<div align="center"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 18pt;"><strong>The Black Box</strong></span></div><hr/><br/><div class="floatleft">(https://i.imgur.com/JCoNFHJ.jpg)</div><strong>NAME:</strong>Lily Jimenez<br/><strong>DAY:</strong>December 4th, 2020, 11:15 PM<br/><strong>LOCATION:</strong>SOPHE Headquarters, IT Office<br/><strong>TAGGING:</strong>Kyless, Open<br/><strong>EXTRA:</strong><br/><strong>WEARING:</strong>Her usual hoodie and jeans<br/><hr/><br/>Six months. It had been six months almost to the day since they dragged her here. And maybe, just maybe, they were beginning to trust her. She had met "the team", and they had learned her... let's call them "quirks". She had trained, and trained, and trained. She had gone head to head with the cybersecurity morons on an almost daily basis, and bested them, though she had to admit they were getting better.<br/><br/>Lily was getting better too.<br/><br/>And of course, the SOPHE higher ups had occasionally called on their favorite hacker to clean up the electronic portion of their messes. Which Lily was happy to do. But she'd have been happier had they ever seen fit to inform her exactly what she had been cleaning up. Most of the time she had to figure that out for herself. And this time, they were doing a better job of locking her out than usual. Which meant they'd put effort into it. Every time she "peeked" into a dark corner of their web servers, she came up with a reference to something new called DPIONS. And that's where the trail ended. Just stopped stone cold dead.<br/><br/>It took about thirty minutes review of the new security measures to figure out what DPIONS meant. She probably should have gone through the regs sooner, but every update was festooned with gems such as<em>Build your firewalls like it's the only thing between Lily and your mom's social. </em>And frankly, Lily Jimenez was not fond of being reminded how little she was loved within her department. Except that technically, she was in ops, who seemed to like her fine. But these guys, ick.<br/><br/>It was a reference to Memo: LMJ post 12/1 – 0302 that gave her the answer. One of her snarky replies to their continual complaints about their little game of cat and mouse.<em>If you don’t want me to find it, don’t put it on the network Schmuck.</em>And that’s exactly what DPIONS did – rather than be left on a vulnerable server, these particularly tempting morsels were held safely off line - to paraphrase a popular candy commercial – locked inside a safe, inside a vault, inside a volcano.<br/><br/>Of all the times to take their advice they had to choose<em>now</em>.<br/><br/>There was something going on though. Lily had been asked to destroy all public camera footage for a twelve-block radius. A shipment had come in for an amount of tranquilizer sufficient to put down a herd of rhinos. And the goings down below were suspiciously quiet. Given all the effort, the smart move would have been to let it go. It would piss the hell out of Azmodiel for one thing. But she was sure there were a lot of reasons not to do it too.<br/><br/>But you simply did not hide things from Lily Jimenez and expect her not to go looking. If they put what she was looking for behind a door, she’d just have to open it. And if that door were locked, she’d just have to unlock it. Or maybe kick it in. But she<em>was</em>going to find out what exactly it was they were trying to keep from her. Even if it killed her.<br/><br/>Damn straight.<br/>