3704/Oracular Investigations

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Oracular Investigations
Date of Scene: 21 January 2018
Location: The Clocktower
Synopsis: Oracle looks into the mysteries of Natasha Cranston's past and finds herself stymied - for now.
Cast of Characters: Shadow, Oracle




Shadow has posed:
    Natasha Cranston has been making some aggressive acquisitions since taking her place as the head of Cranston Multinational. Some of them, particularly the enlisting of Zinda Blake for a takeover of Blackhawk Freight, have drawn the attention of the world's most pre-eminent (or so she'd like to believe) hacker and information broker...

Oracle has posed:
Research is definitely one thing Barbara Gordon excels at -- a lot of her classes in college were heavily research-based, and she enjoys the digging for knowledge. It was why she taught herself to hack -- she's insatiably nosy. CMS wasn't really on her radar until the situation with BlackHawk, so she's been wading for weeks through corporate information, both old and new. Her interest in the command structure deepens as she realizes that all of the people who were booted out when Natasha Cranston took over can be tied to something shady in the books... but it does make her wonder about the remaining ones. And so she keeps on digging.

Today's exercise in digging is less about the specifics of the company and more about Natasha Cranston herself. All the bio information is obvious, but Barbara's more looking for ... perhaps the //why// the young woman just popped up out of nowhere to run the company. It's not like she just inherited, and she's not //just// coming of age. So why now? Barbara wonders. And the missing years are a good place to start. Tracing her through secondary school was easy enough. Then to where her business degrees and such come from. Barbara spends time cross-checking to be certain that the woman actually was where her bio says she was, and she digs deep into the university computers there to find old and archived emails to see if they can lead her to where Cranston went after college ended.

Shadow has posed:
    Legally speaking, Natasha inherited the company at the age of 12 upon the deaths of her parents when the company plane they were taking to Hong Kong was lost with all hands somewhere over the pacific; power of attorney wound up with her uncle, a Kent Allard, but as he wasn't in the direct Cranston line he didn't have the authority to vote with the Cranston stock.

    The finishing school mentioned in her record definitely exists, but as it caters to children of the very rich and influential, extreme privacy is maintained. Records are securely locked -- although not secure enough to keep the Oracle out for long.

    Once she's in, young miss Cranston is easy to follow. Basic education, pre-college education, excellent grades, strong interest in Phys Ed, performs well without standing out. At college level, again excellent grades. Economics, Communication, a whole slew of classes that you'd expect from someone planning to go into business upon graduation. Electives in chemistry and psychology. On the chess team, although not its captain.

    Digging through several years' worth of emails is enough to drain one's will to live; Natasha apparently did a /lot/ of communicating with her uncle, although almost all of it is trivia and smalltalk. There's a smattering of other emails to her classmates as well, the bare minimum of 'networking' going on...

Shadow has posed:
... In fact, as she looks over the volume of communication, there is a certain... Sameness to it that makes some word choices stand out. Almost as if they're communicating in a previously agreed-on verbal code. Of course, without having the key and with this much white noise mixed into it it's almost impossible to figure out what, but the fact that there /is/ one may be significant on its own.

Oracle has posed:
What makes Barbara most curious is the fact that from the outside, Natasha looks like a perfectly ordinary young heiress. But those missing years //bother// Barbara on levels she can't quite explain. Perhaps, in part, because she knows what Bruce did during //his// version of the missing years, and not finding anything in these files makes her far more suspicious that whatever happened, Natasha was up to //something//. There's a reason Bruce's files are backstopped the way they are -- he's VERY good at covering his tracks and being seen in places that he was 'supposed' to be just often enough to give the lie credence. She's not finding that kind of backstopping here -- she's finding NOTHING.

All right. If you could afford someone brilliant enough to completely erase a digital footprint... where would you go to do it? With that tangent in mind, her search becomes two-pronged: 1) Track down the uncle, his location, his finances, any traveling he's doing, what his business is. 2) Tackling the coded messages with NSA-level algorithms to see if she can crack the codes involved.

Shadow has posed:
     Dodging Paparazzi 101 is not in fact officially on the school's curriculum, but given the profile of its average student, the topic is quite extensively if informally covered. Natasha appears to have aced that; After her graduation announcement, and despite tabloid reporters staking out the school, the station and the three nearest airports, no one saw her depart, and no one had any idea where she'd gone. A few articles were written because they did have columns to fill, but there's only so many times you can admit you don't know anything before you give up and look for something more interesting to report about.

    Kent Allard definitely exists - and judging by a rather sizeable invoice from a reputable detective agency, the Board of Trustees put quite a bit of resources into proving that he didn't before giving up. Not /actually/ an uncle, as he branched off the main family line a few generations more, but in the sense of "blood relative in the same age bracket as one's parents". He was awarded guardianship because he was the closest living relative and lived at Cranston Manor while Natasha was elsewhere, then moved to... Gotham, apparently, shortly after her return. He seems to currently be unemployed, with a stipend from the Cranston fortune that more than comfortably covers pretty much any living expenses he might be racking up. No vices of note that Oracle can find.

    During his guardianship he did take care to attend every CMS board meeting and quite often verbally and explicitly on the record objected to certain proposals, although without the Cranston Stock he couldn't express those objections with a veto. Matching the dates of those meetings to the mass of email messages yields /some/ results, allowing Oracle to filter out which messages are definitely part of the code and which ones are more likely to be white noise to degrade the signal...

Oracle has posed:
Something. There is //someting// there and she knows it. It'd driving her up a friggin' wall because it's like having a //word// on the tip of your tongue and not being able to come up with it. Barbara spends hours at the code without maknig any headway, several times getting up to pace around her office madly dragging her hands through her hair. More coffee, and they'll be scraping her off the ceiling of the Clocktower.

Finally she decides she's not going to get any further with this for right now. She needs a new angle.

Instead of continuing to make herself crazy, she shifts gears and goes back to working on the SHIELD intel she's got in her hands.

Shadow has posed:
    Not all mysteries are easily resoved. And when the truth is hidden in Shadows, the only answers one finds may merely lead to more questions.

    After, all, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?