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WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING!? WHAT DID YOU JUST DO!? |
| Warning!! Spoilers ahead!! | |
| This page contains major plot spoilers! If you have not seen up to Episode 18 of The Unsleeping City Chapter II, proceed at your own risk. |
"She's more than a skeleton. She's so much more than a skeleton." ― Pete Conlan to himself
Maddie Park is a black hat hacker and private investigator, initially hired by Pete Conlan's family to track him down in New York City.
Quick Answers
What is Maddie Park's profession in New York City?
What is Maddie Park's cultural background?
Who hired Maddie Park to track down Pete Conlan?
Featured Episodes[]
| Episodes Featuring Maddie |
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The Unsleeping City
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The Unsleeping City: Chapter II
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Description[]
Maddie is one of the most beautiful people Pete has ever seen in his life. She is a young Korean-American trans woman with vibrant, multicolored hair and loaded up with piercings and tattoos. She wears a hoodie beneath a tight leather jacket that is covered in patches and pins, including a trans pride pin. On her arms, she wears two halves of a rubber/cloth-like flexible keyboard, which she can pull out of her sleeves to use.
Maddie is extremely skilled at what she does, using black hat hacking to track down peoples' personal information in order to locate them. She insists that it's a lot of grueling hours of tedious computer programming and is a lot less sexy than it sounds. She doesn't have a lot of close friends in the city, as most of her friends are online.
Background[]
Maddie first got into black hat hacking and private investigation in her early 20s. She's made a lot of mistakes since then, and taken on jobs she's not proud of. One of these jobs includes tracking down Pete for his family, which led to his father, Mitch Conlan, unexpectedly arriving at his place in Greenpoint shortly before SantaCon in 2018.
Chapter I[]
Start Spreading the News[]
When he shows up at Pete's old apartment in Greenpoint, Mitch mentions that he had a hard time finding Pete, and that the family had to hire a private eye to do so.
Chapter II[]
Fight at the Museum[]
Soon after Thanksgiving in 2022, Pete makes a visit to his old supplier, 53\/3N, regarding the destruction/protection of the Forms of the Greater Dreaming scroll, and hacking into the Gladiator hard drive obtained by Kingston Brown. Pete also asks if he can look into doing a background check on Calvin Thomas, his ex-girlfriend Priya Danger's new fiancé. 53\/3N responds hesitantly to this request, as he does know someone who's the best as what she does, but he'd been specifically been putting her off of Pete's trail due to the fact that she'd been working for Pete's transphobic family to track him down.
After finding out the family's attitude towards Pete, however, she got into contact with 53\/3N, asking if he could put her in touch with Pete so that she could apologize and return the money to him as recompense. 53\/3N avoided even mentioning this to Pete for three years, as he doesn't rat anyone out and didn't want to put Pete in danger. Pete accepts the offer and tells 53\/3N to give her his 3rd bumper gmail.
Of Rats & Dragons[]
Maddie later drops money off at 53\/3N's place to square off Pete's debt for dealing with the scroll and sends him an email informing him of her intentions, which Pete finds when Sofia Lee drops off the $2,500 she made for him and notices how many unread emails he has on his phone:
"Hey Pete, 53\/3N told me it was cool to contact you here. I need to write you an extremely sincere apology. I've been doing black hat work for a long time and working as a PI. I haven't always taken jobs that I was proud of, but my stomach was turned and my heart completely shattered when I found out that your transphobic family had hired me to find you, something I never, ever, ever would have done if I had known. I've been fucked up with this knowledge for years. I'm much more careful now than I was when I was in my early 20s and first started doing this work, but I know that apology's not enough. Actions speak louder than words. I settled your debt with 53\/3N. This is not a huge cost to me, I see it as returning the money and then some that your shitty family paid me for in order to find you and put you in harm's way. If there's ever any other way I can repay the debt (free work), happy to help, let me know. I hope all is well with you. From the bottom of my heart, I'm sorry. -Maddie"
Pete replies with his real phone number and suggests meeting up soon. He is excited about having such a skilled hacker on their side, and is eager to get the Gladiator information to her so they can take the company down. Sofia wonders if Maddie could get her tablet working. Maddie responds soon after through an app that automatically downloads onto Pete's phone, "Hey Pete. Going after Gladiator? I'm in."
History Checks and Lost Dex[]
Pete meets up with Maddie later at Neptune Diner in Astoria, where she is waiting in a booth for him. After an awkward almost-hug introduction, they take a seat and Maddie apologizes again for the work she did for his dad. Pete understands and lets her know that he really appreciated her email. He quickly transitions into talking about her career, which she insists is not as sexy as it sounds. She asks Pete what he does now, and he mentions trying to deal with the pay decrease that comes with working at a second hand bookstore instead of being a drug dealer for rich people. Maddie comments how challenging it is to be rewarded so much for doing the wrong thing, and Pete segues into the Dream Team's mission of taking down Gladiator.
He pulls out a copy of the hard drive that Kingston Brown took from the Excelsior Dynamic Homes building on Thanksgiving, and Maddie gets to work, unzipping the keyboard from her sleeve and popping on some next-level techno shit projector glasses. Maddie finds the Umbral Arcana-covered information intriguing and extremely bad and mentions that Gladiator is about to make a major acquisition, but since some of it is blocked off, she needs more time to use her home machine, which is more powerful. She finds Joe Jacobs's internship application, which is a very weird thing to find off of the normal servers in a deep-security cybervault.
As she heads off back home to keep working, Pete asks for her number to keep in touch with whatever info she finds. He also asks for her sign, pretending that its because he filters his contacts in a weird way. She tells him she's technically the 13th zodiac sign, an Ophiuchus (the "serpent bearer"), and knowingly tells him to look it up when he's confused by her answer. She snaps a selfie of herself as she puts her number in his phone and sends herself a text so she has his number too.
Later, as the group convenes at Gramercy Occult Society and discusses how Gladiator is using JJ's research, Maddie texts Pete to let him know that Gladiator just finalized the purchase of Ellis Island and the museum. She also sends him an article from a month or two prior about Gladiator buying up the museum items at Ellis Island, even though they had yet to release any plans to build their own museum for them. She lets him know that there were seven items on display that Gladiator acquired and removed from the site. When Pete and the Dream Team arrive at Ellis Island to find the entrance chained up, Pete sends her a photo (also mentioning that as an Aquarius, they're compatible). She responds with:
"Trying to think of a sweet way to say sober Pete seems equally as crazy."
For the Hoard![]
For Maddie's birthday, Pete texts her asking if she'd like to hang out and grab coffee to celebrate, which she accepts. He buys her a copy of Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, a Japanese contemporary fiction novel which has a trans character in it. She appreciates the gift and comments that since he's an Aquarius, she's got time to think of a gift for his birthday.