I didn’t like to be rude to people just doing their job- unless that job interfered with whatever I was doing- so I left the random office worker to brew their coffee as I thought about what I wanted to do. 

Each of the big rooms had a motion detector, although my guess was that those were to turn the lights off and on as they were needed and not for security. Additionally, the interior camera coverage was fairly light. The labs and workshops had more than the office spaces- meaning one in a corner somewhere to look over the room. Similarly, the halls had a camera up to look down their lengths, which might give me some trouble. Overall, the level of surveillance struck a good balance as any more would have been both unnecessary and maybe give a bit of an oppressive feeling.

As previously noted, to even get to the island SEYA and the related military bases were on, you had to pass some very serious background checks. Or be an MG. The former group could be charged with treason for selling secrets and the latter was well enough compensated and generally of a moral standing that they wouldn’t feel the need or want to.

I was simply a combination of curious and slightly unscrupulous.

Overall, in terms of security concerns, my only holdup was the digital aspect. Last time I was here, the computer I used was just open and ready for use, either because someone wasn’t being secure or due no one thinking it was worth troubling the workers with sign-ins until I broke in.

When the coffee guy was finally done in the break room and everyone else in the building was either working away or simply on the other floors, I took the opportunity to slink along the wall and under the hallway camera with a little begrudging insurance from [Unremarkable]. Annoyingly, these interior cameras were the smaller, tinted-dome-housing ones so I couldn’t throw another ball to knock it out of alignment. The hope was that my perk would cover my identity until I had fully compromised the systems that could see me.

Like before, the security on this device was easy to crack. The video quality was worse than I had expected, and did really get a good look at me as I shied away from it. And due to the issues of storing long videos, all records should be even worse. There was some fish-eye to the picture to get better coverage, which meant I would be in view of each camera until I was almost directly under it. Finally, the connection tracing feeling when combined with the other vague feelings from the exterior cameras, gave me a strong suspicion the building’s security center was on the first floor at the tip of a wing.

Feeling like a spy, I messed around with my thought-to-code ability until I had a part of my mind looping boring footage, then slinked into the break room. A few minutes later, I was heading back over to the copying room with a warm cup of sabotage liquid.

I may have put too much time into trying to figure out how I could hit both the phone and fax machine with one splash, but it was important to  me to properly execute my likely unnecessary coverup.

A box of blank paper reams was moved a little bit into the walking path, which caught my foot at an unfortunate time. With practiced exaggeration and dexterity, the cup of coffee slipped my mind as I flailed to catch a counter with which to break my fall. The improperly secured lid of the cup came off as it tumbled into the phone- itself pushed closer to the edge of the counter to make room for the scraps of a paper cutting project. With the force of my panic and an improbable angle, some splashes of liquid doused the phone before the cup and its remaining payload landed directly on the fax machine’s controls.

Being the dutiful but timid worker I was acting as, I hurried to mop up as much of the spilled liquid as I could with some loose paper- which was then discarded into a wastepaper basket in the corner. More was used and disposed of to poorly dry the scissors and pens than had been left on the affected countertop before I fled the room, resisting the urge to bow to a non-existent audience.

It was probably sloppy to take any time, to not only stage an excuse for random equipment failure, but then also literally play it out. However, I was here at least partially for personal entertainment and that confluence of shenanigans qualified. 

Since no one was around, I was able to just walk up to an unoccupied lab and pop open the lock. To be safe, I only slightly opened the door and reached up to turn off the motion detector without any resistance. With the lights off, the camera would be mostly useless- especially when I took it over.

Since I had no need for light, I left them off and plugged into a computer like the last time I was here. Annoyingly, there was now a sign in page before I could have free access to the system. I had to suck it up and accept I would be subjected to another wave of sickness. I didn’t want to drag it out more than I needed so I dedicated everything I could to the hacking effort. This left me feeling awful and with no senses other than my hearing to let me know if I was in danger of being caught.

When I eventually got through and was able to turn my senses back on, I found myself face down next to the computer in a pile of snot and spit- still death-gripping the table so I wouldn’t fall over even more. It was pretty disgusting and obvious, so cleaned up with the lab’s spill kit as I remotely dug around within the processes and files.

All the applications were tempting me to eat them, but I restrained myself so I wouldn’t end up bricking the entire computer. On the list of things I did consume was a set of interconnected word processors, spreadsheet manager, messenger, and a bunch of other lesser-used things. Those were followed by all of their locally-stored files and a fancy calculator-grapher. Still unsatisfied, I used my stolen credentials to access the computer’s owner’s cloud storage.

Since my computer abilities required physical contact, I was relegated to accessing things like a normal user. I was still able to find some useful information, although most of what I did was downloading files to look through the next time I went to ‘sleep.’ Like with the cameras and security, I had a very poor idea of where the server hosting this information was located; the best guess was somewhere north-west-ish but on the island.

In a flash of inspiration, I realized I could try to emulate the effects of [Magical Hacking]. In the process of the morph, I technically lost the perk- but the whole point of that process was to turn me into a semi-digital daemon.

Actually achieving that goal was a little weird: everything I needed should have been known to me, but it was all messed up or foggy. It also didn’t help that I never put a lot of thought into what I was doing, so I couldn’t try to replicate a previous feeling to guide me.

I spent a few minutes simply sending requests to the server while watching what the computer was doing and trying to follow the path the data took. It came surprisingly- or maybe not- easy to me, so I moved onto attaching my ULE to the data as it was getting sent. These packets contained no instructions, but it was still annoying to them to stick properly. About half way through the experimentation, the volume of ULE I had sent gave me a very good idea as to where the server was, but I had long forgotten the point of this exercise.

After what felt like an hour of testing, making small tweaks, then testing again, I was finally able to get a packet to go to the server, flip a bit, then come back with some energy recovered from the innumerable others I had sent.

It was far from what I had been able to do before, but I still felt elated. Then I remembered I was in a military research facility, which I had broken into, damaged equipment, stolen information, and finally engaged in a long session of searching random strings of characters from a random login. In a final act of luck-pushing, I sent an email to the IT department reporting the computer’s issues and requesting a password reset due to their suspicious nature.

Of course, that message also contained a dumb blob of ULE that would hopefully let me see where the service operated out of. I smiled at the thought of what I could do with an admin account before skedaddling back out the way I came- adding a loop to the exterior camera so I didn't need to do another long leap. For the fun of it, I turned on [Act Like You Belong] and just knocked on the door of the guard house. All I got was a glance before the guard waved me through- no questions asked.