Coding Fantasy [Kallisti]

[Marta]

Marta had been working hard and it was beginning to pay off. Marta wasn’t typically book smart, but when she was excited about something, she worked hard. Marta had poured most of her free time into learning how to code and program. She had done some hacking too, but it had been with Sage’s help, and it had been to get access to his information for her job. 

Today she was working on a text-based fantasy game. She knew not many people played those anymore. They were popular around sixty years ago, but she figured it would be a fun way for her to work on her coding skills in a fun way. She liked telling stories, games, and coding, so why not make a “choose your own adventure” game. 

Everyone seemed to be focused on their work. He wasn’t there often, but today Sterling’s crush, Liam, was here. He seemed to be inattentive at times as he worked on whatever it was he was doing. Marta sighed as she finished what she was working on. Now she needed to test it. She started up her program and smiled as it came up on her screen. So far so good. She went into the introduction to the game and tried an option. It just repeated the first screen. She tried a different option and found the same thing. Something was off. 

She went back into her code and tried to troubleshoot. She thought she found it, but upon testing, she was getting the same thing. She had no idea what was wrong. 

”Ugghhhhhh,” she intoned, frustrated and began to lightly bang her head on the table, accentuating every word.  ”Why. Won’t. My. Code. Work. What. Am. I. Doing. Wrong?” she gave one one bang on the table and then just lay there, feeling a little discouraged.

[Liam H]

The Wicked Truth was at the office today. Liam was excited. But unfortunately he'd already made a date to go to Kallisti and work. Rather it's what his schedule told him to do so he couldn't just up and break it because he wanted to be in the office to meet the man himself. And make sure he didn't hack the system.

Liam tried to work but was distracted by his infatuation with a man he knew by name. Knew he had a computer in his head. And he was going to be talking to his dad! It was exciting. But he had school to do and his dad would get mad if he didn't stay on top of his grades now that he'd found a place that worked for him. Nox's little school for misfits was doing great for his grades. And he still got to see Sterling. She was sitting with the girl with golden eyes. He didn't quite understand all the things that went on here, but it didn't matter to him. He just wouldn't tell his dad -- at least not everything.

The golden-eyed girl banged her head on the table in frustration. He was intrigued by her words and got up and stood behind her and glanced at her screen. Sterling looked up at him and he grinned. She was cute, but he had to play it right, her cousin was lenient but he was also a hard man to convince. Liam liked Nox, though he barely knew the guy.

"Watch out for typos." He said from behind her. "After so long they look alike. You shouldn't be coding like Wicked. He doesn't need things like we need and he forgets that sometimes." Or at least that's what Liam had assumed happened. She was typing in the terminal like a pro -- she needed an IDE with all the fun helpful things that every coder with eyeballs uses. Sage Parker -- the Wicked Truth didn't need those things.

Liam pulled a chair over and sat down next to her and reached for the laptop. "May I?" He added. "I'm not fixing anything, just downloading what I use and setting you up to code as a normal person would. Only the really old or really smart or pedantic ones code without the visual tools. Wicked sees things differently than us it's okay for him."

[Marta]

Marta smelled him before he spoke, so she didn’t react to hearing his voice except to raise her head. She didn’t realize there were tools she could use to code. Sage hadn’t told her, and she had been content to learn it this way. But that probably meant she was farther along than she thought she was.

”I do it this way so I can understand how it works,” she said, her voice calm as she turned to meet his gaze. But maybe she was already understanding how it worked, so using tools would be okay. She was glad he wasn’t going to fix it. He’d rather he show her how to fix it. That way she would understand.

She minimized her screens and pushed the laptop over to him, accepting his help and maybe she was getting this better. Her wallpaper showed one of her cartoons. It was actually the one she had originally drawn for Hayden’s assignment. It showed a four panel story of Nox helping a kitten out of the tree and then getting stuck in the tree himself. She had turned in another one because Nox had lost his power and she wasn’t sure it was appropriate at that time. Since he had gotten better though, she felt more comfortable with sharing it, even if she hadn’t shown anyone yet.

”Okay - go ahead. Show me how to use it too?” she just learned better that way.

[Liam H]

Liam took the computer at her offering and nodded he'd show her how to use it. It really wasn't something he would need to at least not at first. He downloaded the best free software IDE out there. "This is just an intelligent development editor. It can have AI if you want it to, but you should start with the basics. It can help you debug better."

Liam installed the program and opened up her code in it. The plain boring text that she had was now lit with colors. "The colors help you identify functions, and variables and like spell checking in everything these days, we get errors that are stupid, like missing semicolons, a wrong quote, stupid things we all miss."

Liam scrolled through her code looking for something. "So a typo in a variable name can often be a problem. You use it correctly in one place and in the other it's wrong but you've missed it lots of times. See this greyed out variable here. It means it's not used so if you intended to use if you did use it it's either typed wrong here, or where ever it is you would use it. But the good thing is you'll get another visual cue where it is that it's wrong."

Liam pushed the computer back to her. "It can do a lot more. And I can show you how to do it more, but first try with the visual cues. It's no different than what you were doing, just prettier. We can set up debug environments and tests and automations and all sorts of things later. But that's a whole thing unto itself."

[Marta]

Liam was excitable and that kind of attitude was infectious - especially since Marta really liked computers. But he was explaining things a little too fast. ”Woah - slow down a bit. Missed two years of school and not so book smart. Takes me longer to process.” it was true, but she said it with a smile and chuckle to show she wasn’t upset. ”Im Marta, by the way.” she hadn’t introduced herself and they had hardly talked.

She sighed and looked at the screen. ”So the colors show different things, but the great text shows something that the program doesn’t know what it does? Could be a redundancy or a typo or anything else. It just means it’s not understanding what it is supposed to do.” she pointed to a part of her code. ”This is why it’s messing up. I can see that now. I just need to make sure I fix it on every repeat. So what was happening is the program didn’t know what to do, so it reverted to the last place it did. Did I get that right?”

[Liam H]

Liam had been told to slow down most of his life. That was part of the problem. Everything came so fast and he had to just take care of it or he'd forget or get distracted. Either way he nodded and tried to slow his train of thought down.

"I'll try, but my brain doesn't work like that."

Sterling chimed in with a sweet grin. "He's got a touch of ADHD. The kids at school used to see how often they could distract him and get him in trouble. They usually remembered too late that teasing Liam usually meant failing a class." Sterling giggled. Not everyone at school knew Liam was an IT security guy at his dad's company. Most people didn't even know who his dad was.

"My mom calls it shiny syndrome. But yeah you got it mostly right. It's not so much as going back to the last point, it's crashing, and it's just automatically restarting up the app. If it happened later in the game people would be angry they lost their progress." Liam smiled.

Liam opened up a few browser and typed in a few websites in new tabs. "These are some of may favorite learning tools. One of is actually a game that can help you learn to code. They even have a white hat hacking section teaching you how people might try to break your code, by teaching you how to do it yourself so you can write code that doesn't let it happen. And it's fun to play."

[Marta]

Marta giggled a bit. "Well, I won't try to get you in trouble or anything.  I'm neurodivergent too! Don't worry about it. I can work with it - just might ask you to repeat something every once in awhile."

Splash was lying at her feet and poked her nose up to put it in Marta's lap.  Marta scratched her behind the ears. "This is Splash. She wants attention." Marta giggled.

She began to look through what he was showing her online. She nodded. They would be good resources for her to learn and perfect. Still she was feeling better with all this. "Hacking tricks, eh. Sounds like a good idea so people can't break my code. Also just sounds fun in general," she smirked. It seemed like Liam knew of Wicked and at the very least had guessed she was involved with him since he brought him up earlier.  He might assume that she was wanting to learn such things.

She changed the subject. "I'm building my own machine too. Have some parts - will probably get some more for Christmas. Slowly getting what I need. Do you know anything about that too?"

[Liam H]

Liam scratched the dog's ears. Though it wasn't a dog -- he knew that, but it made him feel better saying dog instead of wolf. It was all still so very strange for him.

"I don't really build the machines from scratch. At least not myself. " Liam leaned closer. "I have guys who do that for me cause my dad pays them." He sat up and grinned. "Hardware isn't really my thing. I just buy what I need." He wasn't trying to brag, but he had no interest in the physicality of it all. He was pretty sure Sage wasn't either, but he probably had his own way of doing things too. Specific set ups. They all did. Liam was not like most hackers, he did it for the challenge, not for the benfits of it.

"I can get you in touch with my IT guys and they can give you specs and things, and maybe even some steep discounts., if you mention my name."

[Marta]

Marta gave him a look as he scratched Splash’s ears. Splash was in absolute bliss of course, but she was kind of surprised that Liam didn’t build his own stuff. ”Lame,” she said in response, a smirk coloring her words. ”Sure thing - send me their deets - always willing to learn and discounts are always great.” Marta thought he worked for some tech company or something.

While they were conversing, Marta had been multitasking. She had quickly picked up how to use the program he had downloaded and had fixed her code. She tested everything and it worked out. ”Thanks for that - it works now!” it wasn’t much - but she had made a little game. It was mostly to practice, but now that she knew how, she might expand it a bit. Perhaps she could sell it. She had no idea.

Closing out and minimizing, she saw her cartoon again and sent Sterling a copy. ”Sent you something, Sterling. Wanna know what you think?” she sent many of her drawings to Sterling.

She turned back to Liam. ”Show me how to do something cool. Don’t care what - just something fun!”

[Liam H]

Liam cracked his knuckles and grinned. "I'm going to do it on my machine, since you don't have access and I don't want to give it to you. My dad would be pissed."

The Wicked Truth was on premises. It wasn't really hacking since he had access. But he was going to show Marta how to hack the camera feeds.

"Every good hacker needs to learn how to do this." He opened up a terminal and started typing in some commands. "Hacking isn't like coding exactly, it is but it's more on the fly type command after you get access. So you need to know about the underlying systems just as much as the code you write."

Liam typed away quickly he didn't actually need to do it this way, but he was doing it to show Marta the cool things she could do. When he got access to the camera's the hard way he started a facial recognition program. "I didn't write this one, I kinda took it off from one of Phasers's b0rg when it went belly up. But it'll find our Sage Parker easily the crowd. I just got to feed it the information.... and." The image on screen showed Sage walking into his father's office. "It seems Mr. Parker is just now going in to see my dad."