This is Kurt's private weblog from the Perplex City Academy, only accessible from Earth.
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The Perplex City Academy
The Scarlett Kite
Quirky Acuity
It's been a busy few weeks, during which time I've been doing two jobs and reporting to two bosses (three, if you count Violet). The work on securing the data link between Earth and Perplex City has nearly finished now, following a series of hellishly ferocious simulated attacks. It's so secure now that I'm convinced there's nothing anyone could do to disrupt the flow of information between our two worlds, short of a full physical assault, and the last time I looked, the Third Power didn't have an army.
Partly as a result of this, Garnet's been in a rather good mood. He can often be seen striding around the corridors purposefully, like a man who solved a particularly troubling mechanical puzzle where the parts weren't moving quite right - and now they're all in motion, all in unison. The other reason, it's rumoured, is Camryn Scott's struggles in the election. Garnet's never made a secret of his preference for Earlywine (something which I respect - at least he says it aloud) and it's hard to believe that an Earlywine victory wouldn't benefit him or his ideals.
Garnet's good mood, thankfully, has meant that he's missed my frequent moonlighting as backup for Violet and Scarlett in Lancewood, which was mostly boring, and sometimes terrifying.
Most people are lucky enough not to know what real terror is. Drowning in Silburn-Griggs, seconds away from death, with no way out; that was terror. But when I was sitting safely at my desk in the Academy, watching the Kiteways in Lancewood while someone systematically destroyed the facility... that was worse. And that's to say nothing of the state Caine was in.
Scarlett appeared to cope well with what she had to do to Major Jake Maine in the Quiet Room, but then it can be easy to cover up your feelings. Violet's not the sort of person who likes publicly empathising with, well, anyone, so I assumed that she hadn't talked things through with her sister. I'm not the best counsellor either, but then again, I have relevant experience. When I told Scarlett that she could talk to me about it, she seemed a little unsure but at least she knows that I'm here.
I still think about Miranda occasionally, in the abstract. I think about who she was when she was younger, and how she became part of the Third Power. I don't let thoughts wander too closely to anything else.
Between the more pressing demands of my real job and Lancewood, I had to break off my investigation into Special Project 487 (which sounds suspiciously like Major Jake's '487th'). It's an odd string of characters. Whenever I look for it, there seems to be less and less information available, as if there's something monitoring the term. I mulled this over a little while, and realised the behaviour bore more than a passing resemblance to the Djinn virus, which managed to hide itself from discovery by monitoring and changing information on the network intelligently.
But it's not quite the Djinn virus. It's better than that, because when I tried to decompile it, it wiped my key. Back to the drawing board, I suppose.