Doing your best to not slide away, you become sure that skis and ice were never meant to go together. That also goes for curling and hills. Ski-slope curling is the latest invention of whatever sadistic entity puppeteers these games; you pray that this isn’t Santa’s doing.
“Oooohh this is a good workout,” says dAnkan while impressively doing the running man in their skis and accepting a bottle of water from the flask server. “But I feel like it’s time to get this party started. How’s the competition looking?”
You glance over to the Polish team. Stefanos Floorsweeperski and Zaslaw Rockspinniski look as intimidating as when you first saw them.
“Like wimps, boss.” Your attempt at sounding courageous misses by a few octaves.
The whistle blows and you and dAnkan start skiing down the slope: you with the mop ready and dAnkan slowly rotating while sitting on the curling rock, seemingly having a great time. Just as you are about to start sweeping, you hear the ice crack under you, and you fall down into what seems to be a control room. Computers filled with red, blue, and white LEDs blink in an obnoxious manner, and there is a big terminal set on a desk. As you are inspecting a quirky “Template Injection” sticker on the server’s side right next to a post-it saying “TØDØ: hide thæ SSH crædentials file”, dAnkan points out that the computer is set to Norwegian.
“I managed to login using my classic username: dAnkanHelper123, and it welcomes me as an old friend right there on the screen! But… I am pretty sure that I never made an account on…whatever this is. Well, since we were probably not winning against the world curling champions anyway, we might as well explore this. Try to list the contents of the directories on this computer, see what the Norwegians are planning.” dAnkan almost slurps from a cup of raw oil but stops themselves at the last moment. “Hmm, this should probably be sanitized. I bet the Norwegians are as reckless with their cybersecurity as they are with their dishes!”
You look over at the user interface of the website. When it comes to logging in, “try” might be the most apt verb to use. Hoping that you can get over all the pop-ups, you get to hacking.