Divine Celebrity 100 (Patreon)

Why would someone try to dig for information about the players that had left with our old coach?  And, why do their player reports? 

I realized that I didn’t dig much about the disappearance of Coach Bill, just taking it as ordinary college-level poaching. After all, he was far better than an ordinary defensive coordinator, enough to be poached by more competitive schools, and it was normal for some of the best players to follow him.

Curious, I started searching for Coach Bill on the web, trying to find any news about his new school. It didn’t take long for me to find some news about the University of Thunder, somewhere on the east coast. 

A college that was operating for fifty years, but with no notable success. 

If it wasn’t for the mysterious new player poking around, I would have written that off. The lack of success wasn’t surprising, as they wouldn’t be the first college that paid a fortune for a good coach with the hopes of creating a first-generation sports program to make their school a more attractive location. 

With that, I started to dig around the news, the timing, the photos, everything. 

The first thing I noticed was that the photos from the college, showed the new players practicing. They were fake. 

Even worse, they were very well-made fakes, with subtle discrepancies that I only caught due to my Traits, making it more curious than badly-photoshopped garbage. Worse, because it showed a significant amount of preparation, pointless for a college. 

With that making me curious, I started digging more toward the digital presence of the college, with enough evidence to conclusively show their existence going back fifty years, and doing so almost convincingly, with only a few details that revealed its fake nature. 

A great achievement considering I was able to only catch those despite my supernatural enhancements. 

“What a fascinating twist,” I murmured as I stopped digging. What I found was enough to show that the school was fake, and the earliest real sign of their existence went back only a year. Not exactly a lot to go on. 

While I could get more by trying to hack into their servers, I was afraid of it. Digging around the web was one thing, but trying to hack them would leave the marks of my intrusion.  

It was a risk that I easily took against a museum with a horrible sense of digital security, but I doubted that a fake college that put enough effort to create a fake digital presence that almost tricked me would have digital security just as bad. 

And, almost tricking me was truly a great achievement. I had several Supernatural abilities to enhance my otherwise meager coding abilities. Moreover, I knew exactly what to look for due to the clue Coach Bill, which was the equivalent of playing hide-and-seek while the players were tagged with GPS trackers. 

“Mystery thickens,” I murmured, temporarily shelving the questions that plagued my mind as I prepared myself for the next stage. 

But before I could do so, my phone rang. It was Lauren. “Where are you?” she asked. “We need to talk about the surprise tournament.” 

“Sorry, there is some paperwork I need to finish,” I answered. 

“Can’t you drop them? We need to talk about this new tournament!” 

“Sorry, it’s just urgent, but I promise I’ll be there in an hour, and we can go through everything.” 

“That’s not enough time—“ she started, her voice uncharacteristically high, almost as high as when she confronted me before the tournament we met, blaming me for being a jock there to sabotage the event. 

Good times. 

As much as I enjoyed her getting angry, I didn’t have the necessary time to savor that moment. “And we’ll have even less if you insist on keeping me on the phone,” I countered. “I’ll see you in an hour,” I added, and terminated the call. 

Before I could put the phone away, the phone rang once more. I was ready to turn that off, but then I realized it was Megan. “Tell me, but be quick,” I said. 

“Rude,” she answered, her tone sharp enough to show her distaste. “I was going to ask your opinion about how to react to the changes in the tournament publicity, but if you want to deal with something else…” 

“Sorry, just tell me,” I said with a sigh, knowing her enough that a quick apology was the best way to make her act — at least in such circumstances. Without the urgency, she probably would have made me beg for ten minutes before moving on. 

“They are ramping up the tournament preparation even more. Even setting up a huge screen on the main square, purchased recently by a mysterious donor, with the talk about a show match between schools to start, with some guest players.” 

“Oh, finally, some good news.” 

“Are you sure, I heard that one of those players is a rising star of the chess world, some kind of genius?” she said. 

“Doesn’t matter, just escalate the situation as much as possible. The more, the better?” 

“Are you sure?” she asked, a rare concern in her tone. “With everything going…” 

“Have you ever seen me taking on something I didn’t trust myself to handle?” I said. 

“As you wish,” she said. “I don’t want your life ruined before you finished paying for the favors. You’re running a big tab.” 

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, and she ended the call, leaving me to focus back on the events. 

Then, I temporarily shelved the chess tournament as I started typing furiously, creating a much more efficient version of my early-version web crawler. Though, even as my mind was occupied by it, I couldn’t help but feel fascinated by the speed I designed the new program — with several fascinating connections that I could never come up with before. 

The Traits I had earned while live streaming my car repair, particularly Design, increased my capabilities of high-level development significantly, and the benefits of Pattern Recognition on code design, I had already identified. 

Resulting in a beautiful, elegant program that worked wonderfully, especially when factoring in the little time I had to sink into it. 

It wasn’t a complicated, fancy program. Essentially it was an advanced version of my earlier web crawler, with more advanced indexing and search capabilities, with some filtering to reduce the impact of the false reports. 

“Let’s give you a test drive,” I muttered as I started digging through some of the earlier reports, searching the reports that corresponded to the departure of Coach Bill. Identifying their time of departure was easy. 

There were more than enough people that had shared posts on social media that morning. Some were showing the departing players stepping into some luxurious cars — their actions still precious following our spectacular win — while the others showed those cars in the background of their own pictures — which was still easily found through the crawler. 

It was easy to track them to the airport, but after that, things got much harder. Passenger records were not directly public,  but also not particularly difficult to dig as well. Yet, none of those passenger records showed any of the players or the Coach on the list. 

I had some pictures from the airport, showing them actually arriving, shared by some enthusiastic fans, taking selfies with them. Thad, in particular, was in many such pictures as they went through the airport, including the lounge. 

I frowned as I started checking the flight records, which, unlike the passenger records, were actively public. It didn’t take long to notice that, along with all commercial plane records, there was a private plane as well. 

A private plane that no news about, and no landing report. 

I remembered something else. A report about a private plane, disappearing in a suspiciously sudden storm. Yet, when I searched the web, it came empty. 

Luckily, a mysterious disappearance had fulfilled the earlier keyword criteria for my web crawler, and I had several offline copies of such news — which allowed me to check the news without the obligation to dig around for hours. 

I had no doubt that, no matter who tried to remove something from the internet, they would not succeed, and with enough effort, it could be discovered. 

The problem was the time it would take, which I was happy to bypass. Instead, I started reading the reports, quickly calculating the location of the storm, the time when the plane departed, and the lower and upper bounds of the travel time. 

“A match,” I murmured. Technically, that was not certain information, but combined with the fake cover story to give an excuse for their disappearance, I was confident of my discovery. 

Pity I didn’t have time to follow up properly, or even properly consider the complications. Instead, I added several more keywords to my webcrawler, all of their names, with a special focus on my old dear coach. 

Only then, I stood up to prepare. 

I still had the career of a Dean to ruin.