With the painfully obvious revelation that I should actually be using the full power of my new toys, I quickly reassigned priorities for each of the clusters. There wasn’t a whole lot I needed orders of magnitude more time to deliberate on, nor was I in the best place to practice practical applications, but I could still iron out theoretical aspects of myself.

Well, mostly just my magical abilities. I was avoiding doing introspection for a little while for reasons related to the other recent revelation I had had thrust upon me.

To that end, I upped the hacking team to six clusters, put another three on building a model of how to best create constructs of my polymers, used two for background support, and gave the final cluster the holy task to finally find out where the hell the autonomous tail control programs were hiding.

With that done, I begrudgingly got up from the unused office lounge I had been enjoying to do something productively destructive in the real world. Taking advantage of new-old knowledge, I sent a network identification packet out- laced with a healthy dose of ULE. Immediately, a handful of routers lit up in convenient outlines, making it even more trivial to make my way over to the closest one. As always, [Act] and [Unremarkable] let me slip under the notice of anyone I met, and due to my plans of completely taking over, digital systems could be retroactively cleaned of my presence.

I didn’t stick around the device for long- only a quick pass by to stick another glob of ULE onto a packet heading out of the router.

While I could have just dominated a few devices and traced their connection back to a probable central server bank again, I wanted to apply some of the tricks my clusters had been relearning. My goal here was to establish covert monitoring stations on every computer on the system at relatively the same time. For that I needed to leapfrog back to the root of internet access for the building.

With my next target identified, I snaked my way through the less populated hallways and room, down back stairwells, and into the basement. Well, it was more accurately described as a sublevel; it was clearly regularly used, just not by most of the office workers and management.

With on one in sight- let alone with the ability to see through my obscurement- all it took was picking one normally-sufficient lock and I was able to slip into a utility room.

Based off some rough guesses at the likelihood of getting caught, I decided I should be safe from detection even if I released a massive amount of ULE. The biggest worry was a random MG wandering nearby and picking up my activities, but all I could do about that was keep a look out and take a break should that happen.

With one last deep breath out, I unleashed the full extent of my focus upon the box of plastic and silicone. The weak protections acquiesced almost instantly, but that was to be expected. A flex of will drew in a torrent of ULE, supplying my body- and by extension my servers- with the energy they needed to temporarily synchronize with the modem and start recording all the network traffic.

The large and constant stream of information was handed off to a cluster for it to sort through for the useful devices. Another few took that filtered data and added packets of ULE mimicking the download information for a likely-poor recreation of my old RATs. Within less than five minutes of entering the room, I was heading back up a set of stairs to get out of the area on the off chance I had been noticed.

Remote feeds of hundreds of computers were flowing through the magically bolstered modem, straight to a cluster that was watching for passwords, facility information and signs of illness- with a particular focus on headaches and trouble focusing. Any devices identified as belonging to IT personnel were given special attention and marked in the real world for individual integration. As people came and went, I was sure more would pop up over the next few days, but for the ones I had already identified I was stalking their users for any signs of leaving the devices unattended.

As always [Act] carried me as I strolled through the building catching workers on bathroom or coffee breaks, social media distraction, or in the case of one unfortunate guy, filling an email with possibly thousands of ‘j’s as he napped face-on-keyboard.

I helped him out by hitting send.

Since he was out for the time being, I got to start the next phase of my plans a little early. A cluster scanned over a few hundred emails written by my victim so it could mimic his style in a convincing enough way to create a sensible ‘hey there's been some slightly suspicious activity, so you should change your password’ email. This was then sent off to a solid list of important-sounding people from the directory, who would hopefully find it convincing- especially since it was coming from a generic help ID.

All I had to do now was wait for them to hopefully connect to the network, get infected with my RAT, then notice the warning and give me a key-logged copy of their new password and any other login information I might need.

I was far off from being able to crack this sort of thing without help like my old perks could- as well as the cute cartoon that it used to show- so trickery was the best path forward.

On my way out, I made sure to stop by a break room for a cheap, individually wrapped biscotti-thing. Despite being not great, it was gone by the time I was entering the next building on my list. Unsurprisingly, due to being built at basically the same time, the general layout was the same so I beelined to the same room as before- although I noticed that this time there was someone already there.

After a moment of thought, I continued from where I had paused. When I reached my destination, the door was still open so I silently came up behind the maintenance person and watched what they were doing. My best guess was that it was some sort of routine check of the basement’s electrical systems.

With nothing better to do, I pulled an outlet tester off their belt before simultaneously loudly dropping it, stealing every writing utensil on their person, and using my tail to pop a couple of the fuses in the box they had open. [Covert Requisitioning]’s niche but powerful effect to briefly make me invisible- or possibly beyond comprehension- let me easily walk back out of the room and monitor the results.

Once they blinked back into focus, there was a beautiful cascade of confusion. They initially continued reaching down to pick up the tool I had displaced, putting it back where it belonged with no issue. Once that was done, they noticed the burnt out fuses and tried to make a note of that- only then realizing they had no pencil. After some increasingly confused cycles of looking around, checking behind their ears, and patting down pockets, the worker finally gave up and trudged out of the room- grumbling under their breath as they did so.

Now free to do as I wished, I put the stolen objects on an obvious shelf and repeated my modem-hacking trick. It went much faster this time as I could effectively just copy all the work that had been done for the last one with very few changes, although the process still took a ridiculous amount of ULE- doubly so since I was trying to go as fast as possible. 

I could see that the worker had only gone to fetch something to write with from the front desk, so I couldn’t stick around. Frustratingly, just when I was almost done, the maintenance person stepped out of the elevator a few seconds away from where they would have a clear view of the doorway to the room I was in. I likely could have gaslit my way past them with ease using my perks, but I could technically continue my work remotely so I rushed out of the room.

As we passed in the hall, they threw me a confused look. It definitely wasn’t because the sheer amount of data being passed to me by two entire buildings of people was using significantly more mental power than I was expecting- thus causing me to stumble and intermittently forget to pay attention to the real world. Nor was it definitely not caused by my scramble to alleviate that issue by bludgeoning the processes I had set up into only infecting new devices with my RAT and ceasing the torrent of random internet traffic of which I was incapable of fully ignoring.

Predictably, my solution caused another large issue: the limited lifetime of my magical programs. Eventually, when I had finally relearned my perks- specifically [Can of Worms]- this wouldn’t be an issue, but until then it was just another item on the mostly forgotten list of ‘things I really need to do once I have the time. For real this time.’