Digital Distraction: Part 32

Dani felt guilty as she followed the goons though through the service entrance to the castle and hid in the kitchen. Tristan and Kari had made for an excellent distraction to allow her to get away, that didn’t mean that she didn’t feel horrible for letting them get caught.

Still with the bad guys distracted by their latest batch of incoming players, it was easy for her to slip into the rest of the castle and search for the information she had been sent to get. She was running out of time. The players were piling in, eager to get their DimDisks reset so they could continue their game session. Once they were all here, Dani didn’t doubt that the ritual would begin and everyone here would die.

She needed to get to the admin room. Once there she could unlock everyone’s DimDisks and at least give them the ability to defend themselves while she downloaded all the information that Pegasus had requested she get.

She didn’t know what else she could do. She didn’t have magic, there were people on the island who did though, she just wasn’t sure she could rely on them. Not when the backup Pegasus had promised her was helpless to do anything because his brother was being held hostage somewhere on the island.

She figured the brother had to be here, in the castle. She was hoping to find the security room while she was looking for clues. They had to have security cameras around here. If only to ensure they could be aware of who shanked who during their Gathering. If her luck held up, though, they would be at two completely different ends of the castle.

She started off by heading down the stairs at the back of the room. The huge stone staircase, with its heavy looking wooden railings, led down into the store room. It had huge wooden racks and cupboards that looked like they could easily hold enough food to feed the horde they had invited to the island. Most of them were empty though, just confirming Dani’s suspicion that they weren’t planning on feeding their guests.

Towards the back of the room there was a heavy metal door with a barred window, hidden away behind the last huge rack, where she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been investigating a noise that she could hear from the back of the room.

She couldn’t see anyone beyond, but she could see more doors, just like the locked metal one she was peeking through. She couldn’t find the keys for the metal door and honestly she didn’t think she had time to play ‘Hunt the Keys.’ Whoever, or whatever, it was down there was probably safer than up here with the bad guys.

Instead she headed back towards the kitchen, hiding behind one of the stacks as a secret entrance slid open and two of the robed figures from earlier, their hoods up, hiding their faces, entered the store room using a secret entrance. She watched them go, unsure if they deliberately left the secret door open wide or not, and then followed them upstairs, being careful not to be spotted as they went through the kitchen and into a dining hall.

She waited a few minutes, until the sounds of talking on the other side vanished, and then slipped through the unlocked door. The difference in style was startling. While the store room and the kitchen had looked old in style, they had had all the modern mod cons, the dining hall had a huge, heavy wooden table with thirty to forty uncomfortable looking wooden chairs around it and one, cushioned, spiky looking chair in a dark wood that had probably been stained black.

It was a room that was meant to make an impression, with its narrow windows that barely let any light through and the solid vision torches on the walls that gave off just enough light to pass as real torches but not enough to light the gloom in the middle of the room.

Dani was nervous as she tried to decide which of the four doors to go through. The one behind her she could rule out instantly, that one would only lead back to the kitchens and either the store rooms or the back door.

She had no idea which door led to what besides that. She had no inside information, no understanding of how the castle was laid out and she wasn’t a super spy. Realistically her best bet was to just keep trying doors until she struck gold.

She was just about to try the rightmost door when the leftmost door opened, revealing a room full of computers, a robed goon whose hood was down, revealing him to be a young man of about twenty with a strange henna tattoo down one side of his face.

She got lucky. Something started alarming on the consoles within, causing the mook to turn to face them. Dani took advantage of the disruption to dart into the room and slam the door shut behind her.

The mook wheeled around at the sound of the door shutting but Dani was ready, driving a fist into his chin as hard as she could. He staggered backwards, slamming into the console that was beeping, taking a moment to recover. Dani used that time to make another swing at him.

He ducked, driving his knee into her stomach and winding her, causing her to curl up in a ball and collapse to the floor, coughing and wheezing.

“Who the hell are you?” He demanded as he poked her with his foot, glowering down.

Dani grabbed his foot and rolled over, making him lose his balance and slam head first into the door. The mook crumpled into a heap, leaving Dani to push herself up, leaning on the desk chair which looked about as medieval as the rest of the computer banks in the room, i.e. not at all.

This had to be the admin room she had hoped to find and, luckily, it did seem to have all the security cameras in place. For once, it seemed, the ShadowSwords had been organised and kept all their technology together, out of sight of the players. She couldn’t help but wonder, though, as she sat in the desk chair and tried to work out what was alarming, if it had been the ShadowSwords who had been organised or whether DimSoft had been trying to keep the castle’s atmosphere in as many places as they could.

She finally managed to find out what was causing the ruckus when she noticed that one of the security cameras had picked up movement in somewhere that looked like a dungeon. Tristan was busy trying to break into a cell.

“Right...” Her hands flew across the computer bank as she worked, inserting a portable hard drive into the system to copy the data over to even as she cut off the alarm to give him more time and tried to see if there was a way to override the locks in the building automatically, “Time to go to work.”