Into Equestria

by TheMajorTechie

7 | Is only the beginning.

Ding.

Lisa lifted her headset a little, eyeing the notification that appeared on her phone. It was a little hard to read from the angle she was reading from, but from the looks of it, it was some sort of alert.

She lifted her headset higher, reaching for her phone. So much for a relaxing evening. Then again, an alert was an alert, and it wasn’t as if this simulation was all that important anyway.

“Spacing out again? Sis, you really need to stop… uh, stopping!”

Leaning back with her phone in hand, Lisa pulled her headset off entirely. The device let out a tinny whine in protest of the sudden disconnection, but nevertheless smoothly returned control to AI-Lisa. The bright glow of her phone’s screen illuminated her face in the otherwise dark room. She scrolled past the usual swath of randomness that’d built up in her notifications—emails, some messages from a chatroom, CatFactsDaily—the works. She paused when the alert finally came into view.

“Anticheat?” Lisa muttered under her breath, “That’s… that’s the first time in a while we gotten an alert from it. Huh.”

She set her phone down, rolling herself over to her keyboard. Something big enough to trigger the anticheat was definitely going to leave a mark in the server’s audit log.

It only took a few clicks to navigate to the logs. The most recent one—that is, the one generated by the anticheat—sat at the very top of the list.

“Lisa!” Twilight’s voice suddenly shouted through the speakers. “You got the notification, right? Anticheat just caught a Queen Chrysalis impersonator. I’m not really sure what she was trying to do that triggered it, but it seems like she might be a problem for a while.”

“Okay, okay!” Lisa switched over to the constantly-active viewport window into Equestria. Twilight was standing front-and-center, Luster Da… Elise Fairchild standing at her side. The little green light on her webcam turned on. “So, you’re saying that we could be looking at the beginning of some kind of hacking effort?”

Another ban notification appeared—this time on-screen.

Twilight looked over her shoulder, then back to Lisa. “Yep. Certainly seems like it right now. There’s another changeling as well that seems to be an underling of the false Queen Chrysalis. He hasn’t done anything much yet, but I’ll be keeping an eye on him for now.”

Yet another notification. This Chrysalis impersonator really didn’t know when to stop, did she?

“How many times do you think she’ll try reconnecting?”

“No idea,” Lisa pulled up the audit logs, scrolling through the multiple ban notifications pointing to a single account. “At any rate, I think an IP ban’ll probably be a better idea. She hasn’t tried using a different account yet, but if she does, then she’ll at least need to go through the hassle of a VPN to get back in next time around.”

“You’d think that she’d be stopping by now,” Twilight rolled her eyes as another notification appeared on Lisa’s screen. “Isn’t trying over and over when you know nothing’s gonna change the definition of insanity?”

Lisa shrugged, typing a string of commands into a console window. “There we go, a blanket-ban on the IP address.” she yawned, glancing at the time. “I think I’ll leave it at this for now. If anything happens, the system’s anticheat should be able to handle it. Goodnight, Twilight.”

“Goodnight.”

“And you too, Elise. I know it’s still a weekend tomorrow, but after the weirdness that went down, I think you should have some off-time as well.”

She minimized the viewport window and logged off her computer. Though, the fact that there was a hacker on the server at all was a little unnerving still. Security beyond the individual headsets had never really been prioritized if she remembered correctly, so…

Lisa shook her head. She could think about that tomorrow after some rest.

~~~

“Ack,” Chryssi spat, pulling off her headset. “Freakin’ blanket ban. I can’t even try reconnecting now. Pincer?”

“Kinda busy at the moment! Being interrogated by an angry purple pony right now!”

Chryssi rolled her eyes, ending the call. Even with admin perms, she was still caught by anticheat. If she was going to be able to—

“Neat.”

She looked up at Night.

The woman folded her arms over her chest, smirking. “So, little miss hacker girl, what’re you gonna do next? You’ve already more than proven yourself for now. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m getting myself a new account,” Chryssi stood up, brushing past Night. “I’d best ditch the old one now that they’ll know who it was. Gonna be a heckuva time doing anything without admin though.”

Night looked down at her new housemate’s desk. Sticky notes and coffee-stained folders littered almost every inch of its surface; old notes, memorabilia of some kind, even a couple doodles here and there. A single flash drive, however, was what caught her eye.

“I’m heading out to the store!” Chryssi yelled from the hall, “I am not gonna trust you enough yet to buy a new code online. You’ll just steal my card info or something. I think. Uhh… out. Yeah. Bye.”

The front door slammed shut, rattling the house. Night’s attention turned back to the flash drive. Of course, any old flash drive was probably as uninteresting as the next, but this one?

This one was Chryssi’s, and from the looks of the faded sharpie on it, there was something big on it.

~~~

Chryssi let out a loud sigh on the doorstep. It was pretty stressful, keeping up the act for Night and all, but it was something she could get used to. Though, that whole thing about not trusting Night enough to use her card online in the same room as her wasn’t a lie—Night just seemed like the kind of person to steal what she could get her hands on. It was a good thing she set her computer to lock itself when she walked too far away from it, that’s for sure. At least out here, she didn’t have to worry about constantly making herself look like she was ready to burst into a fit of rage or whatever. Away from Night, she could be good ol’ Rosanne again. Not Rosanne the rich girl in class, not Rosanne the programmer girl who stepped in when Samantha left; she was Rosanne the nobody, just the way she liked it.

Her thoughts shifted to getting a new account. Her old one—the one she’d been banned on, was her old work account from back when she worked at the company. It was a little odd that she retained admin rights on it even after all this time, but hey, who was she to complain? It still stunk that she wouldn’t be able to use it anymore, though. Minus the cost of support hardware, a new account was… what, a thousand… two thou—no, those were for the bundles they sold a while back. By itself a new one was probably gonna set her back some hundred or so bucks. Those things weren’t cheap, but it was at least better than a pay-to-win microtransaction scheme.

Still, at this rate, along with now needing to pay whatever amount of rent to Night every month, she’d probably need to find herself a job if she didn’t want her savings to go dry.

She went around the back of the house, pulling her bicycle out of the rickety shed leaning against a tree. She wasn’t going to even try driving the rusty white van parked in the driveway, if she knew what was good for her.

Rosanne buckled the chinstrap for her helmet, hopping onto her bike.

First task, buy herself a new account.

Second, get herself a job. Maybe she’d try some restaurant work for once.

Author's Note:

Things are only gonna escalate from here.