Valerie's nervousness soon looked to be unwarranted as the trio reached the apartment complex they were after. Valerie kept up the charge in her shock plug. The real work would only begin here. The engine and power core of her wheelchair hummed softly as she cautiously followed Kal along the side of the street into the alley, occasional growing slightly louder when one of her wheels had to roll over a stray piece of garbage or a damaged bit of road.<br/><br/>The wheelchair-bound girl didn't need to duck as they passed the windows to evade the gaze of anyone inside. Courtesy of of her lower vantage point and the fact she hadn't been anywhere as tall as the two men next to her to begin with. At Kal's worries about being in the right place Val shrugged a little. "<i>We'll find out soon, Bleu."</i>It would be a tad silly if it turned out they were attempting to break in some hobo den.<br/><br/>Of course, when Kal stumbled into the corpse Valerie stopped dead in her tracks. She was accustomed to ignoring human misery, but a body in the middle of the street was hard to simply pass by. Even Kal looked a little shaken, while their hired gun simply riffled through the dead woman's pockets. Her logical side said that was the smartest and most practical reaction, but Val still found herself looking up and away. An uncomfortable pit nested in her stomach. The air was misty, thick with condensation. Somewhere high above, it might've been raining. A lonely quiet drip fell down, passing by Valerie.<br/><br/>Val shook her head, following Kal's directions to the back of the building, leaving the body of the old woman with her plastic and metal prosthetic hand behind.<br/><br/><br/>The back of the building was uncomfortably exposed and open to the plaza. The short wall didn't really feel like good enough cover against the gaze of the worn dragon statue or anyone else that might wander into the plaza. Valerie took a deep breath, putting their exposed position in the back of her head as she moved to the utility box Kal had opened. She nodded to disperse his uncertainty.<i>"Yeah, we're looking good."</i>The light told her as much, signaling that the building and it's systems still had power. Someone had tempered with it, likely to steal electricity but it wasn't like fuse boxes were her specialty so she couldn't really say.<br/><br/>The jacks had an older design, of course, but Valerie had to wrangle with outdated hardware every day. She retrieved her neurointerface's screen, more for the comfort of her companions than any use to her. Slipping one of her plugs into the jack, she connected with the power grid node. A firewall raised up to defend itself against the unauthorized access, but Valerie used hard- en software far beyond what it was expected to keep out. She bombarded the counter-measures  with a mass of false access attempts while her main connection probed the firewall, slipping through an undefended port and shutting it down.<br/><br/><br/><i>"I'm in." </i>Announced the words that suddenly appeared on the screen held by the wheelchair-bound girl. Valerie's body rigid and her eyes focusing things that weren't there, the girl blind to the real world while delving this focused into the apartment block's neurogrid. Figures poured on the screen, mapping the flow of power through the building, showing the location of the elevators and the numerous cameras. Of course, this method of mapping didn't show where the walls were. Or any doors or stairs.<br/><br/>Valerie ran the Warden program of her own design, setting it to watch over her connection node and to pass anything her body heard along. She was fully floating in the neuronet now, a mass of data only interpreted as roughly female looking by her own mind and her neurointerface's programming. She glided through the blue and black lit cyberspace, pinging the various data nodes in the grid to identify them without triggering their defenses, exploring the system she was in.<br/><br/>Behind her traced her connection, a line connecting her neuronetic avatar with her access point. The more she moved, the greater ruckus she caused, the higher chance a sniffer program could find it and trace it back to her access point. This would only be a problem if another neurorunner or an agent defended the system, what with the outdated defenses. Getting kicked out of a system forcibly hurt like a bitch, and had it's dangers, but the bigger threat was someone using that connection to invade her own systems. A script-kid sitting safely in his home would only suffer a corrupted system and a lot of headache and time to repair it, but Valerie would be in mortal danger if anyone ever accessed her systems. She had installed the best defenses she could design, but someone smart, savvy and skilled enough might still be able to force her heart's support system to shut down. At least the Warden program would alert her to anyone trying to use or shut down her connection, so she had a chance of fighting back.<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>