Okay, so it's time for the first preview of D3RP & PR0XY. In the spirit of being someone with a few 90s laptops lying around with age-appropriate operating systems (Windows 98 with a dial-up modem), that's the computer that's going to be doing most of the editing and bookwork (sans the upcoming week, of course). Anyway, you're going to see the welcoming pieces of their lives. Penelope isn't a Greg House (like a certain Soviet Vyatka we know and thankfully don't exist with), though she still doesn't let anything go. Jayden, on the other hand, knows how to be a decent person in general and to not use her talents for making a sweet $20k from digital murder. Granted, that's not to say either of them are without their flaws. Follow along as Penelope and Jayden go about their daily lives, first in Bellevue, then to Chunking, Tientsen, and Tungking. Everyone else, however, calls it Tokyo, but the girl uses a lot of Mandarin when she speaks. Anyway, follow along as Penelope shows where a once-troubled outcast truly shines.
I woke up around 9:45, according to my phone- another late night. Yesterday had been a standard-issue day for me, so much so that the most exciting thing was finally getting a Mr Coffee from the store. It didn't have any of the bells and whistles on it, just a cheap unit. On the other hand, I was still getting used to Jayden moving into my house and having the spare bedroom. Before March 2022, I could go through wherever and whatever I wanted until I fell asleep (I didn't even turn the washing machine on until 1:00 some nights). Now, I had to be quiet, which meant more than I'd like it to, but when people found out that D3RP was giving computer classes, there were actual bidding wars taking place. Jayden had gotten the old store building on the hill and fixed it up with a desk at the front and two rows of five tables that could seat two people each, as well an area for the printer, router, and electric kettle. The cops, meanwhile, were still looking for PR0XY (my handle), and had been profiling it as a Macanese woman.
Getting ready for the day wasn't something I put too much thought into, it just never affected me. Today, I ended up in a pair of blue jeans, black shoes, and a red shirt that had 阅读他妈的手册! printed in bold, yellow characters. My square sunglasses from the dollar store propped on my head and my hair was styled the same way it was every day: with complete neglect.
Jayden had already went to teach her morning class, which left the house empty. Being it was a Monday, I probably had loads of numbers to work with, but I'd probably just wait until it closed at 8:30 before I got started. While there was black paint on the Plexiglas window on top of the half-wall behind my workstation (there had been for a few years now), that didn't stop the chatter from being constant. Sure, it didn't look very well (according to some), but it took care of prying eyes that were shorter than seven feet. Combine that with Jayden staying at my house and I had the perfect reason to not start on any of that work until 11:00 at night. Still, while I had my old laptop, I didn't have much of a use for it anymore. Before, if I needed a spare because my Acer had crashed, I could just have Windows 98 route all of my networking traffic through my proxies and go on unaffected, though this happened rarely, so it stayed in its bag on the shelf for 90% of its life after I got the new laptop a few years back, rinse and repeat with upgrades.
Still, there was something nice about sitting down to that thing and hearing the drive click as I worked, even if it was just a board from eBay making the noise with the light on the case.
『That'll end well,』 I muttered in Chinese as I poured another cup of my robusta coffee.
The TV in the living room was set to the cable feed and turned to channel 42 with the news going on about how Pr0xy still was on the lamb and how officials now think the account might be controlled by several people from different locations around the world, rather than a Macanese woman in her early thirties. In reality, it was the girl who ate up free time on the job with hacking or playing Doom and Myst.
“Hey,” Jayden said, coming back in a few minutes after I'd sat down to an episode of The IT Crowd, “Having fun yet?”
“I just woke up.”
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