[Adelie]

"Anyways, I just find bugs," he continued. "Sometimes I fix them, too."

It wasn't him being modest - at least not in his eyes. He found other people's mistakes; he fixed them. When he'd first gotten into this line of work, he'd been surprised - perhaps even frustrated - at just how many careless errors and negligent failures people made, but sooner or later he'd just gotten used to it.

Or perhaps, he'd matured. It was just a fact of life, after all - the artist is blind to the flaws in their own work, and a second set of eyes is needed to point out the obvious mistakes. His job was just to provide a second opinion. Just a particularly nuanced and specialized second opinion, that was all.

"Yeah, you say that," Chi said, and he could almost hear her rolling her eyes at him. "Pretty sure you'd say Professor Pascal just finds bugs, too."

"That's different," he protested. "What Kurone did practically defined a new era of hacking. A whole new discipline - "

[Adelie]

"And she did it by finding a bug," Chi emphasized. "C'mon, Mirny. Are you going to argue with her star student on her accomplishments?"

He scoffed at that, but he couldn't exactly find fault with her logic. "I'll never understand how she ended up being your mentor. You two aren't even in the same field."

"She liked me, that's all," Chi said. "My excellent personality won her over, of course."

"Kurone?" Ven suddenly interrupted. She had been quietly following the conversation for a bit, but seeing there a bit of a lull in it - Mirny had been too scandalized by Chi's unabashed boasting to dignify it with a response - she decided to ask a clarifying question. "Who's that?"

"Another name for Professor Pascal," Mirny explained. "Probably the name she's better known by, to be honest."

[Adelie]

"Huh?" Ven said, sounding more than a little confused. "I thought her first name was ... Chloe, or something like that? Is it one of those weird pronunciations?"

"Man, the kids really don't know anything these days, do they?" he asked airily.

"You sound more and more like an old man every time we talk, Mirny," Chi responded, then sighed. "I thought most people at the university knew about this, though," she continued. "Like, it's probably one of the seven wonders of Jawan, or something like that."

There was a brief silence as both other members of the call pretended like they knew what she was talking about.

"I guess since you're not really interested in computers, it makes sense you wouldn't know," she continued. Mirny really wanted to tell her to get on with it, but if she wanted to make this a dramatic reveal - well, he may as well settle in and wait for Ven to be disappointed. "Did you ever wonder why Professor Pascal courses were so popular? Why there was always a waiting list for them?"

[Adelie]

"No?" Ven admitted, very simply. "I didn't even know her courses were popular, to be honest..."

Once again, he could almost hear Chi rolling her eyes. Whatever she'd been working up to was now summarily ruined. "Well, they are," she said. "Probably the most popular lectures in the entire university, honestly. They keep making us expand the class size, and I keep trying to convince them not to, because it just means more work for me."

"Oh," Ven said. "I just thought that was because computer science was a popular major..."

"I mean, it is," Chi said. "But Professor Pascal's lectures are especially popular." That didn't invite the response she was looking for - whether that be speculation or additional questions - and after a pause, she continued on. "That's because Professor Pascal - or rather, Kurone - is really famous within the hacking community."

"So she's like a celebrity," Ven said. "Huh, that's pretty cool."

[Adelie]

"More than pretty cool." Mirny couldn't help but inject his opinion here - maybe it was just that he wanted to correct a misconception, maybe he was just a bit more of an idol-worshipper than he wanted to admit. "Kurone's practically a legend."

"Enough of a legend that no one minds that she can't give a lecture for shit," Chi groaned. "The amount of times I've had to physically drag her out of her office is just too many."

"Please stop ruining my mental image of my hero," Mirny chided her. "I haven't recovered from the last time, when you told me you regularly manhandle her to get her to actually grade assignments."

"It's all true, though," Chi grumbled, before brightening up entirely. "Oh man, did I ever tell you the story about how I found her hiding under her desk one day?"

"If you keep telling stories like this I'm hanging up."

[Adelie]

"You're no fun," Chi said, just as Ven said, "Maybe we should move onto another topic."

Another brief awkward silence ensued; despite the addition of a new person to their conversation, it seemed that none of them were particularly educated in the art of keeping a conversation alive. Finally, Mirny said, "So, what should we talk about?"

"How have you been passing your time in quarantine?" Ven asked. "Chi and I are still in college, after all, so we've just been doing schoolwork. Well, schoolwork and procrastinating, mostly."

"Can't say I've been doing much different," he admitted. "Work and procrastinating, mostly. I started a few personal projects I've been putting off for a while, because I thought I'd take advantage of all this spare time to get some work done, but I just have no motivation to work on them."

"Same," Chi said.

"Same," Ven repeated.

[Adelie]

"I watched a couple of interesting dramas recently," Ven said, in an effort to stave off yet another awkward silence. "Well, a couple is kind of an understatement, and interesting is kind of an overstatement."

"Oh, weren't you talking about that with Vers recently?" Chi said. As an aside, she explained, "Vers is another friend of ours from that game we play. He's ... kind of a character, I suppose."

"Venomous Phoenix's Harem Daily Life?" Ven asked. He wasn't sure how she could spit out such a ridiculous - and long-winded name - without tripping over it or being ashamed in the slightest, but he wasn't exactly up-to-date with what people were watching these days. Maybe he was getting old. "Man, I hated that series but Vers really, really loves it. The female lead's just so unlikable, and all the love interests are ... well, calling them living trash cans is kind of harsh, but it's not exactly wrong..."

[Adelie]

"Vers is just biased because of the costume designs," Chi said.

"Yeah, that's true," Ven lamented. "The character designs and the outfits are so good! I really want to cosplay some of them, but I just can't get over how awful the characters are. Like, cosplaying's kind of an extension of your self, you know? And I don't really want to associate myself with someone I don't like."

"That's pretty understandable," Chi said. "Well, there's the maid, at least. She was just comic relief most of the show, at least."

"Yeah, but she doesn't get all of the fancy princess dresses," Ven said. "What was even the point of watching this show if not for the fancy princess dresses?"

"I wonder," Mirny mused. "Chi, you seem suspiciously educated on this topic for someone who professes never to watch such tasteless things as television dramas."

[Adelie]

"What? Me?" Chi protested. "I've just been listening in on conversations, you know? You don't know just how much Ven and Vers have been talking about this show, okay? They've been going on about it for hours at a time for the past week, so it's only natural that I would've picked up something in passing."

She didn't sound particularly convincing.

"I actually heard Nebs picked up the series because we were arguing about it so much," Ven said, laughing. "She wanted to form her own opinion on it, I guess."

"This sounds like a typical case of any publicity is good publicity," Mirny said. Truth be told, he'd taken this moment to check out exactly what drama they were talking about - and read the extremely heated discussion and reviews on it. Apparently this drama had adapted an infamous webnovel, which had its own share of controversies and discussions. Add to that a new growth in readership with the television adaptation, and a slew of source readers arguing over ways the adaptation had mishandled the plot and the characters, and the whole thing looked like a powder keg.

[Adelie]

"Don't tell me you're also considering watching this series," Chi told him, sounding all the more like she was encouraging him to do exactly that. "It's a total waste of time."

"Spoken from experience, I would presume." But no - he definitely didn't want to get himself into some kind of intrafandom war; he had enough of internet flame wars just doing what he usually did. Even if he did have a whole lot of spare time on his hands, and even if there were certainly a lot of episodes to fill that spare time with...

"Actually, if you wanted something to watch," Ven piped up. "I watched this show about people competing in cybersecurity competitions recently that was pretty good."

"Like, a documentary?" There were definitely a few of those floating out there - he'd even had one approach him for an interview, but he'd politely declined.

[Adelie]

"No, like an actual drama," Ven said, a note of excitement creeping into her voice. "It was supposed to be a romance between the handsome rich boy team captain and the poor but good-hearted netcafe owner, but honestly I thought the chemistry between him and the rival team captain was way more convincing."

"There she goes again," Chi said.

"I can already tell this sounds nothing like an actual cybersecurity competition," Mirny said. Well, it wasn't exactly that there was no romance in the field - rather, he almost wanted to say there was too much of it. It had certainly been that way when he did them as a highschooler, at least; as it turns out, when you got a bunch of socially awkward and very excitable kids together with people who finally 'understood' then, relationships developed fast and flared out just as fast.

A mere television drama could not do justice to the real-life drama he'd actually witnessed.

[Adelie]

Unperturbed by their doubtful responses, Ven continued, "They left it with a pretty ambiguous ending, though, so I guess you could say my 'ship still lives. Apparently, they changed a lot from the source material, so one of these days I need to go read that..."

No one seemed particularly interested in hearing about the interpersonal relationships of the characters, so she went back to the topic at hand. "Anyways, the competitions were really cool-looking, but I imagine they must've taken some liberties with it to make it more appealing? How popular are CTFs anyways? Do they usually take place in big arena venues?"

"Hmm," Mirny mused, not particularly convinced. "I mean, there's one or two big competitions each year that get a lot of participants, but it's not like they're filling up Nabias Arena or anything. It really isn't much of a spectator sport, to be honest."

[Adelie]

"That's kind of disappointing," Ven said. "They made it look so cool in the show, too. Like, there were VR holograms of everyone's characters, and so on..."

She trailed off, and Mirny caught the end of her sentence. "...characters?" This was starting to sound more and more suspicious with every word.

"Yeah, characters!" Ven said. "Like, how else are you going to get the flag?"

He had to scratch his head at that one; it took a moment before realization dawned on him. "You know it's not a literal flag, right? Like, you don't... physically capture it... Or I guess virtual reality capture it, or whatever they're showing in there."

[Adelie]

"You... don't?" Ven said, with the exact tone of voice one would expect from a child who had just been told Santa wasn't real. If this were Chi, he'd assume she were just exaggerating for dramatic effect - but since he wasn't familiar with her, he couldn't really tell if he'd actually hit a nerve or not.

Either way, he felt a little guilty. "It uses the same terminology, but it's all virtual," he explained. "The 'flag' is usually just a string of letters or words, and your goal is to find the 'flag' and report what's on it. I guess they might've used the metaphor to visualize it, though - but it's really not that exciting."

She didn't respond, so he continued his explanation. "The kind you're talking about is probably the attack-and-defense type, where there's actually two competing teams. I've never been really good at them, so the CTFs I did were even less exciting. There's no opponent in them - the gamemasters set up a bunch of challenges, and then you compete on how many flags you can get from those challenges."

[Adelie]

"I guess that's still pretty interesting," Ven said, sounding obviously disappointed. "Well - I mean! It's really interesting, actually. I figured they must've exaggerated for dramatic effect, but I didn't know how different it was in real life."

Well, he'd accept that. "Yeah, the media never does a great job with these things. I'm just glad they didn't depict everyone as like, Mountain Dew-guzzling Dorito stains or whatever the current stereotype is."

"Honestly, the way you describe it, it sounds like an esport," Chi said. "And that's been pretty popular these days, as we well know."

"Oh, you're right," Ven said, as if she'd suddenly remembered something. "Now that you mention it, I think that's one of the changes they made from the source material. The book was originally about two esports teams..."

"That," Mirny said, "explains a lot."