Yeah, But Why Are You A Clown? (Lukalot)

The steam trail from the late night cup of coffee rose from the ceramic mug floating telekinetically in front of Bliss. She strolled past the bookcase containing the false wall to lead to her basement laboratory. No keypad. No secret switch. Just a lever strategically placed on the back side of the wall so only a telekinetic would be able to open it. While she began to focus her energy on flipping the switch, she took the coffee mug in hand. "Son of a bitch!"

The mug plummeted. But, stopped just before the floor. It did little to save the top half of her coffee, but the prevention of a broken mug gave her a little solace. "I'm glad no one else is here." It was true Bliss acted as the sole occupant of the mid sized condo she and her fiance inhabited, but it did little to make the house anymore quiet. Bliss pointed a judging finger towards the mug. "You're still not off the hook."

The false door opened and Bliss stepped down. Her slippers gently brushed down ever step while her bathrobe covered the black shorts and pink T-shirt underneath. Her traitorous coffee mug still hovered in front of her. Bliss definitely considered the mug half empty.

Inside of her basement lab, she sat down at her computer terminal. The basement encompassed a fifteen by fifteen foot room with a fairly high ceiling. All around the room were mannequins adorned with different body suits, casual clothes, and formal clothing. Bliss touched the tip of the mug to her lip and took in a quick aroma of the coffee, while keeping the liquid from her out of fear of its heated wrath.

Bliss picked up a pen. Her finger moved along the side to a quick trigger button. With a quick push, the formal clothing shifted into a more practical body suit, complete with padding and heat resistant features. "Awesome." Bliss slumped back in her chair, taking in a swig of her coffee only to be betrayed by her drink on account of the terrible things she said to it moments before.

Ike steps across some broken glass across the pavement. The back alleys are wet and dark, precisely the type of area that Ike prefers to avoid. Bacteria must coat the walls of these places. "But, to keep hidden, it's my only choice", he sighs as he imagines being seen like this. Number one, he looks like some sort of ninja wannabe, and number two, if he reaches the news for this... EVER, he would be completely at the mercy of his government acquaintances. After all he's done to them, they would not be forgiving.

Nevertheless, he has to come out here. This is the true business that keeps his corporation thriving. It's all him. Hacking into banks, stealing scientific discoveries and inventions. Without it, Deeptech would never be half the company it is today. Stealing is what Syber does best.

Tonight though... Ike clicks his tongue....

Some information on a young woman named... Bliss Fukuyama? Isn't that the hero who fought in the New York Assualt? Syber already doesn't like the sound of this, but the data says that she may be in possession of powerful nanotech, with the potential of being extremely lucrative if sold to the right people.

Her condo should be right across the street when he exits the ally. Syber seems to concentrate for a moment before his body appears to dissipate into a pixelated cloud, before completely disappearing. As he turns to face the exit his face becomes visible for a moment- before he pulls some sort of veil over his face.

He's completely gone.

At least, that's what it looks like the the average person, but with a second glance, you can see the bends and folds in the objects behind him. The light magnification of everything around him, and as he moves, a slight lag to catch up with his new surroundings. It's quite effective, and it has gotten Ike out of many an unnerving situation in the past.

He quickly slips out of the alley and towards the building that holds the nanotech. He mentally drools thinking about it. But he's past the point of dreaming... he has to be quick now, before he runs out of power in his suit.

Reaching the door he quickly touches the keypad that is there, but not to dial a number, no no, his suits invisibility cloak flickers for a second before warping out of shape and swirling into the keypad.

He's inside. Yes, inside the keypad, and not physically, but cybernetically. The world inside the condo's network is neon blue, and Syber is surrounded by a small lump of nodes connected in a web, each one a device that is connected to the network. Breaking through the weak encryption program in this public keypad to gain access to the computers at the main desk would be no problem at all, but that's not what Syber wants. He has to gain access to either Bliss' Door Phone or her computer to be able to quickly get into her apartment.

Unfortunately, after several long seconds of searching, Syber finds no connection between the door phone and Bliss' computer, but he _has_ located the Door Phone marked **** the exact number of her apartment as noted by his information.

Teleporting to that location on the network, he focuses yet again for a moment, causing the glowing world around him so become blurry and out of focus, before dripping away like water on a divers mask. The apartment around him swirls into view.. and the last person he had hoped to see here is right down the stairs in front of him: Bliss.

Shards of the coffee mug littered the desk around Bliss. No, she did not throw it in anger or drop it in shock. Her wrath did not win the day against the poor mug; her clumsiness reaching for a roll of duct tape to wrap up some loose cables laying around the room cost her the last of her piping hot bean juice. And with it, so went Bliss' chance at a peaceful night. But, other circumstances would see to that as well.

With her nanotech working, Bliss only spent a few minutes reveling at her own achievement before getting back to building a few servers to host the increase in capacity she would need for a future project dealing with extradimensional communication relays she heard of from Tengo Okami. Whether it worked or not, building servers put Bliss at east. More so than the cup of coffee she still had not mopped up.

Then a click came at the top of the stairs. Her mind went to Ashley. Then her memory caught up with her. Ashley went to China for the week to do something Bliss ignored because she was eating and pretending to read. This noise would not be ignored. Not the second time. Certainly not the third time. Bliss wanted to send out a challenge to see if Danny had let herself in or even one of her half sisters, but none of them would stay content standing above the stairs, gawking down.

"Who's up there?" Bliss started forming a ball of ice in her hand, preparing to get more serious.

Not busting out the outfit serious, but iceball followed by a telekinetic blast serious. "Let me just tell you, I'm more concerned about messing up my house rather than your face if you're here to steal something." The ice in her hand grew. "But, I might not be all that concerned."

As he listens to Bliss attempt to frighten him (which would be very effective if he wasn’t so used to it, wether it be from government officials or his soon-to-be victims), Syber sends a mental command to his suit to change monitor graphics and appear to be a businuess suit. It always helps Syber’s self esteem to dress more... civilized, especially when meeting someone with such a renound reputation.

Stepping down the stairs, he pretends to button his jacket in an attempt to appear perfectly calm. As he walks down to the bttom of the stairs rather briskly he says, “Hello... Bliss Fukuyama I pres-“...

Syber stops mid sentence and drops the somewhat charismatic persona. Seeing the stone cold look on Bliss’ face convinces him that he cannot toy with her. No, she isn’t one to be intimidated. In fact, for a passing moment, it is Syber who feels anxious.

Knowing that things will only escelate from here, Syber quickly reaches for his folded rifle behind his back and flips it open roughly. Despite being a sniper rifle, it is capable of bringing some heavy devestation even in close quarters. He rolls to his left and lets off a round in the direction of Bliss’ head- almost half heartedly, becuase as he always reminds himself, “It’s never quite as easy as one shot, one kill”...

This guy looked familiar, but people robbing Bliss happened a lot. Maybe he just matched a profile. Once Bliss took some time to smack this guy around, she could ask him about his background, childhood, and family- but for now, this man pulled out a very large rifle. And changed his clothes?

Oh.

Two can play at that.

Bliss snapped her fingers twice. Once to put a telekinetic push against the firing mechanism of the rifle, hoping to trigger a misfire in the sniper rifle. The second snap switched her clothing with nanobots to move from slipper and bathrobe clad homebody into the black pleated skirt with white leotard with a pair of knee high black boots. "Nice suit. But, don't bring a rifle to a magic fight."

Ice would begin to form around Syber's feet, trying to freeze his ankles. "It leads to cold feet."

As the bullet jams in Syber's rifle barrel (setting off a small alarm to prevent use while damaged), he quickly realizes that his usually trusty companion just won't cut it in this fight. In fact, he realized that in this situation, even he himself really is no match.

Noticing with some level of horror that his feet are literally beginning to frost over rapidly, he yells some combination of curse words before he directs his suit to tense hydraulically, ripping away from the mound of ice, which, unfortunately for him, snags several small hexagonal screens from the sole of his suit monitor as its prize. He throws the beeping rifle to the ground with a clatter to remain un-locatable.

"There goes about 10k", he mutters under his breath, and without warning, he begins to vanish into thin air. Suddenly he swings a fast double-kick in Bliss direction (seen as a few sparking (damaged) black hexagons flying rapidly through the air towards her) and then is nowhere to be seen.

"I find that the world is a much more inviting place for the invisible...", Bliss hears him say with a laugh.

Syber begins an unpredictable barrage of punches and kicks that seem to come from thin air...

Everything was coming up Bliss!

"Your gun isn't working." Bliss pointed her finger at Syber and his weapon, giving a confirmation of the technical situation. The rifle clanged on the ground as ice began to form around Syber's ankles. "Oops. I think you broke it."

Ice began to form up around her hands, preparing for a blast of either ice or telekinesis, or maybe both, right into Syber's chest or gut, or maybe both. But, then she could not see her target anymore. What she did not go through the motions of was a flying double kick to her shoulder and arm. That came as an unpleasant surprise. She just managed to dodge the kick to her head, keeping herself conscious and unconcussed.

More blows followed up inside of Bliss' defensive guard, too close for her to put up any form of shield against the attack. But, she did manage to muster some defense in her stead. Ice began to form around her chest and upper arms, hoping to punish any punch her opponent delivered with a frozen and jagged respite. While she suffered the concussive force of the blows, Bliss managed to get her hands up to defend her head while edging closer through her frozen upper body, until she could try to reach out and grab a part of Syber. If she could grab hold of his arm or shoulder, she could unleash a focused telekinetic blast.

Syber's barrage continued only momentarily before his fist struck a sharp icicle forming on Bliss' shoulder, slicing straight through the tough fabric of his suit and between his knuckles, deep into his flesh and parallel perfectly to his fore-arm, projecting out slightly beyond his wrist. He staggers back while howling in pain, not so much because of the immediate pain of the icicle, but the horrible results of Bliss grabbing and twisting his arm while it was present. The wound appears like a miniature crimson cloud in the air dripping blood like raindrops.

Realizing that this fight is now hopeless for him, Syber spins off the ground with his last strength, in an attempt to both escape and trip Bliss, and takes a running leap to her computer.

Knowing that he is now easily visible to Bliss (due to his wound and missing monitors) he simply deactivates the suit to preserve energy, and after flipping the lid on Bliss' laptop up rather violently, attempts to enter the machine my pressing his hand firmly on the monitor... any moment now he will be absorbed into Bliss' PC...

Bliss managed to recover her stance, but it would take some time for the soreness of the barrage delivered to her to subside. But, from the look of Syber, he would take longer to recover. Instead of immediately jumping to deliver a direct response, Bliss made sure her peripherals let her know the coast was clear. A quick kick to her leg knocked Bliss down to a crouched position, but she persisted through the pain.

No follow up came.

If he did not want to continue the fight, he wanted to run. And, if he wanted to run, he probably wanted to steal anything he could get his hands on. "Hey!" Bliss pointed her finger towards Syber, pulling her abdomen too tight for comfort, and straining her sore core. "Hands off the laptop!"

An impossibility played out before her. Syber made his way into the laptop. Bliss rushed over to the computer, lifting the screen to see the monitor before looking to see if she could still manage control over the device. "Time for a failsafe." Bliss would flip the laptop over and pull the battery out of the back of the computer, then she would grab the power cord and try to disconnect it.

The inside of Blss computer is exactly the opposite of what Syber was wishing to see. Half of her files appear to be dumped on her desktop, including large collections of software source code not organized between folders, and many of the files that are in folders are encrypted.

This is like Syber’s worst nightmare, as second to bacteria on Syber’s list of major dislikes is a messy file tree. So much so that his employees at Deeptech Inc. are obligated to organize their desktops every morning.

Bliss’ semi-transparent desktop looms in front of him, a perfectly lined up image of her leaning casually against the edge of the monitor, while creating a ball of brightly glowing ice between her hands.

Syber feels a pang of regret at never having such a cool wallpaper. He’ll have to have his designers get on that.

All of this, of course, won’t matter at all if he doesnt manage to get the nanotech and get out of here quickly enough, which seems to be an ever dwindling possibility. Through the haze Syber can see Bliss beginging to flip over the computer to remove the batteries... something he needs to prevent immediately. After gettig a glance at a few intrueging files on her desktop, he opens the terminal and quickly enters a couple lines:

> cd ~/home/desktop/nanotech
> run nanotech_control_protocol.exe

...

Reaching to unplug her computer, Bliss sees a bright red window pop up on her computer screen:

EXECUTING NANOTECH CONTROL PROTOCOL!

The sleeves of Bliss shirt which are composed of nanotech would rapidly flow down her arms and begin to crystalize over the computer plug and power button...

Taking the battery out got her halfway to stopping Syber from doing whatever he put his mind to. None of it could be good. Nothing at all. Especially when the halfsleeve of Bliss' leotard turned into a full sleeve. Quickly, the material overtook her arm- and the power button and cord of the laptop. "Executing Nanotech control protocol?! Who told- oh the stupid guy is in my laptop."

Bliss began to try to lift the laptop over her head, throwing it to the ground.

But, the laptop never left her hand.

The nanotech kept Bliss and the laptop attached to her hand. Since she could not smash the device, Bliss went to the next step. Freezing it.

Syber's search to find any files on the construction of the nanotech is going well. He has already found what he assumes are nanobot schematics, but Bliss has encrypted them with a specific key. Without the key, the schematics will be useless.

Due to the layout of the encrypted data in the file, he knows that the key must be a 64 digit Zue-Key, a powerful encryption tool developed by Zue Industries about 5 years ago.

There must be a file mentioning the correct key somewhere on her computer, because memorizing a 64 character key is virtually unheard of...

As he executes his final file search, which he is almost certain will return the correct files, data on the file system begins to crumble away with horrible screeching noises.

With a glance to the physical world outside, there is almost nothing to see but a pale frosted screen with shards of ice crawling gradually over it.

For a moment Syber is aghast at what he is seeing happening around him:
The files start disappearing in droves, and the computer's terminal starts glitching erratically. Not surprisingly, freezing a computers hard drive solid does not do good things to the file system.
Syber's file search completes.

-| Located 1 file matching entered regular expression!

The cyber world around him is quickly deteriorating, crumbling to pieces. Now connections to other networks are simply popping off the grid: The computer seems to be losing its connection to the condo's Internet Router.

"Damn it! If I don't get out now, I'll be corrupted with the rest of the computer!"

Syber pushes off the node he is standing on in the file tree hard, and floats quickly towards the encryption code he located. Touching it, it is absorbed into him and stored in his suit memory banks.

"Time to get out of this hell hole!"

With a millisecond of concentration, his image warps and is accelerated at light-speed down one of the remaining internet connections.

The computer spits out a loud buzz as its core system files are corrupted:

ERROR:
A problem has been detected and your operating system has been shut down to avoid damage to your computer.

[HARDDRIVE_COMPROMISED]

If this is the first time you've seen this Stop error screen, please restart your computer.

Ice continued to swell over the casing of the laptop. Bliss grimaced as she thought of all the data she never backed up on the laptop, but then she began to grimace as she thought of how much it could hurt when she actually broke the thing against the ground. "Maybe telekinesis would- no, shrapnel. Much worse."

One strike.

Two strikes.

Three and a broken casing.

Water from the melting ice sparked the motherboard. "If he's still in there, he's not happy." A brow raised over Bliss' forehead and the ice covered laptop fell to the ground, shattering. "I'm not happy."

Nothing else in the room tried to kill her. And, no footsteps traipsed through the upstairs. "Bad news. Always bad news. Did that guy look familiar?"

The clamor inside of Bliss' apartment appears to have gone mostly unnoticed. The apartment buildings around Bliss' condo are beginning to flick off for the evening one by one. But not everyone is falling fast asleep. No, a tall man with a top hat reveals himself out of the shadows of an alleyway. He faintly whispers something like "Now, now, what was my brother up to here..." before laughing as if it was a joke. His red hair glows in the darkness as he walks almost daintily up to the door of the condo. He punches the keypad's buttons randomly while chuckling for several minutes as if very pleased by it until he murmurs something about "having enough fun for the night". He sets his hat on the ground next to the door and reclines on top of it.

Somehow, it is not crushed by his weight.

He rests patiently on his hat, occasionally looking at his wristwatch and clicking his tongue as if someone were late...

What was left of Bliss' computer lay shattered on the ground in front of her. Sure, she did not have a computer anymore, but the computer knew the score. If it could still manage to think, it would fear the harsh retribution. All would fear her retribution.

While her foe rushed through wires and data, Bliss kept to the good old fashioned lift of her legs. She would leave behind the wreckage of her basement for later. For now, she needed to close the distance on who or whatever conjured up the audacity to attack Bliss in her own home.

Bliss kicked her slippers off and replaced them with a pair of tennis shoes. For all of her nanotech, she still could not get away from trusting a good pair of slippers. With her feet taken care of, Bliss made her way to the door, careful to check the peephole first to check for anything out of the ordinary, then stepped out onto the front porch of her abode.