"Welcome, Shadowrunner."

A voice greets a rookie Technomancer.

The voice that greeted Chimes was digitized, making so little effort in sounding human that it almost came across as disdainful of the technomancer listening to it. Nontheless, it was a confirmation to Chimes that she was indeed a shadowrunner, a true asset to her newfound peers in the wake of the twelve minutes of mayhem she had recently been a part of. She took a moment to compose herself - relieved that the instructions she had recieved to find and connect to the Stand-Alone DataCache were legitimate and not a roundabout way of frying her synapses for some unknown slight - and pushed on into accessing the device, shirking her feelings of vunerability in being away from the crowds in this digital frontier of the Matrix.
The red haze, emblematic of of Raleigh's Local-Grid, dimmed were swallowed into a dense black fog coalescing around her as she accessed the cache, and was replaced with a warm golden glow from a source whose direction she couldn't comprehend. The operating-system that acted as an intermediary between the user was surprisingly spartan in comparison to her expactations: A small swarm of dimly-glowing beads of a golden sheen emerged out of the icon in her avatar's hand in the midst of a hazy void, conected to oneanother by drooping, gently glowing strings. Each bauble seemed to correspond to a specific purpose - the one that floated directly infront of her looked to be a sort of main directory, while the smaller pinpoints of light orbiting it corresponded to a form of categorisation system for the information inside. Distant nodes and structural-code faintly flickered like stars, and appeared to lose definition and pixelate the further it dissapeared into the fog that gave the illusion of distance. As she took it in, it became clearer that this was not as sparsely designed as first thought but rather given the facade of utilitarianism, reminding Chimes of jeans that come fresh out the factory covered in holes and fake stains. How strange...
She was not alone, a realisation that for a moment pushed the warmth of her resonance - that unintelligible but comforting presence that had been with her all her life - right out of her body and replaced it with an primal chill. Before she could comprehend this unsettling sensation, the abstracted form of the cache's creator and and curator loomed over her shoulder; the faintly glowing muzzle of a feline skull pushing its way into the periphery of her vision.
"No issues finding your way inside, I hope." The interloper's tone was impersonal, and dripping in the same arrogance as the voice that greeted Chimes at the threshold. "This is the first time a Technomancer has connected to the cache, and I wasn't certain you would be able to emulate the necesarry software-"
"It wasn't a problem. Really." Chimes replied, a tad too quickly and with a tone of defensiveness. This wasn't her first interaction with Null Kit - after all, they had just participated in the same shadowrun, albeit for seperate and morally opposed purposes - but Chimes did find herself rather let down, as it seemed he was just as aloof and unforthcoming to her now as he was in the midst of begrudgingly showing her the ropes of a routine datasteal. Such thoughts would have to wait however, as she found the bottom of her spine tingling, a sensation she has long since acclimated to associating with a signal or message directer to her personally. Surely enough, a small window slid its way infront of her face and offered her the credentials for provisional access to the precious information she had nestled in her hand.
"Mm," Null Kit's grunted in skeptical acknowledgement. "As per our Mutual Benefactor's terms, you will be given access to our more exclusive data for as long as your prior stated needs require them." The mass of shimmering, geometric shapes that made the rest of Null Kit's body lazily slid on the tips of its past Chimes like an ice-skater, his skeletal head pivoting to an inhuman angle so as to keep facing his guest. "And only for that long. Don't think you've earned a right to call this space yours just by fetching a few gigapulses from a host."
"Not yet, no." Chimes replied, ignoring the condescension. She accepted the invitation, and with that her namesake mark - a single brushed-metal chime, dangling from a crimson string - emerged from her hand and floated to a spot above the light floating in her hand, briefly illuminating a handful of other undistinct marks before dissapearing. Chimes took a moment to think about all the other matrix-users who had been where she is, few as they were, and for an instant wondered if this cache had the feeling of exclusivity, or merely the airs of such to cover up its unimportance.
With that mark accepted, the fog around her appeared to lift, albeit slightly. The dull beads around her hand gently came to life, illuminating with a warm amber glow as snippets of data began leasurely ebbing in and out of the light. Masses of polygonal shapes began to coalesce above each node until they took the form of various images - skulls, scales, bullets and so forth - each with a body of latin text hovering underneath, no doubt a visual-key alluding to the category of information readily accessible from that particular point of light. And above the central sphere in her hand, an effigy of the ghoulish feline skull that Null Kit uses as his avatar's head rose into prominence, taking with it the latin phrase: 'Suos Cultores Scientia Coronat'.
Knowledge crowns those who seek her.
"Take your time, and ask if you need anything." Said the condescending decker, his unsettling persona finally touched down a short distance away from Chimes, sitting itself down in thin air and pulling a glowing light from his own hand to begin scrolling through the same cache of information as she was - a pointless show of luxury in being able to surf the host's archives in a fraction of the time as anyone else - and gestured at his guest with a dismissive wave of the hand, apparently finished in the arduous task of acknowledging another matrix-user's existence.
Chimes took a moment to take it all in. All she had asked for was for a couple of questions to be answered, and now it seemed like the floodgates to Raleigh's accumulation of illicit information were opening up to her. It was overwhelming, and at the same time... it all felt so comforting, almost familiar.
Gathering herself, Chimes pressed a hand against the first glowing sphere that appeared relevant to her needs. The web-like string linking it to the main node pulled taut and began to reel it in until the two were absorbed into oneanother, replacing the latter's icon with its own. A slim window blossomed out from the light alongside several boxy interfacing-tools, and began listing the contents of the note in utilitarian text-boxes.
This is going to be very educational, Chimes thought, opening the first node she came across...