do something like that..."

Her speech has long pauses in it, like thinking is difficult now.

"You'd be surprised how quickly people can loose their way when everything is taken from them by these blue-collared pigs." Daemon says in a voice that doesn't hide how disgusted he is by these people's potential crimes.

"Sometimes...sumtimes...I think they're worse n' the straight vils. 'least you know a vil is a vil," Gabrielle tries to make sense and starts rubbing her face, which is starting to feel a bit numb.

"Quite true, Grimmace." Daemon says as he continues digging through financial records of peope who lost more than 50% of their savings or net worth in the past 2 years.

He looks at Grimm wondering if he should call the girl a cab.

There's a few that lost their retirement funds, or 50% of their savings. There's one name that pops up as having lost the most on a bad loan, a money pit house with several refinancing loans that made it worse. The property was eventually foreclosed on. The name is William Wades.

Grimm probably couldn't drive or teleport herself home in this condition. "This place'd be better...without...without all the vils," she mumbles an obvious statement before her head falls forward to hit the table. She's down for the count. She must really trust Daemon to be willing to get pass out drunk around him. Or, wait, she was drinking before he even contacted her about his bad day. Bad Grimm! Bad! This is not a place a college girl should pass out at alone.

Daemon brings up his local AirLyft app and calls a HoverCar for Grimm. He provides her address and connects his creditchip to the account.

He smirks and reaches across the table for a drink missed by Grimm. He drinks it and orders himself anotehjr round.