Emma invited Puppy into her flat but received another curt head-shake. Instead Puppy found a space up there, mostly concealed, almost den-like and Emma tried not to shake her head in disbelief, and found a couple of blankets and a packet of biscuits that she left up there. Curled up in a nest-like structure Puppy seemed closed to her nickname that Emma remembered her being when they were... running for their lives, she supposed. Back inside her own flat she pushed away the memory of jealousy. She'd been wrong on that, and maybe she'd been an idiot even to be jealous, but that was in the past. It was odd how old emotions hung around like that though. She hadn't even been aware that she could still remember feeling like that, remember pushing Red away because she thought he preferred Puppy – Laika – over her. That was after Q had died... and now there was a sadness, an ache that she never actually forgot but that sometimes she could put where she didn't have to think about it. She rubbed her eyes. She was tired, not crying. Tired or not she opened up her laptop and connected to the anonymising Tor network. Q would have loved this, she thought; it was everything he'd used to do but simplified, made accessible to other people. God only knows what he'd have built on top -- hah, inside of -- it. Something beautiful and abstract that would protect their secrets even better than last time. The browser loaded the landing page.Welcome to Goat Skull Ranch read the text, and there was an image of a California ranch house with two goat skulls, bleached by eternal summer, mounted on wooden stakes at the start of the driveway. She opened up an app on her phone, and the number 4 popped up. She reloaded the page 4 times, then clicked on a window in the ranch house. Nothing happened, but when she opened a new tab and tapped in the URL for Canada's international gateway she was redirected to a form submission page: white boxes and a submit button, and no indication at all of what it might be used for. She typed Mail into the second text box and clicked Submit. An outlook-styled mail client loaded onto the page. Her phone buzzed, and she checked it. Message from Red: Secrets found and a picture. She frowned, wondering why there was a picture of a chainlink fence with an angry dog leaping up at it, until she spotted the object on the ground near a broken window. Zooming in, she decided that it might just be a bust of some kind... it looked familiar. She scanned through the email messages: not many thankfully. In the days of the Rebel Voice there'd been more. But... ah, she'd been expecting this somehow. A message about forged paintings. Just what were they being pulled into here?
Greg - love the image of Puppy setting in on the roof.
And clever inclusion of the prompt. Was pretty sure this would stump you on continuing the story but I suppose I should know better by now than to underestimate you.
Enjoyed the little trip down memory lane as well. And now I'm as curious as Emma is as to what is going on here...
I was cleaning the washrooms at main beach one morning when a lady, who was out walking her dog, came over to me and said 'Someone abandoned a package over there on the curb.'
That's an interesting way of putting it, I thought.
"I don't know what it is. There's... things sticking out of it.'
Okay, am I entering CSI territory? This package sounds suspicious as hell.
"Okay, I'll go take a look," I told her. "From a safe distance.'
Then her parting shot, as she was walking away: "I don't know if somebody left it as a joke or what..."
So I go check it out, approaching slowly while trying not to look worried about what I was going to find. Turns out? It was a plastic grocery bag... with a goat skull in it. One full horn, one broken horn, missing it's mandible.
And, when I nudged it with my garbage picker, it frickin' stunk.
I had no idea at the time what in the hell was going on. My foreman though maybe somebody had left it out to dry/cure/whatever and a dog had dragged it off. I decided that I was happy with that explanation and stopped thinking about how else it might have gotten there.
3 comments:
Emma invited Puppy into her flat but received another curt head-shake. Instead Puppy found a space up there, mostly concealed, almost den-like and Emma tried not to shake her head in disbelief, and found a couple of blankets and a packet of biscuits that she left up there. Curled up in a nest-like structure Puppy seemed closed to her nickname that Emma remembered her being when they were... running for their lives, she supposed.
Back inside her own flat she pushed away the memory of jealousy. She'd been wrong on that, and maybe she'd been an idiot even to be jealous, but that was in the past. It was odd how old emotions hung around like that though. She hadn't even been aware that she could still remember feeling like that, remember pushing Red away because she thought he preferred Puppy – Laika – over her. That was after Q had died... and now there was a sadness, an ache that she never actually forgot but that sometimes she could put where she didn't have to think about it. She rubbed her eyes. She was tired, not crying.
Tired or not she opened up her laptop and connected to the anonymising Tor network. Q would have loved this, she thought; it was everything he'd used to do but simplified, made accessible to other people. God only knows what he'd have built on top -- hah, inside of -- it. Something beautiful and abstract that would protect their secrets even better than last time.
The browser loaded the landing page.Welcome to Goat Skull Ranch read the text, and there was an image of a California ranch house with two goat skulls, bleached by eternal summer, mounted on wooden stakes at the start of the driveway. She opened up an app on her phone, and the number 4 popped up. She reloaded the page 4 times, then clicked on a window in the ranch house. Nothing happened, but when she opened a new tab and tapped in the URL for Canada's international gateway she was redirected to a form submission page: white boxes and a submit button, and no indication at all of what it might be used for. She typed Mail into the second text box and clicked Submit. An outlook-styled mail client loaded onto the page.
Her phone buzzed, and she checked it. Message from Red: Secrets found and a picture. She frowned, wondering why there was a picture of a chainlink fence with an angry dog leaping up at it, until she spotted the object on the ground near a broken window. Zooming in, she decided that it might just be a bust of some kind... it looked familiar.
She scanned through the email messages: not many thankfully. In the days of the Rebel Voice there'd been more. But... ah, she'd been expecting this somehow. A message about forged paintings. Just what were they being pulled into here?
Greg - love the image of Puppy setting in on the roof.
And clever inclusion of the prompt. Was pretty sure this would stump you on continuing the story but I suppose I should know better by now than to underestimate you.
Enjoyed the little trip down memory lane as well. And now I'm as curious as Emma is as to what is going on here...
I was cleaning the washrooms at main beach one morning when a lady, who was out walking her dog, came over to me and said 'Someone abandoned a package over there on the curb.'
That's an interesting way of putting it, I thought.
"I don't know what it is. There's... things sticking out of it.'
Okay, am I entering CSI territory? This package sounds suspicious as hell.
"Okay, I'll go take a look," I told her. "From a safe distance.'
Then her parting shot, as she was walking away: "I don't know if somebody left it as a joke or what..."
So I go check it out, approaching slowly while trying not to look worried about what I was going to find. Turns out? It was a plastic grocery bag... with a goat skull in it. One full horn, one broken horn, missing it's mandible.
And, when I nudged it with my garbage picker, it frickin' stunk.
I had no idea at the time what in the hell was going on. My foreman though maybe somebody had left it out to dry/cure/whatever and a dog had dragged it off. I decided that I was happy with that explanation and stopped thinking about how else it might have gotten there.
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