tavihargrave:
A message on the screen and in the code, in some kinda magic alphabet Tavi doesn’t understand. A message, which either means that it is what’s activating the curse or whoever did this is taunting them somehow—and he’s got a bad feeling in his gut that it’s the latter, because there had to be easier ways to curse a computer than by writing out big runes in ASCII with a huge chunk of your code—you didn’t need that, to make a message appear on screen, and you didn’t need it to get the virus to actually do anything. The whole block wasn’t a functional part of the code. Instead, it feels a little bit like some kind of sick show-boating…
He pulls up the screenshots he’s taken; he didn’t get quite all of it, missed the first two or three letters of whatever this message is, but he grabs a piece of paper and writes down the rest of them, big blocky letters as close to accurate as he can manage to the ones on the screen, passes the piece of paper across to Abel, since apparently they’re good enough to translate this, whatever it says.
“That’s… that’s great, right? If we can reverse this, you think it might be able to reverse the memory loss and everything else? Or at least stop it from getting worse?”
The computer in front of him isn’t acting up, yet—the progress bar on the install window is stuck at 98%, blinking and flashing, and he gets the feeling it’s a bar that will never fill, that whoever had hidden the virus in this program had anticipated that any wix—or anyone, really—would get bored of waiting for InstantChat to install if it went on forever and would quit the program, so that there didn’t need to be anything to the program but the virus, no actual program to complete the illusion of a free software trial. He quits it, too, powers the computer down. There’s a chance replacing the RAM might fix the computer, too, and make this hunk of junk salvageable in case something else like this comes up again and he needs a computer he can afford to ruin.
“So, what does it say?”
If they can get the correct rune sequence when it came to the curse, they feel like they have a genuine shot at reversing this thing. There’s a chance Tavi may not have gotten every single line of the curse embedded into the disk, but having a good portion of it should give them what they need to fill in any missing pieces.
“I think so,” they reply as they look down at Tavi’s laptop screen, their brow furrowed as they try to work out just how to go about this. “If I can write out the counter curse, do you think you could put that onto a new disk, and reverse whatever was done to the computers too?” They don’t know a lot about technology outside of how to use a laptop. They had a feeling this curse was going to be tied with the computers, so if they reverse the curse, and reverse whatever effects the computer was under due to it, maybe they’d then be able to help the victims fully recover.
When Tavi motions to the floor, Abel’s gaze shifts back to the chalk drawn letters. The runes Tavi found should give them enough to help the victims, they just hoped that whatever this message was would lead them to an actual culprit.
“Here give me a sec,” they respond, “I think I have something in my desk that could help translate this.” Ducking out of the conference room, they head to their desk, and fortunately it takes only a couple seconds of rummaging around its various drawers until they find the small worn paperback book on the Theban alphabet and several other magical lettering systems.
When they get back to the room, they pick up the chalk again, and start to decode the message, writing the translated message just below the one they’d quickly scribbled down from the screen. Once they’re done, they stand back, as the culprit’s message comes into clear view.
“I just wanna to tell you how I’m feeling...” they begin to read, face contorting into that of clear confusion as they continue, “Gotta make you understand....Never gonna give you up, never gonna let- oh for fuck’s sake,” Abel grumbles as they kick at the chalk lettering. They may not have been an expert in no-maj culture, but even they could recognize the lyrics written out on the floor in front of them. Gripping tightly onto the small book in their hand, they feel like tossing it across the room out of annoyance, but instead toss it onto the nearest table.
“He’s fucking with us,” they groan. Moments ago they’d been so hopeful for this case, between the code Tavi obtained and the message they saw, and while there was still plenty of hope they could help the victims involved, catching the culprit seemed to be a much more difficult task.
“So what should we do now?”














