Lenore::Offline - Post-Chatroom
// OoC: A small piece for @siren-legion about an accidental intruder into a certain online chatroom. Once again, thank you for the wonderful concept. I really adore the Siren aesthetic. >w<
Cheap headphones clattered onto a wooden desk, dull echoes lingering in the stale attic air. A pale hand pulled the webcam off the top of the monitor, and the quick flick that followed disconnected it from the desktop.
A white ceramic mask slipped into the confines of the drawer, its previous presence on the woman’s face quickly replaced by a set of glasses and a plain blue hairband.
With a weary plop, she sunk into the warm confines of her bed. Gold-hued eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, the brain it was connected to ruminating on events hours past.
Wings.
That chatroom was filled with people who had genuine wings.
Originally, Lenore had wanted to troll everyone as her online persona, fiercely denouncing these "cosplayers" and slinging her exaggerated faked contempt for all things roleplay at everyone before getting banned by a responsible admin or moderator.
...But the pictures of the wings people posted - the “noods” they called them- caught her attention. Even with her trained eyes, she could find no flaws to suggest they were photoshopped other than the fact those wings could not possibly exist.
Curious, she ran the picture through her image processor and hunted for those harshly-contrasting artificial values that didn’t quite match the flow of a natural image. Essentially, she was looking for any signs that would suggest a Photoshop.
She found nothing. Not even a hint of an issue.
And because she couldn’t accept this result, she ran the images through programs with more sophisticated algorithms such as error level analysis and became increasingly agitated with every negative result. Only after she fed it through one of her own babies, a program that detected the probability of modification through the statistical distribution of the random noise inherent to all images, did the hacker finally admit defeat.
At this point, it was either the pictures were real or every person who posted ‘noods’ in that chatroom could photoshop pictures better than she could detect it.
Her confidence in her ability prevented her from accepting the latter, thus she could only believe the former.
Reigning in her persona’s normally rabunctious self for once, she shut her proverbial mouth and simply observed.
And as a result, she caught glimpses into a world she was never meant to see.
Disappearances. Punishments. Companies. Singers.
A plethora of oddities all linked by a single word.
Siren.