Ranma's Inn: User Crash [Episode 100504]

“Hi… Hi… My name is M.E.-tan, what’s yours?” chirped the cute girl, as if politely introducing herself after waking up naked in a stranger’s house was a perfectly normal routine.

Ranma blushed and apologized automatically, “I’m Kamiya Ranma, uh, s-sorry about this.”   He fidgeted and tried to look anywhere but at her pert breasts; and failed.   “(Hey up… Wait a minute.…)   What am I apologising for?”

“I don’t know,” M.E.-tan admitted with happy puzzlement as she filed away the registry data.   “Wasn’t that your password?”

“What password?” Ranma wondered.

“Oh, is that your password?” M.E.-tan inquired eagerly.

“What password?” Ranma demanded again.

“Yah!” M.E.-tan cheered and leapt to her feet to bounce for joy.   “Reboot complete!   Yah!   Yah!   Go, go M.E.!”

The sight of a cute girl doing naked cheer drills was way too much for Ranma nasal capillaries to endure.   They finally broke under the mounting pressure and the resulting spray rocketed his head back hard against the wall.   Fortunately a blackout gave instant relief to his sudden splitting headache.

“Yah!  Yah… Ya…what the?   Oh, no!   My user’s crashed!” M.E.-tan exclaimed in dizzy confusion.   “Whoa…, What do I do now?   This has never happened to me before!”   Her head span as she looked around vacantly for help.

When in trouble or in doubt, M.E.-tan decided, run in circles scream and shout.

“Hurah?” Ranma grunted himself awake on the futon he’d set up in the manager’s room.   “What a weird dream.   Finding a naked girl in a secret basement.   Sheesh!   Yeah, right; I should be so lucky.”   He yawned, and stretched, scratched his head (and other parts), then stepped off the futon and found the hole in the floor once again.

“Wha…!?” yelped Ranma as he thudded down onto the hard cement floor.

“Oh, good mornin’” chirped the girl as she peered down at him from his room above.   “You had me worried for a while there.   Is it normal for you to collapse from a bloody nose like that?   ’cause I looked and looked and looked for a way to restart you and couldn’t find the reset button anywhere!”

“Would you put some clothes on!” Ranma demanded as he squeezed his nostrils tightly between thumb and forefinger.

“What?   Clothes?” M.E.-tan asked as she looked about.   “Searching… Searching…”

“What the?   Don’t you have anything to wear at all?” Ranma demanded as he looked about the basement and found it bare.   There was, he noticed, nothing besides the white dust cloth and, as he snatched it up, he wondered how she got down to squat there anyway.   The only entrance seemed to be the creaky old steps leading up to the trapdoor boarded over with now broken timbers.

Tossing the cloth to her as he cautiously climbed the steps out of the pit of weirdness, Ranma brushed passed her with eyes averted as best he could.   “Here, cover yourself up while I find something for ya to wear.   I think I saw a maid’s outfit in one of the closets.”

“Oh, okay…” M.E.-tan agreed in a small voice as she clumsily struggled to fit under the cloth, winding up wearing it like a poncho, though it had no hole for her head to fit through.

“Ah, here we go,” Ranma exclaimed as he returned with a bundle.   “What the… Yo, put this on, I think it will fit.”

“Uhm, thank you,” M.E.-tan agreed politely and let the sheet slide off to the floor as she reached for the pile of clothes in Ranma’s outstretched hands.

“Arggh!” Ranma spurted, then quickly spun the girl about by the shoulder to push her towards a door.   “Go change in the bathroom!”

“Ah, alright,” M.E.-tan complied with a pout and wondered what was wrong with her body that he didn’t seem to want to look at it.   A moment latter she reemerged wearing a blue dress with a white apron.   Bright red ribbons were laced in a small bow at the front and a large one at the back.   She handed him back the clothes bundle then curtsied.   “How do I look now?”

As he absently set the bundle on a nearby table, he paused to think, “(wait, how can she give me back the outfit she just put on?)”   Then he turned back to blink like a dear caught in headlights and promptly forgot his question, and probably his own name as well.   “Ara, you’re very cute.”

M.E.-tan blushed then straightened up her skirt with a few fidgety strokes.   She then clasped her hands in front of her, set her shoulders straight, and waited nervously for further instructions.   Everything about her user’s processor was so strange and new, but she was keen to make herself useful in her new environment and try not to loose any essential data.

Ranma shook himself out of his saccharine-overdose-induced trance.   “Now then, er, miss Emmy.   Just where did you come from?”

“Come from?” M.E.-tan repeated, then sniffled and began to tell her tale of woe betide.   She told of how she was an OS girl working happily on her last user’s desktop with no problems, well except for maybe being a little bit clumsy, when her user’s mean ol’ brother had her uninstalled in favour of XP and it was so unfair that everyone plain liked XP better just because she had bigger memory…