Tracking is like Hacking

The past few days was nothing but driving around from city to city, I'm looking for someone, someone who knows how to hide their tracks, someone who knows how to drop off the face of the earth, a talent they acquired by cheating existence itself. I'm no tracker, the only way I could find anyone I wanted before, was either through the path, or another domain that I've been using once I left the proxy club and even then that didn't always work.

Question is, how do you track someone, who not only inherited their skills from an extremely skilled survivor, but also someone who had no dossiers on themselves anywhere? Little that I know about tracking is that hacking comes into play a lot, however, a lot of people have a misconception about hacking, it has less to do with you click clacking your fingers on the keyboard and more to do with social interactions you partake in with your target, social engineering they call it, I believe. That's why a lot of the proxies were so good at hacking, or relatively competent, it's because a lot of them would pretend to be their target's friend, FreedomCaged is a great example of that, another one off the top of my head would be NightScream who would act out elaborate scenarios to get someone to trust their partner in crime.

But how can you socially interact with someone, you can't even find or have contact with? Well, I'm not trying to hack anyone now am I? I'm trying to track someone down. I don't need to socially interact with the person I'm tracking, instead, I need to know WHO they're socially interacting with at the moment and then track that person down and ask them a few questions. Now what makes me think that my target is even talking to anybody at all, after all, I sad before, they inherited their skills in hiding and staying off the radar, why would they compromise their position by talking to anyone, right? Well because human being are like that... Actually, scratch that, that logic doesn't entirely apply to my target, it only applies partly, since they began to only learn what's it like to be human right before they dropped off the face of the earth.

Which yields two possibilities, on one hand their inherited skills will take control over their desire to explore their own human nature, for the purposes of survival and this is nothing but a dead end tracking endeavor on my part, OR due to them learning of their own humanity, right before going into hiding, will create a greater desire to explore their humanity further and lead to a great desire to communicate with someone.

I think it's the latter rather than the former, simply because, right before dropping off the face of the earth, they weren't alone.

Confused yet? Good, no doubt the men in black are reading this as they try to track me down, so being as unspecific as I possibly can, helps. Not to say that it's entirely impossible to connect the dots here, not at all, in fact it's really simple and I'm pretty sure they'll figure out who I'm talking about, I'd assume people who own brain frying technology wouldn't be THAT stupid. Thing is, once they connect the dots, they'll be several steps behind.

The game is afoot.

Coincidences.

I don't believe in faith, the idea of a pre-determined outcome that we are inevitably going to stumble upon, due to someone's machinations over us, makes me want to throw up. I do, however believe in happenstance, a "Shit happens" if you may, sometimes certain people just get lucky, or unlucky and that's it.

So after my first debacle with Knitty's little family, I was back at square 1, having no leads, or clues as to who might have taken my darling away. With nothing left to do and nobody to question I decided to come back to where I asked KnitWolf to leave her, in hopes that if I were to keep an eye on that spot, someone suspicious looking enough would turn up for me to question.

Turns out, I didn't even have to wait, because as I was returning to the alleyway where my darling was supposed to be stored, I see this clown in a white hazmat suit, cleaning the inside of a fuse box where my darling was supposed to be hidden away with a dusting brush, if that's not suspicious looking, I don't know what is.

So I casually strolled up to him, he couldn't hear, or see me approaching him, due to the hazmat suit. Tapped him on the shoulder, he immediately turned around with a silenced gun, trying to shoot me, talk about paranoid, too bad he was too slow and I was able to stab him through the forearm, with two spikes which grew out of my sleeve. He instantly dropped his gun, he was about to yell out in pain, but I put my hand over where his mouth was and slammed him hard against the wall, making sure that not even a sound escapes from him, I didn't need the cop's attention on me.

I then proceeded to rip off the top of his hazmat suit, revealing a regular man behind it, nothing note worthy. He was visibly scared, but he tried his best to hold the fear in, he knew he fucked up, I can tell this guy wasn't used to physical encounters. I grew a small, sharp spike out of my sleeve and pointed it towards one of his eyes, I told him that I never really scooped someone's eyes out before, that it would be a new experience for me, told him how much it sucks to loose an eye, since I have experience in that field, told him all sorts of horrid shit to scare him, how once I would scoop his eye out, I would then proceed to put dirt in the eye hole, infecting the wound even more, etc, etc.

I didn't bullshit him, I told him that I was going to kill him, whether if it was a quick death, or a long one was up to him and if he was willing to answer my questions. But he wasn't budging, he was taking the exceptionally difficult route. Now, personally, I'll be honest with you dear reader, I know squat when it comes to torture, I rarely ever had to torture people for information , bottom line, I'm shit at torture and no matter how many times I stabbed away, he wasn't budging, apart from a few profanity's directed at me, I wasn't getting anything from him.

Not unless I went a completely different route, a route I don't like taking because it gives me a massive migraine. I was going to send a tendril inside of him, much like I did with whelp to get the information I needed myself, which is exactly what I did, only instead of sending it through the nostril, I sent it through his newly made eye hole. Whilst I was doing that, I kept on telling him that I didn't need his cooperation, that his mind would tell me everything I need, I could see him tense up more and more, as he felt my tendril digging inside of him, rummaging through his veins, slithering around his brain, this is when he started squirming, begged me to stop, told me that he would tell me everything I wanted to know, so I retracted my tendril, because I honestly don't prefer learning the needed information that way, it hurts like a motherfucker and leaves me completely vulnerable, feel free to note that down.

So he finally started singing, started telling me how there's this secret, research organization dedicated to researching our slim friend, that they've been around for decades, yet another shadow group, as if those always worked out. He told me that they were doing experiments on Azoth for years, that they were particularly interested in my darling, because of how different she was according to me. Told me that the way they found the hiding spot was through their technology, KnitWolf had nothing to do with them finding her. He told me that they've been conducting experiments on my darling for 4 years now, that pissed me off. So I finally asked where she was and just as he was about to tell me, he suddenly stopped talking.

He began shaking, his head vibrating, the veins around his face intensifying, I could see smoke coming from his nose, ears, eyes. He was shaking like crazy, he began foaming at the mouth. His last eye popped right in my face, covering me with blood, eventually he stopped shaking, moving in general, he was dead.

As I wiped his blood off my face, I saw in the reflection of his hazmat helmet that was laying on top of the dumpster, I saw him, our tall, thin friend. Standing on of a distant rooftop, watching over me, he wanted me to see him, otherwise I would have never spotted him. I don't know why he was there, if he wanted to kill me, he would have done so in a instant, he wouldn't announce his presence like that, no, he wanted me to know that he was watching, always watching, mocking me, showing me that I'm not a threat in all of this, just a nuisance, well, he can think whatever he wants, I don't care.

I knew he didn't cause this guy's death, I don't remember anybody dying from him just being around, let alone smoking whilst dying. So I started digging through the guy's body hoping that I would find something, I dug around in his brain and almost missed it, but I didn't, it was a small device of some sort, looked burnt up, no doubt this was what killed him, which means someone killed him just as he was about to spill the beans about the location of my darling, which meant that our tall friend wasn't the only one watching me, somehow the people behind this guy's murder knew exactly when to flip the switch.

So I'm being watched, tracked and most definitely they read this blog. Well good, I want them to see me coming. I'm not sure what my next step is, but I have a few ideas, I did pick up a very important clue after all.