3336/Who Is Hunter, Who is Prey

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Who Is Hunter, Who is Prey
Date of Scene: 08 December 2017
Location: Gotham City
Synopsis: Riddles wrapped in mysteries tied up in enigmas
Cast of Characters: Oracle, Talia al Ghul




Oracle has posed:
With her glasses perched on her nose, Barbara Gordon puts the finishing touches on the report she's got set for Batman regarding the 12 men he disabled and turned over to the police. Despite having been armed with non-lethal weaponry, they are all extremely skilled German mercenaries with training in a variety of pretty hardcore militaries. It makes her very leery -- why would anyone send in this kind of brute squad and not arm them for bear? The only conclusion she can draw is that whoever sent them wanted them to make a good show of what they were doing, to look threatening as hell, and yet not be an actual threat to their target. Which means they're bait. Which means the whole purpose of their arrival was to draw attention and get that drive to someone -- whether that someone is the Bat or someone else, though, Barbara isn't certain.

The flash drive that has her interest, however. She's worried about whether it could contain a virus or other nastiness, and her instinct is to load it onto a stripped-down, completely isolated from the networks laptop to see what's on it. She even goes so far as to not just disable the laptop's wifi but to remove the card altogether before loading the thumb drive into the machine and booting it up.

Talia al Ghul has posed:
The mercenaries were indeed professional and German, each with a fairly lengthy history. Non-lethal armament, quite true, clubs and tasers being the most prominent. Extremely skilled, extremely expensive, and apparently extremely expendable.

Extremely troubling.

The flash drive looks innocuous enough, to be sure. Once it's inserted into the computer, the hard drive clicks and grinds, lights flickering with a bunch of behind-the-scenes activity. And after a few moments that symbol pops up to fill the display like a typical hijack virus.

leviathan.jpg

Oracle has posed:
The symbol is intriguing enough all by itself. The scripts that Barbara has installed on the laptop start running, popping debug windows up to tell her what else the drive might be doing. That will take a few minutes. In the meantime, the redhead takes a picture of the symbol and moves to one of her other computers, this one secured with about a billion firewalls and protections, some of which are even Kryptonian thanks to borrowing them from the BatCave, to start a simple image search online -- perhaps the symbol will pop up as a business logo or something else that will give a hint as to the sender.

Keeping an eye on the debugging laptop, she's surprised to realize the program the drive is running is really a pretty simple script. All it does is ping its own location through a number of places to a final destination -- it's a 'phone home' program. Once she has those coordinates, a quick search of latitude and longitude gives her South Africa, which has Barbara scratching her head a bit.

"Okay," she posits out loud to the empty room. "Might have to scratch the initial premise here... Not looking for Batman. He's easy enough to find, all you gotta do is come to Gotham. So.... who are they trying to locate?" Barbara moves to yet another screen and starts running a search for anyone from South Africa in the greater Gotham/Bludhaven region who might be a high-value target.

Talia al Ghul has posed:
ET Phone Home. German mercenaries. Signal pointer to a South African IP address. Whoever set this up is certainly a global player, that much is certain. And they're looking for something. Something or someone.

The symbol? While there are similarities to ancient religious symbols from around the globe, the composite is completely unique. Perhaps something useful can be gleaned from stacking the similarities... yes. A particular Middle Eastern flavor begins to emerge. And many of the commonalities go back into early recorded history.

Narrowing in on the IP address is a pretty short trip. It's the digital equivalent of a PO Box that is registered to a holding company tied to an off-shore bank. In other words, a complete dead-end. Except that someone must check the mail every so often, as it were. Perhaps there's a way to reverse the trace when the mail slot is opened...

Oracle has posed:
Oh-ho! Now Barbara is fully engaged in this search. The only way to backtrace that is going to be to get the drive onto a computer that's net-connected so that her backtrace can be broadcast along with the signal. The 'phone home' code is so simple, though, she's going to need a very subtle, elegant solution. So it'll potentially take a couple of days before she baits the trap. It'll give her time to update Bruce anyway.

With the additional digging, the Middle Eastern and early history ties immediately bring to mind Ra's and the League of Assassins. It's not like Batman hasn't had trouble with them before. But... it doesn't really *feel* like them. So... what the hell? Barbara is stymied. But she gets everything ready and when Bruce is ready to set the trap, she'll bait engage it. First she'll have to fill him in.

Talia al Ghul has posed:
Yes, the symbolism definitely points towards the League of Assassins. It does and it doesn't. There are similarities and there are differences. Or perhaps the differences are more in how the references stack up. Barbara is familiar enough with Ra's al Ghul's signature on plans and events to be able to pick up his trail. But this certainly isn't him.

Gains and losses. Progress and circular references. Hypotheses need to be tested. Trails need to be followed. Hopefully nothing that goes too far down a rabbit hole. The flash drive sits there in the computer, its light blinking away merrily while the red and black symbol glares at Barbara like a big, occult eye.

Almost daring her to chase after it.