Basgiath IT Department

Recovered Correspondence from the Basgiath IT Help Desk

Lt. Pyrige,

Congratulations on your new posting to the Basgiath Help Desk. I'm looking forward to having someone with rider experience working on our systems, and I'm certain your Reboot signet will be a major asset.

Your commanding officer will be Col. Markham and the Help Desk offices are located in the Archives- please ensure you do not work any unscheduled overtime as we would not be responsible for your death. The server room is located in the sub-basement next to the forges so IT emergencies can be handled 24/7 as needed.

As a fully-trained rider, you may also be called out for support as needed. We'll be providing you with two Scribe cadets to train as help desk interns to cover in such an emergency. The morning account deactivation list will be provided to you shortly after the death rolls are read in formation.

Welcome aboard,

Gen. Lilith Sorrengail

PS. Please immediately deactivate v.sorrengail@scribeq.basgiath.edu and recreate as v.sorrengail@riderq.basgiath.edu

---

Hi again Lt. Pyrige,

As part of this morning's briefing, General Melgren asked me to let you know that Panchek's gonna click on a stupid phishing scam email again and please block him from accessing Navarazon so he can't buy any gift cards for scammers this time.

Thanks in advance,

Lt Col Kennedy

Personal Secretary to Gen Melgren

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Redaction Duty

Lieutenant Bran Pyrige wandered into the officer's mess. It was macaroni and cheese day, which meant it was Tuesday. He'd lost track again because he'd gotten called down to work on Sunday. When he'd gotten posted to Basgiath, he'd told himself that sure, IT wasn't glamorous, but at least it would be easy compared to a posting out at the front.

And okay, it probably still was that even when he had to work on his days off. There were no gryphons trying to claw his eyes out, after all, only scribes who were mad that their attachments were too large for the email server and healers who had locked themselves out of their email again and riders trying to access… well, somehow it was always the riders' quadrant that generated the really interesting access attempt logs.

Lunch tray in hand, he scanned the mess hall looking for someone worth spending an hour with. He spotted one of the scribes he got along best with and made his way over, ignoring the way his friend looked miserable.

"Ean! How can you be so unhappy when there's macaroni and cheese?" Bran asked.

"Two reasons." The scribe held up two fingers. "First, I'm lactose intolerant." He flipped his hand around so that he was flipping Bran off. "Second, Markham's pissed at me so I'm on fucking redaction duty."

Bran wrinkled his nose. "Oh no, what'd you do this time?"

"I think he got wind I'm supposedly responsible for something that was supposed to get burned but maybe didn't make it there, but there's no proof since you can't prove something was destroyed."

"But he can make you read all the second years' mail from home anyway."

Ean nodded. "Not even all of it. Just one letter."

"How could one letter be that bad?"

The scribe looked around to make sure no one was paying attention. "Riorson sent the little Sorrengail a letter."

"Riorson like… Oh right, they were like 70% of the drama in the riders quadrant last year. Still, how long can a single letter take? It's not like he's going to send her detailed troop movements or something, right?"

"See, that's the thing. Markham's convinced there's a secret code in it, but it's all like… 'when I was a kid I liked to sneak cake' and 'I miss your face' and… let's just say I hope I don't have to look Violet in the eye any time soon."

Bran laughed at the blush on Ean's face. "So what, Markham thinks that there's a secret code about some rebellion hidden in Riorson's childhood stories?"

"I don't know! Apparently! Either that or he knows there isn't one and he just hates me."

"Well either way, you know what the answer is."

"I do?"

"Same thing you told me to do when I was on library duty, remember? If there isn't a right answer, make one up." Bran grinned. "Say the childhood stories are probably a way to signal there's nothing going on at the moment, or see if you can make Markham blush. One finger if by land, two if by sea?"

"Fuck no, I knew her father!" Ean hid his face. "But I'm sure I can manage something. How was your morning? I'm pretty sure I saw smoke coming out of your office again…"

---

Malware Detected

I waved at the scribe cadet watching the door as I stepped into the Archives for my workday. Fortunately it was one of the usual cadets, one who knew me and didn't ask questions about why a rider worked in the Archives.

I work in the Archives because that's where the servers are, and IT goes where the servers are.

On a good day, I log in and there's a few new tickets about password resets, maybe some new equipment in the healers quadrant that needs to get on the network, maybe a request to set up credentials for replacement staff.

On a bad day, well… today I logged in to see sixty nine new alerts, each helpfully letting me know there was MALWARE DETECTED.

"Nice," I mumbled out of habit, looking at the number, but it was not nice at all.

I pulled up the login history and started looking at the access logs to find the location. Oh, look, it was the riders quadrant. How shocking, by which I meant it was not shocking at all. There's a reason the riders have their own firewall, and it's not to hold back the dragonfire.

Let's narrow it down… not Panchek's office this time, not the library (thank Zihnal, malware on the public devices was easier to fix but harder to solve the problem), so I started narrowing down the dorm IPs until I found the right one and then I pulled up the website history in question.

Well, fuck, this was going to need some discretion. It was one of the new flier cadets' dorm, and it looked like he'd been searching for photos of their new favorite flier, that cat Broccoli riding in a basket on a gryphon, but their Navarran could use a little work. Instead of a cute kitten in flight goggles, the cadet managed to search for 'new pussy riding gryphon'.

I sent an email off to HR before settling in to wipe all of the malware the porn site had managed to spew onto our network and I was almost done when my phone rang.

"Basgiath IT," I answered, hitting the speakerphone button. Through my office window, I saw a scribe make a face at me, but if they didn't like it they should soundproof the damn office.

"I got your email," came the more-familiar-than-I'd-like voice of the local HR director. "I know I said I wanted to handle anything related to the fliers after the fight club riot-"

"And yet you're calling me, Major Silver, so I must have missed something."

"I just wanted to check… are you certain the flier was searching for… those search terms by accident?"

"Not at all," I answered cheerfully. "It's entirely possible he was genuinely looking for gryphon porn. But based on my experience with rider cadets and unfortunate searches about hemipenes, I find it's easier for everyone if we all pretend it was an accident."

"Hemi- oh dear." I could hear a soft thunk, presumably Major Silver letting her head hit the desk in frustration.

"You said the fliers were your problem, so enjoy your problem," I tried not to smile as I said it. "Let me know when you've talked to the flier and then I'll restore his computer."

"Of course," Major Silver sighed. "Have a good morning, Lieutenant."

Character Profiles

Lt Bran Pyrige

Physical Description: Unruly brown hair that tends to be too long, grey eyes, 5'8" with a stocky build

Signet: Reboot (a type of mending limited to wards, runes and similar magic that allows him to turn runes off or "reset" magic that's been disrupted.)

Dragon Name: Theic, full name Taictheicnigeach

Dragon Type: Brown clubtail

Bran graduated from the Riders Quadrant the year before Violet entered there. As a first year, he discovered his signet by accident when a second-year in his squad thought it'd be funny to ward Bran's room so that he couldn't enter it, and found himself slotted into specialized signet training. He was quiet for a rider and mostly kept to himself in his free time.

He never expected to end up in leadership, but on Conscription Day of his second year, his new Wingleader came to him to ask a favor. He'd agreed to take the marked ones into his wing, and everybody he'd asked refused to be a squadleader for them. He knew Bran hadn't applied for a squadleader position, but would he be willing...? Bran agreed, wondering if the marked ones would even make it to threshing. Probably he wouldn't even have to be a squadleader for more than a few months, so better him than someone who actually wanted the role.

It turned out to be one of those things that changes how everyone saw him. People seemed to decide he'd done it out of sympathy, or pity, or maybe some kind of moral high ground. He didn't feel like it was any of those things, at least to start with. By the time he was warding the rooms of the four that made it through threshing, he realized that yes, he'd gotten attached. And he'd gotten the attention of leadership in an entirely new way.

Whoops.

Suddenly nobody was sure if he should be exposed to the kind of situations where specialized signet training was required, and his RSC got... awkward... especially since technically his squad was all first years so he was thrown in with Third Squad's second years. By the end of the year, leadership had decided to break the "marked squad" up in the name of unity and Bran wasn't in leadership anymore, but as his third year concluded it was clear to him that leadership was no longer sure what to do with him. He expected to be shuffled off to a frontline post but instead they decided he might as well make himself useful at Basgiath, maintaining the mage lights, the presevation spells in the Archive, and the computer networks and absolutely refusing to do anything about the streaming traffic to Aetos's office.

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Lt Col Tosh Kennedy

Physical Description: Short, curly brown hair, brown eyes, 5'9" with a muscular build

Signet: Eidetic memory

Dragon Name: Biur, full name Biùrocrasaidh

Dragon Type: Green daggertail

Tosh crossed the parapet the year before Brennan Sorrengail, though she only knew the general's son in passing as a cadet. With a signet that was not particularly useful in battle, she trained twice as hard on the mats and at battle maneuvers. (It helped that she had to study very little for her other classes.)

At graduation she was pulled out for special service, and even trained as a spy. At first they intended to have her infiltrate the Tyrrish rebellion, but that ended before she could do much but try to help evacuate Aretia. She didn't have the ear for language to be much use in Poromiel; she could recreate documents she saw in other languages but couldn't actually learn the languages well enough to pass as a native speaker.

When Melgren's previous secretary died because someone pushed him off a turret, Tosh was reassigned to "Melgren detail," where her duties include transcribing any battle visions the General has, sending orders and instructions based on those visions, murdering any attempted assassins that Melgren has seen coming, speedreading field reports to compare and compile detailed summaries, taking dictation on dragonback, picking up Melgren's coffee every morning, and trying to fill the void in her life left by the profound disappointment of surviving the Riders' Quadrant just to get stuck in this job.

Nah, just kidding. She makes the scribe interns pick up the coffee.