5/9/2004
09:12 PM
Logfile from GarouMUSH.
[Out in one of the Starschmucks near SCCU campus]
Contents:
Jeremy
Obvious exits:
Whispering Pines
Midday, then, or sometime in the afternoon when the sun's out and nice, the SCCU campus is bustling with students going to and fro, studying for finals and getting ready to get the hell out of there. For the MAN, aka Brian Anderson, aka Neo (yes, Neo), he and his buddies are hanging out at a cafe-restaurant near campus.
Making his way through the crowd is Jermey, dressed in his Gothic attire and looking just as Neo'ish. He heads towards the group at the cafe, holding a notebook in his hands and a pen tucked behind his ear.
Brian and his buds just laugh there, sharing a joke amongst themselves without a care in the world, nor a care for the people trying to study in the cafe. They came for the atmosphere, but that's what happens when frat boys on a free ride come in. Jeremy is utterly ignored, for now.
"Brian Anderson." Comes the creepy voice from behind them as he pauses in step, chains jingling about his person. He stands there with arms crossed, save the notebook peeking out from behind him, head tilting to the side. He simply stares.
"Hahahaha--huh?" That's the brief, confused voice of Neo there, gazing behind him as the others in his group, Devin, Thomas, and John all look at Jeremy with various expressions ranging from "What the hell?" to "*grunt*."
"Brian Anderson, I am Jeremy Statton. I run the Urban Legend's department for our school newspaper." Jeremy says in a flat voice. "I would like to speak to you about your recent submissions into the bugle about the lycanthrope issue that we seem to be having."
Brian adjusts his view so he sits upright this time, but the everpresent smirk and glimmer of a troublemaker's eyes gaze at the goth without a hint of remorse. At first, he doesn't reply or give permission. "What about it?" is the question afterwards, posed by the frat boy. It's clear on the jacket that Devin wears, that at least one is a member of BAT - Beta Alpha Theta - one of the many greek societies on campus.
"I was wanting to know if I could do an interview with you regarding it, on how you've obtained the information and such, and if the rumors could possibly be true." Jeremy says as he shifts a bit, sliding the pen out of his ear, then reaches into his jacket, fumbling about as he stares at the other man with an unhalting gaze. One would never know that outside of his Gothic lifestyle, he has the shark like skills of a Sales Manager in a retail environment. He knows all about eye contact and how to hold it firmly.
Brian's smirk twitches some, considering the humor of the way Jeremy has literally no humor. "An interview? Man, one little photo and a video clip and I'm famous." The frat boys, Devin particularly, laughs. "Yeah, ok, I'll do an interview." The other guys make room, and John in particular, who looks definitely older than the three others in his group, simply moves out of the way to pull another empty seat over after asking the girl if it could be borrowed. "Have a seat, Jeremy."
Settling himself down in the chair, Jeremy relaxes himself as he opens up his notepad, tapping the pen tip against it. "I wouldn't really consider yourself famous." He says in a soft voice, ridden with angst as he drolls his eyes upwards to the other. "First of all, how did you obtain the photo and video clip? Can you please go over the details of the situation how it happened? You don't have to be very detailed, I can add the suspense for you if you wish."
You paged the room with 'Just to scene set, the cafe-restaurant's pretty full, but most people are just paying attention to books and typing. The people you've got are Brian, 21 years old, and he's pretty known on campus to be a frat boy troublemaker whose old man's money has given him a free ride through college. Devin is a jock and daredevil, a sophmore, and he's like a tough guy on the basketball team. The others are Tom, 19, a subdued kinna guy who's a physics major, and the last guy is John, 23 years old attending school part time. And you've probably heard of the John guy under the name of Bach - really mysterious guy.'.
Brian shrugs, considering the answer before rattling out, "We were camping at the park for a couple of nights, and it's all Blair Witchy out there. Cameras and video cam provided by Bach, here," the guy motions to John. "All I did was see the monster for like, split seconds."
"You must have seen it for more than 'split' seconds if you were able to obtain a video clip of it, as well as a seperate still image." Jeremy says pointedly as he scribbles a few things on the notepad. Unfortuantly for them, the writing is in Japanese in the form of small symbols. "Were you scared when you saw it?" He asks, shifting his gaze to Brian, then Bach. "Seeing a 'werewolf' would surely make someone frightened to say the least."
"It was unusual," Bach states in almost monotone with the biggest understatement of the year, like this incident of seeing a werewolf is nothing at all. Brian clears his throat as if to draw attention back unto himself. "Damn right of course it's freaky to see something like that. But the more important thing is gettin' the photos. After I saw it for a moment, we got out the stuff and decided to see what it was. Course I didn't know it was a werewolf at first. Stuff like that you think you only see in the movies."
"Are you /sure/ you saw what you saw? You said a few seconds. So.. in that few seconds, you were able to blink in surprise, dig out your camcorder /and/ camera, power it on, then program it to adjust to dark lighting, and /then/ take its picture and record it? The werewolf actually stood there /that/ long for you to document it?" Jeremy says, seemingly bored with the conversation as he makes a few notes, then shakes his head. "To me, that sounds a bit farfetched, because a creature of obvious primal instinct wouldn't simply stand around and wait for you so that he can pose for a couple of College kids." He starts to rise from his seat. "I suppose I am wasting my time with nothing more than a prank."
"Tch, man, you weren't there, you wouldn't fuckin' know what we saw," Devin growls out now. "The cameras were out 'cause we wanted a little memento of the camping trip," Brian says matter-of-factly, a slight frown beginning to touch on his features. "If you think you're wasting your time then go on." Tom just sits there drinking his coffee, occassionally eyeing a physics textbook on the table while Bach watches the Kin with invisible curtains drawn over his eyes.
"You are right, I don't know what you saw." Jeremy says cooly as he shifts his shoulders. "Its just that I find it hard to believe, that is all. We've had 'rumors' of lycanthropes in our woods before and of course that ended up being another joke as well. Curious though." He says, eyes half lidded as he stares at them with unhinged movements. "Do you remember everything in detail? How it moved, how it acted? Did it seem more.. human when it ran? Was it /fast/? Did it leave prints behind? Did you stay after you took the shots or did you pack up and go home right afterwards?"
"Shit, you think we'd stay around if we knew monsters are in the woods?" Brian asks, looking at the goth like he's asked a stupid question. "All we got was that little bit of clip on video before it disappeared on us. We're not stupid enough to go chasing monsters like a dumb bitch." The frat boy leans back on his chair. "And it just vanished into the woods. Considering it was dark as hell, we didn't see where it went after that."
"You did set fire to the garbage dumpster last year behind the science building, and I considered that pretty stupid, so, who knows." Jeremy says with a shift of a shoulder, revealing a hint of information that was once thought hidden and tucked away.
There is a bit of a pause from Brian at that, but he shrugs it off afterwards. "Who knows?" he echoes. "Anything else you wanted to ask?" He glances towards the notepad, and notices it's not in English. "What the hell are you writing in there?"
"The way it moved, Mister Anderson." Jeremy says in his best Smith voice as he slowly draws the mirrored glasses off his nose, revealing his deep, blue eyes. "How did it move? Was it fast like a blur, or did it move in a bi pedal formation?"
"What?" Brian asks first, just wierded out with Jeremy's Smith impression. It's Devin's turn to smirk but the jock says nothing. Neither does Bach, but Tom finally does speak up and say, "It moved on two legs. I'd say it was a decent size, but unless you actually went back and looked for tracks, did some calculation, you wouldn't be able to know how big it was."
"Could you take me to the spot that you saw at it if possible?" Jeremy asks cooly as he scribbles once more, another character next to the rest as he clicks his skull ball ring against his teeth as he wets his lips. He glances back up to the other four, his features solemn. He knows he has their full attention now, and probably has them on edge.
Brian shrugs again. "We're not going back there anytime soon," he claims, finally sitting up and looking to the others. "You wanna look for werewolves, go look for werewolves."
A smirk slightly tugs at Jeremy's lips in amusement as he simply says. "You guys are able to stuff poor Frankie Dominguez in a garbage can and roll him down the street during your BAT parties, but you can't find the balls to go back out in the woods during the daytime and point out a spot? Would it make you feel better if I could assure your safety out there?"
"Fuck you," Devin spits out, angry at the goth's smugness. He's not scared at all, and looks like he'd be more than happy to put Jeremy in a garbage can and roll him down the street. Brian looks dead on at Jeremy, eyes narrowing dangerously. "Don't fuckin' insult me, goth boy. You might have the free time to play your angst and drama tragedies around campus but we have better things to do." Tom resumes his study of the physics book, while Bach just stares, occassionally blinking. He's studying Jeremy like a vulture.
"Really? Like what? Get drunk and run around whooping and hollaring as loud as you can, then running from the Cops and playing innocent? Just like you did last Friday?" Jeremy asks in a calm, sedated voice as he stares unblinkingly at the four. "I'm not insulting you, I'm just surprised, since the four of you provide such bravado for the rest of us 'goth boys' on a day in and day out basis, I figured something as silly and whimsical as 'werewolves' wouldn't phase you. Lets be honest.. you probably didn't see a werewolf and you may have seen a big dog, or even someone trying to run a publicity stunt for Van Hellsing, which conicidently opened at the theaters on the same night." He says with a crack of a grin. "Now, that would be a good headliner for the paper. Four College popular boys, fooled by a 'furry'."
For a brief moment, Brian looks like he's going to punch Jeremy hard. It's the same for Devin, but Bach speaks up at last. "I don't recall there ever being an Urban Legends 'department' in the school paper." This is said quite ominously, without flourish. The three BAT boys look at him for that one moment.
"I don't think you guys even read the school paper." Jeremy says right back, curtly as he crosses his arms over his chest. "Why don't you wait for Friday when it comes out, so that you can see for yourself." He says, shrugging his shoulders as he turns around, reaching into his jacket, tapping something inside, then tucks his pen behind his ear. "Too bad you guys didn't want to go back out there. Everyone else is. You created a media frenzy and I doubt any fur suiters or 'werewolves' will be out there anytime soon."
"You'd be surprised," Bach replies calmly, taking everything in stride. But, it appears that Brian and Devin look like they're going to shake down the goth boy in front of everyone regardless. "Lemme see your notepad there, Jeremy. I want to make sure you haven't misquoted or wrote shit about me." Brian's comment has a veiled threat, one that suggests he'd sic his dad like a guard dog on the kin if there was any libel going on.
"Unless you can read Japanese, I don't think you would understand a single word of it." Jeremy says as he continues to walk off, tossing a look over his shoulder at the four. "With this, I bid you good day. I'm going to be out in the woods, chasing werewolves, by myself since I'm unable to obtain a navigator." His sneakers lightly pad upon the ground as he goes, not bothering to rush. In fact, he looks quite calm.
Luckily for Jeremy, none of the guys read Japanese and the only one who looks remotely like he could would be Bach, who isn't budging from his spot. When the goth leaves, Brian snorts and grumbles something under his breath before turning back into the regular fratbro he's known to be. "What a geek," Devin comments right before he's out of earshot.
"Ah, the wit of a third grader continues to be your greatest trait, Devin." Jeremy calls over his shoulder. "By the way, if I were you, I'd study for that English final of yours. It'd be a shame to be held back /twice/ now." He says, continuing off through the crowd, chuckling to himself.
[later that night...]
Its near one in the morning and Jeremy is sitting at his PowerMac G5 in the living room, tapping away as always, pulling up a few Unix shell commands and deciding to attempt a back door through the telnet FTP. Running a password sniffer in the background, he taps connect and lets the wizard run its course, trying to snatch the password and allow him access. Dakota is asleep on the couch curled up under a blanket, having grown tired of trying to urge him to bed for some mother's day snuggling and then a long night sleep. He finally convinced her he had work to do and she left him alone.
Angel's Bugle is, as all professional businesses are, well protected with latest technology. For a hacker to try and access their servers and databases directly, would be a poorly planned attack. The site itself is updated of a fairly daily basis. Upon first testing for password sniffing, the program comes up with nothing. On the bright side, it doesn't seem like anyone would be able to actively prevent a hacker - no one stays at the magazine's building past closing time save for a few dedicated nuts.
Jeremy furrows his brows slightly as he comes up with nothing, then tries to upset the server by tricking it using a telnet prompt to slip a fake email with a router on it. He wants to try and set it up as a 'forget your password' technique that he learned off the web, hoping it'd bounce the user name and password to his mail box.
Unfortunately, the server doesn't seem to like that. The forget your password technique doesn't work, as neither login nor password come back. It must be the fact that the magazine's a tabloid... rather prone to random hackers who want to mess around.
Jeremy drums his fingers slightly on the table with one hand as the other reaches to his Rock Star, bringing it up to his lips and taking a slow swig. He stares at the screen, pondering for a few moments. He takes a few minutes to stare at the screen, then decides to log in as Anonymous and search about any folders that have been left unhidden.
Score! Some fool's left some folders unsecured. One folder looks particularly promising, until it's clicked on. Then, the kin is treated to a listing of files in the directory consisting mainly of just random photos of celebs that have been circulating around. There doesn't seem to be anything of photos on the werewolf incident.
After boredly searching through the photos carefully for about an hour, he tries to pull up the user folder, the one which shows all the accounts in the system. This way, he'll at least have a username to login as. All he'll need is the password.
The jackpot of user logins is revealed as a confusing jumble of letters and numbers for each folder. The names go such like JS0501, or another called CD0507.
Jeremy looks faintly annoyed as he taps open a few folders boredly, then decides to back out to the beginning. He drags a folder into the FTP client, hoping to unleash a cracker into it, one that would patch the password automatically upon clicking connect.
Hm. As a spark of genius... thanks to an Int 4 kind of thing, CD0507 just may be a login for Chris Davis, date 05/07. The very same as a certain date a certain article was written for the Bugle. The cracker, however, takes its very sweet time to find anything. Once the realization of the login occurs though, the password also starts to reveal itself. A few letters and a number, leaving about 3 digits left to crack.
With that, Jeremy loads up his password sniffer once more and lets it unleash, having only three digits instead of many to figure out. He drums his fingers slowly on the table, huffing out an impatient breath as he watches Dakota wobble her way down the hallway.
The password sniffer sniffs, snorts, doubles back on the trail, leads off somewhere else, and then finally scores another 2 digits. One would think there's only so many things that can be inputted into a password, but apparently there's lots. After another 20 minutes, the password is revealed. A whopping 9 digit combination of letters, signs and numbers.
"Ping." Jeremy murmurs softly as he starts to go back to that CD0507 folder, tapping it open to hopefully find what he needs.
CD0507 opens to reveal a few documents written in regular MS Word, and a few subfolders easily identifiable. Images, Video, and HTML. Strangely, the security for the subfolders is also quite high and the password is asked for each time each subfolder is accessed.
Jeremy thumps his head against the back of the chair, letting out an annoyed huff. "For the love of fucking God." He murmurs. "You'd think they were working for the CIA." With that, he starts password popping as he opens up the folders, starting with the video one first.
If the server could laugh. The video folder opens without trouble once the password is fed in. Scanning down the various video clips, there is one called BA_WWNP. That's quite promising indeed.
The kin decides to select the entire folder and download it onto his desktop, where he can open up every video at the same time. A grin forms its way on his face as a look of celebration finds his lips.
And the video clips are downloaded easily as drinking water. For the images folder, the same happens but the images are less obviously labeled. Nothing an image browser with thumbnail capability can't parse. The HTML folder however, may take some time to actually find the files which are used for the article on the website... if the HTML is stored there at all.
Jeremy decides to download the entire HTML folder as well and softly thanks the gods that have blessed enhanced DSL. He taps a few more keys, then starts opening everything up at once on his G5.
All the files, once on the Mac, seem to work well up to the point that some of the HTML files decide not to work as nicely on the Mac-specific browsers. Another few hours tick by, and there's no clear indication of a source that makes up the actual article on the web. Perhaps that file is back with the main server's public area.
The website, after loading up, comes up with the homepage normally. The images and video clips links to the werewolf article, including the article itself, come up 404, error, and all that annoying stuff that people trying to read a tabloid online would hate.
Jeremy decides to mess around with his own website using Dream Weaver, then upload it onto the server. During this, he enhanced the hell out of the pictures of the werewolf using Photoshop, trying to get a better look at it.
That's when the server from the site cuts off the Mac, but likely because of a timeout from the server. The image enhancement of Photoshop provides little info. JPEG compression killed it, but surely a professional graphics enhancing program like Photoshop would eventually help sharpen up the image to the point that certain things could be seen. The most obvious, is that the werewolf is no crinos at all. It lacks height, lacks strength, lacks grace, and generally couldn't possibly be the slavering warform of a Garou. Even the Van Helsing werewolves were more convincing, but once the conclusion that the werewolf is a costume is reached, one has to admit... taking the time to make a costume like it must have taken some time.
Jeremy lets out a breath and squints his eyes, then uploads the new HTML onto the Site, this time trying to slip it into the main page so that when it loads, it simply shows off as HOAX. For shits and giggles, he even posts the four poor boys pictures on the site, pointing at their foolishness for being frightened by a 'furry'.
The problem with uploading the new HTML is that for a moment, the server rejects the file. A few refreshes on the page shows it doesn't load. Then, a bit later, the pages start showing up.
Jeremy leans back in his chair, savoring the glow of the screen on his face as he takes another slow sip of his rockstar, humming to himself. The sun is nearly up, and he doesn't look the least bit tired. Then again, he has seven Rock Star cans settled about his desk.
So the page remains changed. And it'll stay that way, until someone from the Bugle realizes the errors, the hacking, and missing files.
Subject: Fwd: Veil Breech update.
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-After spending some time online and a whole lot of coffee, Jeremy sends a nice package to the two of you, containing photoshop enhanced photo printouts of the 'crinos' from the web. Now that they have been cleaned up, its /obvious/ that what they saw out there was someone wearing a costume, and that the 'werewolf' is surely no Crinos. It lacks the girth and power and even looked floppy. Its obvious someone put a lot of time into it. On the web, Jeremy has noted that he hacked the Bugle site, changed the template and made it out to be a huge HOAX, pointing fingers at the four boys who took the shots and labeling them fools for being scared by a 'furry' playing dress up in the woods. He even posts their pictures on the site, with the words OWNED on it. On the site, in the lower right hand corner, is a small glasswalker icon, crawling around in a circle. A trademark of the ragabash like kinfolk.
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