The Adventures of the Chibi-Bumbles

By Nurannoniel Amruniel T.I.M.E.

Rated T for language and violence.

A/N: I don't actually have a beta right now, so if you guys see something that needs fixing – be it grammatical, spelling, or something that just plain doesn't make sense -, please point it out in a review or email me at with the details and I'll try and fix it. Thank you!!

Prologue

"What do you mean it's not Vista's fault? My laptop's been glitching out since the moment we installed that damn – hey, don't you – hello? Hello?? SLAG!!"

You're probably wondering what in the Pit that was all about. Well, you see – hey, don't click that back button yet! I'm not writing a cliché, I swear! … Okay, so maybe I am, but will you just hear me out for a minute?

Look, have you ever owned a piece of technology that you absolutely would swear was possessed by the Chaos Bringer himself? Or maybe you just named it and laughed the problems off as if it were a personality-challenged mini-'bot? Who're we kidding, you're a Transformers fan, you wouldn't be in this section if you weren't; of course you've named something as if it were a robot in disguise. I used to, too.

This started when I'd ordered one of those Dell Inspiron laptops for college last summer. You know the ones; they come in flamingo pink, iguana green, a sunshine yellow that rivals Bumblebee's, and a bunch of other colours. Anyways, it was a techno-nightmare from the beginning. First it was a week late. Then of course, those things come with Vista, so you can just imagine… My attempt to set up a password protect when I first booted it up got me locked out. I had to re-install everything, from the OS to the drivers to the complimentary virus protection. Then, a couple of weeks later while trying to type up lecture notes, my MS Word '07 suddenly started changing question marks to Es, inverting my quotation marks, and…well, let's just say it took me a couple of months to come up with a legend for all of the punctuation changes. My Gadgets randomly reorganize themselves, and I can't reboot without being flashed a Blue Screen and sitting for a half-hour while the auto-repair tries to figure out why it's trying to self-destruct itself.

Oh yeah, and it beeps. It's actually kind of embarrassing to be sitting in a lecture, and all of a sudden your laptop beeps at the top of its speakers for seemingly no reason at all, in spite of the volume button being most assuredly pressed to "muted."

Mind you, you'd think I'd be used to this sort of thing from computers by now. I used to work in a hardware store that uses those self-check-out machines, and they had "personalities" too. One would reject perfectly good cards, another's scale would be wrong no matter how many times we called someone to recalibrate it, another would beep and start it's greeting and end-transaction speeches when there wasn't a human within ten feet of it, and another would come up with the strangest fatal errors at the worst possible second. It's just the way technology is though, right?

Ah, there's that lovely little key word we all love: "right?" Now, you've probably read enough of these sorts of fics to know what I'm going to say next, so you might as well say it with me:

-click-

Chapter one, coming soon! And feel free to light a fire under my aft if you feel I'm going too slow.