--
That night, Wendy lay awake for an hour after her parents had gone to bed, until she was sure that they must be asleep. She crept out into the corridor and strained her ears for the murmur of her parents’ voices, but all she could hear were the sounds of deep breathing and John’s light snores coming from the bedroom he and Michael shared. Perfect.
Wendy stole downstairs and into the playroom, skirting around the patch of creaky floorboard in the middle of the hall, picking her way over John’s discarded skateboard and Michael’s old teddy bear. She threw a blanket over the modem to mute the noises it made, and dialled into her favourite local message board, a lively London BBS called CompuChat.
Her father would be apoplectic if he found out what she was doing, but Wendy was willing to risk getting caught every few nights in order to connect with like-minded computer enthusiasts from around the country. Sure, there were plenty of idiots on-line, but there were also people who understood the amazing potential of computers and software, who dared to bend rules and think in new ways and who weren’t above fooling around for a few hours every day just to see what they could do. In just one more month, she hoped to be spending all her time with those kinds of people.
Wendy scanned the list of recently posted messages and frowned as a familiar name caught her eye. "PremiumWarez is down???" Wasn't PremiumWarez that notoriously awful rip-off board? She couldn't believe anyone would even miss its presence. Out of sheer morbid curiosity, she clicked on the thread. Her eyebrows rose further and further with every post she read.
PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: NEO PUNK
What happened to the Premium Warez BBS, I can’t dial in at all. Did the SysOp quit???
Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: SPRAWL
Who gives a $h!t about that BBS. It’s run by crooks. They charge through the nose for warez you can download elsewhere for free. When I called the SysOp on it, he got all ragey at me about trying to “sabotage his business”. Good riddance...
Re: Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: NEO PUNK
Really??? I had no idea, so where can I get hold of this stuff free then???
Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: PANDA BEAR
Ding, dong, the witch is dead.
Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: CHARTREUSE
I bet I know what happened to them.
Re: Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: NEO PUNK
>I bet I know what happened to them.
Wait how??? What was it???
Re: Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: PACBABY
>I bet I know what happened to them.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Man, I heard a rumour that he’d sworn to crash the BBS but I didn’t think he really could.
Re: Re: Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: NEO PUNK
Who’s “he”??? Man I feel so out of the loop.
Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: SPORK
Ohohohoho. It is done.
Re: PremiumWarez is down???
Message from: SPACE INVADER
Peter Pan strikes again. This is a message to all you money-grubbing crooks out there. JUSTICE WILL BE DONE and you will find your existence erased.
Wendy's heart was pounding as she reached the bottom of the thread. It felt as though a fire was alight inside her chest. The epic battles between good and evil that she wrote about in her stories weren't just fantasy. There were real people out there on-line, fighting to eliminate the selfish, the corrupt and the unjust.
"Peter Pan..." Wendy murmured, touching a finger to the name on her computer screen. "Who are you?"
Author's Notes: This is the second half of Chapter One, which will lead straight in to the excerpt from Peter's point of view that I first posted on this blog. Originally I hadn't planned to introduce our hero so early, but it follows on quite naturally from that last line, and really there's no reason not to. It works much better than what I wrote for chapters One and Two back in November. You live and learn.
I'm most interested in getting opinions on the thread transcript in this half of the chapter. How well does it work in its current form? I wrote the whole thing out mainly for my own entertainment (I love writing fake Internet exchanges, I've no idea why but I definitely have a wealth of experience to draw on) and only planned to include a short extract from it. Then I changed my mind and shoved the whole thing in. Is it too long? Fun or boring to read? Flows well or doesn't flow?
As always, this is only a first draft but every comment that I get will help towards making subsequent drafts much better ;)
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