Chapter 117 - 117

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….

"Thank you, but please allow us to taste your wonderful dish a little later. Right now... you wouldn't happen to know the password to Mr. Parker's computer, would you?"

"No," Aunt May shook her head. "I am just a simple, weak woman, and this information, as Peter said, could bring me a lot of trouble. I can only help with some of the equipment in the cave, mend the suit, repair the shooters, things like that. All the important information Peter kept strictly inaccessible to outsiders."

"Logical," damn, looks like the local Web-Head was a competent guy. "Then we'll go another route. We're going to hack it."

"I was already thinking about that," the Unusual Japanese Schoolgirl piped up. "The terminal is primitive, of course, but he could have installed a number of defenses, up to and including data wiping and physical destruction of the drives, so I wouldn't recommend brute-forcing it."

"Naturally," I nodded. "I think I'll start with 'rainbow tables'."

"Oh!" the girl perked up. "You know your stuff! But how will you extract the hashes? And I'd still pull the hard drives first and check them for physical kill-switches."

"We'll do that," I was liking this girl more and more. "Actually, the easiest way is to hook the drives up to a new system, and from there use a 'ghost' to get to the tables and crack it with a brute-force memory dump."

"I still don't get how you're planning to snag the tables. What's a 'ghost'?" she frowned comically.

"Oh, a very useful little gadget. To log into a system, you need a password. But how does the machine know it's the right one?"

"By checking the password hash, the tables you mentioned. But that's an intra-system operation, completely inaccessible while the system is locked down."

"That's exactly where the 'ghost' comes in. It lets you capture the memory sector the system is accessing at that exact moment and copies it. There will be a ton of garbage data in there, of course, but after that, you can brute-force it alongside dumping the memory. Thankfully, you can also track where the failed attempts are being registered."

"And if we further filter out the excess with a 'Spider'..."

"Nah, the local Parker clearly knew his way around high tech, so he would have absolutely planned for obvious hacking methods. Which means 'spider' algorithms might end up filtering out the actual key."

"Do you understand what language they're speaking?" Spider-Noir asked his porcine colleague quietly.

"In my world, computers are the size of wardrobes and run on punch cards. I only understood the prepositions, and not even all of them."

"I am in the exact same boat... Although wait, it sounds like they might actually be able to get the data."

"Uh-huh..."

"It still won't work," Peni's shoulders slumped. "I can connect to the local tech through my mech, but I don't have the right programs or algorithms. The architecture, the software, it's all too different. In my world, silicon semiconductors are only taught in history classes."

"You are mistaken," a theatrical snap of my fingers, and Spidey's systems beeped in greeting and booted up. "I'm already done," I smiled charmingly at the girl.

"Uhh... how?" The anime girl's eyes crossed in a comical expression, and even a characteristic "sweat drop" appeared on her head.

A spiral-patterned background practically materialized around her figure, perfectly illustrating her utter bewilderment.

"Exactly how we discussed: physically isolating the drives, brute-forcing the password, and reconnecting the system."

"B-but... we haven't even unscrewed the tower case yet!" It sounded like an amusing mix of timidity, awe, and indignation.

"Hey!" I pretended to be insulted. "I am the God of Magic! I was assembling quantum computers atom by atom when humans were still running around in animal skins!"

"What does magic have to do with quantum computers?!" Peni's bewilderment grew, reflecting even on her robot's sensor glass, where huge question marks replaced the eyes of its "smiley face." Even MJ, standing nearby, raised an eyebrow in confusion.

"I don't know how it was in your worlds, but in mine, the whole confusion stems from the fact that primitive humans, upon hearing the term 'magic,' endowed it with exclusively mystical properties, inventing 'technology' and 'science' as its polar opposites. Even though originally, magic was simply a term encompassing all areas of applied knowledge.

"Just consider that to the Gods, mystical energies are as familiar and manageable as ordinary rocks or sand are to you. Meaning, on a perceptual level, there is no fundamental difference between mysticism and physics for us, and we don't attribute any 'wow-factor' to mysticism. So, if you translate my title accurately, I am the God of Science, Technology, and Invention. It's just that purely mystical manifestations are also naturally and routinely involved in all of this for the inhabitants of Asgard."

"Deus ex machina!" the private detective-noir exclaimed.

"Yeah, something like that," I confirmed, but I didn't even have time to finish the sentence before my colleagues in forced interdimensional displacement were synchronously "shot through" by the rainbow radiance I was already familiar with.

Yeah, that's a problem. I wasn't the only one suffering from "atomic digestion," and the Spiders were glitching just like me, maybe even worse, considering they had absolutely no way to counteract their "dissolution" by the local world. Well, if I couldn't fully halt this process, I could certainly mitigate it somewhat.

"Ugh, my guts are twisting," the Pig complained. "Almost hurts as much as getting hit by another one of that crazy mouse's malfunctioning machines."

"Who are you talking about?" the detective inquired.

"We have this rodent back home. He's a genius, but an idiot."

"Not Tony Stark, by any chance?" I asked, because the definition was painfully familiar.

"That's the one," sighed the superhero with a snout.

"Hmm, no, don't know him," Spider-Noir shook his head, "although I've heard the name Howard Stark in passing."

"Tony is his son," the piglet explained.

"Howard has a son?" Parker of 1933 was surprised.

"Well, maybe he will," I shrugged. "Anyway, enough talking. Let me patch you guys up; we still have to dig through the local Peter's databases."

"What do you mean, 'patch up'?" the Japanese schoolgirl eyed me suspiciously, clearly tensing up upon realizing a scenario akin to "some scientist wants to tinker with me" was unfolding.

"You don't belong to this reality. You are incompatible with it. And like any foreign body, you are being expelled, or rather, 'digested', by the local continuum. The longer you stay here, the faster you will dissolve, ultimately resulting in complete disintegration."

"I see you don't have that problem, pal?" Spider-Noir stated more as a fact than a question.

"Well, I am the God of Magic and Deceit, after all. I just slightly altered my body to match the parameters of this universe and blend in. Generally speaking, I'm supposed to look like this."

And I created an illusion of my real appearance.

"Wah!" was the anime girl's first reaction, staring wide-eyed at the phantom. The others also froze for a second.

"Uhh..." The "Disney" (or was it "Warner Bros"? Whatever) Pig shook himself. "Not that I don't want to stay here with these magnificent pies, but I still want to go home. Say, it won't start dissolving me there too, will it?"

"Don't worry," I dispelled the phantom. "I'm not going to biologically restructure you, that's too slow, resource-intensive, and without my equipment, damn near impossible. But throwing up an illusion to 'trick' the universe for a while? Very doable. It won't completely solve the problem, but it will significantly weaken the glitches, or even stop them entirely for a while."

"Oh, excellent!" Spider-Noir nodded. "What do we need to do?"

…

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