Chapter 52: ~Chapter 17~ Part 1

"I still can't believe this..." I whispered for the umpteenth time between two sips from my giant ‘I <3 coffee' mug. I re-read the section in question to make sure I interpreted it properly before I jotted down a few questions into my notebook, crossed out a previous one, and then dropped it all onto the desk with exasperation and stood up from my computer with a low groan.

A quick glance at the clock told me it was well past midnight, and while it wasn't late per se (the word kind of lost its meaning because of my sleepless lifestyle anyways), it still meant I spent close to seven hours hunched over in front of my monitor. I was fairly certain that was unhealthy, but I continued right where I left off after a quick bathroom break and grabbing some snacks from the fridge downstairs.

I stared at the site still open in front of me and I couldn't decide whether I should feel incredibly lucky or absolutely terrified. Angie probably had no idea about it (or at least I hoped she didn't), but its main purpose wasn't to educate newly initiated Celestials. By the way, yes, Celestials living in human society had to be initiated at a young age, and before that, they didn't even know they were magical. It had something to do with protocols and hierarchy and something that sounded suspiciously like a caste system, but it was beside the point.

Wait, what was the point again? Ah, right: the Celestial Hub. In short, it wasn't just a crappy site designed to show the ropes for the newbies; it was actually a crappy site designed to show the ropes for the newbies... that also happened to be the hub of the entire Celestial Intelligence Network! In other words, I just hacked into the Pentagon of the supernatural by complete accident!

I mean, what the actual hell? I knew mundane governments had lots of problems with cybersecurity, but being able to guess an administrator-level password of an allegedly elite branch of a secret supernatural superpower was a failure of such epic proportions that I was still half-expecting it to be a trap.

Yet, the rewards were simply too great to ignore, and what originally began as cautious browsing of the more innocent-looking items soon turned into a deep dive into the secrets of one of the supernatural giants of this world.

Most of the data contained within the databases and reports, which had to be accessed through a separate interface that reminded me of the DOS era, were obviously about Celestials and their sneaky business. Looking at it made me realize just what Angie meant when she said her people ‘had a reputation' and that everyone would think she was a mole in the group. Hell, after what I saw here, even I wasn't one hundred percent certain she wasn't.

But I was getting ahead of myself. According to what I gathered, Celestials were defined by three things: their frantic search for this previously mentioned ‘Deus' fellow (who contrary to his name wasn't a god, just a very powerful not-angel and a bit of a cult-leader), their rigid adherence to a stratified society, and using third parties and counter-intelligence to keep the other factions at bay.

All three of those were related to said Deus fellow, so I might as well explain his deal. A couple centuries ago there was a war between the Celestials and the Abyssals. I can't say I was particularly surprised by that one; angels and demons obviously wouldn't get along, even if they were roses by any other name. Anyways, the Abyssals were actually winning, so Deus, the dear leader of all Celestials, hallowed be his holy socks, sacrificed himself in order to create an impenetrable barrier to seal the Abyssals into the Abyss (and just to answer Angie's off-handed question, yes, apparently they were called so even before they were sealed away).

What's that? You wonder how Snowy and her big bro are running around if there is a totally impenetrable and no way contrived barrier locking all Abyssals into their underground realm of slight unpleasantness? Well, okay, technically it wasn't all that unpleasant, as one informant in a thread even said they had great vacation spots. More on that later. Anyhow, the reason for the Abyssals' presence on the island was...

... entirely unclear to me.

Since Judy didn't know about all this when she talked with Snowy, she naturally couldn't inquire about it either, so I supposed it was left to me to ask the girl later. By the way, my dear assistant also sent me another report with all the info she drilled out of the white-haired Seducer (that was the technical name of her kind; I suppose ‘succubus' wasn't on the nose enough), but I was so deep in my site-crawling that I only skimmed it before I returned to my PC. I didn't want to devalue her efforts, but damn, this site was a treasure-trove that was hard to compete with.

Anyways, according to the long mourning diatribes on the 'tutorial' facet of the site (and I do mean long; there was even a three hours long eulogy there), the Celestials were devastated by the death of their most noble, courageous, and charismatic leader, and dedicated themselves to upholding ‘the perfect society he created'. Did I mention he was a bit of a creepy cult leader yet? Because he totally was.

By the way, this is where the Celestial prophecy comes into the picture. According to it, this Deus fellow's soul would be reborn as a human and usher in a new golden age for the Celestials. However, they had absolutely no idea exactly when or where he would return, and they were afraid that if they interbred with humans (which they could apparently do, for your interest) it would make finding the needle in the haystack even harder, so they not only completely removed themselves from human affairs, but even proceeded to work in the shadows to limit the influence of the other factions as well.

What were these other factions? Well, I was already well-acquainted with the Draconians and the Abyssals. The former were descendants of an ancient race of shape-shifting dragons interbreeding with humans and used to be the dominant force in human society until a few hundred years ago. Then they were hunted down by knights. Whether those knights were also rescuing princesses from tall towers in the process, I had no idea.

Seriously though, there've been a couple of references to something called ‘The Knightly Brotherhood of the Most Heroic Bloodlines', which was a mouthful of a name if I've ever heard one. More relevantly, they appeared to be a sort of secret society that existed for nearly a thousand years and has been fighting the supernatural races in general and dragons in particular. The Celestials had a pretty bad opinion on them, calling them a ‘failed experiment' and whatnot, but they were apparently responsible for the extinction of the real dragons and the Draconians' decline in power.

Now, silly as it sounded, I actually wasn't kidding about them rescuing princesses, though I was still entirely unsure about the tower part. As my research revealed, Draconians seemed to have a strange obsession with kidnapping royalty. Or rather, Sebastian in particular had a strange obsession with it. If these records are to be believed, a dapper gentleman with white stripes in his hair had been running around continental Europe and occasionally kidnapping people in power since the freakin 5th century. Well, I had to give it to him, he was dedicated to his craft. Or maybe he just has a fetish for princesses. Or their ransom money. One or the other.

Speaking of fetishes, while the Celestials didn't like the knights, they must've found the dragons incredibly sexy, as Abyssals are actually a race that was born from a mixed Celestial/Dragon lineage. The articles on these guys were also all over the place. About half of them described them as crazy, war-mongering madmen leading armies of Fauns (those are some kind of animal-human-hybrid monsters or something; they never went into great detail) constantly fighting each other over something called ‘Mana Wells' in the Abyss, while the other half described them as creepy, manipulative assholes that would sell their own mothers for power. Granted, the two depictions weren't mutually exclusive, but then there was a very small minority that said that the Abyssals were perfectly normal people who are just being driven to extremes because of their exile.

Now, the faction I didn't actually know much about was the Magi. Or Wizards. Or Mages. Or Sorcerers. Or whatever.

I'm serious. It seemed that no one could make up their mind about what these guys were called. I've already referred to them as Magi, since according to Judy that's what the class rep called her ‘people', so I decided to stick to that.

Thankfully, what they were was a little bit easier to figure out than their official name. Magi were, according to the introductory articles, another secret society focused on researching magic and ‘piercing the veil of creation', whatever the hell that meant. They had a central governmental body called The Assembly, but they otherwise lived and worked in ‘Schools' dedicated to certain pursuits. While I figured this was a reference to different ‘schools of magic' one would see in an RPG, I had a hunch it might have been fairly literal in our case. In fact, I was pretty sure the local ‘School' was right under our actual school.

More importantly, Magi were something of a grudging ally of the Celestials, or rather, their goals were fairly similar. The Magi wanted to preserve the status quo to be able to research magic and do whatever else they wanted in peace, which was pretty much in line with the Celestials' non-involvement policy. The grudging part came from the fact that the Magi viewed the Celestials as just as much of a nuisance as the other factions, and thus their relationship was less about cooperation and more about turning a blind eye to their activities so long as it didn't involve Magi business. So yeah, petty power-politics were very much alive in the supernatural world as well.

There were also some footnotes about another minor faction in the articles, something called ‘Non-causative Science Research Society', an off-shoot branch of the Magi that broke off a couple of decades ago. There wasn't much known about them, and they didn't seem to be a major player, so I also delegated them to my own footnotes.

Speaking of which, my notebook was getting messy again. I looked over the questions I've written down and decided to start doing pinpoint searches. My first target was the word ‘prophecy', but when I looked up at the screen I noticed a red exclamation mark on the button just above the search bar. It said ‘Chat'.

I hovered my mouse over it for a moment, uncertain about how safe it would be to make direct contact like this, but curiosity took the better of me. I should've been fairly safe. I was using a proxy and was accessing the site with a browser designed to be hard to track, so unless I made some mistake with the settings, my identity was fairly secure.

I took a deep breath to steel myself and clicked the button. After the site reloaded, I was treated to a blank white chat window. It didn't stay that way for long.

"MoroseMoose: Hello Admin."

"MoroseMoose: Where have you been?"

"MoroseMoose: We haven't heard from you for months."

I gulped as my fingers hovered over the keyboard, albeit not for long.

"Admin: I was busy with work."

"MoroseMoose: I figured."

"MoroseMoose: Are you back for good?"

"MoroseMoose: It was a pain in the ass to manage the site in your absence, you know? T_T"

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: ADMIN IS BACK?!?!?!?!???1?!!?one (٭°̧̧̧ω°̧̧̧٭)"

"MoroseMoose: Yes. I just noticed it too."

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: FINALLY!!! (≧∇≦)/"

You are reading story The Simulacrum at novel35.com

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: DUDE WE REALLY NEED YOU TO GET RID OF THESE F****G SPAMBOTS!!!

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻"

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: WHERE DID YOU DISAPPEAR TO ANYWAYS?!?!?!"

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: HELLO, ARE YOU STILL THERE?!?!?!!!!?!? ( •᷄ὤ•᷅)？"

"Admin: Yeah. Stop yelling."

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: oops.sorry. ⁄(⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄)⁄"

I paused for a moment. I recognized the names from the forums attached to the main site. These guys were some of the regulars, and while they were ‘agents', they seemed fairly typical as far as internet denizens were concerned. Then again, most Celestials living in the human world only knew this site as a crappy PSA page dedicated to helping newcomers catch up. Because of this, we had a lot of fairly normal people who used the forums to ask questions from more ‘experienced' Celestials, while the actual spies and field agents only used the site to deposit their reports into the main database.

These guys were the middle ground; users who were serious members of the celestial intelligence network but at the same time used the forums and chat to socialize as well... and I had no idea about how to interact with them. In retrospect, maybe entering into this chatroom was not one of my brighter ideas, but I had no choice but to run with it and improvise as best as I could.

"Admin: I was underground."

"MoroseMoose: You were in the Abyss?"

"Admin: Not literally."

"Admin: Also, the Abyss isn't actually under the ground."

I paused again and suddenly recalled a fairly recent report I skimmed through a few hours before.

"Admin: I had to move because of the fallout after the Cardhouse incident."

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: THAT S**T AGAIN?!?! F***K, WAS THERE ANYONE WHO WASN'T F*****D OVER BY THAT S**T?!?!?!!!?!?!?? ( ≧Д≦)"

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?!!?!?!?! (ó﹏ò｡)"

"Admin: Mostly. I have to lie low for a while."

"MoroseMoose: Good to hear."

"MoroseMoose: Are you going to keep managing the site?"

"Admin: Yes, I will try to clean things up a little."

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: GOOD. START WITH THE M***********G SPAMBOTS!!!!"

"MoroseMoose: I have to agree with my eloquent colleague."

"MoroseMoose: I'm not joking. It's been a huge problem since you left."

I massaged my brows to help them unknot as I looked at the chat window. So now that I took the identity of the administrator, I have to keep pretending until I finished getting as much info out of the site as I can. Though, on second thought, having the hub of the Celestial Intelligence Network at my beck and call had potential. Oh, and danger. Blood-curling, run-for-your-life, the-entire-might-of-the-Celestial-people-crashing-onto-your-head kind of danger. Any sane person would've pulled the plug at this point. I suppose it says a lot about me that I just snorted and limbered up my fingers before I continued.

"Admin: Fine. We are going to do a full reset."

"MoroseMoose: What? :\"

"Admin: We reset all the passwords. I'm also going to get rid of the ads, they are a security risk."

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: AND HOW ARE WE GOING TO PAY FOR THE SERVER?!!!!?!?!"

"Admin: Let me worry about that one. You guys spread the word, I will take care of the new security measures. We need better password security too. I might also hire someone to redesign the main page if I'm at that."

"Admin: If everything works as planned, we should get the site working as intended in a few days."

"MoroseMoose: We? Since when are we working on the site?"

"Admin: Since about ten seconds ago. Congratulations on your promotion."

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: WOW!1!!one! Ｏ(≧▽≦)Ｏ"

"W1NG3D N1NJ4: ADMIN TOOK A LEVEL IN AWESOME!!! I APPROVE!! (●♡∀♡)"

"MoroseMoose: Whatevs. I will do my part. "

"Admin: Good."

I stretched my fingers and began to enact my plans with enthusiasm that surprised even me.

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