The Music Stopped • •

[puck austen valburn]

Puck had assumed that when she had graduated college she would walk off the campus and never step foot on it again. Alas, that was not the way. With Booker and Aloy she was always returning to the place she honed her IT skills. Family meant a great deal to Puck, so much in fact, that she was sure everything she did for them was going to cost her them one day. She was, after all, the only person in the family who knew that Booker had a six month old son. That was the kind of secret that could break a family apart if they chose to be stubbornly dramatic about it. Puck considered herself one of the calmer members of the large, proud, family. She was content to be left alone at the holidays, on the edge of the celebrations, with a drink and something she could read to keep her attention. Puck would let her cousins and the younger ones have the attention and the fun. She was happier away from crowds and chaos, which was why she hadn’t missed the madness of NYU’s campus. It was different when she was a student. It was expected then. These days she was used to the few hours in the fancy office for meetings and assignment hand offs, but then she spent most of her time in her home office, working against the backdrop of New York City with all her comforts and likes surrounding her, and very little to bother her.

Puck was by no means anti-social. She kept busy with a lot of activities outside of her work, but she preferred a quiet life. She liked things to be planned out, scheduled and just at least mentioned ahead of time rather than a spontaneous night out that ended with the sun rising, broken shoes, and a hangover to curse ancestors with. She liked her clarity, and she liked to be organised. She was the friend who always had whatever anyone needed in her bag, and always knew the directions to where they were supposed to be, even if they were in a brand new city or country. Puck was used to strangers thinking that her organised personality meant that she couldn’t have fun, but she was also the type of person who refused to prove herself to others. She was comfortable and confident in her skin, and wasn’t about to waste her time trying to impress people who clearly were unable to open their minds to look beyond a tiny bit of who she was.

She felt out of place now. Her student days were long gone, and she didn’t feel like she blended in with the hallways anymore. She was just thankful she could still remember her way around after dropping off Aloy’s work uniform at the library where her study group was. How it had been left in Puck’s kitchen at breakfast that morning was beyond knowing, but it happened far too often. Puck felt her phone buzzing in the tight pocket of her jeans. She pulled it free and glanced down at the ‘911’ text from Booker asking her to babysit while he went to another late rehearsal for a dance exam or something. Puck was not an artist; she was logical and as such she struggled to keep up an understanding of his plans and routines. Her thumbs skipped across the screen as she fired back the text message, telling him she was only free after she put in a few solid hours of work first. Message sent, she pushed her phone back into her pocket and pushed her hair back from her face, looking up just as she realised she was about to crash into someone. It was too late to stop it happening, but Puck swivelled on her heel anyway to try and accomplish some kind of save. All it did was guarantee that she fell backwards and that the poor person she was already crashing into ended up as her personal crash mat. She landed sprawled across his lap, her hand narrowly short of backhanding him across the face as she flailed for something to hold onto, finally grasping the shoulder of his shirt.

• • •

TAGGED! Kian James Presley
WORDS! 704!
OUTFIT! Perfect Puck!
LYRICS! Come A Little Bit Closer - - - Jay And The Americans
NOTES! <3 <3 <3

[Kian James Presley]

Kian had planned on teaching for a while and see where that took him. He didn't know how much real-time and effort it would take at first so he wanted to keep his schedule as open as possible. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which way you looked at it, he was more prepared than he needed to be and ended up sitting around waiting on his students to submit the work that he actually had to grade himself. Most of the stuff he taught, he had been able to upload the answers to the system so it was automatically graded. The more complicated the class, however, the more hands-on he had to be in grading the work. He couldn't just put a bunch of coding through the system and have an AI see if they worked correctly. In those cases, the visual representation of the coding meant more than the codes themselves and he needed to see for himself if they were working as they should be. If not, that's where the fun of reading through the coding really began. Unfortunately for him, Kian hadn't taken into account just how good he was a reading and writing code. It never took him more than a couple of hours to grade those assignments and then he was left with too much spare time.

He didn't like having that much spare time. There were only so many hobbies a guy could have before he started to feel a little stir-crazy. He probably should have spread out his classes a little more but he'd always preferred having his afternoons and most of his evenings available for surprise plans. It was probably impressive that it took him four months into teaching to come up with the idea to fill his spare time and make some extra money for it. King Cyber Security hadn't taken him long to get off the ground, especially since half his roommates from college were working in fields that relied heavily on the internet and keeping their information safe. A foot in the door here, proof he could do the job and do it well in half the time and voila, a new career path for the professor. He'd liked that fact that word of his skills got around to other companies and businesses and while that business was slow, he had the teaching gig to keep him occupied.

Kian loved to teach and while it was enriching, it wasn't enough for the guy who was always doing something. Games lost their allure after a few hours of play for him and his attention could only be held for so long before he was flitting off to do something else. He was returning a text message from one of the guy's he employed to check lines when he was in class, so he didn't notice until he was pocketing his phone the girl about to run right into him. He saw the fancy footwork but knew it was too late. He tried to catch her knowing it was useless so instead became the cushion she fell on. He hadn't recognised her at first, too busy trying to calculate the odds of catching her and not falling to realise he knew the woman sprawled over him. "That is some fancy footwork there, Sprite." He said with a grin, looking at her.

♦ ♦ ♦

 
TAG; puck austen valburn
WORDS; 560
LYRICS; I Won't Give Up --Jason Mraz
NOTES; <3

[puck austen valburn]

Puck rarely found herself explaining her profession to many people. Most of the time “Cyber Security” was enough for them and they didn’t need to know the ins and outs of how Puck basically broke into places from the comfort of her pyjamas and home office. Of course, all of her equipment was provided to her and monitored so she couldn’t even consider doing something like this just for pleasure. There was always a routine, a structure, and she was always needed in the office within a few hours after completing a security check to go over what strengths and weaknesses she had found that needed to be patched or redone completely.

When she had been in high school, she had never thought that she’d be paid to essentially hack into large companies and secure databases. Back then she had simply been trying to get people to acknowledge that she was smarter than she was pretty. Alas, teenagers -the boys in particular – only seemed to think primally, and with parts they didn’t yet know how to use properly. There had only really been a handful of teachers and Kian who had pushed her, given her the tools to pursue this strange interest that had been born on lunchbreaks hiding in a computer lab. Puck had to admit, she loved it when people assumed that she wasn’t a computer expert. She had been at government meetings and security conferences where they gave her a drinks order or thought she was the girl coming to tell them that the keynote was about to begin. A handful of times she had been a part of the team giving the keynote, hacking a system live in front of a crowded audience to show the weaknesses of systems that were once boasted as the best. With technology and cyber security constantly evolving and being pushed, the best thing six months ago could very quickly become an open door for cyber criminals.

Dazed, Puck raked her hair back from her face and blinked at the poor man she had fell on. Recognising him almost immediately, she grinned and threw her arms around him, hugging him tight. “Kian! You haven’t changed a bit!” She laughed, still situated in his lap. Puck had harboured the biggest crush on Kian when she had been in high school. He was the only guy there who she liked, who she dreamt of when she was alone in her room. No one knew that, of course. Puck was a very private person who didn’t share stories of her life with anyone she didn’t consider a close friend. Most of the time now she only shared her concerns and worries with her cousins – her very best friends – and she knew they reciprocated; otherwise she wouldn’t be secretly harbouring a child, or running across the city with work uniforms and for early morning coffee breakfasts. “I should probably get off you now, right?” Puck finally realised she was still sitting on him, and prised herself away, arching herself back up to a standing position. “What are you doing here?” She asked him, fairly sure she remembered Kian telling her that he was almost done with school back when she had been unsure of her own future.

• • •

TAGGED! Kian James Presley
WORDS! 549!
LYRICS! Come A Little Bit Closer - - - Jay And The Americans
NOTES! <3 <3 <3