The Herder

[[This is a companion fluff story for the /tg/ homebrew game Server Crash.]]

Our webfort's librarian wanted some data from Wikipedia. It's been said that it's cooled down there a lot recently, so me and my buddie Jim offered to do it. Me, I'm Dave, a Cracker and my buddy's a Coder. We were rookies who had been lucky recently and completed a few missions so we thought ourselves top of the world, real pros, and besides it was just a small article quite far from the core. Nothing to worry about, right? Wrong. We go through a maze of links, our librarian gave us a hazy guide which was out of date as it turned out but due to shear luck we found the article. Jim had learned the ancient art of Copy Paste from his dad so he got to work. I was laying back and relaxing, thinking of all the porn I could buy with my earnings. When I heard a boom. The whole page started to rumble. And from a small hyperlink bursts out a Cyber. I'm not sure how to describe it to you. It had chosen it's image to instill fear and it had succeeded. Ever hear of a T-Rex? Things that inhabit the real world, apparently. Now cross it with a more familiar threat, a virus. Eight legs, all black and spiky but it still had a hint of those giant lizards. And by Moot did we wet ourselves. Jim copied as soon as he saw the thing and started to bring up a firewall. Boom. It breaks it with ease, Jim could';t bring a good enough one in time and the Cyber burst through it with ease. Poor bastard never had a chance, while he was being broken down to his bare code he sent me the article. I ran. This thing was way out of my league, should be nowhere near this way out of the center. I was trying to head to the nearest link out of the page but it was too fast. Those eight legs really count for something, you know? Just about as I was about to say my final good byes and praying to Moot to let me have a nice resting place in some image macro, I see a swarm of black. A sea of it washing through the whole page. It washed over me and devoured the Cyber, legs to head. The Cyber snarled and tried to break down the sea it but as I got a closer look at the sea I saw it was million and millions of viruses. I wondered briefly why I wasn't being destroyed, but was too relieved to care that much. It enveloped and destroyed the Cyber. Afterwards on the other side of the article I saw a man dressed like those cowboys you see in some of those Western articles on top of a big Virus. A Virus Herder. Gives me a good old smug wink, but I didn't care. He could be smug about it all he liked I was just glad to be alive and grateful for his help. When I dredged my way back to the webfort I gave the news about Jim. And I tell the librarian that she can shove her article up her ass as I paste it. But I'll never forget the Cyber that nearly killed me. Nor that saving black sea of viruses.