Orb Weaver: Within the Serpent's Coils: Chapter 2

Going after low-level Empire thugs might not seem like a big deal, but…

I was poking the Empire. My initial attacks had been easy. Too easy.

Then I’d walked into a Master’s lair.

Overconfident. Stupid.

A lesson.

One I would not forget.

The Empire was well organized. And I noticed as I watched and listened, changes in their procedures. Empire members were now calling in before they went out on patrol.

A day after my little show let everyone know Orb Weaver was back, I tracked new packages—home security cameras. Cameras were mounted in the houses and around some of the Empire’s member’s businesses.  Wireless capable cameras.

I wondered if they were being monitored or just on a record… The one would provide warning but would need manpower, or perhaps an advanced monitoring program. The second would not provide a warning, but would provide a record of my actions…

But both had a chance of letting me track the Empire’s higher echelons, maybe even subvert the system they’d set up and use it myself. I’d spend a good deal of “time” studying this sort of technology.

Or rather, the same amount of time anyone else had, only spread over sixty reading threads.

But anything obvious would clue them in. If they were taking me seriously, I had to assume they themselves were considering the danger of their measures being turned against them.

I leaned back in my chair. Dad was working late, and I’d finished my own work, so I was just relaxing, while preparing to get a pair of high-speed scanners, machines that could scan an entire large book in fewer than five minutes, complete with an automated feeded bin and spine removal mechanism.

Libraries used them to digitize books that were out of copyright and were coming apart. While I could have my bugs turn pages, that was currently my big bottle neck. In this way, I could digitize nearly a hundred books a day, and then the only limit on my reading would be how many monitors I could set up, with far faster page turns.

I’d already done it on stuff that was already on the Internet, but now, now I would have so much more.

A pity I can’t use the warranty—oh. Oh. I couldn’t use the warranty on the machines I was purchasing, but the Empire probably wasn’t doing that I bet every camera was entirely legally purchased so why not use a warranty?

So the cameras the Empire was using were under warranty. If a few got destroyed—no, better, just fell off their mounts, they would send them back. And the Empire was buying locally through their members.

And a store wasn’t expecting Orb Weaver to make some additions to their stock…

I sat back and smiled. After all, if the Empire was going to the trouble of setting up a surveillance network, it’d be entirely impolite for me not to make use of it…

*****

The next day, I was at school for the first tutoring session. I wouldn’t lie to say I was a bit nervous. Aisha was there. Five others. Chris, Eunice, Jacob, Marsha and Wendy. Three of them, I had come to the conclusion were mainly suffering from not wanting to work. Chris and Eunice suffered from other factors. Eunice had been caught in between Hookwolf and Oni Lee, and while she’d not been hurt, beyond bruises from where Hookwolf tossed her into an alley, she was suffering attention issues, and by reading between the lines, sleep problems.

I could empathize. Knowing that her life dangled by a thread had to have been hard. As for Hookwolf, my analysis was simply that he liked a fight, and even ignoring the PR aspect, a slightly overweight fifteen year old girl was the platonic ideal of “not a fight,” so he probably tossed her out of his way to simply things.

“Right,” I told them, as they filed in. “As you know, I’ve been working with Aisha…”

“Run, save yourselves!” Aisha said, while one of her Numbers did a convincing death imitation.

I rolled my eyes. “And that brings me to my next point, Aisha, or Krewe is here to learn, so even if it’s a “totally not Aisha Number” asking you for answers, say no.” Everyone laughed. Aisha had the ability to work with people that well… I was envious of it.

So I started. The teachers had been impressed by my lesson plan, one warning me to not neglect my own work when I’d shown him my syllabus and notes.

I wasn’t, but they didn’t know that.

We spent the time doing tests and such and as I worked with them, I watched Chris. I needed to observe him directly before I could make my suggestion and…

His attention flagged, and I could see him trying to force it, getting frustrated, then getting more distracted. I said nothing. That would be after the class.

There was little more humiliating to have your disability called out in front of people, after all.

“Hey Chris,” I asked as everyone was leaving. “Can you talk to me for a little bit?”

Wendy wolf-whistled. Chris turned red.

I just raised my eyebrows, while underneath, insects coiled tightly before relaxing.

When everyone left, Chris looked at me. “You saw I was screwing up.”

I looked down at his paper. The writing started neat, got messy, then got neat, then became completely messy, not just the handwriting, but the trains of thought.

“No. You have ADHD, correct?”

“That’s what the doctor’s say, in between telling me how lucky I am that it isn’t worse.”

I didn’t disguise my wince. “I have a thought. How long can you stay on track?”

“I mean, thirty minutes, forty minutes? Then it gets harder. I try to force it—“

“But that doesn’t work,” I nodded. “When I was working on this, I found something that may be able to help you.”

“Panacea finding out that she can work on brains?” he asked, and I could sense some bitterness behind him.

“No. If a problem is impossible to defeat head-on, why not go around it?”

“How…” He blinked as I held out a printed sheet for him.

“This is called the Pomodoro Technique,” I gestured at a seat. “It’s a method developed in Italy, but put simply, you work for about 25 minutes, take a five minute break, doing anything else, then start again. In your case, depending on how your ADHD responds, we might want to try mixing up the subjects, or just go through them with five minute breaks.” I held out an egg timer I had picked up at a cheap store. “Twenty-five minutes, then a five minute break. Watch a video, do jumping jacks… But the idea is, the hope is that this can work with your ADHD instead  of trying to just force through it.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Then we try something else. But Chris, don’t start out with ‘what if it doesn’t work.’ Let’s start out with ‘when it does work, what then?’”

He put his hand to his heart. “My God, an optimist in the Bay!”

I shook my head, and then the bell letting everyone know it was time to leave the school sounded and we both went out, Chris holding the little egg timer and looking at it, now and then.

It had been A Good day.