A Study in Gas - Ch. 3 (Jan 2025)

Margo had been to only two libraries before realizing this was getting tedious and probably not going to work. People often thought finding someone in security camera footage was an easy thing. It wasn’t. If you don’t have a specific date to go off of, you had to sit there and stare at the screen for hours. Generative AI was still in its infancy trying to match faces. Maybe the FBI had better models, maybe if the perp was serious enough to be on the Most Wanted list, but not your run-of-the-mill local police. There wasn’t anyone who really matched the description who had sat down at the computers. But then again, it was very possible that the perp looked completely different during his daytime activities, and even then, the best AI program might have trouble finding a match. Nothing was infallible. For all she knew, she had just watched the perp on the footage but had no way of telling if it was him. She did mark down a couple potential suspects and took screenshots off the computer. At the very least, they could search those people to see if anything interesting comes up, like past criminal behavior.

            But even after submitting this information to the computer team, she had a feeling it would go nowhere.

            During lunch in the break room with her partner, Margo said aloud, “I think we have to do this the old-fashioned way and pull a sting operation.”

            “How do you propose we do that?”

            “Same way you catch any predator. Go online. Put yourself out there. Pretend to be someone. They’ll take the bait and incriminate themselves.”

            “And…” Harry danced around the next words. “Are…you going to do this?”

            “I was hoping someone with more…experience in the field of social media. But then again, someone with experience will have to be the bait. I don’t mind doing that. Do you know how to use Discord?”

            Harry chuckled. “This feels funny. Yeah. I do. I can show you how to use it.”

            Margo had invited Harry previously to her house to go over research. After all, she had a comfortable home whereas he still lived in a cramped apartment. Harry first tried to show her the ropes through her phone. She found using Discord on her phone to be quite aggravating - so much to do on her tiny screen. When Harry told her that she could use her laptop to sign in, she gladly chose that route. She hated having to use her phone for everything. Something like this would require hours of sitting on the laptop on her desk, waiting for the perp to take the bait. When Harry saw how pleased she was to use Discord on the laptop, he shook his head and said, “You’re such a Gen Xer.”

            Margo grimaced. She could have snapped at him about age and generations but she was too annoyed by this case to get worked up about anything else.

            Harry helped her find some communities to join. There were several well-known website forums with a simple search. From there, Harry pointed out the links to Discord servers she could join. She spent a good half-hour trying to figure out a good username. This was the very first time she did something like this.

            “I still have my first email when I was little,” Harry said. “paintballerx1997.”

            “Lovely. Please help me figure out a good one.”

            He shrugged. “I dunno! It’s something you should personalize. Make it feel real. Is there a movie you like? A board game? What did people your age do back in the day? Did you have video games?”

            Margo scowled. “Harry, I’m only one generation away from you. I know what a video game is.”

            She had a momentary nostalgic flashback of going to an arcade with her high school friends. She recalled the smell of popcorn and the excitement swelling in her chest when she found that one guy whom she used to have a crush on. She was never one for nostalgia, but in that brief moment it hit her with intensity.

            What was that game she used to play? There were like five of them with similar titles…it was on the tip of her tongue.

            “Ah,” she finally said, and typed away.

            Harry laughed when she typed her username. He said, “GalagaGal? Nice.”

            “It was a good game.”

            “You say that like it died and went to heaven. You can still play it wherever.” He brought up his phone. “See, if you download this app—”

            “That’s enough. Okay, what now?”

            “Put a pfp.”

            “Pfp?”

            “Profile picture.”

            “I’m going undercover. I can’t do that.”

            “No, no, nobody ACTUALLY puts their real face. God, no. Not unless you’re using Microsoft Teams or some shit. Some people put an anime character or a video game character or—I mean, anything really. Anything at all!”

            Margo sighed heavily. She was growing impatient. “Do I need to do this?”

            “Yes!” Harry said, insistent. “Absolutely. You will look sus as hell if you don’t have a pfp. People might think you’re a bot or spam.”

            “Alright…”

             Margo settled with a picture of her dog: the face of a forlorn basset hound named after the legendary cartoon character Droopy.

            But Harry shook his head.

            “What’s wrong with my dog?” Margo said, offended.

            “No, no, no. That’s a very mom thing to do. He would know right away that you’re at least 40.”

            “Dammit, Harry. If you’re so good at this then YOU pick a profile picture.”

            Harry nudged over and typed away searching for scantily-clad female fictional characters. She wanted to protest but bit her tongue for the sake of the investigation. When he finished setting up her profile picture – a stern-looking redhaired woman wearing medieval armor - she crossed her arms and said, “And who the hell is that?”

            “Erza. From Fairy Tale. It’s an anime. All the kids love it.”

            “Allllright,” she sighed. “Something tells me I have to do more research than I thought.”

            “You go do that. I’m calling it a night.” When he was about to step out of her door, he looked back and said, “Don’t get too sucked in, alright?”

            After another hour of wrapping her head around the interface, she ordered pizza, got a couple beers, and sat down at her laptop to get to work on finding the “mad gasser”. She had to get used to all the “channels” and was very cautious not to post in the wrong place. Most people introduced themselves in a channel aptly titled “Introductions”. Margo was halfway through telling her life story when she had a second-thought and backspaced everything. She had to think simple. She noticed that everyone posted when they first got into the fetish. She knew this was going to be out of her comfort zone. She had done undercover work before posing as drug addicts and smugglers. But this was somehow a thousand times more difficult. This felt more personal than trying to act like a simpleminded thug. She couldn’t just say “yeah I’m into this”. She had to make people believe it. She grimaced reading walls of messages where people talked about what specifically about farting they liked. The sound. The smell (she recoiled at the thought). The relief.

            She sighed again, not knowing how to introduce herself.

            Close to midnight, she had eaten through a large pie of pizza, four beers, and had not gotten up from her seat. Her office was lit up only by the dim glow of her laptop.

            She had been watching video after video of fart models. She had just watched a woman fart for over a minute-long. The fart ended with a sputter and she sighed in relief at the end with a voice that sounded orgasmic. The model, a large Latina woman, looked over her shoulder at the camera and laughed. The whole thing, even though it had no nudity and no sexual acts, felt lewd and pornographic.

            “Impossible,” Margo said, scoffing. There had to have been something behind that fart. She had already learned that a few models pumped air, but then quickly started to gain an ear for knowing when it was by air and when it was pure, 100%, “homebrewed” gas. Those were the impressive ones. Those had a certain sound she couldn’t find the words to describe. Somehow…gutsy and rippling.

            “My god, how would that feel?” she wondered aloud. “Does it hurt? Do they just…hold it in for that long until they are ready to film?”

            She was lost in thought jumping from video to video, page to page, channel to channel, that she didn’t notice she let out an obnoxiously loud fart until halfway through. She was sitting flat on her chair and felt the gas “bubble up” underneath her. The thought came to her that next time she felt it coming, she should lean to one side.

            Margo then messaged the Discord server for the first time.

            Does anyone else forget to lean to fart and you get this bubble feeling? I hate that.

            She stared at the message after she had sent it in the general channel. She immediately felt regret, because she looked at that message and felt as though she hadn’t been herself when she wrote it, and yet it was true at the same time.

            Margo continued browsing other channels until someone replied to her:

            Hahaha yeah! Especially when you’re in a place where you can’t actually lean to fart. Fucking hate it.

            Margo grinned. She had begun getting herself integrated.