Chapter 56: ~Chapter 17~ Part 5

"Are you sure this is safe?" Judy asked me as she peeked over my shoulder.

"As safe as I can make it," I told her while finalizing the last few settings on her new, secure, and completely, 100% untraceable browser. Well, so far as I knew at least. I went out of my way to hide her identity behind as many proxies and false accounts as I could, but even then 100% was still a bit of a hyperbole.

"Should that make me relieved?"

She was still unconvinced, so I gave her an emphatic "Yes."

She nodded after a few seconds and walked over to her bed and sat down. If the previous conversation didn't make it abundantly clear, we were in Judy's room. It was a sparsely decorated place dominated by earth colors, beige and ocher in particular, including the drapes and the furniture. It wasn't exactly ‘girly', but it was neat and had a lived-in sense to it that my own room severely lacked, probably due to me belonging to the sleepless persuasion. In fact, her entire home felt like that, but I didn't bother to tell her that. Not that I had any chance to do so.

When I arrived I was immediately besieged by her distractingly youthful mother. We had to sit down with her for a while when she invited me for a cup of tea, and while she said she wanted to talk to me, I didn't think she meant that literally. For about half an hour she kept talking nonstop and about so many different things I lost track of the conversation five minutes in.

Judy gave up as well after several failed attempts at interrupting her and only fidgeted awkwardly at my side. It was fun to see this side of her, but I started feeling sorry for her after a while and decided to politely tell her mother that we had things to do. She finally let us go, much to my assistant's relief. She apparently was really bad at dealing with her hyperactive mother, which I found absolutely hilarious (though only in private, as Judy's sour disposition made me consider expressing my feelings a teensy bit dangerous).

I was later also introduced to her father, a stocky fellow with a bushy mustache and a fashion sense right out of the 50s. Thankfully, I didn't have to interact with him much, but when I did so during the dinner, all his lines were just thinly veiled threats about ‘making his little angel cry'. Judy seemed to be embarrassed by him too, so that was yet another topic I decided to steer clear of.

That left me with nothing but to focus on the actual thing for which I came over: the site.

"Come back for a moment please," I gestured for Judy, and she got up from the bed and walked over to me. "We need a username for your account."

She thought for a couple of seconds before she leaned over me and began typing with one hand while supporting herself with the other. She was kind of pushing her chest against my shoulder in the process, but I decided it wasn't polite to mention it, so I bore with it until she finished.

"Just ‘Assistant'?" I asked while peering at the screen. She nodded. "I guess it's fine, but it's a little plain."

"You are called Admin on the site. I think it's fitting."

"Touché."

I asked her to come up with a password, which she did while still brushing her chest against me, but by this point I didn't particularly mind anymore. Once she was satisfied, I clicked the OK button and leaned back, which finally broke our contact.

"I will approve your application once I get home and Ill introduce you to the regulars. You should be able to access most of the site. For now, we should limit ourselves to browsing it on our PCs. I'll look into whether I can get a safe browsing interface on our phones later."

"Understood. What do you want me to look into first?"

"To be honest, I don't know. There are thousands of reports there, and even more in the repository. I only skimmed the most recent ones, but the site has been running for a couple of years and the database is a mess. First, we should get that organized a little more than not at all."

"And after that?"

"It should take us a while, but after that, we should focus on our immediate area. The articles are a good primer, but the actual reports are more focused on local and political issues. We should only concentrate on the ones that are related to the island in general and Josh and company in particular."

"Sounds logical."

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"The next step should be—" I started, but then I was interrupted as the door opened without a single knock and Judy's father stuck his head through the opening.

"Hello!" he greeted us with a strained smile. He changed out of the business suit he was wearing during the dinner, instead sporting jeans and a plaid shirt that was unbuttoned at the top, possibly on purpose to show some chest hair. He looked me in the eye and his smile, barely visible under his mustache, became even more strained. "Good. Good."

"Father, what are you doing?" Judy asked, and he turned his eyes to her.

"Just checking to see if everything is all right," he said with fake pleasantry before he looked at me again. "Just a friendly reminder: I have a shotgun."

"... Duly noted?" I said with no small amount of puzzlement.

"Take care!" he quipped after delivering his message, whatever the hell it was, and closed the door behind him... only to immediately open it again and look us over once more like he was expecting that we would move in the half-second he was gone. After he did so, he let out a satisfied grunt and closed the door again, this time very, very slowly.

Once we heard him leave I turned to my assistant and flatly told her, "Your parents are weird."

"I know," she agreed immediately, and we left it at that.

It was getting late at this point. It was only half past six, but the sky was already pretty dark outside. It was autumn after all. I said my goodbyes to the family and told Judy I would call her later when I approved her account. Her father gave me the evil eye at that and once again reminded me that he was allowed to legally carry firearms, which obviously made me a little uneasy, but aside from that little intermezzo, I managed to leave without any drama.

Once I was already on my way home, I let out an unconscious sigh. This day was way, way too hectic for my taste. The thing that bothered me the most was the entire ‘love life' business though. Just where did I go wrong? I was one hundred percent sincere when I said I didn't want to get involved in any kind of dumb romantic drama while I had so many other things to worry about, yet somehow it only led to even more problems. Why can't anything be simple for once?

I was lucky that even with all my internal grumbling I heard the noise. It was a scraping sound, like shifting gravel reverberating in an empty drum. I instinctively stopped and faced the source of the sound. I had to strain my eyes for a moment, but then I noticed ‘it'.

It was a large shape barely visible in the dark. It was just outside the light cone of the street lamps and it was vaguely humanoid, except too big to be a human. Just from a glance, I put it in the ballpark of about two and a half meters, but unlike actual Guinness Record holders, it was also as wide as a car.

Not only that, even a cursory look revealed that there was something wrong with its head. It looked like it had large, ridged horns that curled around its skull, and while I couldn't see the face, its eyes were glowing with a dull orange light. For a moment I thought it was like a cat's eye, reflecting light, but the longer I looked at them, the less certain I was about that.

And then it happened. I kept staring into its eyes, and without any warning, our gazes ‘linked', like two magnets dangling on strings snapping together and refusing to let go. It was a weird and more than a little scary experience, as for a moment I thought I could feel emotions pressing against my forehead. Not literally, of course, but then again, there really isn't a good way to express how it feels to experience another being's emotions projected onto you.

I expected something alarming, like anger or an intent to kill, but instead the first emotion that swirled against my consciousness was surprise. Not only that, it was a pleasant surprise, followed by confusion and then, at last, curiosity. There was an undercurrent of hostility deep below these emotions, but for the most part, it was just honest to goodness interest.

He let out a low grunt, but even that didn't sound particularly aggressive. Bolstered by this I was just about to call out to him when something even weirder happened. As if this wasn't weird enough already, eh?

His outlines abruptly flashed with the same incandescent orange light as his eyes, accompanied by what looked like a swirl of embers in the air and he lunged at me. Except he didn't. Only the outlines. I almost let out a panicked scream, but it got trapped in my throat as another amber outline appeared. This one came from me of all places and it ran towards the incoming outline of the creature at an angle. The spectral copy of the huge thing raised its fist, which was about as big as my head, and swung it towards my own outline. It rolled under the strike and sprung to its feet in a single motion and the two constructs of light squared off against each other.

Then, just as I thought the orange silhouette of the creature was about to lunge again, I was hit with another wave of emotion. It was astonishment and... respect? Was respect even an emotion? Either way, ‘he' let out a noise that sounded like a content chuckle coming from the throat of a whale as he turned around. As our eye contact broke, the orange specters began to rapidly fade away, and by the time I recovered my wits the creature was already gone, his footsteps barely making any noise despite his enormous size.

I took a deep breath, turned around, and began hurriedly walking towards my place. I got there in record time, opened the door, closed it behind me, locked it, and then immediately went over to the sofa while trying to ignore the cold sweat covering my body. I fell into my seat, held my head in my arms, and asked one, very basic question.

"What... the bloody hell... was that?!"

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