fandomhigh | Spy Games, Monday, Period 5

Sarah was nowhere near as nervous as she'd been the week before as she clacked into the activities hall and waited for class to begin. In front of each seat, there was a set of lockpicking tools, and a TV screen was set up in the front of the room.

"Good morning," she greeted the class. "Today we're learning one of the most basic spy tools -- getting in without an invitation. Usually, it's easier to get in with persuasion, but sometimes you have to go for brute force and pick a lock. It's not hard once you know what you're doing; plenty of people have put up videos on YouTube explaining the technique. Let's watch one. That actually shows how to do it with a bobby pin."

She played the video, occasionally pausing it for comments on the girl's techniques, then quickly demonstrated with some of the locks on her desk and a set like the students'.

"You also want to be able to crack a safe," Sarah said, passing out another set of handouts. "Basically, that's about good hearing and patience. You're spinning the dial until you hear the pins fall, then spinning it again until the pins fall again. It takes time, but you can get good if you understand the knack behind it." She explained more about that, too.

"Our next topic is electronic lockpicking -- hacking," Sarah continued. "I can't teach you how to hack in one class; some of you might be better than me anyhow. But one thing to remember is that people are predictable when they're setting passwords. The most common passwords are things like 123456, qwerty, family member's names, pet's names, sports teams, and the words admin, letmein or password."

"If you need to know one password, that might not help unless you know your target well. But if you just need to get into an employee terminal to access a main server, there's a good chance that the guy with the Red Sox pennant in his cubicle has redsox123 as his password. I'm passing out a list of the 500 worst passwords; if you're using one of them, you should probably change it as soon as you get back to your computer."

"For our activity today," she added, "we're going to practice both kinds of lockpicking. There's a safe set up if you want to work in pairs to try to get into that, and a bunch of padlocks and other kinds of mechanical locks as well. There's also a group of password-protected computer terminals -- if you get in, you'll be able to play a game." She smiled. "I set the password."

"Pass in your homework before you leave the workshop," she added, clearly as an afterthought.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Enjoy the handwavy lecture of great handwaviness.

The information was interesting, even if Griff never expected to need to pick a lock given his abilities. The computer passwords though, that was info he could use.

Triela had worked with lock picks before, but figured a bit more practice couldn't hurt. And the safe-cracking was new. That could definitely come in handy.

Katchoo was sure the lecture would've been interesting, given that she'd never had to worry about that sort of issue (Darcy had people for that) .

If, that was, she could be bothered to care today.

Which wasn't happening.

Karla needed to invent a spell that could take notes with Craft while she took others; there was simply not enough time to take them all. First of all--what was that magical moving picture? She had to remind herself to pay attention, instead of just watching it in awe.

The idea behind picking the locks was interesting, but Karla didn't think she'd need them. Why pick a lock when you could just pass through the door? And if the door was shielded against Craft, then Karla probably wouldn't be able to go in anyway, even if she could pick the lock.

On the other hand, picking the lock wouldn't leave a trace of her psychic scent...

Wait--what were electronic locks? Passwords? Computers? Help!

All this stuff was pretty interesting and useful so Lois was actually paying attention in a class.

It was a miracle.

Claire wasn't sure if her father would approve or disapprove of her learning this kind of stuff.

But she was enjoying it.

Sam looked positively gleeful as the lecture went on. As much as he loved to learn new things, sometimes it was nice to have a class cover something he was already good at.

Liir listened to the lecture curiously, much more interested in the lockpicking than anything else.

Emma had been so exhausted from her trip last week, that she hadn't even paid attention beyond the assignment.

Now, however, she was checking out her classmates as she listened to Walker. Karla was in the class, which was fantastic, but so was the annoying boy from the party.

Still, the subject matter seemed interesting, and Emma did jot down the occasional note during the video.

It was neat, seeing how other people explained lock picking and Ino made sure to pay close attention because, even if she'd learnt it in the Academy, it wasn't like she used it much here so the refresher was good.

Valentine was much more interested in the hacking parts than the more conventional kind of lock-picking. Sometimes, making the programs to crack those 'locks' were more fun than actually doing the cracking itself. She grinned a little, amused. Her days of bothering with all that stuff had probably passed, so it'd be neat to kind of fiddle with it for a class assignment now.

Ellie would likely never have use for this information in her life, but it was interesting. So she was listening intently.

Agnes took careful notes, and was grateful she'd signed up for this class. Being able to open a locked door without a key totally counted as witchery, or at least it would to people who were easily tricked.

Ooh, lockpicking. Alice was especially appreciative, since she usually kept bobby pins on her person.

Spy Games, Monday, Period 5

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