It was much too early in the morning to contact the team to arrange a meeting about their new options, so Justin decided to just wait and assume the others would receive the team notification when they woke up.

There were a number of new options for assigning leadership and administrative positions in the team, but for now Justin just tagged Division as Team Leader and left the rest for the team to work on together. The most interesting option though, was the ability to setup a temporary team lobby. A place outside the game world for the team to discuss things without worrying about eavesdropping or staying in character.

He drilled further into the details. The team were allocated 2 minutes per day, which carried over, so they currently had 14 minutes. Not a great amount, but it should be enough to cover some things. It appeared Somnus would still be in effect, so they would probably still appear as some facet of their character, but limitations would be removed, which would have been really useful when he was struggling to be understood. He wondered how he would appear in the lobby, definitely something to look forward to.

There were quite a few things he'd wanted to talk with the team about over the last week, little details and questions he couldn't ask while staying in character, or had struggled to explain thanks to Kip's poor English.

He'd really begun to appreciate the advantage of a group of friends signing up together, able to log out and coordinate details before jumping back in. For everyone else they were limited by the immersion pledge Imagitech had all players sign during orientation.

They'd defended the pledge as part of their commitment to a fully immersive game. No silly character names, no one running around asking for build advice or quests, no real world chatter and no calling denizens NPCs, noobs or DPS. If people wanted that, they could logout to the game lobby or forums and chat away.

Justin was willing to accept that the pledge kept the game feeling 'real', but he couldn't help wondering if part of Imagitech's motivation had to do with easing the way for their game-cast channels, where the week-removed streams of in game adventures could be watched, lived, edited and re-released by the masses. There was no real money in it for anyone other than Imagitech, but it provided vicarious viewing for people who didn't want, or weren't able, to play in one of their games.

Justin doubted anyone who'd stumbled on his stream had stayed for more than a minute. He couldn't imagine watching code puzzles and lab-work was terribly thrilling, maybe he'd turn up in an Outsider re-cast, or as the antagonist on one of the villain streams.

Whatever their reasons for pushing the pledge, and whatever the unnamed sanctions were for breaking character, it would be nice to talk to his team mates as players, to discuss their character builds and goals, to talk about where they wanted to take the team.

Amidst all the other interesting information on the team page, Justin was surprised to spot the Fame stat at 12. It wasn't that it was so low, the team was only a week old, had no media presence, and had only spoken to reporters once. What surprised Justin was that he remembered receiving Fame himself, after catching the Ebon Fox breaking into the art museum. Surely being involved in the ambush should have at least netted him at least some Notoriety.

He checked his Reputation page, something he really hadn't bothered with up to now. Nothing but 2 Fame. Did all the Reputation go to the team on group missions? He supposed it would make sense, maybe with smaller rewards to the more talkative, media-wooing members of the team. The one to ask would probably be Shift, the younger hero was pretty active on social media, talking about his exploits with fans. Justin added it to his mental list of game-related questions to ask the team.

Before getting back to decrypting, he checked in on IRA and Chompers. He really should have known better than to name the little guy, it would just make it more difficult to flush him later. They both seemed to be doing fine, though IRA was a little grumpy at having to play nursemaid to foreign code. Justin couldn't see why 'Chompers duty' was somehow worse than the other menial scut work he'd had IRA doing, but he seemed to think it was.

He also took the time to check in on a couple of experiments he had running. The new alloy bonding was going well, and Justin had very high hopes for the nanite printer he was testing. Working at that scale was arduous and incredibly imprecise, even for a machine immune to biological disturbances like arterial palpation and muscle fasciculation. He was currently on his twenty-eighth attempt, which was exactly why he needed the nanites in the first place.

Happy that everything was proceeding as well as it could be, or was at least muttering quietly to itself in the case of IRA, he settled back in for a final attempt at cracking the drive.

He still hadn't succeeded in completely opening up the damn thing up, but he had been able to identify and concentrate on video files.

Successful Skill Use +10 xp to Decipher - Novice Level 1 [81%].

+5 xp to skill group Coder - Novice Level 3 [02%]

Successful Skill Use +14 xp to Hacking - Novice Level 1 [03%].

+7 xp to skill group Coder - Novice Level 3 [05%]

Congratulations! Your knowledge of Hacking has reached the Novice tier.

You have received 1 attribute point as a reward.

His Hacking skill had been trickling up all night, and had finally reached the Novice rank right as he'd unlocked the last file. It was enough to make Justin wonder if the game was messing with him.

Flicking through the video files, he found he was now the proud owner of about a month's worth of recorded council meetings, about 20 gigs of porn, and thankfully, the building security feeds. He wasn't sure who'd been using the municipal server to download porn, but they had some really strange tastes. He fed them to Chompers, and really hoped the program wasn't influenced by the files it consumed.

The bad news was that the security feeds were labelled only by date and camera number, and Justin was missing any sort of legend that would have identified and structured them by location. He figured it must be integral to the security control panel rather than in system software. Which meant he was going to have to access each feed individually and sort them as he went. Sixty-two individual cameras feeds meant he had his work cut out for him.

The first thing he did was find out the exact time of the explosion, easy enough to do since the media had been reporting on the incident for over twelve hours now, and then cycled through each feed to that time, looking for evidence of the explosion. It turned out he needn't have bothered looking up the time, since half the feeds cut off within a couple of seconds of it, and the rest only lasted a minute or so after.

Finding the only camera with a view of the explosion itself, he watched as what looked like a potted fern imploded, before blasting outwards in a shockwave of fire and shrapnel. The camera's view swung for less than a second, either the mounting or the wall itself collapsing under the pressure. The remains of brickwork were momentarily visible through the cracked lens of the camera, and air thick with plaster dust.

After re-watching the explosion for a couple of minutes, he decided he had absolutely no idea about what kind of device had been used. It was obviously powerful and passive enough not to have set off scanners.

He rewound back to the start of the day and found the fern missing, he fast-forwarded through the day looking for the pot being, well, planted. He soon found the culprit, a heavily-built man in a utility outfit and baseball cap dropped off the potted fern and then carried on his way without ever showing his face.

Justin followed the man throughout the building, every time he lost him he would have to do a search through all the footage around the same time, gradually piecing the camera layout together, and realising that the man must have known the building or had a detailed plan, because right from entering by way of a rear staff door, ID accepted and plant pot in hand; to leaving through the car park just before the explosion, he never once turned his face towards a camera.

Frustrated, Justin put together what information he could work out on the man. He determined his height by comparing it to known variables, and took screenshots of the most revealing angles of the man's profile, before scrutinising some of the higher resolution images for distinctive characteristics.

Successful Skill Use +16 xp to Analysis - Novice Level 1 [09%].

+8 xp to skill group Inquiry - Novice Level 2 [82%]

Successful Skill Use +14 xp to Investigation - Novice Level 2 [10%].

+7 xp to skill group Inquiry - Novice Level 2 [84%]

Successful Skill Use +12 xp to Mathematics - Novice Level 2 [03%].

+6 xp to skill group Science - Novice Level 3 [44%]

Successful Skill Use +12 xp to Assessment - Beginner Level 6 [03%].

+6 xp to skill group Inquiry - Novice Level 2 [85%]

In the end he had a file for their bomber: 5'10", heavy-build, short black hair, eye colour unknown, olive skinned (possibly Latino), small canine tattoo on the inside of his left wrist, and finally, unless he had a unique form of eczema, scaled skin visible at the nape of his neck. It seemed their bomber was a super.