fandomtownies | Chilly Boulder, Tuesday Afternoon

Entry tags:

Chilly Boulder, Tuesday Afternoon

Checking up on Nina's little 'project' had turned very weird. In, like, an 'upset teen girl' kind of way. And so Hardison, the human embodiment of a Care Bear, had done the natural thing - invited her out for milkshakes and a friendly ear.

He'd arrived about ten minutes after they'd hung up, grabbing a booth, grinning at the picture of his kids, and paid for two large milkshakes, flavors to be decided when Nina arrived.

...Except coffee. He pretty sure the girl didn't need any more caffeine. Or maybe just any at all. The sugar was going to be plenty dammit.

That taken care of, her grabbed a table, pulled out his phone, and poked around while he waited.

[Hardison here for one, but Chilly Boulder open for other folks to stop by! Though SP in effect as the husband is coming home in 3 hours and I have to pretend like I haven't been a trash-goblin for a week.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Nina was, like, yeah, okay it took her a little longer to show up. Not that he'd given her a time, exactly, other than right then, but also because she'd had to crawl out from under her bed, put herself together (and she looked absolutely flawless, thank you very much), and gather up her physical notes, in addition to her tablet and Foomy.

Foomy was totally coming along for this, mostly because his burbling, chirping nonsense as she snuck through town (what even was that PRIDE thing going on?) made her feel a little less like she was...

Walking to her doom? Yeah. That.

The door chimed when she wandered in, still totally flawless and also feeling a little smug that no one had noticed her throughout town but now, like, now she had to be noticed and she, like, didn't want to be but--

Well, Nina was old hat at that and that smile on her face was a pretty good one, for all that she was still all doom and gloom and about a million words and zero punctuation at the moment.

"Hi!!!!!!!!!!!!" she chirped, with an enthusiasm she definitely didn't feel but, like, Nina was also old hat at knowing that people didn't like crying girls. Happy girls might be thought of as stupid, but people liked them.

Edited 2019-06-26 00:04 (UTC)

Oh, Nina, bless. Hardison didn't think most people would believe the sudden cheer making its appearance now, but certainly not Hardison, who was intimately familiar with both grifting and overselling it.

Still, far be it for him to call her on it.

Yet.

"Nina," he said, standing up as she approached the table, using his best manners. Sometimes the little things helped. "Thanks for comin'. You know what kinda milkshake you want?"

Manners were always appreciated, even when Nina's were sometimes incredibly dreadful, for a lady, like she aspired to be, but it was also just... like... really nice to have a guy be a gentleman to her?

"Thanks for having me," she said, settling on simple, but also sort of genuine. Even if this was, like, just going to be a lecture or something, it was a lecture with milkshakes and a lecture was still someone paying attention to her. "I like strawberry the best, if that's okay?????"

The world might be currently lacking in colour but when it wasn't, Nina was pretty much the pinkest person on the planet from clothes to tastes.

"Absolutely," Hardison said. "Let me just order 'em an' you can show me what you dug up when I get back, a'ight?"

He wasn't entirely sure what had gotten her so squirrelly, but he figured it would be better to start with something he could either help or praise and then go from there.

He ambled back up to the counter, getting a strawberry shake and a creamsicle shake, giving Nina a second to get herself in order before heading back over, shakes in hand. He settled down in the opposite chair, body language calm and relaxed.

While he was gone, Nina took the time to set up. Not that there was much to set up, since her paperwork was already neatly organized and her tablet was charged, but it was nice to fidget with it a little.

And dump Foomy off in a napkin she folded up so it was like the lid of a box. Foomy could get out, of course, but the little walls would amuse her tiny burbling jelly demon.

Nina cast a glance at him and, so help her, even though she knew he had to be putting on a show, and she hadn't figured out what his angle was yet, it was just... nice. Relaxing. She hadn't thought this could be, really.

"Thanks for, like, for this," she said, turning a pen over in her hands. "You, ah," didn't have to, "where did you want to start??????"

Hardison took a long sip of his shake. "Let's start at the most basic," he said. "What order do you have 'em in, an' why?"

Nina blinked.

"Ummmm, alphabetical?????????" she said, not really sure how else she should have organized them. It had made sense to her. "By restaurant name??????? Because that way, like, I know where they are in a list???????"

Hardison laughed. "That works," he assured her. "But there are a bunch of ways to order data. Alphabetical is the simplest an' most obvious - an' ain't wrong with usin' it, especially when you're presentin' to someone else." He was earnest about that. "Though..." he gave her a sly look. "You wanna be the kinda hacker that takes orders from others? Or the kind who does her own stuff?"

Nina hesitated at that question too. What sort of hacker did she want to be?

The sort that could save her best friend's life was, like, the most honest answer to that?

She squirmed a little, reaching for her shake to give her time to think, because, like, she didn't even know if Prompto was coming back and it was just--

"I guess, like, being the sort that does her own thing would be........... more useful??????????"

And it wasn't like any of this was of any use to Lady Teresa or Lord Shin.

Hardison nodded. "Information is currency," he said quietly. "Especially if you're a free agent. I can tell you already go deep." He tapped the stack of folders, impressed by their depth. "I'mma teach you more about figurin' out what information is crucial an' what ain't, but right now, just the sheer amount you were able to find is hella impressive."

Hardison didn't believe in stinting praise when it was deserved.

"But you wanna go broad as well, lookin' for other patterns, additional information that might not seem connected on the surface. An' one way to that is to always dig around on whoever hired you to do the job. That'll give you different avenues to investigate, more ways to link the data, an' it'll let you figure out other ways to present your findings. If you know why someone wants something, you have a better insight into them. An' also maybe advance warnin' if they're gonna try somethin'."

Even now, over a decade later, he kicked himself for not realizing Dubenich was going to double-cross them, even if that double-cross had led to his whole life changing.

"So, knowing what you do about me, would you change the order you have 'em in?"

Nina's blush, there, was entirely with genuine pleasure at being praised for her work. That helped still the wailing, ugly thoughts of how she was just a worthless, useless girl--she couldn't be, right, if someone was right in front of her, saying she wasn't. It couldn't stop those thoughts, she knew that, but it... paused them.

She took a long sip of her milkshake as she considered her information, his words, and what she knew about him--and his gang. She didn't have a lot on him and his... Parker and Eliot, mostly because it was his walls she couldn't get through. But she lived on the island. She was nosy as hell. She knew a bit, even if most of it was conjecture and guesswork from sideways allusions.

Then, she reached for her folders, and shuffled them briefly, pulling out a few and setting them to the side.

"These ones are all owned by the same people," she said finally. "Not, like, on the surface, but through different names and... and businesses," Nina didn't know how better to explain it, "but if you dig through the paper trail long enough, they're all the same people. The three top files have ones where the store... manager?????? The ones that run the day to day, are connected to the owners. The ones after that seem less... meshed in whatever's going on. Like they're, I don't know, red herrings??????" Nina patted the other, smaller, pile. "These other files are all legit owned by other people. Some of the businesses are doing well, others not so much, but they're all resisting selling out to the owners of the first pile."

Nina studied her folders.

"Um, so like, I think... I think that's what you're interested in. If, like, they're going too far in their... takeovers???????????"

"Shell companies," Hardison explained. "Businesses that exist only to muddy the waters an' hide what you're doin'? Those are called shells."

He gathered up the folders she slid towards him, thumbing through them. "I'm impressed," he admitted. "You got more info 'bout me than I thought you had." He glanced up at her and grinned. "I kinda assumed you'd go with 'wedding' an' hand over folders for places that did caterin' or offered bakin' services or somethin'."

"Not when, like, your wedding is so soon and you didn't give me a deadline on this project," she protested, though she couldn't help but smile at that. "Like, that doesn't even make sense!!!!!!!"

Also New Orleans seemed, like, pretty far away from here. Nina wasn't sure how catering would even work with that much distance between places.

Did food travel well through portals?

Hardison snapped his fingers and pointed at her, before closing his fist for a bump. "That's exactly the kind of attention to detail that separates good hackers from just decent ones," he explained. "You see, a lot of what you're gonna be lookin' for is information that ain't there anymore, stuff that's been hidden or deleted. Sometimes, the only way to find it is by lookin' for the shapes of things, how they seem to move around somethin' that ain't there anymore. More than just, like, an email that references a report you can't find or files that skip from 100 to 102." He paused. "You ever do any drawin'?"

Nina laughed, a little, and lifted her hand to do that fist bump. How could she resist?

"Drawing, like, how???????????" she asked. "If you mean, like, fancy art like Sabine's work, then not a chance!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I do some," and not just a bajillion hearts in her diary around the names of boys she crushed on, "mostly, like, layouts and a little bit of cartography and summoning circles??????????"

One of those things was super not like the others.

"And, like, sometimes they, like, can get really intricate but it's just like a giant jigsaw puzzle???????"

Hardison just chuckled. "Then you get usin' negative space, right?" he asked. He grabbed a napkin and started sketching out a human figure, but rather than drawing an outline and shading it in, he started coloring around it, creating a human outline in white. "Negative space," he said, tapping the figure. "You only know its there when you look at what's around it."

"I've never heard it called that before," she admitted, looking at the napkin with keen interest. "But, like, yeah, I get the idea of it????????? And that's........... that's something you can do online too??????????"

"Takes a lotta practice, learnin' what to recognize," Hardison said, "but you can learn to do it. Let's say...a'ight. Say you're lookin' around someone an' they have their whole day planned out, every day. Meetings, meals, all that. An' every week on Thursday's, there's just this hour where there's never anythin' there. Nothin' ever scheduled there, ever. What do you think?"

Nina was quiet as she considered that, stirring her milkshake with her straw.

"I think, like, that first I would maybe see who else can access their daily planner," she mused. "It could, like, be something as innocent as working really hard on a cross-stitch in secret for someone's birthday and not wanting that someone to know they're crafting at that time. Or it could be an affair. Or an hour where they deliberately don't plan anything!!!!!!!! But, like, it looks weird. Like it's a secret, badly hidden??????? And, like, my first inclination would be to see who maybe they're hiding it from??????????"

Edited 2019-06-28 02:34 (UTC)

"An' that's usin' negative space to find somethin' out," Hardison said, taking another long sip of milkshake. "An' island of nothin' in a sea of somethin'. Might turn out to be nothin' important, sure. But it's still a thing. Get me?"

"I think so," she said, frowning a little. "It's a thing because the person whose calendar it is made that choice????????????"

"Sorta," Hardison said. "It's where a spot of blankness is a cover for somethin' that's actually there, just hidden. Inferences you can make cause of everythin' else that's goin' on around it. A'ight, let's try somethin' else, a little more basic. There are three ice cream containers. One is empty. The container to the right has vanilla. The one to the left has strawberry. What flavor was probably in the middle?"

Nina hesitated.

She… she was pretty sure this was, like, some sort of cultural thing she didn't know, since otherwise how was she supposed to guess?

"Noooooooot a combination of strawberry and vanilla?????????"

Hardison burst out into self-deprecating laughter. "Looks like I just learned a lesson 'bout makin' assumptions," he said. "Sorry bout that, Nina-girl. I ain't even think about whether or not that would be a universal thing."

He shook his head. "In this section of the multiverse, three of most common ice cream flavors are vanilla, chocolate, an' strawberry."

[I'm sorry! This didn't post!]

She laughed, too, since chocolate was a bit obvious, wasn't it, once it was said!

"Ooooooooh," she said, giggling. "Okay, so, it's chocolate....... though, like, I don't know what you guys all use in your cooking, really, when most of the ingredients make no sense!!!!!!!!!!"

Admittedly, all it took to make ice cream in Nina's world was one chicken egg.

Yes.

Just the egg. ~~The cooking mini-game was possibly insane.~~

THERE WAS A COOKING MINI-GAME?!?

"I mean, I can't argue with that," Hardison said. "I'm pretty sure it's magic, though sayin' that just makes Eliot make a face."

Was that maybe why he said it?

.....Yessss.

THERE WAS! And it was great!!!!!!!!!

"I mean, like, past a few basic dishes, I'm pretty sure it is magic," Nina said, grinning. "Even if, like, it's a magic of skill................"

"Magic don't stop bein' magic, just cause you know how it works right?" Hardison asked.

He leaned back, taking another pull from his straw. "So, you wanna explain what got you so upset on the phone?" he asked easily.

Well.

Wanting to explain was never, ever going to happen. She'd been feeling better, with a distraction, and a reason to look and act mostly put together and that question--

That question.

"Sorry," she said, her smile faltering. "Sorry, like, I didn't mean to, I mean, like, I just--I know that I shouldn't have and that, like, this is super great and you're probably busy and I didn't mean to!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Chilly Boulder, Tuesday Afternoon

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject