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Description
Throughout the months that followed, Bade and the Code Master habitually met up in the digital pool hall of the Code Master’s design, primarily discussing their work as superheroes.  As it turned out, the hack on Bade’s computer had been an assignment from a mysterious new group called Chaos Watch—not much was known about the government agency besides that it was highly mysterious.  They were “good guys,” it seemed, (the Code Master wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise) but still very secretive.  Why they’d wanted information from Bade’s computer remained a mystery.

Bade didn’t hold it against him, and the Code Master seemed to think nothing more of the slugs.  In fact, they both secretly were glad about the misunderstanding—they both found themselves enchanted by this ghost person who knew more about something than they did.

They both got very good at pool.

“Did you know there’s a website about you?” the Code Master asked out of left field one day.

Bade grinned foolishly at his computer.  Was the Code Master really spending his time looking up Bade on the internet?  “My Dark Castle?  Yeah, it’s run by a pack of fangirls.  I give them the info.”

“I was wondering why they were so well informed.”  There was a pause as if the Code Master had gone back to studying the site.

Bade’s smile quirked, he couldn’t resist:  “Reading up on me, Codes?”

“I’ve been thinking,” the Code Master said, instead of answering (Bade had noticed that the hacker seemed to spend a lot of time out in left field).  Then he said nothing, so either he’d blown an artery and died at his computer, or he was typing something unusually long.  Bade waited patiently.

“You know how we’re physically in two different places, separated physically by a quantity of space/time; but are enabled by virtual means to virtually exist and communicate within a close proximity?” the Code Master observed tangentially.

“God bless the internet,” Bade replied, amused at this one-eighty.

“But I mean, the entity of ‘the internet’ isn’t defined by physical space.  We can ‘be’ in the same place because it’s not physical.  We physically remain stationary, while the internet world seems to move from place to place, but the sites themselves are not even connected in the traditional physical sense.  We talk of addresses, like badesdarkcastle.com, but in the traditional sense, that website doesn’t have a physical neighbor,” the hacker theorized at length.

Bade took the block of text in with a good-natured furrow of the brow.  “Uh-huh?

The Code Master paused to reorganize his thoughts.  “I mean, we enter a virtual address into the system and are ‘transported’ to a virtual destination, but the two points are not physically related.  You were able to transport magically a thousand slugs to a physical destination that you discovered virtually—shouldn’t there be some way to write a magic ‘code’ that would allow the physical user to transport himself to a physical location by entering a physical address?”

Understanding dawned on Bade like an excitement rippling under his skin.  “I don’t know, you’re the master,” he typed carefully.

“If I designed a program that handled the input, do you think you could magic up a ‘user interface’ to control it?”  The question stood bright and expectant in the chat box.  Both men held their breaths as they imagined the possibilities.

“I think I very well could,” Bade said at last.

The Code Master dubbed the program “Dispatch,” and sent pieces of the code to Bade as he wrote them.  His end of the deal was the device, the magic ring of the operation, the program that contained all the information of what the end result was trying to be.  Billions of physical addresses, plotted geographically by waypoint, were encoded and indexed, searchable by keyword.  The application ran in one window with a simple search bar and a bin for results, each one of which would be like clickable links—if the magic worked right—routing the user to the physical location of his desire.

Meanwhile Bade studied up on every text involving magical transportation, from summoning of mythical beasts to Vegas vanishing acts.  He worked at attaching the magic directly to the program, imbuing the code with mysticality just like any of his other supernatural tools.  Just like rubbing the magic ring, the clicking of the address link would invoke the spell and take him to the place indicated.

All in all, he thought it just might work.

In this friendship their project forged, Bade began to wonder if maybe he was getting a little too carried away.  It ended up being the first thing he did upon returning to his current lodging was to flip open the computer and check the pool hall.  More often than not, the Code Master would be gone days at a time, running long-term hacks against the un-faced forces of evil.  But Bade always checked, hoping to see the name logged in.

More than once, he caught himself sitting with the computer on his lap, just watching the screen for the Code Master’s arrival, hours disappearing this way.  Sometimes in the field he would try to access the internet only to see the pool application open up because he’d automatically clicked on that icon instead.

He was especially glad, though, for the mediated communication through turn-based chat, because it gave him time to filter his thoughts, or even delete them when he slipped and started typing things like, “So you were in my dream last night....”

The Code Master, in between assignments, working on Dispatch, and occasionally sleeping, took to examining Bade’s Dark Castle with careful scrutiny.  He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, or if even he had an ulterior motive, he was just interested.  Then he found it.

He took a moment to re-read the page he was looking at, then copy-and-pasted a section into the chat box, putting quotes around it and a question mark at the end.  He hesitated a moment before sending it along to Bade, but curiosity won out over prudence:

“‘Gayer than the day is long’?”

Bade blinked at the question on his screen, finally realizing the evidence must have come from the fansite.  Yes, that was indeed information he had given them.  Bade tapped his fingers lightly on the keys, thinking about what the hell he could say.  “That is my expression of preference,” he said at last.  He half held his breath as he waited to see what the Code Master thought of that confirmation.

For the record, the Code Master himself wondered momentarily what his reaction was.  “You’re like 25 hours gay?” he jibed lightly, trying to identify the sudden fluttering feeling in his gut.

“400 days a year,” Bade returned, wondering if trading jokes is a good sign or not.  Secondarily, he wondered how well his deadpan translated across.

“I wouldn’t have expected,” the Code Master settled on saying, feeling like there was some appropriate reaction to this situation, but failing to discover what it was in time.

“It’s a great combat tactic, the bad guys expect high fashion and perfectly styled hair—they never expect the flamethrower and the sword.”  Somewhere between the lines lingered the hope that this revelation wouldn’t put a sour turn on their friendship.

Impulsively, though, he kept typing before the Code Master could reply.  “You could tell me that the person sitting on your end of the screen is a woman, though, and I’d stop being interested.”

He hit enter without proof reading, and then stared at the incriminating words on the screen in horror, hand hovering over the damning key.  Oh God, what had he said?

“Nope, still male over here,” was the comparatively uninformative response.

The Code Master thought that this development was fascinating.  He spent the rest of the night re-reading the site, simply absorbing all the information on Bade there was to be had.  There was something in what Bade had said (he was interested?) that had kindled a fire in the young hacker.  He was very surprised—the news was fully unexpected, yet not entirely unrequited.

Then, in a forgotten corner of the site, he stumbled upon buried treasure—security footage of Bade in action.  It was grainy, poorly framed, and black and white, but the broad-shouldered man fending off a pack of terrier-sized rodents was clearly Bade, if the rumors were anything to go by.

The clip was eighteen seconds long, and it featured the man falling into the screen, throwing a large rat into the wall, rolling to his feet and stabbing another while four more swarmed after him.  Then he took a few steps back as two more leapt at him, and exited the picture.  One of the rats flew back into the frame at about chest height before the clip ended.  The Code Master watched this, entranced by Bade’s movements, until the screen went white and he blinked against the sudden brightness of it.

Bandwidth exceeded for the day.  Just how many times had he watched that clip?  Sheepishly, he accepted that there must have been something to it when his heart had hummed a high note at what Bade had said earlier.

Description
Throughout the months that followed, Bade and the Code Master habitually met up in the digital pool hall of the Code Master’s design, primarily discussing their work as superheroes.  As it turned out, the hack on Bade’s computer had been an assignment from a mysterious new group called Chaos Watch—not much was known about the government agency besides that it was highly mysterious.  They were “good guys,” it seemed, (the Code Master wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise) but still very secretive.  Why they’d wanted information from Bade’s computer remained a mystery.

Bade didn’t hold it against him, and the Code Master seemed to think nothing more of the slugs.  In fact, they both secretly were glad about the misunderstanding—they both found themselves enchanted by this ghost person who knew more about something than they did.

They both got very good at pool.

“Did you know there’s a website about you?” the Code Master asked out of left field one day.

Bade grinned foolishly at his computer.  Was the Code Master really spending his time looking up Bade on the internet?  “My Dark Castle?  Yeah, it’s run by a pack of fangirls.  I give them the info.”

“I was wondering why they were so well informed.”  There was a pause as if the Code Master had gone back to studying the site.

Bade’s smile quirked, he couldn’t resist:  “Reading up on me, Codes?”

“I’ve been thinking,” the Code Master said, instead of answering (Bade had noticed that the hacker seemed to spend a lot of time out in left field).  Then he said nothing, so either he’d blown an artery and died at his computer, or he was typing something unusually long.  Bade waited patiently.

“You know how we’re physically in two different places, separated physically by a quantity of space/time; but are enabled by virtual means to virtually exist and communicate within a close proximity?” the Code Master observed tangentially.

“God bless the internet,” Bade replied, amused at this one-eighty.

“But I mean, the entity of ‘the internet’ isn’t defined by physical space.  We can ‘be’ in the same place because it’s not physical.  We physically remain stationary, while the internet world seems to move from place to place, but the sites themselves are not even connected in the traditional physical sense.  We talk of addresses, like badesdarkcastle.com, but in the traditional sense, that website doesn’t have a physical neighbor,” the hacker theorized at length.

Bade took the block of text in with a good-natured furrow of the brow.  “Uh-huh?

The Code Master paused to reorganize his thoughts.  “I mean, we enter a virtual address into the system and are ‘transported’ to a virtual destination, but the two points are not physically related.  You were able to transport magically a thousand slugs to a physical destination that you discovered virtually—shouldn’t there be some way to write a magic ‘code’ that would allow the physical user to transport himself to a physical location by entering a physical address?”

Understanding dawned on Bade like an excitement rippling under his skin.  “I don’t know, you’re the master,” he typed carefully.

“If I designed a program that handled the input, do you think you could magic up a ‘user interface’ to control it?”  The question stood bright and expectant in the chat box.  Both men held their breaths as they imagined the possibilities.

“I think I very well could,” Bade said at last.

The Code Master dubbed the program “Dispatch,” and sent pieces of the code to Bade as he wrote them.  His end of the deal was the device, the magic ring of the operation, the program that contained all the information of what the end result was trying to be.  Billions of physical addresses, plotted geographically by waypoint, were encoded and indexed, searchable by keyword.  The application ran in one window with a simple search bar and a bin for results, each one of which would be like clickable links—if the magic worked right—routing the user to the physical location of his desire.

Meanwhile Bade studied up on every text involving magical transportation, from summoning of mythical beasts to Vegas vanishing acts.  He worked at attaching the magic directly to the program, imbuing the code with mysticality just like any of his other supernatural tools.  Just like rubbing the magic ring, the clicking of the address link would invoke the spell and take him to the place indicated.

All in all, he thought it just might work.

In this friendship their project forged, Bade began to wonder if maybe he was getting a little too carried away.  It ended up being the first thing he did upon returning to his current lodging was to flip open the computer and check the pool hall.  More often than not, the Code Master would be gone days at a time, running long-term hacks against the un-faced forces of evil.  But Bade always checked, hoping to see the name logged in.

More than once, he caught himself sitting with the computer on his lap, just watching the screen for the Code Master’s arrival, hours disappearing this way.  Sometimes in the field he would try to access the internet only to see the pool application open up because he’d automatically clicked on that icon instead.

He was especially glad, though, for the mediated communication through turn-based chat, because it gave him time to filter his thoughts, or even delete them when he slipped and started typing things like, “So you were in my dream last night....”

The Code Master, in between assignments, working on Dispatch, and occasionally sleeping, took to examining Bade’s Dark Castle with careful scrutiny.  He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, or if even he had an ulterior motive, he was just interested.  Then he found it.

He took a moment to re-read the page he was looking at, then copy-and-pasted a section into the chat box, putting quotes around it and a question mark at the end.  He hesitated a moment before sending it along to Bade, but curiosity won out over prudence:

“‘Gayer than the day is long’?”

Bade blinked at the question on his screen, finally realizing the evidence must have come from the fansite.  Yes, that was indeed information he had given them.  Bade tapped his fingers lightly on the keys, thinking about what the hell he could say.  “That is my expression of preference,” he said at last.  He half held his breath as he waited to see what the Code Master thought of that confirmation.

For the record, the Code Master himself wondered momentarily what his reaction was.  “You’re like 25 hours gay?” he jibed lightly, trying to identify the sudden fluttering feeling in his gut.

“400 days a year,” Bade returned, wondering if trading jokes is a good sign or not.  Secondarily, he wondered how well his deadpan translated across.

“I wouldn’t have expected,” the Code Master settled on saying, feeling like there was some appropriate reaction to this situation, but failing to discover what it was in time.

“It’s a great combat tactic, the bad guys expect high fashion and perfectly styled hair—they never expect the flamethrower and the sword.”  Somewhere between the lines lingered the hope that this revelation wouldn’t put a sour turn on their friendship.

Impulsively, though, he kept typing before the Code Master could reply.  “You could tell me that the person sitting on your end of the screen is a woman, though, and I’d stop being interested.”

He hit enter without proof reading, and then stared at the incriminating words on the screen in horror, hand hovering over the damning key.  Oh God, what had he said?

“Nope, still male over here,” was the comparatively uninformative response.

The Code Master thought that this development was fascinating.  He spent the rest of the night re-reading the site, simply absorbing all the information on Bade there was to be had.  There was something in what Bade had said (he was interested?) that had kindled a fire in the young hacker.  He was very surprised—the news was fully unexpected, yet not entirely unrequited.

Then, in a forgotten corner of the site, he stumbled upon buried treasure—security footage of Bade in action.  It was grainy, poorly framed, and black and white, but the broad-shouldered man fending off a pack of terrier-sized rodents was clearly Bade, if the rumors were anything to go by.

The clip was eighteen seconds long, and it featured the man falling into the screen, throwing a large rat into the wall, rolling to his feet and stabbing another while four more swarmed after him.  Then he took a few steps back as two more leapt at him, and exited the picture.  One of the rats flew back into the frame at about chest height before the clip ended.  The Code Master watched this, entranced by Bade’s movements, until the screen went white and he blinked against the sudden brightness of it.

Bandwidth exceeded for the day.  Just how many times had he watched that clip?  Sheepishly, he accepted that there must have been something to it when his heart had hummed a high note at what Bade had said earlier.