"Remember, if you break it, you buy it." Nabiki's voice interjected from her bed, where she was trying to keep her attention on the manga she was reading. Though she wasn't all that dissapointed in frequently being distracted by Ranma's outbursts, or frequent pleas for help. The whole deal was after all, incredibly amusing and amazingly profitable, two of her favorite things in life.
"I won't." Ranma groused, calming down and taking a deep breath, before he once again opened his eyes in order to engage in a stare-down with his arch-nemesis, Nabiki's computer.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on ones point of view, the computer wasn't really capable of staring back. But Ranma didn't let such a minor detail get in the way of glaring intimidatingly at the wretched object which had in the last two weeks, earned itself his undying hatred, undisguised loathing and the top spot on his list of enemies.
"You wouldn't have to suffer through all this, if you hadn't accepted the match, you know?" Nabiki commented with a fair amount of smugness in her voice.
"Martial Arts Computing... Feh! How was I supposed to know that we actually had to use the computers, instead of beating each other senseless with them?" Ranma muttered under his breath.
"Did your opponent look like he could beat up anyone with a keyboard?" Nabiki asked with a smug grin on her lips.
"No..." Ranma admitted. The frail little pimply nerd didn't look as if he could even lift a keyboard, to say nothing of actually veilding it as a weapon and managing to knock someone out with it.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. One would think that you might have learned something regarding accepting weird challenges by now." Nabiki said, then shook her head. "What's got you stuck now?"
"I can't get my e-mail!" Ranma complained, shaking his fist at the computer.
"500 yen." Nabiki calmly responded.
"Fine. Just get this awful thing to cough 'em up!" Ranma snapped, gripping the edges of the monitor as he stuck his toungue out at it.
"Let me have a look." Nabiki said and merely looked at the monitor for two seconds, before she saw the problem. "The mail server isn't responding." she commented and pointed at the status line of the e-mail program. "Try again in five minutes." she hinted and yawned. "I'm hungry, I'll go see if there's any leftovers." she revealed, then strolled out of the room as Ranma pulled one of his eyelids down and stuck out his toungue at the computer again.
He leaned back in Nabiki's chair and stared up at the roof for half a minute, before his impatience got the better of him and he snatched up the mouse, clicking frantically at the left mouse button with the pointer over the send/check e-mail option.
Fortunately, whatever problem had lost him five-hundred yen and prevented him from getting his mail earlier, seemed ot have passed and Ranma whooped in triumph as messages started to appear in his inbox. Ever since the challenge two weeks earlier, he'd had to pay Nabiki a horribly large fee for renting her computer and for her tutoring him in it. Fortunately, he still had two weeks more before the match, but at the moment he didn't feel at all confident regarding the outcome. Would he really learn enough in those two weeks to kick that little nerds ass?
He shook his head, at least Hiroshi and Daisuke had been thrilled over his new obsession and sent him several e-mails a day. Even the rest of the class had gotten riled up and sent him little encouraging messages, links to helpful sites, useful little hints and handy programs.
With a little luck, one of them had found something out about Martial Arts Computing that he could actually learn and put to good use in his upcomming match, which was why he was so eager to check his e-mail.
A faint 'bing' announced that the computer was done and Ranma instantly focused his attention on his inbox, rubbing his hands together as he saw that he had seven messages waiting. Four were from Daisuke and Hiroshi, two were from other classmates, but he didn't recognize the adress of the one who had sent the seventh message.
"'You may just have gotten everything you'll ever want!'?" Ranma quoted the topic line, scratching his head in confusion, as he opened the letter and only saw an empty letter, with a single executable attachment included.
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(Posted Tue, 29 Jun 2004 17:50)
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