Saving Matthew Patrick

Change Your Wifi Password!

Nessa POV

A huge chunk of me was focused on my mission, of course. Save Matthew Patrick and bring him home so that he could continue on his work with his friends and family. But a small chunk of me was still quasi-excited that I was here with people that I'd more or less idolized over the last year. The fan in me wanted to give them a hug and talk about games and films and whatnot, but I held back. If we were successful in saving Matthew, we had time for that later. Maybe.

I set up my Toughbook and hooked myself up to their internet connection.

"Wait, I'll go get you the--"

"Wifi password? We'll have a conversation about that later, because 'justatheory51912' is way too easy to crack. You need to UP your security levels, starting with passwords. But we have time for that later. For now, let's focus on finding your husband." Stephanie nodded. She looked like she wanted to fall apart, or scream, but she remained calm. I admired that resolve in a person.

"So how are you going to find him?"

"Well, I'm using my laptop to grab an image of your computer right now so that I can work on pulling apart every single thing about this stream, this timer, everything about what this Wraith guy gave you. From the looks of the metadata in this file, he's not that smart. He's thought this through far enough that he's currently monitoring the screen feed off of your laptop, Steph. But he's not smart enough to have a safeguard in, detecting if your screen is being mirrored by someone else. For now we'll be able to use that to our advantage."

I pull up a slew of terminals in order to mask my current IP address, as well as to scour the dark web for any active red rooms in the California area. I couldn't find any, which I actually expected because authorities were closing in on the dark web now, so I went deeper: The Shadow Web. Five red rooms popped up at me, and it made me sick to my stomach that I couldn't find a way to save all of them. It didn't take me long to start making alarms ring out in those five areas to figure out which red room Wraith was keeping Matthew in.

"Steph, please tell me when you start hearing an alarm from the feed." She nodded and put her headphones on, listening intently. I rung the alarms one by one, and she tapped my arm when I started the third one.

"I can hear something, but it's far, like probably two blocks away from where Matthew is." I moved the firetruck I'd hacked into and navigated it a block over. "It's getting louder." I kept driving the truck closer and closer, looking for Steph's feedback. "What the hell?" I looked at her. "The sound cut off." The words NAUGHTY NAUGHTY flashed on our screens and I cut my feed to her laptop.

***

A/N: Ruh oh! Looks like someone's on to their sssssssscent! 

Question of the chapter: How did you discover MatPat/GameTheory/GTLive? For me, it was because of DDLC; I was watching Pewdiepie's playthrough and then I decided to immerse myself in all things regarding the secrets, and the decoding of the character profiles, etc. Then I saw a comment in one of the videos about a Game Theory regarding this, and so I watched The Game Theorists' video on DDLC. And I kid you not, I freaked out during the opening skit when Matthew said "Steph!" because my name (my real name outside the interwebs) is Steph, and so I went "OH NO! THIS IS TOO META! I'M QUITTING THE INTERNET!" for five straight minutes until I realized that it's probably not the case and kept watching 🤣.

Hope you guys like the update, and the gang will see you again in 24-48 hours (I have some RL things to deal with tomorrow, so I might not be able to publish an update. I so sorry). Until then, you can chat with me over on the comments section, as well as on Twitter (muddy_orbs). Bye!