Slept through my alarm. I blam the rain and over cast morning. Apparently it went off and I just turned it off and rolled over. Oh well, let’s catch up now with the morning prompt. Ready everyone? Fabulous Let’s go.
Okay this could lead to something interesting. I think it might actually be my favorite prompt this week. So many story line possibilites.
Thursday, January 19th: How long will it be?
“How long will it be?” she asked tapping her foot. He tried not to roll his eyes. It was the third time the question was asked and he was tired of giving the same answer. Still he knew that snapping would do no good.
“It will be as long as it will be,” he told her. She sighed dramatically.
“You said that five minutes ago,” she informed him. Her mouth pulled down into a deep frown.
“And if you keep interrupting me it will take longer,” he said. He tried to keep his voice level but he feared there was a sting in it.
“You are stretching it out on purpose,” she said. Her face tightened, the frown lines seeming to deepen. He knew a wail for her mother was soon to erupt if he didn’t do something.
“If you keep making that face you’ll get frown lines,” he told her.
Despite being nineteen his step-sister had an unnatural fear of getting old. Her face immediately cleared and she scampered off to study her face in the mirror. He doubted the expression had time to carve permeant lines in her face but hoped it disarranged her makeup enough that he bought himself a few minutes of quiet time in which to work as well as staved off an explosion.
He shook his head and went back to his laptop. He was sure his step sister would go through with the yelling, despite the fact that it would do her no good. Tanya was not one of the brightest bulbs on the planet. He gave her credit, she was smarter than she appeared, but she was selfish, entitled and rarely took the time to think things through. At the moment his involvement with her was a perfect example of this sort of life backfiring.
Tanya was being blackmailed. The blackmailer didn’t want money, just Tanya’s social ruin. There were pictures, the sort that if they got out would spell social disaster for Tanya. However they were also the sort that should her mother know about, there would be many erruptions at home as well.
Tanya wanted him to find out who had the pictures before she had to do anything compromising and he agreed. The fact that she was still causing this much of a headache for him when he was helping her out was proof that his ‘avoid Tanya when possible’ policy was a good one.
His fingers flew over the keyboard, their rhythm confident as he skated past firewalls and encoded and encrypted password protected barriers. He slipped and sliced easily through the electronic ether. It was something he had been doing for a long time. He was always told that someday his skills would get him into trouble. He was fairly certain his father had visions of him hacking into a governmental computer at some point and causing a national emergency or an international incident.
Ten til Midnight 