Ghost King Meets Batman

Hobbies

[Edited  April15 , 2023]

After his strange encounter with Damian, Nico headed back upstairs after grabbing a pomegranate from a fruit basket on the counter (why they had one was beyond him). There had been a large variety of choices, but he had chosen a pomegranate sort of as a joke but also because he actually enjoyed the fruit. He found it strangely satisfying to eat the pulp off of each individual seed. He also grabbed a napkin since they were really juicy sometimes. Hopefully, it was ok to have fruit around computers.

While he appreciated that the others were clearly trying to welcome him in their own ways, Nico wondered why Tim felt any particular need to show him his computers. Well, it was more the computers that he didn't understand. Modern technology baffled him and usually was more trouble than it was worth. Unless you knew what you were doing, it wasn't really worth the risk, especially as a child of the Big Three.

Computers hadn't existed before he went into the hotel, therefore he had no idea how they worked. Beckendorf had shown him how to turn one on before and explained the concept of the internet, saying that it was the internet connection that the monsters could sense. He also explained that his computer wasn't connected to the internet so it wouldn't emit a signal that the monsters could sense.

Nico got to Tim's door and knocked lightly. Moments later Tim opened the door and invited him inside. The younger boy's room was well-organized. He had 2 shelving units along the left wall near the door. They were out of the way and somehow didn't seem to make the room feel cluttered. The rest of the room was very similar to Nico's but with a ton of personal touches such as pictures, news articles, the color scheme, and the piles of papers on every flat surface. With all the space it didn't really feel like much of a mess.

All of the shelves were filled to the brim with what he could only assume were computer parts and police evidence lockup boxes. He could see papers sticking out of the tops of most of them so he assumed they were mostly full of case files or that sort of thing. The computer parts all seemed to be grouped by types of components. There seemed to be an organized system with everything in it's place. 

While Nico wanted to ask what Tim was doing with all this stuff, he didn't ask. He didn't want to pry or distract from what the other boy had been planning to show him. 

"Wow... this is way too technical for me," Nico said as he slowly  looked over the shelves. He honestly was interested, even though he couldn't tell the difference between a mouse and a hard drive.

"Well, we can talk about the cold cases I'm looking at instead if computers don't really interest you," Tim offered. He plopped into a spinny chair and rolled himself over to a desk on the far side of the room. 

"Cold cases?" Nico asked. He'd heard the term before, but he couldn't remember where. 

"Yeah. The cases that went unsolved for so long that people stopped working on them. Sometimes they go cold because there isn't enough evidence or because the technology needed to properly look at the evidence hasn't been invented yet," Tim explained. He returned to the shelves and grabbed a file out of a box on the third shelf down.

"Like DNA testing?" Nico asked. Tim was thumbing through the file absently.

"Exactly. In this case, for instance, the only thing that seems to be standing in the way of an arrest is the fact that a photo can't be enhanced enough for positive identification. They got a reflection of a person's face off of the side of a car. It was taken by the victim on their smartphone. If they could enhance the photo, they may be able to see who it was in the reflection."  Tim set the case back down on the stack. 

"That must be frustrating to the police," Nico speculated. He would assume it would be, anyway. 

"Definitely," Tim agreed.