OTA

[girl_upgraded]

Rave had been busy hacking into an Arizona based defense contractor, some jackass working on anti tank vehicles that would be filtered into the American police force when the tours in the war zones was over. She'd just found out that was happening with this that had happened in the American south and she was outraged. A few keystrokes later and the money of the contract was bogged down under holds and casements and she felt she'd done something good. But it was a defense company and any time she went after someone like that she got edgy, looking around for some secret police or something coming after her.

She finished up and pulled out the USB that held her operating system, leaving the laptop she had clean. She'd gone through so many USB sticks. She kept her system as untraceable as she could. She bounced her signal through servers around the world. She had no standard online profile that anyone could trace, really, except some of her work. She was Rave and she was Anonymous and she was Legion.

She didn't look it as she packed up her computer in the messenger bag. She was in black jeans and a black leather jacket, heavy black boots with buckles and studs. Her shirt was white, though, and proclaimed that Well Behaved Women Rarely Made History.

Just outside she stood, plugging one earbud in and looking around. Two cops walked her way and she immediately turned, trying not to look suspicious. There was a person and she smiled at them, a smile that didn't reach her eyes.

"Do you know the nearest underground stop?" she asked, her posh accent giving her away as 'not from this area'.

(no subject)

[anamusebouche]

Jack the Ripper is back in town – and this time no one is safe.

Hannibal read the newspaper head-line again. It didn’t sit well with him. It didn’t sit well with him at all. How terribly banal.

Hannibal Lecter had been in London for a few years now. During that time several people had vanished, but none in any public way. It was only recently that inspiration had struck him to change that.

And that was where Bertrand Jensson had come in.

Bertrand Jensson was a don at Cambridge and guest lecturer at King’s College. Hannibal remembered him from when he had been a student at Cambridge, years and years ago. He remembered the man's rudeness, his crude remarks about Hannibal’s Eastern European background, and his fondness for humiliation of students in general. He also remembered his strict religious ways, how he tried to impose them on the students and how he preached on morality while he found it very hard to stay away from the younger students of the faculty himself.

Hannibal remembered him well. And now, nearly thirty years later, Jensson had paid with his life, two lungs and a kidney.

The newspapers got their hands on some photographs, and as a consequence of that, Jack the Ripper had been brought back to life.

Yes, admittedly, the fashion in which Jensson had been killed was not dissimilar to how Jack the Ripper had murdered his victims. The work showed surgical precision, not unlike the Ripper’s work. But it didn’t sit well with Hannibal that the media compared his work of art to the pathetic activities of a sad impotent failure who exhorted his rage on whores.

The ripper killed his victims and then maimed them. Jensson had been disembowelled before his throat was cut. The don had been ripped open and displayed, on the steps of a church in praying position, holding his own guts as a rosary. Several of his organs had been removed while he had still been breathing. After that, his neck had been sliced, nearly decapitating him. Only then had he been placed on the church steps to confess his sins.

Jack the Ripper is back in town… Hannibal sighed. Perhaps he ought to demonstrate how unlike the Ripper he was. But that would be indulgence into vanity, which might ultimately cost him his freedom. It was a risk he was unwilling to take.

He turned a corner and in a moment of lesser vigilance, he was shoved into an alley by a foul-smelling waste of space and air.  There, two more homeless men appeared, carrying knives.  "Your money and your phone, " they threatened. 

Hannibal resisted the urge to smile.