[Kon know he can just wait this out. Tim's exhausted and if anything is going on with this, Tim thinks he's drawn him in. He'll know that Kon might get distracted by the internet and plan to look at whatever is going on with this quiz in the morning.]
[So he just takes his good ol' time so that he won't be able to do anything but fall asleep. Tim's beddy bye is Kon's morning and afternoon, so he can do this allll day.]
[Kon's handled him as much as he needs to get a good look at this computer so he takes his time with it.]
[Sometimes he wonders how much like Lex that makes him now, the being good at handling difficult people and seeming natural, but the good thing is he'd have pretty damn far to go. Slowly backsliding into bad habits is never going to let you catch up with the guy who no-scope 360-ed his way into the pit in a earnest desire to someday be Satan's roomie.]
[Besides, reporter's instincts tripping, snooping through someone's stuff, and play-acting a little at being disarming is a time-honored Super tradition, too. No harm in letting this timid, flattery-effusive bespectacled reporter near the hallway with your technically-public filing cabinet, right Mr. Mayor? Isn't it Lois Lane you need to watch, making a racket with hard-hitting questions to your campaign manager over there? (Or sometimes it was the reverse and and Clark was the one being distracting by awkwardly spilling a drink on someone. He'd heard quite a few of their stories, Ma and Pa thought it was hilarious).]
[It'll be years before he fully sorts it all out but he's starting to finally realize he's some of the good and maybe some of the bad from both of them - and a few things all his own.]
[He answers the quiz and gets to the end. The result is that he scores high because of the farming and how homesteading would be necessary yada yada yada.]
[The questions are...weird. He starts with googling them, changing up the wording in different ways and using the right search terms to account for variations.]
[The writing style is a little...different on some of them. Like someone needed extra questions and plagiarized them but didn't have the time or energy to worry about converting them to their use.]
[Like...maybe someone putting together a quiz with a ridiculous number of searching questions. Someone aiming for enough of the questions to be very colloquial and informal to offset a bunch of very precise ones about farming.]
[And so, the possible creator of the quiz becomes suspect and he has a suspect for it. But why?]
[There are a few other quizzes in the quiz-maker's profile but no dates listed. Not much work was done on them, they seem to be basic, like they're just there to fill out a profile. He clicks "View source" and digs around in the source code of the page to see if there's something flagging them with a date somehow and finds it folded into the actual quiz number in the link for each. It's not that Tim isn't smart enough to hack the server of some quiz site to change it, but he probably didn't expect Kon to go ham with trying to suss it out.]
[They were all made after the recent shift in the stuff with the guilds because Tim's not a time traveler. He'd have to have hacked it to change any of them and didn't bother because he never expected Kon to look.]
[Kon then searches for other zombie quizzes on both the same site and on the greater web at large, looking at the questions of the first ones that pop up as he goes. And he finds some that were on the quiz Tim handed over, just worded differently. But not differently enough, hence why it sounded like some questions were copied from other sources.]
[They were and he didn't take the time to reword them that much.]
[But Tim doesn't have the advantage of a billionaire's wealth backing him anymore. He's back to an annoying day job outside a board room (in the place of school), back to spreading himself thinner.]
[And Kon knows that, as much as his best friend clearly cares about him, and holds him up as one of the best people he knows, it has never been a secret to either of them that Tim is smarter. Especially since Kon has often outsourced the brain stuff to Tim when they're doing hero stuff together.]
[Tim's never seen him have to figure out something alone. He always does it even if it's harder.]
[It takes him a few hours, but he manages to figure out what other quizzes most of the questions were stolen from. And it becomes clear that the farming questions are standing out because none of the other zombie quizzes mention farming and there just aren't a lot of farming-based quizzes on the site. What normal internet-savvy person made farming quizzes? Nobody. What farmer doodled around making quizzes? Again, none of them.]
[So he turns to the internet at large for those. Clark taught him the more fiddly search terms one time, when he was working on a paper. How you can narrow things down with certain phrasing, or leave things set up as blanks to fill in. He also showed him alternate search engines that those kinds of terms still work on since google is a bust anymore.]
[Altering the phrasing enough is how he finds the citizenship application online, and the specific questionnaire for immigrant applicants that are farmers, a very long pdf that asks variations of a bunch of those farming questions.]
Tim.
[He huffs it under his breath.]
[But still, it could be coincidence right? Unless...]
[Was he so confident Kon wouldn't snoop that it's somewhere in the stacks of junk on his desk? Kon stands up quietly and looks down at the stacks of papers, his eyes briefly glowing blue. He's able to look layer by layer with X-ray vision to avoid the sound of any papers shuffling.]
[When he's done looking, when he finds it, he's not angry enough to wake him up but he is very, very angry. At Tim doing this behind his back. At Tim trying to handle him and manipulate him into doing the quiz.]
[But he waits and lets Tim sleep because he needs it. He doesn't want him to not get it and then be out there fighting crime even more sleep deprived than usual.]
[He takes the time to read about this island country of metas. He doesn't actually have anywhere to be today, it's a day off from work and he has no other plans beside normal patrols.]
[No, he waits until the afternoon, when Tim is finally stirring a little. That's when he pulls the half-finished application out of the stack and tosses it on the blanket near Tim's feet.]
[When Tim wakes up he'll see the papers on the bed and that Kon has pulled the wheely chair around to be right in his line of sight when he wakes up. He's sitting with his arms crossed. He does not look pleased.]
no subject
[Kon know he can just wait this out. Tim's exhausted and if anything is going on with this, Tim thinks he's drawn him in. He'll know that Kon might get distracted by the internet and plan to look at whatever is going on with this quiz in the morning.]
[So he just takes his good ol' time so that he won't be able to do anything but fall asleep. Tim's beddy bye is Kon's morning and afternoon, so he can do this allll day.]
[Kon's handled him as much as he needs to get a good look at this computer so he takes his time with it.]
[Sometimes he wonders how much like Lex that makes him now, the being good at handling difficult people and seeming natural, but the good thing is he'd have pretty damn far to go. Slowly backsliding into bad habits is never going to let you catch up with the guy who no-scope 360-ed his way into the pit in a earnest desire to someday be Satan's roomie.]
[Besides, reporter's instincts tripping, snooping through someone's stuff, and play-acting a little at being disarming is a time-honored Super tradition, too. No harm in letting this timid, flattery-effusive bespectacled reporter near the hallway with your technically-public filing cabinet, right Mr. Mayor? Isn't it Lois Lane you need to watch, making a racket with hard-hitting questions to your campaign manager over there? (Or sometimes it was the reverse and and Clark was the one being distracting by awkwardly spilling a drink on someone. He'd heard quite a few of their stories, Ma and Pa thought it was hilarious).]
[It'll be years before he fully sorts it all out but he's starting to finally realize he's some of the good and maybe some of the bad from both of them - and a few things all his own.]
[He answers the quiz and gets to the end. The result is that he scores high because of the farming and how homesteading would be necessary yada yada yada.]
[The questions are...weird. He starts with googling them, changing up the wording in different ways and using the right search terms to account for variations.]
[The writing style is a little...different on some of them. Like someone needed extra questions and plagiarized them but didn't have the time or energy to worry about converting them to their use.]
[Like...maybe someone putting together a quiz with a ridiculous number of searching questions. Someone aiming for enough of the questions to be very colloquial and informal to offset a bunch of very precise ones about farming.]
[And so, the possible creator of the quiz becomes suspect and he has a suspect for it. But why?]
[There are a few other quizzes in the quiz-maker's profile but no dates listed. Not much work was done on them, they seem to be basic, like they're just there to fill out a profile. He clicks "View source" and digs around in the source code of the page to see if there's something flagging them with a date somehow and finds it folded into the actual quiz number in the link for each. It's not that Tim isn't smart enough to hack the server of some quiz site to change it, but he probably didn't expect Kon to go ham with trying to suss it out.]
[They were all made after the recent shift in the stuff with the guilds because Tim's not a time traveler. He'd have to have hacked it to change any of them and didn't bother because he never expected Kon to look.]
[Kon then searches for other zombie quizzes on both the same site and on the greater web at large, looking at the questions of the first ones that pop up as he goes. And he finds some that were on the quiz Tim handed over, just worded differently. But not differently enough, hence why it sounded like some questions were copied from other sources.]
[They were and he didn't take the time to reword them that much.]
[But Tim doesn't have the advantage of a billionaire's wealth backing him anymore. He's back to an annoying day job outside a board room (in the place of school), back to spreading himself thinner.]
[And Kon knows that, as much as his best friend clearly cares about him, and holds him up as one of the best people he knows, it has never been a secret to either of them that Tim is smarter. Especially since Kon has often outsourced the brain stuff to Tim when they're doing hero stuff together.]
[Tim's never seen him have to figure out something alone. He always does it even if it's harder.]
[It takes him a few hours, but he manages to figure out what other quizzes most of the questions were stolen from. And it becomes clear that the farming questions are standing out because none of the other zombie quizzes mention farming and there just aren't a lot of farming-based quizzes on the site. What normal internet-savvy person made farming quizzes? Nobody. What farmer doodled around making quizzes? Again, none of them.]
[So he turns to the internet at large for those. Clark taught him the more fiddly search terms one time, when he was working on a paper. How you can narrow things down with certain phrasing, or leave things set up as blanks to fill in. He also showed him alternate search engines that those kinds of terms still work on since google is a bust anymore.]
[Altering the phrasing enough is how he finds the citizenship application online, and the specific questionnaire for immigrant applicants that are farmers, a very long pdf that asks variations of a bunch of those farming questions.]
Tim.
[He huffs it under his breath.]
[But still, it could be coincidence right? Unless...]
[Was he so confident Kon wouldn't snoop that it's somewhere in the stacks of junk on his desk? Kon stands up quietly and looks down at the stacks of papers, his eyes briefly glowing blue. He's able to look layer by layer with X-ray vision to avoid the sound of any papers shuffling.]
[When he's done looking, when he finds it, he's not angry enough to wake him up but he is very, very angry. At Tim doing this behind his back. At Tim trying to handle him and manipulate him into doing the quiz.]
[But he waits and lets Tim sleep because he needs it. He doesn't want him to not get it and then be out there fighting crime even more sleep deprived than usual.]
[He takes the time to read about this island country of metas. He doesn't actually have anywhere to be today, it's a day off from work and he has no other plans beside normal patrols.]
[No, he waits until the afternoon, when Tim is finally stirring a little. That's when he pulls the half-finished application out of the stack and tosses it on the blanket near Tim's feet.]
[When Tim wakes up he'll see the papers on the bed and that Kon has pulled the wheely chair around to be right in his line of sight when he wakes up. He's sitting with his arms crossed. He does not look pleased.]