100% of gamblers lose before they win. (Arcana Virus)
-
It was a slow day, both at school and at the auto shop, and Kaita had half a mind to wander to the Ministry out of boredom before he remembered the chatroom. He opened it to find that, once again, not only had he totally missed when everyone had been online, but they’d also gotten into a subject way, way over his head.
“The future?” Kaita wondered aloud, lounging upside-down on his bedroom bean bag chair. “A giant meteor in the future? Wow…” He let his arm drop to the ground instead of holding it out in front of him; the chatroom window remained where it was, despite the tapping of the PET case against the floor.
Turboman, still projecting himself upside-up like a stick-in-the-mud, bent sideways at the waist to read for himself about the ‘vintage PETs’ and ‘EM Bodies’. “At least they don’t seem to be trying to get their hands on those vaults that have Hikari-hakase all stalled out,” he pointed out.
“If they shoved a giant meteor through the portals, would we need to go on standby for that, too?” Kaita wondered idly. There was no sign of the Netto-chan he’d met in the chatroom, either, though that lonely notepad person had come back.
“What would we be able to do about a giant meteor?” Turboman asked incredulously. “Wouldn’t you call ANSA about that, and not us?”
“It’s emitting some kind of noise,” Kaita pointed out. “So it’s obviously got something funny about it…” Reminded that there was a solution to his boredom sitting right there on his wrist, Kaita reached up to grab at the chatroom screen, navigating back to its main menu.
“What’re you lookin’ for?” Turboman wondered, noticing the new upswing in his Operator’s energy.
“I’ve got nowhere to be, so now’s my shot,” Kaita decided. “I’m gonna try the portals out for myself!”
While Kaita carefully tapped UI buttons, Turboman wondered, “Should we tell someone first, or…” The portal, tall enough for a fully-sized adult, snapped open in front of his hologram. “Whoa.” Turboman’s eyes, already pinpricks of light beneath his visor, seemed to shimmer a little.
“I wonder if I can make it smaller,” mused Kaita; the portal shut with a snap of displaced air and a shimmery, sci-fi whoosh as he navigated over to where the settings ought to be.
The next few minutes were spent on the issues of size, placement, and shape; square, round, the size of an eraser, next to the tree in the backyard and just as tall…
“Cool… I mean, maybe we should close it! Before someone sees us!” Turboman fretted.
“Okaaaay…” A bit reluctantly, Kaita disappeared the huge rift in spacetime in front of their window. It had been kind of funny, honestly. “Well, they could put a small meteor in it, that’s for sure,” he concluded. “…Okay, next up.”
“Next up?!” boggled Turboman, but there was no stopping Kaita in the throes of boredom. A new portal opened, this one resolving into a very familiar neighborhood. If Turboman hadn’t known better, he would’ve said that Kaita had simply opened a portal that would take them a couple of streets down from where they were. “I guess it’s not too bad if you’re just taking us for a lap around the neighborhood…”
“It’s Netto-chan’s Akihara Town!” Kaita explained, climbing to his feet and retrieving his backpack. “What better place to see what going through a portal’s like for ourselves, right?!”
“Your Mama’s gonna kill me…” complained Turboman as Kaita lined himself up for a jump.
“Here… we… go!” And with that, Kaita was through, Turboman’s hologram pulled along for the ride as his PET went along with his Operator.
-
If it weren't for the fact that Lan's mom was actually home somewhat early for once, Rock was sure that Lan would be spending this evening moping and childishly hunting for viruses to dispose of. There was nothing wrong with a little enrichment, Rock thought, but Lan had been really miserable the past few days, and she was starting to worry that she might pop like a balloon and do something impulsive at any moment. No catharsis from the Lotus Engine, suspicion from all her friends and enemies... It wasn't a situation that Rock really knew how to handle, since she was kind of part of the problem.
But Ms. Hikari was home, so Lan pretended that everything was fine. The glazed-over look that she wore when she didn't want anyone asking questions was only a marginal improvement over her looking like she wanted to beat someone to death. Rock, in speaking for her operator, made something up about school being a little hard at the moment so that Lan could evade the truth, but she felt horrible about it, regardless.
Lan kept her head laid down at her desk as she tossed and tumbled like she was having a bad dream. Stupid. So stupid. One second people were calling her a hero, and the next they all thought she was some kind of malicious demon. Well, it's not like that was to be completely unexpected, anyways. Something, something, the prestigious Hikari family, how could they have fallen from grace. All it took was one public fuck-up, and then everyone thought you were one step away from becoming some evil freak that was going to start experimenting on and killing people for no reason.
Stupid. Stupid. It was a stupid cycle. She was nothing like her dad, and yet everyone thought she was evil anyways!!
...It was then that a sudden, unfamiliar beep went off from one of Lan's desk drawers. She nearly jumped out of her seat before she quickly darted to open the desk drawer and find that...
"It's... the Fossa Tracker," Rock realized, already holding her breath. "Shit. What's going on?"
Lan narrowed her eyes. "I'm an idiot," she muttered to herself. "I forgot that I left it here after I kept traveling. O-of course." She squinted her eyes, then dragged her fist across the desk, before she attempted to compose herself. "God damn it! Mom's home! I can't just leave! But I bet someone's gonna come and try and interrogate me about all this crap again because-"
"It could be anything, kid," Rock interrupted, trying to stop her operator from winding herself up. "Could even be a false positive. No use worrying when I'm right here, right?" That seemed to reassure Lan, at least. It wasn't like she was going to get separated from Rock. She wasn't going to let that happen.
Slowly, she creaked open her bedroom door, and began to tiptoe down the hall. There was nothing she was going to spot from her bedroom window, so she probably needed to look outside the front. But she didn't want to go downstairs and explain what that beeping was...
-
Kaita marveled at the Akihara Town he’d traveled to. “It… seems a lot like our own,” was Turboman’s initial impression.
“No, it’s different,” Kaita noticed. “Everything looks older.” He pointed out the house where Meiru lived in their own world. “The roof’s gray.”
“Everything’s just kind of… drab, isn’t it?” mused Turboman. “I wonder if we’ve even got our red roof, if Meiru-san’s house looks like that…”
“I don’t think Meiru-san would change it to a color like that. I wonder if she even lives here,” Kaita continued to think aloud as he turned his attention back to the house in front of them. The Hikari home was still its proper whites and blues, albeit under a layer of grime. Nobody had been out to pressure wash it in some time, it seemed, and the upstairs balcony that Kaita remembered as attaching to Netto’s room appeared to be missing. Even the shrubbery in the planter seemed more unkempt, overgrown and patchy.
Something about it filled Turboman with foreboding. “I think we’d better head back for now,” he suggested.
“Hmm…” Kaita pulled out the chatroom app on a holoscreen, still displaying the inputs he’d made to take them to the spot they stood in. “If we went here, though, that means Netto-chan’s gotta be home.” He smiled down at Turboman’s hologram. “It’s been a while since we talked! We oughta at least stop in and say hi, don’t you think?”
“That’s the nice thing to do, yeah,” Turboman couldn’t help but agree as Kaita bounded up the steps.
“Even the doorbell’s somewhere else…?” wondered Kaita, searching for and locating a much less sophisticated setup than he was used to seeing on the homes in his neighborhood. As the analog bell rang out, he marveled, “That's old-school, too…”
-
Lan had made it halfway down the steps just as the doorbell rang, making her freeze up. It had officially crossed into too late territory before she could even say anything... especially since she quickly realized that her mom, in fact, was still in the kitchen. She could feel her own doom encroaching as those footsteps trailed across the floor, the door threatening to be answered at any moment now. "N-nooooo..." she couldn't help but whine to herself, as she scuttled down the rest of the steps like a strange bug, slowly peeking around the corner and occasionally ducking behind it.
It took a few seconds for the door to be answered, like the person on the other side was hesitating even answering it to begin with. Maybe they were peeking through windows on the other side - it wasn't like Kaita would be able to tell. Eventually, the door unlocked, and Kaita was presented with someone he would surely recognize. The Ms. Hikari of this world definitely looked a little younger than the one he would know, but in exchange, her clothing was a bit more formal, there were shades under her eyes, and her expression was confused and vaguely unwelcoming.
"Oh, er, hello," Ms. Hikari answered, her expression slowly shifting to better suit the fact that she was talking to a child. "Is it that time of year? Are you making the rounds for a fundraiser?"
-
Kaita waited, looking around at the stillness of the house with open-eyed wonder. He supposed he was an unfamiliar sight around this house, but it was still taking a long time. The entire neighborhood was so much quieter than his own version of Akihara Town. Was anyone really home…?
Finally, before Kaita could try the doorbell again, the door opened. He was a bit confused by the greeting he got—what sort of a fundraiser? A Net Savior Bake Sale, maybe?—but quickly recovered.
“Hello!” Kaita cheerfully greeted. “I’m Kaita, one of Netto-chan’s friends!” This Hikari-san was different enough from the one he knew for him to remember to say, “You’re Netto-chan’s Mama, Hikari-san, aren’t you? It’s nice to meet you!” and bow politely but enthusiastically.
-
Haruka blinked for a second, pausing just long enough for the thought that he had said something wrong to perhaps cross Kaita's mind. "Oh! Oh! Hello!" she greeted once she'd composed herself, brightening up considerably. Standing up straight, she opened the door more. "She didn't mention that anyone was coming over! Ah, she doesn't really have anyone over, now, does she...?"
It was then that Lan peeked around the corner and spotted their unexpected guest. Said guest was so out of the blue that she couldn't help but give away her position, stumbling out of the staircase hall and into the living room directly adjacent to the kitchen. As her mother peeked behind her shoulder, Lan curled into herself and pointed across the room. "Kaita...?! What are you doing here...?!" she couldn't help but babble, which immediately threw any hope she had of lying about him visiting right out the window. "U-uh... uhhh..."
Haruka smiled at Lan and beckoned her over. "You never mentioned a Kaita. Ah, you really ought to tell me about these things!" she said, to which Lan immediately shied away. "I knew this had to be a surprise, though. You never invite anyone over..."
Lan held her head low in shame as she scurried over to the door, hanging off to the side to let Kaita in. "I-I don't want to," she mumbled to herself, before eyeing Kaita with a bit more of her usual fervor. "K-Kaita, seriously, though, I hope nothing's wrong..." Both she and Rock were seriously hoping that Kaita had not been sent to check on her after the former's meltdown in Netto-san's office. Netto wouldn't have told anyone else about that... right? Lan really, really hoped so.
-
As Haruka blinked, Kaita blinked back. What an odd reaction. “Is everything o…”
But just like that, Hikari-san was back to her usual self. “I just felt like it!” Kaita explained brightly when she wondered. Once Lan properly revealed herself, he beamed and waved to her, Turboman waving from his shoulder.
It always felt a bit funny to be privy to someone else being talked to by their mother like that, no matter who it was. Maybe he really had caused Lan a bit too much trouble...?
He was startled from that train of thought by Lan’s worrying. “Nope, nothing at all!” he reassured her, bounding to her—
“Kaita, your shoes!” Turboman hurriedly cautioned before Kaita could make it more than two steps inside.
Kaita took an exaggeratedly large step back to the door, slipped his shoes off, then scurried on sock foot next to Lan. “Like I told Hikari-san, I just felt like it,” he said, completely honestly. “I wanted to see if I could make the trip over, that's all."
-
"Oh! Well, how kind of you," Haruka responded in turn, though she still looked a little confused. She eyed the source of the voice reminding Kaita of his manners, apparently surprised that another Navi was present. "Lan shuts herself in a lot, so I'm glad she has friends that will check on her. Come to think of it, you haven't told me much of anything about your friends as of late."
"Th-there isn't anything... to say," Lan answered awkwardly. She wriggled around a little bit, attempting to slip into her poker face as Kaita walked up to her. It was hard to really him away when he was looking at her like that... but her mom was right there, so it wasn't like could say everything.
Haruka walked back into the kitchen, but continued to engage with the so-called conversation from across the house. "The trip over... Hmmm, you must have met over the Internet, then?" she wondered out loud. "Where are you from, if it's not Den City?"
"...Yeah, it's another city," Lan immediately interrupted, before Kaita could say anything would get her in even bigger trouble. Leaning closer to Kaita, she lowered her voice. "W-well, you did it. I mean, there isn't anything that would've broken it, or whatever, but..."
Rock's hologram appeared on her operator's shoulder, interrupting her train of thought. "You guys should sit on the couch or somethin'," she suggested, perhaps as part of a ploy to give them a little privacy. She figured that Kaita couldn't lie even if he tried... but she still needed to keep Lan calm, lest she blow up over recent events yet again. "Can't tell you how glad I am that it was you at the door. The kid's been having a hard time lately."
"Rock!" Lan hissed, and her eyes wandered just in time to notice an eyebrow raise from her mother. Lan didn't want to say anything! She had the right to remain silent!!
-
Kaita opened his mouth to say that they had in fact met online, then watched with a sort of wonder as Lan swooped in without hesitation to provide a cover story. Lan didn’t talk to Hikari-san about her friends? Did that mean this Hikari-san didn’t know about the chatroom, then? Was she just stricter, like Asuna-san, or was there something Kaita was missing here?
The most obviously missing thing was… Hikari-hakase. A touchy subject for Lan, Kaita recalled.
This Hikari-san might as well have been an entirely different person, Kaita realized. He instinctively began to follow Rock’s instruction, carefully taking a step down the hallway before realizing that ‘the couch’ might not be where he thought it was, and that Lan needed to lead the way. “A—“
Once again, Lan’s frantic interruption saved Kaita from a critical error. “Uh, right! Yeah! Let’s go find the couch, and then we can catch up!”
-
Lan couldn't help but be a little bewildered by the insinuation that they would need to find the couch, since it was literally just right over there... although now that she thought about it, maybe Kaita just expected the couch to be in a different place? Netto-san's house was different from hers, after all. It was a lot less... old.
"R-right..." she muttered to herself, motioning for Kaita to follow. The living room was on the opposite side of the hall as the kitchen, and the worn-looking couch had headrests that were more than suitable shields to hide behind. Lan nestled herself on the couch and ducked her head down as a dour expression washed over her face. She'd been trapped now, hadn't she...
"I'd have thought that hoodie-her would've sent you, or somethin' like that," Rock began as Lan sat down, her hologram appearing on the coffee table in front of them. "You're really just here for fun, then?"
Lan pouted, keeping her voice down. "...Everyone's bothering me lately," she mumbled, her eyelids lowering. "I wish I didn't win that stupid tournament."
-
Kaita was quite bewildered by Rock’s idea. “Why would Netto send me?” he wondered. “I know you paid a visit to Meiru-san, but it sounded like it went great.”
Turboman sighed and answered Rock’s question for his Operator. “Yup, we sure are.”
But to Kaita, it was obvious that what Lan was saying was way more troubling to her. “It… wasn’t worth it, then?” he asked.
Turboman authoritatively chimed in, “We—“ before rapidly backtracking. “Uh, not that I’d know or anything, but—“ Confident once more, he explained, “I’ve always heard the rewards you get after the victory lap’re pretty sweet. Prize money, some hardware for your shelf, whatever else the sponsors wanna throw in…”
“But whatever it was, it wasn’t worth the attention,” Kaita repeated with more certainty, for Turboman’s sake more than Lan’s. “That stinks…”
“Must’ve been a real lemon of a prize,” sighed Turboman.
After thinking it over a moment longer, Kaita scrunched his eyes shut and sighed, “I’m sorry.” Tilting his head from side to side as he thought, he added, “It feels like you should only get good attention from a tournament, not this bad attention…”
-
In turn, Lan was equally as bewildered at what Kaita first assumed that she would be upset about. "Wh-what...? A prize...? N-no, I don't care about that," she muttered awkwardly, pausing to check behind the couch as if her mother would listen in. "I-I mean, I got this trophy, but that doesn't really matter. I just mean, um, that a lot of bad stuff happened."
She curled into herself, though, as the desire to simply not say anything overtook her. What was she going to tell Kaita, that she was apparently this super dangerous darkness-person now? Really, it was Wily's fault, at the end of the day, because he made them go to the tournament to begin with! B-but, but, she wasn't going to tell Kaita that, she couldn't afford to make one more person think she was a freak-
"People judge her a lot," Rock interrupted, snapping Lan out of her fervor. "We had to step up our game to deal with the shit people were throwing at us, and... well, it brought a lot of attention. Kid doesn't like attention, period." Lan lowered her eyelids, but Rock brushed her off, continuing to talk in her place in the hopes that they could perhaps, maybe, somewhat, have a normal hangout with someone she was already friends with. "It wasn't just a tournament. We had to kinda, sorta... stop the Net from being destroyed. Stuff like that."
Lan puffed her cheeks. "Rooock," she complained, before realizing her Navi was totally cornering her on purpose. "W-well, it sucked. It was horrible, and I hurt someone that I cared about." She shuffled uncomfortably in her seat. "I-I mean, I know that it's fine, but... still..."
-
Kaita listened along intently, giving Lan the same time Netto would’ve needed to complete his thoughts. “The whole Internet!” he marveled once she was done. “The one Turboman and I went to just wrecked an island. It must’ve been really hard to fix it all. That’s amazing…”
“It’s still bad attention if everyone’s just focusing on your technique instead of your victory, in my books,” Turboman added. (Though he had to admit to himself that he was a bit put out at any competition being described as ‘just a tournament’. Racing had been his whole life, once. Still, it had been so long since those days that it was easy enough to move past—it wasn’t like he could talk about it, or anything.)
“Exactly!” Kaita readily agreed. “You stopped a big crisis, but nobody said thanks properly. Of course it’s not fine!” He shook his head ferociously before correcting himself. “Well, you did it, so in that way it’s fine. But, like… if your friend’s not okay, and you’re still shook up about it, and people haven’t let everything calm down…”
-
Lan grew a little frustrated that Kaita didn't seem to get it, but pushed her feelings away so that her mom wouldn't sense that something was up. "I-I mean, my friends were happy that I did it, obviously-" she began to blubber, shifting in her seat. "It's, it's just, I feel bad about it. And..."
"You know your friends aren't the ones who're beatin' you down for this," Rock couldn't help but interrupt. She turned to Kaita, crossing her arms. "People from the chatroom are givin' her a hard time over this power we found, is the short of it. We're still tryin' to figure out what to do."
Lan pulled her knees up to the couch cushion in shame. "I-I just shouldn't think about it," she muttered to herself. "All it does is scare people and make them upset." There was an awkward pause, as her eye contact drifted away from Kaita. "I-I don't want to upset you, either."
It was such a sincere declaration that Rock couldn't help but smile. "There just hasn't been much time to breathe after all that crap, y'know? Traveling overseas, and then all the fallout from everything," she continued explaining to Kaita and Turboman. "She needs a little bit of leeway, is all. Something that'll actually calm her down."
-
“From the chatroom?!” Kaita blurted in genuine surprise.
“Kaita!” Turboman hurriedly hissed. “Keep it down—“
“F— from the chatroom?!” Kaita asked again in an undertone. “But they should know all about this kinda stuff! Aren’t they supposed to all be Net Saviors, too?!”
“…I have to admit, I’m surprised, too,” Turboman added while his Operator simmered down a bit. “It’s pretty tough to come up with a perfect answer when you’re going two hundred down a rocky road…”
“You shouldn’t feel bad about it, is what he means,” Kaita was quick to explain. “Nobody’s gonna make a perfect choice in a situation like that, and people from the chatroom oughta know it.” He offered Lan a sunny smile. “I found out all that stuff about my Netto, and it was a lot, but I still get it. He really didn’t have a shot at making a perfect choice! So, what I mean is, don’t worry about me.”
Both Kaita and Turboman nodded at Rock’s suggestion of finding something to calm Lan down. That took a moment of thinking over, since neither of them were sedate sorts of people. “Like… reading a book, or looking for some cool page on the Internet? Mary-chan knows more about calm than me, I think, but those are things she likes, so, um…” Kaita looked back to Lan. “What do you like?”
-
Unfortunately for them, Kaita's outburst was enough to attract the attention of Lan's mother, if only for a moment. "Is something going on with a chatroom?" Ms. Hikari called out from the kitchen. "I hope you're not getting in trouble online, again. Everything's safe? You aren't doing any drugs, or anything? Ha, ha."
Lan blanched at such a strange attempt at a joke. "What?! No!" she barked back as she peeked over the couch. "It's nothing! It doesn't have anything to do with me." She ducked behind the cushion again before any part of her face could betray the lie... though Kaita's reassurance quickly changed her expression to a strangely thoughtful one, anyways.
"I've only heard of Net Saviors bein' in your guys' world," Rock observed as Lan lowered her head. "There's Officials, and Net Sheriffs, and stuff, but some of those Officials have been way more of a pain in the ass than you'd ever expect." She shrugged. "I don't really get it, myself."
"...I mean, you're not an adult," Lan muttered to herself, before immediately hurrying to correct herself. "I-I guess Netto-san, and Meiru-san, they kind of are, but- um- it's different." Embarrassed, she looked away for a moment. "But... I didn't think of it that way. With the stuff that happened to Netto-san..."
Rock raised an eyebrow. "The Silver Division stuff?" she asked, her expression becoming just as thoughtful as her operator's. "Yeah... yeah, that's true, ain't it? There wasn't ever going to be a perfect answer... so we might as well just play the cards we're given, right?"
Lan went quiet, like she wasn't fully able to express her feelings. "I... I guess," she murmured to herself. She made eye contact with Kaita again, and after a few quiet seconds of contemplation, she blushed. "W-well... um. Either way. I don't know what I like," she admitted shyly. "I mean, battling isn't going to calm me down..."
"You're always watchin' anime when you're-"
"We're not watching anime," Lan instantly responded.
-
Kaita felt both baffled by Hikari-san’s interruption—drugs?—and backed into a corner—‘in trouble online’ described basically everything Kaita and Turboman ever did there. He stayed huddled behind the couch, staring in the direction her voice was coming from with wide eyes.
“I guess ‘Official’ was the title before it got changed to ‘Net Savior’,” Turboman explained. “Dunno why it didn’t change for everyone else’s worlds. The new one sounds way cooler.” As Rock thought through Kaita’s example, he turned back to Kaita. “I don’t think Hikari-san was being serious.”
“Oh,” Kaita said faintly. His eyes met Lan’s before she began to throw out suggestions of what not to do.
“Not anime, and not Netbattling,” Turboman repeated for the nonexistent record, entirely serious. “Got it.”
“We could… go back outside, I guess?” Kaita suggested. “We could send our Navis to Internet City, or some other hangout spot? We could watch not-anime…”
“Why don’t you do something outdoors? Like… uh…” It was obviously taking some doing for Turboman to think of something that didn’t involve some form of vehicle. Kaita couldn’t help but smile.
“Frisbee, or soccer, or something,” he finished so his Navi didn’t have to stay stuck on it.
-
"It is way cooler," Lan muttered under her breath, puffing her cheeks. For a moment, she didn't even realize she'd voiced the thought out loud, and immediately shied away. "U-um... but, yeah. I don't know. I don't even think there's that many of them. I don't know what they do." She paused, averting her eyes. "At least you guys have to go look at those liminal spaces or whatever..."
Rock exhaled a little once Kaita realized that it was just Ms. Hikari having a very strange sense of humor. Really, she didn't understand half the things she said sometimes... but it wasn't like she saw her much, anyways. "Internet City...? They have cities on the Internet?" she couldn't help but question. "I sure as hell haven't seen 'em."
"I don't care what we do," Lan mumbled. "But if we go outside, then we could talk a little louder... I guess." She narrowed her eyes, having remembered some fuzzy things in the back of her mind. "When was the last time I ever thought about... soccer...?"
Without waiting for an answer, she kicked her feet up off the couch and swerved towards the door. Her mother, of course, wasn't going to let her leave without some comment. "Going somewhere?"
"I dunno," Lan mumbled back. "I just want to go outside."
"Well, be careful. Don't stray too far," Ms. Hikari responded, in a tone that Lan always had trouble tolerating. "You know how I feel when you're out late..."
Lan didn't respond verbally, instead opting for an incomprehensible, embarrassed "mmmph".
-
“Yeah, Internet City!” Kaita answered Rock. “It’s a huge virtual world with lots of games and the Net Colosseum and stuff!”
“It started up a while ago now,” Turboman added. “Seven years, at least…”
Lan pointing out that they’d be able to talk more freely outside caused Kaita to nod enthusiastically in approval. “Let’s go!” He sprang to his feet and ran after her to the door, only stopping to quickly pull his shoes back onto his feet.
But Hikari-san’s interruption at the threshold, after the troubling interjection of earlier, stunned him into a momentary silence while he scrambled to figure out what to say. It wasn’t like his own mother had ever seemed to completely believe him when he tried to come up with what he could be doing that wasn’t ‘chasing down Nova’…
“We’ll stay out of trouble, Hikari-san! Promise!” he finally managed to blurt. Then, he took Lan by the wrist and marched the both of them out the door before anything else could be asked.
Once they were down the front steps and out of the lawn, Kaita could finally relax. “I think we’re in the clear!” he cheered to Lan.
-
"Huh. Sounds neat. For a second I thought you meant... here... which, uh, yeah, no," Rock commented, just before her hologram disappeared so she could catch up to her operator. Shows how good of hosts they were if Kaita was already jumping to going to a completely different Internet. She should really be putting more effort into finding interesting things to do, shouldn't she...? Especially after their meeting with the other Lan ended so poorly.
Lan would have darted out of the house on her own, but Kaita unexpectedly ferrying her out stunned her a bit. Once they were outside, it took Lan a few seconds to pry her hand away and look a little more alive again. "Y-yeah," she mumbled, still looking embarrassed. "Um... sorry. I-I mean, I don't want to look for trouble, but I hate just... sitting around... and..."
As if specifically to spite her, it was then that the PET was attacked by an incoming call. "What now?!" Lan couldn't help but groan, pulling her PET screen close to her face... and quickly finding out who was actually calling her. "What?! No! I'm not answering that!"
If it weren't for the fact that it would be a supremely bad idea, Lan probably would've thrown her PET to the ground. Instead, Rock reappeared on her shoulder, looking just as annoyed. "I wish we could just ignore it," she groused. "But it's probably... something important."
"Ugh! Fine!" Lan complained, before realizing that Kaita was still standing directly next to her. "Uh! One second! It's nothing!" she said sheepishly, scuttling off to the side and hiding on the side of the steps leading to the front door. Dr. Wily, of all people, was the absolute last person she wanted to be hearing from now. What was he going to do, trick them into using another super-powerful program or whatever?!
Once she answered the call, she didn't even bother turning on the face display. "What?" she quietly hissed. "Don't- I don't want you to-"
"We have a problem," Dr. Wily interrupted, before Lan could even finish her complaint. "News is getting out about those little Arcana-viruses that you've been battling."
Lan's blood instantly ran cold. Were they being watched? "Wh-what...?"
"Not the ones you fought," Wily corrected, which immediately relieved Lan. "Rather... There's some rumors going around that Dead Hand is suing a business for 'theft of proprietary data'... and their description of what they're after is all too familiar." Wily tapped his fingers on his chair, laughing darkly at the matter. "Oh, the things you find out about when you spend too long looking at public court records."
"...Okay?" Rock barked back. "What do you want us to do about it? We're not fuckin' lawyers." She crossed her arms. "If what's-its-name knows about it already, won't we just get in more trouble if we take it for ourselves?"
